Revenge of the Sneeds

I can't believe I have to do this

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In 2020, the board could get you estradiol from a vendor somebody had actually used and probably engaged in sex that, frankly speaking, wasn’t great, a needle gauge that wouldn’t wreck your thigh but will make you frankly rethink your choices, a range to aim for (seriously, the doctor not understanding a trans woman’s healthy hormone levels in 2026 is crazy; maybe I should write “ dump your doctor next” ), and an unemployed stranger who would read your labs at two in the morning for free because she was awake anyway and remembered being scared of the syringe. Nobody was kind about it. Nobody was ever kind about it. Half the replies told you that you’d never pass and that you should have started at fifteen, which you couldn’t have, because at fifteen you were in your mother’s house praying it would go away, begging your family to understand you. You took the dose information and left the rest, and the trade was worth it, because the endocrinologist had you at a level she wouldn’t have accepted in a menopausal cis woman, and she wasn’t going to explain why.

Six years later, that same culture can get you a word. Not a vial, not a ride to an appointment, just a word, which is about as useful as a Tumblr discourse thread in a medical emergency.

(I swear that’s the last Star Wars reference.)

Ngansuril published “Attack of the Sneeds” on August 1, 2026. It’s a careful piece of lexicography about “sneedhon” and its back-formation “sneed” , dragged through the trenches of 4chan’s /lgbt/. First found there in April 2021 as nonsense from a Simpsons joke. And also some dork on tranny twitter in 2023, which I will be honest I cannot bring myself to find.

And synthesized around 2023 into an archetype, the naive trans woman with bad presentation and no self-awareness. Flattened and smoothed over into “sneed”, then into “the sneeds” , a clique described from outside by people who aren’t in it. She’s honest about the limits of her analysis. Discord is a walled garden and always will be, Twitter’s search died with the purchase, and so /lgbt/ or more commonly known as /tttt/ (they more often use 4tran now but whatever) becomes the source of trans online culture by default rather than by merit. That’s a real problem to say it plainly.

The essay stops being lexicography and begins to sort every trans person alive into Sneeds and Moders, sorts them by intensity of dysphoria, and lands on the claim that Boymoders are ontologically proletarian. Which is where I come in.

The true parts are, of course, divas, and I’ve spent a year writing them myself. Healthcare is an endless slog with no end. Vaginoplasty and facial surgery get filed as cosmetic, while the same surgeon reconstructs a cis woman’s breast under insurance, and that’s called reconstruction, and I think both should be covered, but I know this isn’t based on progressive values to you, but we will get there. A woman can try three times to hold a job and fail three times and lose access to the fourth attempt, and nobody in the optimist economy has a plan for her. Forced positivity functions as a gag, and the girls who report their pain accurately get treated as the problem for having reported it. A lot of the people theorizing about us are building careers on material they’ll never have to live inside. The last twenty-six years produced enormous movement on legal recognition and almost nothing on getting a poor transsexual woman an operation.

She didn’t get the etymology wrong. I don’t think I could improve on her account of how a word goes from a Simpsons joke to a “slur” (but I would argue it is more harmful to the user as it ends with them in a locker typically) to a class marker. She built the case with real care and then spent it all on a conclusion that will get women killed. A case made with that much care deserves an answer made with the same care.

Everything after the lexicography goes wrong, and it goes wrong in an old, well-documented way. I want to take it apart at the level of the person doing it, not just the argument, because the doctrine’s downstream of an injury, and there’s no point arguing with a doctrine while the injury underneath it is still running. So let’s play dr and get into it.

The Genealogy That Won’t Turn Around

Nothing I’ve read names the mechanism as cleanly as Nietzsche does, and I go back to this book more than any other when I need the vocabulary for what’s happening on that board. ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ (1887) makes an argument in its first essay that this piece walks into and gets hit with. He describes a moral system produced through “ressentiment”, and the claim while bastardized (and nobody is more bastardized than the Big N himself) is a mechanism more so than insulting: this kind of morality has to have an outside before it can produce anything at all. It begins with the No said to what is external. Its creativity is real, it genuinely makes values, and every one of those values is a reaction. The other kind says yes to itself first and only afterward bothers to notice what it isn’t.

