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Breaking Silence

This article was never supposed to exist. I resisted writing it for as long as I could. I resisted sharing it with the world as long as morally possible. But today, I am giving in. Not giving in to any form of outward pressure but giving in to my self-imposed moral obligation to speak up about something that I have kept to myself too long. In a first attempt at making things right, I made this story public on Twitter, but since the person it denounced has a lot of influence there, it was only a matter of time until this string of tweets got deleted. Do not underestimate me, though. I am resourceful, everything had been copied and saved, and apart from the sheer frustration caused by being unable to use my account as I would like to, there are no real consequences to this deplatforming attempt. I know you will read that so let me be crystal clear: there is no silencing me.


Just to be clear, I have nothing to gain from speaking up. On sunday my account was locked. Nevertheless, I refused to delete my thread. At the time, it didn't seem like the morally just thing to do. To be honest it still doesn't but I did it anyway because my account means so much to me the thought of losing it hurts. Hopefully the story I shared will help prevent people from falling into this person's trap. At the moment, this chaotically written article is my only way to express my anger and my determination to see justice being served. Nearly 7 years of my life have been haunted by this ghost and this is also, undeniably, how I'm letting it all go. You do not control me. At all. Never have nor will. I will see this through. Very likely, there should be something to read between the lines of this particular paragraph.


I would like first and foremost, to express my gratitude towards everyone taking time out of their day to read this humongous written piece that, undoubtedly, will be very boring and dry. I will try my best to remain concise and to sum things up, but I also feel like much detail is needed to flesh out the portrait I am trying to paint of someone whose actions have wronged me and many others.


This article has been a long time coming because I had to consider the legality of it all, and my options when it came to how open I wanted to be about everything. The person I will be discussing throughout this article will be referred to as JY and I will use neutral they/them pronouns to describe them. This is due to a Canadian court ban on their name that normally should not affect me on this site, but I have chosen to remain on the safe side (not for them but for myself). Aside from this technicality, I would like to emphasise my absolute lack of desire for debate on the issues that this person's gender identity raises. I knew them before this was a thing in their life, they already were a terrible person, and this is the part I would most like to focus on. I wish to state that I do not consider this particular person to be representative of the transgender community as a whole and I do not condone the numerous articles that have, even though I might quote parts of said articles in the rest of this post in order to prove my point.


My very first encounter with JY happened towards the end of 2012. Those who know me are aware that at the time, I was a very dedicated fan of a Youtube band of six sisters called Cimorelli. I had noticed (because I'm smart like that) that the girls were not always the ones answering their Facebook comments, so I took it upon myself to figure out who was. And there was JY. I don't think I thought much of it, although I do remember that knowing that a 26 year-old male (JY was unequivocally identifying as male at the time) would spend their day pretending to be a group of girls and answering their mostly young and female fans was a little bit odd. Due to personal reasons, I blacked out a lot of what happened in my life in 2012 but I remember going to JY about something they had translated into French, because it made no sense. JY is an English-speaking Canadian and I am French, so I knew exactly what I was talking about. They treated me in a very condescending way, so I got annoyed and decided to not talk to them again since they were being unreasonable.


I reached out to one of my friends to vent about JY because right after they had been rude to me, I also found out they were offering their services (the same ones they were doing for Cimorelli) to another Youtube band of sisters. It sounded like a dumb business decision to me and I said so to my friend in private in words that were perhaps very harsh. My friend got hacked by a 12 year old JY had coerced into becoming their ally. The 12 year old girl, who obviously did not know better because she was a child, sent screenshots of this conversation to JY who promptly posted them publicly to their Twitter page and privately on a group that contained approximately 400 German fans.



