Two years ago, I was the victim of a sextortion scam that claimed to have obtained media of me unknowingly connecting with a minor and which demanded money from me and threatened to destroy my reputation. While I understood this to be a scam, the experience of extortion and harassment I experienced greatly increased my awareness around issues of online safety, which I had not been paying as much attention to amidst the many other challenging things going on in my life. While I had previously used websites and platforms for dating, sexual connection and online sex work that required users to attest they were 18 years or older (i.e., like most dating apps), I now recognize that it is safer to only use platforms that require ID-based age verification to avoid the risk of unintentionally connecting with someone misrepresenting their age or otherwise using the platform improperly or in an exploitative way. I say safer because uploading your ID to an external and often unknown corporation can still result in data leaks, doxing, and other types of violence for queer and trans people.

Over the last decade, I’ve struggled with significant gender-based trauma and mental health symptoms that resulted in hyper-sexuality, and online sexual connection was one of my coping mechanisms that helped protect me from facing additional gender-based violence and other harms. After more than two years of intensive mental health recovery, I have worked hard to develop better coping mechanisms. I have also committed to only using platforms with ID-based age verification moving forward, when I do use these platforms, such as for online sex work. I wrote more about my evolving digital ethics following these experiences in an essay.

This experience was scary, and the idea of being doxed was an impactful experience. I wanted to write about the experience briefly here, in a direct, clear, and unvarnished way, to describe the experience and how I responded. I will share more about the emotional impact of what I went through via my art. This – combined with other experiences I have had – also led me to reflect deeply about my noncarceral values for responding to harm in writings such as “A Personal, Noncarceral Guide for Responding to Harm with Care,” “On Noncarceral Approaches to Responding to Harm and Preventing Violence,” and “Punishing and Shaming Individuals Is Ineffective for Social Change and Often Backfires.”