From Gamergate to TERF Wars

As may be betrayed by my dated pop culture references, I am what is known as a Xennial, sitting on the cusp of GenX and Millenials. 

I am old enough to remember a time before the Internet and to have played 80s video games when they were new and cutting edge. I got into scrapes with my friends on our BMX bikes - not quite like in Stranger Things, but the world of my childhood was similar, albeit a lot more North London and a lot less Northern Indiana.

But I also love the Internet.  I did my time waiting for 56k dial-up modems to connect and I was a beta tester of broadband. The Internet is a spectacular creation that has allowed many fantastically good things to come into existence. It has shaped my life massively.

Unfortunately, it is a double-edged sword, which also enables many horrible things to happen. The Internet can be used to gather a mob, to call down extreme harassment and abuse, and one of the earliest examples of this that I’m aware of is Gamergate. 

Wikipedia is by no means my go-to source for reliable facts, for obvious reasons, but it gives what I think is a pretty good overview of Gamergate: “a loosely organized misogynistic online harassment campaign and a right-wing backlash against feminism, diversity, and progressivism in video game culture.”

One of the main targets was Zoë Quinn, an independent game developer.  She wrote a detailed and insightful book about her experience, which I read shortly after it came out in 2017. I decided to revisit it recently and, even though the events she describes happened less than a decade ago, it feels something like ancient Internet history.

That said, as I re-read her words, it struck me how the things she and the other Gamergate victims experienced then are very much not a thing of the past.  In fact, they were a blueprint for many of the issues we frequently see now.

What was Gamergate? What happened?

It was 2014, and Zoë was beginning to make a name for herself online creating, as she describes it, “weird little artsy video games about feelings and farts”.  She had recently ended a relationship she characterised as abusive, toxic and controlling with a guy who, I think it is fair to say, has not done anything to dispel that impression.

Sometimes relationships don’t end well and, most often, we pick up the pieces, learn our lessons and go our separate ways.  But that is not what Zoë’s ex did. He took it upon himself to write a nearly 10,000 word “manifesto” about her, accusing her of cheating, of being some kind of evil manipulator and painting himself as the entirely innocent victim.  He posted it online and it quickly ended up on 4chan, although he disputes that he himself posted it there. 

(If you haven’t heard of 4chan, it is a website with a well-founded reputation for being a place where online mobs can be riled up and mass abuse is coordinated.)

I have taken the time to read what he wrote (hours of my life I’m never getting back) and, to cut a long story short, I don’t buy it. It wasn’t an off-the-cuff outpouring of emotion and upset, it was a carefully crafted, vitriolic rant, complete with catchphrases and graphics to help it go viral. 

In fact, he later bragged online that he deliberately designed it for that purpose. Whether that is true or not, and whether he could realistically have predicted or intended what followed, it stirred up a colossal storm of hate.

One specific accusation really took hold - made by one of the self-appointed leaders of the growing mob: she had slept with a journalist in return for a favourable review of one of her games. 

Gamergate sprang largely from the huge amount of misogyny in parts of the gaming community; a significant number of young, male gamers who seem to resent women being part of it. I think they believe they somehow own what gaming is or what it should be and that women are taking over something that they feel rightfully belongs to males. 

The fact that games made by women tend to push back on the prevalence of submissive, hypersexualised female characters and introduce different types of gameplay is not something that has been well received by this group.

So, it was an absolute gift to this movement to be provided with a target of a female developer who was stretching the boundaries of gaming and perhaps - gasp - had the temerity to have a sex life. She was the embodiment of everything they wanted to attack. 

She was held up as an effigy of everything that was supposedly wrong with women in the gaming industry; to be attacked, destroyed, and metaphorically burnt at the stake.

The onslaught of abuse she received was truly appalling: death and rape threats; doctored gore, snuff and porn with her face on it; shared private nudes; doxxing; swatting (police being erroneously called to her house); dead animals in her mailbox; friends and family targetted and threatened; and more. It went on for several years - yes years, she had to move house multiple times and her life was turned upside down.

Anyone who attempted to defend her or ask questions became a target themselves and received similar treatment.  Fear of reprisals became a powerful motivator in stopping potential allies speaking out, and they were also massively outnumbered by this point.

But the most ridiculous thing? There was no review. Her game was never reviewed in the magazine the writer worked for, let alone by him personally. But that did not stop the mob believing it did, and attacking anyway.

At the time, this was the first clear-cut example I had encountered of something I now see happen more and more, where people simply do not seem to care about the facts. Even when the most cursory inspection of the evidence finds glaring holes, people will ignore that if it contradicts what they want to believe. It’s pure confirmation bias.

So you could take a twisted partial truth, or an outright lie, and put it out there on the Internet.  Even if it was trivial to disprove, if it told enough people what they wanted to hear, it would likely persist, context and truth be damned. And if you knew the right places to go and the right groups to incite, you could actively organise abuse, and trigger a pile-on of hundreds or thousands of users upon your chosen target. Push the right buttons and they weren’t going to be fact-checking, because they already wanted to believe it.

