Two years ago, I was the victim of a sextortion scam that claimed to have obtained videos of me unknowingly sexting 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 that much attention to. While I had previously used websites and platforms for sexual connection and online sex work that required users to attest they were 18 years or older (i.e., similar to 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. After more than two years of intensive mental health treatment, I have worked hard to develop better coping mechanisms. I have also committed to only using platforms with ID-based age verification, when I use these platforms moving forward, such as for online sex work.
This experience was extremely scary, and the threat of being doxed and canceled was a foundational experience for me that has informed my creative process and has directly influenced my upcoming writing and art. I have written about this experience multiple times in prior essays and deleted my words each time after a few weeks. I wanted to finally write about it here, in a direct, clear, and unvarnished way, to share the experience and how I responded from an ethical lens. I will share more about the emotional impact of what I went through via my art.
