What 5 hours of ‘Gender Critical’ harassment looks like
An illustration of what a mere few hours of attention from the “gender critical” (GC) movement looks like.
Content warning for harassment and mockery. None of what I’m going to share or reproduce here is particularly explicit. While there were, have been and probably will be more vile comments directed at me, I have only chosen examples that don’t require too much context or explanation. These are the tweets that simply make insulting, sneering or derogatory comments about me. I have gotten a lot worse and I am actively choosing not to share that with you because I don’t have the time or the energy to dig through it all.
The harassment here mostly takes the form of mocking my appearance, particularly my twitter profile picture in which I’m dressed as a cat for halloween. It’s coupled with spurious allegations that I am predatory or perverted, simply for not conforming to gender stereotypes.
Most of what you are about to see came within a 5 hour period. Just contemplate that for a moment. This was over the course of 5 hours in response to a tweet where I complained about the sneering and dismissive attitudes of the GC movement. If you read this and think some of these comments I got in the space of 5 hours are inappropriate, degrading, insulting or offensive, then try to imagine what a typical day or even a week looks and feels like, being hounded by these people for daring to express any opinion that they dislike.
The harassment
I’m quite happy sneering at a grown man wearing the same face paint as my 10 year old niece! I’ll also sneer at you as you undress in my local changing room! #pervert
In response to a thread of mine criticising GCs for being sneering, a GC account quotes the thread to admit she’s proud to sneer at me for wearing face paint and makeup that she thinks is childish. She then accuses me via hashtag, of being a pervert apropos of nothing (she doesn’t know me or where I get changed). Pure sneering, nothing else.
Says the man who thinks he’s a female cat, and then you wonder why people take the piss.
This one simply sneers at me for thinking I’m a female cat (except…I don’t think that… at all) and then goes on to imply I’m the one to blame for people like him mocking me. Mocking me whilst also victim blaming me.
Men who cross dress deserve to be mocked.
Here’s a GC just saying the quiet part out loud: they think men who cross dress deserve to be mocked. Most GCs will, when pressed, pretend to support gender nonconformity, usually by claiming that they’re a fan of Boy George or that (used to) like Eddie Izzard… but it’s BS. They simply hate gender bending.
Perhaps you think they’re just an outlier though, surely a movement that prides itself on its progressive feminist credentials would believe something so regressive…
“Men who cross dress deserve to be mocked”? Yes.
And you’d be wrong. They really do just hate crossdressing and gender nonconformity.
We’re the weird creeps? Mate….
My profile picture seems to really bother a lot of them. Literally no argument from this one. No response to what I said, just sneering at my halloween costume.
I’d told somebody they were a weird creep for obsessing over what bathroom I use, and in typical GC fashion, somebody totally different comes parachuting in to call me a weird creep for… dressing up for halloween?
In response to being accused of sneering, almost all of them… sneer.
Please do tell me about your whiskers, cat’s ears and head tilt.
This guy is asking about my ‘whiskers, cat’s ears and head tilt’ but what does he want to know? It’s my halloween costume. The ‘head tilt’ is a GC meme that Graham Linehan apparently popularised: the idea being that trans people all tilt our heads in selfies. Despite that being an extremely common thing (especially amongst women)… so what?
This deranged man is whining about how mean women are because we don’t want him to watch us undress…lol okay bud.
Just look at this specimen
Several accounts wrote fanfiction about me or them undressing before getting to the part where they sneer at my appearance. The hashtags are supposed to upset me by calling me a man. So many transphobes do this because they’ve been told that this is the single most devastating thing you can do to a trans person and that since we’re all a monolith, it just works on anybody. Except, it doesn’t bother me. I am a man. Not all trans people feel the way I do, sure, but I don’t care about these labels applied to me. Call me whatever you want. It doesn’t change the fact that I exist and deserve the same safety, security and dignity as anybody else.
As for my jokes, I’d be fine having a conversation about my sense of humour with them, but these are people who apparently love free speech and irreverent humour… except when trans people say vulgar things I guess.
I asked some of them explicitly to stop making sexualised or inappropriate comments to/about me and their response?
@minusplnp: When I say don’t make sexual comments about me, I’m being serious.
@Charlieismycat_: Grown men dressing up like *that* deserve to be mocked. No one thinks of you in that way
Very progressive. Much feminist.
And to cap it out, more sneering at my profile picture.
That is such a well balanced, mature look, how dare you imply it’s a silly teenager with no education, no critical thinking skills, and anime addled brains?
Not only am I an ‘it’ now, I’m also a ‘silly teenager’ with no education. Ageist, ableist, classist and homo/transphobic all in one tweet.
Conclusion
This was just a small sample platter of the most explicit examples. There were dozens more from that same time frame that simply require too much effort to explain what’s happening (which is a feature of GC slang… it is almost impossible to understand without lengthy and tedious explanations of their community hate-memes) but suffice it to say, this harassment from gender criticals is utterly relentless and pervasive.
Spurious allegations of perversion and predation are all wielded like weapons in service of excusing and justifying the harassment. If you dare complain about any of these, you can expect to be dogpiled by GCs who respond by changing the subject or simply denying it before going on to do the EXACT SAME THING (and studiously ignoring their confederates already doing it).
The harassment is the point for them.
All the sophistry about being critical of gender stereotypes or supportive of gender nonconformity goes straight out the window as soon as they smell blood in the water. Gender criticals give people like me more grief for experimenting with gender and gender expression than they do to rape apologist men like Andrew Tate for viciously oppressively promoting pure sexist gender stereotyping.
Being gay/trans/gender nonconforming on the internet does NOT give anybody and everybody free license to attack, insult, disparage and shame you.
Responses
“oh, just block them”
I do. And still they come. Anybody suggesting this as a course of action has either not seriously experienced online harassment or is actively trying to dismiss/downplay the harassment pattern.
“padlock your account”
I’ve done this too, now and in the past, and while it’s a more effective strategy, it also cuts me off from discoverability and visibility by my own community, I wish the people suggesting this would at least acknowledge that. Actively making myself less visible to the world is isolating.
“you’re doing digital self harm by repeatedly picking at this scar, hey want to play some computer games together?”
Yes, you are absolutely right and I would love to do that thankyou.
Update
In another entirely unrelated conversation, I brought up the fact that I am intersex to a ‘gender critical’ account. I was replied to by one of her followers with this
No. You are an abomination.
Naturally, I tried reporting this comment.
Twitter’s response?
After reviewing the available information, we determined that there were no violations of the Twitter rules in the content you reported.
Twitter’s moderation policy seems to effectively sanction dehumanising intersex people as ‘abominations’. We might have already suspected this from the way the report form is structured: there is no way to report interphobia specifically. Interphobia exists both at an intersection of and wholly separate from homophobia, transphobia, ableism and in many cases (although not this one) racism. If somebody is being interphobic on twitter, you have to select one of those categories and hope that the automated system thinks the comments are similar enough to the category chosen to take action.
This is unacceptable. Bigotry doesn’t follow a flow-chart, and so neither should the response.
That’s why I’ve made the decision to lock my twitter account and render it inactive. I simply can’t remain on a site that has zero interest in even having, let along enforcing policies that provide robust protection from discrimination and abuse.
