[Editor's Note: the following is an unflinching cry of sympathy in the face of hate. It involves trans and mental health issues and suicide, and horrifying events that result from ignorance involving them. Please read at your own discretion]
I’m covered in chemical burns. I’ve got stubble and it’s pouring rain. My roommate is taking me to Seattle in her charming piece of shit car and I wonder if the rain will let up. Usually I ask her to bring my makeup, a change of clothes and my breastforms. However it’s my first time at this place, and we’re strapped for time already. I’m on the way to Pike Place Market Clinic. We’re going to see if I can get some medication for depression and likely find out the stupid fucking hoops I have to jump through to be proved competent enough to get on hormone replacement therapy pills. Staring down at the phone, I’m perusing Twitter and made aware of a story that immediately grabs my attention.
The words that pop out are “crowdfunding” “transgender outing” and “suicide”. There was a time when that would’ve been enough to catch my attention. It wasn’t. There’s a contingent of people I know who often publicly talk about their suicidal ideation on a regular basis. In great, explicit detail. It is tied to their conditions in life, and in part to a world that is hostile to them. There is also the matter of depression being tied to issues they face in regard to their identities, and their constant battles.
I see it so often I feel there’s almost a set of blinders I passively set up. The hell of severe depression is that there’s a lot of things that can compound it. Friends, loved ones and strangers on the brink.
I finally get something resembling concrete information in the way of this thread: A young woman named Chloe Sagal has committed suicide on a live stream at Twitch.TV.
What she presumes to be her final words tear into me, and my eyes well up. This has happened too many times already. The ability to even force the tears is beyond my capability, and all that’s there is anger and a faint sense of a bond, of knowing that bleak language of finality.
I’ve failed.
I’ve failed at everything I love, I’ve even failed at saving myself countless times, all because I’m a coward.
If it wasn’t enough, everyone was quick to tell me that I had failed, as if no one else had bothered to tell me. Constantly barraging me over and over and over, as if I needed to know.
Just keep telling yourself that I’m just a drama queen, and I don’t know what pain is. It hurts so much, and I’m tired of feeling it. I’m tired of being afraid of everything, I’m tired of wearing this mask that kills me everytime I take it off.
Everyone has to be so sure of themselves, and would rather subject someone to a lifetime of pain than to bend just a little bit.
I don’t care anymore.
[...]
I don’t know what else to write. I’m tired of talking.
If you’re sick and want to watch my final moments,[Ed. here Chloe posts a link to her Twitch TV channel]
How does someone get to this point? At present it’s vague as to whether or not she’s still alive. Most information isn’t actually verifiable save whatever information that thread says is the truth. There’s talk of her being stable and in the hospital.
What do we know?
The Wikipedia Entry for Chloe Sagal concisely states her relationship with the development and rationale for creation of Homesick as such:
Around the year 2009, Sagal is alleged to have been severely injured as the result of a car incident. According to Sagal’s account of the incident, she was immediately given surgical treatment and appeared to make a full recovery from the incident. However, it was later discovered that an unknown piece of metal remained inside of her after the incident, presumably a piece of shrapnel. As a result, Sagal was suffering from metal poisoning and other medical complications, and was told by her doctors that a surgical procedure was urgently needed to remove the object. However, Sagal lacked the estimated $29,000 needed to pay for the surgery, and her insurance would not cover it. She decided she would create a product to request donations alongside of, in order to raise the needed money.
The use of “alleged” is where the story gets murky. An Indiegogo campaign was created on her behalf for this surgery, on the premise it was getting more dangerous. It was then taken down and created again by Chloe herself. It recieved a lot of buzz from gaming sites, asking to help in a surgery that would save her life. In Sagal’s own words, “I am suffering from metal poisoning, I need this shrapnel out of me before it kills me.”
Indiegogo later took the campaign down due to issues of legitimacy, but after communication with Sagal it was put back up. Indie game developers threw in on the effort, and on April 10th the campaign successfully raised enough money for the surgery. Shortly thereafter it was gone.
Gaming news outlets then followed up, saying Indiegogo has protections against fraud and stating that contributors had been refunded.
At this point it persists and vague fallout coalesces across gaming sites. On May 5th she responds to questions on Indie Stone’s forums , a game developer that raised about 4000 dollars or so for the fund by contributing sales from a game. She takes issue with the way Indiegogo handled her case, reveals how the response to her gender expression breaks her heart, and reiterates the truth: “yes, I am still dying, and yes, I am in an extreme amount of pain.”
