Feeding the trolls

I am finding the world increasingly hard to understand right now and feel, more over, that there are ever-growing factions in the world who are expecting us all to polarise. We’re either “woke” or we’re white supremecists. If we agree with something Trump says, we’re evil. If we’re critical of a trans person, we’re transphobic. We can’t be a Labour supporter without being antisemitic. I feel myself polarising all the time. I did it with Brexit voters before I began to look into the manifold reasons beyond hatred of foreigners that people voted that way. And the business of Muslim people in Birmingham violently demonstrating against LGBT issues being taught in schools has taught me that we do need to have uncomfortable conversations about immigration and British values. It’s far too easy to leap on someone who makes this statement and criticise them for being a racist. Everything is nuanced. There’s no black and white. There’s no right or wrong. “The truth” if we bother to look, to quote Kate Bush, “lies somewhere in the middle.” And yet, for most of us would far rather it wasn’t.

The knitting community, on the outside, would appear to be a rather innocuous group. They display great acts of kindness by spending long hours knitting things for those they love. They go into yarn shops and rub delicate, soft yarns up against their cheeks and make purring noises. They cook lovely cakes and are a little eccentric but are essentially lovely, harmless people.

In the majority of cases, these statements are true. I’ve met some lovely knitters through Nathan. But yesterday I witnessed the seething, hideous under-belly of the community, and I don’t like it.

Over the last couple of years, an ever-growing group of people have been holding the community to ransom. They have negatively adopted a hash tag, “diversknitty,” which Nathan himself invented. Instead of promoting understanding and kindly pointing out when people have maybe spoken inappropriately, they routinely ride in, en masse, largely on social media, slamming people down for their apparent racist and misogynistic views. You take one on, the pack moves in and you’re torn apart. They boycott yarn festivals. Their profound vitriol has put designers out of business and they’re gleeful when they find out what they’ve done. Most, from what I can gather, are white women getting angry on other people’s behalves. People do not dare to take them on, so their views go unchecked. I suspect their very vocal and vicious posts are largely responsible for knitting website Ravelry’s wildly controversial decision to ban anyone expressing their support of Donald Trump, because “supporting Trump is supporting hate speech.” And yet, ironically, the hatred which glistens from this groups’ keyboards is worse than anything I’ve experienced from the far right.

Yesterday, Nathan made an appeal on social media for people to use the hashtag he created with more love and compassion. He has seen friends utterly destroyed by the haters and wanted to point out that the hashtag was supposed to be a tool for the promotion of ALL diversity rather than just those with a BIPOC axe to grind. Skin colour is, of course, a hugely important part of the diversity discourse, but Nathan has campaigned all his life for LGBT rights and has always used his social media platform to explore what makes people beautiful and unique. The direction his hashtag has gone in therefore feels very disappointing.

His Instagram post opened the doors to hell and the harpies rushed out like a fleet of dementors. I have never seen such ghastly online behaviour. Apparently, a white man asking for ALL knitters to behave with respect when discussing all aspects of diversity is specifically a white man addressing black women. And telling black women not to be angry is trying to silence them and that is a repulsive display of white man privilege.

Now, I have a degree of sympathy for an argument which says “we’ve been shat on all of these years, and we’re gonna shout as loud as we want.” I felt like that over gay marriage. I would even have a degree of sympathy for someone who felt Nathan was being a bit pompous - or even naive - for asking everyone to think twice before pulling the trigger, but I genuinely feel that rule number one in the quest for true equality is knowing who your friends are, and only going hammer and tong at your actual enemies. 

Instead, was he endures was a feeding frenzy at the zoo. Nathan was told that, with the hashtag diversknitty, he’d merely renamed a concept which had been around for a long time, and therefore was no no better than a colonialist renaming a country he’d invaded. He was accused of trying to silence black voices. He was accused of misogyny - well, from what I can gather, simply for being a man. He was accused of Nazi sympathising and White Supremacy. Message after message came in. 700 messages. Those who expressed support for him were instantly shot down in flames to the extent that they started messaging him privately out of the fear of what would happen to them if they did it publicly.

This is not a culture I recognise. It mustn’t be possible to whip people, to bully people, until they comply with your thoughts. Those who object are rendered utterly powerless.




I don’t normally get involved, but on this occasion felt compelled to support Nathan, and responded to three particularly obnoxious comments. I explained to the writers that, as gay men who’d lived through the 1980s, we understood prejudice and suggested they took their anger elsewhere. They say you shouldn’t feed the trolls, and boy I learned this lesson the hard way. It instantly kicked off. I was accused of being Nathan’s mouth piece. I was accused of misogyny and racism. “Not a good look”, one white girl told me, “to criticise a black woman for what she says about race. In 700 negative comments why did you only chose a black woman to have a go at?” I explained politely that I’d simply chosen the three most vitriolic comments and responded without looking at the photos of those who’d sent them. If she’d bothered to check, as I then did, she’d have seen that I’d taken issue with three people, two of whom happened to be white, but there’s no arguing with a troll. To the point I’d made about being a gay man in the 1980s I was told “yes, a gay MAN with white male privilege.” And then came the torrents of veiled homophobia. Nasty. Nasty. Nasty.




I soon backed off. The whole thing was making me oscillate between feeling hopelessly upset and utterly enraged at the injustice of it all.




I went for a walk and saw two homeless men walking down Ballards Lane. One was missing an arm. Both were white. I wondered what level of white male privilege had brought them to their knees.