You don’t want to read this post, it’s just me wallowing in self-pity.
I’m not presently suicidal. If I were suicidal, I’d be ineligible for a lot of trans related things, and more importantly, I just left the house for the weekend, so my cat is being extra clingy and reminding me how much it would be upset if I ever left and didn’t come back.
I have, however, completely given up any hope of ever being happy, or feeling safe, or having a job, or someone I can trust, or not bringing pain and misery to the people I do care about.
Looking back over the archives of this blog, I see a post from a year and a half ago which oddly enough, I also titled Isolation. Reading back over that, it’s pretty informative about what I’m dealing with tonight, and I’m at a point where I can fill some of those blanks in from that.
There is some guy named Gabe who leads some little clique (sometimes referred to as “the tankies” or “the anime communists”) whose collective hobby is making up ridiculous rumors about trans people, spreading them to people with a weird willingness to tear down “fake progressives,” and continuing to stalk and harass targets for years afterward and targeting anyone else who comes to their defense. Recently someone wrote a nice article explaining that whole mess, and I think, lately, they’re enough of a known quantity it minimizes the harm they can do.
At the time they targeted me, this little group was untouchable. When people talked about them at all, it was always in guarded whispers and vague references with the implication that powerful people defended them, and I was personally urged never to speak about them by Zoe Quinn. At the time that had me particularly horrified about how powerful they apparently were because Zoe wouldn’t say that about any other hate group, and my personal opinion of Zoe was entirely too high for the thought to ever cross my mind that Zoe might be one of the “powerful people” defending them.
I absolutely panicked at the time, partly because the attack itself was quite effective, with hundreds if not thousands of people in my professional and hobby circles hearing some vague third hand account that I was bad news and should be blocked, which is how it always goes with this group. The actual accusations are patently ridiculous in context- someone gets painted as a violent anti-feminist for muttering about TERFs, or islamophobic for saying Trump’s nazi ties concern them more than hypothetical hawkishness from other candidates. In my case, it was some ridiculous story where I’m a racist cop from Brazil using coded phrases to attack some random woman I’d never heard of. Those full versions though get truncated down when they start spreading. “She’s anti-feminist.” “She’s islamophobic.” “She’s racist.” And the rumors are spread amongst people with no close connection to the target, generally.
What mainly concerned me at the time though was Zoe Quinn’s reaction when I found myself getting blackballed left and right and asked for advice. Lots of “I have friends on both sides of this,” and “I don’t want to get involved.” In hindsight, the obvious meaning here is “I don’t want to alienate my troll friends by defending you against their obviously baseless slander” which is pretty inexcusable from the public face of an organization whose mission statement was helping people deal with exactly that sort of attack. From my viewpoint at the time though, it was so much worse. My impression was that there was some version of the absurd rumor floating around about me having it out for some random woman and spearheading attacks on her was so convincing that my most trusted friend and confidant at the time not only believed it, but was too scared of me lashing out to even discuss it.
That lead to me attempting suicide on multiple occasions, particularly as Zoe encouraged more mutual friends not to talk to me, shut me out of my only support network at the time, and made it overtly clear I wasn’t entitled to so much as a sympathetic ear when I was later targeted by Jesse Singal and Randi Harper when they came out as deeply transphobic.
I didn’t even start to piece together the more mundane version of things until early this year, when my routine private conversations with other people driven to the brink of suicide by mass harassment campaigns showed me how many other people I know were terrified that Zoe had completely cut them off on asking for help dealing with attacks from the same nasty little clique, all of whom had also been downright worshipful of Zoe to the point where Zoe not believing them made them feel like nobody would.
I’ve finally mostly come to terms with all that. Someone I thought was a really good friend I could always trust wasn’t. OK. And a ton of people I’ve never even talked to think I’m some kind of monster because some creeps spread ridiculous rumors, and people always forget the specifics when they here someone’s a bad person but that they heard it tends to stick, so no matter how much those people get exposed discredited it won’t matter for their victims. OK. People always say though that these sorts of things help you work out who your real friends are though, because they stick with you. But that isn’t true.
Recently I wrote something touching on some of this. I really didn’t want to. I was fine with working out who else got hurt the way I did and helping them cope quietly, and not publicly expose any ugliness. But then Zoe went and publicly posted something about hanging out with her super great friend Randi Harper, and a couple dozen people suddenly see the person who gaslit them into suicide attempts by pretending mass harassment campaigns weren’t happening and disappearing from their lives, publicly endorsing someone who actively attacked them and took out a damn hit from reddit nazis, so people started saying things about it, and getting discredited, and getting attacked. And since these are all severely marginalized people whose lives were destroyed by all of this, and nobody believes them, I stood up and laid the cards out on some of what I’ve been carrying around for the last two years. And more people I didn’t realize had been hurt like this came out of the woodwork to thank me for letting them know they weren’t the only ones suffering like this, so I think that was the right call, but obviously a ton of other people didn’t want to learn about this and walked out of my life.
And so did people who already knew all this. In that earlier blog post from a year and a half ago, I mentioned a point when “I was considering suicide, and only two people in the entire world bothered to say anything.” One of those two people is someone I was extremely close to. We’d talk about serious dark stuff in their life, we’ve both talked each other off ledges, they personally witnessed a lot of what left me such a mess, and they were the only person to even attempt to pick up some of the pieces and clear the air about ridicious rumors about me. Less than an hour after I posted that storify, they severed all ties with me, blocking me in everything we’d ever used to talk, all without a single word. Other people who’d heard what I’d been through at the time, just without the names, and offered support, turned on me viciously once they had names. A friend without any onnection to anyone else involved just bowed out of my life because I suddenly didn’t seem like someone to be associating with.
Then a professional bigot highlighted the whole thing and spun it as some new ridiculous attack, and more people let me know they hated me, and when I finally thought it was over, I went somewhere public, and ran into people I hadn’t talked to, who made it clear they don’t like me, and I came home to more sudden wordless blocks, and comments about not being welcome places. It never stops and any time I try to speak up it only ever gets worse. Nobody believes me, even when I can prove I’m telling the truth. It’s better for everyone to denounce me than risk hurting the reputation of people who have wronged me I guess, and even at the best of times I don’t know if I’ve ever even really had a fairweather friend. There’s people who say consoling things when I’m losing it, but I can count on one hand how many times anyone has ever just spontaneously asked me to come see a movie, or paid me a visit, or introduced to their other friends, or just checked up on me since it had been a while.
And when there is someone who seems to kind of like me, I can’t ever trust it, because people I thought were the best friends I’d ever had have stabbed me in the back without a second thought, and my own parents don’t even like me. All I really have is this cat who’s sitting on my lap licking tears off me, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do that will ever change that.
