I’ve thought a lot about what to say in this post. It all sits like a weight in my belly, the sensations of my body shaping around it the way water is displaced by a stone. I need to get this stone out of me. 

I feel vulnerable writing this, and I’m not sure I’ll say everything right. It’s hard not to be emotional as I look back over the past weeks, months, and years. Over my time on Twitter. 

I hope you’ll bear with me and try to understand what I’m saying. If you feel able and willing, I ask that you stick with me through the whole post. You may have similar feelings, and if so, I hope you will feel understood. Though this post will have a lot to do with trans women, I hope you’ll also feel emboldened to talk about your suffering, whether you’re a trans woman or not. 

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Last week I was given a 7-day suspension from twitter because of a post I made complaining about TERFs wishing rape and death on trans women. Enough TERFs reported this post that Twitter support decided to read the tweet as me wishing rape and death on someone. Heavens, I even had a content warning on the tweet, which seems like an odd way to threaten someone, but a decision was made.

I’m not defending my tweet—I don’t think it needs defending—but gesturing at the context under it. I spent that entire day being harassed by TERFs. If you’re not aware, “TERF” is acronym used in feminist discourse for “Trans Exclusionist Radical Feminist.” Trans women also use it to mean “Trans Exterminationist Radical Feminist,” because extermination is a more accurate description of what they want. 

I am beyond sick of cis women wishing death and rape on me. I am beyond sick of cis women telling me that I can never understand what it’s like to live in a culture that threatens you with rape and violence, and therefore it’s just for it to happen to me. Feels an awful like like when cis men wish rape and death on me, also an experience written into my pre-verbal memory. It reminds me of the boy in my freshman history class who sat behind me, continually tossing out editorial remarks about my body, my posture, my clothes, and whispering gleefully day after day that he and his buddies could show me the gay experiences I no doubt hoped for. That I better be careful in the parking lot or he and his bros would show me what getting fucked like a woman would feel like.

That’s the point of all this. Nothing these TERFs did or said was shocking. They sang no new tunes I haven’t heard before. The dull familiarity of this experience was exactly what makes it hurt. The fact that I’ve heard this precise song from a dozen corners, from men, from women, from cishets and queers, sometimes other trans people. 

This is my normal for Twitter, and that’s the entire problem. 

A Long, Uncut String

A little context for my tweet that got reported. I posted it because immediately before this, I was wading through tweets and direct messages sent to me by these same TERFs. I had written a tweet thread that went a bit viral, in which I talked about the myth of trans women being threats to cis women because of our supposed physical powers of male strength. When I was thirteen, an eighteen year-old girl who was stronger than me, more skilled at fighting than me, and who’d spent months relentlessly harassing me, beat the shit out of me.

I, of course, was blamed for it—the bus driver was quick to append her judgment that I was disgusting and cowardly for getting into a fist fight with a girl—a biowoman if you will, a ~natal female~ with all her delicacy and vulnerability. The fact that she’d been harassing me for months, and had both instigated and easily won the fight, didn’t seem to be important details. 

I tweeted briefly about this experience, and went on to talk about how it wasn’t that different from how boys treated me—cis boys and at one point a trans boy. They also seemed to have nigh unlimited freedom to do whatever they wanted to me, and the problem usually became how I reacted to the harassment, the physical assault, the continual invasions of space. If I cried, then they were picking on me because I was a crybaby. If I fought back, then I was considered the true aggressor. If I did neither, then maybe had I considered not being such a gross little faggot? 

An avalanche of anonymous TERFs emerged from Twitter’s woodwork to jump on this thread. I stuck to my tried and true habit of simply blocking the harassers, but they came so swiftly I couldn’t keep up. 

The antagonism quickly shifted to gestures of violence. I got DMed with assurances that these people would be delighted if that same girl found me and beat the shit out of me again. “I hope you get beat again, tranny incel” became the crescendo of the song this time, along with other shades of this sentiment. If only you’d been hurt more. If only she had killed you. If only someone would kill you.