But surely, nearly a decade later, we have learnt some lessons and we are all a bit wiser, right?

It doesn’t look like it to me. If anything, it is worse - the same pattern is seen all over the Internet. Facts are secondary to what you can persuade people to share and which groups you are able to mobilise. And, as far as I can tell, existing on the Internet as a woman with anything other than meek acquiescence means enduring repeated harassment and abuse.

A pertinent case is the treatment of gender critical women, where evidence seems to have been very much thrown out of the window. For example, it is largely considered an indisputable fact online that Harry Potter author JK Rowling is “transphobic”. If you believe what you see in many places, she is actively seeking the literal genocide of all trans people, purely because of her own irrational, demented hatred.

But if you spend even 5 minutes reading what she has actually written, it is absolutely clear she thinks nothing of the sort.  At the very worst, some of her tweets are what I would describe as “a bit snarky” - hardly unforgivable on the dumpster fire that is Twitter, and certainly not justification for death and rape threats. If you ask those who insist she is a hateful transphobic bigot to quote something she has said to back up their view, they cannot. Or I have never found someone who can.

If they answer at all, they’ll most likely point you to an opinion piece that quotes her tweets or the essay she wrote, but you’ll find that none of the quotes are actually transphobic. The accusations of transphobia will come from the interpretation of whoever wrote the article. 

It will require a convoluted explanation that while she says she cares about the rights of women and girls, what she secretly means is that all trans people are evil and don’t deserve to exist. Even though she said absolutely nothing resembling this, it is what she meant, because the person writing said so. And if you can’t see that, then you are a bigot too. You’re not a bigot, are you?

I couldn’t tell you whether anyone has put a dead animal in JKR’s mailbox, but I’m pretty sure every other form of abuse that was inflicted on Zoë Quinn has also been directed at Rowling for her supposed crimes. And no doubt some novel ones too.

Another prominent example of the internet’s disregard for the truth lies with Kelly Jay Keen aka Posie Parker, an increasingly well-known women’s rights activist. The label of ‘nazi’ and ‘fascist’ has been slapped on her far and wide, including by politicians and people in authority who, frankly, should know much better than to speak without checking their facts. 

She is someone else who is characterised as seeking the literal extermination of trans people. But, if you actually watch for yourself what happens at the events she organises you will see they do exactly what they advertise: Let Women Speak. Women of all ages and backgrounds sharing their experiences and concerns - women who are not given a voice anywhere else. 

Rather than being listened to with compassion, these women are shouted down and sometimes physically attacked just for daring to speak. I don’t even want to try to imagine what KJK’s inbox must contain - I’m pretty sure it would make even those with the strongest stomachs sick.

A similar pattern also played out with the way Kathleen Stock, a professor of philosophy and writer, was treated over her book, Material Girls.  Her book examined gender ideology using the philosophical method, and she was effectively harassed and hounded out of her post at the University of Sussex for doing so. 

And the same blinkered thinking underpins the way Newsnight journalist Hannah Barnes’ comprehensive research in her book exploring the Tavistock GIDs service, Time to Think, was dismissed offhand in the groups for parents of trans kids I was part of. If she hasn’t also received a ton of online threats and abuse, I’ll eat the AOL free trial CD I still use as a coaster.

Countless others have been demonised in the same way, including a 12 year old girl, who was compared to Hitler Youth this week, for speaking out about her experiences at her school. I have no doubt many more will be given the same treatment in the future.

You’ll be told that no evidence is needed, that the target’s guilt is ‘well known’ because loads of people on the Internet are saying it and it’s impossible for a big group of people to be wrong. No smoke without fire. 

If you ask for specific examples of things that are incorrect or harmful, you’ll be told things like “no I wouldn’t put myself through reading it” but somehow the same person will claim to be able to give a meaningful opinion on this thing they haven’t even looked at. 

The transparent reality is that they just heard that opinion from someone else and repeated it. And that person heard it from someone else, who heard it from someone else, and none of them thought to ask questions, either because they had already decided to believe it, or because they were scared of being called transphobic themselves.

The words of these Bad Actors are apparently so hateful and so evil that even reading them or hearing them will warp your mind. And the implication is that you, the reader, are so weak-minded or lacking in integrity that you will be completely unable to tell reality from hate yourself. You’ll be seduced by the dark side.

But I think we’ve all got the capacity to think before we swallow what we’re told. So here is my plea: don’t be afraid to ask questions. Don’t be afraid to say “that makes no sense to me” when it doesn’t. If someone tries to shame you for doing that, don’t be cowed - it’s a sure sign they don’t have a good answer.

Engage your brain. Look at the evidence. Think critically. Make your own mind up. 

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Bibliography

1. Barnes, H. (2023). Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children. Swift Press.

2. Quinn, Z. (2017). Crash Override: How Gamergate (Nearly) Destroyed My Life, and How We Can Win the Fight Against Online Hate. PublicAffairs.

3. Stock, K. (2021). Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. Fleet.