I think the thing that breaks my heart the most is that there were a good amount of people here who explicitly stated that they did not care if I was scamming people or not, that they had a fantastic game that I gave them for free and they had no problem donating based on that. To see them to a complete 180 with only the suspicion that I was scamming… It just hurts a lot. To make matters even worse, there are several people who made said comments that still did the same move even when they knew the entire story, and knew that I didn’t scam anyone. But I will chalk that up to me being frantic and explaining things like an idiot as usual.
But spoiler alert, I don’t care anymore. I’m giving up. I’m going to let the clock run out, but I feel I should at least get to explain myself before I do. It is too painful to live in this life, and while some people may accept my problems, I highly doubt anyone will really understand. It is impossible to feel empathy for something that rarely any person gets the opportunity to feel, and the lack of being able to find someone who is empathetic is what makes this situation impossible to deal with. So, please, continue to feel righteous and tell yourself you know exactly how I feel and that you still would have done things the way you feel they should have done. I already hate myself, I have for a long time. I mean, hell, I made a game where you are more than likely able to see myself being brutally murdered several times, it should have given some people some clues into how worthless I really feel. I miss my family. I don’t deserve to be living.
The allusions and purposefully vague mentions in addition to the abject shame take me aback. A situation where someone has little to no avenues, and now nothing to show for, can only go terribly, and she’s about to show us. People had been scrutinizing her intensely as a result of a video she posted initially linking to more aggressive donation and try to out her as transgender. She relates this in response to a later post on the thread:
dinosaurJR wrote:
If others are making you feel bad about how you choose to live your life, well, it is them with the problem – not you.
please get some help!
Chloe’s response was:
I tried to get help, and now this is what I wake up to:
And these are some of the more tame ones
It culminates in the the final words in the opening of this article, and 18 minutes of streaming what could be her last moments on Earth.
Not content with these events likely creating a corpse, Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid makes the odd decision of making the speculative outing of Chloe Sagal A Very Real Outing on Twitter. His exchange with Pixiemania of Twitter is the stuff of wrongheaded due dilligence legend.
In this exchange (which, I believe is currently deleted as it is fucking embarrassing) he is not only guilty of gatekeeping Chloe’s decision to deal with and face her critics on terms she sets as it involves very real consequences and extreme danger which can look like violent reprisal, he is also guilty on many counts of not fucking knowing how pronouns work, and is completely ignorant to the fact he does not get a choice in how Chloe refers to herself in her personal and private life. Which codifies why I’m recounting this in slow, and clinical language given how upsetting this can be as a subject.
After discussing this, and receiving very due criticism given his having all the nuance and responsibility of a pack of feral dogs, he goes on to respond in what he believes is even handed language :
I hate that I had to out her nature and troubles, but I hope you can see now that I couldn’t not mention these things if I were to tell the truth. I didn’t want to make up lies to protect her lies. That’s not who I am as a professional or person. If she had listened to her teacher and not put herself in the public eye, this never would have happened. I hope someone somewhere learns something from this.
Now, given the lack of self-awareness this guy has, I’ll wager there are easily many facts that elude him regarding why what he did. outing her to he public, what unequivically wrong. Any sort of employer can fire her legally or illegally at their discretion with this knowledge. She has a one in seven chance of being murdered. Compound that with the fact trans women have an average life expectancy of the age of 27.
Was she wrong for threatening suicide? I am no doctor, but after spending hours pouring over this shit and looking at my own life I can’t understand where she’s coming from. Not in a punitive way. I’ve been privileged. My family has supported me emotionally, financially and I’ve seen a lot of America despite horrible circumstances. It hasn’t all been bad, but it’s been tough. I’ve been to the brink, but I had people ready to catch me.
What kills me is the imagery.
A piece of shrapnel was killing her.
I feel the car crash was reconciling and gaining an understanding of identity post-adolescence. The metal was the facade she held up while holding down shitty jobs. The erosion and poisoning of daily interactions. You’re looked at as a monster, or a joke. You lose people. You might get to interact with some people in a situation that isn’t inherently hostile to you.
She was using the only language people would latch onto and care about as it’s easier to be dying and receive help in America than it is to be dying from not being who you are in America. She was chased in this maze of familiarity, in the dark of America’s True Face.
The killer never does relent, pulling apart any desperate attempt at doing something, anything to survive. An internet culture that in essence crucifies Chloe for being a shitty scam artist never had to deal with the gatekeeping she so obviously had to throughout her life. Returning donated money was more important than a life. If she is the wolf gnawing off her limb to survive, Allistair and The Dipshit Detectives Of Reddit are the hunters proudly hoistening a cinderblock above their heads ready to peform some perverted notion of justice.
Allistair’s framing is telling of this notion of gatekeeping that had to have drove her to this point.
