This is not the return to social media I had imagined. Not by a long shot.

It has been a difficult week in the sapphic book community. A lot of people feel very betrayed and hurt by the actions of an author that has been found to likely be falsifying details about their identity and their life, and the revelation of that has caused considerable pain and distrust amongst readers, authors, and the wider sapphic book world.

But, this moment has brought other troubling elements to the surface. It has emboldened some people to be openly transphobic, while others have been perhaps unwittingly engaging in harmful stereotypes about trans, genderqueer, and agender authors. Some have taken this moment as an invitation to condemn and make harmful assumptions about writers who may be questioning their gender identity or sexuality under the guise of “protecting our spaces.”

This is the same rhetoric being used to exclude trans people from using facilities that align with their identity. The same regurgitation of tired stereotypes that prevents athletes from participating in competition. In putting incarcerated trans people into prisons where they will be targeted due to their physical and mental differences.

The same venom and baseless hate that recently lead to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom to declare trans women as men in the eyes of the law.

I am not here to defend Sabrina Kane or the writer behind the Sabrina Kane persona. I have never read a book by this author, and have not interacted with them aside from liking a few of their posts and leaving a couple of comments on social media.

Jae’s article exposing the author behind Sabrina Kane revealed that the author was apparently using false information to construct an image for their fans. While I am not entirely sure if any of the actions taken by this author would be considered predatory by my standard…if there is more evidence from private DMs that shows predatory behavior, my stance could change, but nonetheless the information about this author was revealed.

On the initial publication of Jae’s article, parts of it did leave me slightly worried. While Jae did not make any accusations toward this author that were transphobic or deploy any transphobic rhetoric, I did feel that the original version focused on the writer’s apparent gender in a way that I felt was too presumptive.

To her credit, Jae was aware of the conclusions others may jump to and even included lengthy sections in the article to defend trans and gender non-conforming authors, and to state that this case was expressly not about targeting authors based on their apparent gender.

Despite these efforts, and maybe solely because I’m a worrier, I found myself deeply anxious that this case could be used to justify harassment and investigation of trans writers, and that the centering of gender within the article could contribute to people calling into question the gender identities of many authors like myself.

I messaged Jae on Instagram with my concerns, and she was kind and receptive to my criticism and feeling that the original version of the article focused too much on the gender of the writer, and revised the article to focus more on the allegedly fictional backstory and life of Sabrina Kane.

I want to thank Jae for listening and being welcoming to being called in regarding this. I worked with her to contour some of the language and make it more clear that her issue was with the author making up details about their life, not the fact that the writer is allegedly a cis man using a feminine name.

I believe there is a larger debate here as to whether an author, of any genre or background, owes details about their personal life to their readers. There is more there than I can wade into right now, but my overall feeling is: no, they don’t owe the audience any personal details or a guarantee that the personal details they present are accurate to their real life. People have reasons to not tell the truth, and I don’t believe being fully truthful about your real life is a prerequisite to being able to write any genre of fiction.

What I am concerned about is how some people have seized on the fact that the author behind Sabrina Kane appears to be a cisgender man. I have seen assertions that someone who appears to be a cisgender man using a woman’s name and presenting as a woman on social media is predatory by default, and that writers of sapphic fiction, especially erotica or high-heat books need to be women (some go further, arguing for ‘biological women’ only) who are abundantly clear and entirely accurate about their personal details in order to prove their identity is acceptable enough to write sapphic books. The proposed alternative to their identity being fully exposed and accurate is for the writer to never share any details about their life and to “just let the books speak for themselves.”

Both proposed solutions are unrealistic and harmful. Neither prevent predatory behavior.

I would say there is not one solution for this, no universal rule that can be applied to declare how long somebody can inhabit a persona. I believe there has to be nuance

and each possible case of someone suspected of being a bad actor must be evaluated in isolation. People should talk, discussions should be had, and known bad actors should be confronted for their actions directly.