Sneed is a value produced entirely by negation. There’s no dose in it, no vendor, no price, no plan. What it contains is a person you aren’t, ranked below you on a scale you didn’t build and can’t climb.

The lambs and the birds of prey passage is the one that stings here. The lambs decide that being unable to seize anything is a moral achievement, and weakness gets reinterpreted as a merit freely chosen. The board runs the same conversion in the other direction. Its members got hit hardest by the surgical price list, by puberty, by family, and by the labor market, and the culture takes that beating and reissues it as rank. Intense dysphoria becomes clear sight. Poverty becomes materialism. Failure to pass becomes the ability to see who else isn’t passing. What was done to a woman gets converted into a standing she holds over other trans women, and the standing is the only thing the beating has ever paid back.

There’s a smaller point in the second essay of the same book that ends the article’s central defense of the word. Nietzsche says the cause of a thing coming into existence and its eventual usefulness lie worlds apart, that anything in existence gets seized and reinterpreted toward new purposes by whatever has the power to do it. Her own method concedes this without noticing. She tracks a word that meant nothing in 2021 becoming an archetype in 2023 and a clique in 2026, which is exactly a thing being seized and repurposed, and then she defends the word by returning to its origin. Sneed comes from a Simpsons gag; therefore, it carries no contempt for the disabled; therefore, the objection is folk etymology and beneath a serious person. The genealogist’s whole discipline says the gag is irrelevant. What matters is what the word does in the mouth of the girl using it in July 2026, and what it does is sort.

The mirror problem

Here’s what I think is actually happening, and I want to be careful with it, because I’ve been in the state I’m describing, and I don’t think contempt explains it.

Dysphoria breaks the instrument you would ordinarily use to know what you look like. You can’t see your own face. What you see is a composite of memory, fear, the last photograph that ruined your week, and whatever a stranger’s expression did to you on the bus. The instrument reads differently at different hours of the day. A girl in this condition is in a genuine epistemological emergency with immediate practical consequences. She has to make expensive and irreversible decisions about surgery, about coming out at work, about who she lets touch her, about whether to walk home at night, and the measuring device is broken.

So she outsources the measurement. This is the single most important thing about the board, and almost nobody says it out loud. An anonymous rating thread is a calibration device. You put your face in, and you get numbers back from people who have no reason to be nice to you, and for one hour, you know something. The reason the harsh verdict is preferred is that a kind verdict is worthless as data. Your mother says you look beautiful, and it tells you nothing because your mother would say that regardless. Your girlfriend says it, and it tells you nothing because she’s fucking you. The clinic says it, and it tells you nothing because they need the appointment to end. The only statement that carries information is the one from a person who would enjoy hurting you and still couldn’t find the thing to hurt you with.

That’s a coherent epistemology, and it was built by people who were lied to constantly. It’s also wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that eats them.

It’s wrong because the calibration never terminates. There’s no reading that closes the question. A woman who gets told she passes concludes the thread was being nice, or that the photo angle was generous, or that the anons are getting soft, and she posts again next week. The device produces a permanent demand for more readings, which is how an addiction behaves. It’s wrong because the raters are using an instrument that’s just as broken, and every one of them learned the criteria in the same place. The accreditation standards weren’t rigorous. And it’s wrong because the process converts a private emergency into a public hierarchy: once four hundred women are all submitting to the same ranking, the ranking becomes a social fact with winners in it, and the winners have an interest in its continuation.

Then there’s the second function, which is the prophecy. You will never pass. You started too late. You should give up. Said to a nineteen-year-old six weeks on estrogen, this is false as often as it’s true, unfalsifiable as advice, and said constantly. It’s said because it works as inoculation. If you say the worst outcome yourself, first, in your own voice, then it can’t be done to you by someone else. Hope is the thing that costs. Every time it fails, you pay, and after enough failures, a girl will pay a fixed price up front to never be charged the variable one again. Doom is a way of buying out of the future. It presents as realism, and it’s a defense, and you can watch it operate in real time in any thread where someone posts a picture and asks an honest question.

The third function is anonymity, and it’s the reason none of this can ever become anything. A reputation is something you can be held to. It accumulates, it can be ruined, it obligates you. Strip it, and you get statements nobody owns, which means nobody can be argued with, corrected, thanked, or asked for help next month. It also means the same woman writes the insult and receives it. She posts her face at midnight and rates someone else’s at one, and both posts come out of the same wound. Self-hatred with two accounts is still self-hatred, and it feels like company.

