Ableism kills

On December 5, 2022December 5, 2022 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?Leave a comment

I found myself rather sad last night. Not that the feeling has gone away.

If there’s any truth to the saw of ‘the lesson replays itself until you learn it’, I can definitively say I’ve learnt my lesson.

It’s a human need to interact with others, to socialize, to be an integral part of a group. To belong, to have acceptance. https://www.universalclass.com/articles/self-help/a-brief-history-of-our-need-to-be-social.htm

But when you’re autistic or ADHD or often another form of neurodivergent, you may easily live your life without something allistics and other types of neurotypical people take for granted. Simple social acceptance. A group to belong in.

I highly doubt I’m the only autistic/ADHDer who’s lived a life like mine.

I’m late diagnosed, so in elementary school, I didn’t understand why people didn’t like me. In high-school, the bullying in school and the abuse at home just made me want to crawl into a hole and never come out again. I ended up in an abusive relationship where I was pressured into sex far too young because being in the back seat of my boyfriend’s car (whether I actually wanted to be or not, I didn’t) was safer than anywhere else I could go. It’s one of the reasons it’s imperative to talk frankly with ND kids about our differences, we’re heavily at risk of every kind of abuse.

NT = Neurotypical ND = Neurodivergent

Because we’re sadly still human. We desperately just want to feel like we belong somewhere. That some people on this cursed planet actually want us around.

The things we’re capable of doing to ourselves in the mistaken hope that we’ll eventually find acceptance is pretty awful, to be honest. Humans are social creatures and when you’re prevented from being social… it hurts and harms in so many ways.

I had a brief period of acceptance in university for around 2 years. I joined the SCA and found a lot of other weirdos like me. I had a ttrpg group. I had a coven to practice with. I had people who acted (and were) pleased to see me. I’m no longer in the SCA because of what it’s become, so that time period didn’t last long.

I lost my coven and ttrpg groups when we all graduated over the course of a few years, moved away, and I’ve never found a group to practice my faith or my enjoyment of ttrpg with again. Solitary is lonely. Several of us are still in touch, in a haphazard fashion… but me loathing Facebook makes it harder for me to stay in touch with uni friends.

2 years out of 46. That’s a pretty terrible ratio no matter how you slice it.

It’s common these days in publishing to need to be good at social media to get anywhere. Or so that’s what everyone says. After my experience being harassed off social media, excluded from groups both professional and social repeatedly, I can say I don’t think they mean the advice for people like me.

Social media gave me a voice I’d never had before. It was nice. But it’s always my ‘voice’, my ‘me’, that people end up getting sick of, complaining about, and eventually excluding me over. It’s not like I misrepresent myself. I’m out as autistic/ADHD/mentally ill everywhere online. I’m too… worn out… I guess, to try to hide everything from everyone anymore. There are things I choose not to talk about, due to stigma, but everything I share online is authentic.

I can say with complete honesty that I’ve tried so many times to make friends, to find a group of people who would give a shit if I died. I’ve finally reached the point where I accept that I can’t have that. I can’t have a thing humans need to thrive because of ableism.

Because the intense, lifelong experience and pain of loneliness is better than the painful exclusions, the bullying, the ableism… it gets to the point where we just don’t have it in us to keep trying. I don’t have it in me anymore. I’m scraped clean. This latest exclusion has been not only horrifically painful for me, but it’s also rock-bottom. I can’t do it anymore. Excluding people and freezing them out is a form of bullying, y’know. In this case, it’s a form of cyberbullying.

So many autistic and ADHD folks have similar experiences. We try, and try, and give it far too many ‘last tries’ before we just… realize, I guess, that it’s just a grossly repetitive pattern and we stop trying.

I trusted a friend that the groups they were in were largely made of decent people who were accepting of differences. I don’t blame my friend, they’re a wonderful person and perhaps those groups were accepting of them (friend is ND too). So I tried again. I thought I was accepted too. But in hindsight, I can see I was barely tolerated. Y’know, it would be super helpful to be able to read social context in the moment. But that’s one of the reasons autistic and ADHD people are disabled. Many of us can’t pick up on social clues and we often completely miss social context.

It’s not that we’re trying to be the sand in the oyster. I actually tried to be as unobtrusive as possible in that group while still having a presence there. It didn’t change the fact that people complained about the way I ‘talk’. That is so, so ableist.

I didn’t complain about the many, many times I was hurt, harmed, or insulted in that group. I just did the professional thing and quietly blocked anyone I didn’t want to see.

But people didn’t have the decency to extend to me the same courtesy. Being ND is hard enough without gleeking ill-nurtured ableist coxcombs being utterly nasty. And trust me, if you’ve complained about the way any non-allistic talks/types, or if you’ve penalized one of us for it, (as long as it’s not obviously harmful IE racist, misogynistic etc.) that’s exactly what you are.

Years of supporting others, and of being as professional as I know how to be (I’ve worked fortune 500 corporate, I know how to act professionally even with people I don’t like). I extended them the same professional courtesy I’d hope people would extend to me… all of it gone in a flash with no warning. The reason given was the way I talk (communicate via text). The words used were both inaccurate (I’m an editor and that word was used incorrectly) and deeply insulting. Please understand that judging how a disabled person communicates, and complaining about it, is deeply, wretchedly ableist. I lost people I thought of as friendly acquaintances, professional contacts, and just… other weirdos who do this writing thing. I lost a place I mistakenly thought was a place where I was welcome. People I’d spoken to or read almost every day for years gone. I also lost any opportunities that being part of that group would’ve offered. And no, I can’t reach out to people in the group because I don’t know who or how many were complaining about me. I have a few guesses. Probably pretty accurate ones given my training in psychological forensics (it’s not all dead bodies, y’know). But I don’t have facts.

Those who I term ‘baby NDs’ or ‘unhatched autistics/ADHDers’ are people who may or may not know they’re ND, but who still cling to neurotypical social expectations and behaviors like some sort of ropy, gooey Turner and Hooch-esque slime trail.

I can’t blame them really, I clung to the same concepts for far too long myself. We’re raised, whether we’re NT or ND, to feel that following the social ‘norms’ will work for us.

Except it doesn’t work for autistics and ADHDers. The unhatched often (and full disclosure, I’ve been guilty of it myself… in my 20s when I didn’t know better) harm other ND people (including their own children) in their mistaken belief that if they just try hard enough, if they mask enough, if they entertain enough, if they get rid of the disabled person who talks funny… if they… if they… if they…

Trying to change the unchangeable and masking (autistic masking) has never done me an ounce of long-term good. All its done is break my heart, over and over again. I developed the habit of masking to survive. I used to be so good at masking that people didn’t believe me when I told them I’m autistic/ADHD/mentally ill.

I probably missed a good career as an actor. It’s what I did every second of every day and I paid the cost for it.

I’m not sure if it’s the fact I’ve been a SAHM for 15 years, the pandemic and the required quarantine my immunocompromised family still lives under so we don’t die, or whatever having covid did to my brain, but I can’t mask hardly at all anymore. I can manage it for brief interactions like buying groceries, but even that is just… utterly exhausting.

It’s nigh impossible for me to mask online. I have a social media persona, everyone does. I’m a little more outspoken online than I am in real life. I’ve always communicated better in writing so you’d really think it wouldn’t be an issue for me to find spaces where people like me are accepted, would you?

Except, online groups and social media have turned out to be just as cruel to me as people tend to be IRL.

Any sort of change, but especially unexpected change, is incredibly difficult for autistics. That’s got to be one of the world’s most understated facts.

I don’t know if I can even describe it. It’s similar to the feeling of overwhelm, it has some similarities to how someone feels when everything they’re comfortable with is suddenly gone.

It wrecks our routine, our reality, (routine is so, so, so necessary for many autists). That feels like your world shakes like an 8.0 earthquake and has its resulting destruction.

It’s a bit like how it feels to be gaslit, the questioning of everything you’ve done, said, experienced because obviously, you hadn’t picked up on some social thing that someone else felt was important enough to hurt someone (badly) over.

I’m not entirely sure if this thing autistics/ADHDers do when something goes wrong is innate or a trauma response from a world that makes it very clear we aren’t wanted.

But we tend to replay memories, which are often crystal clear for many of us due to how autistic memory works, trying to figure out what exactly we did wrong and when, so that we don’t do it again.

It’s an exhausting morass of circling, intrusive thoughts and please trust me when I say you don’t want to experience it. It’s certainly not a voluntary process. Things others can brush off as no big deal will often scar an autistic person for life.

I’m still involuntarily replaying memories of when I was 4 years old, for fuck’s sake, so can you imagine what it must be like in our brains?

That “professional” group was the last group I had. Apparently, it’s a time of endings. Because I can’t make myself find new groups to repeat the process with. I’m done. Social media will take a much lower rung on my personal ladder going forward. I’ll be in my own discord group, on Twitter until the wheels come off, and one other platform I haven’t figured out yet. At least I won’t be kicked out of my own group. If you’re interested in writing, reading, editing, art, stories, mental health, autism, ADHD, or are simply another lonely ND person, my group is safe space for NDs, feel free to check it out. As I write, it’s small and not very active because it’s new, but I hope it will become more over time. https://discord.gg/cqF4zKSCwK

Over the past 2 years I’ve thought I’d found welcome… or at least mildly concussed acceptance in 3 groups. They’re all gone now. I left one voluntarily when the mods proved to be disgustingly ableist. One imploded thanks to the behavior of one of those mods and someone who acted about as unprofessional as you can get. And this last one where I was unceremoniously ejected because an ableist twatwaffle complained about the way I talk/type. Or more than one, who knows. I certainly don’t.

Please be kind to people different from you.

If you ever have a problem with someone you know is ND, put on your grownup pants and communicate the problem. I guarantee most of us are appalled when we miss a social cue. And we will miss them. Usually, our brains are literally not wired to pick up on social context well. It’s the most affected portion for me on my diagnosis papers. Social skills/awareness ranked pretty close to zero for me.

No wonder I’ve always preferred dead people to live ones. (Forensic bioanthropologist, not serial killer.) Dead people haven’t ever hurt me. I can’t say the same about living ones.

Allistics love to accuse autistics of ‘not using our words’. But from where I sit… it’s incredibly obvious that the autistics/ADHDers/mentally ill aren’t the problem here. Allistics need to communicate better.

It’s also ableism. Pure and simple. And ableism kills people. How? Most autistic people die around age 36. The leading causes of death are heart attack from the stress of living in an ableist world, and suicide, because we never fit in. No matter how hard we try.

If you enjoy my writing, we’re a family of 4 immunocompromised/autistic/ADHD folks, two are kids, any tips/help is deeply appreciated. We live far under the poverty line.

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Shootings and Mental Illness.

On May 24, 2022May 25, 2022 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?

Content warning: May 2022 Texas School Shooting

I need to state something unequivocally. Mental illness does not cause mass shootings. Period. Paragraph. End of story.

To say anything else, to imply anything else, to draw any sort of connection between the two is ableist and massively harmful.

Mental Health is a constantly evolving, improving field. Like anything else, you can find things on the internet that will say it does cause them. I will direct you first to the date of the article. Anything pre-2018 will likely have a bad case of confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values.

The Massacre at Columbine in 1999 was poorly reported and based on the panicked reports of children being attacked. It affected many people in North America.

Unfortunately, that cemented some nasty (untrue) things in the public’s mind. Things like ‘outcasts get revenge’ and ‘bullied kids become mentally ill and snap’.

Neither is true. I’m not going to revisit the wheel, but likely, everything you ‘know’ about how mental illness is, of course, related to violence is at least in part, based on that attack. Here’s the debunk. https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/04/19/bullies-black-trench-coats-columbine-shootings-most-dangerous-myths/

Older articles from usually reliable sources will likely be severely flawed, at best. It’s easy to blame Mental Illness and to demonize mentally ill people, so that is what society has done. It’s what medicine has done. We aren’t that far, historically, from women being institutionalized for ‘hysteria’ after all.

Luckily, mental health care is improving, and bias is fading at a glacial rate. Newer studies have proven that the motivations for mass shootings do not have high correlation to most forms of what we term ‘mental illness.’

This article is 50 pages, on the surface, if you just skim it, it appears to support the idea that there’s a huge correlation between mental illness and violence. However, if you actually read it, you’ll find it’s saying the opposite. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4318286/

“surprisingly little population-level evidence supports the notion that individuals diagnosed with mental illness are more likely than anyone else to commit gun crimes. According to Appelbaum,25 less than 3% to 5% of US crimes involve people with mental illness, and the percentages of crimes that involve guns are lower than the national average for persons not diagnosed with mental illness. Databases that track gun homicides, such as the National Center for Health Statistics, similarly show that fewer than 5% of the 120 000 gun-related killings in the United States between 2001 and 2010 were perpetrated by people diagnosed with mental illness.26“

In short, people diagnosed with mental illness are much less likely than an average person to commit any sort of violence.

Perhaps some definitions are in order. When we say something as imprecise as ‘mental illness’ we’re basically tossing the entire junk drawer of human brain issues into a basket, jumbling it around, then blaming it for everything under the sun.

You can read further about the types of disorders and conditions that fall into that basket in layman’s terms here. https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/mental-health-types-illness#1

I’ll detail a few that are usually the ones people have in mind when they blame mentally ill people for (insert whatever someone wants to blame us with).

Psychotic disorders: Psychotic disorders involve distorted awareness and thinking. Two of the most common symptoms of psychotic disorders are hallucinations — the experience of images or sounds that are not real, such as hearing voices — and delusions, which are false fixed beliefs that the ill person accepts as true, despite evidence to the contrary. Schizophrenia is an example of a psychotic disorder.

Personality disorders: People with personality disorders have extreme and inflexible personality traits that are distressing to the person and/or cause problems in work, school, or social relationships. In addition, the person’s patterns of thinking and behavior significantly differ from the expectations of society and are so rigid that they interfere with the person’s normal functioning. Examples include antisocial personality disorder, obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, schizoid personality disorder,and paranoid personality disorder.

