#who died and made you arbiter of fandom racism?

[lagosbratzdoll]

Many of you in this fandom overstep boundaries. When I talk about anti-blackness and misogynoir in the fandom in general and HoTD specifically, it is not your place as a white/non-Black person to tell me that “akshually, I don’t think it was anti-blackness. I think the writers were just lazy.” 

That is an egregious overstep, and it annoys me very much. Black people in fandom can have conversations about the misogynoir and we can even disagree, but where the fuck do you, as a white/non-Black person, get off? You not only insert yourselves, but you question the experiences of Black people in fandom as if you have any authority or personal understanding. 

I cannot give credence to the opinions of individuals who cannot even recognise the presence of anti-blackness in their shipping communities. There is nothing you can say that I am interested in hearing. Our conversations are not for you to intrude on, they are intra-communal and I am getting sick and tired of you lot inserting yourselves where you don’t belong.

[digoxinpurpurea2-blog]

One of my grandfathers died of AIDS complications before I was born.

There, that's my pound of flesh. You have to present those before anyone listens to you on this fucking website.

I didn't delete my tumblr because oh no I'm the Hamilton cannibal mermaid freak. I have been that for years. And, for what it's worth, I never interacted with Israa as Israa. She tried to interact with me, once, two years ago, about the intentionally dumb garbage I wrote in my spare time. I ignored her because I didn't know who she was and I didn't care.

Nah, I deleted my tumblr because you freaks kept sending me death threats and I couldn't exactly deal with that after being awake for four days and trying to manage the emotional fallout of this monster.

Don't send people death threats, you fucking loons.

This was not about fandom, because I do not orient my world around fandom. This was about my grandfather, and not just him, and not just the other people I have known who have had their lives irrevocably altered by HIV, and not just the fact that she stole money. This was about basic common decency. It's not about me. I'm not going to pretend I'm an angel or anything but I have never done anything like this.

But this is not about me.

The person behind hivliving, Alix McLiar:

1. Lives in a $500,000 waterfront house in a wealthy suburb in the US with her married and very wealthy parents, both of whom have terminal degrees in the sciences

2. Goes to a prestigious private out-of-state university on a merit scholarship worth approximately $250,000 over four years. Or maybe not. Maybe she got kicked out. Still not sure. Her school has been contacted multiple times by multiple people, and the chief of police of her university told me that she would be punished appropriately. I believe, at least, that she's no longer involved in the school's anti-racism groups as an administrator, and I know that her advisor knows, and that the head of the diversity office knows, and that her friends all know and have completely stopped talking to her. Rephrase: she went to a prestigious university while this was going on, majoring in a healthcare-related field.

3. Went to one of the best high schools in the United States

4. Started racefaking on the internet early in her senior year of high school, possibly earlier - she was 17 at the time and is 19 now

5. Vacations internationally with some frequency

6. Is white and cisgender and REALLY FUCKING RICH, meaning she definitely used the money she got as “Israa” for drugs or something

7. Is probably going to do this again

She used the following identities:

1. Israa, Liar Prime - bigender bisexual Chinese-Pakistani 19-year-old, from the China-Pakistan border (once or twice specified as westernmost Xinjiang), HIV+ after being trafficked into sexual slavery by her parents as a young teenager, Muslimah, hijabi, once had her eye popped out of its socket after someone found out her HIV status, once raped and robbed by police at gunpoint, pregnant, miscarried, married, living in India with her wife - blueskysapphic/hivliving/angischuyler

2. Muk(h)ta (she spelled it different ways) - Somali, Catholic, raised in America by her American father who was implied a few times to be a diplomat of some sort, 18, trans woman, lesbian, married to Israa, trafficking victim, not HIV+ - thewarsnotdone

3. Naj, American lesbian POC (never specified other than that), congenitally HIV+, fairly active in ace discourse -allolesbean/hivliving

A bonus identity discovered while investigating:

4. Alix, Lebanese Jewish lesbian, self-identified as an Arab, from Lebanon, living in the states for college - lesbianeclipse

(the Jewish community in Lebanon numbers about forty, by the by. She's fond of doing this)

Israa lied a fuckton but she didn’t just pop out of the blue. She had put together the biracial trafficking victim persona before she started posting her fic. She had convinced other people of this persona before she started writing fanfiction - named the wife, picked out Chinese and “Muslim” names (yes she called Israa her Muslim name), found a beta for her fic, made up a backstory. 

