Mx. MacTaking a break from Twitter but not sure yet if it includes Mastodon. Probably not. Things are... Less tense here.
I love being an LGBT+ activist, I love working with my local LGBT+ community, and also local LGBT+ youth. But being an LGBT+ activist in social media takes a different toll entirely.
Like at work, I can have my huge fuck off LGBT+ pride flag at my desk, I can get up and give speeches about the importance of diversity. But in the workplace, if someone has a problem with me or my identity, I'm not going to get hate messages. Because. Yanno. Being a working employee in a state with LGBT+ protections kinda means you deserve rights?
But online all I have to do is say I'm bisexual and trans non-binary in my profile and I've got a slew of stalkers or random people who want to fight me over my identity. And it's tiring validating yourself over and over again to strangers. So usually I try to ignore it. But on Twitter that doesn't always work. They get threatening, stalkery even, and it just gets worse.
Today I brought up the fact that there's a popular LGBT+ site that's transphobic. And another organization with 55k followers starts telling me I need to send them direct receipts/etc for the OTHER company who they aren't affiliated with. I didn't want to link to friends' content w/o permission so I declined. And also mentioned being a random person/unaffiliated company and just demanding shit from trans people/victims/etc, is kinda shitty? Just, in general?
OF COURSE the response I got was about how I basically shouldn't run my mouth then and they're allowed to say things because they have trans people they work with.
AND anyways. When people with like 55k followers start pulling that shit on someone like me who barely has over 1k followers and was trying to convey other friends experiences, it makes me anxious. Like. Dudes. I get you want proof, but then, why don't you read their timeline? Ask them yourself? (They'll block you if you do fwiw.) ANYTHING. You can do your own work too yanno.