I don’t share a lot of the shitty things people say to me these days because, well, it’s not worth my time or your eyeballs.

But as a cis woman who firmly supports trans people, I need to point out the tactics TERFs have been using on me over the last few weeks. This was today:

About four months ago, a good number of trans people and allies got publicly upset with me. I won’t go into why at this point because it’s way over now. But how it happened and when it happened left me in a very bad place where I was in full PTSD mode and suicidal.

Immediately after, I started receiving emails from people who claimed to be “gender critical” (AKA TERFs).

They seemed to be very carefully written to be sympathetic and comforting. They said they knew this would happen to me eventually and could I not see why they were right?

The emails kept coming. I don’t know how many I received (I wasn’t well and I wasn’t counting) but there were a few. Each felt like an attempt to persuade me to see trans people (trans women especially) as vicious, abusive and hateful.

I nuked those emails from orbit.

Eventually, it must have become clear I wasn’t going to reply and they stopped coming. That tactic didn’t work.

The new tactic since I’ve returned to twitter is to tell me at every turn that the trans community hates me and will turn on me again in a heartbeat.

Please remember in all of this that I’m a cis woman - you know, one of the people they claim to be protecting? And yet they dig and dig and try to get under my skin, to make me afraid, to silence me.

It won’t work (thanks therapy!) but it does make me angry.

This is how people get radicalized. Hate groups find us at our weakest and they use whatever they can to us on side. It’s a well-known manipulation tactic and I’ve seen it happen in real time to others.

Shame on anyone who does this to vulnerable people. It’s disgusting.

I’m just putting this out there because it’s an unfortunate constant in my life now and I’m going to use it as a teaching tool.

Like a lot of hate groups, the TERF movement is getting louder and accumulating more disenfranchised people. Let’s be aware and proactive about it.