And the fourth is the consolation of rank, which is the plainest of them. At the bottom of the world, there’s still someone below you. The sneed exists so that the moderator isn’t last. Take her away, and the moderator is alone with the actual arrangement of her life: a landlord, an untreated condition, a wage she can’t get, and a body that hurts.

What they actually believe

I’ll state it as a doctrine, in its strongest form, because the strong form is what people are converting to, and the weak form is a straw one.

Sex is the substrate, and gender is what people say about it. Medicine can move you across, partially, at a cost measured in money and years, and the outcome is largely fixed by when you started and what you were built from. Passing is the only outcome that changes your material conditions, because passing determines whether you get a job, a landlord, a partner, and a walk home. Dysphoria is a real medical condition with a physical target, and its intensity is the thing that separates a transsexual from a person with an identity. The institutions lie: the endocrinologist underdoses you, the therapist gatekeeps you, the surgeon prices you out, and the academic uses you for a chapter. Optimism is what people say to you instead of helping. Anyone who claims to be happy in an unpassing body is either lying, or was never in the condition, or is rich.

The first thing to say is that a great deal of that is correct, and the correctness is the reason the culture recruits.

Passing does determine your material conditions. It’s the most honest sentence in the doctrine, and the liberal trans world can’t say it, because saying it means admitting that the outcome is bought and that most of us can’t afford it. I’ve sat in rooms where a woman said exactly that and watched everyone flinch, like she’d said something dangerous, when all she’d done was tell the truth before anyone in the room was ready to fund it. The clinics do underdose. The surgeons do price by what the market will bear. The academics do build careers out of us. Everyone who told a suicidal girl that her problem was internalized transphobia rather than an untreated condition with a surgical solution deserves the contempt they get for it. They’ve earned it.

The second thing to say is that the doctrine smuggles four claims through under cover of the true ones.

First: the intensity of dysphoria establishes authenticity, which turns a symptom into a credential and makes the sickest woman in the room the most real one. This is a hierarchy that rewards deterioration, and it will be obeyed. If suffering is the entry criterion, people supply suffering.

Second: the outcome is fixed at the start. This is presented as biology and it functions as fatalism, and it isn’t what the evidence of anyone’s own eyes says. Women transition at thirty-five and end up unremarkable in public. Women transition at sixteen and don’t. The variance is enormous, the predictors are weak, and the confidence with which nineteen-year-olds get sentenced on the board is manufactured.

Third: anyone happy is lying. This is unfalsifiable and it’s load-bearing, because it protects the whole system from counterexample. Every visibly content trans woman becomes evidence of fraud rather than evidence against the model.

Fourth: being right about medicine makes you right about politics. It doesn’t. The board’s medical realism is often better than the nonprofit’s, and its political content is an aesthetic ranking with no demands attached. That gap is the whole argument.

Why they hate the sneeds

There isn’t one reason. There are several and they stack.

The sneed is proof that the pain isn’t universal. If there’s a trans woman who is calm, employed, publicly out, badly dressed, ugly by the board’s metric, and not suffering, then suffering is a distribution across a population. And if it’s a distribution, then a moderator’s position in it has causes, and causes implicate a life, and a life implicates choices, and now the whole architecture that makes her position bearable by making it fated is under threat from a woman with a pride flag in her bio. The sneed doesn’t have to say anything. Her existence is the argument.

The sneed got the thing without paying. This is the oldest resentment there is, and it doesn’t need transness to explain it. Someone else received what you were told had to be earned through a decade of misery, and she received it by asking for it, and she doesn’t seem to know what it cost anyone. The response isn’t a political analysis. It’s the response of a person who paid full tuition watching someone walk in free.

The sneed says the pain is a mindset, and that’s the cruelest lie anyone tells us. When a woman with an untreated, physically targeted condition is told her problem is her attitude, the correct response is fury, and I’d defend that fury against anyone. What the board does with that fury afterward is a different question, and a worse one.

