What I'm about to say here I should preface by stressing that this in no way makes them less of a very serious threat, but I'm perpetually stunned by how this particular group of obsessive stalkers manages to be so profoundly pathetic and incompetent in everything they attempt.
Case in point, I've been seeing them come at Yonah all day long shouting the bog standard slurs scumbags love shouting at trans women, and I don't see how those can be expected to have any real impact on someone who is not transfeminine.
Which Yonah is very plainly not.
Which is
something you would really expect these people would know, as they have been maintaining a massive stalking database on Yonah since before they came out as non-binary, and if you look at their feed today, or really any time in like, the past 3 years or so at least, you will see
quite a lot of discussion of problems that are only relevant to people whose anatomy does not match up with those efforts to say hurtful things. I also see a lot of the classic "you'll never be a woman!" shouted towards someone who, again, finds that assertion quite affirming.
And it's not even just whatever combination of sloppiness and lacking even a 12 year old's understanding of biology causing them to pair up the wrong slurs with the wrong targets. Basic entry level intuitive stuff about stalking and harassing people that would apply to anyone,
these people consistently manage to drop the ball on.
Like the most common thing they ever try to pull? They try to find trans people's dead names and old photos, then set up fake twitter accounts with the best they think they've got, again, plenty of examples of this on Yonah's
feed today. And the only thing they ever seem to do with those accounts and the associated information is just... hurl insults at that person.
Like, I'm not going to sit here and list off all the more effective ways one could weaponize that sort of thing, because I'm not trying
to give these losers useful feedback, and I don't assume anyone else reading this is stupid enough not to think of a dozen things on their own, but wow is that a lot of effort to go through to deliver an attack with all the strength of just sending someone an anonymous message of
like, "you eat boogers!" or something.
Oh and half the time they send their targets links directly to the forum threads on them too, which is just the saddest damn thing in the world. Like what the hell do they expect to get out of that? Do they think their targets will be so
proud of all the stalking homework they've done and pin it on the refrigerator or something? It's shockingly impotent.
And again, while I am absolutely making fun of these idiots, I'm not making light of them. Like, people from that website have taken guns, gone out into public
places, and fatally shot multiple people. That needs to be taken very seriously, and if we had functional law enforcement in this country, I'd be badgering them non-stop to start making arrests on all the co-conspirators. But at the same time, I'm not at all shocked that people
from that site have the lack of morality and strength of conviction needed to commit mass murder, but I'm kind of surprised they managed to successfully work out which end of the gun the bullets come out of.
Rare exceptions like that aside, most of what makes that site dangerous
isn't the regulars, it's actually competent people finding the site when running searches on targets and finding ready-made deposits of fuel for attacks that they can use and claim they "learned all this from someone else, feel free to look it up on your own." And it's not like
you can even make the argument that these losers are contributing by "doing solid detective work" because nearly all the "dirt" they have on any of their targets is just fan fiction the most sad and miserable losers on the planet wrote about random strangers. The most damage it
can ever do is with people who just believe anything you tell them and don't know the first thing about the targets to begin with.
Weirdly enough though, the total lack of competence and basic reasoning skills actually makes them more frightening than they would be otherwise?
Like someone who sits outside your front door holding a knife and shouting about how the second you set foot outside they're going to gut you like a fish is a whole lot more intimidating than someone standing there holding a rubber chicken and shouting "baked potato!" at you, but
if the baked potato guy is literally out there rain or shine every single day for 5 damn years, that is really damn disquieting.
And like, this is a site full of people who've been on porches for shouting potato for a hell of a lot longer than that. And completely vomiting all
over the internet with SEO exploits so that if you do a search for anything related to their targets, you just get page after page of results just saying potato and like, photos of people's garbage cans.
It's less of a "this person is going to try to harm me" fear and more of a
this person is wasting so much time and energy on an all-consuming obsession without any clue what they're even doing that just the act of trying to get into their head and work out why they don't spend their time on literally anything else is just impossible.
