Pretending To Be

“If I didn't define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people's fantasies for me and eaten alive.”

― Audre Lorde

Hey, just a heads up if this blog is read by anyone who hasn't talked to me in a long time, oh my god, particularly my family. Yeah, I've been identifying as nonbinary and living as queer and trans in my personal life since 2017. Surprise!

I should have re-read this blog before I returned because I only ever use it to moan about ILX.

Seven months ago, I signed up for ILX again and started posting, almost exclusively on ILM, mostly about Japanese new wave bands. Seven months of completely uncontroversial discussions, during which I was complimented on my posts and thanked for the discussions that I started. I even interacted with the mods a couple of times - ironically trying to get a trans man's dead name removed from a thread title - and no one raised the slightest issue with me. A couple of people who know me well IRL noticed the posts and approached privately to ask if it was me, and I totally copped to it. They understood all too well my reasons for not advertising who I was.

Then I made the mistake of talking about the forbidden issue (feminism) and got hit with this:

My initial reaction was confusion. 'What on earth are you talking about?'

I want to be clear about the two issues here 1) that I was previously permabanned and 2) that I was 'pretending to be someone else' and dispute this interpretation.

This is the last communication I ever had from an ILX mod, back in 2021. I fully admit that I was beefing at the time, and I absolutely deserved a 7-day time-out, or even a 30-day ban.

My memory (and this is from nearly 5 years ago so I fully expect that memory is unreliable and the details may be fuzzy) was that I had been arguing with a woman we'll call Clare. The irony is I no longer even remember exactly what we were arguing about. Probably feminism or trans rights or both. I'll be honest, I didn't like Clair. And she made it very plain that she did not like me either. I usually kept her muted because we had both reached 'b*tch eating crackers' with one another. IIRC, at the time, I was posting from my phone, where the hide user script didn't work. Either way, we beefed. Mea culpa. I'm sure I said some things in the heat of the beef that I would otherwise have reconsidered. Hindsight, 20/20, etc.

Did I crawl back to social media and subtweet some 'the lion, the witch, the audacity of this... [cracker-eating woman]'. Almost certainly. Then I got home and sat down to watch a film (The Changeling by J. Michael Straczynski - more on this later*) to distract me while I calmed down.

This part, I remember clearly. A few hours later, a friend PMed me to warn me that Clare had doxxed me, and was posting tweets of mine, claiming that my film-inspired remarks were actually subtweeting her.

Yes. While I was banned, this woman took it upon herself to doxx me and start yet another clusterfuck pile-on about someone who was unable to reply or defend myself or explain. 

I have no idea how she even found my twitter. I didn't follow her; she didn't (as far as I know) follow me. I have never advertised my social media on public messageboards purely for safety reasons. (Being openly trans or nonbinary in the UK has unfortunately got a little too scary over the past decade.) And I honestly do not understand hate-reading. If someone annoys you, mute them, block them - do not let them live rent-free in your head by seeking them out! This is Therapy 101 stuff.

I knew that something had happened with my social media, because almost immediately, I got hit with a wave of unwanted activity. This is the thing that people tend to forget about messageboards - the people who post are at best 10% of the traffic. Not all of the people who read ILX are trans-friendly. I did a lot of blocking that day. The stats on my tiny little 500 follower art twitter went from a typical 200-300 to 3000-4000 views per day, even after mods deleted the doxxing post(s). Once information is out, you cannot get it back. In fact, deleting the posts ended up deleting evidence that she actually did this, so she can maintain plausible deniability that it wasn't like that, when no, actually she DID doxx a trans person.

Because let's be clear, this was absolutely doxxing. It's true; I did not use my government name on Twitter. But I used an artist's pen name that was well known in my physical community from local art shows. And I tweeted about local issues often enough that where I lived and who I was, were easily identifiable. It creeped me the f*ck out that this woman I barely knew and generally avoided was secretly monitoring my physical and personal life.

Do I have to spell it out, how dangerous it is to doxx trans people in the UK in the 2020s? This is not beefing and namecalling and being rude. This is physically endangering someone. It is unsafe.

