On Saturday morning, popular trans Twitch streamer Clara Sorrenti — better known online as Keffals — was arrested at gunpoint by the London, Ontario police after trolls sent death threats in her name to local city counsellors.
The police searched her home and confiscated her laptop and other electronic devices she uses to stream.
She was released without charges, and her electronics were returned to her; the police, perhaps fearing a lawsuit, even apologized for repeatedly deadnaming her during the ordeal. As I write this, she is streaming about the raid on keffals.gg. She plans to move to another city, not convinced that this couldn’t happen again with the London police.
You can read the unsettling details of her arrest in this Globalnews.ca story; I won’t rehash them all here.
While Keffals has gotten a great deal of support from her fans and followers online, the not-so-good people on the Gender Critical forum on Reddit clone Ovarit are having a little blame-the-victim party.
Some are celebrating the arrest, and accusing Keffals, based on nothing, of having child porn and other incriminating evidence on her computers. (I’ve removed the deadnaming and deliberately incorrect pronouns from the quotes below.)
“Godspeed to the poor officers that have to trawl through [ wrong pronoun ] electronics,” Ave_Lucifuge wrote. “We know what this degenerate posts publicly, I would hate to see what [ wrong pronoun ] keeps private.”
Given that the electronics have been returned to Keffals, I’d have to conclude that this part of the “investigation” ended fairly quickly without any incriminating evidence to be found.
The thread started with a comment suggesting snidely that the arrest has been a productive “grift” for Keffals.
“Keffals has been grifting on [ wrong pronoun ] Twitch channel and on Twitter for donations and claiming that [ wrong pronoun ] was actually targeted by transphobes and “swatted” 🙄,” wrote OneStarWolf.
Except I’ve never heard of a SWAT showing up with a judge approved warrant and confiscation of all electronics in a household. Sure thing, [ deadname removed ].
Betting [ wrong pronoun ] will be charged with child porn or worse in the upcoming weeks.
In the meantime, [ wrong pronoun ] has managed to scam over 60k from idiot TRAs and followers for [ wrong pronoun ] escape fund.
Others accused Keffals of still more imaginary crimes. A commenter called pennygadget insinuated — based on nothing — that the streamer was trading drugs for nudes of underage followers. She also accused Keffals of being the one with a dirty mind.
I love how they dodge the shady shit this [ wrong gender ] has actually been up to. Nobody is mad because [ wrong pronoun ] advocates for civil rights and covers news stories (LOTS of trans people do that on the internet). They’re mad because [ wrong pronoun ] creeps on children and actively sends [ wrong pronoun ] army of chaser fanboys and flying monkeys to ratio and harass people online that [ wrong pronoun ] dislikes.
I guess “getting ratioed” must be as traumatizing as having a police officer point an automatic weapon at you.
Pennygadget also misrepresented LGBTQ+ history in an attempt to put her and her fellow Gender Critical transphobes on the right side of history.
[G]ays & lesbians back in the day just wanted to be left alone. They didn’t demand the “right” to tell school children about their sex lives. They didn’t want to teach children about the “gay lifestyle” behind their parents’ backs.
No one is fighting to “tell school children about their sex lives.”
They just wanted marriage rights and not to be arrested because they broke an archaic anti-sodomy law. Comparing gay activists to creeps like Keffals is a fucking INSULT!
Ah, yeah, its just that here in the real world the gay rights movement kicked off in 1969 when a bunch of drag queens and other patrons of Greenwich Village bar Stonewall fought back against police raids. Also, are you familiar with a group called ACT-UP? LGBTQ+ advocates never won anything without a real fight.
Does Pennygadget think LGBTQ+ people gained marriage rights by simply asking nicely?
In any case, her brand of historical revisionism suggests that the Gender Critical are willing to toss aside not just Ts but fellow LGBs who don’t buy into their moral panic, which increasingly looks similar to that of the extreme anti-LGBTQ+ ideology of the Christian right.
There was one commenter who acknowledged that the police raid was possibly a bad thing. But even she couldn’t’ work up any sympathy for the victim.
