Ra'il l'Nasah Kiam, YourSlipisShowing, and the Erasure of Black Trans Organizing

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In June 2014, the Friday before Father’s Day, Ra’il I’Nasah Kiam (he/xē/they) and Shafiqah Hudson noticed a peculiar trend on Twitter. The two started to see new accounts pop up, each with the similar position: abolishing Father’s Day. These new accounts often espoused this viewpoint in broken, incorrect African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Users of the time may remember seeing #EndFathersDay as a viral hashtag.

The tweets had bizarre claims. One argued that, because interracial dating exists, Father’s Day had to be abolished. The other claimed it had to be done away with because of “men raping and killing us.” Their handles were equally bizarre. One was simply CisHate, another NayNayCantStop. Another was a racist caricature of Black women’s names.

“One of the accounts had a picture of a Black woman and then the name was LatrineWatts or something like that. Literally a play on the word Latrine,” Kiam said in an interview with Trans News Network.

His online history began on BlackPlanet, Myspace, Livejournal, and Facebook, a casual lurker in most instances. Between 2009 and 2011, he grounded himself in digital Black spaces, migrating to Twitter and Tumblr, building communities that served as extensions of existing, in-person networks.

Much of his work focused around love and communal support, as well as digital activism with the #BringBackOurGirls hashtag to confront racism in media outlets. Other work included discussing theory, as well as challenging misinformation and racism in many casual spaces.

He eventually uncovered that these posts were an operation orchestrated by 4chan users on the infamous far-right /pol/ board. At this time, the idea that there could be such a large, coordinated hoax movement online was still new to the mainstream press and to the corporate world. Kiam knew people at Twitter who reported shock in meetings, with many initially skeptical that this was even possible.

But to Black feminist writers and organizers, it was painfully obvious. Kiam had a history of dealing with similar types of trolls on Tumblr, where white people pretending to be Black for the sake of discourse was a common occurrence in the early to mid 2010s. Hudson, active in feminist writing spaces for years, was intimately familiar with many in those communities, which made these new accounts immediate outliers.

It was through this experience that Hudson was able to expose many of the accounts as fraudulent, and Kiam was able to find the original 4chan thread, watching right-wingers post in real time about this fiasco, including openly admitting to being behind many of the accounts.

“I started putting together screenshots of like, this account says that they’re a Black disabled woman, and this is a lie,” he recounted. Much of the initial evidence came from their own lived experience. “We could just tell by some of the way the language was being used. There was AAVE being used poorly or there was just a lot of tells in terms of cultural and networking giveaways.”

“We managed to figure out that these are astroturfed sock puppet accounts.”

This culminated in Hudson forming the hashtag #YourSlipIsShowing, designed to counter and document instances of this racist hoax. Even the name of the hashtag reflects the easy-to-identify nature of these fascists, Kiam emphasized.

“#YourSlipIsShowing is an AAVE saying, because the slip is something that you wear under a dress to smooth down wrinkles and help create the illusion of like, fashion or whatever. So if your slip is showing, the thing that you were trying to hide in order to come across as more put together is actually showing.”

The movement spread like wildfire. People began mass replying to those using the #EndFathersDay tag, revealing their fascist origins, and often providing receipts for how they were lying. Many people who didn’t otherwise know each other began collaborating to identify fascists. In one instance, an account used a photo of former Buzzfeed writer Heben Nigatu, who was well known among Black feminists at the time.

The amount of hate and vitriol they got, all in all, started to decrease. Not because of any action from Twitter – which lagged behind, only banning people after much damage was done – but because of his own labor.

“[Me and Shafiqah] kind of went on to have the experience of just watching. Even though we kicked off the hashtag, it absolutely became like a group effort in terms of a number of other feminists, the queer folks, women of color like in our circles, just kind of kicking off throughout our networks being like, ‘okay, here's another one over here,’” Kiam remembered.

While some prolific figures on the right-wing including Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and Dan McLaughlin easily bought into the hoax to try and discredit people on the left, the impact that #YourSlipIsShowing had proved much greater than the trolls. It laid a great deal of the groundwork for digital antifascist organizing, and many people from this time remained in touch, maintaining solidarity networks that helped people for years to come.

This ultimately led to a resurgence of interest in the hashtag in the buildup to the 2020 election, where these pre-existing networks proved instrumental in further developing digital antifascist communities. An article in Slate interviewed both Hudson and Kiam, recounting the hashtag’s history in detail.

But this would be among the last major publicity Kiam and Hudson received. Further, neither of them received any financial benefits from their work.

“Me and Shafiqah just were not able to get a job within the tech spaces. We were doing other work or crowdfunding or, like I was working as a nanny for a while, I was working at Barnes and Noble and making it work with crowdfunding,” Kiam said.

“There's this whole sort of misinformation, disinformation industry that's like propping up around us and everybody's telling us how important our work is. And it ends up being in this book and that book. We speak here and there and so forth, like maybe once or twice at a conference here and there. But in terms of the work receiving a proper due, that wasn't our experience.”

