The #MutualAid Housewives of Bluesky County

[benji]

Here's a real (ABSOLUTELY TRUE, NOT COMPLETELY FABRICATED) tale of woe from another struggling 40 year old trans woman who can't get a job:

I have been really preoccupied lately with some heavy thoughts, and I think I need to just get this out there before I can get back to being productive and properly streaming and all that, and for reasons I'm going to get into I don't have anyone I can just dump all this on so I'm shouting into the void here. If you have no interest in seeing that sort of thing, cool, skip reading this thread, simple enough. For everyone else though, hey, I have had to completely restart my entire life from scratch entirely too many times over the years, and it's harder every time.

The first time or two, are nothing particularly special I don't think. I'm a trans woman, and a big ol' nerd, so I have the same basic childhood story the rest of us have. Excelling at everything in school for a bit, gifted program, bla bla bla, but messed up violent kids have a really amazing trans-dar if only on some kinda subconscious level, so I faced some real serious violence regularly all the way through school. Thrown to the ground and kicked in the stomach, stabbed with pencils walking down hallways, pelted with rocks. Had my leg broken real bad being tossed out of a bus. Never healed right. Sexually assaulted.

Tons of property destruction too. Both my own and the school's. Books destroyed with tearing and water damage. Scientific calculators I was borrowing because yeah, I was in a scary financial situation too. No heat, food assistance, threadbare clothes etc. And I've had serious health problems, some from those circumstances, some just from bad luck of the draw, some long term disease effects. That meant I kinda needed some sort of pricy assistance devices, which the school was on the hook to pay for, which seriously ticked a lot of people off, so I never actually got those, and was dealing with a lot of abuse from administrators and teachers too. Had to jump through some serious hoops to graduate, and even then they had some 11th hour gachas like refusing to give me a diploma because my falling-apart clothes were disrespectful or whatever. Another student saw that, called it BS, and let me borrow some stuff, which was a huge deal from someone I didn't even really know. Sucked that he was about half my size and none of this fit at all, but whatever, I got out of that. Anyway, not a great experience. Left me real damn socially isolated, bit traumatized interacting with people in general and despite acing every standardized test and taking AP classes and all that, people made damn sure there was no way I was getting a scholarship anywhere. So there I am fresh out of highschool, all of one friend not related to me, no real prospects. Gotta start over.

Had to start working before I was out of school, because oh, my single parent ended up out of work. I don't want to go into detail on what I did for the next few years for privacy reasons, but I made a surprisingly big name for myself in my chosen field, was kind of a minor celebrity for a bit, got speaker engagements and stuff, and also I had a boss who was exploiting the hell out of me, shorted my pay real bad when I actually got a check, which was rare. Months and years went by when he'd just "forget" or be having personal budget problems. I got really seriously sexually harassed basically the whole time too, because hey real vulgar crap goes so far over the head of this incredibly sheltered very much underage trans girl who was a pariah at school that she doesn't even understand the sexual nature of all these comments, that's hilarious right? Anyway, stuff of mine was also stolen, I got regular violent threats, and the whole thing fell apart under really traumatic circumstances, which also included me dealing with a few people's deaths. I don't like talking about this period, and I don't generally mention it on my resume. I left that with nothing. No contacts of any kind, no means of staying in touch with the people I liked. Clean break, again.

Wound up recovering from a really dangerous mental health situation by getting laser focused on game design. I self-published a few things. They reviewed pretty well. I of course got seriously ripped off by parts suppliers left and right. Had a fun time with a shady shipping company trying to just kinda seize the entire shipment of a completed game I went into serious debt getting out there. Also had a publisher I was briefly negotiating with just straight up clone a project of mine... and someone else lift one title and all after an early con demo.

Lawyers cost money. I was, again, in massive debt. Random hackers completely nuked the page for my company and I never got it up and running again. Plus this was all pre-transition, so the name slapped on all these games is my dead name. Consequently, none of them ever go on my CV. Oh yeah, and a small game store pulled some crap inviting me out to run a demo on the promise of a big order, had me drive out across a couple states, jumped me with "oh I meant I'll take a bunch on consignment." Never got paid for those. So again, broke, nothing to show for another 7 or 8 years of my life. Welp.

I spent a few years after that writing. Tons of that were on my own websites. Hosts went under, that's all gone. Contributed to a couple anthology books as kind of a free thing. Did some games journalism stuff for a few outlets and someone's personal side project. Generally didn't get paid for any of this work either, and once again, it's all under my deadname. Also quite recently my main point of contact for all that work, who is very well-known and established in the relevant circles decided to ROYALLY screw over the staff on some of these years after the fact. I heard how it all played out secondhand, since the guy in question did not maintain or ever try to reestablish contact with me when I transitioned, but aside from once again missing out on a paycheck, I'm pretty sure I still ended up mentioned by name by other people, repeatedly, while that was all playing out, so I am almost certainly persona non grata with most of the press and industry people I knew back then. With the obvious exception of the people I heard about all this from, who are of course in that same boat.

And then of course I transitioned. Which also didn't go great at all in terms of support from anyone in my life. Several people are just straight up gone, many many more haven't formally cut ties in any way but sure as hell haven't talked to me on more occasions than I can count on one hand in the decade plus since. And of course on the medical side of things there's a bunch of stuff I really like, in an actual, there are serious health complications from me not having this done sort of way, need to have happen that I've been denied for again, over 10 years. And there's a bunch of fun hidden costs to transitioning like you know, the shape of your body radically changes so none of your old clothes remotely fit, which I've barely made any headway on.  Hell I still don't own a single bra, besides a couple people wildly guessing at my size for gifts and being dead wrong.

