I'm so sorry you've had this experience with trolls and with people who are willfully reading your work through the lens of their own issues, but this is so relatable, and you hit the nail on the head. I've tried to write stories about abuse, sexual relationships, and sexual experiences, and I've gotten everything from men telling me it's wrong of me not to include statistics on female abusers (um, hello, it's a memoir-style essay about a man who abused me, not an academic whitepaper?) to telling me that it's "clickbait" if my title refers to sex when the rest of the story is also about... wait for it... *a sexual relationship* but the takeaway message goes way deeper than that.

The thing that sucks about trolls is that they can easily flag GOOD stories, POWERFUL stories as being supposedly problematic.... and the trolls are most likely to come after women and other marginalized writers in the first place. This only discourages us from using our voices in the first place, because there's a mental-health price to pay for daring to express ourselves. The pressure from trolls makes the artistic and online worlds a less diverse place.

Platforms need to take this into account when deciding how to respond to complaints from readers/viewers, because I can almost guarantee that the majority of good-faith content that gets reported has been authored by women and minority creatives, and that the trolls reporting them are simply acting out of bigotry.

Thank you for sharing this very important observation. And I'm genuinely happy for you that you're at a place where you feel better within your body now than before. ❤️