What we’re up against

Cisgender supremacists are telling us not to politicise the death of the trans girl who was killed over the weekend.

Meanwhile people are still, tonight, continuing to send tweets like this to it.

Transphobic abuse I’m receiving on twitter even now I’m unable to use my account

This, despite the fact that my Twitter account which I use for activist communications has been locked out because of some sarcastic things I said against homophobia and transphobia 2 years ago (likely as a result of a mass reporting campaign by the same collection of far right trolls currently revelling in trans death targetting my account).

I don’t generally draw attention to the vast majority of this stuff, and this is very much on the tame side. I try to avoid sharing it with others generally speaking because it’s a psychological hazard for anyone to be dealing with it in bulk.

Hundreds of instances of this is what being a trans woman online is like.

A transfeminine Trans Safety Network researcher and friend of mine (

Meryl Links

) has been repeatedly been being sent graphic videos by anonymous accounts for months depicting executions. She can block one, but they have hundreds more. She says every time she sees one it’s like a little bomb being planted in her head and she doesn’t know when it’s going to go off. I know the feeling because I’ve seen a lot of similar videos being circulated around far right groups I infiltrate and monitor. They use videos of people’s heads dropping down half severed at the neck to desensitize each other to the idea of murdering us in real life, egging each other on towards terrorism.

I’ve learned to watch the groups they share these with the sound turned off, and with video autoplay disabled, or to quickly pause the videos when I know what’s going to happen. I’ve given workshops training people on far right monitoring where I tell people how you should never monitor far right groups while you are already stressed, dehydrated, upset, tired, etc, because the chances of you developing PTSD from the constant onslaught of horror go up and up over time and you need to take care of yourself.

Anyway that’s what we’re up against.