A few days ago I tweeted a response to somebody posting on the Gamer Gate hashtag, in which I insinuated that they were a straight white male person masquerading as a minority woman. They posted a picture which seemed to prove that they were not, and apparently Reddit got wind of it, because for the next day or two I was inundated by hundreds of the meanest, dumbest, most awful things that have ever been said to me on Twitter.

It quickly got to the point where locking my account was the only thing that seemed to slow the avalanche down, if not stop it completely (as it turns out people who you don’t follow still show up in your @-mentions even if your account is locked, which really should, at the very least, be a switch you can toggle).

I’m opening my account back up, though, because after the initial shock of this deluge of crap, and my knee-jerk reaction to just hide under a blanket until it all passes, I’ve realized I don’t want to give these assholes the satisfaction. I don’t want them to be the reason I’m not using Twitter the way I want to.

And also, because I’m constantly humbled by people like Zoe Quinn, and Jenn Frank, and Leigh Alexander, and Anita Sarkeesian. And if they can continue to live their online lives in the face of the unimaginable, unending litany of hate that they receive, then I can tweet from a public account that gets a couple of hundred idiotic @-replies over a weekend.

I do want to address something serious here, though, and that’s my initial reaction to the woman that started this whole thing. Jumping to the conclusion that she was a straight white guy based on the way she tweeted showed poor judgement, and it was a shitty thing to do. I’d like to apologize to that person for doing so.

After all, if I’ve learned anything from this whole situation, it’s that not only straight white guys have rotten, worthless opinions about things.

Anyway, I’m back.