And it wasn’t just hivliving that she was involved in. Israa and friends' modus operandi in fandom was to declare someone a pedophile over fanfiction, sic followers on them, threaten to dox them, force them to divulge (often sexual) traumas, and then use those traumas to harass them into self-harm. She did this multiple times, mainly to young gay teenagers and young trans men and young impoverished women. Some of those people did self-harm. And she knew it. And she kept on bullying, and told anyone who said “Stop it” that how DARE they, she is HIV+, she can do this.

And, given that Israa and her crew placed so much emphasis on IP address hits to Tumblrs as "stalking," it is absolutely impossible that none of them - including the one who followed her on her "Lebanese Jewish" tumblr and Facebook-linked twitter - did not know. This was a squad of teenagers dedicated to threatening and sexually harassing rape victims over fanfiction, with their core defense being 'Israa has been much more traumatized than you, by people like you, and she's protecting other people by hurting you.'

Yeah, no. Weirdly enough, most trauma victims don’t go out of their way to tell victims of child sexual abuse that they should kill themselves.

Israa used the social capital and following she gained being a moral arbiter and Teller Of Wise Truths About HIV in fandom (she and her crew also picked on an HIV+ member of the Hamilton cast on Twitter such that I believe he blocked them, by the fucking way) to start hivliving. 

The person behind Israa is not Muslim. Or Jewish. Or HIV+. Or Somali. Or biracial. She was not trafficked to another country by her parents. She grew up wealthy. It was incredibly obvious she was not who she claimed she was. A basic knowledge of geopolitics would have nipped this shit in the bud literally years ago, because nothing Israa said made any sense. This should have been caught day of. Other people knew and let it ride because it’s fun to cloak your repulsive behavior in the language of social justice to get away with it. Other people should have figured it out.

Point by point:

1. Language

Israa claimed to speak Chinese and Urdu natively and English, Spanish, and Kannada as second languages. She exclusively used English on her blog. She learned English as an adult and yet had absolutely perfect grammar, spelling, mastery of American slang, etc. Is this impossible? No, of course not, but learning a second language as an adult - especially in a non-immersion environment, especially one from an entirely different language family, presents a ton of difficulties. I am currently learning a second language in a non-immersion environment. Writing and reading are easier than speaking, sure, but they do not come easy.

Israa wrote like a native English speaker. She never made the mistakes in grammar or spelling common with people learning English from Chinese. She never had slightly odd turns of phrase borne from not grasping all the tiny nuances of a given English word. She never had an accidental character inserted when she forgot to rotate the language on her keyboard. (I rotate keyboards. Lemme tell you, it happens frequently.) She used British spellings pretty consistently, but not British or Indian English phrasing. Her slang was all American, young, Tumblr-approved. The media she talked about was almost all in English, minus one Chinese-American film and one Chinese novel available in English translation. She never used Chinese or Urdu on her blog, except to write brief greetings or her name. She never talked to anyone in Chinese or Urdu or Kannada. Her punctuation was completely American. She never, ever forgot a word.

This person, from a family poor enough to knowingly traffick a child into sex slavery, was fluent in 4-5 languages, presumably literate in at least 3 (meaning she could effortlessly cycle between 3, possibly 4 different writing systems) and somehow so fluent in a language she had started learning only two, three years before that she was indistinguishable from a native speaker.

How?

How was her English so native-perfect after only two or three years?

Because she didn't only have two or three years to build on. Because she was a native speaker. Duh.

2. Offensive racial stereotypes

Israa consistently presented herself as from western China, right along the China-Pakistan border. Never specified city or town, presumably because Alix was not invested enough in the character to pick a random town name off of Google Maps. She also once posted about her family having a dispute about the family rice farm.

There is almost no rice agriculture in extreme western Xinjiang. Not none, but almost none. Too arid.

But rice, China, right?