The sneed is reachable. The insurer isn’t. The surgeon isn’t. The state isn’t. She has a public account, she replies, she can be quote-tweeted, and she’ll be hurt by it in a way you can watch. Contempt aimed at her produces a result in under a minute. Contempt aimed at a hospital system produces nothing, ever, unless there are two hundred of you and a lawyer.

The sneed is visible, and visibility is a public cost that somebody has to carry. A woman who boymodes is running a private solution. It’s a rational one and I’ll defend it below. But it depends on other trans women being visible enough to be the face of the thing, taking the legislative hit, taking the sidewalk hit, getting followed into a bathroom, being the one on the news. The girl with the flag in her bio is absorbing a cost that the invisible strategy doesn’t pay, and being sneered at by the people whose privacy she partly subsidizes.

And underneath all of it, the sneed is usually younger, or was insured, or had a mother who signed the form at fifteen. That’s a class resentment with nowhere to go, misfiled as an aesthetic objection. It comes out as a complaint about black lipstick and Bluesky because a complaint about inheritance would require a politics, and the board doesn’t have one.

## Why the needs are right

They’re right about the destination and useless about the road, which is the exact reverse of the board, which knows the road and has nowhere to go.

They’re right that a jaw isn’t a verdict. The board’s central empirical claim, that womanhood is settled by the skeleton, is false, and it’s falsified daily by cis women who get read as men and by trans women who don’t. Passing is contextual. It’s a function of the observer, and it moves with the neighborhood, the hour, and who’s looking. Treating it as a fixed personal property is bad measurement even on the board’s own terms.

They’re right that the desire to be unmarked isn’t an obligation to be unmarked. A woman who wants to be read as female without qualification is asking for something reasonable, and she should get it. The board takes that legitimate want and converts it into a duty, so a woman who can’t achieve it becomes a failure rather than a person who was denied a resource. This is the same move the surgeons’ price list makes, performed by the patients.

They’re right that a politics assembled only from the most dysphoric excludes the people who do the actual work. Look at who drives somebody to a consult, hosts, signs a lease, runs the fund, answers the phone at four in the morning, and keeps a spare bed made up. It’s disproportionately the earnest ones, the flags-in-bio ones, and the reason has nothing to do with luck or moral superiority. You can’t run a phone tree on contempt, and someone has to be willing to make the calls. The disposition that lets a woman be publicly, embarrassingly hopeful is the same disposition that lets her stay in a friendship with someone who was mean to her last month, and that second thing is the entire material basis of anyone surviving anything.

They’re right that the informed consent clinics, the name change guides, the funds, and the crisis lines were built by earnest people, not by the board. You can hate their vocabulary. The board has been running for a decade, and its cumulative institutional output is a lexicon. Apparently, the revolutionary program is inventing another noun.

And they’re right about this too: optimism is infrastructure. It’s the cheapest and most renewable resource a poor group has, and every serious movement of poor people has run on it. Treating it as stupidity is a luxury position held by people who’ve already decided nothing is coming.

And where they’re wrong, they’re seriously wrong, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise, because the board’s audience was manufactured by these failures.

Telling a woman her dysphoria is internalized transphobia is a form of medical denial, and it has a body count. Treating grief about a face as a political error is contemptible. The purity apparatus that turns a disagreement into an accusation is real, and Sarah Schulman’s *Conflict Is Not Abuse* (2016) has the mechanics of it right: a conflict gets escalated into an abuse claim, the group is recruited to enforce it, and the escalation feels like protection to everyone participating. Every trans woman I know has been on the receiving end of that at least once, and Black trans women get it first and hardest, because we’re the ones whose harshness reads as menace. And the earnest world abandons us fastest when defending us becomes socially expensive, which they’ve proven, repeatedly, at scale.

So both statements are true. The sneeds are correct, and they left us to rot. That’s not a contradiction. That’s a description of liberals.

The actual name for it: transfeminine cultural nationalism

What the board has is a nation.

It has a territory that can be encroached on, and the July 2026 complaint about the sneedification of the board is a border complaint. It has a language, and the language is guarded, and using the wrong regional variant marks you as new. It has a founding injury and a mythology of that injury. It has an authenticity test administered on the body. It has traitors, and the traitors are always the ones who look like assimilationists to the nationalist and like ordinary members to everyone else. It has a diaspora, on Twitter and in the servers. It has a flag, and the flag is the boymoder. And it has no program, no demand, no target, and no address to send anything to.