“Ok, so this [ wrong gender ] might very well have been doxxed by some Pepe incels for whom this is the idea of a laugh,” wrote bellatrixbells.
Which is shitty, granted. And probably terrifying and humiliating.
However, I have a hard time having too much sympathy for these TIMs. How many women does [ wrong pronoun ] terrify and humiliate every time [ wrong pronoun ] asserts his human right to use female only facilities?
Is [ wrong pronoun ] one of the men in dresses who will tell “terfs” that women only deserve participation in society if we allow [ wrong pronoun ] and other [ wrong gender ] to determine our boundaries? Is [ wrong pronoun ] part of the mobs which pile onto women who say no to [ wrong pronoun ], spam their employers to make them lose their job?
In any case [ wrong pronoun ] is claiming to be a woman. Which puts a lot of people in a very difficult position where we are often being bullied into validating [ wrong pronoun ] imaginary identity. So many women made to shut up because of [ wrong gender ] like [ wrong pronoun ].
Not much empathy really.
No, not really, not on Ovarit.
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[shrugs]
They all just shits molded into somewhat human forms, stimulated into galvanic displays that resemble human hatred.
I wish I expected better of even one of them.
They’d best stay online and anonymous, though. In real life, I’d made their time with me very unpleasant indeed.
Just a little thing, you missed a pronoun in the last set of quotes – the fourth line has two wrong pronoun uses. You got the first and missed the second.
“Back in the days teh gheyz were satisfied with keeping hidden so long as they could do so in peace” is right up there with “back in the days women only cared about the right to vote”. No. There might have been a few people who didn’t care much about anything else, but civil rights movements as a whole always care about much more than one or two things. In the beginning they need to pick their battles carefully: fight hardest for what’s both presently possible and useful as a bedrock foundation for future battles. (Well, in theory. In practice, “what the least oppressed members of this group desire most” also has an influence.)
Also the attitudes around the SWATting of Keffals displayed above is a good demonstration of the moral divide between the left and the right; far too many on the right have very low standards for themselves, at least in some areas, but they “know” that they’re good people and their political opponents are bad people, so the “logical” (not actually logical) conclusion is that said opponents must be even worse than them in those areas.
As an example, for all the noise they make about children being precious beings which need to be protected at all costs, they’re actually pretty terrible about treating children as people in their own right. Rather, they fundamentally treat them as prized possessions, or worse, as extensions of their parents’ own egos. So most of the “protection” is not really about keeping them out of danger, but “protecting” the parents’ ownership of them by denying their personal rights and agency. It’s hard for anyone to be any more terrible without going into outright depraved areas, so that’s where they go with this. “Clearly”, the left must be treating children as mere resources to be harvested: for organs, for brain chemicals, for sex.
Excepting those whose bigotry is largely confined to racism: LGBTQIA+ people are “clearly” the worst of all, because they can’t do “simple” things like “stay in nice neat gender and sexuality boxes”, so “obviously” they have no limits on how low they can go. Which is of course not how anything works. But it’s how they have to contexualize it, because otherwise they would notice that they *are* the baddies. And that has profoundly negative consequences in the real world. Such as this.
One thing I’ve never got about TERFs is that the nexus of their argument, as far as I’ve understood it, is sex-based rights and “sex not gender”. But if that’s the case why are they so insistent about the word “woman” (ie. an indicator of gender) rather than using “female”? How come they think there are “gender identity ideologues” when by their own beliefs all our genders are an identity, and constructed? And if they believe that gender is a construct built on the “reality of sex” then why did they collapse so quickly into arguing “women are INHERENTLY caring, gentle, victims. They are mothers and carers. They bring forth life from their magic wombs” and all their ancillary nonsense.
It genuinely puzzles me. It’s almost like they are just bigots trying and failing to patch together a coherent internal logic to justify their bigotry.
Ah yes, GCs are definitely the real feminists here, as you can see from, uh… their support and sympathy for trigger-happy cops. Right.
Can they just fucking let us live?
Speaking of pronouns, I just learned of this today (about two minutes ago)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/third-person-gender-neutral-pronoun-thon
TERFs can eat dirt. This is gross shit that can get somebody killed. I’m sure the GC’s and other related transphobes would just _love_ to be able to use the state’s guns to murder us.