The next part is hard for a lot of people. Unless you are a psychologically trained medical professional, you have no business, and no right to be armchair diagnosing anyone with a ‘mental illness’. Least of all a domestic terrorist.

Why? Because you’re very likely to be wrong. And that increases negative bias. It hurts people. What most people believe and think about the vast amount of mental illness is wrong. It’s based on ‘facts’ like ‘what the press reported’ and ‘my crazy granny had that’ and ‘jimmy down the pub told me about’ and ‘I read/saw/heard it in fiction so, of course, it has to be true!’

Just stop. Please.

Misrepresentation of all forms of mental illness is rife, everywhere. What you believe and think about it is extremely likely to be massively, harmfully, flawed. And trust me, your beliefs, examined or unexamined, come through in so much of what you say and write.

I ramble. I know. Back to why I felt motivated to write this.

I was in a group chatting when the Texas shooting came up, and I was going to respond in group. I want to preface the rest with saying that I’m not angry or anything. I rarely actually get angry, it takes a lot.

I’m heartbroken.

Because I felt on the verge of meltdown, I decided to turn my thoughts into a blog post so it can be useful for others wishing to learn. And hopefully, no one will feel the need to either argue with me about my accurate information or accuse me of … whatever people who reject autistics from groups think we’re doing. (I don’t actually know what that is, if I did, I’d try to stop doing it.)

In case you don’t know me, I’m Kai. I’m an autistic, ADHD, mentally ill, disabled creator and disability advocate. I’m also a damned good writer and a great editor. I’m a life partner, a parent, a loyal friend, a traumatized and healing person, an irreverent shit, and an over educated pain in the ass. My degrees are in research oriented fields. I know how to do proper research, and how to do it well.

I’m out about some of my mental illnesses. Some I’m not because I get enough harassment just being out about being queer, autistic/adhd, and mentally ill. I’m diagnosed with chronic severe depression, high anxiety, generalized anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, C-PTSD, and bats in the belfry.

I’ve spent most of my 45 years trying to, somehow, be less autistic, less ADHD. This is impossible because my brain wiring is so different from an allistics. All I’ve ever hoped for was acceptance. It’s a basic human need, social acceptance. To date, there are 3 people I’m not related to who know most of my messy self and still love me, regardless.

I mask instead, since I can’t change my wiring. (Masking, in this usage, means having a socially acceptable persona that we pretend to be to get along in life.) I started intentionally masking my autistic traits when I was 9. So I could have friends who didn’t decide to hate me because they don’t understand me. So I could just… exist.

Masking kills autistic people, did you know that? The average age an autistic person dies is 36 years of age.

The suicide watch for parents of autistic and ADHD kids starts at 9 years old.

What do I mean by that? Wise parents start watching their autistic and ADHD kids closely for severe mental illness and suicidal attempts at the age of 9. (Technically, 9 for boys & AMABS, 11 for girls & AFABS.)

Why do we have to do that? I’ll spare you the terrifying statistics on suicide in autistic, ADHD, mentally ill, and people with other forms of neurodivergence. Mostly because I don’t want to look at them again, myself. I have young kids. You’d better believe I watch them.

That’s the point of my work. That’s why, even when I don’t want to stir the shit or when I just don’t want to talk about it… I do anyway.

Bias against neurodivergent people kills us. Mental illness is a form of neurodivergence. Autism and ADHD are too. Bias claiming autistic or mentally ill people are violent is factually untrue and it is killing us.

36 years old. That’s when most of us die. I’m past my expiration date by 9 years and goddess… it feels it. Every day grinds me down further. And that’s why I do the advocacy work I do.

It’s far, far too late for me. The world has broken me into the tiny shards of a kintsugi project, and I don’t have gold to glue myself back together. But I have children. If my advocacy work can make the world see what it’s doing to people like me, if I can help people understand… maybe the world will be kinder to future generations of autistic, ADHD, mentally ill, and otherwise neurodivergent people. My kids included.

I’m still working on taking off the mask. I still mask far more than I intend to. And I still, always, get into trouble when I slip into autistic speech patterns.

Autistic folk often get… emphatic, I guess, when we talk about things that matter to us. People can feel overwhelmed when we get going either because we’re excited or we care about the topic. Because… well, it can be a lot, I guess.

Most of us mask everywhere, which does end up killing us; as most forms of ableism tend to kill someone.

Since we mask, we only end up overwhelming people when we slip into what I call autistic mode. I caught myself before I managed to do it today in group.

I’m not always aware enough to catch myself before I slip. Especially, if I’m excited and enjoying a topic, and think people are also geeking out with me (instead of being overwhelmed). It’s really easy for my socially inept brain to not notice that people want me to shut up… on those occasions, I pay for it. (The fact I shouldn’t have to completely hide myself in order to have some semblance of a social life, because people don’t understand autism & adhd is a whole ‘nother blog post.)

I’m obviously not excited about the shooting in Texas, but the related topic I brought up is one that’s both intensely, personally painful and the focus of much of my advocacy work.

I was afraid that talking in group would result in another experience of ‘Kai slipped into autistic, had social doors slammed in xyr face, melted down, and had to leave the group.’

I’m rather tired of that happening, and I’m still deeply grieving the last group where a person or people made it obvious I wasn’t welcome because I can’t change that I’m autistic/ADHD.

When I’m upset, I can’t talk or respond to more than one person at once, if that. It’s a recipe for a meltdown. Hence, the manuscript/blog post.

I’m not looking for argument, debate, apologies or discussion. This isn’t an easy topic for me. I also wouldn’t be able to meet my gaze in the mirror if I didn’t say something. So.

I’ve been bullied and attacked and driven out of groups I really liked because people rarely stop to ask the intent behind an autistic’s words.

So… I just want to clarify; my only intent here is to educate. This is part of what I do in my advocacy work. It’s also incredibly painful for me, so as soon as I post this I’m getting off the net for a while. I don’t have the wherewithal to discuss this as if it’s not incredibly, personally painful, because it is.

The most recent shooting, today in Texas, is another horrific event and I’m beyond nauseated.

The very first thing many people do when another of these awful occurances happens is look around for a reason. It’s average human behavior. Because of decades of misrepresentation in media of mental illness and autism, (including by writers, which is why accuracy in any kind of representation is so important) the very first culprit people often think of is ‘it had to be someone mentally ill’ or ‘the shooter was obviously autistic or had autistic traits’.

This is almost universally untrue, because both populations are, by far, more likely to be the victim of violent crime than the perpetrator. There are plenty of studies out there about it. If you really want to read them.

Psychologically, it’s natural for humans to want there to be a reason. It’s even natural that we want the reason to be something that makes the perpetrator ‘not like me’. Few people want to believe themselves capable of buying a weapon, walking the halls of an elementary school, and then… I can’t even make myself type it. It’s so beyond horrifying.

That desire, that need, for us to believe we couldn’t do something like that, that ‘good people like me’ (tribalism) couldn’t do that… It makes mentally ill & autistic people easy targets. In the next few days, watch the news, you’ll likely see it.

The reason really does boil down to evil. The definition of evil is ‘profoundly immoral and wicked’.

There have been plenty of papers written on who a domestic terrorist is likely to be. (A cis white male without a history of mental illness or autistic traits between the ages of 16 to 30 is most likely. A cis white male without a history of mental illness or autistic traits between the ages of 45 and 60 is the second. Third is a cis male without a history of mental illness or autistic traits.) Yes, there are studies confirming this.

There are several things that play into this. Toxic masculinity is one. Radicalization is another. White nationalism, forced birthing, the list goes on and on. We want the answer and the culprit to be easy.

Unfortunately, it isn’t. That desire for an easy excuse harms people like me. It. Kills. Kids.

And it is not okay.

If anyone wants to read studies on this, the information is out there.

Mental illness has very little, if anything, to do with radicalization. To say it does is discrimination, and it’s ableist. There’s no proof. None. There’s a lot of information out there about how radicalization happens, too.

Calling for better mental health care when another terrorist shooter attacks may be well meant. We definitely need it, and I’m 100% for better mental health care everywhere. It would help so many people and massively improve society. I’ve always said everyone can use therapy.

And the connotations of shooter = we need better mental health care is painfully obvious.

Mentally ill people are not the ones doing this. While we absolutely need better mental health care, the people guilty of these atrocities aren’t the kinds who would use it.

Radicalized people often think they’re doing the right thing. Many of these acts have been racially motivated. And if the reasons are traced back, it often equals the ‘not enough white babies’ BS. Other motivations have been domestic violence and religious intolerance. None of these are mental illnesses.

It’s easy to say better mental health care would help. It would help a lot of things! Shooters would be in the vast minority. There’s plenty of studies that’ve been done on this topic, too.

The one thing I’d ask people to remember is this. Stop and think before you say anything.

Is your information on what you feel the fix is accurate? Is it fair? Does it unnecessarily demonize innocent people who don’t need more pain while they just try to survive? While we try to survive in a world that hates our very existence at worst, and barely tolerates it at best?

Every time another terrorist strikes. Every time. Someone trots out the ‘autistics did it’ or the ‘mentally ill people did it’ and that gets incredibly old, very painful, and exhausting faster than most average people can imagine.

It’s already a minefield, trying to just exist as either an autistic or mentally ill person in this world.

There isn’t a day that goes by that someone like me isn’t harmed by misperceptions or casual off-hand comments or someone harming us in another way.

Do you really need to add to it by either overtly or by connotation accusing autistic or mentally ill people of something so heinous it makes this mentally ill, autistic, ADHD person utterly nauseated? It will sicken most people like me. Autistics particularly usually have a hard wired need to help others.

So it’s particularly cruel to accuse an innocent population of people hard wired to help… with choosing to harm.

The solution to domestic terrorism isn’t in blaming it on people more likely to be the victim of violence than the perpetrator. Studies overwhelmingly support the statistics that autistic, ADHD, mentally ill, and other forms of neurodivergent people are far more likely to be the victims of violence than the perpetrators.

But that’s not what people believe. And it’s certainly not what they say. It will take a multi-faceted approach to solve the problem. Because the problem is so multi-faceted.

Step one has to be acknowledging where the problem actually is.

It’s not with people like me.

If you got this far, thanks for reading.

If you have the wherewithal, I’m a disabled creative and my family lives in extreme poverty. My work of words is my only income.

If I made you think, even for a moment, please consider a tip.

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Response to J. K. Rowling on being an autistic ‘girl’ and her hatefulness.

On June 11, 2020June 12, 2020 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?, Writing

Content Warning: J. K. Rowling, language, genetics, definitions of terms regarding trans issues, transphobia, TERF, TERF rhetoric, domestic violence, mention of rape, facts and figures about suicide, mention of suicide, suicide, hate speech on her part, screenshots of her Twitter account, menstruation, body parts, name-calling on my part

If you need this in black and white without coloured text, click here.

There are spoilers in this for her work. There may be tangents. (You kidding? It’s me, of course there are gonna be tangents.) I got emotional and slung names, I know I shouldn’t have, but omg, I feel revoltingly soiled after reading what that TERF said.

Rowling hasn’t ever been anything except, ‘oh that person who wrote those potter books?’ to me. The books didn’t hit big until I was in mid to late university, I was heavily into cosplay and hanging with my friends when I wasn’t working on human skeletons/cadavers as part of my degree work, so I just… didn’t really notice them. I had my favorite authors that I read, and she just wasn’t one of them.

I decided to read that blog post because I can. It won’t hurt me as badly as it might others in my shoes simply for the fact that Rowling was and is nothing to me. I can give my educated opinion based on both what she says and how she says it, as well as do some research into her claims.

I don’t have a horse in the race as far as my emotions about her worlds/characters go, so I’m choosing to read this and give the gist of the important bits to my readers, so they don’t have to read what I’ve been told is utter hatred.

After reading it, I can state, unequivocally, based on her words and basic google searches that she is pushing forward an agenda of hatred. She uses nothing but TERF rhetoric and ‘oh pity me’ tactics. She is dangerous, hateful, harmful, and just a downright awful human being. I hate to even share a species with someone so hateful.

I’m so, so sorry for her fans, people who really loved her world and work. I hope you can separate the work from the creator and keep some of the joy her worlds and characters gave you. She may have created it, but without you, her fans, it wouldn’t have life. YOU breathed life into her characters and worlds, and if you want to (and can) keep that, I think you should.

So. Who am I?

You can call me Kae. I have a habit of fact-checking authors on things they claim. If you’re in autism circles at all, you may recognize my name from me tearing apart TO SIRI WITH LOVE and AUTISM UNCENSORED. I’ve written for both BUSTLE and The NY OBSERVER. I’m a published author, a reviewer and I make my living as a freelance fiction editor. I’m a parent, a life partner, and a bit of a loudmouth about social justice.

I’m speaking as an autistic disabled activist, a bio-anthropologist/forensic scientist, and as a trans person. I’m trans-non-binary, I’m neither man nor woman, I’m both and neither depending on the day. My thoughts and feelings are mine. My words are based on my understanding of these concepts. I am autistic, there’s no hidden meaning behind my words, I’ve used the words I actually mean. Any twisting of them is on you, not me. Twisting words is an allistic thing. If I fuck up, please let me know as I’m truly not trying to. Email is best, as I don’t have comments on my website and no contact forms thanks to massive harassment. Kaelan.Rhywiol@gmail.com

Structure: I’ve used coloured text to highlight definitions that might be triggering, things I felt needed extra oomph, as well as her actual words. If you’re trans, I highly recommend you just read my words and avoid hers, which are in Burnt Orange. I didn’t have a horse in the race and her words still hurt me.

As far as the definitions and concepts, I’ve posted common definitions and clarification of a couple of concepts for people unfamiliar with terms used in anthropology, biology, and yes, by trans people and our allies. It’s also HERE in case you want to have it up in a different window while you read. If you’ve rarely run into these terms and concepts they can be hella confusing.

These are the definitions and concepts I have learned from others in the trans community and from advanced science classes in university. (As with all communities, there will be some who agree with me, and some who won’t. Neither autistic people nor trans people are a monolith.)