Dull. Familiar. More familiar than most would guess. I spent a long time wrestling with the bone-deep fear that she would find me and beat me again, and like the last time, there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it or the resulting blame.

This was part of the reason that when other kids—male and female—aggressed against me, I tried to just accept it.

When an older girl fondled me during lunch time and told me she wanted me to let her 18-year-old boyfriend fuck me so she could watch, I didn’t say anything. When adult men pretended to ask me out in public places so they could make vicious jokes about my disgusting appearance, I didn’t say anything. When my first girlfriend, who I’d met online—and was of age while I was a minor—threatened to kill herself if I didn’t travel states away so she could have sex with me despite me saying I didn’t want to…I was the one who apologized. 

When I ended up in a relationship with an abusive boyfriend who tried to cut me off from my family and destroy my relationships, it took months of servile pining before I finally found the gumption to simply blame him. 

The string winds through a labyrinth, growing more taut as it unspools. That string weaves through my nerves, my body, my memories, and links unbroken to these moments. To moments in my childhood I don’t even remember. 

Apparently when I was four a fully grown cis dude slammed me forcefully into a dumpster and closed the lid on me. I don’t remember this. I vaguely recall a story about me being found inside, sobbing, but I don’t remember it happening. 

I do remember being excited to join first grade. My first grade teacher was an older cis lady who I’d adored. That entire year ended up a blur. I found out later that this teacher was physically violent toward me. I don’t remember it happening. I don’t think she was disciplined. I remember fearing her, instead of adoring her, by the end of the year.

This was also the year that my female friends in school started to distance themselves from me, to join in on the boys finding ways to embarrass and attack me. I remember being taken into the office once day after being gang-piled on the playground, boys and girls (including that one trans boy) pulling my hair, punching me, holding me down.

Every one of these instances are like weights on that string, running uninterrupted back to my earliest memories. A string that vibrates with infantile fear, suppressed rage, shame, pain, and the sensation that the world is profoundly unsafe. When strangers throw trash at me, it tugs on that string. When men cat call me, it tugs on that string. When I get that look from a customer or a job interviewer that says “yeah, I’m not being nice to this fucking shemale,” it tugs on that string.

When TERFs tell me they hope I get beaten, they hope I die, they I hope I get raped, it tugs on that fucking string.

No one wants to experience threats or harassment. But it isn’t that by itself that really hurts, that awakens the terror conditioned into my bones. It’s the tension of the string. These aren’t single instances of mistreatment, they’re parts of a symphony. Played on that string, vibrating with purpose and repetition and familiarity, familiarity as nauseating as it is dull.

What makes it a problem is that it compounds with dozens of things like it, becoming a song that never seems to stop playing.

And then I got silenced for speaking about it. Just like I was blamed for so many other beats of this song, I got blamed for this one too. 

Moral Discharge

So TERFs are bad. That part’s easy.

But if naked TERFs, the kind of bigots I described above, were all I had to deal with, life would be much easier.

TERFs online are almost a little relieving in that they’re so relatively easy to deal with. You don’t have to maintain complicated relationships with them, like I might coworkers or colleagues or family who take out their transmisogyny on me. Even the kids in school I just talked about were a lot harder to avoid, cope with, and recover from than any individual TERF account named something like XXAdultHumanFemale. They might get me suspended at times or get my posts deleted, but blocking and keeping my head down can make that relatively bearable. 

It’s all the other ways people pull that string that are hard to deal with. 

My impression is that most cis people who are new to trans justice tend to have the sense that the biggest recurring problem for trans women is misgendering, not having our gender respected. But my earliest and most frequent taste of transmisogyny has always been blame.

