This post is cross-posted to my tilde-town page.

This is a post about something I've been thinking about for a long time. It might just be bias from this being one of my few "permanent" homes, but this community (and the historical ones from years ago) seem to have had a higher-than-normal rate of transgender, genderqueer, and generally atypically-oriented people. I've thought it over a few times trying to figure out what made this place so appealing to people on this spectrum, though I don't have much in the way concrete thoughts, here are a few:


1. Places for acting "out of gender"
Acmlm's Board, the original, actually had a forum basically dedicated to this [archive.org]. While I would wager that most of us weren't really familiar with the concept of "transgender" at that point, the forum was mostly centered around just being goofy and ... well, feminine. (It's probably worth mentioning that there wasn't any masculine counterpart to this forum just because most users were male.)

This forum actually existed for quite a while, though after a few years it turned more "mature" and less "silly"? It's hard to really put into words.


2. Encouragement of experimenting with self-presentation
Most forums consist of only a few things:
- Username, often immutable, or at least with changes "discouraged"
- Avatar
- Signature, usually size-limited or text-only

Acmlm's Board, on the other hand, was far more liberal; usernames were changed frequently, often with themes; usernames had colors based on the account's gender option and administrative level; signatures were in reality full layouts, designed to envelope posts in a design that could be as simple as a typical signature or as elaborate as a fully-designed wrapper with art or characters. Previous designs were also saved with posts, so a historical view of them was possible, compared to most forums where the current signature is appended to all posts.

All of this combined to allow users to change their presentation radically, adopting a new appearance, theme, and name just by making a new design and requesting a name change; in some cases, these would sweep the forums at once, especially around holidays (e.g. Christmas- or Halloween-themed names, avatars, and layouts). Sometimes they would spontaneously appear; one of the more often-occurring spontaneous change was that to "opposite gender" appearances, sometimes accompanied with a little change in posting style to fit a more "feminine" appearance.

(More typically for the time, there was no verification of who you actually were behind the user, so things like "full names" were entirely optional and very rarely seen. Modern systems, especially the likes of social media, trend more towards using legal names, or at least connecting the pseudonym to the person behind it.)


3. General strictness towards personal attacks
This one is a little shaker because it is relying entirely on my memory, but for the most part the community wasn't tolerant of ... intolerance; disagreeing opinions were seen as okay, but attacking anyone or any group of people was generally verboten. This meant that people had a wider range of being able to be "open" without being attacked for who they were (or weren't) — while this policy didn't always work, it was at least present. The old forum Officer's Club was available as a sort of "serious space" where any sort of personal attacking was met with punishment, allowing people to open up and air their thoughts without risk of being attacked for them.

I don't actually know if this was ever used to vent these sorts of things; it's difficult to search a dead, offline community, but the environment at least existed, which may have led to people sticking around.


In closing
These are just thoughts. While I don't fall entirely into the LGBTQ spectrum*, these are some observations gathered from being around a lot of people from this community over the last 15 years.

We're a quiet place now, but I'd like to think that over that time we've helped people become who they are, safely.

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(Lv 231 with 188072973 EXP)