At that point, the insults and the harassing messages started pouring in. I wanted to be angry at everyone but it did not take me long to realise those young fans were being manipulated into thinking that JY was very closely linked to Cimorelli and that as fans they had to give JY support. I wish things had stopped at me getting harassed and I wish this was only a story of online bullying but it is not. After I had figured out who leaked the screenshot, I contacted her and she admitted to doing it. Slowly but surely, I managed to make her realise she had made a mistake and was being manipulated. This is where things started to get dark. JY began harassing her in addition to harassing me. I was 20 and I could somewhat handle it; she was 12 and obviously did not handle it that well. She would come  to me every day with a new horror story of how JY was torturing her. One of JY's favorite things to do, besides calling her a whore (again, she was 12), was threatening to spread rumours about her to her favorite Cimorelli girl. Keep in mind that although this sounds like a trivial thing to an adult brain, she was 12 and idolised a band. And, knowing that, JY used their position to blackmail her into doing things she did not want to do and making sure she would remain loyal. Things were already getting pretty dark and I tried to protect her the best I could. Several underage girls were coming to me (as I was the most vocal JY opponent) and asking for protection because they were realising how dangerous and creepy what JY was doing was. Every day would bring something new. Anyone who would take my side or defend me would get their pictures DMCAed and their accounts reported.

The more I looked into it, the creepier it got. We tried warning the Cimorelli girls who were saying that they were not contractually linked with JY and could not control what JY did in JY's free time (even if it involved harassing little girls apparently...). Two girls (both Canadian and under 15) who did not know each other told me the same story about how JY would prevent kids from making fake Cimorelli accounts. Knowing the fakes would most likely be tween fans, JY would send pictures of their (male) genitalia to those children to scare them off. I remember thinking "This is so messed up and way out of my depth". So I went to the police and asked if I could file a complaint for harassment, because JY was in fact harassing me daily (thousands of questions in total) on my ask.fm accounts. I was told there was no use because it was online and JY came from a country different from mine. At this point I was running out of stamina. My threats of legal action got JY to back down from their daily insults towards me and the little girls who were JY's victims managed to more or less block all of JY's accounts. One of them had to completely remove herself from the Internet after telling her parents everything, because they very rightly got creeped out.

After a few months of quiet, questions started popping up again on my ask.fm that I could easily and clearly identify as JY. They were telling me about JY's new girlfriend, Desiree Turnbull, a 16 year-old aspiring singer whose name I had seen pop up once or twice on Twitter. I knew this was provocation because I am not as stupid as I look. I also knew that there was no way to make it go away so I made a point of being excessively encouraging and on congratulating them very ironically yet emphatically on their budding romance. The more time went, the bigger the lies got. Soon I had them announcing Desiree's pregnancy in my ask.fm account just to prove that they had "done it". I pointed out that this was creepy at best since JY was 27 and Desiree was 16 at the time. This remark, besides getting my pictures reported again, got me an answer along the lines of "well it's legal in Canada". Like... Congratulations... Anyway, just from reading Desiree's profile I managed to see that she had no contact with JY at all besides a tweet or two occasionally. As time went on, I realised they had never even met and she got increasingly creeped out when people started asking her about her wonderful boyfriend Jonathan (this is what JY identified as at the time). More and more people were finding JY's actions disturbing. One day, JY got removed from the Cimorelli Facebook page and got his jonathan@cimorellimusic.com e-mail address revoked. The girls said it was due to their label wanting to get control back on their Facebook. I thought this would be the end of JY and the last time I would ever have to hear about them, but oh boy was I wrong, the strangest things were yet to come.

In 2015 I realised through a strange Cimorelli earbud product that JY still had contact with the Cimorelli girls which I was NOT pleased about at all considering the damage they had done all over the fandom and how predatory they had sounded to me. But I chose not to buy the earbuds, I had JY blocked everywhere, I carried on living my life despite many people trying to get me back into this whole JY story again by asking me who JY was and what they had previously done. I tried my best to stay out of trouble because I had had to deal with so many abusive things I knew I could not take any more of this and should not subject myself to this especially since I somehow always seemed to be the one getting the most hits.

I lived my life calmly without thinking about JY at all, and then one November morning in 2018 I woke up to this message.

To be very honest with you, my very first reaction, that I now attribute to the trauma JY put me through, was to reject this altogether and just decide it no longer was my problem. But I am a caring person, and also a curious person, so I read the article I had been linked to and what I read appalled me. In those few years I had not heard about JY for, JY had not stopped hurting women, but rather just switched circles.

