another day, another episode of YouTube Drama à la Arielle Scarcella.
there are few people who i adamantly refer to a pieces of shit, Donald Trump and Arielle Scarcella being two of them. hell, i make it a point to avoid anything and everything that has Arielle in it, but being a YouTuber involved in many of the communities that Arielle likes to shit on means that her drama always finds its way into my social media outlets regardless. sigh.
since it’s probably best to assume that most people reading this are unfamiliar with Arielle, let me backtrack. Arielle is a cis lesbian YouTuber who’s most well known for her channel Girlfriends TV which has 250k subs and her personal channel which has 500k subs, neither of which i recommend. needless to say, she’s a “Big YouTuber” with a lot of viewership power, but she also considers herself to be an “LGBT Activist” and her ‘work’ can be found all over the internet, such as her latest piece of shit video about a trans woman showing her her vaginoplasty up close and personal, which off course ended up being proliferated all over the internet via the Huffington Post & the Daily Mail (warning: don’t actually click the links). she has been called out ad infinitum by other YouTubers, but she’s continued to persist with her bullshit without improvement over the years. i’ve spoken a little about her here on Tumblr before, but there really is a long, looong history of the shit that she does while considering herself to be an “ally” and “advocate” for the people who she continually shits on for the amusement (she calls it “education”) of her largely cis lesbian, gay and straight audience.
anyway, her latest episode of bullshit was the product of a collab video on
’s channel. in typical Arielle fashion, the video in question (which i don’t recommend watching) features her and Jaclyn, another cis woman, “”logically”” and “”scientifically”” discussing what it means to be trans and the “fact” that there are “only two genders” because their “trans best friend even says [so]”, with Arielle even going on to explicitly say what she feels “genderqueer” should mean to genderqueer people and people in general bleh bleh bleh all within the first 2 minutes of this 10 minute shitfest of a video.
the fallout from the video, as usual, happened largely on Twitter with Arielle doing the usual non-apology “apology” only after asking for “scientific proof” of non-binary genders and while still continuing to selectively downtalk those challenging what she’s said. there’s been talk by some YouTubers about making videos in response to the video in question, which is how this whole thing made it into my Twitter notifications.
thing is, i can’t and won’t ever be able to respond directly to Arielle no matter how much i may want to at times (which, for the record, is rare). i’m not the most patient of people when it comes to dealing with someone doing what Arielle does, but with Arielle specifically my patience has long since been worn down to zero. any response to her from me would quickly result in me becoming overly emotionally invested and “losing my cool,” which then results in me being seen as the “angry black person” whose response “doesn’t help anything” and would without a doubt been seen by Arielle herself as me being yet another one of those “entitled [non-binary / trans people]” who gets mad at cis people for not getting shit right instead of “just politely correcting them.” never mind the fact that the “beef” that i have with her isn’t even exclusively about non-binary / trans issues.
no, better to not engage with her at all then to do so but then just as quickly have to disengage with her to avoid falling down the black hole that is any actual two-way engagement with her if she does choose to acknowledge you at all.
better to just sit back and let others do the responding with my fingers crossed that they’ll say what i’d like to be said to her without inadvertently being problematic in how they say it themselves. then again, it’s not like such responses even reach her anyway, given her already long history of being called out / responded to with little result other than garnering her even more sympathy from her fans.
yep. better to just keep sitting on my hands, as usual, with the occasional venting anywhere but on YouTube itself because even such indirect venting as this is using up what little spoons i have. sigh.
edit: she’s since posted this apology video. meh. meh. i feel like it’s her most sincere apology video to date (and she has posted quite a few over the years, believe me), but i will continue to be meh until there’s actual proof that she’s learned anything from this whole thing. i will continue to call her a piece of shit because this whole thing is in fact but a fraction of the offense that i take with her.
edit edit: for future reference, some related videos by other YouTubers:
[ ChasingCady ] . [ uppercaseCHASE1 ] . [ Ashley Mardell ] . [ Riley J. Dennis ] . [ OnisionSpeaks ] . [ JaclynGlenn → OnisionSpeaks ] . [ OnisionSpeaks → JaclynGlenn ] . [ RyanClarken ]
note: i’m including links to the above videos regardless of my personal opinion on them.
