Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/08/04/popular-queer-native-american.html
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Here we go yet again with this kind of shit.
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Asshole
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People are strange.
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Especially when you’re a stranger. 
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What is the “payoff” for catfisherpersons?
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This sounds like someone who was absolutely desperate for attention, found a way to get a lot of attention, and then didn’t know what to do about that. That woman has some serious psychological issues.
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This is the payoff.
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Shades of Dolezal…
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Went full Daniel Day Lewis with this one.
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That was my first thought, except she was maintaining two identities.
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This sucks for so many reasons, and one of them is that it poisons the well with suspicion. I know, in real life, a young woman who is very involved in online SF fandom and fanfic. She has a lot of serious disabilities (she’s quadriplegic, epileptic, has depression), and sometimes she needs to bow out of a responsibility she’s taken on, like moderating a board or something, because of a health problem. People quite frequently assume she’s a liar and a flake, because no one could possibly be funny, pretty, creative AND have multiple disabilities, so she must be catfishing, right?
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Yeah, that’s my question too. She’s not making any money from this. She’s not really influencing anythign or wielding any kind of power. It’s a big investment of time and effort. She risked lots of damage to her reputation, which seems to have happened. So? Just the thrill of being a jerk and trolling people? Attention?
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In this particular case, the payoff that people are speculating is that it gave McLaughlin a highly visible BIPOC friend and ally. She has been under fire for some time for being dismissive of non-white women at her MeTooStem charity. Folks are assuming that the catfishing was to somehow deflect that (“I’m not racist–look at this Hopi friend I have online”).
Edit: please note that this is just the scuttlebutt speculation. I’m not sure we will ever really know.
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Ok, that makes sense. Super-stupid though, the total population of Hopis is under 20k, they probably all know each other within one or two steps, the right age group is probably a few thousand people, and if queers are about 1% of the population that would indicate about 100 queer Hopi within the right age group, and they would all know each other, so this whole charade was doomed from the start. She should have picked some more ambiguous group and let the character fade out by disappearing from Twitter. Even picking Cherokee would be a lot smarter as there are over 300k enrolled Cherokee and they don’t allow know each other, not even close.
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Seriously Boing Boing? Why can you not apply the term “trolling” in this headline? Because that’s what this was, and that’s what she did.
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Delegitimizing the issues faced by actual human beings?
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Yeah. The whole thing is unsettling.
It seems to have been an evolving thing without just one motivation, too. I just read the NYT article linked in the post; I had forgotten that the account was already around at the time when McLaughlin was in her tenure fight with Vanderbilt. The faux account was a big supporter of the petition circulating online (in support of McLaughlin), so maybe it started as an attempt to drum up support for her career crisis? The claims of Hopi identity came later.
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She’s actively made it more difficult for everyone who really faces marginalization in academia and STEM. She’s arguably worse than the garbage people who are openly bigoted.
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