Blame seems to be the territory upon which moral battle about trans women is continually fought. We see this in news, in legislation, in cultural narratives. Media is full of portrayals of trans women—or characters coded as transfeminine—who deserve blame. Moral panic about trans women is fed with the idea that we might harm others, so we need to be controlled. Blame feels like a resting state for the wortld’s attitude toward us.

This, too, is an uncut string. It wouldn’t be so bad if the blame weren’t coming from so many sides. The TERF activist that vilifies trans women draws her power from the echo of this vilification across society. It agrees with cis bros that rage at the thought of us tricking them into ~gay sex~ with us. It agrees with conservatives who say we’re brainwashing their daughters and destroying their values. It agrees with transmisogynist queer and trans people who blame us for their oppression, as if everything would be easier for them if trans women would just shut up for five minutes.

The most stressful transmisogyny I experience online comes from cis people who are theoretically my allies, and from other trans people who begrudge the “visibility” that pervades trans women’s lives. It’s a vibration across a network of strings, pitched to the frequency of blame. 

TERFs unfortunately represent real power in both the US and UK—the kinds of anti-trans laws we’re currently seeing across the US were originally advocated for by TERF groups—but as randos on social media, I can generally ignore them. I’d take that any day over the dance of blame, anxiety, and pain that takes place nigh constantly in trans and queer communities. 

Using Twitter has meant an escalation in the degree of pushback I experience for using social media. The pushback isn’t new. In my time in social justice communities, I’ve seen many social explosions targeting trans women over seemingly minor incidents, at times leading to harassment campaigns or calls to exile. I nevertheless wasn’t prepared for how much the exposure of Twitter—one of my main reasons for using the platform—fuels this.

Intellectual disagreements turn into accusations of abuse or evil intent. Off-hand comments are twisted into narratives of you being sexually predatory or even pedophilic. Speaking about transmisogyny within trans communities should theoretically be welcome, but it’s a little stunning how often doing so has resulted in someone calling me a Nazi, rapist-like, or an abuser. This at times has reached audiences that would otherwise not have picked up on intra-community conflicts, with the followers of popular authors, reporters, or celebrities joining in a pile-on in which the few trans women involved were denounced as vicious and deserving of punishment.

Lots of people seem to want to grab for a narrative that this is endemic of internet hypersensitivity, of environments of hotheadedness, of trans people being explosive. These are all distractions at best, especially when we consider this simple detail: the behavior is lot like how cis people treat me offline.

I’ve had rumors spread about me that I was stalking children because I was standing at my workplace while a group of kids stood nearby. I’ve had customers refuse to speak to me, insist my manager fire me or else they wouldn’t do business there anymore, or accost me with disgust as they demanded someone else serve them. I’ve had strangers stare in terror, turn and flee when encountering me in a restroom. I’ve had men loudly discuss their desire to assault or rape me because I happened to be in their line of sight. I’ve seen cis mothers anxiously pull their children aside as I walked by, as though I would attack them.

The common thread is swift escalation over little, and the attribution of threat. It all tugs on the same string, whether it’s trans people or cis people escalating, whether it’s on Twitter or in a department store or on the bus or in the news. It’s not hard to see how far that string reaches, all the way up to reactionaries publicly announcing their fear of trans women before they stormed the Capitol building during a right-wing insurrection. Up to country-wide anti-trans laws furnished on the culturally embedded terror at trans women existing.

I’m not the only one who suffers it. Ana Valens, a trans sex worker, wrote this piece about her own experiences with hypercriticism. A trans woman I know on Twitter, NightlingBug, wrote this popular thread about how the social justice process is used against trans women. A well-known essay about this phenomenon is often circulated for its unabashed description of how social justice is used to bludgeon trans women. I’ve watched some of the trans women of color I follow face notably intense versions of this, exacerbated by being more heavily affected by transmisogyny, and by social media also having a prevalence of anti-trans racism. 

