What I Learned From My Online Impersonator

I was spending the weekend in Paris. While enjoying my first coffee of the day in a cozy Parisian café, I got a text from a guy I barely know. He congratulated me on my coming out as a trans woman on the social media app Threads.

I was a bit confused. 

First of all, I haven’t come out as trans to anyone in a long time. I’m privileged with looking very feminine and with starting my transition from male to female at a young age, which has erased most, if not all, male traces from my body and from my life. Nowadays, I live a feminine life and only mention my past if truly necessary or through creative writing in essays like these.

Second, I don’t use Threads. 

I thanked him for his support and then asked him how exactly he gathered this bit of information. He told me about a Threads profile in my name, with my pictures.

Over the last five days, a person had been living a fictional life in my name on the app on which they posted all sorts of comments and pictures. Some of these posts had gathered almost 500 likes.

I gasped. I felt a sweat breaking through the outer layer of my skin, and I dropped the croissant on the plate in front of me. I took a deep breath and started a deep dive into this fake profile.

The fact that someone lived a secret life in my name—it scared me in a way I’d never felt before.

At first, it appeared that this person’s main goal was to speak up about transgender rights. My impersonator posted things like:

Let’s make this clear once and for all: trans women are women, trans men are men.

The impersonator continued by posting a couple of pictures of me wearing a bikini. I recognized them from my personal Instagram account. The caption was: 

Tell me why you wouldn’t call me a woman when I look like this.

After that, it got more personal. The impersonator started sharing stories about my dating and sex life. I recognized faint details about a story I once posted, but this person gave their own twist to the story. The impersonator proclaimed that I was going on a date and that the guy in question abused me.

It didn’t stop there. The more I read, the more layers were revealed. Not just of my impersonator’s personality, but also of our modern-day society.

In one of the posts, the impersonator shared a couple of screenshots. They were conversations they had in my name with some men. All the conversations were sexually tinged and the men expressed their interest in sleeping with me in foul ways.

Eventually, the most obvious layer was revealed: the hate comments. Random people who shamed (fictional) me for outing myself so boldly. They proclaimed that I’m an abomination of nature and that I will never be a true woman.

All these revelations left me shaking. My mom saw the panic in my eyes, but I didn’t know how to talk to her about this. The fact that someone lived a secret life in my name, conducted conversations, and started dramas in my name—it scared me in a way I’d never felt before.

I’ve never really been bullied for being transgender and I’ve always tried to stay as far away as possible from negativity, but here it was spelled out for me how hateful some people still are towards people like me.

I’m also not an openly proud fighter for equal rights for LGBTQ+ people. I don’t want to speak up about it with open conversations and big gestures. I do want to educate people about the topic, but in my own way—by writing about it, sharing it through art. I tackled my womanhood as something beautiful, and my transition as something people could learn from.

Now thinking about all of this, I don’t know what frightens me the most: knowing that someone pretended to be me and spoke up about the topic in a way I would never agree to. Or knowing how a part of this society still feels about people like me, despite my beauty, my kindness, and my femininity.

Knowing that people will take my hard-fought work and use the information for things like this, it made me take a step back. For a moment, I lost hope for a better, more equal future.

A couple of days after the incident, I put all my accounts on private. The fake account got deleted and the impersonator disappeared. I typed in the name one last time and found some mentions of people asking where she went. They were worried about her. They showed their love and support for her and hoped that everything was okay. I considered commenting on their posts to tell them the truth, but I didn’t.

I closed the app, deleted it, and let her name die out.