Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

So, general reminder/plea for help here:

I live basically every moment of every day in a state of constant fear.

Several years ago I came out as trans. Later that week, fascists of various stripes started to stalk and harass me. As happens.

Some months into dealing with that,

which to be clear has at no point stopped or really lowered in intensity (although my filtering has gotten pretty great), several people who a general public consensus seem to deem "good people" began to stalk and harass me in the same way as those fascists, coordinating attacks

even, using shared harassment resources.

I remain unsure exactly why that suddenly happened. The best theory I have been able to put together is that one "good person" put a spotlight on another "good person" over some disagreement which caused their respective volatile social

media follows to start some really aggressive behavior and later those two people decided to kiss and make up and also decided the best way to deal with that aggressiveness was to claim it was actually brought on by an arbitrary scapegoat to be painted as some malicious aggressor

and I was chosen to fill this role rather arbitrarily via some combination of not actually being in the circles where things went down, getting the bad blood out of the system, being highly visible (as a whole lot of very prominent people around the time were boosting posts of

mine with very clear and basic messages like "nazis are bad" and "assume nazis saying that other people are bad are probably lying, and definitely have been in these cases where facts can be checked"), and being very easily Othered, as not only am I a trans woman, I do not put my

name or face out there at all, nor even any sort of identifiable avatar (I think at the time I literally did not have one, or possibly had the literally faceless one still on my Patreon page, one of 3 to date I have used upon having someone suggest I switch to one they provided).

Whatever the case, said "good people" have also at no point ceased that stalking and harassing, nor have I noticed any sort of reduction over the intervening SIX YEARS in how often someone stokes those particular fires, and I've observed this odd phenomenon where as people get

fuzzier on the details of the original fictitious story, names and crimes get shifted around so that I am in variant retellings, a monster who hates X, a frothing defender of known monster X, both of these at once, and a charismatic neo-nazi thought leader directing vast hordes.

And as these confused and contradictory retellings of something that was a pure fiction to begin with get distorted, more and more people seem to pick up on random added details which seem familiar (most are specifics from attacks against other people being repurposed) creating a

steady growing consensus, particularly amongst "very good people who know a lot about these sorts of things" that these weird vague rumors sound correct, and that I am clearly very bad news as there seems to be a growing number of "good people" who can attest to... "something."

And that growing disc of people in vague agreement that I definitely did something really unspeakable to someone they know even if nobody seems clear what exactly grew to cover nearly everyone I knew quite fast, and continues to scrape out large chunks of people I've come to know

since, which also means the general pool of people harassing me, stalking me, and spreading horrible rumors about me, which all kinda flows freely between full on fascists and people who ostensibly are in opposition to such has grown to include a lot of people I used to trust.

So for instance, people who knew me under handles I used prior to coming out now overlap with the whole "this bitch needs to be straight up ended" mindset. And people who had access to my dead name. And while I'm fairly sure none of those people have, to date, fully crossed the

line of leaking all that straight to the nazi stalker sites because I imagine the number of violent face to face encounters and threatening letters sent to close family would be significantly higher if they did, those numbers are not zero, and there have definitely been plenty of

unfortunate incidents I can attribute to such people turning to the darkside as it were. Like, you know, sudden horrific hostility in circles where I go by different handles, or the whole fun thing where members of my family I was decidedly not out to were suddenly quite aware of

me being trans, which had a pretty damn dramatic impact on my personal life, and is the reason there are members of my family I would like to be in close contact with that I cannot speak to, and largely related to that bit where I had to cease living where I had previously been

in a rather abrupt and spontaneous fashion. And this whole mess is also why potential sources of income I had at the time are no longer available to me, and new ones have been particularly difficult to come by.

Also, I cannot for the life of me recall, during all of this, any

instances (at least where word got back to me) where any of this horrific smearing has encountered any sort of pushback like someone hearing some iteration of some horrible rumor responding with "that is clearly not true, I've known her for years and never seen anything to back

that up" or "holy crap have you seriously not spoken to her in over five years because of some baseless rumor? After all the times she's publicly gone to bat for you?"

Which of course means I have zero expectation of such things being said the next time someone I consider a

friend has some nasty thing whispered in their ear (which, again, continues to happen years down the road).

This leaves me with some pretty serious trust issues and a general feeling of impending doom in addition to, you know, all the direct abuse and violence resulting from the

years of stalking. Like, I don't want to downplay the death threats and such, but the steadily eroding sense of safety and stability is way worse.

And it gets a whole lot worse when I see people I still kinda trust getting all friendly with people who have actively made my life

a living hell for over half a decade. And it also gets worse when I see other people getting thrown under buses by the same people. And it also gets worse when I see anything specifically reminiscent of a growing list of specific trauma triggers.

And wouldn't you know it, all of

those things have been on a serious uptick recently. To the point where I get up in the morning, open my browser to this site, and immediately see something within 15 minutes that completely destroys my ability to think straight and generally function and I sit here freaking out

and losing time until someone tries to get my attention. And since stalkers kinda did a fantastic job cutting me off from the vast majority of my friends and family, that task tends to fall to one of my cats or a friend with a whole lot of health problems, with that whole short

list kinda prone to spending large swaths of the day in bed.

Said friend has been encouraging me to generally get the entire hell off the internet lately which is a pretty tempting idea what with being a regular daily source of trauma, but literally my only source of income now

is Patreon and I kinda figure if I didn't pop in now and then to explain some bigotry and provide a friendly voice to other people dealing with real serious garbage, that would go away, and I'd definitely lose access to hearing about anything else I could do for money (like argh,

a couple months ago someone suggested I submit a pitch to some horror magazine and that sounded great and I immediately lost all the relevant information because that was a harassment spike day and flooded out my mentions).

So... I don't really know what it is I'm trying to ask

of people here exactly. I guess broadly...
- Be nice.
- Stop treating the internet as a thing you look at to find out who it is you're supposed to hate and tear to pieces that day.
- Put more positive things out into the world like stuff you make or pet photos or just kind words.

- Stop stalking people you hate and sharing your findings with the rest of the class. Yes that even applies to nazis and transphobes. Yes including ones with a specific vendetta towards me. Like damn it just to get weirdly specific here, years ago I said I never want to see any

mention of that one nazi I'd rather avoid mentioning because this is a very emotionally vulnerable thread and bad people love their term searches, but he used a Roman emperor's name as a handle, was primarily notorious for getting media spotlights to spew out nazi talking points

on talk shows and college campuses and such, and eventually got totally banned from this site which basically neutralized that threat, and makes it particularly bad that people with bigger platforms than what he now has (I think just like, Patreon updates or something?) keep on

finding quotes of his and sharing them far and wide. Stop that.
- The same logic applies to 4chan/AITA/mumsnet posts which you're only highlighting to go "can you believe this awful person went to this collective of awful people and posted this awful thing?"
- Maybe say something

nice/friendly/supportive to me any time it strikes you to do such a thing to offset all the threats and hate speech constantly coming at me?
- Money/work offers are also good, but clearly a bigger ask.
- Step the hell away from things if they're getting to you and generating bile