Serving Gender Diverse People & Safety

(in 2023)

This presentation is taking place on the traditional unceded, unsurrendered territory of the Anishinaabe Algonquin People.

Who am I

• Maëlys
• Pronounced Mah-Eh?-Liss
• Butch trans girl arc: hacker in my teens, work at a start-up now
• Documenting transphobia for the last decade
• Love taking pictures of quiet moments

Antagonists

There are multiple anti-trans networks targeting local gender diverse people, organizations, and events

But the lines between these groups are blurry - they share membership, amplify each other, pass off open-source intelligence to each other

This is a partial list biased towards more immediate threats

FARTs

(Feminist Appropriating Radical Transphobes)

FARTs

• Ratio changemakers on Twitter, their social media of choice
• Protest around Canada and post transphobic stickers
• 15 or so protest in Ottawa

Convoy

Convoy

• Christian white nationalists
• Show up to intimidate those at any venue supporting gender diversity: schools, libraries, restaurants
• Have called in bomb threat to library hosting drag story time
• Willing to get into physical altercations
• Include street preachers and members of groups from the mid-2010 neo-nationalist wave like Yellow Vests which were responsible for physical attacks at Hamilton Pride and Toronto's Dyke March

Right-Wing News Orgs

(and the people who consume it)

Right-Wing News Orgs

• Fabricate reasons to hate gender diverse people
• Launders content from extremists
• Will target individuals, support groups, safe spaces, any venue that is safe for gender diverse people
• Will attack funding
• Content creators might show up to collect footage for disinformation, harass, disrupt
• Their consumers will ratio gender diverse change-makers on social media, harass profiled gender diverse people on the street, leave threatening phone calls, review bomb establishments that support gender diverse people

Right-Wing News Orgs

• National Post
• Rebel News
• Post Millenial
• Economist
• Daily Mail
• The Telegraph
• FOX News
• etc...

(This author performed conversion therapy)

Right-Wing News Orgs

Journalists at other outlets, such as the New York Times, Reuters, The Atlantic, CBC, The Guardian can pick up these stories, sanitizing them. This obscures their extremist roots and makes them sound reasoned.

Right-Wing News Orgs

Stories that fit the narrative of how cis people are victimized by gender diverse people existing / doing innocuous thing will also go international, causing further grief.

Conservatives will use this to attack sources of funding / grants. More of a threat when they're the government.

Libs of TikTok

Libs of TikTok

• Twitter account with 1.9M followers
• Advocates purging society of gender diverse people
• Targets any visible gender diverse people, no matter how insignificant they are - they will target teenagers because they shared a happy moment on social media
• History of targeting changemakers in Canada
• Their followers have made multiple bomb threats to children's hospitals, organized a terrorist attack on Pride events
• Given immunity from Twitter CEO
• Content amplified further by FOX News, FARTs, right-wing media in Canada

Libs of TikTok

• Similar to the threat profile of 4chan but with a wider audience
• They are a source intelligence for FARTs / convites / white nationalists

These groups share common traits that are pertinent when it comes to how to be safe from them

Their connections exist primarily online, versus in person, on dated social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook

There's a content-maker and consumer relationship, where only a small number of individuals come up with what gender diverse thing to rage over next

They get hyper-fixated on very specific topics and people

Rage-farming leads interactions and dissent is not tolerated

Which means they won't want to deviate from established patterns other than escalating what's already being done

Safety

First we'll talk about general good practices

I'm not going to touch on securing your website from breaches

I assume the devs among you already know about the OWASP top ten, etc.

Good Practices

Good Practices

• Do not ever re-use passwords between apps/sites
• Enable Two Factor Authentication ("send a code via SMS") on every app/site that allows it
• If a site uses password recovery questions, provide gibberish answers (I write those down on paper)
• Enable a lock screen on all devices
• Use Google Drive / iCloud to share files instead of external media, and only to a pre-approved list of individuals (no anonymous users)
• Modern phones / laptops encrypt your information, so you're safe if they're pinched
• Double-check email address / social media handle from people who contact you, to make sure it's actually them

Assess what information has already been compromised (eg. via haveibeenpwned.com)

Assess what information has already been compromised (eg. Chrome Settings)

Discoverability

Desired

Undesired Discoverability

• Remember that these antagonists tend to follow a pattern
  • ...they communicate via social media, Twitter especially
  • ...they hyper-fixate on specific keywords and people
  • ...there's few producers of original content
  • ...they're trying to appeal to peers in the US & UK
  • ...dissenting peers are quickly ostracized
  • ...they find belonging in this movement

Undesired Discoverability

• They look for keywords for the manufactured panic du jour, such as drag. This gets lots of traction because it appeals to bigots in the US and UK. That's important because social fulfilment is part of what they get out of this.
• They hate-follow high profile gender diverse content creators because going after them is proven to elicit approbation. This is also one way they learn of other gender diverse people to target.
• They attack any gender diverse person profiled in legacy media they might consume, such as newspapers. This is largely an older crowd.

The next slides are about minimizing being noticed by antagonists and making it harder for them to collect information on others

Social Media

• Use keywords in an image instead of as caption
  • Have the image include alt-text for screen readers
• Include actual names vs. @profile_name in posts
• Keep your profile private, or have a public profile without any sensitive information
• Who you follow may be scrutinized - keep follows on a public (versus private) profile to a minimum
• Your likes might also be public

Social Media

• Block, block, block
  • Some platforms have tools to mass block
  • eg. Block Party for Twitter
• Delete, delete, delete
• Get a backup account ready to if account disabled due to malicious mass reporting
• Consider dropping platforms with poor moderation like Twitter entirely

Online Events

• Publicize event, but don't post Zoom link
• Have that sent to people after they register using a valid email address
• Search Twitter / FB to see if your event is being noticed by bigots
• Don't ever share your email address - create one specific for the event if need be
• Never share phone numbers

In-Person Events

• Advertise date / time / city, but not specific address
• Require registration, and send address to registered attendees a day before the event
• Search ahead of time to see if the event is being circulated by bigots
• Do not share literature ahead of time
• Let speakers omit last name if desired
• Have guests have name tags with pronouns if you want, but not names

In-Person Events

• Provide contact or social media information that is unique to event (eg. email address just for the event, instagram account just for the event) who don't follow anyone
• Again, never share phone numbers
• Don't mention specific grants/hosts that have a single way to reach them, mention their parent entity instead with too many possibilities to be practical

• Check the information on the WHOIS
• They may contact your hosting company, registrar, and any entity mentioned
• Make it hard for them to figure out who to contact or be successful at it - though webhosts/registrars are biased to leaving you alone

Website

Google Yourself

• Evaluate what information you have about yourself online that they might use against you
  • Google your name
  • Google Image Search your name
  • Google your account names / email address
• We talked re-using passwords earlier, but what about re-using account names?
  • What other platforms do you share your account names with?
  • Dating apps, Etsy, FetLife, eBay, etc.

Mitigating Disruptions

The next slides are about what to do to mitigate transphobes that show up

• It's about not giving them the opportunity to disrupt, and immediately removing those that try
• Preferable to use platform that has a unique link to join per email address, which can then be blocked
• In large groups, only have voice enabled for those leading the event
• Have moderator receive all questions/comments privately, who can then repeat them to audience
• For smaller groups, make sure there's always someone there with the ability to block trolls
• Open voice/text chats can be great! Don't prematurely get rid of it

Online Events

• Prepare plan for how to deal with disruption
  • Gather volunteers to counter transphobes
  • Disruption outside event doors
    • Creating safe passage, using flags and music to visually/audibly block transphobes
  • Disruption inside
    • Who to call to remove them from facilities, what quip to say to those in attendance, and what alternative activity you can do while disruption is being resolved (have slide with lyrics ready! make it an impromptu exercise time!)

In-Person Events

• Wear masks, as they will be recording you
• Have a registration table that is required to access the event
• Make literature available at the end, rather than at the start
• If event does go viral among antagonists, make the response viral too - solicit community members to show up

In-Person Events

• The risk is less your site being hacked or a Denial of Service attack from anti-trans types
  • It's more 4chan / KiwiFarms that do this
• Still, store the least amount of information required about users - ask yourself if you really need to know their legal name, gender, their city, etc. when what you really want is the name they go by, pronouns, and their time zone
• Also ask yourself which of that information needs to be visible to anonymous users visiting the site, and what should only be visible to logged in users
• Never store any credit card / banking info

Website

Harassment & Threats

When it comes to harasment and threats, I don't have a good answer

Because none of the tools at our disposal are adequate

I don't think I can offer anything suggestion that you haven't already thought of

Instead, I would ask, how do you support each other after an incident?

Questions?

Discussion

False claims made to university / granting agency 

How to support victims of harassment

Thank You