So, how was your weekend?
Mine was a little rough. If you didn’t hear, one of the world’s most popular authors sent her 14 million Twitter followers after me because I asked her to reconsider her rhetoric on trans issues.
This person has contributed to a pervasive atmosphere of hostility towards trans and queer people that has been weaponized as a “culture war” by far right politicians. I told her as much and asked her to reconsider her position. I loaded up Twitter a little while later and got a message from Twitter saying, “Your tweet is getting attention!”
Sound the klaxons.
The author had shared my tweet with her followers, with her own commentary attached (straw man nonsense, I’m afraid), and her followers were responding.
I didn’t see those responses because I immediately set up filters that blocked them out, but enough friends reached out in concern that I knew the responses were, let’s say, candid and enthusiastic.
There’s no established etiquette around “quote tweeting” someone to disagree with them. The author is entitled to do it; most people recognize that when someone with a lot of followers quote-tweets to disagree with someone, they’re inviting harassment and abuse towards that person. I’m small-fry and I still avoid using quote-tweets to dunk on people with less of a platform than me.
This author does it a lot, often to queer people and women. She’s either very insulated from the consequences of her actions or she does it knowing that her fans will attack these people for days, weeks, maybe months, while she moves on.
If that’s the case, I find that behaviour baffling. The intention must be to frighten people out of disagreeing with her, but why does she need to do that? If I had my own theme park, I imagine I’d be too happy to spend time casually launching mobs at strangers to silence them. If I had my own line of Lego sets, I don’t think I’d be that mean.
A few hours after the quote-tweet, a friend hinted that the author had come at me again. Someone else had quote-tweeted me to claim that by asking for consideration I was “joining in” with “paedophiles, rapists & misogynists”.
This sort of bad faith batshittery is common on Twitter, and usually it’s easy to ignore.
The author had retweeted this to her 14 million followers.
This was terrifying. I had asked the author to consider the impact of her words, and she had invited 14 million people to link me with pariahs, with the most detested types of people in the world. Some of those 14 million people are probably not okay. The author had invited a threat to my safety that may hang over me for the rest of my life. Or end it.
Honestly, there are fewer Belgians in the world than there are people who now might want me dead.
I try to see the funny side.
There’s a much more serious side to this than the question of my safety, though I am heavily invested in that. Anti-trans rhetoric hurts vulnerable populations, especially trans kids. It encourages the kind of hateful legislation that we’re seeing sweep the US. It destroys lives and it racks up a body count.
I’m just collateral damage. The author wasn’t thinking about my safety when she quote-tweeted me, just as she isn’t thinking about trans kids when she elevates the bogeyman rhetoric that has hurt queer people for almost a century. She doesn’t seem to understand the power of her words.
A writer should know better.