LGBT Authors Outed By Transphobic Readers
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 they not only admitted 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.
There are several receipts of this:
theartofmadeline
ellievsbear
prguitarman
gracieabrams
romaincrisis
snowghoul