Fanon called this, and it’s in *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961), in the essay on national culture. His argument is that the colonized intellectual, cut off from a living tradition, goes looking for an authentic culture to defend, and what he ends up defending is a mummified version of it, a set of customs and words held up as proof of existence. Fanon’s objection isn’t sentimental. He says a culture is the present struggle of a people, and that a nationalism which stops at custom, which becomes a matter of correct vocabulary and correct dress and correct memory, never converts into political and social consciousness and will hand the country to whichever elite is standing closest when it matters.

The other half is in the violence essay, and it’s the one that should be read out loud on that board. Fanon describes the aggression of the colonized turning first on the colonized. Before it ever reaches the settler, it gets discharged sideways, into feuds, into fights at the edge of camp, into an obsessive vigilance about who among us is really one of us. He isn’t calling those men bad. He’s saying the aggression is correctly produced by the situation and is being spent in the only direction that’s open, the direction where nobody stops you. The sneed is what a trans woman does with a rage that has no permitted object. I know what that discharge feels like from the inside, and it felt like being right the whole time I was doing it.

Amilcar Cabral, in “National Liberation and Culture” (1970), makes the point that finishes it. Culture is a product of a people’s history and their level of development, and the return to the source by an educated stratum means nothing unless it converts into taking part in the struggle. Cultural pride that doesn’t become organization is a class alibi.

Transfeminine cultural nationalism is what you get when a group of women with a real grievance, real material deprivation, and no organization builds a nation instead of a movement. The nation is cheap. You can found one on a phone. Its membership dues are payable in vocabulary. It offers what a nation offers: the sensation of belonging to something with an inside and an outside, and it requires nothing except that you enforce the border, and the border is the only place where the members ever get to feel powerful.

And it’s not feminism. It has never made a demand on a single institution. It has no position on housing, no position on the wage, no position on the prison, no position on who does the cooking. Its entire content is a determination of who is really one of us, adjudicated on the body of the applicant. That’s the definitional core of a nationalism, and it’s the opposite of what feminism has been for.

The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977) is the document I’d hand to anyone who thinks I’m splitting hairs. Those women built a politics directly out of their own material position, which is exactly what the board thinks it’s doing. And they explicitly refused separatism. Their objection to lesbian separatism was that it rested on biological determinism and left out too much of actual life to function as a politics. They wanted an analysis that could hold race, class, sex, and the wage at the same time, and they said so while being poorer and in more danger than anyone posting today. A politics built from your own oppression is feminism. A politics built from your own oppression that ends at the border test is a nation, and the two look identical from the inside, and Combahee could tell the difference in 1977 with no money at all.

The feminist critique, which is worse than the nationalist one

Here’s the part that should end the argument, and it’s the reason I can’t treat the board as an eccentric cousin of my own politics.

The board’s ranking criterion is the verdict of the street. Passing means being read as female by strangers, most of them men, in public, in bad light, quickly. That’s the instrument. So a culture that ranks trans women by passing has taken the definition of womanhood and handed it to the appraisal of men. Every internal hierarchy on that board is a proxy for how a man on a bus would sort us. They believe they’re the last realists in a world of pretenders, and they’ve installed the male gaze as their standards body and given it final authority over who counts as a woman.

Feminism has one long, unbroken argument about that arrangement, and it isn’t complicated. Being appraised is the condition. Passing the appraisal is a survival tactic, and it’s a good one, and any woman who can should use it. Making the appraisal into a rank is submission to the thing that’s grading you, and it produces exactly what it produces among cis women: a hierarchy of beauty in which the women near the top police the border most aggressively because their position is the only asset they’ve been paid, and the women at the bottom are treated as having failed at a job rather than as having been denied a resource.

This is my Theory of Feminized Punishment doing exactly what I built it to do. The punishment is administered by women, on women, for insufficient compliance with a standard set elsewhere, and the administration is experienced as honesty and love. Hon, the ur-word of the whole lexicon, is a term for an older woman who is deluded about how she looks. Strip the transsexual context and you have the most ordinary misogyny on earth, the thing said about every woman over fifty who wears something bright. They imported it whole. They think they invented a science of the body, and they reproduced the beauty terror in a purer form, because the population is a group of women who have been stripped of every other currency and have only this one to trade.

