It should go without saying but I would very much appreciate if you respected my privacy during this time and didn’t go looking for any of the stuff I’m about to discuss. Just block and report these people if they come anywhere near you, or even if they don’t. They are desperate and just plain evil, frankly.
A photo of Graham Linehan, he looks surprised.
So I’ll be taking a long and impromptu social media break real soon, this after once again Graham Linehan has shared a photo of me as a child to his rabid and toxic fan base. Alongside various accusations about me as a person including claims that I have a lot of STDs? Wild. The man who wrote all the TV I watched as a child now spends his time writing lies about me on the internet. What a time to be alive.
Linehan has his own piece out about the events which led him to once again engage in harassment of a prominent transgender person he doesn’t like. Which doesn’t sit right with me, it doesn’t feel okay that the only piece out about what transpired are that of well… Graham Linehan. So before I take my leave to let the bigots seethe and simmer for however long it takes them I wanted to just quickly give my version of events.
I was minding my own business doing what I do on Twitter which is mostly just winding transphobes up, connecting with trans people, posting links to my articles, engaging in discourse™ with my fellow trankind. The usual. When suddenly and somehow I come across this profile with an absolutely astonishing banner. The picture portayed a slightly masculinised woman, probably intended to be a transgender woman, peeing up against a wall. But here’s the catch, that wall? It had the word “WOMAN” written on it in red. The rest of the image is black and white.
My Twitter post from May 20th showing @DrawingEggen’s profile. The banner is the image as described above. My caption reads; “this banner is dope but it needs more trans flag tbh”.
Now we can clearly tell this image is meant to be some sort of bullshit attack on transgender equality. I guess literally interpreted its “trans women are pissing on women’s rights”. Which is the same old “if we give <insert minority> equality then everyone else will lose something!” nonsense civil rights activists have had to push back against for decades. Equality isn’t a zero sum game because the way you choose to treat people and the legal protections we have are not a finite resource. No one loses if we stop being an asshole to trans people, except transphobes.
So me being me, I thought what better way to show I’m unphased by this clear attempt at anti-trans propaganda than to appropriate it for myself. I took the banner to photo editing Photopea which I’m sure is supposed to rhyme with “utopia” but I read it as two words, “Photo Pea”. It was a 5 minute job to crudely cover her watermark, slap a trans flag in the background with the wall lines and art shining through and finally; give the trans woman pink hair. I finished it up and set it as my new banner.
A screenshot of my tweet dated May 20th. It’s a post of the image as described above with the caption “problem solved”.
Oh boy was she pissed. Mission accomplished. I took something a transphobe did to annoy, upset or hurt trans people with and reversed it. However, I played my “no u” card too well it seems because initially transphobes assumed I had made the art and were calling me all sorts of disgusting things for having done so. Then they find out it was a transphobe who made it and the next thing you know Eggen, the artist herself whose real name is Lucia Eggenhoffer apparently, is threatening me with a law suit. No really, a law suit, for copyright infringement, over piss art!
Eggen’s legal threat, its a tweet dated 21st May 2021 and reads; “Hello, you have ‘professional’ in your name, but you are VERY unprofessional, I see. What you did is called Copyright Infringement, you have no legal right to touch my artwork with your dirty bluepinkwhite hands. I’ve just called my lawyers. REMOVE IT or I will take legal action.”
Obviously I consulted lawyers of my own — and by that I mean people I know with a legal background on Twitter because my god do I not have the money for legal fees. I got a few opinions and they were all roughly the same in that I was likely covered by the fact that I did not make or intend to use the art for commercial purposes and it probably counted as fair use under parody anyway. This is not legal advice, I am not a lawyer and I didn’t pay anyone for this information; if you find yourself in a similar situation please do not just read this as gospel.
I had had my fun and rather than drag out the joke for days upon days and I didn’t know if she would seriously attempt to sue me over it. I don’t have the time or money to be fighting pointless court battles so all in all I figured yeah. Lets just take it down now and be done with it. Eggen actually DMd me after I did to say thank you in a really weird up-your-own-transphobic-arse kind of way.
A screenshot from my DMs initiated by Eggen. Her DM reads: “Thanks for putting it down. Attack my opinions if u need it, just don’t manipulate somebody’s artwork. It is a serious thing. You could be taken down from Twitter. Just imagine somebody took and manipulated your own artwork. How would you feel?” I responded “You’re a joke”.
Honestly the stones on this lady to be literally drawing art work meant to undermine trans people’s human rights and frame us as disgusting perverts and also asking other people “how they would feel?” about anything. I haven’t even mentioned how her feed, even before I got involved, was just a paradise of harassing and doxxing trans people. There were literal threads she had made where she took our photos from our profiles, blocked us, then started saying abusive stuff about us where we were unlikely to ever see it to be able to report it.
