To start off, I won’t be sharing my account name, as I know there are plenty of TERFs/other transphobic people here that will just repost it elsewhere.
Long story short, I have a mildly successful TikTok account. A video of me singing went viral earlier this year and since then I’ve posted more videos and have slowly built an audience. Because I’m a trans woman still going through the process of transition, I often focus on trans experience and related things.
But about 4 weeks ago, I started going viral on the transphobic side of the internet. I had been a full-time content creator before joining TikTok so I was aware of getting hatred, but not on this level. Millions of views and thousands of hate comments, including death threats and other horrible things. A good chunk of it has made me fear for my safety, but for the past month or so I’ve just kind of ignored it, made fun of it, and catered to the people who are there because they actually like me. I had a video that went viral among not-transphobes, so I thought it was slowing down.
However, in the last few days it’s come back at an even bigger magnitude than I’ve had before. Like, TikTok seems to be exclusively sharing my videos with transphobia now. In the past 12 hours I’ve gotten about 2,000 comments and probably 10 of them are actually nice.The intensity of the hatred is really ruining me. I know I shouldn’t read comments, but it is hard when I also want to continue to grow my account. It’s not like I am a huge creator whose fanbase can outweigh it, I’m a relatively small TikToker with around 40k followers who does want to continue growing, but doesn’t know what to do.
In the past month I’ve tried engaging with the hate, completely ignoring it, reporting to TikTok (which is not effective at all btw, recently I reported a comment saying that I should go to a gas chamber and TT didn’t find anything hateful about it), but nothing seems to work.
I recently quit my other job as a full-time content creator when I got bottom surgery and in the months since I’ve been focusing on TikTok and growing my music following. My husband recommends I just continue posting but don’t engage with comments at all, my best friend says I should stay off TikTok completely, but I have no idea how to proceed. I should also mention that I am a full-time freelance musician, so I have a big incentive to keep growing my online following instead of abandoning it.
I don’t have any other way to get my music out there and don’t just want to get up and leave the people who do follow me and enjoy my music, but I also know that continuing as I have isn’t healthy and the human brain is just not meant to process that much hate.My worry is that if I just continue posting and don’t read comments at all, I won’t e able to see what people like, what they don’t, and how I can improve the videos I make. I don’t know, I just wanted to rant here in a semi-anonymous way. If anyone has any tips on how to navigate this, I’m all ears.