Anonymous asked:

i agee FCKH8 seems pretty stupid to me, but what about them is actually harmful? they just seem like some gay hipsters who maybe dont take their work seriously enough...

periegesisvoid-deactivated answered:

Problems with FCKH8:

  • According to their own FAQ, they’re a for-profit company.  Allegedly, they have given about $250,000 to “directly funded projects” and “LGBT charities.”  They do not say which projects and charities (always a bad sign), though according to Bilerico, one of them is the Trevor Project.
  • Their product categories uphold the gender binary and use ageist and sexist terms.  Additionally, nearly all their models are white, and the rest are still very light-skinned.  And their women’s sizing only accommodates rather small women; probably a lot of transwomen would not be able to wear the more feminine shirts, especially if they’ve had top surgery.
  • They’re co-opting the anti-gay crisis in Russia as an excuse to sell merchandise.  And that merchandise isn’t even in Russian—it’s a Cyrillic transliteration of “gay okay.”  Moreover, they’re trying to send pro-gay coloring books to Russia, which will just get kids’ parents taken away from them, if the books make it into Russia at all.
  • They’ve made promotional videos where they make small children gratuitously say “fuck.”  Because brand-name recognition.  Some of these children appear to be less than 6 years old, and nearly all appear heavily coached.
  • That same video erases all queer issues except marriage, adoption, and military service.  In a video whose title is about bullying, anti-gay bullying gets less coverage than marriage.  It also features extremely offensive caricatures of transwomen, the worst one involving a black transwoman, and hypersexualizes gay men, and uses slurs like “faggot,” “homo,” and “lesbo,” in a decidedly non-reclamatory context.
  • The rest of their videos are much the same, and are frankly so offensive, juvenile, and stereotype-filled that they would probably turn me into a homophobe if I weren’t actually queer.
  •  On Facebook, FCKH8 erased and mocked asexuals (and less directly, the entire rest of the acronym), told someone pansexuality was fake, and then blatantly misused the word genderqueer.  And of course, haven’t apologized.
  • They also stereotyped all religious people as haters and all priests as pedophiles.
  • They overprice their products.  Moreover, on sitejabber.com, numerous reviewers complain that they never received their orders—many after more than three months of waiting—or that it took over 5 months to get their orders.  For one person, it took 2 years.  (Oddly enough, someone from FCKH8, whose screen name is “Ryan S.”, started spam-replying about having fixed the site, and that the company is not “selling a logo.”  I’m not going to test the former statement, but I’m pretty sure the latter is a lie, so….)  And the company still takes people’s money, of course.
  • They’ve stolen people’s art on numerous occasions.  Often the victims are queer artists.  At least one (blackandyellowdoodles) is someone I follow on Tumblr, and I’d seen his original art long before FCKH8 used it; they only changed the color to purple and slapped a logo on it.

In the interest of ever doing any of my homework this week, I’m not going to list anything more.  It would be rather redundant anyway.