If you’re at all confused about the extreme difference between sex and gender, I suggest you read the definitions.

AGAB – Assigned Gender At Birth

AFAB – Assigned Female At Birth

AMAB – Assigned Male At Birth

Cis – you feel like your AGAB

Trans – you do not feel like your AGAB

TERF – An acronym for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist: A social movement focused on excluding trans people from society. They use many methods to gull people onto their side of things with the sole purpose of eradicating any acceptance for trans people in the world.

GENDER – A socio-cultural construct often based on perceived external biological differences but also on social roles within a society, activities, and on unspoken codes and rules: IE Nail polish is only for girls, only boys wear blue (Both of which are patently untrue, men were the first to wear earrings, nail polish, and makeup, high heels, and corsets even, in renaissance Europe. It goes much further back in other cultures. It wasn’t until much later that men let women dress up in all the fancy stuff.)

A June 1918 article from the trade publication Earnshaw’s Infants’ Department said, “The generally accepted rule is pink for the boys, and blue for the girls. The reason is that pink, being a more decided and stronger color, is more suitable for the boy, while blue, which is more delicate and dainty, is prettier for the girl.” Source: Smithsonian

Words like woman, man, girl, boy, et cetera refer to gender. They have nothing to do with genetic sex, perceived biological sex, or what functions our body displays. Our genetic sex and the things our bodies do aren’t relevant to our gender. These are two separate and distinct concepts. Anthropologists and other scientists know this. It’s fact. As many people have said, Our Parts Don’t Determine Our Gender.

SEX – genetic sex on the chromosomal level. Whether someone is xy, xx, xxy, xxxx, xyy etc. and how that affects what our bodies can/can’t do. A person can look and feel like a cis male and be xxy. A person can also be a “woman” to everyone’s perception and be xyy. (Not even sex is binary, sorry nonscientists, it just isn’t, 7th-grade biology lied to you. Shocking, I know.) This is the only way in which ‘sex’ matters to anyone, and the only one it matters to is the person who is carrying those genetics, their medical team, and if they have them, their partners. For further reading on this subject here are a couple of twitter threads that make it easy to understand.

So. Hi new people! Apparently, we're gonna talk about sex. Like physical sex! Because… there's some confusion.

First, sex defined: We're talking physical sex here, not gender. Body parts, hormones, and genetics (and more).

BLUF: BIOLOGICAL sex is a spectrum

1/

— ScienceVet (@ScienceVet2) August 30, 2018

This tweet went viral over the weekend, and I got a flood of questions about sex, gender, and genetics. I wanted to wait until after Christmas to delve into addressing them. So let’s go.https://t.co/IRZwLwc8X8

— Jacob A Tennessen (@JacobPhD) December 26, 2017

GENDER IDENTITY – What one feels inside, their own internal perception of their gender. MANY cultures from all over the world throughout recorded time have always known there’s a distinct difference between gender and perceived biological sex. Scientists in pretty much all fields know it today. It’s only in modern society that people like Rowling have their heads up their rectums about it.

PERCEIVED BIOLOGICAL SEX – What someone looks like to someone else. This is fraught territory because there are butch cis women who look masculine and there are femme looking cis men. The point being, of course, that you cannot tell what someones’ gender or genetic sex is by looking at them. It’s actually impossible.

Utterly impossible, you’d need a compound microscope to see genetic sex/chromosomal sex and I haven’t seen many of those in girls’ bathrooms or boys for that matter. As far as seeing into someone to try to figure out what their gender is? I don’t think we’ve developed telepathy and thought sensing yet, have we? So why don’t we just do the radical thing of believing people are who they say they are with regards to gender? Hmm? Peachy.

I’m a disabled activist. I’m autistic. I’m also trans non-binary, my pronouns are xie/xem/xyr.

Not that many people use them, given what I look like. I doubt I’ll ever be as androgynous as I want to be. I present as (look like) a woman, I’m not one. ‘She/her’ has ALWAYS felt like an itchy, too tight sweater, one that’s likely to cause hives. I loathed being forced to wear dresses, skirts, make-up, and ‘girly shit’ (I had some misogyny to work out) but the only reason I felt that it was ‘girly shit’ is because it was constantly being shoved down my throat. Every time I heard she/her or what is definitely a feminine first (legal/dead, don’t use it even if you know it) name. I cringed. Always.

I remember asking my mom, when I was 4, when I’d get my penis because I was sick of waiting for it. She laughed her ass off, mocked me and I never asked again. It took me until I was 39 to really understand who I am because I didn’t have the language to label it. Now I do. I had to do a lot of internal work to beat back internalized misogyny, massive feminine social indoctrination, trans discomfort, and a whole load of other crap that really isn’t relevant to this post.

Suffice it to say it took me a while to both understand and accept who I am. I’m proud of the work I’ve done to help my true me come out from under the decades of abuse I’ve experienced. My autism played a part in that, but it’s not the part J. K. Rowling wants you to believe. See, the way she talks about it in her post, we poor little autistic girls can’t possibly be trusted to understand our own genders. We need to be protected!

AS an autistic ‘girl’ and the mom of another one, all I have to say about that is if you’ve never tried to make an autistic do anything, you have no idea how very stubborn we can be. We get enough hate, just by being autistic, we’re not likely to add on the trans unless we’re dead sure we are.

Autistics, in general, tend to question everything, so, um, no, Joanne, we don’t need you to protect us poor innocent autistic girls. Fuck. Off. You do not have permission to use my and my daughter’s neurotype as a screen for your bigoted hatred.

I’m AFAB, (Assigned Female At Birth). Some boneheaded doctor looked at my crotch when I was born and told everyone I was a girl. Science knows that even perceived biological sex isn’t a binary. Trust me. I’m not a girl and never was. I’ve always been gender-fluid non-binary. I’m neither or both man and woman. Some days, because I’m fluid, I’m more femme, most days, I’m neither or I’m masc, as I’m definitely masc leaning.

So when it came to light yesterday that J.K. Rowling has once again doubled down on her awfulness against trans people, I tried to ignore it. It’s the same old song and dance from that old culturally appropriating has-been.

She’s stirred up trouble for trans and queer folks for YEARS, the queer community has known about it forever, she retroactively assigned Dumbledore as gay AFTER she wrote the books. Now… if that isn’t reaching for stuff that isn’t hers? I don’t know what is.

It’s not gay if it’s not on the page babe, and honestly, there are queer authors out here who can write it WAY better than you can retcon it. Me included. BUT now she’s getting worldwide attention for being awful to trans people. Katelyn Burns broke down Rowling’s history of transphobia for Vox last year.

So what does she do? The glory hound doubles down and hurts more people with a blog post. Including me. I don’t like her books or her worlds and I never have. I feel they glorify child abuse in an extremely disturbing way. I mean, they KILLED a scared and abused kid at the end of Fantastic Beasts, then went out for tea and it was all done with.

Like, WHAT? How is that… and this is OKAY with people? (And frankly, as an editor, I have no idea how those books got published, they’re extremely poorly written just from a technical standpoint. J.K. Rowling and E.L. James. Two rich and famous authors who can’t write worth beans.)

I’m not generally involved in trans activism for personal reasons.

I am, however, EXTREMELY involved in autistic and disabled activism. So when I heard that freaking glory hound had tried to use autistic girls as a shield for her awful beliefs and words… I knew I had to make myself read that blog post that everyone is talking about.

People don’t think autistic girls exist, did you know that? We’re unicorns. We’re gods damned myths. Except that I’m sitting here with a diagnosis of ASD, (among other things), a vagina/boobs drinking tea, and writing a blog post I don’t really want to write.

I’d rather be playing Animal Crossing.

But no. J. K. Rowling. You do NOT get to use my existence as a way to hurt trans people. There is a HIGH amount of crossover between queer and autistic communities. While I may not have spoken up about trans issues (trans, not trans activist) I absolutely will about autistic ones.

You done fucked up. Bitch.

Dear gods I don’t want to read this.

A note on structure as a reminder: I’ve put Rowling’s actual inflammatory words in BURNT ORANGE. Please don’t read those if you’re trans. You don’t need to see that. I’ve broken down what she said so people can know without having to swim through her sewage.

The blog post, if anyone wants to pollute their eyeballs with it is here. I definitely don’t recommend reading it, it’s really, incredibly painful to read. Go clean your bathroom with your tongue, it’ll be more productive and you’ll honestly probably feel better than if you read that trash. If you do read it, and it sounds logical and reasonable, then you are part of the problem. Please, please educate yourself.

Anyway:

She writes at first that she’s read lots and lots about trans issues. (I guarantee she hasn’t. If she has at all, they’re outdated, falsified, TERF leaning rhetoric.)

She goes on to say:

“On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.”

Firstly, that’s a lie. There’s been plenty of tweet threads and people proving that she’s got a long history of ‘absent-mindedly’ liking inflammatory tweets. It’s even been referred to by her publicist that it was a ‘middle-age moment’.

I’m middle-aged. I do not ‘like’ things on social media that aren’t anything I actually support. Whether we enjoy it or not, as public figures (authors are) we need to be careful what we like and retweet because a like or retweet or share from us DOES count as supporting it.

Hey, Joanne, guess what you had to do? All you had to do was say, oops, my bad. And no one would’ve said a thing to you.

Aren’t we all, in western society at least, taught that we should say we’re sorry when we fuck up? She didn’t say she was sorry. Instead, she doubled down.

She talks about willfully supporting Maya Forstater, the woman who even an Employment Court of Britain basically labeled a TERF.

Great choice in icons there, Joanne. She talks about knowing that people would hate her for supporting Forstater. Uh, yeah, J.K. people don’t like TERFs much. Shocker, huh? We don’t like Nazis either.

She whines more about the ‘social media abuse’ for fuck’s sake, this reads like a ‘poor little me, the evil trans people are out to get me’ gags.

She talks about supporting Magdalen Burns. Another known TERF. Just a lesbian one.

“to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, “

Have you ever been hated? I mean, truly hated for something you can’t help? I have. I am. It sucks, a lot actually. And yes. It can ACTUALLY kill. (See what I mean? She can’t write.)

“What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive.”

(She needs a comma in front of that last and)

Yep. J.K. There are tons of TERFs just like you. Don’t you find that sooooo comforting? asshole. No. Suppurating, hemorrhoidal asshole.

“They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights.”

(comma before the first and)

So, you… a beloved children’s author with MANY queer young people who adore you, decide to side with the TERFs. Having trouble on understanding the logic there J.K., if all you want to do is protect people.

Billionaire white woman plays the ‘oh my mental health’ card. Holy cow. Sucking hard on the social teat there, aren’t you J.K? (You can be rich and mentally ill, and rich people have more resources to get treatment.)

I’m not mocking mentally ill people. I’m mentally ill. I’m mocking the incredibly common and likely habit of white women, when called on their shit, to whine about some aspect of their mental health. Usually anxiety, cause these days, the ‘pretty’ mental illnesses are anxiety and depression.

Oh, yeah, right, she says she only returned to twitter to share a free children’s book during the pandemic.

Let’s see. She’s quite active on May 25th, and I don’t know if that’s a joke, but dang, threatening to steal people’s pets? Great look J.K. Fantastic. Peachy.

So classy, professional even. (My eyes roll any harder I’m gonna have to get up, fetch them from wherever they land when they fall out of my head, dust the damned things off and figure out how to reattach them.)

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Above: Screenshot of J.K. Rowling’s account, showing her posting and threatening to steal dogs because no one told J.K. Rowling (fucking egotist) she couldn’t on May 25th, 2020 (I *think* it’s meant to be a joke, but I don’t think ‘jokes’ about how you’re above the law are funny.)

And here she is posting in April, she posted frequently enough that Twitter found quite a bit.

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Above: Screenshot of J.K. Rowling’s account showing her posting in April

March:

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She does seem to have been absent for February. Probably licking her pride from having people tell her she’s wrong about trans folks. Sex, biological sex, is not binary. Scientists know this. Egotist billionaire children’s writer’s who shit on their fans do not. I mean, you should see the love people send her way, and she STILL wants more attention? Disgusting.

Hell, I’d be happy to have even a small percentage of that love for me and my books. :/

Instead, she goes and beats on the trans community again when her free children’s book didn’t get enough attention to suit her.

SO. My little data-mining project into her Twitter account (I really need a shower now) proves that not only is she a TERF, she’s a fucking liar too. Great role model for kids. Fantastic.

Back to that awful blog post. I need wine.

“Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.”

Nooo, Ms. Egotist. Activists didn’t swarm back into your tweets until YOU attacked TRANS PEOPLE with this awful tweet.

2020-06-11

Screenshot of the tweet that started all of this crap up again. It’s a retweet of an opinion column: Opinion: Creating a more equal post-COVID-19 World for people who menstruate.

Rowling’s words: “People who menstruate.” I’m sure there used to be a word for those people. Someone help me out. Wumben? Wimpund? Woomud?”

She’s not only starting it all up again with that tweet, she’s WILLFULLY attacking anyone who, in her view, isn’t a woman.

Which, like, look in the mirror lady, you were born in 1965, unless you’ve discovered what the rest of us haven’t, at 54, you probably don’t menstruate either. It’s called menopause. Pretty sure you probably know what that is by now.

And I’ve just done a data dive into her account, (shudders) so no, there weren’t any activists in her replies/mentions that I saw, not for months after she popped back in early March like a bad case of head lice you just can’t get rid of. Prior to that tweet, she had the usual outpouring of love from kids and their parents who loved her free book. Lots of illustrations from those kids, her responses to them (which were kind, she was kind to kids, I’ll give her that, just not trans kids. No, no kindness for kids like I used to be.)

Then she goes on to bitch about the term TERF and mislabels its source.

“If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists.”

It was actually coined by Trans-inclusive cisgender radical feminist blogger Viv Smythe who popularized the term in 2008 as an online shorthand. (Wikipedia)

(Difference is that Smythe is a trans-inclusive blogger, not an activist. Smythe isn’t to my knowledge in that circle.)

