idadeerz
@idadeerz

hey please read this post if you wanna know what urlfest this is and which people to avoid. thanks!

i said i wasn't sharing that previous post for no particular reason whatsoever. well, i'm sure i totally had you all fooled there. there was a very particular reason for it!

@eggsbox invited me to the server of an open submission urlfest, to check out the set they were working on for the fest. i won't name the people hosting the urlfest in question since i think that'd be against the cohost guidelines.

after having some fun hanging out with it and everyone else in the vc there, i decided, fuck it, why not, i'll make a set myself, it doesn't need to be very high effort anyways. two hours later, when my set was pretty much complete, i noticed that chuck messaged me, stating that an anonymous user went to the staff to complain about me. quoting chuck, this user supposedly said i'm "into necro" and that i "defend 4lung", both of which basically aren't true. these rumours are only still floating around because people have twisted my words into the most insane bullshit possible.

i look in the userlist of the server — something which i should've done the moment i joined, honestly, because i stopped feeling naturally feel safe in online spaces because of this shit a long time ago — and i immediately notice there's a handful of artists who i recognize from a collective that has previously pushed this false narrative about me. this user submitted their concerns anonymously, but i have reasonable suspicion as to who it is.

chuck tells the host and the staff to speak to me directly. they don't. they do however lie to chuck by implying that they were discussing things with me. i contact the host directly. i don't hear anything back. i spend 30 whole minutes typing up my defense and explaining that this is slander that's being spread about me because these people want to farm clout off of my back. i get no response. a short while later, i get a message back saying that after 'a lot of talk within the team' they do not want me to participate.

chuck also gets told that the staff 'reached out to multiple trusted people to help with this decision'. i guess they're all telephone gaming the same story to eachother about how i'm a fucking weirdo. they 'do not feel comfortable' with me participating in the fest.

i basically couldn't sleep last night from all the stress. i've gotten used to my entire body shaking violently as a stress response, because i've lost count of how many times that shit has happened to me as a result of people mass harassing and dogpiling me. there's been entire private groups of people dedicated to sending me harassment. i've literally been doxxed by nazis before over shit like this. last night, i stayed up until 5am because it took until that long for my body to stop raging in response to me being treated like shit for the millionth time when i just wanted to have fun with people.

i think everyone who allies with rhetoric like this should fucking die a slow and painful death be forced to walk a mile in my shoes. even if they mean well and they just wanna be "better safe than sorry". in fact, i think that sort of behavior is even more insidious than the people who are blunt about how much they hate trans women. because instead of people who make it clear they hate trans people so you can easily avoid them, here you end up with people who say they support trans people; but when push comes to shove you get betrayed by them taking the path of least resistance in your face. they just leave you in the middle of the firing line, instead of doing their due dilligence to unlearn their internalized biases and to not aid and perpetuate violence against trans women and other marginalized folks.

you know, do i really need to point out how fucking stupid it is that in a time where trans women are constantly pedojacketed by conservatives, this kind of slander and mass harassment still gets uncritically perpetuated against me? and the people who pretend they're safe about it won't even challenge it because doing so is more difficult? they'd rather believe literal fucking lies because it's easier than admitting that the people they trust aren't as trustworthy as they thought and then they'd have to deal with the fallout from that.

look, i would be remiss if i didn't at least mention that i originally found this urlfest and the person hosting it through cohost, and that's part of why i didn't vet the whole place like i always tend to do. because i figured cohost was not designed as a place that welcomes people who leverage this shit against vulnerable queer people. i didn't expect someone on here to do that to me.

i told the host "well fuck you" and left, and even that took a lot of restraint already.


You must log in to comment.

in reply to @idadeerz's post:

Mother of god, like that really fuckin' sucks. One of my fears of being too popular is to have people spread false assumptions about me to others so they could ruin my life. It's why I don't like to talk or publicly socialize a lot so I don't have stalkers fucking with me.

my brand of mental illnesses and coping mechanisms is just being extremely extremely extremely vocal in the face of shit like this. i don't really know how i do it either, i think that most other people would have caved in if they were faced with the same shit happening to them. i'm already popular so i can't really go back anyways :/

nooooo............ that really sucks.
i was excited to see you!!

i know that the host is on the ”means well“ side of all this —and i can imagine that it would be scary to have to deal with a newcomer's arrival and being told all this concerning stuff about the newcomer by an established member of the group you're organizing while you're already in a time crunch— but it's pretty sad how it played out.

it sucks to have to pick sides, but it also sucks to not investigate the story proper and propagate a narrative that harms queer people.
(that said — i'd hate to see people do to the host what they've done to you, and slap the label ”transphobic“ on them because they're extrapolating way too much from your post, causing people to assume the worst of them from all what that label entails, rather than on the actual issue you were addressing of being too harmfully passive.)

having a target on your back like that sounds exhausting.
things are better in cohost, but not perfect.
and it'll continue to become less perfect as its userbase grows and more chances for crappy things to happen.
i just hope that its culture, by average, will continue to vaccinate itself from too much crap happening compared to other social media platforms.

EDIT

wrote all this before i saw your update.
still processing everything.
worrying whether i'm the one who's being too passive, now.
will probably lie down and blank out instead of coming to any decisions.
realizing that i'm feeling like i'm picking sides now, and oh how nice it would be if i didn't have to......

i think everyone who has ever perpetuated harassment against me "meant well", and they were all mostly fellow queer artists themselves. i wouldn't call anyone involved here transphobic; i will absolutely call them transmisogynists though, which is not the same thing, and it can absolutely be something which other trans people can internalize without realizing it.

you can have ideals of protecting communities and "meaning well" all you want, but if you let that get exploited and co-opted by bad faith actors who will feed you lies about fellow queers in an attempt to get you to harm them, you're as useless to me as any garden variety transphobe is.

carelessness and passivity destroy lives.

(this whole comment isn't directed at you or anything, i'm being general here)