Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

If you don't mind indulging me in a bit of a ramble, and I cannot stress enough the degree to which this is not me saying "hey go mess with this guy for being a jerk like this,"and I'd like people to focus on the general moral here not this specific example, but to follow up from

https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/1272004400836419584

So, some random person I don't know saw this video podcast Graham Linehan did where he apparently (hell if I'm going to watch it) spent a good chunk of time attacking me, made a thread on how screwed up that is, summed it up with a linking post, which then went out into the world

and was RTed by something like 650 people, including a bunch of people I know and like, through whom I saw it, and then had to sit down and write this big exhaustive thread about how hey, this and the MANY other threads like it paint a really horrible picture of me, with no basis

in reality, that then encourages a whole lot of violence and resentment to come my way, and hey, earlier this year the last time that particular bit of fiction welled up I very nearly... did not survive the resulting circumstances, to put things delicately.

So just first off, if

people want to do me a favor and really share this thread here around a LOT, I would very much appreciate it-

https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/1272004400836419584

And again absolutely no ill will at all towards anyone who RTed this, or the person writing the particular post I'm highlighting there (who again

if nothing else made me aware that a powerful bigot tore into me in a podcast last month, and it's good to know when things like that are happening, and I suddenly understand the out of the blue uptick I had in KF crap that month).

Anyway, after I wrote about this someone showed

my big long thread to the person who'd spread some nasty rumors to 650 or so people, who then proceeded to respond to that person with "sorry" and delete the post in question.

Which is good, because I don't need that crap circulating.

... but really falls short of what's called

for there.

Again, the original post spent about a day, prior to being deleted, sitting right there on the feed of everyone who RTed it, for all their followers to see, read, and come away with the impression that I am a hideous gargoyle who is directly responsible for every bad

thing that has happened to trans people in general for the past 5 years or so. And just deleting the post in no way undoes that. You're not deleting it from history, just, from an increasingly distant point way down there if anyone should look at your twitter profile. Again, it's

good that the post was nuked so nobody else can come across it and RT it and keep it spreading around, but like... when an oil tanker springs a leak, welding the hull and sailing away does not clean off all the seals and seagulls and such where the contents washed ashore, y'know?

And in this case, the deleted post was just collecting this big ol' thread of stuff with the same bad info into a single post, those are still totally all up for anyone who does scroll down to where it was (though, again, having that podcast being picked apart out there is good,

so I'm not at all saying, "hey go delete all those too!").

The thing that would be needed to properly undo the harm here is to make a new post, like "hey so that super popular post I made the other day about Graham's whole horrible existence tracing back to one random trans gal?

Turns out that's not actually true and she's getting pretty seriously harassed over the misunderstanding, so, whoops. Pass it on please." Which of course would reach much less of an audience because there's just a flaw in human nature where we're more likely to spread bad info

than corrections. But hey, it'd be something. Again, as would just RTing this correction thread from me, whoever should see it-

https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/1272004400836419584

Anyway, again, I'm not raising this to single out this one instance. I'm just kinda trying to encourage everyone to be more

mindful of making a real effort to undo harm you cause/spread by sharing things that later you learn weren't actually true.

If I were going to single out a really horrible example of this it'd be that incident years ago where a very popular writer got it into her head that I was

some manner of horrible racist troll, with a murderous vendetta against her friend, which I was pushing with bizarre and original racist dog whistles, which weren't even the proper flavor of racism. To which she then went on a massive tirade about the vital importance that anyone

she could reach must cut any ties to me, actively threatening those who didn't, and getting my handle added to quite a lot of anti-racist anti-misogynist etc. blocklists.

Then like 2 weeks later she decided to directly confront me to ask what my deal was, and after a very long

and confused conversation, eventually realized that I knew literally nothing about her friend, was speaking about an entirely unrelated subject, had not in fact invented any flavor of crypto-racist code-talk and responded with something like "oh. I need to go delete some things"

To the best of my knowledge, she did then delete that long thread she had made 2 weeks prior, but again, long after everyone had already read it and it had vanished so far down the archive hole no one noticed it wasn't still there.

So... years later I and a good number of people

who interact with me even briefly still get, with surprisingly regularity, really seriously violently worded threats/intimidation/industry-wide-blacklisting from people who remember reading that, or encountered some secondary source based on it. All because someone made a mistake

half a decade ago and was too embarrassed to ever go "whoops, my bad" about it.

So... please, correct your mistakes, and do so at least as loudly as you made them to begin with. Errant snowballs still roll down the hill and grow large enough to kill people.