Julia Serano’s *Whipping Girl* (2007) named the double bind that makes it airtight. Trans women get punished for failing at femininity and punished for succeeding at it, and there’s no position on that axis that isn’t contempt. The board resolves the bind by choosing a side: succeed, or be honest about having failed, and either way accept the axis. The sneeds resolve it by rejecting the axis, badly, with terrible theory and an annoying vocabulary. I’ll take the bad theory that rejects the axis over the good theory that submits to it, and I don’t think that’s a close call.

The race analysis makes it worse, and this is where I stop being able to hold it at arm’s length. The passing metric is a set of European facial norms: brow ridge, jaw width, nose, hairline, skin. The whole grammar of what reads as feminine in that grading system is white, and it’s applied to Black trans women by people who genuinely believe they’re measuring sex. A Black woman gets read as masculine because of race, and the board scores it as a failure of transition. I’ve watched it happen. I’ve had it done to me, by other trans women, in threads I should have closed and didn’t, because some part of me still wanted the number. The board’s most confident scientific claims are a beauty standard with the racial history filed off, and its members will defend the scoring to the death because it’s the only expertise they’ve got.

Hortense Spillers, in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” (1987), makes a distinction between the body and the flesh, where flesh is what’s left when a person is reduced to material available for marking and measurement by someone else’s instruments. She’s writing about the Middle Passage and the American slave, and I’m extending her, so take that as my argument and not hers. The rating thread is a machine for converting women into flesh. It takes a person and returns a set of measurements taken by strangers using a captor’s grammar, and the women submit to it voluntarily because they’ve been denied every other mirror. That’s the most feminist thing I can say about the board and the most damning: they built the appraisal shed themselves, and they line up.

Monique Wittig, in “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1981), argued that women are a class produced by a social relation and that the myth of a natural, biological woman is what keeps the relation invisible. Both sides of this fight fail her test. The needs make gender an essence you declare. The board makes sex an essence you’re built from. Both have swapped a relation for a substance, and neither can explain why the poor ones cook.

The platform question, which is why I care in 2026

None of this would matter as a subculture. Subcultures are allowed to be strange and cruel and inward. What’s happened since 2022 is that this one migrated onto a platform engineered to reward it.

Musk completed the Twitter purchase in October 2022. In April 2023, the hateful conduct policy quietly lost its provision against targeted deadnaming and misgendering. In June 2023, he stated that cis and cisgender would be treated as slurs on the platform. In July 2023, the ad revenue share for paying subscribers began, which converted engagement into a direct payment. Paid accounts got reach, replies got sorted by subscription, and the search function that Ngansuril correctly mourns went with everything else.

Put a culture whose only remaining product is the ranking of other trans women onto a platform that pays cash for the ratio and boosts whoever pays eight dollars. The result isn’t complicated. Contempt for other trans women is the highest-performing content a transfeminine account can produce because it’s the only transfeminine content the general audience will amplify. A trans woman saying that most trans women are deluded, ugly, mentally ill men who should stop kidding themselves will be retweeted by tens of thousands of people who want every one of us dead, including the woman who wrote it. She will get paid for it. She’ll interpret the numbers as vindication because the number is the only feedback the platform gives.

That’s the laundering operation, and it’s the actual danger. The vocabulary was developed in a room where everyone was trans, and in that room hon and sneed and youngshit meant something specific and internal. Moved onto Twitter, they became citable evidence from a native informant. Every gender-critical account on Earth has learned to quote a mod, because a trans woman saying it carries an authority no one else can supply. The board built a supply of testimony against transsexual women and put it on a platform that pays for volume, and the buyer is a political movement currently removing our healthcare by statute.

And the incentive runs the other way too. A young trans woman arriving on that platform in 2026 finds that the transfem accounts with reach are the ones doing this. She learns the vocabulary in a week because the vocabulary is what gets the likes, and she has no idea it came out of a room with a dosing wiki in it. She gets the contempt with none of the material function that once justified it. I’ve watched a joke that meant nothing outside a group chat get screenshotted and passed around as testimony against the rest of us. That’s the culture becoming dominant, and it’s what I’ve been watching happen for three years now.

