This post is dedicated to all of the people that think sexism in tech doesn’t exist, that harassment isn’t a big deal, that trolling is harmless and funny, and that the gender disparity in tech is due simply to biology.

I originally posted my story on Facebook and later on imgur under the title Abusing Women is the New Normal. It’s the first time I ever publicly discussed everything that had happened. I told the shorter version of my story there, and I’m going to tell you the longer version today. Trigger Warnings abound.

Next year, I will have been in an abusive relationship for 2 decades, and I do not plan on leaving. I love my partner, and even though the situation seems hopeless to some, I’m going to hang in there, because I want to believe that it’s going to get better. Some people think it’s my fault that I’m treated this way. Others don’t think there’s any problems at all, because I’ve done such a good job of hiding my bruises. Some tell me I should leave, but I’ve hung in there this long. If I left, what would I do? Where would I go? We’ve had some good times. Maybe things can change. Maybe if I work hard enough, if I fight hard enough, things will get better. Bruises fade, after all.

I’m in an abusive relationship with tech, and this is my story.

When I was growing up, I lived in the middle of nowhere. It was a teeny tiny village in the midwest, and I was the only kid in the entire town. When I finally got old enough to go to school and meet people my own age, I had problems. I couldn’t break the social code. I didn’t really understand how to communicate with the other kids, and I didn’t find out until much, much later in life that this was due to HFA and later, ADHD. Those weren’t really things back then. I excelled in school without even trying, but I didn’t talk to people. I became an introvert and spent most of my time reading or sitting in the woods letting my imagination run wild. It wasn’t a horrible childhood, but the only real friends I had were those I found in dusty tomes from the public library.

My parents didn’t have a lot of money, but when I was 6, they scraped together enough to buy me a Commodore 64. I fell in love with something other than books, much to their relief. I started enjoying going to the dentist’s office because in the waiting room, there were issues of 3-2-1 Contact, a magazine which had C64 BASIC code in the back. Sometimes, I’d get my mom to buy me a copy (or I’d sneakily pocket the one from the waiting room), and I’d spend hours typing in all of those lines of BASIC, only to find out that there were errors. The first program I ever got running was a version of Snake. It took me forever. I didn’t have anything beyond that magazine to figure out what I was doing. There was no Internet; there was no Google. There was just a 6 year old girl with a huge amount of determination and nothing better to do.

This went on for years. Eventually, I had a 486 running Windows 3.1. I’d gather up all of the AOL disks I could find, because we didn’t have a local ISP at that point. I’d spend my 10 hours in AOL chat trying to break the human interaction code, and then I’d go in search of another disk. I started dialing into various BBS across the country. I obsessed about Legend of the Red Dragon. I ran up huge phone bills. I found text files on boards that told me how to build devices so I could not have huge phone bills. I was always in trouble. I didn’t care, because I was in love.

Infosec was fascinating to me. It’s never that I wanted to do things that were bad. I didn’t care about anything other than the puzzle of working around restrictions in an age where computer security was still in its infancy. There was so much to learn. There was so much that I could do online, when in real life, I was stuck on a farm in the middle of nowhere surrounded by people that found technology to be suspicious and repulsive.

When I was 14, I found IRC, and with it, a whole subculture of people that loved the same things that I loved. Suddenly, I wasn’t the quiet girl in the corner reading a book, wishing she was elsewhere. I would stay up all night talking to people, trying to absorb their experiences and their knowledge. I’d never really felt seen before. I wasn’t even bullied in school because no one knew I existed. I was a ghost. I lived in my own head except for when I was online.

With the new-found power of existing came the unfortunate side effect that goes along with being a naive and socially inexperienced female on the internet. Don’t get me wrong, the attention was amazing. I’d never felt anything like it before. But the negative attention that came from being a female on IRC far outweighed anything I got from the positive. This was really my only substantial interaction with humans though, so I didn’t know it was weird. I thought that this is just how it was. I didn’t know it was wrong to treat people that way. I saw it happening to other women on IRC, too. Even though I never consciously acknowledged it, women felt like second class citizens to me.