Also, bit of a digression as the character could have started wearing it while not living there, but about wearing hijab in Xinjiang: it's not exactly legal, right now. Crackdowns on specifically Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang have been front-page news in major English-language publications for years. Crackdowns on Hui Muslims (the ethnic group she occasionally claimed to be a part of) are less common, but they happen. And, of course, not all Muslim women wear hijab...but all Muslims are the same, in Israa-world. Speaking of.

Israa claimed that she had relatives in Gaza and that she did medical research at a clinic in Gaza under the auspices of her university.

1. How did she get a passport? It would have to be either a Pakistani or Chinese passport. Traveling from India to the Gaza strip on a Pakistani passport would be, shall we say, extremely difficult. It would be difficult for her to acquire a passport in the first place (did she have any documentation before she was trafficked? After? She was trafficked into India and India repatriates trafficking victims. Presumably she would have been repatriated to China. Would she, an HIV-positive member of a Muslim ethnic minority breaking the law in Xinjiang, be allowed to acquire a passport? How would she afford a passport? etc) 2. How would a 19-year-old non-medical student undergraduate receive permission to enter the Gaza strip, especially if she was traveling on a Pakistani passport? 3. Current Israeli law gives the Minister of the Interior the right to deny access to Israel (and thus Palestine and Gaza) to any HIV+ alien or migrant worker. Presumably Israa counted as an “alien or migrant worker,” so how did she get into the country to travel to Gaza in the first place? 4. Did Israa not realize that Pakistan and Palestine (and China) are culturally very dissimilar because they're in very different parts of the world? This is another China = rice moment. Alix assumed that all Muslims are the same? How would the aforementioned impoverished ethnic minority family be wealthy or mobile enough to have relatives at the other end of the continent?

I'm pretty sure her logic there was "Chinese Muslims are oppressed, Palestinians are oppressed - basically the same, right? Family!"

Oh and by the way she seemed to not remember if her family was based in western Xinjiang or in Karachi. She had sisters living in Karachi at some point and then she told me and, apparently, told quite a few other people, that she would be moving back to her loving parents in China soon after graduating university, at the age of 19.

Her parents who trafficked her.

Hokay.

Oh and besides the 80s high school AIDS crisis AU fic she wrote a lot of seriously offensive “Muslim AU” fic that trafficked in a lot of incredibly harmful and racist tropes about Muslim women but I said I wouldn’t mention fandom

3. Her wife

Mukta/Mukhta - Somali, Catholic, raised in America by her American father, somehow ended up in India as a trafficking victim, monolingual in English. She implied a few times that her father was some kind of diplomat. Muk(h)ta married Israa and they lived happily together as an interfaith couple, doing such coupley things as packaging Christmas care packages at Muk(h)ta's church and having wanted pregnancies.

1. As far as I can tell, Mukta and Mukhta are not Somali names, and if Muk(h)ta was monolingual in English wouldn’t she, like, spell her name in the Latin alphabet consistently 2. There are approximately 100 Somali Catholics. (Like I said, she liked doing that.) 3. An American-raised child of a diplomat being kidnapped (?) and trafficked for sex in India would have made international news. I CANNOT STRESS THIS ENOUGH. IT WOULD HAVE BEEN INTERNATIONAL NEWS.  4. Legal gay marriage does not exist in India. I wouldn't bring this up, people can call their partners whatever they want in the absence of legal recognition, but Israa made a distinction between "wife" and "girlfriend" and talked about having a wedding in a religious space, so - 5. How were two married female teenagers living together with apparently no problem in Bengaluru? 6. Muk(h)ta and Israa ended up in the same brothel together after being trafficked and one day decided to take the bus out. TO WHERE. HOW DID THEY GET THE MONEY. How Israa talked about the brothel was completely bullshit too and seems to have been based on legal brothels in Australia or Nevada - personal amenities, private bathrooms, private rooms, et cetera. 7. Again, India repatriates, or attempts to repatriate, known minor victims of trafficking - so why were either of them still in India?

Oh also Muk(h)ta's blog literally only talked about how awesome her wife was and Hamilton and she almost never interacted with other people by herself and she would have had the same non-Bengaluru IP address as Israa (same blog organization, frankly, as allolesbean), so -

4. Being a student in India

Israa insisted she, a Chinese (and?) Pakistani national, was a science student at a university in Bengaluru. She would not have been able to do this without documentation and you have to apply for a student visa in India outside of the country.

