LGBT Authors Outed By Transphobic Readers
Iām a long-term reader of LGBT romance and I have to say Iām appalled by what Iāve seen recently in the āqueer romance community.ā 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 hadnāt because the transphobic, gaslighting garbage I found flipped my stomach and tbh I canāt 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. Itās horrifying, so buckle on up yāall cuz we got some serious shit to talk about.Ā
For at least six months (possibly longer, I didnāt go back further than that because honest to God I couldnāt 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 āscammingā readers in Amazonās Kindle program. That āscammingā seems to be a flavor-of-the-week situation covering all manner of shit thatās not really relevant to this conversation. If you wanna know more, go surf the #getloud hashtag on FB and Twitter, itās all there.Ā
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 itĀ like adults and moved to doxxing the authors they thought were doing something wrong to shut them down.Ā
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 donāt like an author, they do everything in their power to break into that authorās social media accounts, email accounts, and anything else they can break into. Then theyāll 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 theyāll just post whatever damning things they find all over Twitter. I donāt 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 thatĀ when the group was called out on what they didĀ theyĀ not onlyĀ admitted to doing it, they explained how they did it and revealed that legal actionās been brought against them in the past for the same thing.Ā
There are several receipts of this: