The Context and Logs

(Note that Google compresses these images on mobile)

2022/01/08 - Updated with transcriptions and added a couple responses

2022/01/09 - Additional screenshots added, encased in <#1> </#1> to denote, (also fixed chaos dates oops lol)

After being repeatedly being kicked whenever I joined into discussions about being gay by sharing that I am also gay, I managed to have this conversation in global chat:

When I relogged back in, to see if I could test something, I discovered I was banned from chat.  (Later discovered this was a temporary banning).

I sent an email to berserk games as follows immediately afterwards and received no response:

After a week with no response, I found their official discord and decided to ask in there, and got this response:

I never got a response after that. A spam bot came by later, but was cleaned away, I assume I’m just being ignored at this point.

<#1>

I share an exchange later, but the above was never addressed with me.  I include this screenshot only so you can see no one responded to my question, “Are you suggesting that being trans is a fetish or political?” Rather, a separate dialogue begins.

I’d go into this but I already shared that bit later.

</#1>

Things I’m Asked A Lot

Why is this bad, just talk about being gay/trans elsewhere

On a fundamental level, this means that it is impossible to find queer community in chat, or to ask for queer games in chat. You can’t ask for games with gay/trans representation or about gay/trans experiences because you will get kicked. It is considered against their rules.

The suppression of identity tells those people it’s not safe to be themselves in those spaces. I’d occasionally see some banter of people celebrating their queerness, people saying they love being gay, and the like, and I assume all of them must have gotten kicked the same way I did when I joined in. This sets a precedent that you are not welcome here, that you can be here as long as you leave your marginalized identity at the door. When other people are allowed to speak about their hetero cis experiences but gay and trans ones are silenced, you are using your platform to say only hetero and cis people are embraced here.

This is why people say representation matters.  Cis hetero experiences are so normalized in our culture that we don’t bat an eye at discussions about hetero girlfriends or boyfriends, or about men feeling manly, but at the mere mention of being gay or trans you will be removed.  This is their global chat so that sends a general message to all that use their platform.

But it’s their rules

Yes, and their rules are harmful, that’s the point here and why I won’t be prototyping on their platform going forward.

They probably don’t allow any discussion of sexuality, even hetero or cis stuff

This took me minutes to take, and I was never kicked for it. I’d get kicked in seconds at the mention of being gay.

<#1>

I hope it is obvious, but yes I was testing for keywords at this point. I saw this was shared in their discord and I’m so glad it was because I thought I lost the screenshot but this reminded me where I could find it. I was eventually kicked, but it wasn’t because I was saying cis, straight, or trying to stir up political drama, but because I finally said a real fetish which is a totally understandable thing to kick for, but again, I was testing at this point.  You can see from their logs that it was exactly that fetish that triggered the kick, non of the overtly political or sexual orientation or cisgender discussion. I also want to note this happened way after all the other kicks including the banning. This was the final time I was kicked from chat. Also note the big gap in time where I was just sitting idly in chat after celebrating being cis.

Here is the log shared in their discord, although they are misrepresenting me as all prior times were instantaneously in response to me mentioning being gay or asking why I was banned for it. I’m mostly sharing for the chat log which collaborates the above and shows why I was kicked, I can only imagine they aren’t showing the logs that have a big ⚠️[gay], which, lol, ya it me.

I also wanted to include the following tweets of mine to show just how quickly you get banned for mentioning being gay.  Although I will admit that referring to rules judgments is against the rules (I didn’t realize this until much later), but the last one is me responding to “ur mom gay” with an affirmative, that I am indeed g@y.

https://twitter.com/XoeAllred/status/1459421185079341057

2 seconds from gay to kick

https://twitter.com/XoeAllred/status/1476089010506240000?s=20

6 seconds from gay to kick

https://twitter.com/XoeAllred/status/1476341797693833216?s=20

11 seconds from gay to kick

</#1>

You’re lying, I got kicked today for saying I’m cis/straight

You can blame me for that, sorry. If it makes you feel better it’s only temporary, unlike my banned identity. Also I’m noticing now that the very unambiguous term “cis” was not addressed.

They have your money already anyways

Tabletop Simulator is a very social platform. The only reason it is able to maintain its momentum is because of the plethora of people who continue to use it. Whenever you host a game on the platform, that’s another reason for someone to purchase it to participate. Whenever you insist this is how you play your games, that’s a friend who may purchase it hoping to join you. You could debate the efficacy of boycotts, and I’m not explicitly asking for one, but it is not without its merits to stop using the platform in protest.

This is blown out of proportion

If you don’t care you don’t care. I can’t make you care. I have been tweeting about individual instances of this for a while, not getting more than a handful of likes and maybe a couple retweets. I honestly thought my recent tweet would get the same attention, quickly ignored and easily forgotten, these receipts completely unnecessary.