Rowling is also incredibly wrong that there are ‘many people labeled TERFS who, waaaah, don’t deserve it’. No, Joanne, honey, you have to earn that title with your behavior. Which you most definitely have. Even if none of the rest of it were true, that ONE tweet, the one mocking people who menstruate, makes you a TERF.

Trans-Exclusionary means you exclude trans people from anything, really. Just like you, Joanne, are excluding trans women from womens’ rights, womens’ spaces, womens’ conversations, and womens’ lives.

Trans women are women. Period. Even science backs that up. A transitioning trans woman’s bones, skin, hair, body all become incredibly similar to a cis woman’s. A trans woman’s brain is more like a cis woman’s than a cis man’s EVEN BEFORE TRANSITIONING. Scientific fact. Same goes for trans men.

Woman is a GENDER IDENTITY DEFINITION. It has nothing to do with body parts and whether or not you bleed from them. Frankly, I know a couple penis owning people who menstruate, and they were born with those things, so like… what are they? Aliens?

“Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).”

I mean, does she know for a fact she’s a ‘biological’ female? She’s had a chromosomal assay done? Wow. Interesting, she’s more committed to her TERFuckery than I thought. And she’s misused ‘literally’ again. Sigh.

Really, REALLY can’t write.

There’s also no such thing as a biological woman. That’s mixing up the definitions of two very different concepts. People may PERCEIVE her as a woman, she may perceive herself as one, which makes her Cis. Also an asshole, but a cis asshole.

Gah, I’m tired of this blog post already and I haven’t even gotten to the ‘using autistics’ part. We’re still in the ‘shitting on trans people’ part.

“So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?”

She says she’s doing it because someone has to defend the poor innocent children.

No, Joanne, you’re ‘speaking up’ with your bad facts and baseless accusations and your bloody lies because you’re a damned egotistical jerk who isn’t getting enough of the attention you feel is your due. And pardon me, but no, I don’t think you’re capable of research, not after appropriating Indigenous culture for your books (AND NEVER APOLOGIZING) and this bullshit about trans gender people.

Why do I feel that way? Because I’m an ACTUAL scientific researcher. My degrees are in Bioanthropology, Forensic Chemistry, World History, and Education. Trust me, in all that, I learned how to do research and to do it well.

All Joanne here has got is her bad attitude, her prejudice about what makes a woman ‘a woman’, and way, way too much ego.

“Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.”

(Sigh, roles eyes, trans activism isn’t new, she’s just not used to being called on her shit.)

“Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.”

Trans women’s brains are much more like a cis woman’s brains than a cis man’s. Oh, and there are sooooo many trans people who are the victims of domestic abuse, in prison, and are victims of sexual assault. If you knew anything about MS, you’d actually listen to the Doctors who would tell you that trans women are valid. Next bad point?

“The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.”

I’m an ex-teacher too. The only thing hurting trans kids is not being believed, not being able to express their true gender, and later, not having transition care if they need it. It’s foolish to think anyone would or even could ‘make’ a kid trans, or transition. We’re born the way we are.

All of us trans folks, but especially adolescents, already have incredibly high suicide rates, her bullshit is NOT helping.

Joanne my dear, just because you won the author lottery in a big way (we all know it’s not a meritocracy, or you definitely wouldn’t be where you are) doesn’t mean you are the be-all and end-all of things you obviously don’t understand. Just because you have money and can fund a charity… no, just no. You’re utterly HORRIBLE.

My heart bleeds for all those trans kids out there, the ones who thought maybe Harry Potter and Hogwarts had room for them, only to find out that not only does Hogwarts not have room, the author’s heart doesn’t either.

I highly recommend turning to fanfiction. There’s so much wonderful fanfic out there based in her world that you can find exactly what you need without having anything to do with her. There are also a lot of trans authors out here, we write worlds where you are welcome, wanted, and loved. Where you’ll find people similar to you having adventures and joys and happily ever afters. You’ll need to search indie and self-publishing for us because mainstream publishing hates us as much as Joanne does.

“The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.”

You and Trump do make a pair don’t you? Both sharing scientifically disproven bullshit under the guise of caring for someone else when all you want is attention and controversy.

**Shame on you, Joanne Kathleen Rowling. Shame. On. You. During the biggest Black Lives Matters worldwide revolution ever, you do this. You’re disgusting.**

And again, that’s not hurt talking, I never liked her books, Hogwarts wasn’t ever this special fun place for me, I was in Uni when the books became big, so they just missed me completely. I didn’t lose anything by her being awful.

I feel so horrible for those who did. I’m so sorry my luvs, you’re VALID and her bullshit is exactly that. A steaming stream of grass-fed, medicated cow shit (grass-fed, medicated is looser, wetter, stinkier) splattered across a barn floor. Just toss some hay on that and shovel it out the door. At least cow shit has fertilization usages, her shit is just glorifying her own sad, hateful ignorance.

I can’t even imagine myself being that wealthy so it’s not jealousy either. I mean, hell, she wants to support trans people she can, I’ll happily give her my Paypal address. In the blink of an eye and the click of her finger, she could change the lives of so many trans people if she just bothered.

Most of us have paypals, kofis, many of us have GoFundMes to get out of abusive situations or get our surgeries if we need/want them. Trans creators tend to starve, wither into the unknown, while she in her mighty white rich lady ‘knowledge’ is ‘writing a crime series’ so ‘the topic of trans issues is interesting to her’.

Translation, she’s thinking of stealing a trans author’s place at the publishing table by writing a trans book.

But we all know she won’t do that. She won’t help trans people. She hates us.

Freedom of speech exists, yes. It means you get to say whatever you want unless your government forbids it, yes. It also means you get to take the consequences. Which is people like me loathing you. Knowledge that you’re hurting KIDS, as well as your fans. The people who put you where you are. Your Fans.

I’m an author too, and as I detailed in my thread here, I can’t wrap my head around hurting my fans that badly. Without our fans, we writers are nothing more than extremely odd people in torn t-shirts, messy hair, and skivvies, (if we’re feeling fancy) whispering stories to ourselves in dark rooms.

Without your fans? As an author? You’re nothing but a blowhard. And she’s doing her level best to hurt so many of her fans to stroke her outsized damned ego.

“The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”

Gods, did she pull that out of her toilet? I think she did. It’s nothing more than TERF rhetoric. Precious fertility, beautiful femininity cow crap. She talks about transition care as if people are passing around pills like at the rave parties in the ’90s.

No. That’s not how transition care works. You have to go through SO MUCH to even be able to access transition care. Psychotherapy is just part of that, it’s not something you do on a whim, like she’s painted there. The rates of people detransitioning are extremely low, because of the barriers in place to prevent whims like she’s describing. No, the ones who detransition? They’re almost always the ones who have to rely on intolerant family members for support.

Hey, Joanne, if you’re so concerned about those who have to detransition, why don’t you go to GoFundme.com and give some of your unearned wealth to those who really need it. The ones who have no choice but to sacrifice their true selves so that they can feed their bodies?

But no. We know you won’t do that either.

Oh, our fertility… boo hoo. Transition care doesn’t do that.

As if fertility is all that. JFC, everything she says is TERF rhetoric. EVERYTHING. And somehow she thinks people transition BECAUSE of homophobic family members? I mean, does she really have no idea how much more abuse trans folks suffer from that very hatred? Obviously not.

“The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.”

Uh, yeah, there’s A. More people running around earth these days, and B. It’s not quite as unacceptable to be trans as it used to be, so of course, more people are going to be looking for transition care. They just stopped hiding. Duh. Same thing happened when I was a kid and it became less awful to society to be left-handed. (I was taught, violently, to write with my right hand. I’m naturally left-handed.)

As for Autistic girls, unicorns, yeah, there’s HUGE, MASSIVE overlap between queer identities and autism. There’s been a few studies done on it. No, we don’t yet know why, but as an autistic enby, one you’d call a girl, I’ll tell you it’s not because of peer pressure or because I don’t know who I am. I’ve always known who I am. I’ve always been trans. My parents did their level best to turn me into a girl because of my crotch, guess what, I’m not one!

The only confusion I’ve ever suffered about my gender identity? Was thinking I was a girl because I’d been socialized as one. So Fuck Off, Joanne, with that bullshit about autistic girls. You do not have my permission to use people like me and my daughter and so many others as a shield for your TERF actions. Absolutely not.

She mentions in glowing terms a supposed Dr. Lisa Littman who studied ‘growing numbers of youth affected by the echo chambers of social media’. She says the doctor received censure from her colleagues for spreading misinformation.

Now… um, I don’t know about you? But Peer-Reviewed Science is a thing. If that doctor’s peers said she was spreading misinformation and that she needed to be censored? That’s good enough for me and most of the general public. Not TERFs though. Not good enough for the All-Mighty Joanne here. She knows better than all the docs in the US and UK combined! We should really listen to her! Not.

“The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.”

That’s because they do. You jizz-whistler. Here’s an article from the Human Rights Campaign with facts and figures. It’s not pretty, and guess what you flappy twat, you’ve made it worse.

Here’s one showing that puberty blockers (again, transition care is incredibly hard to get, you have to jump through a LOT of hoops to get it, especially for a kid) REDUCE suicide in trans kids.

Preventing suicide in trans people, by the Trevor Project (I’m pretty sure the Trevor project knows more about trans people than Ms. Fantastic TERF here.)

I could keep going, on, and on, and on, and on with the science. It’s not like I looked into my toilet bowl one morning, figured a particular turd looked nice and decided to smear it all across my Twitter feed like Joanne here did. No, I actually look up resources that are recent, usually peer-reviewed, and relevant.

“In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’”

Bullshit. I call bullshit. I bet that guy was MADE to resign because of his bigotry. There have been MANY peer-reviewed, scientific studies on trans people, and transition care. That’s just absolute, utterly foolish, easily disprovable hogwash. A Google search would tell you that!

You see, kids. You can find support for ANY prejudice on the internet. Joanne here found hers in TERF rhetoric, discredited doctors and psychotherapists… and apparently after a bowel movement.

“The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.”

No. No, no, no, no, no you yeasty, white-livered harpy.

Every trans person I ever met, when I was going through my own journey to acceptance, both back as a teen who never fit in ‘her’ skin and as an adult… EVERY ONE supplied information, websites, places to find more information on what it feels like to be trans. This bullshit of hers also completely erases the struggles of non-binary people and trans men!

Trans folks advised caution, to wait and sit with it to make sure it fit.

We don’t go around trying to convince others to join us like some freakish cult. Thanks for that insult you damned soggy noodle. No, I’ll leave that kind of cultish behavior to you and your TERFy friends.

It’s well known in the queer community that Tumblr especially, but also Reddit are blood-chummed feeding grounds for TERFs looking for young queers to radicalize AGAINST trans people. Including young trans people. It’s awful.

It works too, that’s the sad part. And Joanne’s self-aggrandizing chicken scratch doesn’t help that.

EVERYTHING Joanne here has said as ‘proof’? It’s TERF rhetoric. Here, don’t believe me…

How to spot TERF Ideology, from the University of Cambridge, UK.

“…although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria.”

Joanne dear, was it published this century? Did you forget your glasses? You’ve got the numbers backward, darling. Almost exactly backward. 60-90% of trans teens either commit suicide or attempt to commit suicide. They don’t ‘outgrow’ anything, except maybe their asshole parents who didn’t listen to them. If they don’t transition, they tend to do so in adulthood if they can.

Oh, and few of us speak to the parents who denied us who we really are. I certainly don’t.

“Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass.”

Another lie, if anything, it’s harder to access transition care now. To my knowledge, trans kids have the exact same transition schedule, if not LONGER than an adult does.

How many of these am I gonna have to debunk before I get to the autistic part? (Note; I had already passed the autistic part, she was just using us as a shield. Dehumanizing our minds and taking possession of our bodies as a way to make herself look good.)

“We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.”

What a bloody prude. Uh. Nope again. I have a daughter. I see what her life is like. I weigh it against everything I experienced as a kid in the 80s, yes dear, we grew up in the same decade, and no, absolutely no, this generation is far easier on girls than it was on people dubbed ‘girl’ in that time. Just the existence of so much indie porn is a sign that the world is NOT more misogynistic. Female presenting people have more freedom to express themselves in any way they want, including sexually, in this century than ever before.

You’re a fool. Joanne. A dyed in the wool fool. You’ve bought into TERF rhetoric in a big way and you’re too damned egotistical to admit you were wrong and apologize for hurting so many people.

“Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.”

Yeah? Do you forget, Joanne dear? It was followed by a backhand in the ’80s. Maybe a belting with dad’s belt if we didn’t conform. Been there, done that, have the godsdamned scars to prove it. You, you… lying bitch.

“The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion (of womanhood) concerns many others just as much.”

Sure. Sure, Joanne, when someone with your reach starts shitting out TERF rhetoric on your Twitter feed, you’re gonna get a lot of TERFs reaching out to you expressing their ‘concern’.

There are A LOT of TERFs, Joanne. You are ignorant, you’re dangerous, and I wish to gods you’d get kicked off Twitter.

“Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.”

Sighs forever. I’m reasonably good looking Joanne, I look like a woman, I’m not, but that hasn’t stopped the slurs, the catcalls, the sexual assaults, the rapes. Plural Joanne, Plural. Rapes. Sit with that.

I still use gender-inclusive language and you know what? It’s not only ACCURATE (or aren’t you a woman anymore you post-menopausal crab?) It keeps people from KILLING THEMSELVES.

So a bunch of biddies who never got to do anything in their lives because of sexism don’t like the terms. Sorry not sorry? I’d rather have a few people uncomfy with the changing times than see another single trans kid dead.

You weren’t much to me, I knew your name, saw the Potter movies once cause I was bored, tried to read your awful books to my kids (Kids asked me to stop by the way, I was willing to soldier on for them). Then I saw, over time, some red flags of queer hatred.

Turning Dumbledore gay only after the fact? Not even close to cool. I started to not like you much before this most recent painful mockery, Joanne, but now? I hate you. With every fiber of my being. I wish nothing good for you for the rest of your life.