There’s even an older Everyday Feminism article about this. Sometimes it’s staggering that as often as this has been pointed out over the years, the pattern goes strong. Being transfeminine tends to feel like you can’t put a foot wrong, because grace for mishaps, disagreements, or imperfections quickly vanishes. Trans womanhood and transfemininity mean needing to be constantly ready for battle.

This is part of a larger phenomenon I call moral discharge. Moral discharge is when the anger, hurt, and need for justice in a community has to go somewhere when thwarted, and follows the path of least resistance.

As oppressive conditions mount, we are inundated with experiences of powerlessness, helpless rage, and a fundamental desire to get back in control. Arguably this is why we have anger: it’s the impulse to resist being manipulated, dominated. We need anger to protect our boundaries. Unfortunately, we usually can’t enforce boundaries with our active oppressors or those who hold the most power in society. Lawmakers and cultural influencers who make life worse for us are too far above our capacity to impact even with our loudest protests. The vast majority of the human population right now is caught in a cycle of defeated anger, with our natural urges to fight back continually frustrated by our lack of collective power.

Just like anger stores up in the body, it accumulates in communities as well. This anger has to go somewhere. Moral discharge is the process of it flowing at those easiest to target, whether we realize it’s happening or not. These are people I call hyperstigmatized, more conventionally referred to as hypervisible. Trans women, Black people, Jewish people, and people with certain disabilities like psychosis or BPD, are examples of hyperstigmatized people (this is not meant to be a comprehensive list). Blame, suspicion, and vilification tend to surround these people like an aura, infused from environments in which we’re taught to see these people as naturally threatening.

This stigma creates paths of least resistance, and the more blame is frustrated in flowing where it’s deserved, the more moral discharge there is. Most people don’t seem to realize they’re contributing to it, and as a result, there’s a tough complication—the more a person or community tries to pursue justice, the more likely they are to morally discharge, which makes some injustices worse. 

The process by which trans women and other hyperstigmatized groups become repositories for the anger in social justice communities is easy to see after a while. Social justice communities prioritize speaking out against wrongdoing and punishing infractions, especially when those infractions have something to do with oppression systems. This in itself a good thing, but it means there’s usually a norm that “going easy” on people is letting oppression win. What tends to happen is that relatively minor infractions—or only perceived infractions, or the signs that someone might perform an infraction—are highly punished in hyperstigmatized people, but the same infractions (or worse) of more privileged people go overlooked because it’s harder to punish them. Social justice communities are full of moral discharge because they emphasize punishment—for good or ill—but usually without identifying where the paths of resistance are. Punishment becomes about the individual. 

What’s more, the greater stigma a group of people bears, the more likely they seem to be to work educating, speaking out, and organizing. This leads to a lot of opportunities to make honest mistakes that are then punished harshly. Moral discharge can lead to the myth that they just aren’t working hard enough, because when we look at how often they’re punished, the impression mounts that this group is especially problematic, no matter how much they’re contributing to the community. The people in those groups swiftly burn out, lose their faith, and become embittered toward the same communities they were trying to serve—and this bitterness tends to be interpreted as a sign that they were bad all along, and must have deserved the degree of punishment they’ve received. 

The Labyrinth of Strings

Social media environments tend to excessively punish trans women and other hyperstigmatized people, and this punishment echoes the kind of mistreatment that we already face in our daily lives. Why do trans women and other similarly afflicted groups use social media at all, then? If so many people are complaining about this, what’s the point in going back for more punishment?

This has been the toughest nut to crack for me about all of this. At times I’ve wondered the same thing. Am I looking for punishment? Blame and feelings of guilt seem to be flip sides of the same coin. My lifetime has brimmed with obsessive guilt, all the way back to when I was four years old, when I found myself anguished that small mishaps—a broken dish, a torn piece of clothing, getting in trouble at school—meant I’d proven I was a bad person and that my parents might disown me. This sensitivity to guilt eventually blossomed into full-on moral OCD, a problem which plagues me today. I feel guilty often enough that one might believe I agree with the inhumanly high standards under which I’ve been blamed.

