You’ve probably heard many complaints about Tumblr in various corners of the Internet. Are any of these complaints legitimate? Let’s explore three of the most common problems people have with Tumblr and why they arise.

1. “Tumblr has so many gender identities”

Sometimes it’s to discredit the legitimacy of queer and trans people’s identities, and sometimes it’s to mock Tumblr, “this generation,” or “SJWs” for their supposed ridiculousness or irrationality or oversensitivity or whatever. But the idea of several, or many, perhaps innumerable gender identities is totally legitimate.

First of all, gender is a completely nebulous social construction and because of that it can pretty much literally be anything. If you’re just complaining that the world doesn’t fit into a bunch of simple categories that you were taught in grade school, you’re the one who’s being oversensitive and needs to get over yourself.

But also, think of it this way: can you at least agree that gender identity falls along a spectrum rather than two binary categories? Of course some people will always insist on the binary, but if you can at least conceptualize gender as a spectrum, then it makes sense to think of identities as points along that spectrum. And how many points fit on a single line? That’s right, infinite points. So of course there are tons of gender identities. There could be as many as there are people who ever lived.

2. “Tumblr is so sensitive”

See also: all arguments involving the words “free speech”

I’m sorry, but if you want to make jokes about rape, or make fun of the LGBT+ community, or threaten to run over black protesters on the highway, you don’t get to be a champion of free speech. You get to be a jerk. You’re responsible for your behavior, and just because it’s legal for you to say something doesn’t mean it’s right, doesn’t mean it’s moral, doesn’t mean you still get to be a good person who says those things. In fact, if everything that was legal to do was also morally okay, we’d be living in a totalitarian society, and we don’t. There are a lot of people out there, the same people who like to make fun of Tumblr’s oversensitivity, are also the same people who complain about “cultural Marxism” a lot, who want to form a culture where you can’t be labeled negatively because of what you choose to say or do (as long as your choices of action and speech involve demeaning people for their culture or identity and insisting really hard on the status quo, and not, for example, expressing a non-normative gender or sexual identity, or exercising an actual constitutional right to protest), and their justification is “free speech.” They don’t want free speech to mean “I have the right to say what I think, including criticizing the government, without the government intervening to stop me or punishing me.” They want it to mean “I have the right to say whatever I want, without considering the social consequences, and still be thought of as a good person.” Sorry bro, it don’t work that way. I completely reject the idea that the concept of being respectful of people’s identities and experiences means we are “too sensitive.” We’re just trying to be better, to respect one another, and build a better community and a better world. Of course, everyone has the right to voice their opinion however they like. In fact, everyone pretty much has the right to be as cruel and insensitive and insulting and degrading as they like, until it gets into the realm of actual threats and harassment. But that doesn’t mean that you get to keep a spotless reputation as a great person while also tearing people down and being utterly disrespectful. I hear arguments about how these days you can’t say violent and harmful things about someone because of their identity and/or community without being labeled intolerant or considered a bigot and how that’s an affront to free speech. But being considered a bigot is not a legal ramification for speech. It’s a natural consequence of your behavior.

3. “Tumblr mobs people with hate when they make mistakes”

This is one I will give a tiny, tiny bit of credence to. I think that it’s a pattern for social media in general that a black-and-white sense of morality sometimes appears. I think this comes from the fact that if someone says something stupid or insulting on social media, say it’s a celebrity who says something casually racist, it has a far greater chance of being seen by someone who is personally impacted by that statement. Maybe someone who has to deal with casual, implicit, and systemic racism every day of their lives and has reasonably just had enough. So it makes plenty of sense for that person to react to that statement, without much thought for whether the celebrity generally knows better about those issues, or whether they didn’t intend for it to sound racist, because it really doesn’t matter. A statement that hurts someone is hurtful, even if it wasn’t intended to be. The problem comes in when people with more privilege, who aren’t as directly affected by those comments, see the negative reactions from people who have just had enough, and they pile on, even though they are in a place where they could have a much more measured reaction. And then you get a sort of mob mentality where a little too much vitriol ends up all getting aimed at one person.

Of course, you personally do not have to be fine with it if somebody does something awful, especially if it affects you as an individual. And calling people out is great, because it lets them know they screwed up and how to improve in the future. However, when people immediately condemn someone instead of telling them they screwed up and giving them a chance to be better, it isn’t as effective. And if you aren’t personally affected by what they said, you have no reason not to call someone out the right way.

But while some people may be doing calling out the wrong way on social media, what’s definitely a bigger problem is how people respond to being called out. Being called out is an opportunity to learn from your mistakes and grow. If someone responds to being called out by instantly getting defensive and trying to justify what they said, they prove that they aren’t better than what they did, usually digging the hole deeper and deeper until they say something like “the tumblrinas are attacking me for this one thing I said” when in reality, if they had just apologized for that one thing, admitted that they screwed up, and tried to do better in the future, it would have been fine.

So of course, don’t expect graciousness and magnanimity from people you hurt, but from the opposite side, try not to pile onto a hatestorm if it’s not productive. This is something “your fav is problematic” teaches us really well. Everybody has said or done something dumb. The trick is correcting it and being better in the future, instead of getting defensive.

We can probably all agree that everybody’s behavior on the Internet is not always great, but it’s not really fair to pin it all on Tumblr. The call-out culture problem is probably more present on Twitter than Tumblr anyway. Tumblr seems to have taken on a scapegoat kind of role, where if someone is annoyed by something another person says on another social media, like Facebook, for example, they say “go back to Tumblr” or accuse them of being a “Tumblrina” even if there’s no association with Tumblr in the actual conversation at all. I’ve even heard people refer to actual academic, sociological terms like “patriarchy” or “heterosexism” as “Tumblr words.” Maybe we shouldn’t be especially surprised that the one social media that has become a safe haven of young women and LGBT+ people is probably the most commonly mocked, but we can all try to be our best selves, even on the Internet, and try not to add to the negativity.