Warning: this wank is fucked. up. Mentions of self-harm.

So a while ago Leafing made a comment on Dahne's LJ, saying pretty much what we usually do (shouting at people who've made a misstep doesn't work if it was done out of ignorance, etc.) and including the information that she has no offline social interaction and:

On the average day, it is highly unlikely that I'll come home from the greenhouse and think to myself, “Is the proper term 'transman' or 'trans-man' or 'trans man?'” In reality it's more like “Do I want a chocolate martini or a guava martini? Fuck, I'm out of carrots again.”

Note that nowhere in there did I mention getting supremely pissed off at an old lady for calling a begonia a “posy” and asking for “dirt” instead of soil.

…

An important difference here is that people and society are way more complex than the plants hanging out in my greenhouse. … Keeping in mind that society is FAR more complex than taking care of plants …

(A “horrible, evil” analogy.) Reactions were good at first, but then SJers took it to sf_drama, which flipped its shit and said she was dehumanizing transpeople. It became clear, if you weren't focused more on dogpiling a sinner than anything else, that Leafing wasn't quite neurotypical, and eventually she posted that she was so upset that she'd started cutting, and that she could post pictures if they didn't believe her. Despite the community's commitment to social justice, they merely sneered at this and told her to “sit the fuck down and try and figure out why people are reacting to your words so badly”.

NB: Apparently a lot of subthreads have been deleted. According to eyewitnesses, threads encouraging her to cut and to take pictures were deleted as triggering. We are sure that erasing history had nothing to do with it. (According to other eyewitnesses, this never happened. It just goes to show that they're right about eyewitnesses.)

So, of course, she went through with it. Which, of course, led to more people telling her off - because we all know that self-harming tendencies are completely rational, right? And telling people to stop doing it will fix them.

Unfortunately, the pictures she posted triggered some people who also had or had had self-harming tendencies. And also triggered some people who didn't? IDK. But sf_drama was sorry she felt the need to self-harm, but did not want to hear about it. Wank_report sided against her, but what do you expect.

Unfortunately, anons tend to follow Leafing around the internet and take potshots at her, which is pretty gross.

The topic of Leafing occasionally arises on fail_fandomanon, and there are always a few nonnies who want to blame her for everything that happened. One such example occurred in an early-October 2011 thread titled “Our Reputation.” The ensuing wankfest caused Leafing to be declared a banned topic for the rest of the post. In early January 2012, she came up again in a thread titled “What's the angriest you've ever gotten in an internet argument?”