For someone like you to fall into TERF rhetoric, and then to not only just… quietly believe it… (not good, but sure, you want to believe that shite and keep it to yourself? Whatever. Not on me) but to publicly, as a beloved children’s author, as a Queen’s Companion of Honour, as a billionaire, as a celebrity… my gods, just… my gods. You have no idea of the harm you’ve done and continue to do. The Peter Parker principle applies, with great power comes great responsibility. J.K. Rowling has not only abandoned that responsibility, she’s used her might to support and push forward the beliefs of an awful edge group of so-called feminists who wouldn’t know feminism if it bit them. She’s used her power to HURT.

Realistically, TERFs are quite good at making people believe them, at making all these so-called talking points of yours sound reasonable. They’re not reasonable. It’s hatred, Joanne. You’re spewing hatred on all your fans. Trans and Cis alike. My gods. You’re utterly revolting.

I have no idea how many deaths among the trans community you’ve caused with this egotistical braying, but I guarantee you there have been some. Their blood is on your soul. Pay for it forever through time as far as I’m concerned.

Onwards. I really wish I could drink wine right now. REALLY, REALLY wish I could. This is fucking painful.

This is her last “reason”

“I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.”

So what? What the honest rotating hell does your abuse have to do with you shitting on trans people and causing so much harm?

I was abused too, Joanne. I was beaten, I was sexually assaulted, I was raped as both a child and an adult. I was emotionally abused, gaslighted, harmed in just about every way a human can be harmed, and still fucking survive.

When I tell people, or when I used to tell people because I don’t anymore, about my past, about the things that happened to me… they ALL, Universally, get this look of abject horror on their faces… then they whisper, ‘how, how… are you even alive?’

I earned my unfortunate chops as far as abuse goes and no. It has nothing to do with trans people. It has nothing to do with me being trans. It has nothing to do with your hate. These are entirely separate issues that you are conflating to muddy the waters of your harmful beliefs.

I lived in domestic violence from the time I was born to the time I got away from my parents. YEARS. DECADES of abuse.

Your abuse is irrelevant to your hatred of and abuse of trans people. Period.

“I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.”

I suppose I don’t count in that ‘women who have histories like mine’ crap.

Bigot.

Ignorant bigot at that.

Hateful, ignorant bigot.

Sigh. How many people go where they aren’t wanted?

We can tell when we’re not wanted, most of us, right? I mean, even my autistic ass gets it eventually and I utterly SUCK at social skills.

So… does any actually reasonable person think that a trans woman is going to hang around where she’s obviously not wanted? The answer is obvious, it’s a big fat No.

I can’t even get my trans women friends out of their homes half the time to meet up for coffee. (Gee, I wonder why? Massive eye-roll) You honestly think they’re gonna go pollute themselves at your biddie teas? Nope. Enh. Gameshow buzzer noise.

(I’m no longer applying reasonable to old Joanne here, TERFS have her brain in a jar somewhere. Probably behind the toilet where she gets her ideas from.)

Shit, Joanne, you really could’ve warned your readers you were gonna talk about Triggery shit regarding domestic violence. And I’m out of my anti-anxiety meds too. Great.

“If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship.”

No. No, we wouldn’t, Joanne. Because if you can spout words like I’ve seen on your blog page and on your Twitter feed? You have no solidarity for trans people. You have no kinship to offer. You have only hatred, mockery, and nastiness.

I said I hate her already, right?

Good, cause if I hadn’t? This would’ve done it.

“On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’.”

Gods, she’s such an asshole.

Triggered is not a contemporary word.
1. Contemporary: Of or referring to taking place in the present
2. Triggered was first used in medicine in 1918. (it’s a medical term Joanne, some of us mentally ill people NEED that word to describe certain issues. You using it like that threw us under the bus.) Physicians were trying to deal with figuring out ‘war neurosis’ from WW1. The etymology of Triggered.

“Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown,…”

OMG you liar! I scanned your twitter feed, I saw NOTHING ahead of you posting that awful tweet about people who menstruate. Relentless attacks my right tit! Prior to that, yes you were actually being nice to children. Good for you.

I mean, you do know your Twitter feed is a matter of public record and that anyone with the skills can search through it pretty much at will, right?

“Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.”

Yeah. Joanne, that’s how they get you. TERF radicalizing action plan 101. They’re the ones doing the doxxing. They’re the ones making trans people lose their jobs. Their livelihoods. Their lives. They got you, and now you, with all your privilege and power are doing their work for them. Brava, lady. Bra-fucking-va.

I almost feel sorry for you now. But you have hurt too many people.

Arrogant, ignorant, with money and a large following. Why haven’t people de-platformed this wretch yet?

“I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers,…”

Oh, you mean those young gay kids you’ve hurt? Who you’ve made choose between their community and their beloved author? Those young gay kids? (SMDH, they got her good, didn’t they?)

More TERF rhetoric, it’s damned nauseating.

“I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.”

Darling, you couldn’t write an emotionally complex character if someone sent you a starting kit with a paint by number guide, an AI, and a thesaurus.

She meanders off with more TERF rhetoric, and that’s the post.

I have not felt this unclean in a long, long time. (Whole body Shivers).

I saw nothing in that blog post that wasn’t TERF rhetoric. They got J.K. Rowling good, and the sick, sad thing is she doesn’t even know it. Or if she does, she actually believes that shite and doesn’t care who she hurts with it.

It would’ve been bad enough if she’d just quietly believed all that awfulness. In spreading it on her Twitter feed, she’s given TERFs a famous, obscenely rich, utterly ignorant tool to wield against any trans person, but especially trans kids.

And that is utterly reprehensible in so many ways.

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My Amazon Author Site; I write books with queer autistic people like me. I write in the genres of SFF, Paranormal Romance, Historical Romance, and Futuristic Romance as well as erotic vignettes.

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Please also see the twitter hashtag #KaelanRhysRarities for more recent pieces. Etsy charges me to list and maintain a listing, so I put my pieces on the hashtag first to save both me and a potential buyer money.

For further reading:

On ‘biological sex’ and why it’s bullshit (Between the (Gender) Lines: the Science of Transgender Identity by Katherine J. Wu HARVARD)

WHO: Gender and Genetics.

Sex and gender identity by Planned Parenthood

So. Hi new people! Apparently, we're gonna talk about sex. Like physical sex! Because… there's some confusion.

First, sex defined: We're talking physical sex here, not gender. Body parts, hormones, and genetics (and more).

BLUF: BIOLOGICAL sex is a spectrum

1/

— ScienceVet (@ScienceVet2) August 30, 2018

This tweet went viral over the weekend, and I got a flood of questions about sex, gender, and genetics. I wanted to wait until after Christmas to delve into addressing them. So let’s go.https://t.co/IRZwLwc8X8

— Jacob A Tennessen (@JacobPhD) December 26, 2017

J. K. Rowling’s transphobia isn’t a surprise VOX

Eddie Redmayne criticizes J.K. Rowling over ‘transphobic’ comments

Daniel Radcliffe responds to J.K. Rowling’s tweets on gender identity: ‘Transgender women are women’

TOR: An open letter to J.K. Rowling

Doxxing, authorial behavior and consequences.

On February 1, 2019February 1, 2019 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?, Writing

Content Warning: Bullying, Harassment, Successful Suicide Mention, Doxxing, Mention of Sex and Kink, Mention of Eating Disorder, Mention of Insomnia, Mention of Vomiting.

Recorded version, if you’d prefer to listen than to read is here.

Now that I’m a bit calmer, and the danger has been removed from the perpetrator’s website, I’ll write a bit about what’s had me in a tizzy for the past 18 hours or so.

Last night, a good friend sent me a DM (direct message) with a link to an author’s blog. Her contact page, specifically, that had a comment on it that outed my legal name and associated it with this pseudonym. The comment had been there for anyone to find since August of 2017. There were massive consequences to this, which I’ll detail later.

Now, I’ve always been scrupulously honest about using pseudos, and my reasons for why. When I made the switch from writing custom kink stories for private clients to writing for publication, a former friend who happened to be a sex worker, and knew I wrote kinky/sexy stories, advised me to use a pseudonym. That made sense to me and I didn’t have a problem with it.

I’ve never been particularly attached to my legal name (I’ve hated it *forever* I’m named after a soap opera star for gods sake and it was the MOST popular name the year I was born. I had 6 people with the exact same name in my class of 30 growing up. We had to go by our last names, like we were in the military, in elementary school.) So I chose a name I really liked and went with that (it’s also a bit of a joke, and a nod to my partner’s Welsh ancestry, very few people, mostly native Welsh speakers get the joke.)

Since coming out as trans, its also become my dead-name, I don’t even use it in real life unless I absolutely have to. The absolutely have to is legal paperwork, I just don’t use it. It has those negative connotations to it too. I can’t afford to change my name, because I’d have to change it in two countries. It’s prohibitively expensive and the process is also terrifying for me. So many gov’t offices, embassies, officials et cetera.

But seeing my legal name still hurts me. Seeing it on this author’s page, one I’d call an enemy, shocked and horrified me. Knowing it had been there for so long made me sick to my stomach. I know, it’s been there for years, why is this bothering me so much now? Right? It’s because of the consequences I mentioned earlier.

Having both my legal name and pseudo also associated with untrue, cruel rumours about me rather sucked.

A few years ago, a young woman was bullied during the lead up to PitchWars, which is a contest for authors to get a mentor and get their work in front of agents. I had nothing to do with the incident except that someone who did happened to respond to both me and the bullying victim. I was a follower of all three of the people involved. This was in my early years on Twitter, and I basically followed anyone who followed me, anyone who was a writer. I figured if you were a writer you were great people and I wanted to know you. It’s what a lot of us writers do when we first find the writing community on Twitter. I’m no longer so indiscriminate in whom I follow/become mutuals with. I can’t be. It’s too dangerous. That’s incredibly clear to me now. So clear.

Later, around the mess with ficfest, (another contest that collapsed under accusations of racism and bullying) I was accused again of having something to do with bullying the victim, who suicided later that same year. I was a ficfest mentor for all of 18 hours. A good friend of mine asked me to co-mentor with her and I jumped at the chance because I wanted to help other writers. 18 hours when I was caring for two vomiting children and coming down with the stomach bug myself because my husband was out of town. So not exactly strolling around on the internet, if you know what I mean. When I was well, I came back online to see that the organizer and some of the former ficfest mentors had bullied the person again.

I was still painted as being part of it, because I was a ficfest mentor. Because I’d wanted, naively, to help other writers and had jumped at the chance to mentor in a bigger contest.

I knew about the suicide within hours of her actions, her friend told me, but the news didn’t hit Twitter for months after and when it did it was a huge mess. Once again, because I’d reached out to the person via a private DM to offer support after the ficfest thing, I was implicated in bullying and in driving her to suicide.

Part of my life mission is to educate people on what bullying is and isn’t. I’ve done hours and hours of Master’s level coursework in education, I have a dual Masters in education and world history. I have all this information on what bullying is and how to prevent it. I was a history teacher in the states, prior to that I was a traveling sexuality educator. It was after I’d gotten out of crime scene investigation, before I became a parent and before we came to Canada. I’ve seen and prevented bullying and I’ve also been bullied most of my life. It’s not anything I would ever be part of.

My brother died from suicide, I would never in a million billion years have something to do with driving someone to make that choice. But it doesn’t stop the rumour mongers. One of the worst of whom is the YA author who had my name on her blog.

To have those two accusations constantly follow me around is particularly cruel. If they could’ve chosen things to label me with that would hurt me most it would be that.

About a year ago, or maybe a little more, I wrote an ill-timed thread on Twitter about author behavior. The thread legitimately had nothing to do with anyone in particular, but because I’d mentioned that someone had soft-blocked me just before writing it, it was associated with being an attack on that person.

Now, I will never understand how allistic people think. To *me* I was talking about authors in general, not anyone in specific, there were no names mentioned, just ‘authors’ but thanks to the same person who hosted my name on her blog for so long, (and others) I was painted as attacking a young woman of colour. This person (the one who had my name on her blog) has a long history of attacking and dragging neurodivergent and/or mentally ill people. She never, ever apologizes for it. Nor, does it seem, does she ever suffer professional consequences for it.

Attacking a young person in general, or anyone of colour is also something I would *never* do. (Aside from it being cruel and bullying and contrary to my very firm sense of honor, I have better things to do with my time, like write books, play games or stare vacantly out of the window at fog, maybe scrub the bathroom floor with a toothbrush or my tongue.)

I was subtweeted for days, called all sorts of unpleasant things and I received a lot of harassing emails about it. 10 former mutuals (two people who follow one another on social media) didn’t bother to ask me what I’d meant with my thread, they just listened to this other author and blocked me and subtweeted me, and basically made my life a living hell for over a week. Queer people I’d held virtual hands with the night Frump was elected as we all watched in horror. None of them even asked me what I’d meant with my thread, whether it was directed at someone or not, they just assumed and listened to this horrible author. People who weren’t exactly friends, (I use that word sparingly and with care) but were more than casual acquaintances.

Once I finally figured out what people thought I’d said (I mean… jesus, would it have killed someone to reach out to an autistic person and say, hey, these allistic people think you said X, maybe if you didn’t mean that you might want to clear that up?) I both privately and publicly apologized for my thread.

I still, for the life of me, don’t understand how those awful people could think my words on general authorial behavior could be associated with a young woman who hadn’t ever written a book. I mean… she hadn’t written a book? HOW COULD SHE BE AN AUTHOR THAT I WROTE A THREAD ABOUT? The illogic of it all was staggering. But that’s allistic people for you, they make no damned logical sense at all. Sorry allistics, many of you are wonderful, and I mean that, I wish you made sense to me. You just don’t.

I’m mixed-race, mentally ill, queer, autistic, and physically disabled. I’m a published author of queer romance with ownvoices characters and I also don’t lay down about abuse. I have strong opinions that I voice frequently, and I tear apart warrior autism parent’s self-aggrandizing books. I’m not bad to look at and I have a real, recent photo of myself as an AVI. I get (and I expect to get) a lot of harassment of various types including sexual harassment. I get a lot of death threats, some quite inventive.

