Killing Kiwi Farms Won’t Stop Transphobia
But here’s what will.
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Kiwi Farms is an online community dedicated to mocking and harassing transgender individuals and other marginalized people. I say “community” rather than website or forum because, as of this writing, the Farms’ official online presence has effectively been banished from the Internet.
This long-overdue deplatforming was primarily the result of the #DropKiwiFarms campaign launched by Clara Sorrenti, aka Keffals, a trans streamer who was recently doxxed, swatted, and stalked around the world by Kiwi Farms forum users. See the #DropKiwiFarms website and this NBC News article for background:
Though some may claim this is a “free speech” issue, Kiwi Farms is not just a bunch of mean people saying nasty things about trans folks like Keffals and myself. These users have actively and repeatedly collaborated to make the lives of trans people miserable. Their actions drove at least three trans people to suicide. Kiwi Farms users seek to silence speech, not promote it.
I first became aware of Kiwi Farms several years ago, when an Internet search on my name revealed a thread on their forum with my deadname as the title. I likely came to their attention as a fan of Sophie Labelle, a talented cartoonist who has been subject to relentless transphobic bullying and harassment.
While I did not visit the Kiwi Farms site again, the page with my deadname continued to come up on the first page of search results for some time, until I deliberately excluded their site from my search queries. Though I have not (yet) been a target of in-person harassment by their forum users, being deadnamed is highly triggering to me, as it is to many trans people. A fellow Wikipedia editor once exploited this vulnerability while…
