The Face of TG Storytime Part 6: Is TG Storytime Dying? (The 2020 Controversy + Aftermath)

The Face of TG Storytime

Part 6: Is TG Storytime Dying? (The 2020 Controversy + Aftermath)

This is going to be another shorter blog. I’m kind of surprised it’s taken me this long to talk about this, but better late than never, I suppose.

It’s time we talk about the controversy that happened on TG Storytime about 3 years ago at this point. It was a pretty big moment in the site’s history, and it single handedly caused a good number of authors to stop posting there. As a warning, we will be discussing homophobia and transphobia in this post. So be aware of that. I owe a lot of this information to a reddit post that I will link right here, https://www.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/hjs57o/transgender_fiction_a_foreign_user_singlehandedly/ Read it if you want more in depth information about this.

It all starts on June 10, 2020. A user by the name of “liuzixuan” posted a story called “changeday 中國”. Since TG Storytime is an American website, stories not posted in English are rare and get very little attention. This was the case for liuzixuan’s story, until they began to post each chapter of the story as its own story.

TG Storytime is, all around, a pretty lightly moderated site. However, it still has a set of rules. One of them being that users are not allowed to post each chapter of a story as its own individual story. These stories were taken down by the site moderator, someone who goes by the name “Joe Six-Pack”. Joe is, as far as I know, just a man who has a strong interest in gender transformations, and isn’t transgender himself.

He also runs a site called the “Joe Six-Pack Site”, which he dubs the “The Manly TG Site”.

If I ever end up reviewing anything from this site, don’t ask me for anything ever again.

Unfortunately, taking down all their stories was not the last TG Storytime would hear of liuzixuan. They began posting more stories, all in English this time, and they were all of very poor quality. Admittedly, I haven’t read any of these stories, but from what I hear, they were posted in mostly incoherent, broken english.

The front page was spammed with their stories, all laughably bad. Their stories were all mostly given 1-star reviews. In response, liuzixuan began posting reviews of their own stories, giving themselves 5-star reviews. 

Their stories also took flack for having homophobic and transphobic elements, which did get called out in some of the reviews. The responses from liuzixuan did nothing to help their image as a homophobe and transphobe. In one of the responses they even said “homosexuality will go to hell”. They also said the same about transgender people.

At this point, many users were calling for liuzixuan to be completely banned. Spamming the front page with low effort garbage and pushing bigoted views against gay and trans people were enough for this to be the public opinion on the site.

It wasn’t until June 18, 2020, when the site admin Joe, responded to these calls by stating that liuzixuan would not be banned. His response went by very poorly. To make matters worse, he also said some things regarding how he moderates TG Storytime.

We will get rid of those accounts who are personally abusive, but we will not go after users who are anti-transgender, because this changes our mission from being an open platform of writing to one of applying a test of faith and belief systems to our users and to the stories. We cannot try to weed out "non-believers" as if we were a religious cult.’

Understandably, this didn’t go very well with people.

This caused a lot of authors to leave the site, some even taking down parts of or their entire stories off, being fed up with Joe’s moderation. Eventually, liuzixuan was banned, but at that point, most of the damage had already been done.

The only remotely positive thing that happened here was that Joe did finally create a transgender tag, but it was an indirect effect mainly due to users constantly nagging him for it. On a side note, it’s kind of insane a site literally called “Transgender Storytime” did not have a transgender tag for 10 years. But it did have a “sissy” and “shemale” tag.

So, what’s the point in bringing up something like this so many years after the fact? Well, mainly because, in a way, this event can be seen as a turning point for TG Storytime. A turning point that, for the site, was mostly for the worst.

To be honest, an event like this was pretty much inevitable. For as much as new authors try to push the boundaries on what TG fiction can be, and for as much as they try to introduce explicit trans narratives on TGST, TG Storytime was always, from an aesthetic standpoint and the standpoint of its moderator, going to stay right where it was when it was first created. A site mostly for gender bending fetish material that doesn’t challenge anything. 

I’m not going to say Joe didn’t anticipate that TG Storytime would gain a large trans following. The purpose of the site was to share and post stories involving gender transformations, I think he was aware that the site would attract trans readers and writers. But I don’t think he really anticipated the way in which this would affect the site. And it wasn’t until an event came up when a user was posting blatant homophobia and transphobia that he was finally confronted with how the user base of his site had changed.

Trans people tend to be against transphobia, shocking. They didn’t appreciate when some troll was posting transphobia on the site. They didn’t appreciate when someone was flooding the recent stories page with low effort spam. And they didn’t appreciate when the moderator took no action against them.

I can’t exactly blame many authors for leaving the site after this. I don’t want to make too many assumptions, but I feel like a lot of them realized that, despite their efforts, the site would not change. It was not a site for them. They left, and I completely understand their decision.

It was always inevitable that TG Storytime would fade out in relevance as times change and new sites emerge, but I think this was the point when TGST’s descent was really cemented. Looking at the site now, stories do not get nearly the numbers of reads and reviews they got even just four years ago. There isn’t a single story posted after 2019 that’s even come close to cracking the Top 25 Most Favorite List. It really feels like TGST is past its prime at this point. Even if it does get a fair amount of traffic, it’s not nearly as much as it used to and it seems to be going down.

Even if this event never happened, I don’t think TG Storytime would’ve stayed at its peak for much longer. TG Storytime was always in a weird middle place when it comes to TG fiction. At its start, it was pretty much just Fictionmania 2.0. Hell, more than half of TGST stories in 2011 were literally just reposts of FM stories. As time went on though, a lot of the old really problematic FM tropes slowly started fading away, and stories began popping up that felt like they were pushing the boundaries for what a TG story could be. More explicitly trans narrative started coming out, and old FM tropes were beginning to be directly called out and made fun of. By 2020, TG Storytime was, from a userbase perspective, a much different site than it was in 2011. Looking at TG Storytime as a whole, the incident involving the foreign troll essentially got the old and new sides of it to clash against each other. And in the end, I think both sides lost.

To put a final answer to “is TG Storytime dying”, it’s no. The site will always have stories being posted on it for as long as it’s running. It will always attract a good number of readers and writers. However, I think it’s clear the site has faded in relevancy quite a bit in the past few years. It, in essence, became a bridge from old TG fiction into the new. And since more and more trans people are coming out of the closet and aren’t repressing indefinitely, a lot of people have already crossed that bridge.

Well, if you liked this incredibly pretentious thinkpiece, you’ll love my TGST reviews. The next of which is coming uh… sometime, I promise. Until then, good bye.