Whilst playing a wordgame, I once tried to wind up a person from New Zealand by asking him to make a sentence using the words “Kiwi” and “180 mph”. He said “Kiwi fruit, if involved in a 180 mph collision, can turn into green goo.” Well, it turns out that there has been such a destructive encounter involving a kiwi, and now there’s green goo everywhere. That’s right, folks, we’re talking about the demise of that website.
Now, if you don’t already know the subject, then I’m an appropriate shade of green for this post, but Kiwi Farms was… well, it’s a long story. But for our purposes, what matters is that it was a website devoted to the cyberstalking of several vulnerable groups, including trans people. Their campaign against us as a demographic was notorious for three things: their use of tactics intended to bring IRL violence to us – such as doxxing (where the personal details of trans people, such as home address, were made public) and swatting (where a fake call would be made to the police, with the intention of provoking an armed response at the trans person’s location), their completeness (they seemed to go after every trans person who had even the most minor internet presence), and the fact that they were credited with driving several of us to suicide.
And then they picked on the wrong person. Trans YouTuber Keffals, after enduring a sustained campaign of harassment, led a campaign to get Kiwi Farms permanently disappeared. Co-ordinating efforts from multiple online communities, she put together a team which, first, alienated Kiwi Farms from every available DDoS mitigation service, so that the site had no line of defence against hacking, and then hacked them. As things currently stand, they are not even present on the dark web, and their founder has publicly expressed pesimism about their chances of ever coming back.
It’s possible that this is not the end of the story, but for the moment, I for one feel a lot safer as an online Tranny. But more importantly, this story shows that we can win. Until this happened, the conventional wisdom was that the Farms would be an eternally-present scourge on our community. But if we can win this battle, then we can win the next one, and the next, until transphobia of all kinds is reduced to green goo, and cleaned off of our windscreen forever.
Heathen Rose