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I see GamerGate is in the news because it’s coming up to the tenth anniversary. Ten years ago, I was in the middle of a nervous breakdown caused by transphobic harassment from TERfs organised on social media. They were using the same tactics that, months later, would be the hallmark of GamerGate.

And yet the surviving narrative is that this sort of organised, “culture war” harassment originated with GG.

It didn’t. They did it to trans women, and probably others, first, and we raised the alarm, and nobody thought it mattered enough to do anything.

And then they came for the rest of you.

They keep doing this. We keep raising the alarm. We keep being ignored.

Maybe one day people will learn.

in reply to Sarah Brown

at that time i also experienced a total psychological breakdown in which GG was a big factor. I wasn't in the crossfire but friends of friends were. I remember late night scrolling, watching the patterns, the concerted psyop-like sense of it. The only logical response was to go mad.

After (belatedly, not prior to GG) noticing the identity with astro-terfing, I remember looking at the patterns around Low Traffic Neighborhoods looking the same. All from one set of roots

in reply to Pirate 404

@Jo Walsh Yeah. In the uk it all sprang from the SITP crowd, who thought they were all far cleverer than they were and so got easily used as useful idiots by the hard right.
in reply to Sarah Brown

Thanks -- I'll have to look further into them (a cursory googling isn't very helpful). I seem to have missed a really important chapter in the cultural-political history of our times.
in reply to Sarah Brown

i remember. seeing that happen to you really woke me up to the threat this ‘new’ strategy on the side of the transphobes posed to us. Spent a long time feeling like somewhat of a Cassandra on that unfortunately. And like Cassandra, have been proven right the hard way. You can probably relate to that quite a bit.
in reply to Sarah Brown

so many horrid memories from that time; A few for myself, many for friends and colleagues.
in reply to Sarah Brown

I wasn't very online then, so GG missed me entirely. I had to learn about it after the fact. And it was actually really hard to learn about it for a while? One person likened it to cliques at a highschool lunch table which sounds insane, but for a while that was the only video around. Wasn't until I watched Innuendo Studios's videos on it that I actually got some concrete understanding of the events.

I think some of that contributes to this happening over and over again.

in reply to Jesse Cohn

@Jesse Cohn I wrote about it a bit on LJ at the time. I think it's probably gone now. There's a 6 month gap in my memory from the nervous breakdown it caused, so documenting it wasn't high on my list of priorities.

I've since managed to get a modicum of revenge on some of the people involved. Not willing to go into further details.