So:

1. Again. How did she acquire a passport? 2. How did she prove her residential address outside of India? 3. How did she put together the money to pay student fees? 4. How was Muk(h)ta living with her in the interim, if Muk(h)ta wasn't an Indian citizen? 5. How did she overcome the language barrier in either English or Kannada in enough time to start studying science? 6. Where was Muk(h)ta during the application process? In China? In Pakistan? In India? How?

6. The pregnancy

Jesus Christ where do I start

Israa always, always insisted that Muk(h)ta presented as a woman, was understood as a woman, etc, and the pregnancy was expected and wanted - the old ladies at church (who 100% accepted her) cooed over her baby bump.

Two AFAB people and their magic desired child baby bump. 

NO 19-YEAR-OLD HIV+ PERSON IS GOING TO RECEIVE IVF. ANYWHERE. EVER.

When someone pushed back on this, she started insisting that Muk(h)ta was a trans woman, taking hormones, and then later she conveniently miscarried.

1. How did Muk(h)ta access hormones? 2. How did Israa access her HIV medications such that she was fine with having unprotected sex (she stated a couple of times that she and Mukhta were a serodiscordant couple), and/or how did Mukhta access PrEp? 3. Why would two impoverished teenagers living on student visas (and it had to be student visas as, again, India repatriates foreign trafficking victims) plan to have a baby? 4. How did Muk(h)ta, a devout church-going Catholic living in India, safely and successfully navigate as a lesbian trans woman married to a Muslim woman such that her church accepted her and the pregnant partner unconditionally? 5. Same question but about Israa and Israa's mosque, which she apparently attended regularly 6. If the child was planned, how did Muk(h)ta, a young (17? 18?-year-old) trans woman on hormones, access the healthcare that would have assured them both that her hormones weren't interfering with her fertility? 7. How did Israa access neonatal care? 8. How could they afford all of this and yet Israa needed to ask for donations on hivliving to deal with vague miscarriage-related medical bills?

And on. And on. And on.

Am I saying it's impossible for someone to learn a language quickly, or to be Pakistani and have relatives in Gaza, or be a victim of trafficking, or be a lesbian in India, or any of the other things she claimed separately? No, of course not. I'm sure there's actually someone who is very like Israa out there, minus all the lies.

I'm just saying - are you fucking kidding me? Are all of you so illiterate about how the entirety of the world works that this bullshit was allowed to pass unchecked for two fucking years??? Are all of you so illiterate about how the world works that no one wondered why a person with this background would be spending her internet time primarily writing god damn Hamilton fanfiction??? Yes, you are, because instead of putting together this incredibly obvious idiotic racist garbage in a post to point out the many insane consistencies, I had to wade through the goddamn cash.me terms of service LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER SHE STARTED DEFRAUDING PEOPLE.

And that was obviously not the only time she'd demanded money, she just deleted her tumblrs before I could find the "friend's paypal" she had used earlier on blueskysapphic/angischuyler.

Did she ever talk about living with HIV in any meaningful way? Did she ever talk about it in a way that wasn't just yelling about not blaming asexuals or complaining about people twenty years older than her not using Tumblr-approved phrasing or whatever? Did she actually do anything with hivliving besides reblog things other people had posted and tell people to pm her for more information? The real Alix is a 19-year-old college sophomore who is so stupid about public health that she told people RENT is a good introduction to the AIDS crisis in twenty god damn seven teen and told me that she checked herself into a hospital for narcissism (spoilers: there's a huge lack of beds in psychiatric hospitals and no psychiatric ER is going to admit a person not immediately in danger, especially not for NARCISSISM). She had absolutely nothing of value to contribute. She was clearly not talking from a place of expertise. She did not sound like she knew anything about anything and what she did regurgitate was highly Americanized. If her value as the person who ran hivliving was as an HIV+ pregnant married nonbinary non-American trafficking survivor, then it should have been obvious earlier that she was none of those things.

