The 17-year-old Englishman Thomas “TommyInnit” Simons is one of the biggest content creators for Minecraft and one of the big winners on YouTube and Twitch in 2020 and 2021. Now he is involved in a discussion because he made a joke about wishing to be a lesbian. Some of his fans are upset about this. Twitch streamer Mizif shakes his head at what is happening in the Minecraft community.
How popular is the 17-year-old? TommyInnit has been the big winner on YouTube and Twitch in recent months:
- On YouTube, the 17-year-old has now surpassed 10 million subscribers. His videos about Minecraft regularly reach between 6 and 13 million views.
- On Twitch, he already has 6 million followers. He streams occasionally for one to two hours, but has between 100,000 and 250,000 viewers.
There’s no question, TommyInnit is really huge. People are crazy about him. However, some criticize that Minecraft fans are turning into “stans” for TommyInnit and content creators.
What remark did he get in trouble for? While he was playing Minecraft, TommyInnit received a donation where he was called an “Honorary Lesbian.” TommyInnit has often supported the LGBTQIA+ community in the past and emphasized how happy he is to be part of the community during Pride Month (via twitter).
TommyInnit then wondered if the term “Honorary Lesbian” applies to him:
Am I? I just don’t know. I don’t know if I am a lesbian. I know that it takes time to figure all this out, but I don’t know if I could be a lesbian. Whether I am entitled to it. I hope so!
TommyInit
This remark led to some biting comments in which TommyInnit was attacked.
“Harmful to the lesbian community”
What’s the fuss about? TommyInnit’s remark that he wishes to be a lesbian sparked a reddit post about “lesbian-phobic jokes” (via reddit).
There a user, who described herself as a big fan of the Minecraft streamer, asked Tommy to stop making such jokes. Because lesbians have a hard time in the online world and specifically in the Minecraft community:
- Recently, the Wikipedia page about lesbians was changed to include male lesbians and “BI/Pan-lesbians.” But they don’t exist. And that is harmful to the community.
- If someone now, as a CIS man, makes jokes about being a lesbian, it might seem funny, but it has negative effects on how lesbians are perceived in the real world.
- TommyInnit is surely not anti-lesbian and does not want to be – but he has such a large community that he can influence people’s views with his perspective.
- Lesbians are already strongly portrayed as a fetish in the media – these jokes could make the situation even more uncomfortable and cause lesbians to be further sexualized by heterosexual men.
This is how the post is discussed: Criticism of TommyInnit’s remarks is largely supported on reddit. Only now can one understand why such seemingly harmless jokes generate such a wave of anger, some readers comment.
Others, however, say: The criticism is exaggerated here. It was a cheerful stream and the jokes were humorously packaged.
This is the outside view: The Twitch streamer Mizkif (26) is a bit older and significantly less popular than TommyInnit. Mizkif made a name for himself from 2016 to 2018 as the cameraman for scandal streamer Ice Poseidon, who provoked with his streams and was permanently banned from Twitch in 2017.
Mizkif is observing the situation from the outside and cannot comprehend what is happening at all.
From his perspective, it was a harmless joke.
Is that all? Do you guys mean it seriously? That’s ridiculous. […] How can he get so much trouble for that? What else is the boy supposed to do? He can’t do anything. He can’t have any fun if he has the chance to get canceled as soon as he says anything.
Mizkif
Mizkif wishes for the “old times” back. While that was often bad and there was always a lot of swearing, he definitely prefers those times to today.
The Minecraft community was recently in an uproar on Twitch when an ultra-popular speedrunner addressed accusations of being a cheater:
