My Letter to Slate Magazine: The Sady Doyle Saga Continues

You know, the funny thing that I’m learning about online harassment is that while it’s one thing to have to deal with someone purposely trying to destabilize and hurt you over social media; it’s another to have to keep dealing with them over and over again. As those of you who read my blog are no doubt aware, I had an encounter last Saturday evening with a one Sady Doyle – a writer, Wall of Shamer and someone who has taken it upon herself to smear a great number of active online socialists as abusive, misogynistic harassers.

What you might not know if you didn’t read the link however, is that Sady Doyle is herself an abuser; albeit kind of a shitty, failed one. A simple cursory read of our encounter will make it absolutely clear that Sady was trying to harass me this past Saturday – but you’d need to know that I’m post-op trans to spot the three times she tried to hurt me by unleashing subtle, bigoted attacks. I know it was Sady because while she was tweeting at me and utterly failing in her obvious quest to make me flip out somehow, someone was riffling at high speed through obscure pages of this very website for “ammunition” to hurt me; there was literally only one hit on each rarely seen page or article, including this one – a phenomenon that will be familiar to any woman who’s had someone “creep” their online presence. Silly me, I didn’t check my page hits until about an hour later that night so I didn’t realize her pointed, repeated mention of “an operation to remove the tweets” was actually a bigoted slur. I can be a little naive at times I guess.

The next day, I attempted to confront Doyle on Twitter about this multiple times – her response was to block me as you can see on the right. Mildly frustrating I guess, considering her reputation for advocating AGAINST online harassment of women – but I figure she doesn’t really see me as a woman despite the fact that I paid 30G to prove it over a decade ago. In the end tho, good riddance to bad rubbish, right? I kinda figured that’s the last time I’d have to worry about seeing Sady Doyle and that seemed like a good thing.

Imagine my surprise then when I opened up a link to a Slate magazine article this morning to find that author Michelle Goldberg has literally given Doyle a platform to criticize OTHER PEOPLE for being abusive online. I mean, don’t that just fucking take the cake? The sheer hypocrisy alone is mind-numbing but today I discovered the joy of getting angry and feeling shitty all over again when the person who was trying to literally destroy your self-worth so she could win a fucking internet argument is being ROUNDLY promoted, congratulated and SUPPORTED by the very people who claim to give a shit about online abuse against women.

Read that link again. Am I not a woman? Don’t I count Sady? What about you Slate, why would you provide a platform for online abusers to accuse OTHER people of online abuse? Do you have any idea how much damage this would do to your reputation if anyone knew? Well – now, anyone who visits this blog or my Twitter account is going to know. Shame on you Slate; shame on you for not having the journalistic integrity to do a LITTLE bit of fucking research into the people you promote with clearly NO vetting whatsoever.

Bellow I have attached a screenshot of the email I sent slateoffice@slate.com. Will they respond? Will they apologize for increasing the media exposure and ideological platform of a clearly abusive shitheel like Sady – or is that just fine because I’m a trans socialist and clearly not one of the cool kids who are no doubt, really real girls? Your guess is as good as mine, but I won’t hold my breath waiting for an answer and I can’t grant infinite interviews to other left-wing publications to help publicize my treatment at Doyle’s hands – like she can and does.

– Nina Illingworth

Edit: right now, as we speak Sady Doyle is telling everyone that what you’ve just read and seen is not transphobic bigotry, online harassment and abuse – you can see a suggestion of how she’s spinning this on the right here. These are the simple facts:

• Sady Doyle engaged in a 30 minute attempt to destabilize and harass me on Twitter
• during that attempt she absolutely admitted she was looking at my website
• someone was crawling through obscure pages on my website literally while she and I were “talking”
• there was precisely one hit on a page where I admitted to being post op trans
• Sady then proceeded to immediately make at least 3 tweets referencing “an operation to remove the tweets”
• Sady’s tone during those bigoted tweets is consistent with her attempts to mock & hurt me throughout
• Sady has only deleted the tweets that said operation on her account – almost certainly to hide her guilt
• Sady is right now lying to people about hurling transphobic bigotry and abuse at me on Twitter

Those are the facts. Do with them what you will.