The wilw post

Quickly putting shit together because unfortunately this has been hard to come by and search engines are garbage.

This wasn't my information, a bunch of things people who know more about this have kindly sent me.

I don't have that much time to make this as comprehensive or to talk about this as I'd like, but I think the oral history of trans people on our servers is good enough and if that constitutes a hate mob, you need to understand how issues like this work better.

Wil Wheaton keeps making mistakes and his present attitude is that he isn't owning his mistakes or putting how people respond to him in context with his mistakes, and regardless of any of this, trans people (and we in general) can decide whether we want him around or not given this pretty bad history. Nobody should be expected to forgive him, it's up to each person to decide that for themselves.

His blog post talking about his suspension from mastodon.cloud demonstrates a concerning lack of cognisance about what he did in relation to the negative response. It's framing is pretty terrible - positioning the abuse he received as if it accounted for more than what it did - which was a minority of people, instead of all the trans people he keeps accidentally screwing over. At least a quarter of those supposed 60 reports the mastodon.cloud admin got were probably just instance admins quietly doing their jobs. If the mastodon.cloud admin can't deal with that, then shame on them too I guess.

And his framing also has the fucked up quality of painting this like incident many other people do in other situations this - that the bullied have become the bullies, that people who care about social justice are basically a hate mob and 'all sides' are all collectively ruining society, instead of a minority being amplified and projected. This is the problem with privileged people who apparently keep inadvertently fucking up and wonder why they get any shit at all for anything (not justifying the abuse, but shit doesn't have to be abuse).

Or as my enbyfriend kiilas put it...

Some helpful points

• That blocklist made by Randi Harper was originally for GamerGate, but she's also a TERF. After it's initial publication, she quietly inserted many many trans people into it. This blocklist was promoted within many entertainment industries (including by Will Wheaton) and subsequently seriously damaged the professional lives of many trans people. This damage has never fully recovered. So if you're confused about how Randi Harper fit into that, that's how.

a few links

https://medium.com/@AmberEnderton/wil-wheaton-has-a-listening-problem-accdf6277b88

https://mobile.twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/762902865832574976