I’m a long-term reader of LGBT romance and I have to say I’m
appalled by what I’ve seen recently in the “queer romance community.” A few
days ago I heard about some whack shit going on in the genre and decided to do
some digging. Now I kinda wish I hadn’t because the transphobic, gaslighting
garbage I found flipped my stomach and tbh I can’t believe no one else has
picked up on this yet.
Evidently, this stuff has been going on for months and
several authors, many of them LGBT, have been targeted by a toxic group of
readers and pushed out of their own genre as a result. It’s horrifying, so
buckle on up y’all cuz we got some serious shit to talk about.
For at least six months (possibly longer, I didn’t go back
further than that because honest to God I couldn’t read anymore of it), a super
vocal but small group of readers using the #getloud hashtag on Twitter and
Facebook have been targeting authors in the space for “scamming” readers in Amazon’s Kindle
program. That “scamming” seems to be a flavor-of-the-week situation covering all manner of shit
that’s not really relevant to this conversation. If you wanna know more, go
surf the #getloud hashtag on FB and Twitter, it’s all there.
There are legitimate discussions to be had about the ethics
behind some of the stuff these authors are accused of doing, but this group
skipped right the hell on past discussing it like adults and moved to
doxxing the authors they thought were doing something wrong to shut them down.
The craziest thing though is that after this group, which I
repeat claims to be a group of allies for the LGBT community, decides
they don’t like an author, they do everything in their power to break into that
author’s social media accounts, email accounts, and anything else they can
break into. Then they’ll either pose as that author using the hacked account
and reveal every other pen name that author has written as, exponentially raising the
risk that the author will be outed, or they’ll just post whatever damning things they find all
over Twitter. I don’t think I need to remind y’all how dangerous that can be
for queer authors using pen names to protect their identities in the first
place, particularly those who are closeted IRL.
But speaking of outing, they did it to a trans author named
Xen, who was previously closeted, most recently. They started by sending
him cryptic DMs using his deadname under a Twitter handle they hijacked that
previously belonged to his abusive ex:
It forced Xen to write a very long post basically outing
himself, which itself led to him leaving social media:
Far and away the craziest part of all this though is that when
the group was called out on what they did theynot onlyadmitted
to doing it, they explained how they did it and revealed that
legal action’s been brought against them in the past for the same thing.
All right, y’all. So yesterday I brought you the garbage going on in the “queer romance community” wherein a group of readers claiming to be allies forced a trans author to out himself after doxxing him.
Since I made that post, if you can believe it, I’ve found even more hateful, transphobic crap in their history. Oh, and the group has doubled down on their assertion that what they’ve done doesn’t constitute hacking and attacked more trans authors for daring to speak out against them.
What. The. Actual. Fuck.
I’ll keep this one short and sweet and let their words speak for themselves. TONS of receipts after the cut.
It seems this isn’t the first time this group has outed an LGBT author, another case in which they had no remorse about what they did because they think they’re exposing “catfish pretending to be male authors” (what the FUCK transphobic garbage is that?) and then make jokes about how they’re going to sell courses that teach their methods before refusing to apologize for any of it. See for yourself:
Wow. I mean W-O-W. Tons more transphobic bullshit after the jump.
So, I don’t think I said anything when I reblogged this before because I was on mobile which is not so conducive to writing responses on large posts. However, I’m a Super Official Computer Person ™ and the history of computer security and how to improve it now is something that I’m interested in.
A while back (I want to say 2015 or so?) I read Kevin Mitnick’s book “Ghost In The Wires”. The book itself is not super important (any more than the information about the dude that’s free on the internet is, anyway) but to contextualize, Mitnick is a pretty prolific “computer hacker,” both self described and as described by others. He was, in fact, arrested for the hacking that he did. So what “highly sophisticated” methods did he use to do all this extremely illegal hacking? The exact same thing we see here. Using other people’s accounts posing as them? A crime. resetting someone else’s password, pretending to be them? A crime. “Just using loopholes UWU” to get information about people without their knowledge? Literally criminal, taking advantage of company policy loopholes and people’s good faith is, again, literally how Mitnick did 90% of the hacking that got him imprisoned for years.
Is anyone going to be convicted for hacking someone’s livejournal? Yeah probably not, it’s too low profile and no physical harm came to anybody involved. But it’s absolutely illegal and saying that it’s not hacking is like swinging in someone’s face and saying “I technically haven’t attacked you.” Do it to the wrong person in the wrong place and you’re gonna wind up with someone hitting back in self defense and they will be 100% vindicated.
(I will say though make sure to archive those tweets because if this is something that this person has done enough times to enough people they will absolutely be convicted regardless of how pointless the website is. The tweets can most likely be used as evidence against them, but if they delete before the tweets can be archived nobody will have that chance. Screenshots count for nothing really because they can be altered, it’s all about that archiving of the original page.)
ForLoveFromFear 