Nietzsche has one more piece of this in *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883 to 1885), in the section on the tarantulas. Zarathustra’s complaint about the preachers of equality is that their souls are full of revenge and they’ve agreed among themselves to call it justice. The board runs the identical engine with the doctrine reversed: it preaches rank out of revenge. Same appetite, opposite content, which tells you the content was never the point. If a culture will produce either doctrine depending on which one licenses the punishment, then punishment is the product and the theory is packaging.

The line between what I do and what they do

People say my writing is tttt posting with citations. I want to answer that seriously, because the accusation isn’t stupid and there are pieces of mine where I’d have to think about it.

There are three tests, and I run everything I write against them, including this piece.

First: does the target have a choice? A jaw is not a choice. A hairline is not a choice. The age you started is not a choice, and being poor at nineteen is not a choice, and every one of the board’s criteria is a fact about a woman’s body or her luck. What I attack is what people do: who left someone on read when rent was due, who dropped her when defending her got expensive, who cooked, who got picked up from the airport, who got the guest room and who got the couch, who was told to be patient. A woman can change all of that by Tuesday. She can’t change her skull by Tuesday, and criticism she can’t act on is just a sentence handed down.

Second: does it name a beneficiary? Every piece I write is trying to find who’s getting paid. Somebody is always getting labor, money, sex, status, or safety out of it, and the essay’s job is to find her and say her position out loud. The board’s criticism has no beneficiary in it, because a jaw doesn’t benefit anyone, which is how you know the analysis is decorative.

Third: does it convert into a demand? Money for the fund, a name on the lease, a change in who hosts, a public defense when it costs something, a strike, a lawyer, a bed. If the essay ends and there’s nothing anyone could do differently on the strength of it, then it was ressentiment with footnotes, and I should have kept it in my drafts.

I fail these sometimes. I’ve written lines about trans women that were about appearance and I dressed them up as analysis, and I knew what I was doing, and it got engagement, and the engagement is the tell. The distinction I’m claiming is operational and I’d want it applied to me by someone who doesn’t like me. It’s the only version worth having.

What the board was for, and when that ended

None of that means the board was always this. It was dialectical for a while, and the usefulness was inseparable from the cruelty in a way that makes both hard to describe honestly.

Nobody there was managing your feelings, which meant a girl could ask what her actual estradiol level was and get an answer from someone with no lawsuit, no ethics board, and no funding to protect. It meant sourcing for people whose clinic was eighteen months out or four hundred miles away or run by a man who wanted two letters and a year of therapy first. It meant injection sites, what a bad vial looks like, what to do when your levels crash, and what to say to get seen. It meant that the first honest account of what an incongruous puberty costs, which no organization will print because it isn’t inspiring, was available for free to a seventeen-year-old at three in the morning. I recognize that girl. I was her, at more ages than I’ll list here, and the honesty is the part of that world I still owe something to.

That’s what DIY means. The people who need the thing produce the thing, outside of and against the institution that refused to. The board did that. Cruelty attached to a workshop can be tolerated for years, because you walk out with what you came for and the insults don’t come home with you.

The workshop closed. I’d date it to roughly 2022, and I’d argue it with anyone who was there, but the direction isn’t in dispute: the productive function moved out to private servers, to wikis, to group chats, to DMs, and the board kept the vocabulary. It kept hondose and youngshit and moder and, on schedule, produced sneed. This is what happens when a culture loses the ability to make anything material. Words are the cheapest possible output. There’s no vendor, no money, no logistics, no risk, no follow-through, and a new word still feels like a discovery when you’re the one who coined it.

The anon complaining about sneedification is describing something real, and it has nothing to do with newcomers. A place whose only remaining product is classification gets overrun by people who came for the classification because that’s the only thing on the shelf. Sorting trans women is a hobby with very low barriers to entry.

The test is what the thing can get a girl. A vial, a bed, a ride to the appointment, a lawyer’s number, four hundred dollars, an injection she isn’t scared of, a bloodwork range, a way out of her mother’s house. In 2020, that culture could get a girl several of those. In 2026, it can get her a word for the girl she resents, and the word is free, and so is everything else it has left.

Ending

The girls in the black lipstick with the flags in their bios and the terrible posts about gender being an essence will still be answering messages in ten years. Their theory is bad, and it collapses the second there’s a doctor or a cop in the room. They’ll still be there because the disposition that lets a woman be that publicly, stupidly hopeful is the same one that gets her name onto a lease for a girl with no credit.

