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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