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Is ‘Waffles!’ a New Anti-Trans Dogwhistle?
Explaining the new Bluesky phrase
“You can say ‘I like pancakes’” — so began a 2017 joke on Twitter, about Twitter — “and somebody will say ‘So you hate waffles?’”
If you’ve spent much time on social media, you groan and get the joke: No matter how upbeat and toothlessly inoffensive your “here’s my breakfast!” post may be, it can turn into an online brawl.
I like unicorn cookies (above). I’m not declaring myself part of a faction; I don’t even know what faction that would be. Sometimes a sparkly cartoon horse is just a sparkly cartoon horse.
A new iteration of the “waffles” joke may have just turned it into an anti-trans dogwhistle.
A couple days ago, Jay Graber, CEO of the social media platform Bluesky, accused trans people of perpetrating the same dynamic. She said “social media doesn’t have to be this way.”
She wasn’t making a general observation about how people interact on Bluesky. She was referring specifically to a common request Bluesky management receives: Would they please apply some commonsense moderation regarding anti-trans agitator Jesse…
