A "quick" summary of the events that have been going on today. Massive content warning for suicide and other nasty shit.

On April 23rd, Rachel Bryk (@Rachell47), a member of the Dolphin Emulator development community, speedrun community, and a personal friend, took her own life.

On April 27th a site called Vocativ published an article about the suicide (http://www.vocativ.com/culture/lgbt/transgender-developer-rachel-bryk-commits-suicide/).

This article has had issues, and all day I've been trying to deal with them and the widespread effect they've had on Twitter.

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The article had misinformation, claiming the death was caused by online abuse at the hand of "internet trolls". Besides the fact that "trolling" is a really shitty thing to call online harassment and abuse, this is (as far as my personal experience with Rachel goes) not really true.

On April 23rd Rachel posted her goodbye on Twitter and I freaked out and asked her a bunch of stuff to see if there was absolutely anything I could do to fix things.

There, of course, wasn't.

I asked her why she felt the need to do this. She replied saying that she had "incurable crippling diseases", specifically "RA + fibromyalgia" (RA I assume means Rheumatoid Arthritis).

For those who are unaware here's online descriptions of the diseases (Wikipedia is awful and shows you pictures. As far as I can tell there's no pictures in the following links)

Rheumatoid Arthritis: http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/rheumatoid-arthritis/basics/definition/con-20014868

Fibromyalgia: http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/fibromyalgia/basics/definition/con-20019243

Neither are an easy thing to deal with and I imagine they're far worse to deal with in combination. When I asked Rachel about it she said she had been dealing with the diseases for 7 years and that it "Only gets worse over time".

That was the reason she gave me for her decision. She certainly dealt with a lot of other awful things including harassment, but when I asked her about her choices it came down to her illness.

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I certainly don't know the whole story or how the other difficulties she faced affected her decision, but from what I've experienced and what I was personally told by her, I don't think online harassment was the cause. It may have contributed, but it was not the cause.

This is important, because the reaction people have had to her death have been overwhelmingly about harassment. It's to the point where Rachel is no longer being treated like a person, but rather a piece of data to make a political point. This is why I've been working so hard to fix things today. This is why I've personally spoken to the writer and editor of the Vocativ piece. This is why I'm unbearably upset.

Online harassment (not "trolling", treat things seriously please) is a hugely important thing, and needs outreach and awareness dedicated to it so things can be improved. However, taking misinformation and using it as a weapon in the political agenda against harassment is not ok.

In short, I'm not ok with my friend's death being used as a tool.

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The spread of misinformation has varied from mildly upsetting to downright offensive. I saw one person share the Vocativ link and add a comment blaming it on a particular group (which I wont name) and I was absolutely furious. As if people using the death of my friend to campaign for their political agendas wasn't bad enough, now there was this asshole trying to be high and mighty and use it to support their personal distaste for a group that had absolutely no involvement with the situation. It was infuriating and endlessly disrespectful.

That said, all I want right now is for the misinformation to stop. Moreso I want people to stop using Rachel as a statistic to back up their opinions about the state of the world.

They didn't even know her. I'm really fed up with people being creeps.

Just because she was trans (as am I, for what it's worth) doesn't mean she should be part of a statistic in talks about trans suicide. Leave her be.

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In response to this whole mess I contacted the author of the post (@La__Cuen) who told me to contact the editor (@markham). Both have seemed sympathetic and I had a long conversation with Markham over Twitter's DM function about editing the piece. Hopefully a better version of the article will be up soon.

The damage is done though, and while fixing the article is incredibly important it wont change the fact that hundreds of people on Twitter are still attributing things to the wrong cause. My only hopes are that in the meantime I can undo some of the damage and spread awareness of the whole situation.

In turn it would mean a lot to me if you could spread this piece as well.

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Damning "trolls" for the loss of this great person isn't going to fix anything. Posting false sympathies for your Twitter followers to see that none of us who are affected will ever see isn't going to fix anything.

Letting us mourn and directly supporting us can help. Giving Rachel the respect she deserves in her passing can help.

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For what it's worth, Rachel was an active coder who worked on many things, and while it's a totally different coding language than what she was known for, I had to learn new things about coding to make this page... I just thought that was kind of fitting.

Thank you for reading this.

~Kiri S, @MallowyGoodness