This occurs far too often, both in online spaces and outside. Black — especially Black trans — organizing gets erased by media and professional spheres still dominated by white cis gentry.

He recollected how this wasn’t something that he was trying to capitalize on when first starting off. It was about keeping them and his friends safe online, to be able to talk about topics like race, gender, sexuality, as well as casual conversation about shows like How To Get Away With Murder.

Yet, the social media industry gained prominence in part thanks to his work keeping platforms free of fascists, and this industry primarily hired white people, while excluding the very people that founded the entire field.

It ultimately contributed to Hudson’s death.

“Shafiqah Hudson died in 2024. She died in such a way as to drive home just the bullshit of it all,” Kiam said. “She literally died while trying to crowdfund money for a ride to the hospital. There was a real way in which, whatever she had going on personally, whatever she might have had going on professionally, if she had been a white dude, it wouldn't have ended like that.”

He added that even if he and Hudson did land jobs, he likely would’ve been laid off amidst the massive layoffs at tech companies.

The core of Kiam and Hudson’s work was calling out some core problems with tech companies enabling harmful behavior and refusing to do anything about it, much in the way disinformation campaigns and inauthentic accounts still work today.

He asked, “What’s changed in the past 10 years?”

The Harms of Transphobic Erasure

Ever since 2020, the few accounts of this history all too often erase Kiam from his role in the movement. An NBC News article on a later instance of fascists pretending to be people of color and queer people by the now-CEO of The Onion, Ben Collins, then a reporter, failed to mention the movement at all. Kiam mentioned this was, at one point, brought up to Collins, but no resolution ever happened.

A recent academic article covering the movement also makes scarce mention of Kiam, and still uses his dead last name. An account from a Canadian nonprofit neglects to mention them at all, as does Inside Radio. The podcast There Are No Girls On The Internet, hosted by Bridget Todd, also failed to mention him.

"A very bizarre experience where, for example, Joan Donovan [who is also in the above podcast], who was this big name in misinfo and disinfo, right?,” Kiam said. “[She wrote] this big article in 2016, I think, about people pretending to be Black online to sway public opinion. Then there was just no mention of any of our work.”

While Kiam claims that Donovan later sent him an apology email, “I never read it in full, at least until more recently, because I was like, ‘I just don't believe you.’”

“She gets this whole six figure institute [the Critical Internet Studies Institute], you know.”

To Kiam, the most egregious example comes from a recent article in Essence magazine. This article, also written by Todd, makes no mention of them at all.

“They mentioned the hashtag and all they did mention was just Shafiqah. I went on to BlueSky, went on to Twitter to see if I could find the author and be like, ‘hey WTF,’ and it turns out that the author actually follows me on Twitter,” he added. “I am being dropped from the narrative because the framing is listening to Black women, and I’m not a Black woman. I’m no longer identifying as a Black woman. And rather than just maybe parentheses and ‘co-creator who's non-binary’ or however fucking you want to put it in an asterisk or a footnote or something. [But I’m] just completely gone.”

This was the instance of erasure that hit them the hardest.

“That was pretty fucking demoralizing. It’s really crazy too, because I grew up reading Essence magazine, like so hardcore. I really liked it in the days when I thought I wanted to be a magazine writer,” Kiam said. “This magazine that for a while, at least a part of me was seeing myself represented in these pages is quite literally erasing me now. And it seems to be done for really no good reason.”

Kiam emphasized that he agrees with the core message of how a lot of articles frame YourSlipisShowing: that Black women deserve to be heard and given a large platform. But the difficulty of being erased and continuously misgendered takes a toll.

“I'm never going to sit here and say that like Black women's work was not involved in or central to the hashtag, the campaign, and everything that came out after it. It's just that that's just not the only labor that was a part of it,” Kiam emphasized. “It felt like over the past couple of years or so where I've been coming out and more vocal and in the same online spaces that I've been, just about like being non binary, transmasc, pronoun changes and all this kind of stuff. And just seeing how there wasn't a current shift that was like, so when we're talking about this thing, also include the fact that this person now identifies as this… I’m just still feeling a way about it.”

Kiam mentions that solutions can come in the form of rephrases, terms like gender minorities or marginalized genders. “I know it might be a mouthful, but we’re here trying to do hard things.”

Kiam’s Legacy

After dealing with continued bigotry that prevented them from being hired in tech spaces, he had enough and decided to lean more into his artwork, photography, and pursuing intellectual work outside of academia.

Much of his photography, which focuses on nature and still lives, has been posted to Instagram and Mastodon. He also runs a separate Instagram page which curates Black art and aesthetics. Kiam also provided a Linktree showcasing numerous writings of his, in addition to photography and artwork.

A key throughline for his efforts has been self-actualization, something so many marginalized people are routinely denied.

