Keffals | |
---|---|
Personal information | |
Born | |
Nationality | Canadian |
Website | keffals |
Twitch information | |
Channel | |
Created by | Clara Sorrenti |
Years active | 2021–present |
Followers | 54,900 (February 18, 2023) |
Associated acts | |
YouTube information | |
Channels | Keffals |
Subscribers | 53,900 (January 2024) |
Total views | 3,188,727 |
Last updated: February 18th, 2023 |
Clara Sorrenti(born March 25, 1994), [1] better known as Keffals, is a Canadian Twitch streamer, transgender activist, left-wing political commentator and former candidate of the Communist Party of Canada. [2] [3] [4] She has since ended her affiliation with the Communist Party. [5]
Sorrenti, who transitioned as a teenager, began engaging in transgender activism after Texas Governor Greg Abbott instructed Texas state agencies to treat gender-affirming medical treatments (such as puberty blockers or hormone treatments) for transgender youths as child abuse. [6] [7] [8] She has commentated on her experiences as a trans woman and has hosted people such as Chelsea Manning on her stream. [3]
In 2022, Sorrenti became the subject of a loosely-organized harassment campaign, primarily from Kiwi Farms, [9] with internet trolls using her deadname while filing false police reports, pizza bombing her residence, and organizing a number of swattings.
When growing up, Sorrenti played video games such as Team Fortress 2 and Garry's Mod using the online handle "Keffals". [3] By the age of 12, she realized that she was transgender. In 2013, when she was 18, she traveled to Thailand with her parents to receive gender-affirming surgery. [3] [10] She attended the University of Western Ontario. [11]
Sorrenti is an advocate for the rights of transgender people. She has stated that she receives frequent harassment for being a trans person. [12] [13] [14]
Early in her life Sorrenti volunteered with the New Democratic Party. [2] She entered Canadian politics following the 2016 election of Donald Trump in the United States, [3] running for two races in 2018 and 2019 as a member of the Communist Party of Canada. She ran in the 2018 Ontario general election [15] [16] and the 2019 Canadian federal election, [14] but lost both races. [3] During that time, she was the organizer for the Young Communist League's London, Ontario chapter. [17] [18]
Year | Office | Party | Votes | Result | Ref. | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Total | % | P. | ||||||
2018 | MPP for London North Centre | Communist | 128 | 0.24% | 7th | Lost | [19] | |
2019 | MP for London North Centre | Communist | 137 | 0.21% | 6th | Lost | [20] [21] |
Sorrenti began streaming on Twitch playing video games, but switched to politics after a wave of anti-trans legislation was introduced in state legislatures in 2021 and 2022. She spoke out against Texas Governor Greg Abbott when he instructed Texas state agencies to treat gender-affirming medical treatments, such as puberty blockers or hormone treatments, for transgender youths as child abuse. Speaking on an Alabama law making it a felony to provide gender-affirming care for those under 18, Sorrenti said, "They literally want these kids to fucking kill themselves." [3] [6] [7] [8] In April 2022, she raised US$205,000 for the Campaign for Southern Equality to protect transgender youth. [3] A month later, she called attention to a VOD of a 16-year-old trans Twitch streamer who was taken into foster care after police conducted a wellness check. [22] [23] [24] She has also criticized Florida's Parental Rights in Education act and the false claim shared by online figures such as Infowars and United States Congressman Paul Gosar that the Uvalde shooter was transgender on stream. [13] She was profiled by Taylor Lorenz in The Washington Post in June 2022. [3] [25] Lorenz described Sorrenti as "part of a new class of stars who have abandoned the platform's traditional game-stream format to talk about news and politics" and described her Twitch stream as "one of the few media outlets where viewers can hear the news from a trans person." [3] [25]
In July 2022 her Twitch account was suspended for 28 days (reduced to 14) for "repeated hateful slurs or symbols" that featured on her stream thumbnail. Sorrenti said that the slurs in question were images of past harassment directed against her and that she had been banned "for openly talking about the abuse [she receives]". She moved to YouTube to stream during the ban. [13] [26]
Sorrenti joined Twitter in December 2020, and amassed over 100,000 followers on the platform. Sorrenti is also known for "ratioing" Twitter personalities, [27] and has been in online disputes with former Twitch streamer Destiny, as well other public figures, including Tim Pool, Candace Owens, Lauren Southern, and J. K. Rowling. [3]
She supports her streaming career with fan donations from Patreon and PayPal, using the money to hire an editor and a graphic designer. [3]
In a 2023 Progressive Victory livestream, Sorrenti and fellow streamers Destiny, Emma Vigeland, and Vaush interviewed U.S. Representative Ro Khanna about various topics, including the importance of youth political participation and ways to push progressive political sentiment. [28] [29]
On August 5, 2022, Sorrenti was swatted and arrested after an email was sent to members of the London, Ontario city council claiming to be Sorrenti with an intent to kill her mother and members of the London City Council. The incident, that she believes to be a hate crime, led to computers and phones being confiscated by police. She said the London Police Service had used her deadname during the arrest, as well as in the wellness check on her mother. [14] [27] [30] Sorrenti claimed the police, talking to Sorrenti's mother, misgendered Sorrenti by referring to her as her mother's "son". [31] [32] According to the London police, any use of Sorrenti's former legal name was based on records of prior interactions with the police and not deliberate disrespect. [33] CBC News reported that the police department will "review how officers treated [her]". [34] The swatting came after another earlier attempt had taken place through the Toronto Police Service; according to Sorrenti, the London Police Service was not aware of this previous attempt due to lack of correspondence with the Toronto Police Service. [35] [36] The London Police Service drafted reforms for its treatment of transgender suspects after the incident. [37]