Now, Chloe is in some hospital. She will eventually know that we know she is a liar, a scammer, and transgender. I hate that the truth came out, and I hate even more that she would risk all of this after her friends, myself and her teacher told her not to. She just didn’t trust that people would support her for who she is. I told her I do and I still do. Even after the awful things she has done — scamming good people and broadcasting her suicide — I have a place in my heart to help her.
Thank you, Allistair for having the strength to tell her who she is and having the courage to put aside how terrible she is as a person informing her that coincidentally you’ve allowed to be transgender. Hell, maybe if she isn’t dead she’ll figure that out too! Fucking watch out Superman, because Das-Uber-Ally has blazed a trail for all of us to follow!
What angers me most about his outing of Chloe wasn’t really the ignorance. He does it under the guise of sincerity and invokes very real imagery of discussing suicide and talking her down. Now, my definition of discretion may look very different from yours but I can’t help but think purposely making the point to explicitly state she was transgender instead of doing of saying something along the lines of “It was fraudulant, and I wish to share nothing else given the sensitive nature of this predicament out of respect to its very volatile nature” smacks of speaking to a different audience. He wanted to appeal to the peanut gallery of scumbags and “confirm” their suspicions.
He wanted to cover his own ass. This is the highest cowardice. If she spoke in confidence, you don’t break confidence. If it was handled with IndieGogo, it’s their perogative to handle it how they see fit. If Destructoid was put in a difficult position, it’s not your decision to make for them.
The ability to say something should be tempered with the wisdom you can keep your big fucking mouth shut too.
I don’t pretend to know everything about her life, and I won’t pretend a lot of what I believe to truly be her situation is speculative. You have to understand these terrible narratives have very similiar recurring threads. I believe Chloe did none of this out of malice. She was desperate and beset by evils and made her choices based on the knowledge that she’d die if she didn’t get SRS. It is necessary for those who need it, and that internal conversation evolves differently for everyone identifying as transgender women. Some never get it! Some kill themselves as a result of not getting it. Some are killed for having got it! This is the world Chloe, myself and others live in. The choices and agency we get in life aren’t entirely left to us. She did what she had to in a world inherently bent on not letting her do what she has to.
Who the fuck are you to judge? I hope you’re never in that position, where the only choice you have is the worst one, and you’re converged upon. I pray you never know the pain of desperation, and the pain of being beaten on a noose the world casts around your neck. I’ve done some fucked up things in my life, but I wouldn’t wish that on my worst enemy.
Chloe, I never knew you. I never played your game. After all of this, I don’t want to. I look down at my hands, and my knees and all these new scars I’ll have from this chemical plant where I work. I am berated and made to feel as an outcast, and when I thrive in this environment it is because I am forced to act like a scumbag I’d detest. As someone’s idea of what normal is. The choice is made for me. Each decision I make drives me deeper into the maze and I’m scared when I’m not angry.
I know why you did what you did. You don’t deserve this pain.
When you return to this world know that you return to a club of sorts.
People who have seen the abyss, arms clasped upwards in defiance towards an onrushing future that loves the idea of promise but seldom follows through. We many and desperate, charging on despite stumbling over the bodies of those we know and those we don’t yet still feel their struggle. We can’t stop.
The world has robbed us of pain. Of our personal moments. Even of our failures. You return to a world that will in all actuality be more hostile prior to this confluence of tragedies. Right about now, somebody would make an appeal to the nature of conflict saying that your existence pisses someone off, and that you should do something with that.
I’ve heard that too much. I’m tired of the fight. I want to live a simple life, and love and be happy. I can’t predict the future and say that will happen in this life for everyone. You deserve love, and happiness and being alive can enable this, however negligible the returns may seem.
Know that even if it’s one person, someone does care. You know many. That’s worth something.
The world wants to tell us who we are, and that they know what’s best. They destroy us and give only the means of assembling the mask we outwardly display to fit into their fucking insipid idea of normal. We do what we can in this giant goddamn trap.
I don’t have answers, I don’t know how to survive. I try to survive the best way I can. You did too. Sometimes it’s enough, but I have to believe there’s more than that.
When I don’t know what to do, I look to someone more intelligent than me for something approaching perspective. When I think of survival, despite having a clear cut notion of how fucking terrible everything is, I find solace in these words.
“Hope and optimism are different. Optimism tends to be based on the notion that there’s enough evidence out there to believe things are gonna be better, much more rational, deeply secular, whereas hope looks at the evidence and says, “It doesn’t look good at all. Doesn’t look good at all. Gonna go beyond the evidence to create new possibilities based on visions that become contagious to allow people to engage in heroic actions always against the odds, no guarantee whatsoever.” That’s hope. I’m a prisoner of hope, though. Gonna die a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornell West
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