“I feel like the past few years have just been me really learning how to be a person and myself, which I don't know if that's like an achievement on the same type that most people are looking at,” he said. “But it's like, the pandemic happened and I finally figured out exactly what was that nagging thing in the back of my mind when it was just like, oh, why doesn't this word just feel right to describe me? Yeah, I don't know, just figuring out my gender shit, figuring out that like, oh yeah, I'm still a writer, still an artist, even after all the sort of ups and downs of the industry and the political landscape.”

As he tries to get by, he’s also trying to navigate the internet and cultivating his scenes into a space open for marginalized people. A big piece of this is working in their communities while also navigating his intellectual works.

“I just had this massive investment of thinking that these spaces could be a space that could do right by the people who really created the internet and helps to maintain it as a place of life and culture,” he observed. “Government wartime projects were the roots of the internet, but then it was people of color, like queer people, like the weirdos and all that. They actually made this shit cool. Twitter wasn't cool before Black Twitter became a thing. I feel like gay people make TikTok worthwhile.”

Especially with the rise of the far-right on Twitter, Kiam has searched for alternatives on sites like Mastodon and Bluesky, and worked to make them more accessible.

“I am not a big brain tech person, even after all this time. Like, I don't know how to code. I never will. I'm not. I've looked at HTML shit once and I was like, ‘oh yeah, no, this is not my calling. This is not for me,’” Kiam told TNN. “I'm always interested in meeting grounds, especially since I've been on Mastodon, which is a very heavy, heavy, tech space. And I'm super interested in how to bridge the gap between the people who have a technical know-how and the people who might have the community experience to actually create an internet that is more functional and more of what we all want.”

It’s an experience that he’s run into some frustrations with. Beyond the issues with Silicon Valley and billionaires like Peter Thiel, much of the tech industry has been resistant to social change, instead peddling technologies like Bitcoin and AI that almost no one outside the worst gentry on the planet want.

The core of Kiam’s struggle is that he dreads the push for sites like Reddit to be the only forums, and that he wants to “just be a nerd online with my friends.”

The issue of maintaining spaces for his communities has gone back years. He's run many pages on Tumblr and Instagram dedicated to educating on leftist and Black radical history. Kiam’s role in establishing #YourSlipIsShowing was no accident, as maintaining these spaces forced them to deal with fascists raiding his pages, typically without platforms doing much of anything to alleviate it.

“I don’t think the way things are now is the way it has to be forever. I think we’ll eventually figure something out if only because we’ll get so miserable that it’s just like, alright somebody will figure something the fuck out,” Kiam emphasized. “It’s just been really hard to get to that place because there’s not as much money for those types of things, and there’s just not as much political and cultural will. It’s the racism, the transphobia, the sexism, it is all of that in the tech industry. It’s the culture of the place. And then just the way that STEM gets put on one side, and the human gets put on the other.”

This core problem runs deep in America. Systemic bigotry, particularly oriented around race, permeates every facet of day-to-day life. Capitalism itself was built upon racism and slavery, each structure we’re told to assume as a ‘natural’ part of day to day life working to propagate the very harms we want to end.

This especially is the case for Black trans folk, who find themselves drawing the ire of a bloodthirsty social order. The levels of poverty, incarceration, job discrimination and violence facing trans people as a whole are some of the worst of any demographic. Among Black trans people they are even worse. Social injustice only exists when there are people to disenfranchise, and those who find themselves at the intersection of multiple avenues of marginalization will far too often be pushed out of even ostensibly leftist spaces.

This ultimately led to Kiam logging off for longer and longer periods, focusing more on his artwork.

“I wanted to just spend time making zines, making prints, getting the analog involved with it all, because that's also what people are also moving right now in terms of like, how can we connect to each other past the sort of toxic din of what social media is like right now?”

A major way that he’s hoping to accomplish these goals is via fundraising. He wants to raise enough to cover some fellowships to focus on creative projects for a few months, and to ensure that he’s able to meet his needs for surgeries and to afford bills. For this end, he has an ongoing GoFundMe.

This is why material support is so important, and why erasure does so much damage. The organizing behind #YourSlipisShowing was vitally important in the history of antifascism and broader online activism. The erasure of both Kiam’s role and it as a whole leaves us all weaker. Trans folks — and any cis folks who actually support us — need to be loud about the real damage this kind of white- and cis-washing of the history of resistance does, in their case and many others.

Were Black trans creatives and organizers able to focus on their projects unhindered, we’d be in a far better place. The endless bouts of poverty so many face runs directly counter to this. That’s why some of the best support people can give is financial, a way to help end these cycles.

Ultimately, while he wants to be recognized and duly respected for his work with #YourSlipIsShowing, he doesn’t want to be entirely defined by it or pitied.

“I found it frustrating when this happened because I don’t want this to be my biggest story. I'm proud of the work that I did with the hashtag. And I’d do it all over again if I had to, but it's just like, guys, I'm also more than just like, ‘oh, like this poor person who was abused by the tech industry, they weren’t hired, so sad,”’ Kiam said. “I wasn’t hired and it is sad, but also it’s working just like a fucking sob story, you know? It just feels like, ‘fuck, can I be allowed to be more than that at some point, you know?’”

—Edited by David Forbes