Following the incident, Sorrenti told Global News that "I'm not backing down. I know that the work I do is incredibly valuable, and ... I have [trans] people almost every day saying they came out to their families because of me". [35] Jagmeet Singh, leader of the New Democratic Party, responded to the situation in a tweet saying "Trans folk, and especially trans activists, deserve the freedom to make themselves heard. Not to be doxed and swatted, arrested at gunpoint and deadnamed repeatedly. No one deserves this." [38]
In December 2022, an internal investigation by the London Police Service into the August swatting incident found no evidence Sorrenti had been deadnamed audibly by officers, with the LPS stating they have the video and audio evidence to confirm this. [39] [40]
Following the swatting, Sorrenti also set up a GoFundMe fundraiser with the aim of funding a move and a lawsuit, [41] [38] and said that she aimed to continue to stream. [4] Sorrenti later tweeted that the GoFundMe had had its funds frozen after being mass reported. [42] Nonetheless, she was subsequently able to move to a hotel. On August 17, 2022, the location of the hotel was posted on Kiwi Farms and the hotel was inundated with pizza deliveries made by trolls using Sorrenti's deadname. Sorrenti believes that the location of the hotel was discovered after she had posted a picture on her Discord server that inadvertently revealed the patterned bedsheets used by the hotel, allowing internet trolls to cross-reference the sheets with those in local hotels. London Police Service confirmed that they are investigating this and also a separate doxxing attempt. Following this, Sorrenti moved to a new temporary location and has said that she intends to move weekly until she finds a permanent residence. [43] [44] She also said that she intended to host a protest against Kiwi Farms, that allegedly also played a role in her swatting, outside of the San Francisco offices of Cloudflare, a company that provided services to the forum. [45]
Following continued harassment, including her Uber account being hacked into to send her food, Sorrenti announced that she would be leaving Canada and moving to an undisclosed location in Europe in one or two months. [46] She was once again doxxed in another swatting attempt after relocating to Belfast, Northern Ireland. [47] [48] On September 3, 2022, pressure on Cloudflare in response to the harassment campaign resulted in the company terminating services to the Kiwi Farms website, [49] as the firm considered the forum activity to be increasingly dangerous. [50] The site was briefly accessible only through Tor. Sorrenti declared victory on September 5, saying the campaign had more than succeeded in its aim to shut Kiwi Farms down. [51] [52] On September 6, 2022, The Daily Dot confirmed that VanwaTech was providing content delivery network services to Kiwi Farms, hence bringing it back online. [53] [54]
Violence against transgender people includes emotional, physical, sexual, or verbal violence targeted towards transgender people. The term has also been applied to hate speech directed at transgender people and at depictions of transgender people in the media that reinforce negative stereotypes about them. Trans and non-binary gender adolescents can experience bashing in the form of bullying and harassment. When compared to their cisgender peers, trans and non-binary gender youth are at increased risk for victimisation, which has been shown to increase their risk of substance abuse.
Swatting is a criminal harassment act of deceiving an emergency service into sending a police or emergency service response team to another person's address. This is triggered by false reporting of a serious law enforcement emergency, such as a bomb threat, murder, hostage situation, or a false report of a mental health emergency, such as reporting that a person is allegedly suicidal or homicidal and may be armed, among other things.
Cloudflare, Inc. is an American company that provides content delivery network services, cloud cybersecurity, DDoS mitigation, and ICANN-accredited domain registration services. Cloudflare's headquarters are in San Francisco, California. According to The Hill, Cloudflare is used by more than 20 percent of the Internet for its web security services, as of 2022.
Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet and without their consent. Historically, the term has been used to refer to both the aggregation of this information from public databases and social media websites, and the publication of previously private information obtained through criminal or otherwise fraudulent means. The aggregation and provision of previously published material is generally legal, though it may be subject to laws concerning stalking and intimidation. Doxing may be carried out for reasons such as online shaming, extortion, and vigilante aid to law enforcement. It also may be associated with hacktivism.
Deadnaming is the act of referring to a transgender or non-binary person by a name they used prior to transitioning, such as their birth name. Deadnaming may be unintentional, or a deliberate attempt to deny, mock, or invalidate a person's gender identity.
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Kiwi Farms, formerly known as CWCki Forums, is a web forum that facilitates the discussion and harassment of online figures and communities. Their targets are often subject to organized group trolling and stalking, as well as doxxing and real-life harassment. These actions have tied Kiwi Farms to the suicides of three people targeted by members of the forum.
Jessica Simpson, commonly known by her former legal name, Jessica Yaniv, is a Canadian transgender activist in British Columbia who is best known for filing at least 15 complaints of discrimination on the basis of gender identity against various beauty salons after they refused to wax her male genitalia. The complaints were filed with the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal in 2018 and 2019. It was the first major case of alleged transgender discrimination in retail in Canada. In 2019, the Tribunal rejected her complaints and ruled Yaniv had racist motives. In following years, Yaniv has gone on to make additional complaints of discrimination, libel and privacy breach.
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The 28-year-old took to Twitch...
'It's honestly rare for me to go live on Twitch without at least one person coming into my chat to harass me for being a trans person,' a streamer who goes by the handle 'Keffals' said on Twitter, 'but the hateful conduct that Twitch seems to care about more is whether people use goofy insults...'
Trans rights march (Photo 4): Clara Sorrenti, the organizer of the Young Communist League London, Nov. 4, 2018.
That pressure came after Kiwi Farms was linked to harassment of trans Twitch streamer Keffals.