About a month ago, a friend of mine made a noncontroversial statement on Twitter about the potential dangers of a common over-the-counter pain medication. People, including one uniquely obsessed doctor, harassed this person for days. Round the clock, non-stop QTing and long threads about why this commonly known fact—that Tylenol can damage your liver—is wrong, dangerous misinformation of the worst kind, and how the person who made the claim is an anti-vaxer.
The resulting pile-on had nothing to do with the individual being transgender (which xie is) or an anti-vaxer (which xie is not). It was just because of the extreme anti-vaccine position xie hadn’t taken, which was harming everyone. The pile-on was for the greater good.
A little while later, the same individual tweeted that some writers have sensory processing difficulties or developmental disorders that make reading for pleasure difficult and that commonly-dispensed wisdom about how much a writer should read could be construed as coming from an ableist viewpoint. Like with the Tylenol tweets, people were eager to jump on this individual.
But not because xie is trans.
In both cases, simple tweets became “the discourse,” and with the discourse came the distortion. “Did you see the YA author who said Tylenol is poison and your doctors are lying to you?” “Did you see the YA author who said reading is ableist?” That the person in question was not a YA author and had never said anything of the sort didn’t matter. This individual became the “main character” of Twitter over wholly uncontroversial statements that were made controversial by Twitter users with a bone-deep need to be furious about the things this person never said.
It had nothing to do with this individual being transgender.
Except for when it did, of course. Like months ago, when this individual painstakingly reviewed an advanced copy of an outrageously transphobic book. That’s when author and real-life Veruca Salt, Lauren Hough, stepped in and did what Lauren Hough does best: made everything about herself. This all concluded with Hough insisting that a prestigious literary award had been snatched away from her, despite never having been nominated for it in the first place.
The pile-on my friend faced only got worse, aided by mainstream media, who picked up the story of Hough’s “revoked nomination” without mentioning that Hough had simply assumed she would be handed this prize by default (Hough is the author who, some time ago, threw a days-long tantrum because people dared to give her books four stars instead of five). My friend, who isn’t a YA author, was branded a YA author at this time—a Twitter code word for someone who is the worst kind of hysterical drama seeker, a person who should be avoided and derided at all costs. The brigade rode in, eager to scream about freedom of speech, Nazi book bans, and to question whether this “YA author” had even read the offending book (which xie had, in a detailed Twitter thread and blog post, which became tragically invisible to anyone who disagreed with xer).
The fact that the individual in question is transgender was superfluous to the conversation, of course, and if the resulting widespread internet attention from the media caused an increase in harassment of this individual, that was a punishment well-deserved. It was the principle of the thing. A person who reviews a book is a person who wants to ban a book, and anyone who reviews a book is only doing so in an attempt to ruin the careers and lives of worthy, non-YA writing authors.
Nobody was simply using a silly reason to justify their own transphobia. Xie is a danger to the written word and freedom of speech.
Last night, I opened Twitter and found that Lockheed Martin was trending. With my friend’s name under it. It was the top trending topic in my country.
As it turned out, this individual works for Lockheed Martin. Making drones that kill children. Specifically, xie writes code to increase the lethality of drones targeting children in the Middle East. And xie makes upwards of $400,000 annually doing this work for the military-industrial complex while lying about xer financial situation to scam people with crowdfunding. Even worse, xer job slaughtering innocent babes in their mothers’ arms was the result of nepotism, as xer entire family works for Lockheed Martin in highly paid executive positions. And this awful person, this
YA author, has been lying about it for years.
At least, that’s what Twitter would have you believe. Because in reality, this non-YA author works ten hours a week from home keeping software licenses up-to-date. A job this non-YA author can do from home as a disabled person, a job xie got through family connections, probably offered by a relative concerned about this person’s well-being and ability to live independently (and, at the time, xer’s ability to care for a disabled family member). A job that only pays the astronomical $400,000 annually because people on Twitter decided their lie about it was fact; a simple Google search reveals that the highest paid non-executives at Lockheed Martin make a quarter of that figure working full-time.
But does that matter when a person some find annoying on Twitter is outed as being, in the words of one gleeful user, “literally a cop”?
No. Because there are
reasons this person needs to be punished. None of these reasons have to do with a particular website that routinely targets and doxes transgender people. Sure, the information currently circulating came from their site. Sure, they’ve targeted this person specifically because xie is transgender and uses neopronouns and tweets “cringe.” And yes, the people on that disgusting forum are currently celebrating that a trans man might commit suicide due to their doxing efforts. But this is about integrity. This is about making the truth known.