So that’s why I use a pseudo, it’s got nothing to do with trying to hide who I am. In this industry, my legal name is an open secret anyway because it’s on any query I’ve ever sent. I stopped counting at 500 queries, so you know, a lot of people know my legal name. But most people, most industry professionals, have the decency and honor to keep it to themselves. As is done in any industry where pseudonyms are used.

To out that, to doxx me like that, to host that comment for YEARS on her blog. It’s personally reprehensible to me. Horrific even.

Someone mentioned the possibility that she didn’t know it was there. Anything is possible I suppose, but I highly freaking doubt it.

It was on her contact page, and it’s fully updated to include her agent’s information. I have a fantastic memory when pain isn’t inhibiting recall. My autistic memory is telling me she didn’t get the agent until *after* August 2017. Meaning she had to have seen and approved of that comment. It was the only one on the page! Also, it had been there for years, years! The belief factor of her not knowing it was there kinda fades the longer it’s there.
It was on the contact page, not buried in some random blog post. I glance over my contact/landing page frequently, once every few months, to make sure my professional contact information is up to date, most authors do.
It’s a wordpress site, we all get notifications when we receive comments on our pages. It’s part of the wordpress setup and you have to physically opt out of that option. Most of us don’t bother because we actually want to hear from people about our work. We’re authors, we like to hear what people think.

This author, letting this comment stay there on her page for so long, is directly responsible for the months of harassment I received. Even if the harassment didn’t come from her directly (and I have no proof one way or the other, whether it was her or not). The harassment that eventually made me close my direct messages on Twitter to mutuals only. The harassment that made me take all contact forms (which allow messages from anonymous IP addresses) from my website. (Basically if someone fills in a contact form on a website and sends it in, it looks like it comes from the website, not a personal IP address.) So that the harassers would have to send anything to me from trackable IP addresses so the police could catch them. I had to involve the police with the level of harassment I was receiving. 8 months of death threats, threats of exposing my name, threats of exposing my partner’s and childrens’ names. Where they go to school, my home address…

All because this author had my name/pseudo right there for anyone to find. When I think about it even now it makes me cry. WHY? Why would she do that to me? Why would anyone do that to anyone?

Why does she hate me so very much that she would allow this? It’s her blog, it’s her responsibility. Legally and morally.

What have I *ever* done except try to stand up for people like me, to point out the unfairness of the way marginalized people are treated? What have I ever done that would make this author think this is even remotely okay?

I mean, I know a lot of authors’ pseudonyms and real names, I worked in publishing for several years before going freelance. It would never, ever occur to me to out someone. It would never occur to me to allow a comment outing someone on my blog. I just don’t understand why this person is so awful. I don’t, I never have.

I don’t understand why they won’t suffer professional consequences either, but as I’ve learned, I will never understand allistic people.

During the time when I was getting *at least* a harassing email every week, (often I’d get three or more) I wondered who the person was who was being free with my legal name. Or people, it’s possible other people have something like this out there. Obviously, someone was, because the harassing emails all had my legal information. Many had my partner’s, his place of work. One even had our phone number and license plate number in it.

Do you have any idea of how terrifying that is? I’m a trans, mixed-race female presenting person. A person very similar to me was attacked just last week in the states. I have a family with minor children in it to protect. These are the consequences that this person will probably never face because of what she’s done.

And this author carelessly, or perhaps maliciously, (I’ll never know because I won’t speak to her, in fact have had her blocked since the thread/subtweeting issue) left my name where anyone could find it.

That kind of thing, those unfounded accusations and my legal name being paired together with my pseudo could’ve cost me jobs if I’d gone to search for them. It could’ve really fucked up my immigration status.

How is any of that even remotely okay?

People aren’t, and have never been, shy about telling people like me, in detail, what kinds of horrible things they will do to us and our families to ‘pay us back’ for being queer, or outspoken, or *insert whatever reason for hatred people can come up with*.

They’re not shy about actually doing those things either.

At 4am this morning, I wrote to this author’s agent, begging her to make the author take the comment down. I didn’t know what else to do except publicly out and shame the author (which is a form of cyberbullying, so I didn’t want to do that). I guess the agent must have moved swiftly, because, despite my not receiving a response, the comment has been taken down. I’m certain the author claimed innocence. A lot of allistic people do when they get called on bad behavior. We’ve all seen that. But you know, also, I’ll point you to the fact it was there for almost 2 years. Every day it was there the believability factor of innocence fades. It just does, it’s only logical.

Despite the removal, I still feel so threatened by what that author did. And I’m questioning how many of my mutuals, even people I’m close to, knew it was there and didn’t tell me?

Not being able to trust easily is so hard.

I’m still afraid, I’m still wickedly upset and crying at the drop of a hat (and I really don’t cry easy, I’ve been through too much, too much trauma, but this has just shaken me so damned much.)

To leave that kind of thing up on her contact page for so long is utterly unconscionable. But she’ll get away with it. Just like she’s gotten away with subtweeting and harassing me. Of causing me so much pain in the past. Like she’s gotten away with attacking and dragging other neurodiverse people over and over again. I’ve seen her do that multiple times.

For someone who is a so-called professional in an industry like publishing, gods, especially of books for young adults! (I tell you, I have a young adult. I would not want my young adult reading a book by someone with morals like that. I just wouldn’t, I wouldn’t allow that book into the house. I wouldn’t.) To not only allow the doxxing of a fellow author on their blog but to also leave it where anyone could find it for such a very long time… it’s personally reprehensible to me. Especially when I’m a marginalized author, it’s so dangerous. I’m terrified, angry and sickened by this author’s actions.

Although the post has been removed, it doesn’t change the damage and pain she’s caused to me. The 8 months of harassment I received, me having to contact the police, the danger my family has been in. The danger *I’ve* been in. I had someone threaten to kill my cats!! Yeah. It doesn’t change it.

Because of people like that author, and others, the rumour mongers, I will always have the stink of false rumours and cruel innuendos clinging to me. That is so unfair, I don’t deserve that.

I had a wicked panic attack last night, then I got so, so angry. I still controlled myself. I didn’t publicly out who this author is. I can and will continue to tell people who ask me privately. That is not bullying, and since she had my legal name and pseudo on her blog for almost two years, two motherfucking years!, I have no problem at all telling people who it is if they ask me privately. Email me if you want to know, or if you’re one of the few who have access to my direct messages on social media, you can ask me that way. I won’t become the bully and say it in public, though. Not unless I have to out of self-defense. What you all do with that information is up to you. I don’t advocate for following/unfollowing or blocking this person. (Because that would be bullying.)

If *you* want to unfollow/block, do it, and I’ll support you.

If *you* don’t want to unfollow/block, do that, and I’ll support you.

I make it a policy to not attempt to influence peoples interpersonal connections, it’s far too close to abusive behavior (controlling who someone is friends with is a huge abusive red flag) and I’ve had that done to me by abusive boyfriends and family members. I’ll never knowingly do that to someone else. I may warn someone, I might open the door to say here is this information if you want it, but telling them who to be friends with/not be friends with is just not something I do.

But, I understand the need to protect yourself, and the need to know you aren’t friends/associates/following someone who is capable of doing such a horrific thing as this. So yes, I’ll absolutely privately tell anyone who wants to know. What you do with that info though, you get to decide. I can’t and won’t advise you on that.

My eating disorder reared up again last night, and I’ve been doing so well! I still haven’t eaten (I’m working on it, I really am, I’m working on it).

I had a horrible night of insomnia, and honestly, I doubt I’ll ever get an apology. She’s never apologized for anything she’s done to me before, she’s most likely is not going to suffer anything for what she’s done, professionally or personally, so why the hell would she apologize to someone she obviously doesn’t consider human?

I knew, from previous encounters with her, how horrible she could be, but I never in a million years expected her to stoop so low as to allow a doxxing of me on her blog. Never.

So that’s what’s been behind all the vague angst I’ve had for the past 18 hours. I’m going to go on full hiatus from Twitter for the weekend, maybe even a week. Maybe just stay off online for a bit. I’m removing the app from my phone and tablet for a while.

It’s got nothing to do with any of my followers, you all have been wonderful, but I just need a break. I need to lock the door to my house and keep the world out for a few days. To just be around my family, people I know would never hurt me, either by doing awful things or not telling me about someone doing awful things and thereby endangering me and my family. Enabling the level of harassment I was under.

Because some people I’m close to must have known that was there. It’s illogical that they didn’t with this person being a mutual, a friend even, with many of mine. Being close friends even, with many of you… we have many of the same business associates, this industry is tiny. We know many of the same people.

That fucks me up so badly.

That they didn’t bother to tell me. That’s… rather an ouchy thing to realize. That people I’m legitimately close to would allow all that harassment of me and my family to continue to take place. Knowing the likely source of where the harassers got my name.

Ouch. So I kinda have to cope with that too.

Safe space in fiction

On January 7, 2019January 7, 2019 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Reviews, Uncategorized, Writing

*Blows the dust off my blog*

It’s been a while, if you follow my Twitter you’ll know why, but if you don’t, basically life blew up and it’s taking me some time to find my bearings again.

But that’s not why I decided to blog today.

I probably should do some sort of wrap up for the past 6 months or so of hell, but that’s not this post (and I loathe *shoulds*).

No, this post is about safety in the material we read. It’s also about an author’s responsibility to their readers.

Keep in mind I’m both? A published author and a voracious, marginalized reader.

I usually read a lot of romance, because, for me, it’s safe. I know that unless it’s been mismarketed/labeled, a romance will have an HEA (Happily Ever After) at the end. No matter what hell the author puts their characters through, I’m guaranteed that at the end, the main characters will be happy enough that *I* can be happy finding another book to read.

For someone with as many mental health issues as I have, that’s bloody important.

Me and my list of mental health issues… (Gif description: Crowley from Supernatural unrolling a very long scroll/list on the beaten earth of a junkyard)

But what about the other areas of safety that so many authors, even my favorites, fail to make sure of?

I just ran heart-first into a wicked fail by one of my favorite authors. And even over an hour later and much of that spent cuddling my beloved, I’m still nauseated and wishing like hell I’d never started the reread of a series that I used to like.

For reference: CW something that should NEVER be said about mentally ill people.

I may have to stop reading Singh. I love her voice & characters & worlds but this fvcking hurts.

“What I can tell you is that I get no sense of ‘wrongness’ from you, for lack of a better word. I’ve always sensed that with the mentally ill.”

Shards of Hope/Ivy ~Nalini Singh

— Semi-hiatus-Kaelan Rhywiol (@KaelanRhy) January 7, 2019

There’s a thread there to my reactions and thoughts, but it boils down to one of my favorite authors making me feel so very unsafe.

Unwelcome in her worlds.

Given that she’s one of a dwindling few authors who can still suck me into a story, (I’m always on the lookout for more!) one who I’ve religiously supported by buying her new books even during my political shitstorm motivated reading hiatus of the past couple of years… well, it bloody sucks is what it does.

It hurts to know that one of my fav (former fav?) authors holds enough hatred of someone like me that she’d call me and people like me ‘wrong for lack of a better word’.

I mean… the pub date on that particular book is 2015. Why are we STILL HAVING THIS CONVERSATION?

Seriously, WHY?

There is nothing wrong with being mentally ill. There is nothing wrong with being POC, or mixed race, or queer, or fat, or disabled, or (insert marginalization here).

But you’d really think there was reading some (most?) of the major sellers in any genre you can pick.

Fiction just isn’t safe for marginalized people. I thought maybe, because Ms. Singh is marginalized herself, that I could trust her.

But that trust was just horribly broken and I’m not sure I can get it back.

This is my second reread of the Psy Changeling series. I want to still love it, but all through the series there is a definite thread of ‘if you’re mentally ill, you’re wrong’. And the author went ahead and stated it in that bit of dialogue. The character who said it, by the way, is supposed to be an empath. A really sensitive to others and their problems kind of character. Way to go with the ableism empathic person. Sigh.

Mostly, in the series, it’s shit-talk about people with ASPD (Slur: Sociopath/Psychopath) and it’s hellaciously harmful towards that particular mental illness. (I’m no expert on that, but I know people with ASPD and I’ve read up on it for my characters and like… y’all, don’t ever read that series, it’ll rip you up, you deserve better.) The depictions of ASPD in the Psy Changeling series are narrow, stereotyped to the extreme and wickedly harmful.

The first time I read this series, a couple of years ago, and that book, in particular, I was in a much better place regarding my mental health. I’d just sent out a number of full requests on my first full-length novel I thought worthy of the name, Ilavani. I was seeing modest success on my self-published works, my family was stable and we were making some little bit of extra each month, we had a home and I had a garden. I had a dog.

All of that except my tiny, weird little human family is gone now, and I’ve had to give up on querying my books to agents because I absolutely can’t take it anymore. It, along with the other shit, broke my mental health. I got lucky on one of the last four queries I sent, so I have a great publisher, and as long as they want my work and treat me well, they can keep having my work.

My debut with a publisher is here, BTW, if you like queer fiction with GOOD mental health representation. It’s own voices, the rep is real because it’s how I experience mental illness.

So to say I’m a *bit* more sensitive now than a couple of years ago to the shit-talk about mental illness in the Psy Changeling series is a little bit of an understatement.

I remember crying in joy at reading the way one of the main characters in that book is described. Zaira is mixed-race and seeing the way that expresses in ME, ON THE PAGE IN A MAJOR PUBLICATION… it made me cry tears of joy. (Just goes to show how different time periods in a person’s life can affect their enjoyment of a work of literature.)

Maybe between my stability then, and the way Ms. Singh does so damned well with the mixed-race descriptions and feelings… maybe I missed how horrible she does with mental illness?

It’s possible, I’m only human, after all.

That’s book 14 in the series, by the way, I bought all of them when I discovered Ms. Singh’s work a few years ago, when I had more of a disposable income. I’ve even purchased a bunch I haven’t read yet, which is why I’m rereading the series so I can read the new ones.

