Hi everyone,
I hope you’ve all been taking care!! This post will have some updates on a few changes to this space moving forward.
A couple days ago, news broke that the management of Substack, the service I use to publish this newsletter, have been platforming and promoting several transphobic journalists. If you’d like to read more about this, I would recommend this thread and this essay to start. The long story short is that Substack is paying multiple transphobic people six figure salaries to publish hate speech, and when trans writers and allies pushed back on this, Substack defended their business model and the people they are platforming. I don’t support what Substack is doing, so I have decided to leave the site and publish my essays elsewhere.
Going forward, this newsletter will be housed on ATM Magazine, an online zine grounded in abolition. I am in community with multiple of the editors of ATM, and have written for them before, and I feel really lucky to house my essays on a platform that shares my politics and values.
You might be wondering, what is changing?
Honestly, not much! If you are receiving this email, you are already signed up to receive my newsletter even after it moves from Substack over to ATM. I’ll be publishing essays at the same rate (about twice a month), on the same topics, at the same length. This is still a self published newsletter, and I will not receive payment or edits from the ATM staff. This newsletter will still be free, though donations are welcome on Venmo and Paypal. You will still be able to comment on posts, and each essay will be publicly available to read and share for people who are not subscribed as well. New folks will also be able to sign up to receive each essay via email once I officially migrate to ATM very soon. The only real changes are that the emails you all receive might come from a different address, and the essays will be housed on a different site.
I hope this answers any questions, but if you have any questions or thoughts you want to share, please feel free to reach out to me via email at maryretta33@gmail.com! I’m going to keep all the essays that I’ve already published up on Substack and will also keep this post up so that people know my Substack is no longer active. Thank you all so much as always for the incredible support you’ve shown me and my work, and I’m excited to send new essays to your inbox very soon!
Sending you all my best,
m <3