And then ya know, Gamergate started.

Here's me, a newly out trans woman with a ton of experience in and around games. Here's a bunch of nazis hellbent on getting any and all trans women killed, and especially focusing on anyone remotely connected to games in order to try and rewrite the history of where the term "gamergate" came from to something less embarrassing than a washed up actor getting taken in by a video from a nazi about another nazi making up the most debunkable pack of lies ever about his ex because he couldn't handle being dumped. I've lost count of how many credible threats on my life I've had to deal with, or how many friends of mine actually ended up dead. I think I can count up the number of famous losers who either personally used their social media platforms to attack me or had weird creeps running them on their behalf and doing so. Let's see if we keep it to just people who had their own major network TV shows I want to conservatively say 3? Maybe 5?

And that's not even getting into how a weirdly large number of people when this stuff was making headlines got bafflingly jealous of the people being targeted with all the stochastic terrorism, so I have this whole separate people of bloodthirsty creeps who have been trying to end me in every possible sense for 10+ years, but instead of being obvious nazis, they to this day enjoy the reputations of being cool leftist people in and around games mostly, who just happen to have a deep passion for hunting trans women for sport that everyone turns a blind eye to.

... and then there's the fact that I was doing some real legit antiterror work while all this was going on, and while I REALLY don't want to get into specifics, there's another well known well liked person out there as a result of doing that who never once paid me, subjected me to some really messed up treatment, absolutely threw me to the wolves and badmouthed me to that entire sphere of influence. A few such people, really. And that's not even getting into people who came to prominence as public figures because of the sheer volume of awful nazi crap they were dealing with, who I got to know very well as someone helping people survive that sort of thing, and later went on to become absolute frothing menaces to, among other things, the whole trans community.

So yeah I got subjected to more supremely viscious witch hunts than I can count, had my personal info leaked to nazis and TERFs. The number of friends I had back in 2014 who are even still willing to talk to me still could all fit on a single couch, and I had to straight up flee my home. Multiple times. In panicked single-day moves where I had to leave a bunch of stuff behind.

But wait there's more! Here again I need to be really vague because the game industry is very very small, and everyone talks and I'd like to be able to do SOME work in the field in the future, but shortly after transitioning I had to start my game design career from scratch again, had that actually starting to go pretty well for a bit, but wouldn't you know it, women in games get treated horrifically terribly all over the place, and trans women get it extra bad, and at some point everything just sort of converged and I'm reeling from absolute horror at stories from a whole bunch of coworkers/friends about being stalked and sexually harassed by major creeps at their companies and others, lots of huge staffing changes, major product launches, personally dealing with a real freaking creep as a direct superior of sorts, early Covid panic making my home literally unlivable and my legs being crushed, and when all the dust cleared I no longer had contact info for anyone I'd done freelancing for and also a hell of a lot of people I like & respect quite a lot not talking to me any more via some combination of not wanting to think about anyone in games for a bit/dealing with the aftermath of abuse/generally needing to keep a low profile/not wanting me getting drawn into the whole mess/not realizing I have their backs

Oh and all the Gamergate and associated but non-affiliated gang-stalking and witch hunting also pretty regularly obliterates any sort of social circle I manage to temporarily form every few years like clockwork.

And THEN of course Elon Musk went and bought Twitter, I got kicked the entire hell off the site immediately, maybe due to some nazis with particularly strong antipathy towards me, specifically, very much having his ear?

So I spent something like 2 years just kind of alone in my undisclosed location with nearly no one to talk to losing my mind and getting further and further below the poverty line. I was kinda starting to crawl back to... something with the whole Twitch streaming thing I started doing on Mondays, and got onto this site here with a new handle to avoid some of that stalker heat... and then hey here's my biggest most consistent support abandoning me, here's Twitch nuking everyone's archives completely so nobody can watch my stuff there, and Youtube's current policies making it basically impossible to get anywhere from scratch over there. Plus hey, turns out Bluesky has community toxicity levels pretty on par with pre-Musk twitter, so I'm pretty sure the day I signed up I got added to half a dozen "dangerous people" lists because the people who run those have absurdly itchy trigger fingers, reconnecting with anyone has been going real real poorly due to some combination of being semi-incognito, it being a few years, and people not wanting to reassociate with someone so... gangstalking prone.

So here I am, in my 40s, in a really sketchy housing situation I'm hanging onto by a thread. I basically can't apply for any jobs because my work history is under various names, redacted for security and full of scumbags who probably don't want to admit to how they exploited he hell out of me and could never be bothered to cut a regular paycheck, half a dozen games or so I can't safely take credit for designing, a lot of contacts in the fields I've worked in who don't want to go helping me find work because it'd upset some broken stairs in prominent spots

I basically can't go outside since I don't own a pair of shoes that aren't falling apart or the wrong size, nor clothes that don't have me flashing big ol' high beams because I didn't have this chest when I got them 10+ years ago, and it really doesn't seem like this is a climate/environment where people in general are willing to so much as plug a link now and then to help a down on her luck trans woman rebuild her entire life from scratch for the 8th or 9th time.

So I dunno. Might end up dead soon? Not really seeing a lot of paths to survival here.

In the meantime though, now that I've had a chance to vent for a while here, I guess I'm going to install a bunch of random stuff and continue to do the whole day long stream thing every Monday I'm not making a dime off with as chipper an attitude as I can until that's no longer possible.

It was taking too long to scroll back to some of their begging posts to show because they actually hadn't posted too much recently, but here's one of the examples of the unending struggles they did post: