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A public service announcement for those of you in SFF circles
[Note: this is a repost of a post that was locked. I decided I needed to post it publicly after all, but people commented on the original post in the understanding that it was private. Hence the repost.]
I know there are people who follow me who are either pro writers or active in mainstream SFF fandom. This is a PSA for you guys.
There's a sci-fi and fantasy writer who goes by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, aka Winterfox, aka Requires Hate, aka a number of older pseudonyms. If you are active in SFF circles you have probably heard of her in some context, because in addition to her having stories in a number of venues, SF writer Laura Mixon won a Hugo this year for an investigative journalism blog post documenting Sriduangkaew's long history of bullying, stalking, trolling, harassing, blackmailing, and otherwise threatening and abusing people.
I haven't had any personal run-ins with her, but I know from multiple accounts from people I trust that she is BAD NEWS. The reason why I'm posting this now is because a) she recently went after a friend of mine again and FUCK THAT SHIT, and b) I noticed that after Mixon's post dropped off people's radar last winter, there was a lot of semi-successful effort on the part of Sriduangkaew and a handful of her friends to rebrand everything as a smear campaign against her because she is a queer writer of color. That's bullshit. Or perhaps I should say, either dozens of people (including people I know and like and trust) are lying about her AND someone keeps hijacking her Twitter to post smears against her favorite bully targets, or she is a lying piece of scum. I know which one I'm going with.
She has a history which includes attacking, harassing, and smearing people for years after a single thing gets them onto her radar (including things like: defending one of her other victims, writing a book she doesn't like, etc). There are also reliable reports, described in Mixon's post and also things I've heard from people I trust, of her blackmailing people into supporting and helping her, using personal details they shared with her in email before realizing she wasn't a safe person to be friends with.
She's not your friend. She's not your ally. She's not your defender. She's a person who seems to get her kicks by attacking and hurting people, which lately she has dressed up in the language of social justice (before that, she was a notorious troll, under several pseuds, on various social media going back a decade). Eventually she figured out that people would give her more credibility if she co-opted the language of feminism/anti-racism/the LGBT rights movement for her own ends. And she was right. She was so very right that she was, and to some extent still is, able to harass and stalk people openly for years (most of them female, queer, and/or PoC; she doesn't often go after anybody with abundant social capital to spend, at least not with a comparable level of vitriol).
Mixon describes her methods like this:
BS/RH begins chatter about a writer or a social-justice topic on her blog, a forum such as LiveJournal, or on Twitter. She uses increasingly obscene and insulting language against her target(s). This is done to goad the target (or their supporters, or a particular community) into responding sharply. [....] Often BS/RH will then begin to pursue the person she has decided to target, issuing multiple vituperative posts or death threats on blogs they frequent, and/or on Twitter, and/or in the online forum where she first targeted them.
She is doing this RIGHT NOW on Twitter -- dangling insults against specific targets (none of whom have approached her, bothered her, or had anything to do with her in years) to see if she can get anyone to take the bait. So far, no one has, because thanks to Mixon and the victims who were willing to come forward and allow their abuse to be documented, people are now wise to her tricks.
But once this dies down and more time elapses, people will forget, and start saying the community should forgive her and let bygones be bygones, which was also the case this spring. Pay attention to her behavior right now, guys. She hasn't stopped, she hasn't changed; she's just backed down from the worst of it for PR reasons.
And for the love of God, don't try to make friends with her, or let her try to make friends with you. I would be extremely wary of anyone who interacts with her a lot, too, or at least try not to tell them anything personal that could be used against you someday.
I know there are people who follow me who are either pro writers or active in mainstream SFF fandom. This is a PSA for you guys.
There's a sci-fi and fantasy writer who goes by Benjanun Sriduangkaew, aka Winterfox, aka Requires Hate, aka a number of older pseudonyms. If you are active in SFF circles you have probably heard of her in some context, because in addition to her having stories in a number of venues, SF writer Laura Mixon won a Hugo this year for an investigative journalism blog post documenting Sriduangkaew's long history of bullying, stalking, trolling, harassing, blackmailing, and otherwise threatening and abusing people.
I haven't had any personal run-ins with her, but I know from multiple accounts from people I trust that she is BAD NEWS. The reason why I'm posting this now is because a) she recently went after a friend of mine again and FUCK THAT SHIT, and b) I noticed that after Mixon's post dropped off people's radar last winter, there was a lot of semi-successful effort on the part of Sriduangkaew and a handful of her friends to rebrand everything as a smear campaign against her because she is a queer writer of color. That's bullshit. Or perhaps I should say, either dozens of people (including people I know and like and trust) are lying about her AND someone keeps hijacking her Twitter to post smears against her favorite bully targets, or she is a lying piece of scum. I know which one I'm going with.
She has a history which includes attacking, harassing, and smearing people for years after a single thing gets them onto her radar (including things like: defending one of her other victims, writing a book she doesn't like, etc). There are also reliable reports, described in Mixon's post and also things I've heard from people I trust, of her blackmailing people into supporting and helping her, using personal details they shared with her in email before realizing she wasn't a safe person to be friends with.
She's not your friend. She's not your ally. She's not your defender. She's a person who seems to get her kicks by attacking and hurting people, which lately she has dressed up in the language of social justice (before that, she was a notorious troll, under several pseuds, on various social media going back a decade). Eventually she figured out that people would give her more credibility if she co-opted the language of feminism/anti-racism/the LGBT rights movement for her own ends. And she was right. She was so very right that she was, and to some extent still is, able to harass and stalk people openly for years (most of them female, queer, and/or PoC; she doesn't often go after anybody with abundant social capital to spend, at least not with a comparable level of vitriol).
Mixon describes her methods like this:
BS/RH begins chatter about a writer or a social-justice topic on her blog, a forum such as LiveJournal, or on Twitter. She uses increasingly obscene and insulting language against her target(s). This is done to goad the target (or their supporters, or a particular community) into responding sharply. [....] Often BS/RH will then begin to pursue the person she has decided to target, issuing multiple vituperative posts or death threats on blogs they frequent, and/or on Twitter, and/or in the online forum where she first targeted them.
She is doing this RIGHT NOW on Twitter -- dangling insults against specific targets (none of whom have approached her, bothered her, or had anything to do with her in years) to see if she can get anyone to take the bait. So far, no one has, because thanks to Mixon and the victims who were willing to come forward and allow their abuse to be documented, people are now wise to her tricks.
But once this dies down and more time elapses, people will forget, and start saying the community should forgive her and let bygones be bygones, which was also the case this spring. Pay attention to her behavior right now, guys. She hasn't stopped, she hasn't changed; she's just backed down from the worst of it for PR reasons.
And for the love of God, don't try to make friends with her, or let her try to make friends with you. I would be extremely wary of anyone who interacts with her a lot, too, or at least try not to tell them anything personal that could be used against you someday.
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I think one of the worst things about her is how she's been able to erase and rewrite her history. I couple of years ago, there was discussion of Requires Hate for best fan writer over at Jim Hines' LJ, and a couple people objected on grounds of HORRIBLE BULLY! And I was trying to find something to link to to show what she was like, and it was awful. The Mixon report wasn't around yet, she'd deleted most of the stuff she'd said that I remembered seeing, so it was just, "I, as a random person on the Internet, with no proof of any kind, think she's a terrible bully and harasser, and that she shouldn't get an award for that." Which lacks a certain something.
Meanwhile, her supporters were there arguing that she was a poor maligned victim of a smear campaign because she dared speak truth to power. Good times.
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Well, she and her supporters are STILL arguing that she's a victim of a smear campaign, except now, thanks to Mixon and those who were willing to talk about their treatment at her hands, there is plenty of evidence that this is not so.
I can only imagine how disheartening it must have been to know some of the things she'd done and be unable to prove it because all the evidence had vanished.
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(I'm not trying to paint myself as the hero of the piece, I took like one stab at it before not finding anything and giving up.)
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If we really believe in social justice, we have to believe that women and people of color and LGBTQ people are human beings. Some human beings are vicious bullies. That means that some (well, at least one!) LGBTQ women of color are vicious bullies. Denying that, or saying that it lets the community down if we discuss abuse by people with disprivileged identities, does nothing to help the community. It fractures it by protecting abusers and enabling them to abuse more, usually within that same community. And then their victims, who often also have disprivileged identities, have nowhere to go.
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And yeah - well said. I understand that people are giving her the benefit of the doubt because the idea of the SFF community moving en masse to condemn a queer WoC is uncomfortable for a lot of people -- that it has a shitload of baggage attached. That is totally valid! And I am not going to kick anyone off my Christmas card list for having liked her, or believed her, or supported her -- lots of people did. She is an expert at knowing exactly the right things to say, and the right buttons to push.
But ... well, yes; people are people, and there's an equally insidious kind of awful to the idea that someone who ticks off the right boxes couldn't possibly be bad. (Besides, do any of us REALLY believe that, no matter how open-minded we're trying to be? How many women have actually never met another woman who was a terrible person? C'mon!) If we believe other people are people, then we know they have to be flawed and petty and sometimes intrinsically awful. Because PEOPLE.
And like you said, the victims get screwed over worst of all.
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Huh. Apparently Requires Hate has been describing me as a "literal apex predator of the privilege chain," among other things. Lovely.
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How does she have that much energy?
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At this point, however, we are full on into "I reject your reality and substitute my own." All those other guys' friends and supporters surely ALSO felt very uncomfortable about everyone moving to condemn someone they "knew" was actually a great guy. At some point, suck it up, deal with the discomfort and stop being so hypocritical.
/growling to the choir, I know. I JUST.
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