The bill for the other culture comes due privately, at four in the morning, when a woman with a flawless vocabulary for everyone else’s inadequacy has nobody left to call because she spent six years demonstrating to every available person that she would eventually rank them too. That board rehearses its members’ deaths as a genre. It has been doing it for a decade, and it has never once organized a fund.

Ngansuril is right that it’s a monstrous reality. She has the direction wrong. The word is what a nation manufactures when it can’t make anything a girl can put in her body or her bank account, and it lands on the only people in the story holding less than she is. Andrea Dworkin’s argument in *Right-Wing Women* (1983) was that women attach themselves to the systems hurting them because the terms on offer everywhere else are worse, and she meant it as an indictment of what was on offer. Boymoding is a rational bargain, and I’ll defend it against anyone who’s never had to walk to work in it. What the board did was take a survival bargain and convert it into a moral rank, so the women paying the highest price for their safety became the ones with the most invested in the scoring, and the scoring is the only return any of them will ever see.

The girls it teaches to say sneed will die fluent.

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Works cited

Ngansuril, “Attack of the Sneeds,” Substack, August 1, 2026. The essay under discussion. Used for its lexicography of *sneedhon* (first /lgbt/ attestation in April 2021, semantic shift in 2023, back-formation to *sneed*, the *sneedpoon* derivative), the July 2026 post complaining of sneedification, the Sneed and Moder typology, its list of factors it treats as producing a Sneed, and its claim that Moders are ontologically proletarian.

Friedrich Nietzsche, *On the Genealogy of Morality* (1887). First essay for the account of a morality produced by ressentiment, which requires an external opposing world before it can act at all, and for the lambs and birds of prey passage on weakness reinterpreted as merit. Second essay for the argument that a thing’s origin and its later use lie worlds apart, which answers the Simpsons-etymology defense of *sneed*.

Friedrich Nietzsche, *Thus Spoke Zarathustra* (1883 to 1885). The section on the tarantulas, for the claim that a doctrine can be an alibi for the will to punish, and that the same appetite will generate opposite doctrines depending on which one licenses it.

Frantz Fanon, *The Wretched of the Earth* (1961). The essay on national culture, for the argument that a nationalism which settles into the defense of custom and vocabulary never converts into political consciousness, and that culture is the present struggle of a people rather than a preserved inventory. The violence essay, for the account of the colonized’s aggression being discharged laterally, against his own, before it can reach the party responsible.

Amilcar Cabral, “National Liberation and Culture” (1970). For the argument that culture is produced by a people’s history and material development, and that a stratum’s return to its own culture means nothing politically unless it converts into participation in struggle.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement” (1977). For the distinction I’m drawing between a politics built from a group’s own material oppression and a separatism resting on biological determinism, which the collective examined and rejected as inadequate to actual life.

Monique Wittig, “One Is Not Born a Woman” (1981). For the argument that women are a class produced by a social relation and that the myth of the natural woman conceals it. Applied here against both the declarative-gender position and the sex-essentialist one.

Andrea Dworkin, *Right-Wing Women* (1983). For the argument that women’s attachment to the systems hurting them is a rational bargain made where the alternatives are worse. Applied to boymoding and to why the women paying the highest price defend the ranking hardest.

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (1987). For the distinction between the body and the flesh, flesh being what remains when a person is reduced to material marked and measured by someone else’s instruments. Spillers is writing about the Middle Passage and American slavery; the application to the rating thread is my extension and not her claim.

Julia Serano, *Whipping Girl* (2007). For the double bind in which trans women are punished for failing at femininity and punished again for succeeding at it, with no available position on the axis that escapes contempt.

Sarah Schulman, *Conflict Is Not Abuse* (2016). For the mechanics of a conflict escalated into an accusation and a group recruited to enforce it, used in the section conceding what the sneeds get wrong.

Platform changes referenced: the completion of the Twitter acquisition in October 2022; the removal of the targeted deadnaming and misgendering provision from the hateful conduct policy in April 2023; the June 2023 statement treating cis and cisgender as slurs; and the launch of subscriber ad revenue sharing in July 2023.