I know there are people who really get a charge out of hurting other people, and I’ve certainly had moments when I’ve lashed out at who I believed was a justifiable target … but I did it verbally, and confined it to things like explaining why they were an idjit or a bully or whatever.
I’ve had violent urges about specific people who have done actual harm, but I redirect that to stomping around the house and swearing, or I scoop the litterboxes to work off the energy.
I really don’t understand sending people with guns after other people simply for existing.
@Alan Robertshaw, I’ve never heard of that one but I heard that the singular “they” apparently has been used as a gender neutral pronoun in English since at least Shakespears time. It’s just that at one time it wasn’t considered proper English and it has recently come back into use.
@Jono:
I can explain that one. Singular “they” has been used in English since at least the late 1300s (that is, when people were still speaking Middle English). However, during the 1600s, British Latin professors stated that the only real, “proper” English followed the grammar of Latin as closely as possible (because Latin was seen as “the perfect language”), and as a result they invented a bunch of new rules and told everyone in academia “nice career, it would be a real shame if you lost it for not appearing to be professional”. One of the changes was that singular “they” would be replaced with neuter/masculine “he” (“she” remained entirely feminine), which had the side effect of “he/him” being interpreted as referring only to men or to both men and women in British Common Law and legal systems derived from that, whichever was worse for women.
It wasn’t until the early 1800s that some of those artificially-enforced rules of “proper” English got dropped, including this one, but the rest of them still remain to this day (like “no splitting infinitives” and “don’t end a sentence with a preposition”). During all that time, it appears that ordinary people mostly ignored those rules (or were ignorant of them), but that wasn’t often reflected in writing, as ordinary people mostly didn’t get published. Shakespeare’s works were an unusual exception to this, because he wrote most of his plays for the common folk rather than the elite. There was another attempt during the mid-1900s to get rid of singular “they” by replacing it with “he/she”, and some older people still insist that this is the proper way to do things, but the fact that even they rarely do it themselves shows how poorly that stuck.
What’s relatively new is not singular “they”, but some of the general public respecting non-binary identities. Pretending that it’s never singular (and usually failing badly, sometimes even using singular “they” during their attempts to deny its validity!) is a common form of resistance to that.
It’s not even ancietn history they are changing. The whole ” Back in the day gays just wanted to be left alone” I remember being used around 10 years ago to condemn the idea of same sex marriage in Australia
“Gays back in the day just wanted to be left alone. They didn’t want to get married or force people to accept their relationship. SOMETHING HAS TO STOP!”
Slightly tangental to pronouns, in Old English “man” was gender neutral, meaning a person generally, with “wif-man” for “woman” (which is where the modern English “woman” comes from) and “were-man” for a (specifically male) “man”. After the Norman conquest, as well as women losing the equal(ish) legal status and rights they enjoyed under Anglo-Saxon law, the prefix was dropped and “man” became specifically male. (On the other hand, the Normans got rid of the endemic slavery in Anglo-Saxon England, at least for the following few hundred years, so win some, lose some.)
TERFs: FOAD. thanks. Or at least STFU.
I’m glad she got enough money to relocate.
When even the cops realize how badly they f’d up… you know it’s soooo wrong.
@Alan: I liked the “zie” pronouns, but if the people living the experience wanna go by “they”, then so be it. I think all the trans people I know go by he or she, depending on current gender, but if someone (trans or cis) wants to be “they”, then I will call them “they”.
Irrelevantly, Keffals looks like a darn pretty woman. You go, girl.
Which I don’t mind. I don’t want to be near them and I don’t want them to speak for me. But the sad thing is, they’ll do their worst to trans people, not people like me (a cis bi woman). That’s where they aim all that dehumanizing as well as misgendering language.
Speaking of language…as far as I remember, my internal grammar has always accepted “they” as a pronoun for someone of unknown gender, e.g. “Who left this letter here? They got the wrong address.” Still, it was a bit of a mental adjustment when my friend’s younger sibling came out as non-binary with they/them pronouns, because I hadn’t really applied “they/them” to a named individual before. But that’s just habit and habits can change.
