#sonicfox5000

-In Mortal Kombat 11, Sonya Blade is voiced by Ronda Rousey, an MMA fighter and WWE superstar who is also a TERF (and a Sandy Hook truther, but that isn’t relevant to the story).

-Streamer and e-Sports champion SonicFox5000 posted a joke video on his Twitter from a stream, showing his character (I think Geras) neck-chopping Sonya Blade and SonicFox yelling “TERF!” at every impact.

-TERFs began reporting this tweet en-masse and spamming things like “TERF is a slur” in his notifications. At this point, Twitter deemed the video to not be in violation.

-More big-name TERFs such as Graham Linehan and Helen Lewis show up, posting about how SonicFox was using this to justify misogyny and violence against women, seemingly missing the point that a) it’s a joke, and b) it’s the point of the game.

-SonicFox is report-bombed a second time, and this time the video is taken down and his account is muted for 12 hours. 

-UK MP Joanna Cherry testifies in front of the Human Rights Commission during their discussion about freedom of speech, discussing Twitter’s protection on the basis of gender and not sex and the threatening of MPs, especially female MPs. Cherry then proceeds to ruin her relatively valid point by choosing to run SonicFox’s video in front of Parliament, held up a printed out meme of Lily from Zombieland Saga holding a gun captioned “shut the fuck up TERF”. Cherry directly says "Knowing that there's a debate about trans rights, and knowing that one side of the debate is called TERFs and tends to be women, would this not be on the grounds of sex and maybe even gender?", and implies that the video was only taken down since she and other MPs commented, implying a very strange point about threats to MPs and failing to make a valid argument about anything.  (link to the footage from the testimony, Cherry’s testimony begins at 15:27:27)

-SonicFox is unbanned and, being an icon, points out that TERFs can be men or women, and that if the fatality was performed on a male character they would not be having this discussion in a fairly reasonable series of tweets.

-Cherry responds by tweeting to his thread: “Not abuse but hilariously patronising. Man offers to lecture 53 year old lesbian feminist on discrimination.” Sonicfox, a black gay man, is not impressed, pointing out that Cherry responded to any criticism of her by calling it “abuse”. SonicFox also retweets a link to a trans charity.