The gendretrender article, that has since been deleted as well as the entire blog it was hosted on, established that JY, under the male name I knew them to have, had made several complaints (14 total) to the HRC. On what grounds? They claimed that independent beauticians discriminated against them based on the fact that they were a trans woman. The beauticians explained to JY that they did not operate with male genitalia, be it because they were uncomfortable or untrained, but JY chose to make them to be discriminatory against their gender identity. I understood from the gendertrender article and from a little bit of digging that the laws in Canada make transgender identity declaration-based and this was at the heart of the loophole JY had found. I speak of a loophole because I do not believe for one second JY experiences what transgender individuals experience.

I had confirmation of this gut feeling when I saw that JY had made themselves infamous on quite a few Facebook make up groups for talking very extensively about a strange fantasy of theirs: period products. This rang a lot of bells because I remember them talking to some of my friends in 2013, including the underage ones, about girls' periods and favorite period products. It also clicked in my head that the random creepy questions I would get about periods on my ask.fm very likely were also from JY.

Here is a little bit of all the period and bathroom-related talk allegedly proffered by JY before they even took it to make up Facebook as well as a throwaway ask.fm account that was very likely theirs. I would like to direct your attention on the fact that this was 2013 at the time and JY identified as male and stated they possessed male genitalia, which they have since denied...

When I realised this had been going on for a long while and I could not possibly believe that JY was a wronged trans-woman who had done nothing wrong besides existing, I decided to make a Twitter thread about my experience with them. I made sure to avoid pronouns as much as possible even though slipping up was very easy since I had only ever known this person as male. This thread attracted the attention of corners of the Internet I'm not accustomed to. Gender critical people came to me telling me that I should not give JY the courtesy of "they" pronouns and I could not explain it really well at the time but I was certain this was the best way to go. I turned out to be right, because as I already knew JY is tech savvy and managed to get all accounts "misgendering" them reported and the tweets deleted. The damaged to my thread was recent and only minimal (one tweet deleted), which allowed me to be the main information source on JY's actions between 2012 and 2016.

Let's be clear, I have spoken with Canadian lawyers, and my statement has been transmitted to Canadian law enforcement, but so far nothing seems to have stopped JY.
I tried to keep my composure when I saw JY trying to earn the sympathy of trans-right activists. I tried to keep my cool when I was told JY is trying to get into a Miss BC pageant and asking for money for it. Genuinely, I tried. But I can't sit back as I watch someone who's exhibited predatory behaviour trying to make themselves the face of the trans movement. I do not believe their intentions in declaring trans identity were genuine, or honorable. I believe this person is detrimental to the community of trans people who have been fighting to get rights for a long time. I have no way to prove it, but given their previous actions I would say I am fairly certain that JY's actions are intentionally malicious and have no aim other than personal gain. It is, after all, their specialty, to file bogus lawsuits and get money off of them. Their narrative has changed numerous time, they have pretended to be intersex, they have pretended to have "a heavy period" (despite having male genitalia? I am no biologist but this sounds a little strange) to justify their obsession with tampons, pads and the girls' bathroom.


So I am asking you. Please question their motives and their actions. How could someone who speaks of wanting to get into bathrooms with little girls to show them how to insert tampons benefit from not being excluded from the women's bathroom? That's right. Even with the most open mind there is no way this will not be an issue. I have expressed previously my attachment to trans rights and I believe gender neutral bathrooms can be a solution. However this will require a much much tougher vetting of potential predators such as JY.
If you live in Canada and have had any sort of interaction with JY, I beg you to go to the police with whatever evidence you may have. If you are not Canadian, spread the word online. JY thinks their tech savvy-ness will protect them from their real face to be shown to the world but I believe that if everyone does their part, we will bring them to justice.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION can be found on the kiwi farms thread (this is a very radical medium but it has proven to be a more reliable source than I had anticipated). The article on The Economist provides, in my opinion, a good overview of the waxing issue. Morgane Oger has put up one of the most comprehensive opinion pieces on the matter on her website and I encourage you to check it out.


I would like to thank everyone who's been supporting me in the whole process of uncovering the truth. I don't want to complain but it has not been easy for me, so it warms my heart to know I am not all alone in this.