I am going to do a mean thing

I don’t know all the reasons I am still on Instagram, but one reason for sure is that my paternal half-brother, a dear family friend who is almost a mother figure to me, and my best friend since age eight all use the platform and for two of those people it is my only way to stay in touch with them via social media. Also, occasionally I hear from someone who follows the fan site I run. So it’s not all bad. And it’s a quick way to share photos to Facebook since I have that capability turned on. But I digress.

Anyway. Keeping in touch. So, I went over to see if any of those three people had contacted me in the last little bit, particularly important in my brother’s case since he’s been through some shit lately. And I see Best Friend has indeed sent me a message, but I can also see I’ve got one in the non-friend message requests.

I got as far as you’re going to die alone before deleting it, but the name on the account made me suspicious: Willow Athena Queen.

Wow, what the fuck is this? I thought, because my daughter’s ex-girlfriend (parted amicably; my daughter is bisexual and wanted to be a mom someday and the idea of artificial insemination grossed her out) used to call herself Willow but last I knew, she was going by “Westley” and identifying as trans herself. Could this be Willow re-identifying (correctly) as a young woman and now back to chew me a new asshole? I had to see.

(For the record, I really liked Willow and, perversely, one of the reasons I liked her was that she jumped to Thea’s defense when I put the kibosh on “affirming” her false “non-binary identity.” Her motivation was misguided, but I loved her for sticking up for my girl. Still do.)

But even if it wasn’t my daughter’s ex, I was suspicious trans was involved somewhere.

So after hitting Delete, I was immediately curious. I went to the Instagram search and tried to find the person that way. Nada. Went to Google and the URL popped up but when I clicked on it, nada. Whoever it was, they’d blocked me immediately after hate-messaging me.

Okay, cool, there are workarounds. That was Chrome. I fired up the ‘fox. Bingo.

Uh-huh.

“Willow”? More like Lump.

“Athena”? Bringing a knife to a gunfight? Nah.

“Queen”? Boy, if you gay, someone need to talk to you ‘bout yo damn brows.

Lest you think I kid:

And for the record, of course I’m gonna die alone. We all die alone, kid. Nobody gets to take a pet along. Is that what they told you? Is that why so many of you are forty-two-percenters? Nope. You’re going alone too. ALL BY YOURSELF.

At least when I die, nobody’s gonna have to threaten anybody with jail time to get them to say I was a woman.

Unlike you, ya walkin crotch-rot pocket.

…

Okay. Now I feel better.

If you go bully him, I didn’t send you. It’s not maternal concern. He looks pretty young and at that age, they can carry online grudges for DECADES. I like my peace. Thanks.

A postscript: “Why would someone just randomly send you a hate message like that?” Oh… I tend to terf it up on Threads in other people’s comments. Less often on Instagram since I don’t a hundred percent trust that platform not to boot me off, despite the recent changes in Meta’s moderation policy. (Besides, I’m currently shadowbanned on Facebook from sharing anything. Can post, can’t share. No suspension notification, just… can’t. So my suspicion that Instagram is almost as stupid as Facebook is in danger of being confirmed.) So all I can figure is doof-boy saw me at Threads (or less likely, Instagram) and got Morally Outraged. And here we be. Oh well.