And for the most part, I can choose to ignore the shit rep and the shit talk in this series. (I’ve been hurt so much in life that things that legitimately should probably bother me just… don’t. I’m working on this with my therapist.) The characters, worldbuilding, sexy times and ROMANCE makes up for it *for me*, or it did. I’m not sure I can go back after that line though. It HURT.

It stabbed me right in the heart and punched me in the gut.

I don’t know where I want this blog entry to go now. I want to point out so many examples of lack of safety for marginalized people in modern fiction. So, so, so many…

Even among my favorite authors.

But I think I’ll just stop and say DO. FUCKING. BETTER. AUTHORS!

The information is out there. There is someone blogging or tweeting or doing video about *anything* you want to know about.

So do fucking better. Do your damned research if you’re going to have mental illness in your books (and that means more than a freaking google search or wikipedia article, it means reading real life, lived experiences of the marginalization(s) in question).

Do your freaking research into the queer community and our different IDs if you’re going to have us in your books, (oh, and don’t fucking kill us off either) figure out how to write POC WELL if you’re going to include them. Disability? Please… I can’t remember ever reading a book that had good disability rep that was ALSO mainstream. (I guess we could point to Helen Hoang’s The Kiss Quotient… but I don’t believe my autistic brain is a disability so that one is iffy for me. It’s a fantastic book BTW, if you haven’t read it DO and preorder the second one while you’re at it. It’s just as good if not better.)

I’ll end with this. Include us. But don’t USE us. Oh! And hire authenticity/sensitivity readers PLEASE. It’s kinda why we exist and do what we do… so shit like this DOESN’T harm an unsuspecting reader.

I feel horribly used right now. Emotionally beaten.

I’ll probably end up going back to the series because I’m hard up for things to read that suck me in, don’t make my editor brain scream and ALSO feature marginalized characters I can see myself in.

But the hurt will take a while to fade.

(And for what it’s worth, the PTSD rep is so authentic *to my experience of it* in Singh’s Guild Hunter series that it feels like a warm hug to me, so I have no issue with that series, I just reread it prior to Psy Changeling. It almost feels like sinking into a badly needed warm bath to see that and mixed-race rep done well in a majorly best selling series. I’ve heard bad things about the rep in the Rock Kiss series by the same author, so I haven’t and won’t read that one. It’s odd, how they’re all almost penned by different authors.)

Do better authors. So you don’t hurt your readers. Without readers? We authors wouldn’t be able to BE authors.

We’d be weirdos telling ourselves stories in the dark with coffee stained t-shirts and messy hair. Whoops… saw my reflection there, pardon my description, I’m sure it doesn’t resemble other authors AT ALL. (Go on laugh, I’m trying to be funny, damnit!)

The kindness of strangers

On October 18, 2018 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?

To most people, something like a laptop is a luxury. Most folks can get by using the library computer, their phone, or a desktop without much hassle or fuss.

It’s not the same for me. A laptop is truly an accessibility item for me. I have numerous chronic health conditions, two of which cause me massive, ongoing pain, so when my laptop started to die a while ago, it engendered such a wealth of panic in me that I can’t really find the words to express it.

My sleep and anxiety got worse and worse as my screen died by inches. I knew I absolutely couldn’t afford to replace my laptop on my own, and sending it in for repair would’ve made me lose a good eight weeks of working time, or more, IF I could even get the company to repair the damned thing.

I don’t tend to make a whole LOT of money, I freelance edit, do graphics design work and make a little bit on my writing, but we do depend on my income. Any luxury we have is either purchased with gift cards given to us by family or from my income, and some bills are all on my plate. All of my writing expenses are things I pay for myself, so it’s imperative that I have the ability to work in the only way I can.

Which meant I absolutely had to find a way to replace my laptop.

When I bought my laptop two years ago, I spent what I had to in order to get a computer that I could do all the work on that I needed to do. I had to get a gaming laptop so that it could handle the graphics design work I do.

I could write and surf on most laptops, but in order to do the 3D manipulation I do, which makes up a large portion of my income, I have to have a computer with muscles.

The ultra-expensive HP laptop I bought lasted 2 years, 1 month and 14 days before the screen did the ‘black screen of death’ thing to me.

I will never be able to find the words to express my gratitude that, when, in desperation I opened a gofundme in order to replace my computer in time, donors (many of whom were either dear friends or complete strangers) raised enough money in 9 days to help me pick up a certified refurbished laptop on sale.

My faith in humanity wavers sometimes, but my goodness has it ever been restored. Thank you so so much for everyone who donated, retweeted, spread the word and asked for help for me. You have my undying gratitude.

Something as simple as a laptop is so needed for me to access things like work, the internet, netflix, games, so many things require a laptop for me… people I’ll likely never meet helped me in my hour of need and I’m so grateful.

Closing of Multifarious Press

On August 28, 2018 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Cover Reveals and Blog Tours, Culture, editing, Reviews, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?, Writing

I’ve been dreading both coming to this decision and telling people about it.

One of the hardest things for me to do is admit I’ve been a fool. But boy have I ever been a fool in thinking that *I* had it in me to run a press.

I don’t. I really don’t. If it were something as simple as doing the work of editing, making the covers, publishing the books, (which, I foolishly thought was the bulk of running a press) I could totally do all that. I HAVE done all that for my own books.

But it has honestly come down to people. Creatures I don’t understand in the slightest.

A little over a two years ago I saw so many diverse voices going unpublished because there is a lot of lip service going on about wanting diversity, but not a lot of actual books being put out for a lot of kinds of diversity.

Neuroatypicality for one. I have a lot of the skills necessary to get books out there, but what I don’t have is a thick hide. I’m broken, mentally ill, and the VAST amount of censure and harassment I (and my staff) have come under for DARING to want to help diverse voices find publication is just…

It’s a lot. It’s a large part of what caused me to run my head into a mental health crisis. Just wanting to help diverse voices find publication was definitely not enough. Having the skills wasn’t enough.

I’ve spoken about this before, but other peoples’ expectations of who and what I am shouldn’t have changed the moment I opened a press. Their opinions of my staff shouldn’t have changed either, but there isn’t a single person on my staff except perhaps my website designer who hasn’t gotten hassled for being a *publishing professional* because they’re affiliated with my tiny little shoestring press. I’m appalled that it did? How can people be so… short sighted and cruel? But they were. They REALLY were. People will be people and I’ll continually not understand them.

I thought, maybe if I waited long enough on my mental health hiatus that I’d be able to come back to it and finally publish these beautiful stories. I have some that I wanted to publish so badly that are so damned beautiful, and they DESERVE publication. But I just can’t do it. I don’t think, and neither does my therapist, that me being healthy enough to work at the press is likely to happen any time soon, and I can’t in good conscious keep holding up these brilliant authors from looking elsewhere.

When I opened this tiny little boutique press, I had a bit more faith in humanity. Faith in humanity has always been a failing of mine. I’m an optimist, really, though with all I’ve lived through I really shouldn’t be. I thought that people would, well, help a bit more than they ended up doing. I thought maybe we’d get editors who wanted to pen their own lines of diverse titles, I thought we’d get people interested in helping with contracts and legal paperwork. I definitely thought we’d get more than one patron. There is SO MUCH lip service being put to getting diverse voices out there. There isn’t a lot of follow through from people in publishing on it. Sadly. I foolishly thought there would be.

My staff and I were almost immediately swamped with queries. Which was wonderful, but none of us were being paid for reading them and we have to eat, which means that our paid work and our own writing always had to come first. Our patreon for the press remained for the entire time it was open with ONE person as a patreon. (I’ll be returning that extremely generous patron’s funds.)

I’ve considered keeping the press/website open for as long as I have the business license (another year and a half) but it’s cruel to keep holding the hope that I’ll be well enough to work on these stories over the author heads.

I can’t do that and I won’t.

I’m sorry for not being strong enough to do what I said I wanted to do. I’m sorry I had enough faith in humanity that they’d actually do what they said they wanted to do. But maybe people aren’t yet ready for the diverse stories and voices that are crying out to be seen.

I’ve had many people tell me they’re happy to wait for me to be well enough to work at the press again because they believe in the ideal of the press.

I really and truly wish I could say the same. I believe, deeply, that we need diverse stories. I desperately need more diverse stories to read, but when it came down to it? It was me and my staff working hard at a pipe dream.

I believe I’ve contacted all of my authors personally, if I have missed you, I sincerely apologize. My health has not been good for months, and I can only admit the truth of how badly that affects me, it could easily have made me miss someone.

Authorial Envy, Friendships and how to deal.

On August 24, 2018August 27, 2018 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Uncategorized, Writing

It’s a fact of life I think that anyone with a book out is going to (whether we want to or not) compare our books with the ones that big 5 publishing gives the marketing push to.

I sure do. It stinks. I hate it that I compare my books with the ones that have so much monetary backing behind the marketing that it’s so far out of my book’s league.

But how can I *not* feel envy during awards season?

Am I thrilled to see this year’s Hugo Awards going to the extremely deserving diverse authors that they went to? Absolutely! I read and loved (and voted for) a lot of those books.

But my books aren’t ever likely going to be there because people don’t even know who I am. Ninestar press, the house I’m with provides stories that are so well edited, with stunning cover art and wonderful, amazing stories that I need to read. Queer stories. But they’re a small press, and they just can’t compete financially with the corporate monsters that are Big 5 Publishing.

Even two similar authors within Big 5 publishing may have completely different experiences and suffer related issues with regards to feelings. A mid-list debut vs. a star debut for instance.

That’s bound to make any author experience envy, maybe bitterness or anger. So how do we deal with those kinds of emotions? How do we maintain friendships with authors who we’ve often known for years who may have gotten the marketing push?

1) We acknowledge them. Our feelings are valid. It does suck to know your book can’t compete. My name isn’t a household name, but other debut authors who’ve written books almost exactly the same as mine are. I’ve even worked on some of their books with them in the early stages before they got their contracts. My book isn’t well known and theirs is. Why? Their books got chosen to get the marketing push. It’s not even about quality. Corporate publishing is precisely that. Corporate I’ve read insider accounts of how books are selected for that marketing push, and it has nothing to do with quality, story, editing or anything that we reader/writer type peeps think matters in a story. I’ve worked enough in corporate to believe it too. So we need to take our pride out of the equation. It’s nothing that we did wrong, and they did right. It’s just the luck of the draw. Corporate, for whatever reason corporate had for that season, chose THAT book to push into the minds and awareness of readers through the holy power of the dollar. Both books are still good. Both authors are still (likely) great people who have worked damned hard at their craft.

2) We Accept our feelings. I’ve been in therapy off and on most of my life, and one thing my therapists have always told me to do is to accept that my feelings are real and that they’re valid. They may be yucky, messy, and uncontrollable, but they are our feelings, and the first step to dealing with these often unpleasant emotions in this business is to accept that they exist and are valid.

3) This part is important! We Do Not Act On Our Feelings! Publishing is small peeps. Lashing out at people who got the marketing push when you didn’t is shitty behavior. Don’t do it. It’s not the author’s fault their book got chosen any more than it’s your fault that yours didn’t. I’m friends with several debut authors whose books were chosen for the push. Think about what I might have done to my friends if I had lashed out about how much it hurts that my book has 17 reviews when theirs have 500 or more? It’s not their fault any more than it’s mine. It would’ve ruined the friendship, that’s for damned certain. The reason, again, that their books got that many reviews so quickly is because reviewers often get free print books from Big 5 publishers. Some reviewers REQUIRE print books before they’ll review, (which speaks to a bit of bias I’ll try to address in a future post) meaning that small press, again, can’t compete because it costs money to print the books to send to the reviewers. Big 5 presses have their own printers and storage places, most small press and self-pub use POD (print on demand). Mid-list authors with big 5 press might have a smaller allotment of ARCs that will be sent out to reviewers than are allotted to the star debut, again, it’s not the mid-listers fault any more than it’s the star debut author’s fault.

4) So. How do we maintain authorial relationships with these mixed and divided feelings? A couple of things that have worked for me that may work for you.

a. Remember that your friend might be overwhelmed at all the attention, they’re still your friend. Check up on them! Ask them if they’re okay and if they need anything!

b. If you have other friends who are in the same boat as you are, you can talk to them and share your feelings. It’s healthy to find out that many of us feel the same way, and often times, sharing the way we feel can help us not take it so hard.

c. Do NOT take your yucky emotions out on your friend. Try instead to be happy for their success. They did the same thing you did, you both wrote a book and managed to swim through the creative waters to the point of this: YOU BOTH PUBLISHED A BOOK!! Do you have any idea how many people say they want to write a book, but don’t? Who start but never finish? Try to separate the yucky emotions from the honest happiness that you DO feel for your friend. (It’s there. You might have to do some personal work to find it, but it IS there.) I know I’m utterly ecstatic for my writer friends and acquaintances when something goes right for them. My soul feels giddy for them.

d. Success in publishing can be a bright light that goes out very quickly. Sometimes a debut title that makes a big splash can be hard to live up to with the dreaded book two. Your friend might be worried about that so they might need you to be a good friend and not a jealous hell-beast from the bog of stench-envy. I have friendships with some big-name authors at this point, and every single one of them worries that their next book won’t be as well received as the last. That the previous book was their big bright splash on the map of publishing and nothing else will ever be as good. Trust me, they feel it. ALL of us feel it, no matter where in our journey and how successful or not we are. You might too if you ever get to that point. I am damned sure I’ll want my friends if I ever do get to a very high point in my career as an author.

e. I try to put myself in their shoes at every step on the road. What is my friend feeling? What would I be feeling in their place? How would I be dealing with X? What would I want from my friends if our places were reversed?

Empathy. In short. It’s about having empathy for yourself and for your friend.
Now go write your next book (and I’m going to follow my own advice and finish the sequel to my debut, Blood-Bound).

Kaelan is a non-binary author of mixed race from Upstate NY in the United States who currently lives with xyr partner of 20 years and their children in Southern Ontario, Canada. Xie is not represented by an agent.