Whether you believe what the author behind Sabrina Kane did is predatory or exploitative is your decision to make. If you believe it was a betrayal of trust, it’s your decision whether or not to continue engaging with their work.

My worry is not that other authors will be taken to task. I hope that people with ill intent and compromised ethics are exposed swiftly and brought to reckon with the damage they could cause or have already caused.

No, my worry it is that through hasty investigations and loosely held accusations, things like deadnames of trans and gender non-conforming authors could be exposed. Authors who may be questioning their gender or sexuality could be forced out of the closet before they are fully prepared or fully safe to do so. Even moving beyond the realm of strictly gender and sexuality matters, these kinds of rushes to judgment could expose the identities of people fleeing abusers or bigoted family members, and simply people who wanted to write but did not want to expose their current location or personal details.

My fear is the ripple effects of people with an overzealous attitude that they may even believe is fighting the good fight might use the case of Sabrina Kane or Adam Gaffen as a justification to hastily condemn authors of not being truthful of their identity. Readers digging back into an author’s social media and seeing a picture of a man with a beard and assuming that it’s a picture of the author who otherwise presents as a woman. An author using offhanded gendered language like ‘I’m just a chill guy’ as evidence that their identity should be called into question. These reckless accusations and more overreaching assumptions could cause real and severe damage to people.

And, ultimately, someone’s outward appearance has no bearing on the person’s inner world, and it does not telegraph whether they are definitely what they appear to be.

Gender identity and sexuality are complex matters and may shift and evolve over months, years, or even decades. To require that a person has to look a certain way, have certain kinds of real-life sexual preferences, or that they must be “authentic” enough to be allowed to express themselves as a woman, both in fiction and on social media, creates a dangerous purity test that will harm and dissuade trans, genderfluid, and even cisgender women writers from expressing their own internal truth.

Perhaps even more concerning to me in this case is that there are a number of parallels between my journey to the woman I am today and the deception the person behind Sabrina Kane committed. There are also many, many critical differences, but they are not differences that would have been apparent or even visible if people had investigated my real-life identity early in my career.

I am now very open and proud about being a trans woman, but when I started writing as Chloe Slate, I did not fully know that I was trans. In fact, when I began I was probably in more active denial that I was a woman than I’d ever been before. I considered myself nonbinary and had been so for about a year at that point, but even then, I was primarily male-presenting.

I formally realized I was a trans woman on June 30, 2024, but even after that, my journey was only beginning. In a lot of ways it’s still just beginning. I only began dressing in ‘female’ clothing in February of this year, a month after I started hormone replacement therapy and began laser hair removal. Legally, I still exist under my deadname. Because of the current political climate, even if I were to change to my chosen name, I will have to retain the male gender marker on my passport. A deep dive into my personal information would reveal I had lived as a man for decades before understanding my truth. This could have been misinterpreted by someone looking into my past that I was clearly, obviously, a cis man with no complicated feelings about gender or sexuality.

I cannot be more clear, I am not assuming this is the case with the writer behind Sabrina Kane. I am not giving them credibility or favor or saying that they are having the struggles I was facing while I was exploring my gender.

Struggling with one’s gender is also not a prerequisite to writing in sapphic books.

We don’t expect fantasy writers to have actually ridden a dragon or practiced magic before writing an epic tale of kingdoms falling. We don’t expect mystery writers to be a real-life detective before writing a twisty thriller. Romance authors, similarly, do not owe audiences proof of their romantic conquests or failures.

For the first six months of my career, even though I knew I was writing sapphic books with honest intent, I was terrified of being seen as an invader, someone masquerading as a woman to make profit.

I had questioned my gender at times throughout my life, but when I began writing as Chloe Slate, and began finding success, I was more and more encouraged to embrace the femininity that I had always kept tamped down, both subconsciously and consciously.

In the nascent days of my career, I did not look “womanly”. I did not think I was trans, and I felt that I was, in a way, playing the role of a woman.

