Hate Wins
“I WAS JUST watching a video about you,” someone said to me last fall. Another famous conservative had done another high-trafficking video about how I’m a sick, deluded lady with a fake wiener (I didn’t watch it, but was told the gist was that same ol’ chestnut). “I’m so sorry,” a friend from grad school wrote me early last year about a similar YouTube “harassing,” which I hadn’t even known was happening. Last Monday, I got an email that accidentally let me know a Substack TERF had devoted a post to the “Sad Tale” of my “Life Ruined”—not by my being impregnated by my own father as an adolescent, which she mentions, and which most people would probably rank pretty high—top, even?—on a life-ruining scale. No, that’s not the life-ruiner here. It’s my transition.
She calls me by a first name, “Mackenzie,” that was never mine, neither given nor chosen, and by my father’s last name, which legally hasn’t been mine for half a decade. She misgenders me relentlessly, and says things that aren’t true: that my aunt who was schizophrenic spent her life in state-assisted living (she in fact lived very independently, in a place of her own); that my career is over, implying that mainstream media won’t have me rather than that I canceled a long line of assignments; that my “fake penis will require multiple surgeries due to inevitable problems” though there are zero medical issues with my sweet, perfect, perfectly real D; that my “issues related to childhood sexual abuse have not been properly addressed” when I’ve had more therapy with more experts than anyone I’ve ever met. She does all this while illegally reposting copyrighted photos of me from this site and others (I’ve let Substack know).
I don’t normally read things like this—I still haven’t seen any of the aforementioned videos—let alone respond to them. But minutes after I was alerted to this “article,” which had hundreds of likes and comments when I opened it, a friend let me know that the Pride banners our town had just put up had been slashed, every single one of them. For the last month, I’ve been having therapy multiple times a week after another assault, and altogether, in that moment, I felt the most acutely, most-globally-I’ve-felt-as-an-adult attacked.