Xyr family has three cats, a grumpy rescue chinchilla, and a betta fish. Other than writing, Xie freelances as an editor, makes jewelry and spins with a spinning wheel when xie isn’t writing or spending too much time on Twitter.

Xie is non-binary, autistic, mentally ill, and physically disabled. You can connect with Kae on the following social media platforms.

Twitter
Facebook
Website
Email Kae at Kaelan.rhywiol@gmail.com

Not A Romance

On August 2, 2018August 2, 2018 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Culture, Reviews, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?, Writing

Anyone in romancelandia knows that RWA has a stinky track record when it comes to diverse romance of many different varieties. (Or if you don’t, you probably could do some reading to get yourself up to date.)

Racism, homosexual hate, bisexual hate, and so many other forms of dislike and hatred that it’s exhausting to think about much less try to list them all.

I almost canceled my RWA membership this year after hearing how some of my marginalized author siblings were treated last year at the conference.

I ended up renewing it after reading a release they made about a commitment to fixing the problems. I did it because I want to be able to enter my Bloodbound (my most recent release, also polyamorous, also with autistic leads, also kinky) in the RITA next year. I don’t expect to win that either, it’s for the experience. It might final, that one is excellent enough that The Ripped Bodice chose it for display, and it’s more mainstream.

I had entered my Hugo Nominated Ilavani in the RITA awards contest for 2017. I never expected to final, that’s not why I entered.

I entered my story because I believe in it, and I have a bit of a hesitancy about putting myself and my work forward. Entering my book in a blind-judge contest was a good test of that for me.

It actually surprised me that it got some high scores, it got more high than low (lowest and highest scores are thrown out). I’ll be the first to admit that the science-fantasy aspect of Ilavani is not going to be close to everyone’s taste, nor will be the kink or the genetic engineering, or the queer content.

Going forward there are spoilers for Ilavani.

It did absolutely surprise me that one of the judges marked it very low and said it wasn’t a romance.

Whut??

Everyone who enters the RITA has to judge the first round of books. (That was another reason I entered, for the experience of it.)

We have to answer these three questions and give a numerical score of something like 9.6 or 2.7.

Is the love story the main focus of the book?

Is the resolution of the romance emotionally satisfying and optimistic?

Does the entry fall within the category description?

Now for the spoilers.

Is the love story the main focus of the book?

Ilavani is a polyamorous romance with queer, mixed-race, autistic leads. Here’s the blurb (and the links to places you can learn more about it if you’re interested).

The first installment in a long-running, science fantasy series based in a queer, pagan, polyamorous, universe.

3800 years in the future.

Maëlcolm is a skilled BDSM trainer, a spy, and unfortunately, a prince.

Cameron is Maël’s older brother, titular heir to their father’s kingdom and in love with his enby bodyguard, Li.

Kat is a slave. A genetically modified being created for one purpose, and one alone. To please her masters in bed.

Los is a gifted Companion, the only thing that makes him happier than practicing his calling is loving Maël, the one man Los can’t have an official relationship with.

If Maël doesn’t give up his calling and do as the Ard Righ demands, his family loses everything.

If Cam doesn’t do what he needs to do to become worthy of the throne by the Ard Righ’s stringent standards, their family may be executed.

If Kat, autistic, touch-averse, and afraid, chooses to fight her fate, she’ll die.

When an artificial intelligence named ‘the high king’ is at the helm, the cost to human hearts may be impossible to bear.

You can buy it here, it’s serialized due to length, there are five volumes in all.

You can read the first chapter here if you’re so inclined.

Back to my point.

The two princes must save their father’s kingdom, that’s the underpinning plot of the book, which every book needs, something to drive the characters. The focus (what the story is really about) is the two polyamorous romances going on in the book, and more specifically, the formation of the younger brother’s polyamorous relationship.

Cam, the elder brother, is in love with his enby bodyguard Li. Xie can’t give him the only thing he needs, an heir. This is the tension between them, their thing to overcome. Cam falls in love with one of his breeding partners, this is another part of their journey, and a rather romantic one. I show some of the problems polyamorous relationships can have in their story.

The main character is obvious to whoever reads it. Mael is the younger brother, the one who was always indulged because he was the lucky number 13. In Ilavani he has to face the fact that due to political assassination, he’s now in direct line for the throne and it’s a race with his beloved brother Cam to see who can reproduce first. Whoever does, wears the crown, and Mael doesn’t want the crown. He’s autistic and fears he wouldn’t do well with it.

It’s a HORRIBLE time for the gray-aromantic Mael to fall in love. But that’s exactly what he does.

He falls in love with his last BDSM student, Kat, an indentured servant and a recent import to their planet. Falling in love with her makes Mael realize that he’s BEEN in love with his first student and lover Los for decades. (These peeps are pretty long-lived, they’re basically genetically created elves.)

The *entire* character journey for Mael, Kat and Los is about love. It’s about working through the problems and choices they’re confronted with by each of them being in love with the other. So please, someone explain to me exactly how this polyamorous M/M/F relationship isn’t the main focus of the book?

Did the judge even read it? My guess is that they didn’t, or they let a personal prejudice against polyamorous relationships or queer relationships get in the way of a fair score. If that’s the case then RWA *really* needs to investigate that judge and ask for explanations, which is part of the agreement we all signed when we entered our books.

I have massive issues with Christianity, and fade-to-black romances bore me to tears, (I got more than my share of both of those for my judging packet) but I still rated all the books I was sent fairly based on the laid out rules of the contest.

Given that I am not the only person whose book with a marginalized aspect or relationship structure scored low and got a *not a romance* tag, (see here, and here) I think RWA needs to take a close look.

Polyamory is the open, honest ability to love more than one person. This is my *life*. I *live* polyamory.

It’s something a lot of people live, it’s something we’re crying out for representation in our favorite genres of romance and erotic romance.

Someone who can’t accept that, who would call anything BUT a heteronormative, monogamous white man with white woman book NOT A ROMANCE… well, maybe they shouldn’t be judging a contest like the RITA?

If more than one of the five judges had said ‘not a romance’ maybe I’d question as to whether I did my job as an author well enough with that book. But the other four judges ranked it middle of the road or very high and all of them said yes to the questions.

Is the resolution of the romance emotionally satisfying and optimistic?

Ilavani is the first book of a trilogy. It’s still a romance. Each installment is going to (and in the case of Ilavani does) have an HEA (happily ever after) or an HEFN (happily enough for now). Those are the requirements of the genre. A book cannot be billed as a romance without having that. It’d be something like romantic suspense or fantasy with a strong romantic subplot, but it wouldn’t be a romance.

Romance *has* to have that HEA or HEFN. Ilavani does. At the end of Ilavani Mael begs Kat to accept him as he is, a prince, with this horrible burden he has around his neck (spoiler). He asks her to spend her life with him, he frees her. How is that *not* emotionally satisfying? How is it *not* optimistic? Kat is even plotting how to make sure the guys’ relationship stays strong. So it’s not even because the polyamorous aspect isn’t complete. It’s complete enough *for now*.

Does the entry fall within the category description?

The category class I entered for Ilavani was erotic romance. Ilavani is *the* most erotic piece I’ve ever written. It has so much character driven sex in it people have written to me to tell me it’s their favorite bedroom aide d’amour and it’s saved two marriages (that I know of).

Erotic. Check!

Romance… it’s all about the characters, Mael, Kat, Los, Cam, Li, and Mai. These are the two intertwined polyamorous relationships. This is a family of choice. This isn’t erotica (I have no problem with erotica, erotica is awesome, but it’s defined as *the sexual journey of the characters* NOT the *emotional journey of the characters*. Erotic romance is the latter. My book is about the emotional journey, of people falling in love when they shouldn’t while they are trying to save their kingdom as they know it. (While graphically boinking one another’s brains out in various kinky fashions.)

My book is definitely erotic romance.

I question the veracity of this judge’s answers. If it were just me, I wouldn’t make a stink, but with several other authors that I know of getting poor scores and/or the ‘not a romance’ tag for race or for polyamory, or for bisexuality… well. I think we can see the actual problem isn’t that our stories aren’t romances.

The actual problem is something far darker and much more disgusting.

It’s bigotry.

Bloodbound’s release is an emotional one for me.

On June 11, 2018June 13, 2018 By KaelenRhyIn Blog, Cover Reveals and Blog Tours, Culture, editing, Reviews, Uncategorized, Who is Kaelan?, Writing

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I have so many mixed emotions about my Debut release from a publisher.

I have books out, ones I’ve released myself. I know how to do it, but the experience of being traditionally published is so completely different from self-pubbing that I feel justified in calling BLOODBOUND my debut.

I’ve gone from frustration, to joy, to fear, to tears of joy, to terror at what people will say and think of me after reading my book to knee bending gratitude that my publisher and editor gave me the chance to get my story out there and so many other emotions that I can’t even put a name to them all.

It’s such a maelstrom of feelings.

There’s also this odd… grief… almost. With my other titles, I always have the option, if I need/want to pull them from the market or make a change if someone points out a typo or what have you. I can do that. With BLOODBOUND, I don’t have that. So it’s a lot like saying goodbye to a child I’ve birthed, grown, nurtured, disciplined and made ready for the world to see.

It’s out there now. I can’t protect it anymore, I can’t make changes to it, and I certainly can’t pull it (not that I really WANT to, that would negate the point of publishing it after all).

But there’s this odd melancholy haunting me today. It’s done. It’s finished. It is a thing complete and now I need to move on to new projects. After having BLOODBOUND front and center in my mind, off and on, since November 2016 when I started writing it. It’s an adjustment, for certain.

Moving on, in the factual sense is easy enough, I have BLOODBOUND’s sequel SOULBOUND 95% done and almost ready to send to my Critique Partners. So concentrating on that will be a good thing. It’s already past my self-imposed due date of the end of March in any case.

Emotionally though? I think it’ll take time to sink in, that my brain baby is out in the world now. That I have to say goodbye in a very real sense to that book.

There’s also a sense of hope. That BLOODBOUND will reach the readers it was written for, and maybe provide a window into what life as someone like me is like for those who don’t need it as badly.

And that’s where my ask comes in.

BLOODBOUND is traditionally published through a small press. A larger, reputable one for certain, but it doesn’t have the kind of backing a big-5 publisher can give a book if they choose to. In publishing, so much about success is predicated by marketing dollars and getting the book into the public eye. There are readers out there who will LOVE my book, who need it to see themselves on the page, but if they don’t know it exists, they can’t enjoy it.

I’d like to ask anyone who reads this, if you’ve ever learned anything from me. If you support queer people. Autistic people. Mixed-race people. Polyamorous people. Pagan people… tell people about the book. Retweet things on it, reshare on all the social media networks you’re a part of. Share its name in the fan-groups you’re part of. The book is kinky, erotic, and paranormal with vampires and shapechangers, so it’d fit in any of those groups.

If you can, please buy a copy of the book. If it’s not your kind of book, buy a copy and donate it or gift it to someone who DOES love paranormal romance. Maybe run a giveaway of the book.

If you can’t afford it, and it’s a possibility for you (or even if you can afford it, and want to go the extra step) go to your local library and ask them to order a copy of the book. That helps so much, it’ll take probably five minutes of your time to fill out the form, (and many of them are online now) but it can mean so much success for me, and it’ll help people who need that book to find it.

If you read it, please leave a review on Goodreads, Amazon, Barnes and noble and Indigo. It’s really as simple as cut and pasting your review from one place to the next, I do this all the time and it takes me less than five minutes.

Please understand a review does NOT have to be a magnum opus, it can be as simple as “I loved this book because reason.” that’s it. It helps authors so, so, soooo much.

I’m not joking when I say that reviews sell books. Aside from people reading the reviews, the number of reviews on places like Amazon decide which books get featured in their newsletter and which ones get shown to buyers browsing for books like that. Even if you didn’t like the book, or my voice wasn’t for you… please just review it. Even if you hated it, you can review it because it’ll make sure that other people aren’t getting into something they don’t want to read.

Reviewing is IMPORTANT. I can’t emphasize that enough. I really can’t.

Here’s the info for doing any and all of the above, and you have my sincerest gratitude. Now, on to SOULBOUND! (I might have to shed a few tears of goodbye for BLOODBOUND though, it’s been my companion for close to two years, saying goodbye is hard to do!)

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To buy:

I earn the most money on digital copies from the publisher, but I get the most exposure from either print or digital from Amazon, so really, purchase wherever you usually do business. There isn’t a better or worse way *for me* to have you buy my book.

If you’re thinking of getting a print copy, asking your local bookstore to order it can help a lot because oftentimes, they’ll order a second copy for shelf-stock, ensuring me two sales vs one.

Digital from the publisher

Print from Amazon

Digital from Amazon

Indigo for KOBO (digital, you’ll have to go in with the ISBN to get the store to order it, they can. If they give you a hassle, tell them it’s distributed through Ingram.)

Digital for B&N for NOOK

Print for B&N

Print ISBN: 978-1-948608-91-6

Ebook ISBN: 978-1-948608-80-0

And if you want a signed copy direct from me with the swag pack (until I run out of them!) You can send me $15.99 in US funds plus exact shipping from Canadian postal code N6J 3R5 to your location, to my paypal address and I’ll send it off to you within the next couple of weeks. (As soon as I get my box of books!) Just do me a favor and send me an email telling me you’ve paid for a copy please so I can keep track? (kaelan.rhywiol@gmail.com)

If you purchased it elsewhere and want a free swag-pack, *until I run out!*

All you need to do is send me a purchase receipt from the publisher for digital or anywhere for print to the above email address (Amazon et alli have unfavorable to the author return policies on digital books, so, unfortunately, the digital purchases aren’t eligible from anywhere but the publisher, I’m sorry.) Include your address and I’ll get it out as soon as possible! If you’re worried about how to get the book from the publisher onto your Kindle, Nook or Kobo, you should be able to email them to kindle/upload them to kindle or upload them to Nook and Kobo (I don’t use those two, so don’t know if you can email them or not.)

Thank you so much for everything you do for me and people like me. It really means the world to know that people like me have a place in publishing and in your lives.

Kaija Rayne

Category: Blog