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Dealing with gender critical abuse

5 min readOct 23, 2025
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People in my personal life keep telling me that social media is bad for my mental health, and I agree. The caveat is that I use it to keep an eye on the state of gender critical land, looking at how the conversation is shifting, and seeing the novel approaches they are creating to attack trans people. X is not a healthy platform; indeed, the whole point of the platform is to generate clicks and engagement, to rage bait people into keeping them suckered into the platform. Call me a masochist or just plain stupid, but for me I would rather know what gender critics are up to than shut myself out of the ecosystem and let them strip me of my rights.

For the pains of mildly calling them out on their dehumanising I get the following torrents of abuse:

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These are a snapshot of four days’ worth of abuse. I am not someone who scares easily, or for that matters cares for the putrid abuse they sling. What bothers me is the insinuation that my mere existence is predatory, and that the only reason I play my sport is to creep on teenage girls. This example shows the standard attack run on me, painting me as an abuser in waiting, someone who gets sexual gratification by being around young women:

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Rachel Saunders
Rachel Saunders

Written by Rachel Saunders

Writer, researcher, and generally curious

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