Even though my only goal was to learn, it was always a battle being taken seriously. I was constantly being called things like “scene whore” and “clueless”, but I fought back. I became the person online that I had always been in my head: the person that I wanted to be. I wouldn’t get into a technical argument unless I was sure I could win. If someone tried to insult me, I’d insult them right back, and I would do it better. I knew I was smart. I didn’t have much self-esteem at that point, but that was an undeniable fact and something they were never able to take from me. But the constant criticism hurt. I learned to fake confidence. I learned to pretend that the trolling didn’t hurt me, even while I blamed myself for all of it. If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t have changed a thing other than letting the younger version of myself know that that’s not normal, and that it’s not OK, and that it wasn’t my fault. I lived under a constant haze of guilt for over a decade.

As I got older, the trolling intensified. I was ‘doxxed’. My mother would get phone calls in the middle of the night from boys on the internet that hated me. They would insult her. They would say that I should have been aborted. She tried to cut off my internet access, but I was determined. I would run phone lines from outside into my bedroom just so I could get online in the middle of the night. I would take her bedroom door off the hinges when she wasn’t home so I could get to the computer. She tried her hardest, but I couldn’t be stopped. It was the only world in which I felt I had a place, even as horrible as that place might have been, and I wouldn’t give it up for anything.

School became a joke to me. I stopped going early in my junior year. Instead, I spent all of my time in the public library, consuming all the books I could find about tech. My stepfather and my dad both hated computers, so I learned to be careful and hide what I was learning. One time, so my dad would think I had gone to school, I hid in the closet with a flashlight and TCP/IP Illustrated, Volume 1. I pored over that book, memorizing it from cover to cover. I’d go into school occasionally, wander into classes for tests, and get As, which infuriated my teachers even more. I’d barely pass my classes because I never did homework. I didn’t care. After my dean accused me of backdooring all of the computers in our brand new computer lab (I didn’t; I was simply the person who informed him of it), I formally dropped out at 17.

I left home. I moved in with two guys I knew from hacker culture on the internet. They made bets to see who would be the first to fuck me. I ended up in a relationship with one, until I found about the bet, and then it was so over. I’d known him for years. We’d been flirting since we met on IRC. I had made bad decisions when I was naive and 15, so he had a private picture of me. Later, after we broke up, he published this picture online. As far as I know, it’s still on his personal website. It can be found in other places. I wonder if they realize they are hosting child porn. I wonder if he realizes he’s a child porn distributor. He’s never apologized.

When I was 18, I eventually settled down in Atlanta at my first real tech job, making more than both my parents combined. I was ecstatic. It was a huge middle finger to all those boys on IRC that thought I was some clueless female. I was so happy. I felt validated. However, the trolling continued, and one of those angry boys called my boss to get me fired. It worked.

The first dot-com bubble had just burst, but I was lucky enough to find a new job. I worked my way up, despite dealing with the treachery of internet trolls. Shortly after getting my second tech job, one of the trolls set up a website that linked to my resume and said I would trade sexual favors for employment. One person even disguised herself as a friend until she decided to privately meet with my husband to try to end my marriage. This was shortly after while in the late stages of pregnancy, I’d gone to her place of employment to set up the network for her, since she was incapable of doing so herself. I was angry for a while, although I’ve learned to let go, even after she was instrumental in creating the website that continues to harass and defame me to this day.

Ah, Encyclopedia Dramatica. The claims made within would be hilarious, if so many people didn’t accept them as fact. So, let’s go through some of the ones I remember, shall we? No, I didn’t sell my kid for IRC Ops. While I was not opposed to experimentation in my younger years, I’ve been pretty anti-drug for a long time. I’ve never been fired for ever abusing any illicit substances, ever. Yes, I am overweight. Yes, I have had sex, and all my relationships tend to be with people within the same industry as me for obvious reasons. I don’t remember what else the page about me says, but as far as I recall, those are the main points.

Getting on with the story…

In my early 20’s, I fell in love with a guy. We had an on-again/off-again relationship for years. Despite my career being further along than his, he said I wasn’t driven enough. This was infuriating. I’d already fought so hard, and I felt like I had accomplished a considerable amount. Who the hell was he to judge me… other than this guy that I really liked and wanted to impress. I doubled down on my efforts, just to prove him wrong. In a way, I’m grateful that he was such an insecure asshole, because it’s due to him that I moved away from Linux and tried FreeBSD. I fell in love with it on a technical level, and then I went to the FreeBSD 10 year anniversary party, which changed my life completely.