Once The Mansion began finding success, my profile was raised considerably. I don’t want to sound self-important, but I had a lot of people coming to me looking to form friendships, chat, and get to know Chloe Slate.

But, Chloe Slate is not a real person. She’s a persona inhabited by a writer with a completely different name. I’m probably not really as fun as she seems. Much like many, many authors, I prefer to have a certain degree of privacy and anonymity, especially considering the nature of my writing. But at that time, I had not even taken my chosen name. So, outside of the Chloe persona, I did not have a female identity to feel safe in. But being Chloe, playing that part, allowed me to explore interactions with people as a woman.

Having these interactions, feeling this comfort, feeling like I finally belonged in a space when I had spent my whole life feeling like an outsider, made those questions about gender that I had within myself come up more frequently. My formerly steadfast assertion that there was no way I could be trans began wavering. The phantom of ‘what if I am a woman?’ lingered longer than it had before in my mind. And, much to my surprise, I did not bat it away or thrash against it violently as I had years before, or even months before. There was a seed of my personal truth blooming.

But even within the warmth, safety, and kinship I found in the sapphic community, I was not able to come out on my own terms.

I was forced out of the closet due to social media pressure and the words of a sapphic book fan who may not have even known how damaging their words could have been.

The moment came in a discussion about my book on Facebook. I was in the midst of The Mansion’s success, and I was astonished that people were talking about my book. Seeing that people were loving it and singing its praises was one of the most surreal and rewarding moments of my life thus far. There was no way that I could interpret The Mansion’s performance as anything but proof of success, evidence that I had arrived as a writer, a dream I had held for my entire life but had never been able to achieve.

But, unfortunately, I can be the kind of person who has an upsetting aptitude to look past any amount of praise just to find the naysayers, the critics, on any topic. Eventually, I found the negativity that my pesky mind assured me was there:

“This book reads like it was written by a man, for men.”

I spiraled. I felt like all my worst fears had come to fruition, that this would be the seed of my downfall. This was the inevitable first step to me being cast out of a place I had found so much comfort in. It would not have been the first time I had been kicked out of a social group for not fitting in, for not being the right kind of person, not by a long shot.

Beyond that, it was inaccurate. I knew even at that point that I wasn’t a man. I hadn’t identified as a man for such a long time, and even before I had discovered I was nonbinary, I had never been comfortable with masculinity, with manhood. I would discover later, when I began HRT, that I had very low natural testosterone levels, and that I may have been some degree of intersex my entire life without realizing it.

But, at that time of the accusation, I felt I had no defense against it, and that if anyone peered into my life, they would see a man. A man invading women’s spaces, just like the transphobes assert is happening. I felt I was the imagined monster that they were warning people about.

Amidst this pain, this strife, this panic, I reached out to the moderator of the Facebook group to express my worry about the comment, and I wrote five words that would change my life.

“I am a trans woman.”

I did it because I felt I had to, but that it also felt right. It was my truth, a truth I’d been hiding from for so long. I was forced to out myself, and thankfully I landed on my feet.

But this could have gone differently. If I were in a less stable place mentally, if I had already felt like I wasn’t ‘woman enough’ to be in this space, this accusation and the accompanying spiral could very well have lead to much, much darker places.

Sapphic books had been my salvation, the place where I had finally found comfort, and there’s a chance that being exiled or crashing out of it due to assumptions and accusations about my gender could have had dire consequences for me.

I know that was perhaps a long digression, but I went there to prove a point. All of that struggle I described, all that inner strife, all those questions had occurred within myself, silently. I wasn’t even discussing these struggles with my spouse. There was no paper trail of me investigating my gender identity aside from private online conversations.

At first blush, and even upon further investigation, if the accusations that I was a man invading sapphic books picked up steam and people had made assumptions without talking to me, my case would have had an eerie similarity to the case of Sabrina Kane, and things may have turned so quickly that I wouldn’t have had time to explain the distinction and nuance.

