I was at y!Gallery, and frankly, I’m glad it’s dead.
y!Gallery was, at the start, exclusively for M/M works. Completely understandable, right? Because there wasn’t a place for them on dA or SheezyArt.
They also took issue with “sloppy works,” meaning you had to have a “clean-sketch-to-finished” work, which I guess was understandable for an “art site.” They also banned the use of stolen images that people were using as covers for fanfic, which was probably the only good thing they really put their foot down on.
Except all the works had to have what was “only men.” But that definition excluded the furry community (which, at the time had just a budding spot in a young FurAffinity), any women playing a major role in a comic series (really, if you saw even a dressed woman for a page or more without men dominating the panels, those pages were reported and/or deleted). A single art piece couldn’t have a woman in a major capacity. Multiple offenses constituted a weeklong suspension to a ban for life.
The biggest issue with Y!Gallery was its exclusion of trans people in any capacity. A trans man wasn’t even considered man enough if he didn’t have at least a strap on (and only that was allowable after a huge community backlash), but if you saw a fully naked trans man without a penis, he was banned. THe work was deleted, and repeated offenses would result in a permanent user ban.
Trans women with breasts were banned as “f*tanari,” but if a trans woman could read as “just a man in a dress,” that was acceptable. I’ll pause here to let you all vomit in your mouths and then get a drink of water.
Bishounen, gender-nonconforming, and androgynous men, especially with long hair, were scrutinized like a crime scene on CSI.
You could put any non-cis or non-male or “furry” (which had a sliding scale from “might be wearing a headband” to kemonomimi to full on anthro which was a matter of perspective on “how furry is it?”) into a “misc” folder - but those works were separated completely, to the point where they were not featured in a user’s main gallery and followers had to choose to view the Misc folder.
Furry/Xeno/Robo art was eventually unbanned…ish. They all had to have “explicitly human penises” (weird flex, but that was their ruling), and I think the choice was made solely on the need for y!Gallery to exploit the Furry community for money, because by the time the dust settled from the trans-exclusionist fight, big swaths of users had jumped ship to tumblr, and with a lot of them, their sweet, sweet gay moneys. Furries kept the lights on for another year or so, but the damage from the trans-ban was done.
…a big irony of trans men, furries/aliens/robot/not-human-enough characters being banned, was that m-preg was still acceptable, which just hurts my brain to think about. There was at least a toggle to block pieces with that tag from searches, which… *gestures at the missing SafeSearch tag*
Trans and non-binary folks were excluded, which the small “concessions” y!Gallery made were what drove a lot of us to tumblr in the first place. It was clearly transphobic, the tags were a shit show, the moderation was all over the place, not to mention one of the mods skimming the till… the only thing they were halfway decent on was keeping underage users out. Anyone found to be a minor was banned until proof of age could be documented or the ban would lift on their 18th birthday (whichever came first).
tl;dr: this adult exclusion shit isn’t anything new. It’s the same old turd, wrapped in tumblr-blue paper. Places that start off as “havens” for women and the lgbt community eventually turn on those users thanks to purity police and fucking money.