It is not difficult to figure out things like it is costly and difficult to move between countries, or that midcontinental aridity precludes heavy-water-using agriculture, or that adults who are learning English as a third or fourth language from a non-Germanic language will have quite a bit of trouble with grammar and vocabulary even several years in, or that a nineteen-year-old bigender woman-aligned person would have difficulty living safely with her wife anywhere, or that it’s nigh impossible that a person holding a Pakistani passport could get to the Gaza strip, or that most Somalis are not Catholic.

BASIC KNOWLEDGE. BASIC COMMON SENSE. BASIC GEOPOLITICS. A few hours on Wikipedia could have thrown all of this into the garbage. 

Why did any of you believe this garbage?

Easy! Because:

1. Tumblr fetishizes oppression, especially that of trans people and Muslim women, and Alix made herself a persona that hit every jackpot possible 2. Tumblr consumes only fanfiction and thus elevates it to an insane level of importance in culture, therefore fights over fanfiction content are actual justice (it's not that fucking deep) 3. Tumblr has an extremely warped understanding of social justice theory and abuse dynamics 4. Tumblr refuses to absorb any news or history besides that which is presented on Tumblr 5. Alix was so prone to leading harassment mobs that any pushback would lead to more abuse 6. Tumblr hates gay men and would rather listen to an obvious bullshit artist than anyone the community that is primarily affected by HIV

Really can't stress that last one enough. REALLY can't. I remember some big name ~tumblr LGBT-community famous~ blogger telling their thousands of followers that the pogrom against gay men in Chechnya wasn't happening, partially because they were so stupid that they didn't know how to click through on tabloid publications to the serious reporting done by actual journalists, but mostly because Tumblr has decided that gay men aren't oppressed and AIDS is over or some bullshit.

At least five people, five men, five GAY AND BI MEN, came to Alix with their status, begging for help. She fed them garbage and lies. She looked them in the face and decided she would continue with this monstrousness and you just fucking let it happen and then you made it about fanfiction because you don’t understand that there are things way beyond fandom. She was a psychopath who OPERATED IN FANDOM and 15 years ago she would have pulled this shit on the TWOP boards or the scarleteen message boards or neopets or something.

God, fuck all of you.

I have a tiny bit of money spare this month. If you send a receipt of a donation to an HIV/AIDS-related organization of your choice to thatwhichechoes@protonmail.com, personal information redacted as you so choose, I'll match it, multiple its, for a total of $50 from my end. If that doesn't happen by February 15, I'll just send it all to one of my choice. I can hold a couple bucks spare each month so that, God willing and my rent don't rise, I can consistently send to Rainbow Railroad or my home LGBT center's HIV/AIDS program.

Nothing is going to fix what she did and she's never going to get held to account in the way she should but I'm going to post receipts every so often anyways because I am nasty and angry enough to care about other people. I am angry enough to do penance on her behalf. I have been furious and horrified and sick about this ever since I found out and dealing with her vileness has caused actual tangible harm in my life but again, it's not about me, and I'm going to remember that even if you motherfuckers won't.

I would seriously advise anyone under the age of 21 to get the fuck off of this website and go learn how to communicate with other people in a healthy manner. Go outside! Interact with other people in the real world! Read a book. Read a fucking newspaper! Learn about the world. Or you can stay here and burrow in the echo chamber and become credulous fauxwoke racist homophobic morons who prioritize calling other teenagers pedophiles til they try to kill themselves because Steven Universe or something over doing literally anything that could help the world. Your choice.

The rest of you: comport yourselves like normal fucking human beings for once in your fucking lives and sort out your goddamn priorities. Read a fucking newspaper. Stop giving obvious racist fraudsters like medievalpoc and Israalix the benefit of the doubt and actually think about the information that is being presented to you and then maybe do something more useful with your time than getting into internet fights. For example, I organized an auction in my spare time that, with the help of another lovely person and dozens of wonderful donors, raised $3,917 for various charities over six months, including $200 for GMHC and about $75 for an HIV/AIDS organization in Wisconsin. Go do something similar or get off the fucking internet! It’s 2018! You’re adults! Try tangibly helping other people, at some point, instead of engaging in this terrible narcissistic performative circlejerk where trauma has become a cudgel to beat others!

If any of you do anything like this again I will find you and I will fucking destroy you. That is a promise. 

Go to hell.