In FreeBSD, I found an amazing community unlike anything else I’d ever experienced. I made good friends in several FreeBSD developers, and I’d never once seen anyone associated with the project mock me for asking a question or say anything even remotely sexist or off-putting. I’d only ever seen two other females in the private developer IRC channel, but I never felt different or other. Every project has assholes, but if any of these guys were sexist assholes, I never heard about it. Instead, I was treated with respect. FreeBSD has some insanely smart people like Robert Watson and Colin Percival who were incredibly intimidating to talk to at first, but they treated me as an equal. They never spoke down to me, and they always took me seriously. So many people in FreeBSD became like my extended family. Dan Langille put together this fantastic conference, BSDCan. I went every year, and it felt like I was going home every time. It showed me that good places exist, and it gave me a different context for how I viewed the tech industry. My friends in FreeBSD gave me the self confidence to try my hand at learning and contributing C code in a place where the entire world could see it and judge me for not being perfect, which was one of my biggest fears. I even went on to give my first ever talk at BSDCan. I was terrified. I had never tried public speaking, and I wanted my friends to not think poorly of me. The terror while being on stage was the biggest rush I’d ever experienced. If not for that, I would never have realized how much I loved public speaking. I gained an incredible amount of self-confidence and I became comfortable in my own skin. I learned how to love myself. I owe everyone in FreeBSD so much more than they realize. It saved me.

Several years later, even after finding that safe haven, I left IRC. It wasn’t a good place to be. I was still a target for harassment and trolls, despite only being in that private IRC channel. People were trying to impersonate me to gain access and harass my new friends, and I thought if I left, the trolls would forget about me in time. I didn’t want to be a hassle. I hated feeling like I was chased off, but given that I was meeting people in my field offline, the negative was far outweighing the positive. I tried to forget ED and the people that still would occasionally find ways to poke at me to get under my skin. A few years passed, when I found that my attempts to lay low to get off the troll radar were futile. weev posted an archive of several years of my email to full-disclosure. He highlighted information about my sex life as well as the difficulties I’d had with the very private decision of getting an abortion in my early 20s.

I didn’t know what to do. I’d left IRC, and I was still a target. Was it my fault for existing? What could I do to make these people happy so they would leave me alone? I wanted to ignore it, so I just denied everything, or I shut down the second someone tried to talk to me about it. My entire personal life was out there for anyone to examine and judge. The guilt was horrific. I suffered from some pretty severe anxiety for a while until I was able to forget about it. I still blamed myself, but I wasn’t going to stop being me. It’s not like there was anything I could do to change it. There was nothing I could do except just go forward with my life and try not to think about it. One of my good friends told me years ago that he was surprised by my resilience. He said I was strong. I was surprised when he told me this. I never felt strong. For me, this had always been my life. It was always a struggle, and the battle against people that wanted to see me gone was never-ending.

For the extent of my career, I’ve watched people claim that I didn’t deserve to be where I am. I’ve seen some claim that I slept with all of FreeBSD in order to get my commit bit. That one is particularly hilarious, because I’m fundamentally lazy, and learning C sounds like a lot less effort. I’ve seen people claim that I’m hiding a boyfriend somewhere who mysteriously only comes out to write code for me which I then claim as my own. I’ve been told that I am not pretty enough for anyone to love me. I’ve been told that I am not a real gamer, because girls aren’t good at PvP, and I must have slept with someone to get my rating. I’ve seen people dig up every bit of my past to try to shame me, even my police record from when I was arrested for having an unpaid ticket for expired tags. I’ve seen people photoshop my face onto porn. I’ve watched people construct email campaigns in an attempt to get me fired. That’s actually going on right now. I’ve seen people say I’m not a real developer because I only have a handful of commits to FreeBSD. I’ve seen people say that I don’t even know anything about FreeBSD. I’ve seen men not even in the tech industry be completely dismissive and try to correct me when talking about something that is very specific to my technical specialization. I’ve seen men butt into conversations that I’m having with other women about application design to tell us that we’re doing it wrong, and then refuse to stop arguing with us when we tell him that he’s incorrect until another guy steps into the conversation to back us up. I’ve been told that I do not meet a man’s personal ideas of what is attractive, so I should stop existing. I’ve been told that I am uppity. I’ve been told that I am not humble enough because I dared to stand up for myself instead of being quiet. I’ve been called bossy. I’ve been told that I’m a terrible thing for this industry, and that I’m the reason no women want to join tech. I’ve been told to be quiet. I’ve been told I don’t belong. I still hear all of these things. If I didn’t use ggautoblocker, I would still see the majority of these things being said every single day.