Another way people use “they” is for a country, company, or some other group entity: e.g., “I don’t like that store – they don’t treat their employees well.” I tutor people for a standardized test and I have to tell them that according to “standard” grammar, a company etc. should be “it”…but not to worry about using “they” in their regular speech.
(If I’ve learned one thing from linguistics, it’s that multiple grammars can coexist and saying one is “correct” is limiting.)
…
OT, but I thought Alan might like this: Quebec just passed a law banning some “cosmetic” surgeries on pets, such as declawing cats or cutting dogs’ ears just for looks (ouch). I thought that was good news! But it won’t take effect for another year and a half.
@Snowberry, @epitome of incomprehensibility:
Apart from all the progressive reasons to be so, I’m glad they/theirs has become officially accepted because now nobody can force me to write sentences like “When everyone has finished washing his or her hands, we’ll begin.”
I think I’ve mentioned before that singular they has long been a part of Yorkshire dialect.
Although it has various pronunciations (The all begin with ‘TH’ but after that its a bit of a free for all vowel wise; we get the context though)
@ epitome of incomprehensibilty
I did! Some of my Canadianian friends have been really pushing this; so it’s glad to see it, slowly, paying off.
I had a defamation case arising from animal ‘cosmetic’ surgery. All to do with ear cropping. It was quite an interesting case about the pitfalls of commenting on social media. For reasons though I can’t really go into it much further.
Luckily though the Court of Appeal did a judgment yesterday that allows me to discuss some of the same points.
@Kietazou
We may all agree that threatening women as a reply to a woman’s life being threatened is the correct and classy response.
I’ve been on some terrible forums lately trying to figure out what is happening in the world. I saw the Keffals hate brewing there, and this doesn’t surprise me one bit. It is sickening what Gamergate lead to.
Snowberry wrote:
Well put. Also, what’s relatively new is some of the general public respecting binary trans people who don’t “pass” for cis men or women. Recently, I’ve seen some conservatives on social media declare they’re adamantly opposed to “using pronouns”, by which they clearly mean respecting someone’s pronoun preference and broader gender identity, if said identity seems to conflict with what is deemed that person’s “real” gender. This includes singular “they” and non-binary neopronouns but also “he” and “she” for trans people.
This sort of coded language can be very easily confusing and ridiculous for observers outside the conservative community, but one could argue it’s a practical shorthand. I think some conservatives genuinely don’t know what the word “pronoun” means in conventional sense, and some are trolling for attention by playing stupid. But fundamentally, conservatives just want a simple, succinct word for a new concept they’ve stumbled on (that is, letting other people choose their pronoun), and they have a relatively obscure word associated with this concept (that is, “pronoun”), for which they don’t really have any other use.
I just happened to stumble across a report of a court case from half a century ago involving trans rights and the UK aristocracy:
https://inews.co.uk/news/long-reads/secret-court-case-50-years-ago-robbed-transgender-people-rights-1291857
I’m no lawyer, not even in the US, but I did find this fascinating and am curious to see if Alan or other legal-eagle Mammotheers have anything to say about this.
@ Vicky P
That was fascinating, if a little sad. But just goes to show, nothing new under the Sun.
I think this is definitely worthy of more attention though. I don’t know whether to do this as a video myself; or maybe ask some people who do really good videos about historic cases. They can probably do this story justice better than I can.
And has to be a change from everybody demanding more about ‘that’ trial.
Although there is one minor bit from that. As you may know Amber Heard has dispensed with the services of Elaine and got new lawyers in. Elaine has managed a bit of snark with her best wishes to the new team,
Thanks, Alan. If you or someone you know does a video about that case, I hope you’ll let us know.
@ Vicky P
I’ve messaged a few people who do good histories legal stuff. Having said that, I wouldn’t mind tackling it myself. I think though it would really benefit from some less cishet input. I’m wondering whether to reach out to someone and see if she would be able/willing to contribute some thoughts.
What’s with the strikethrough on the bottom line? It was rather sloppily done, getting the end of a preceding word and extending well into empty space …