I can’t even imagine how hard it must be to be 12, 13, or 14 years old (or sometimes even younger!) and getting so many awful responses about a microlabel that makes you feel real and comfortable when these kids obviously take so much pride in them. If I was told that young that I was just trying to get attention and was the worst of the internet and couldn’t put the situation into context and simply shake it off, I would have pretended to have crushes and maybe even forced myself into a relationship out of fear that people would otherwise think I was broken or an attention-seeker. Yes a lot of the times the situation isn’t that serious, but I’ve seen videos from kalvin garrah victims who were young and figuring out their identity and had thousands of random people bombard their dms telling them they were causing “real trans people to look bad” simply for expressing their gender in a way authentic to them, and I’m starting to see this happen as ace people slowly become more accepted ...