Thread by @Ashaxai, In case you followed me recently, I used to have another account [...]

In case you followed me recently, I used to have another account that was really popular with TERFs.

I saw myself as a moderate, and I also realized that the pendulum was about to swing and a major backlash against trans people was coming.

I was super scared.

It also didn't help that I had just begun to transition and hadn't found any kind of balance with it yet.

The solution, I felt at the time, was to forge a bridge. If I could create a middle ground, then maybe we could find a balance that would prevent the insanity.

I started with empathy. Having been raised in an incredibly misogynistic cult, and experienced and witnessed first hand what that kind of thing can do to women, it was easy to relate.

Moreover, I had had a very negative experience with a trans family member as a kid.

I started gaining followers rapidly. Not long after, I started an organization called TransRational. The idea was to create a collected council of people with wildly different perspectives in order to find the true center.

Meanwhile I wrote threads on Twitter.

Some of these threads were very popular, one gained me around 400 new followers in a day. I thought I was doing something good- people might hate me, but in the long run if I did it right then we'd be protected.

I didn't realize how deep my own internalized transphobia was.

I didn't realize I was transphobic *at all*. How could I have? I was much more afraid of mobs, with their flames and pitchforks. I wanted to appease them.

So TR worked together and created a Manifesto, much of which was more extreme than I liked, but... Balance, right?

Wrong.

I wasn't balanced. And the constant psychological abuse from GCs began to take its toll. GCs started drama and refused to compromise on their hypocrisy, trans members of TR left, GCs doubled down and I began to melt down.

The seeds I had sown were bearing fruit.

But also cool things were happening. I crowdfunded a trip to the UK to attend a wedding, and travelled around meeting and doing video interviews with famous GCs. I met Glinner, Fionne, Helen Joyce, Miranda Yardley, Jane Clare Jones and several more. I was doing interviews.

By then, I'd amassed several thousand followers, and one day, I accidentally stepped out of my lane with a bad take. When they reacted, I doubled down and they cancelled me.

For the next two months, it felt like betrayal after betrayal as people I trusted turned.

Every day I was seeing new takes on me and my motivations by high-profile accounts that were so far divorced from the world I was living in that I couldn't comprehend what was happening at first.

It was intensely disillusioning.

It wasn't being cancelled that made me wake up.

It was this:

Suddenly, for the first time, I really *saw* the bigotry. Before, I'd believed them when they talked about women's struggles and opinions. But now, many of the high-profile GC accounts were inventing stories and lying about *me*. People I had respected. I woke up.

If they twisted what I was saying that badly, how badly had they been twisting everything else? What other trans people were saying? What they wanted? How about misogyny? How much truth was there in their takes?

And then I realized how arrogant I'd been.

I thought I could create a bottleneck, but that was hopelessly naive. I realized that my entire fucking view of the situation was prejudiced by listening to prejudice.

But I wasn't quite ready to admit it, or to give up. I'm nothing if not stubborn.

But I pulled back considerably. And then, finally, a couple of months later things had devolved into continuous drama and I deleted my original account for good.

I came back a couple of months later. The backlash I was afraid of was in full swing, and I hid.

I didn't want to continually be drawn into the drama, and my perspective had changed wildly. I'd started really listening to other trans people and unraveling my prejudice.

Eventually I realized I had to face the music and came back openly.

I apologized for my mistakes, discussed growth, and tried to see if I could maintain some old friendships- politics aside I genuinely loved some of them as human beings. It didn't work, and instead they just attacked and there were glinner pile-ons, etc.

I just accepted the consequences and with each new attack I bolstered the lessons I was learning rather than fight them back.

At first I hadn't realized just how much damage I'd done. But I began to realize that my attempts to stop a backlash had only empowered it instead.

I apoligized publicly for that, and I've since tried to be much more open to listening and learning than I used to be. I hate seeing as much pain as there is in the trans community, and I hate that I contributed to it. I didn't mean to, but I did it all the same.

Nowadays I try to just work on art and be less political. I think there's still a lot of mistrust for me out there, and that's super understandable. I've enjoyed the calmness of being relatively unpopular. You can't imagine the chaps of being followed by several thousand GCs XD

I've distanced myself from that as much as I can, and I genuinely care about the trans community. I always did, just now I've learned that positive growth comes from love. As ashamed as I am of the past, it's still part of my life as much as the time before I transitioned.

So that's who you're following. If you unfollow after this thread, I don't blame you a bit. For those of you who knew, forgave, and gave me the grace of a second try, thanks so much for your support and patience. I've got your back.

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