What would be the appropriate amount of attention this deserves? A lot of my friends have expressed that if they had known this prior they wouldn’t have used TTS to prototype, and are uninstalling in response. I absolutely would not have spent the 1000+ hours I have in TTS if I had known about this stance of theirs. I do think people deserve to know why they get autokicked for joining in with chat with a celebratory, “I also love being gay”. I don’t know how else to communicate that to be quite honest.

<#1>

I hear people say stuff like, “They don’t necessarily call it political or a fetish, they might have just mistaken it as a sexuality” in which case they’re arbitrarily deciding that gay/trans are the ones they’ve deemed inappropriate sexualities. You may have noticed that while I was testing out “straight” people reactively wanted to announce their non-straight sexual orientations, but were probably autokicked for it as I am. I felt awful after that experiment, because what I had just demonstrated was, “You can be straight and proud and loud about it, but the very second you share being gay you’re kicked”.

I have yet to see a positive interpretation of this stance, at best it is silencing queer voices “to avoid drama”, which honestly is still bad. Even if it really was that simple, when I approached them in chat, and on email, and on discord, at any point they could have said simply that, “I’m sorry, but we autokick on gay/trans to avoid drama” but instead I was told it was inappropriate for chat, and quite deliberately grouped with fetishes and politics.  I didn’t bring those things up, they did.  And I’ve yet to be directly addressed about it, despite them deleting the original statement because they know it looks bad.

It’s a stretch to say they have an anti-lgbt agenda

I personally doubt they are consciously and deliberately trying to bring harm to the LGBT community or that they have an anti-lgbt agenda. Charitably, what I think we are seeing here is unknowing systemic homophobia/transphobia based around the dated idea that queerness is inappropriate, a refusal to acknowledge or address it meaningfully, and a refusal to listen when questioned about their decisions. I can only work off of the information given, and it started with me not knowing how to get the rules in the chat itself, to getting banned while asking about those rules from a mod who seemed to be coyly suggesting you can’t self-id as gay/trans in chat because of the bolded golden rule of being family friendly, about games, and chatting with players. I wanted clarification on that because that is a very vague thing to be pointed to, and saying gay/trans being family unfriendly is kind of a big deal. So I emailed them from the rules provided about moderator action, and received no response, I still haven’t received a response to that email. I finally approached them in discord and wanted to first see how strict the rules were that chat be about games because that has not been my observation, and the initial dialogue seemed to confirm that, and so I pushed them on why gay and trans wasn’t allowed and was told it wasn’t appropriate, and was grouped with sexuality, fetishes, and politics. That is a very different and upsetting thing to be told than that they are just trying to recklessly contain a volatile chat. I stopped following discord after that because they stopped giving me direct answers, and here we are. I have still never received a direct correspondence from them. From that experience, from that perspective, do you feel like they have the best interests of lgbt community at heart? Maybe they don’t intend harm, but they have not given the impression that they care about the harm they’re unintentionally inflicting, even when directly told as such.

I wish I had taken a screenshot of when @TabletopSim had retweeted this I’m sorry you felt that way but I clarified to others later hollow apology from CHRY:

https://twitter.com/CHRY3D/status/1480338016950493186?s=20

What exactly would be enough, they said sorry

They have consistently demonstrated an inability to listen and learn from this experience. Every public tweet statement thus far has failed to adequately address the underlying issues at hand, and several of them dismiss the need for change and accuse me of unnecessarily stirring up drama. TTS was my most used game on steam for a long time, I don’t make this decision lightly. I was frequently teaching others TTS tricks. Things are far too gone for me personally but I’m not going to make a decision for you, I’ve already found platforms that better suit my needs, even if systemic bigotry issues were addressed.

They’re saying there is missing context

(Names are obscured to just some of the last letters of their name here to identify the speaker)

I ran out of the emotional energy to engage with them on the official TTS discord, but some of my friends didn’t, and here are some highlights. The stance here taken in context with my complaint appears to be that queer voices need to be silenced so they aren’t discriminated against. But kicking them for self identifying is, well, discrimination. Again I would like to note that it is was not a kickable offense to self identify as straight or cis.

Here someone brings up that tabletop gaming features queer identities, and CHRY of Beserk says these topics don’t belong in global chat, because they just don’t (no explanation given). All we ask is that you talk about board games but I guess not these board games. Also what knitting groups have CHRY been to we’re constantly gossiping about boyfriends/girlfriends.

I’m sure there is more, but I’ve yet to find an adequate response that isn’t some form of backpedaling and lying about previous statements or actions. Thanks for saying trans rights are human rights, but it rings hollow when you’ve told me prior that it would be inappropriate to share with others. I’ll share my pride elsewhere, screentop.gg looks really promising.

</#1>