Like even someone
just huffing paint in a garage and asphyxiating is going to leave this world more accomplished, fulfilled, and and fondly remembered than than any of these losers who can't even stalk people properly. It really is chilling to imagine anyone managing to so completely waste a life.
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I feel like right now is a good time for a little educational thread about death threats, and in a broader sense, that weird little game abusers so love to play, making mountains out of molehills while pointing at actual mountains and labeling them as molehills.
Let's start off
with what is actually considered to be a death threat in the legal sense, something most people don't have a clue about as very few people have ever seriously been sent one.
A death threat as relayed by law enforcement types, is a clearly expressed statement that one party plans
to kill another party, specifying a time place and means by which they intend to do so.
There are enough specific components to that you'd figure it would never come up, and like I said, it rarely ever actually does. Usually, it'll be in the context of some kind of coercion.
So last night I tossed one of those posts up that just sort of inherently generates big numbers and gets a lot of responses, trying to encourage people to speak up about transphobia with a few more teeth than the usual. And that's been happening and all quite positive, except for
one rather striking response from an account not following me or much of anyone else taking pretty huge offense to the whole notion and going off on a ridiculous tirade. And yes, to my lack of surprise, this did in fact appear to belong to a combative sort from the UK. I'd parade
it around as a textbook example of unconscionable behavior, but as is frequently the case with these things, the real point of the post was to try to bait me into saying something aggressive to play victim over. I failed to take the bait, so the bigot in question deleted the post
Rather than easy platitudes like "trans rights are human rights" or "trans women or women," I'm curious if a significant number of people would be willing to quote this and say, oh...
"Trans women are stalked and demonized every day. They deserve real support and opportunities."
And then you know for extra credit, maybe pass this thread along.
Something I wish I'd thought to add when first throwing this out there:
Like 95% of all the harassment any given trans person faces comes from one of like... a few dozen truly obsessed and hateful individuals, and I really wish conversations would focus on them, specifically.
So the big story of the day seems to be a big list of people signing off on a list or making their own PR statements about how much they support J.K. Rowling. And there's a whole lot of names on that list I recognize as members of the same cult who know exactly what they're doing
but I kinda have to give the benefit of the doubt that a few people throwing their support in are a bit misinformed on exactly what it is they're supporting there.
Like are people aware that the thing that first got the spotlight on Rowling was her going accidentally public with
her support of a woman violently assaulting a trans person in the street? And I don't mean supporting someone who did that, I mean she was explicitly playing devil's advocate over the assault itself.
And I know it's easy to lose things in the shuffle when she's throwing so much
I'm always torn when people are getting into the "do you realize the sort of harassment trans people deal with every day?" on whether I should share some personal anecdotes.
Generally I don't ever get into it due to the combination of not wanting to give stalkers feedback as to
what's having a real input and what's them chasing their own tails, and the fact that frankly some of this crap is so extreme and obsessive nobody who hasn't seen it first hand would ever believe it.
I can say though it's at a point where the few people who still talk to me are
generally all afraid to ever do so publicly, because I'm being monitored at all times, and they absolutely will just go complete no-stone-unturned stalker mode on anyone they even suspect might be someone I speak to candidly looking for some new little scrap.
Ooh, I can actually decode the gibberish the bigot under discussion here is spewing forth, and maybe people who indulge me here will learn something new and important on the side.
Two significant facts: 1- Trans women are women. 2- Medications affect men and women differently.
Another significant fact: 3- Bigots are unable to process certain facts, because they contradict their baseless dogma.
Particularly relevant baseless dogma here, the irrational conviction that trans women are actually men. As this fantasy directly contradicts the reality of our
first fact, bigots convince themselves that every time someone asserts this fact, rather than stating a fact, they are stating a slogan, which is not to be read literally but instead taken to mean "trans women are men who we should all pretend are women to be nice to them." Which