There are a few really persistent people(/systems) over the years who’ve made it part of their life’s mission to bad mouth us on the internet and I don’t understand it.
Of the three I can think of, we only knew #1 for more than a few months. We didn’t know any of them for more than a year before they decided they hated us.
All but #1 we never even heard the real voices of. We never saw their faces. We have no idea what they look like. Hell, we didn’t know them well enough to know who was in their systems.
I wonder what about us makes us so hateable. #2 hardly knew us before they decided we were a terf on no basis of fact whatsoever and they’re still spreading that around to this day. they contacted one of us recently and wrote an entire callout post for us being a terf and “ignoring their pronouns” when we have issues properly parsing neopronouns (mostly due to, you guessed it, a memory disorder!) and asked for an alternative.
#3 knew us for a little while but they got in a fight with us over something entirely innocuous when we were 14 and haven’t forgiven us since. Not that we really want them to at this point after we’ve heard what we have about them. (Honestly we haven’t heard from #3 in almost a year, thank god)
But all of them turned around and decided we were abusive with no real basis. And what hurts is that all the people who they screamed it to believed them. There are pockets of this community we’re not welcome in because no one bothered to ask for our side of the story because the word “abuse” was dropped and questioning “abusers” on this site is forbidden.
#1 used us for months. They manipulated us. They’ve admitted to that, they’ve admitted to the fact they often had awful emotional outbursts on us and turned us around in our own system to intentionally try to get us to pity and help them.
But the second we turn around and do something to defend ourselves, we’re abusive.
It’s this awful cycle we’ve been watching on tumblr since high school and it makes us really upset. Not just for our sake, but for all the other people who go through the same shit. I dunno.