This is why making assumptions about somebody’s identity, of their mental state, can be so dangerous. To carelessly throw out accusations based on appearances or even seemingly ironclad evidence such as names or other alleged ‘proof’ that appears to reveal someone’s identity as being definitively male or female could potentially force people out of the closet, cause severe mental distress, or have so many other intentional or unintentional consequences for the person on the receiving end of the accusation. Many times, the accusations come with such fervency and frequency that the accused cannot even have the chance to explain themselves before the court of public opinion has rendered its verdict.

Now, obviously, there are many differences between my case and Sabrina Kane’s. My time within the Chloe persona before realizing I was a woman was brief. I began forming friendships and speaking to people as Chloe for only about two months before I came out. But I was still interacting with people as Chloe.

Even in that time, I remained guarded with my identity and while I did not intentionally deceive anyone about my gender, I may have evaded parts of the truth. I kept my distance and refrained from making intimate connections with others before I came out, but I was still interacting with people as Chloe.

‘Being’ Chloe allowed me safe freedom to better understand myself. I am so beyond grateful that I was allowed to explore as I did, I believe it saved my life.

But, to a person trying to root out the ‘true’ identity of an author in pursuit of maintaining ‘purity’ within the sapphic community, my case and Sabrina Kane’s would have, at points, looked very similar, and it would be reasonable to conclude that similar accusations of being a gender invader or inauthentic in my presentation could have been cast upon me. And it might have not mattered what the actual truth was after the damage was done.

This is not to say that I believe the person behind Sabrina Kane is questioning their gender, is trans, or has a complicated mental image of their sexuality and their gender that they are trying to express through their art. I believe the evidence presented indicates they are a cis man. Whether a person is comfortable with cis men writing sapphic books is a personal choice, and should be kept as such. Additionally, writers choosing to work with or promote any other author is a personal choice. I don’t believe anyone should dictate that to anyone.

But, crucially, we don’t know what is happening in that person’s head. We can’t assume a person’s internal image matches their outward one. That they aren’t struggling with something we cannot see, and they may not even want to talk about to even their closest friends and family, let alone random outsiders or former acquaintances tossing accusations at them.

This is not me giving a pass to predatory behavior or asking readers to blindly accept authors’ claims. It is a word of caution to say that you do not ever know what is going on in someone’s head. Fiction is a beautiful thing, and people from all walks of life create it.

Any purity test excludes people from even trying to understand themselves or create art they want to see.

For a community to be welcoming and inclusive, it must be just that. A degree of permissiveness and giving the benefit of the doubt is necessary to allow people who don’t fit into a certain mold to express themselves and live their life authentically. Some trust and faith needs to be given to all people in a space, even if that trust and faith is guarded and cautious.

Creating a community that insists on a purity test, for someone to prove they are enough of a certain kind of person to be valid, may be seen by some as a way to keep predators out and retain the sanctity of a space, of a community. And to some degree, it might.

But it will also discourage others with legitimate needs and good intentions who may want to enter the community to be able to explore truth that they are only suspecting at the moment.

And that equation won’t be balanced, not by a long shot. Is it worth it to create an isolationist and exclusive community that will preemptively strike fear into and discourage 100 trans or genderqueer authors in the hope that one person with ill intent might get caught as well?

We must have some degree of faith that people may have legitimate reasons to try on other identities, to choose not to share their full real-life truth. We must pair that with the ability to recognize and condemn toxic behavior when it occurs, not assume that a person’s apparent identity makes them toxic by default.

This is how we grow stronger and survive a world that can seem more hostile by the day. This is how to build a strong community that doesn’t collapse into in-fighting and fractured sects.

Strong, sustainable communities are created through letting vulnerable people in and giving them strength, not telling them that they aren’t a pure enough person to join the cause.

Thanks for reading

I promise to get back to the bubbly, fun writer you expect soon enough. Eventually.

-Chloe