This is probably a good time to share that on November 8, I used my Notes app to draft a long message to send to Ari’s @ApostateAri infamous group chat.

Overnight, the group had begun blowing up with calls spearheaded by Prisha @detransaqua to cancel Maia @thepeacepoet99 for being a fake detransitioner and a grifter.

I ended up sending some version of the following message. It’s too long for one post, so this will be a thread. 🧵 My message:

Ari, I’m going to respond about Maia over here because I know Prisha has strong feelings about her and I don’t really want to fight with anyone.

I’ve criticized Maia before on the merits and will continue to do so where I disagree with her positions.

I’m also late to the convo - just woke up.

Ari, I think your video about labels was really important. Trying to nitpick around who transitioned more relies on the same cult concepts as true trans.

Prisha, as a TERF, my position is that ALL transition, even merely social, is seriously destructive to the individual and to society. And of course, the more harm done to the body and mind, the more tragic the case.

So from my position as just a woman who never entered the cult, every voice who admits, “Yes, I was in a cult” is helpful in proving that there is a cult and dismantling it. We actually should except to see this very thing if our advocacy is successful, and I don’t think it’s helpful to be mad at the ones who get rescued at an earlier stage by that advocacy. Projection of pain onto those who don’t have it is psychologically normal, but it’s also dangerous territory. I am tempted to do it a lot with my health issues and friends who just sail through life, but no one is coming to rescue me and I just poison myself with my own bitterness.

TERFs get accused of having grifter motives and bigotry toward gay people all the time. There is no pleasing the TRAs and what was said above about being attacked no matter what is true. That they attack Maia means nothing to me, because they attack me and all of you as well, relentlessly, every single day. It’s perhaps a sign of madness to push forward anyway, but then we’re all mad together.

I also have seen a lot of Ex’s content on breast binding and I think it would be short-sighted and counterproductive of us to take the position that it’s not harmful just to stick it to Maia. I really agree with Maia on that one, and I think stepping back and reflecting on whether the anger over this specific issue is coming from a personal place of pain and loss (TOTALLY understandable, to be clear) or whether it’s “on mission.”

My opinion is that if you don’t like someone’s specific takes, explaining how those specific takes are wrong is much more helpful than making personal attacks that require entire books to explain. The surgical approach allows others to snowball into taking the same helpful positions, and it also provides better protection against others hitting back by examining the personal motives behind the attack. This is how I feel about Maia’s positions on gender ideology in schools; I’ve confronted her on that in spaces where I’ve heard it. If I see a post saying we don’t need to fight it, I will push back.

Not liking individuals is fine and nobody can be friends with or respect everyone. But I was usually the one that people would gang up on when I was young; out of the blue, a whole crew would just decide to hate me. I am too autistic to be good at social games, and I’ve taken the brunt of their impact many times, so I personally try not to play them. I’m honestly getting a little anxious feeling so much pressure from so many different people that I support on here to jump into the kind of activity that was used to harm me over and over during my childhood.

I can’t tell you how to operate, but I don’t think you can ever go wrong by honing your voice by putting out more content of your own, doing IRL advocacy, and building connections, rather than letting individual people get under your skin and derail you from your very important mission of having gender ideology dismantled. I will always support you wholeheartedly in doing all of that. I think people naturally flock to authenticity and candor, as they have flocked to you so far.

The above was said with buckets of love, and I hope I’m not too autistic for that to have come through. ❤️