During all of this, I identified as an anti-feminist, because I saw the women speaking out about the problems in tech as being big ol’ whiners. I survived, right? Fuck you, got mine. I was a very angry person inside for a long time until I had the depth of experience and the emotional maturity to let go of my rage. It was useful while it lasted, because it fueled my desire to succeed. It made me fight harder. Even before I was able to look back at what happened to me and see it for what it was, I finally realized that my experiences are not indicative of other women’s experiences in tech. Internalized misogyny is a real thing, but even aside from that, if some women do manage to go through tech without problems, that doesn’t invalidate the experiences of other women. One positive experience does not cancel out a negative experience, never mind that the negative experiences of women in tech hugely outnumber the positive experiences. The number of women in their early 20’s screaming “Not Your Shield” to silence anyone that dares to say there’s a problem is troubling.

I moved on and continued to be successful in my career. I did my best to continue to stay low on the radar. I didn’t comment on anything, because I had hoped that by not feeding the trolls, eventually they would move on.  I was unhappy, so I learned to let go of the rage. It took years until I found my inner peace and became happy and content. It took even longer to be able to look at my experiences without guilt, to examine each of the things that happened and the motivations of all involved.

While this story is quite terrible, in the end, my experiences have made me an incredibly strong person. It took me years to figure out that while I made a lot of bad decisions growing up, it’s OK. Everyone makes bad decisions, and they have a right to do so without strangers trying to destroy them. It took me even longer to see that I wasn’t the only person having this happen to them. The common denominator in all of the stories I’ve heard was that the person being targeted was a woman. I’m not saying that guys can’t be trolled, but there is a huge difference between a bit of trolling and a multi-decade campaign to drive someone out of the industry.

Shortly before all of this GamerGate nonsense first started, I was actively staying quiet about feminism. I wanted to continue laying low. While I supported those women that spoke out about sexism in the industry, I didn’t want to be one of them. It is incredibly difficult to be viewed as being both technical and an activist for feminism. To many people in this industry, you’re either one or the other, and I had fought so long to be respected for my technical contributions. I didn’t want to lose that. I was afraid that if I spoke out, the only thing conferences would ever want me to speak about was being a woman in tech, when I have so many other things to offer. To this day, I have always refused to be on a women in tech panel, because I have such a deep-seated fear of being typecast solely as an activist.

But the more I witnessed online abuse directed at Anita Sarkeesian, Zoe Quinn, and Brianna Wu, the more something deep inside of me started to burn. I felt words starting to bubble up, and I forced myself to stay quiet for too long. The deep burn turned into a glowing ball of rage. It was the same feeling that had previously driven me to push myself harder, fight back, and accomplish more, so I took hold of that feeling, and I tried to keep it under control so I could stay civil yet be impassioned while I spoke out on twitter about harassment against women in tech. My primary message was that we should start believing women when they say they are being harassed instead of our knee-jerk reaction being to doubt them.

I’m in the gaming industry now, so this was doubly relevant to my interests. I was naive enough to think that if I provided enough context about my background to counter the main tactics that the GamerGate supporters were using against Anita, Zoe, and Brianna, that they might listen. I wasn’t anti or pro GamerGate; I just couldn’t watch women receive the same level of threats and harassment that I’d received myself so many years ago while others accused them of making it up. It’s real. It happens. I know this because it happened to me for decades. These three women have their own abusive relationships with the industry that they love, and so many people were telling them that the abuse wasn’t real, or that they were concocting these stories for public sympathy, or that it wasn’t that serious. I didn’t have anything to gain by speaking out, because my personal and professional credentials are not tied to gaming journalism or what any of these people think of me. I’m in tech first, and in the gaming industry second. I love video games, but I do not stand to profit from turning myself into a martyr. I had hoped that would be enough.

It should go without saying that my attempt at addressing the crowd was met with disdain. I was called a liar. I was called a concern troll. I was told that if I was harassed, I should provide screenshots so they could presumably do… something? I’m not sure what their plans were, but when I’ve seen women post screenshots of harassment in the past, the only action taken by GamerGate was reposting the image after scrawling red lines all over to attempt to disprove the abuse and mock the victim. I spoke out only on the subject of harassment, and then, ironically, I was harassed.

So, what’s next? Onward to Still Here, Part 2: Call to Arms.