But there’s a deeper problem, a string that winds further back. Like transmisogyny and moral discharge, this string extends through more than my own life, tying together innumerable people, providing no slack, while one weight after another presses onto this string. This tension binds the majority of the human species into hardship, its effects all the more pronounced by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

That string is called poverty. 

I’ve been actively working to build an author career for over ten years. Before that, it was a dream, enough of one to motivate my earliest efforts with structured creative work. I wrote earlier about the importance my writing had to me in even my times of greatest struggle, including how my dreams of artistic satisfaction helped me work through suicidal ideation. 

In 2015 I was looking for a way out of an increasingly hostile work environment. I’d spent most of my adulthood working at low-paying, dead-end jobs where harassment, mistreatment, and scapegoating were common. I devoted as much energy as I could into developing my skills as a freelance editor, hoping for a safe haven from the transmisogyny-rife options I faced otherwise.

I worked as a firearms salesperson in a department store before I became a freelance editor. It still baffles me a little that I ever got this job, even more that I was able to hold onto it as long as I did, as often as customers called for my firing, with only the protests of specific allies in management allowing me to keep my job. I was lucky to have this, but everyday I felt how unstable my future was.

Freelancing was better, for a while. It felt almost miraculously better, because suddenly I was working online with people who weren’t nakedly disgusted to be around me. I sometimes wonder what I did to drift away from those idyllic waters, but looking back, I was only acclimating to the different forms transmisogyny and hypercriticism would take in digital environments. Instead of disgust at the obvious tranny, it was disgust at my apparent moral failings, my supposed infractions and bad character, disgust sustained by the energy of moral discharge. 

I worry about what people think about me now in a way I didn’t when it was open bigots at the department store, people spitting at me on my way home from my fast food job. In a way I don’t worry about TERFs harassing me, even when they have the power to silence me on the site I use as my author platform. I worry because I’ve seen trans women and other hyperstigmatized people be swallowed by ostracism and disproportionate punishment, sometimes never to appear again.

Even during my suspension, it was hard because my primary means of supporting myself for a year and half has been crowdfunding through Twitter. This is embarrassing and painful to talk about. I’ve received enormous help from supporters and friends, and at times it has been demonstrably life saving. Since 2018 I’ve struggled with income more than I ever have in my life. The pandemic has contributed its considerable weight to this problem, and even with my career as a published author beginning, I have never been quite so uncertain about my future as I am now.

Part of what makes this so difficult is that I feel guilty for even struggling. Surely after the thousands of dollars that friends and supporters have poured my way, the energy and care they’ve showered me with, I should have been able to find solid ground by now?

Instead, I founder and try to resolve these problems as best I can, though this is a double-edged sword. I talk often about transmisogyny in online communities and in the publishing industry, the two avenues my future depends on the most. Some detractors, carrying out moral discharge, have accused me of demeaning all the people who aren’t transfeminine that I’ve asked to pay attention to transmisogyny dynamics. As often as I’ve defended my intentions, a part of me can’t help but believe it.

Maybe I am just being an ungrateful, resentful asshole who can’t stop harping about my needs despite all that my supporters have given me. I discuss this so much because I’m terrified. I’m terrified that if I can’t find some way to undermine the transmisogyny and moral discharge that threaten me, I’ll be swallowed up like so many others. But every word I speak about it is another pull of the string, felt through guilt rather than terror. 

I don’t intend to shame the many kind people, trans and cis alike, who help and care about me. But all the same, whenever I speak strongly about oppression, I imagine cis friends who’ve sent literally thousands of dollars my way, wincing with shame at my words. I imagine them feeling like chumps for ever caring about me. Even if most of them cite my discussion of oppression as one of the reasons they understand the problem I need help with.