Whereas since I got involved its largely been covered in my dox including images of me as a child and art she made where she lists my sins. Most of which are just shitposts, some of which were deeply misogynist jokes which I have already taken responsibility for, apologised and worked to do better on countless times over. But for those in the back who didn’t hear yet; yes. I came to the internet with ‘South Park’ level humour in which I thought just saying mean things to hurt people was funny; I did this mostly @ the transphobes who were in my mentions which was largely anti-trans activists here in the UK. I do not engage in this behaviour any more, I think its toxic and I was wrong to do it.
I saw some people in the comments of one of Eggen’s posts about me around the 20th/21st May indicating that she should make art of me for her e-shop. For added context, Eggen had a Shopify shop in which she hosted and sold a bunch of transphobic merchandise. This included things like t-shirts saying that supporting trans equality is making yourself into trans people’s sex toy. It also included the likeness of the infamous victim of harassment online; the game stop trans woman. Tiffany Moore’s being justifiably angry at transphobia was leapt upon by transphobes across the internet and turned into a transphobic meme itself. The point of which is “haha women can’t get angry so you must be a man” I suppose?
So I told my Twitter about this and said it was a blatant violation of Shopify’s terms of service. I told them “I’m not saying report it, but I’m also not saying don’t”. Obviously I knew people would, and probably rightly so. Again, this is someone who is literally selling transphobic harassment for a profit, harasses and abuses trans people all day on Twitter and had the audacity to threaten someone with a lawsuit for making fun of her. After posting my tweet I hadn’t thought twice about Eggen until the last couple of days where I started getting DMs about her.
My tweet May 21, it reads: “oh btw. Eggen runs her hateful ass shop complete with images of at least one trans woman shes definiitely not asked permission to sell the likeness of through Shopify whose TOS can be found here:
<Link to Shopify Acceptable Use Policy>. I ain’t saying report her, but I ain’t saying don’t.”
Apparently her shop had been shut down because surprise surprise; she was breaking the terms of service by hosting hateful transphobic content. No duh. She obviously blamed me for this and to be honest, fair, I did make the tweet. But really she should be blaming herself for it. Afterall if your shop gets shut down because you made and posted hateful content to it, in breach of the terms of service, how exactly is that trans people’s fault? Did we make you create a t-shirt comparing trans rights to becoming a sex toy? Did we make you take our likeness to further a harassment campaign against a trans person? Did we force your hand on any of this or was this all choices you made for yourself?
When you make choices, you may face consequences. Transphobia is slowly being recognised more and more in the world because we just have to keep talking about it. Ironically the attempts by transphobes to practice transphobia in society are the very seed from which the rebellion grows. The more awful and terrible they are the more people notice and start pushing back. Its a very slow process but given enough time stories like this will be distant relics of the past.
So I guess that’s where Graham Linehan comes in. Word must have got back to him and as someone who already hates me he was more than happy to once again post photos of me as a child to the internet in support of Eggen. Again, super weird that a grown up adult celebrity comedy man has photos of me from half my life ago, but you know, this is trans life in Britain right now? I guess? Linehan was already completely livid regarding an active case in Scotland in which a transphobic woman has been charged. With Linehan potentially having prejudiced the case by posting about it to his Substack likely causing the ongoing harassment campaign against the complainant who has had to leave home for their safety. So pivoting to attacking me where there’s likely no legal repercussions was a smart move I guess.
So that’s the story from my perspective. In short; I made fun of a transphobe who threatened me with legal action for doing so and then had her shop shut down because I pointed out how her content broke the terms of service, then Graham Linehan and the toxic dox crowd got involved to post pictures of me as a child for funzies. The End, hopefully?
It’s never the end. Transphobes will always find a reason to justify being angry and upset about you and everything you do. This harassment and abuse campaign against me will continue every time I do or say anything they don’t like until I stop saying things at all. There’s the real silencing of women in this conversation for you, the media won’t touch that story for love nor money though, doesn’t suit the narrative they’ve all been helping to create these last few years.
As for me? I’m off! I’m going to take a long overdue break from social media and knuckle down to get my YouTube videos up and running. I’ve got everything I need to get started just need to force myself into getting the ball rolling and then hopefully we can all learn about some trans history together. I’ll still be writing if I find any stories that are interesting enough to drop here, but I get most of my stories from trawling social media to see what other trans people are talking about. So it may be a little lighter on content around these parts than usual.
Look after yourselves while I’m gone, don’t do anything I wouldn’t. ❤
grahamlinehan.substack.com