That was the point where I emailed a friend and asked them to contact the ILX mods to remove my account permanently. That it was clear to me that the line from 'beefing on ILX' to 'stalking, monitoring and doxxing' was a level of escalation that frightened me. I don't need to rely on memory for this, I still have the email where we talked about what happened, so I know it happened.

 

It was not OK. Over the next few weeks, the stress of being doxxed and all Clair's ensuing clusterfucks pushed me into a serious mental health episode. I'm not joking when I say that the Noize Borad Enemy List years left me with panic-attack-nightmares PTSD that I eventually had to seek therapy for. Getting doxxed sent me right back into that state, and it was almost impossible to get therapy during that stage of lockdown. Doxxing and online clusterfucks have real-life consequences.

But that was the last I ever heard from ILX mods. And my understanding was I had been given a temp-ban, which I asked to be turned into a self-ban due to another poster making me feel physically unsafe.

...

 

Why did I go back to ILX? The same reason I always do. Because I missed I Love Music.

Because there really isn't anywhere else on the internet that I've encountered the depth of knowledge, the intelligence and breadth of genre that has accumulated on ILM over the past 25 years. I was there from the beginning. I am literally the reason that there is an ILE as well as an ILM, because I couldn't stay on topic. ILM has literally shaped the course of my life. 

I was struggling to find good, well-researched, current English-language discussion of the Japanese rock and pop that I've become obsessed with over the past few years. A couple of other posters had recently joined ILM to talk about YMO and Susumu Hirasawa, and I wanted to be a part of that conversation.

But I also knew, as a trans person who had previously been doxxed on ILX, that the only way for me to post on the board and stay safe, was to go stealth. It's a horrendous indictment of the current state of UK transphobia that the only way that a transmasc can avoid doxxing and non-consensual outing is to go stealth as an ostensibly cis man.

And can I just take a moment to talk about how easy it was, posting on ILM while being viewed as a random cis man? I honestly believe that was a big part of how uncontroversial my posts were, how politely I was treated, how I was casually allowed an expert level of knowledge, how people automatically extended me good faith even during disagreements. For seven months, people just interacted normally with my actual words, my genuine self, rather than some weird projected straw feminist. It is a complete mindf*ck how much easier it is posting online in a music forum as a stealth trans man than it ever was posting as an out and open transmasc, let alone a woman.

So do I really have to spell it out, just how transphobic it is, to describe a trans person going stealth in order to avoid doxxing, stalking, outing, as 'pretending to be someone else'. Yeah, that's just us sneaky, deceitful, lying, faking trans people - 'pretending to be' - are you f*cking kidding me. I wish I could say it was an uncommon occurrence, but I get this all the time. As soon as I come out about my gender identity, I get hit with the 'pretending to be' line that I'm not who I say I am. It never feels like any less of a kick in the teeth.

I had come back from self-bans multiple times before. The only issue I ever faced before when coming back from a self-ban was trying to get people not to deadname me. (And yeah, I can remember what an uphill battle that was. And how many people who now position themselves as 'trans allies' now, were at the time literally board lawyering for the right to deadname me.) But instead of asking what's going on, here's that bad faith, transphobic 'pretending to be someone else' trope.

But this is my blog, and I get to tell my truth here. Unreliable memory and all.

 

*I was watching The Changeling because I've been a longtime fan of JMS since Babylon 5 days. But the irony being, The Changeling is actually a psychological crime thriller about a horrendously abused woman who is gaslighted, portrayed as insane and literally institutionalised for insisting on the truth that her son was abducted by a stranger and replaced by an imposter by the LAPD to hide their failings. I was struck by the metaphor of the police insisting that she was 'unhinged' - I remember very clearly, playing with that image. A door is unhinged by the use and abuse by others. Doors do not unhinge themselves. Yet in describing a crazy woman as 'unhinged', the woman is held responsible for the damage that was done to her. You give someone PTSD, then complain about how easily triggered they are. I saw myself in it.

I'm just going to leave it here, that if Clare read a series of tweets describing the ways in which institutional authority can be used to gaslight, monster and abuse someone - and she decided to read that as being about her? That says rather more about her than it does about me.