I don’t know how to distentangle myself from the web of strings. Sometimes I wish I could just step away from social media, but the past decade of my life has taught me that social media is such an important place to build an author platform, promote books, and find supporters that I’m not sure how I can do without it. Perhaps more pressing still, I want to find a way to show those who’ve supported me that I care about them too, and I’m grateful for what they’ve done. I want to be there for them, especially since many of them are stigmatized themselves. I feel simultaneously like I have done far too little and far too much. I feel alienated and ashamed of how much help I’ve needed. Every time I receive a crowdfund donation, I feel overwhelmed with love and gratitude, and yet absolutely crushed by guilt. 

None of this would be so intense if I had somewhere else to go. If I hadn’t had to spend my twenties running from a workforce that is profoundly hostile to me, trying to cope with unresolved trauma from my childhood, trauma that contributed to me having few skills and no formal accreditation to obtain better prospects with. 

Authorhood has become not just a dream or a passion, but a lifeboat. That lifeboat has to sail on digital waters, waters teeming with the exact kinds of dangers that I faced elsewhere, dangers I hoped desperately to escape and yet seem to be omnipresent. 

Twitter is such a fraught place for me not only because I’m hyperstigmatized as a trans woman, not only because of moral discharge, but because I am poor. Because I have few other work options, and those I do have are unstable. I’m not making a stubborn choice to stay on social media—social media has at times saved me. 

The double bind I’m describing isn’t just outright hate, it isn’t even TERFism or legal discrimination. It isn’t “cancel culture” or other racist notions like it. It isn’t that I have a taste for “toxic” environments that I could simply leave behind if I wanted.

It is oppression. It is poverty. It is moral discharge. It is the frustrated rage of the oppressed that mounts as the world teeters toward explosion. It is the labyrinth of strings that entangles millions like me, binding hands and legs and mouths and dreams. You cut through one string, and two more spring forth to tangle you. And all along, the string tying you back to your trauma is being tugged, harder and harder with every weight added to it.

The distinctive terror of this labyrinth comes from the fact that I am not alone in it. People die here everyday. Despite all the love, all the determination, all the courage that comes from those who care for me, I still don’t know a way out, for me or for them. 

What Does This Mean?

Does this mean I am leaving Twitter? I don’t think so. I’m not sure how I realistically can. As fraught as Twitter is, I felt lonely during my week of suspension. I’ve come to feel tied to the people I interact with there, even those who I’m not close friends with. Some of us have common struggles, such as injustice in publishing, and I want to help even when that struggle doesn’t directly affect me.

I think it does have to mean change in how I interact with Twitter, and how I think about my career. I think I do need to be much more careful with the energy I expend, even if I’m not sure what that looks like yet. 

But the focus there is also part of it: I’ve been trying to react better to this my whole life, and that hasn’t resolved it. My management of my oppression is not the problem. Choosing to be silent about transmisogyny is also not the answer—the entire reason I began speaking out about oppression is because that oppression was already happening, whether I addressed it or not.

This is the challenge of systemic ills. If some changed hearts or adjusted habits could fix them, they wouldn’t be systemic. The whole point is that the harm doesn’t arise from a solely individual level, and therefore neither can the solution. I can’t fix it, and neither can you, not by ourselves. And the illusion that enough diligence, enough punishment of one person, will finally solve it only feeds moral discharge. 

What individuals can do is consider how our values and best intentions can lead us to strengthen injustice by trying to do exactly the opposite. This is not to say punishment shouldn’t happen, because consequences for oppressive behavior are necessary. But it can’t be the only tool in the toolbox. We need an organized plan for how to build more just environments.

I also know individuals can still make a difference because many have for me. Singular friends and colleagues have helped me through one of the hardest times in my life, and I wouldn’t be here without that. A better future can’t come about without support, without somewhere for our anger—and for our love—to go. 

And if you have insights about how to untangle the maze of strings, I’m all ears. I have a feeling no one knows that the true solution will look like yet. 

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