"You can say 'I like pancakes'" — so began a 2017 joke on Twitter, about Twitter — "and somebody will say 'So you hate waffles?'"

If you've spent much time on social media, you groan and get the joke: No matter how upbeat and toothlessly inoffensive your "here's my breakfast!" post may be, it can turn into an online brawl.

I like unicorn cookies (above). I'm not declaring myself part of a faction; I don't even know what faction that would be. Sometimes a sparkly cartoon horse is just a sparkly cartoon horse.

A new iteration of the "waffles" joke may have just turned it into an anti-trans dogwhistle.

A couple days ago, Jay Graber, CEO of the social media platform Bluesky, accused trans people of perpetrating the same dynamic. She said "social media doesn't have to be this way."

She wasn't making a general observation about how people interact on Bluesky. She was referring specifically to a common request Bluesky management receives: Would they please apply some commonsense moderation regarding anti-trans agitator Jesse Singal? The CEO declares this request inherently nonsensical and off-topic.

If the all-caps spelling of this word triggers the MST3K "WAFFLES!" earworm for you — as it does for me — I invite you to get it out of your system now.

Jesse Singal notably wrote an article in the Atlantic in 2018 about trans kids, casting doubt on their genders; read more context at the Trans Data Library. In 2020, he began a podcast with Katie Herzog called Blocked & Reported (a phrase he had surely begun to hear a lot), aka BARPod. The main image is meant to make them look like victims. A couple weeks ago, Episode #277, "Internet Poisoning," was billed as exploring "online communities, from furries and sissy hypno to nihilistic extremists." That last term had recently surfaced within the Heritage Foundation's effort to class all trans people as terrorists: Nihilistic Violent Extremists, aka NVEs.

Singal has been so interpersonally awful to trans people on X (formerly Twitter) that, when he temporarily left the platform in 2023, trans people exulted.

Ten months ago, he opened an account on Bluesky, instantly becoming the most blocked user on the platform, a title he only recently lost to JD Vance. The existing Bluesky community just doesn't want to hear from him. I mention Vance only to illustrate how well Singal is known; as a serial anti-trans offender on social media as well as mainstream media, Singal is about as recognizable as the VPOTUS, and his reputation preceded his arrival on Bluesky.

There are arguments for why certain behavior ought to be considered a violation of the Bluesky Terms of Service. For example, when people like Singal publish anti-trans articles in major media, those articles get cited by the rightwing to push through anti-trans legislation. The more influential, the more dangerous — that's almost self-explanatory, yet it bears repeating. The fact that some concerning behavior may happen offline only makes that person's online behavior more dangerous or noxious.

As Bruno Dias explained yesterday, Bluesky's "AT Protocol" is a tool that tech-savvy people can use on their own. You can create your own decentralized social media where you can moderate hate speech yourself. Bluesky leadership tends to point to this feature when arguing that they don't have a responsibility to moderate hate speech. But most people who use Bluesky treat it as a centralized platform and expect more centralized moderation than leadership is providing. Since Bluesky leadership does moderate some posts and regularly updates its platform rules, its hands plainly aren't tied, and for the public there's a real question of how Bluesky leadership picks and chooses what it'll moderate and why it has written the platform rules the way it has.

This is not a software development issue, much as they might want to drop it in that bucket for safekeeping. It's really about ethics.

Trans people are saying: "Don't allow hate speech or harassment." This collective request is generally made with goodwill and in good faith.

Plus, trans shitposters helped make Bluesky as great as it is today, so it would be cool to treat us with appreciation or at least professionalism. (I count myself as trans; to clarify, I can't take much credit for shitposting, at which I have little talent.)

Graber is mimicking the request for moderation, claiming that trans people on Bluesky are essentially starting fights over breakfast preferences by saying nothing more meaningful than "waffles!" She's pretending these posts are off-topic. She's pretending not to understand our words. She's responding by wielding power.

As I reflected in Prism & Pen a couple years ago:

…the right wing takes a serious topic or real human need, parodies it, makes nonsense of it, and thereby trivializes it, annihilating the possibility of meaningful discussion.

[Naomi] Klein has a term for this, taken from Philip Roth's novel Operation Shylock: "pipikism," or bellybuttonism, from the Yiddish "pipik," פּופּיק, bellybutton. As Roth defined it: "the antitragic force that inconsequentializes everything — farcicalizes everything, trivializes everything, superficializes everything."

It's the "I know you are, but what am I?" approach.

Graber is pipiking trans people's complaint. She's implying that anti-trans rhetoric (or "skeptical questions" about trans people) are just differences of opinion and that there's no need to get upset or challenge the anti-trans movement, certainly not by asking her to do anything about it. The complaints she sees in her Bluesky feed look like litter to her: the leftovers on someone else's plate at a diner. If they didn't like their pancakes, why didn't they order something else?

The new "waffles" joke is unfolding fuzzily in part because the classic meme was reversed by Jerry Chen: "(bluesky user bursts into Waffle House) OH SO YOU HATE PANCAKES??" Consequently, when Graber says WAFFLES, we don't know what side she's on. Is she endorsing waffles, mimicking the other side's request for waffles, or both? Maybe it doesn't matter to her, and so her one-word interjection pipiks the entire discourse.

It must also not go without remark that "to waffle" means "to flip-flop." Who cares, after all? Do you?

Graber is communicating that she wants Jesse Singal (specifically him) to continue posting his anti-trans articles on the platform. Everyone knows he's a professional troll, and she wants him to keep trolling trans people.

Until we are ground to unicorn cookie dust.

Waffles and pipiks are trolling behaviors. Often they're smug. They're distinct behaviors, though I suppose they can overlap.

Waffles is when you approach a smiling person who was minding their own business, pretend they said something controversial, and needle them into an argument, derailing their topic and harshing their mellow.

Pipik is when you notice someone who's feeling, speaking, or acting in a way that's evidently meaningful to them (and may or may not involve a controversy), go out of your way to mock their interests to render them meaningless (basically pointing and saying "Hey, look at your bellybutton, ha ha!"), and stroll away whistling.

As I said, someone can do both simultaneously.

In short, if you notice the word WAFFLES on social media in the near future, you don't have to scratch your head too long over it. It's figureoutable. It's a reference to a discourse about whether anti-trans rhetoric is tolerable.

So find out which side that person is on.

Tucker Lieberman is on Bluesky, at least for as long as anything lasts during late capitalism. He also left his forkprint at tuckerlieberman.com. He hopes he'll see you today and tomorrow (Oct. 4–5, 2025) at Rainbow Space Magic, a free online conference for 🌈queer speculative fiction.