As a quick note at the beginning of this post, I have permission from the mods here to post this, and they asked that discussion be kept civil. I was originally going to post this to GWA directly, but their mods suggested posting here since it's more targeted at content creators, so here it is.

To the community of GWA,

I wanted to make a post detailing something that really unnerves me about certain posts on this sub and makes me pretty uncomfortable. I ask that you stick with me and read through this whole post before jumping to conclusions.

Overview

So something I've noticed as I've posted here more is the prevalence of "Futa" posts. I don't believe there is a huge problem with this in itself, although I'm sure a lot of trans women (myself included) don't like the idea spread that we're "futas" or in some way just sex objects because a number of trans women have penises, and a lot of us view the term as a slur, due to a number of negative connotations attached to it. Viewing a group of people as sex objects is pretty harmful, but that isn't even what really bothered me.

What truly unnerves me is the conflation of "futas" with a certain characterization here on GWA: overly dominant, predatory, sadistic, blackmailing, or in some way "trapping" or raping others, or in the worst cases, killing others. While this definitely isn't always the case, it's by far the most common representation, and this is what I have a huge problem with.

Let me break down why I find this so harmful. So, there are people in our society who are trans, or in other words, identify as a gender other than the one assigned to them at birth. Some of these are trans women, and many trans women have penises, either pre-op (wanting to change their current genital situation, but haven't had an opportunity or the money to get an operation yet) or non-op (not wanting to change their current genital situation, or don't have the means to). Additionally, some intersex people identifying as women have penises as well.

Then, we can ask ourselves, what does "futa" mean when a post is labeled with it? It means a woman with a penis. In its original context, it essentially meant women with both sets of parts, but it often just gets used as a descriptor of a woman with a penis, regardless of anything else. In the context of the real world, this would mean a pre-op or non-op trans woman, or an intersex woman. This means that all of those negative connotations that I described earlier do not simply apply to some nonexistent group of people, they are labels very often unjustly put onto trans and intersex woman who are just trying to live their lives. Trans women, primarily trans women of color, get killed because of characterizations like these, and the "trans panic defense" gets used to justify murder of people, simply due to what genitalia they have.

What can we do about this?

So, I'm not going to suggest that we dump everything that could be labeled "problematic" in the trash, or that negative characterizations of groups of people don't belong in porn. I do, however, think we should always keep in mind that nothing posted here exists in a vacuum, and that if a group of people (or category that can be falsely seen as representative of a group of people in this case) is generally represented in a negative light, people may start internalizing those views.

What I suggest is that everyone here be mindful of how the things you create make certain groups of people look. If you create something that reflects groups in a negative light, you can make it clear that your work is not representative of the people displayed in it. Alternatively, you can create more affirming representations of people in the margins. This was one of the reasons I started posting scripts and audios here; to create more representation for trans women, hopefully most of it positive. I believe all of us here are human beings deserving of respect, and I'm of the opinion that the things we make here ought to reflect that.

Thank you so much for your time, and I hope that this post can invite positive discussion and change.

Edit: Some Updates/Clarifications

I just wanted to put this here for anyone who is coming into this discussion now and might take points from the initial post the wrong way, or misunderstand what I'm trying to say here, or anyone who wants to better understand my main points.

1. I'm not trying to censor anyone. I think people can post whatever they want (so long as it follows the rules of GWA), and was just making an argument that they should be mindful of what that content may say or mean to different people. As a side note, criticism is not censorship. Neither me nor GWA is making some set of rules you need to follow, I'm just making an argument that certain content may be harmful to certain groups of people. What you do with that information is up to you.

2. A number of people made the comparison of my views to views that violent video games make people violent, which have been proven wrong. I don't think that comparison is valid here, and I'll explain why. The concepts compared here are pretty different, one is a marginalized group of people (trans people), and the other is a concept (violence) which is widely understood to be negative without some agreed upon justification (self defense, etc). I think when it comes to marginalized people where there is little to no common understanding of them, any representation, good or bad, can influence the view of those people as a whole in the eyes of people who know little to nothing about them. This contrasts with violence, where just about everyone has seen a number of depictions of violence throughout their lives, so any one depiction of violence is not all that likely to influence their views on it.

3. It should go without saying, but no, I am not claiming to speak for all trans people here. I speak for myself here, and all these opinions are mine, not necessarily opinions held by other trans people.

4. There was a recent script offer on GWA that was tagged as both [TF4M] and [futa]. This is not evidence that everyone conflates the trans women and futas, but it shows that some people do conflate the two, despite them not being the same. What I was trying to get across was that some people (not necessarily even a majority, just a quantity of people that is not negligible) don't understand the difference, and that could be a problem when many futa posts involve very negative characters. See point 2 for more discussion on why I find this a problem.