On Twitter, making the truth known always involves bending and shaping that truth to fit around whatever narrative has been embraced, but always for the greater good. “This person works in an extremely limited position dealing with software licenses for a company with defense contracts” isn’t bad enough. You have to streamline it. You have to remove all context—the availability of work for disabled people, the hurdles to employment faced by transgender people, the notoriously hostile state the individual lives in, and what the individual’s job entails—for the greater good. This person is bad. Unredeamable. And they must be punished. Whatever lies and exaggerations made to pursue that goal are immaterial as long as that goal is reached. For the greater good.
Critics of this individual were more than enthusiastic about their campaign for justice. They’d always
known that their personal opinion of this individual was right. They just could never put into words what made this person so thoroughly evil. Maybe it was because xie was the ringleader of the crusade against Isabel Fall, a claim that lacks evidence but sounds incredibly good when justifying one’s behavior over the past sixteen hours. Or because xie’s outrageous censorship campaign caused Lauren Hough to have that prize she hadn’t won yanked from her hands by a blood-thirsty social justice mob. Xie was always crowdfunding; something about that is just annoying, right? Plus, xie was a “woke scold,” a person who obnoxiously and audaciously suggests that marginalized people deserve human rights. And get this: xie calls xer spouse “kissmate.” That’s just cringe. Far too precious and cute. That’s certainly harming the human race in some vile way.
There were so many reasons—none of them transphobic!—that doxing this person, accusing xer of lying, and driving xer off Twitter wasn’t just justified. It was righteous. And definitely not transphobic! Plus, finding out how horrible xer’s job is retroactively makes all the past harassment okay!
The way Twitter reckons it, securing software licenses for a defense contractor’s offices is no different than pushing the big red button to detonate a city block full of innocent civilians. Sure, some of these people work for companies that are arguably just as evil as Lockheed Martin, albeit in other ways. Some spend their time online defending members of the United States government from attacks by the right-wing mobs. Some of them have or had jobs or internships working for the United States government themselves. But without xer keeping all those software licenses in line, the United States would be wholly incapable of committing war crimes. And if xie is forced off Twitter and hopefully driven to suicide, world peace will be restored. There is no need for, nor room for, nuance in this discussion. Xie is, after all, making millions of dollars being, in the words of that astonishingly rational thinker I quoted above, “literally a cop.”
Which leaves me to wonder… if xer working for Lockheed Martin part-time means xie is directly responsible for every death caused by the U.S. government’s imperial crimes, what are the people aligning themselves with Kiwi Farms guilty of by association?
Hmm? What was that? Oh, Kiwi Farms? Probably time to note that the persistent backlash against this individual has been driven since 2016 by a website that
defended its connection to the mass shooting in Christchurch, NZ (a “shithole country” with “faggot laws”) and whose members have been linked to at least three online harassment campaigns that ended in the
death by
suicide of
their targets. The entire site exists to mock, harass, and dox people, especially transgender, autistic, and fat people, but simply being ugly or annoying can serve as reason enough to target someone and harass them, ideally to death.
While I would never doubt the righteousness of people who have turned away from the war criminal in question, I do wonder what some of them would say if they saw how their actions were being viewed by the forum that composed the jaunty tune they’re all dancing to.
“RIP Bozo, puffin on that enby war criminal pack […] maybe anna will commit unalive in roblox and kiwi farms can take credit.”
“I didn’t know anything about Ana until earlier today when all of the other trannies started shrieking for his head as a war criminal and ganged up on him until he left Twitter. The fact this happened due to information gleaned from a Kiwifarms doxing, the site they claim makes you a fascist if you even dare to peek, is perhaps the most hilarious thing I have seen all month.”
“All the YA twitter lefties are ignoring the fact that we’re the ones who got the dox lol. They always do when it conveniences them. Is KF le evil nazi forum or not, guys? Pick a side. Lockheed Martin tho”
“I saw the screeching on twitter and knew exactly where they had gotten their deets. I love how KF lays these little mines on the internet, they stay silent for years just ready to explode whenever the woke mob decide is time to eat their own.”
Phew. It’s a good thing that none of this outsized fury, public mockery, gleeful celebration of doxing, and vicious harassment had anything to do with a years-long hate campaign run by a website known for its body count. Because that might mean the outrage was driven by something other than righteousness and the shining moral purity of everyone involved. It might mean that this time, the Twitter rage machine was driven by, if not transphobia, the desperate need to have one’s own biases confirmed.
If you participated, don’t worry. Those doubts you’re having about whether or not you’re a fool who’s been led into a targeted harassment campaign by your own easily fed ego? Let them go. I mean, you’re just firmly aligned with a web forum full of people who pat themselves on the back for the suicides they’ve directly caused. It’s not like you have an extremely limited part-time job working from home for Lockheed Martin. You’re not a monster.
