Xiaxue: “Hold my beer.”
Just over a week ago, the Internet enfant terrible likened K-pop boy band Monsta X to “a group of trannies” on Twitter.
Since then, she has been accused of hate speech, told to commit suicide and even worse, was called a “tranny” herself.
In other words, just another Friday night for the woman also known as Wendy Cheng.
Teens: "STOP SAYING TRANNY IT'S TRANSPHOBIC"— ♥‿♥ Xiaxue ★彡 (@Xiaxue) February 25, 2017
Also teens: "XIAXUE YOU LOOK LIKE A TRANNY YOURSELF DISGUSTING"
Me: 🤔
And then someone tweeted her: “I dare you to come for BTS or EXO.”
(For you non-K-pop fans who can’t tell Super Bang from Big Junior, BTS and EXO are the names of two other K-pop boy bands.)
Not one to back down or pass up an opportunity to troll, Xiaxue accepted the dare and replied, “OK. BTS sucks and EXO sucks worse.”
And thus she incited two additional K-pop fandoms to urge her to kill herself.
This led to a particularly disturbing image sent to Xiaxue of a tombstone with a picture of her and her young son, Dashiel.
Inscribed on the tombstone: “Xiaxue and her family. Cause of death: Made fun of EXO and BTS.”
And you thought wild chickens were a public health risk. Who knew that mocking K-pop idols could be fatal? We may have been culling the wrong thing.
The sender of the image also tweeted: “I’ll make sure to kill you, your baby and ur womb.”
The “kill ur womb” part seems rather redundant since after you kill someone, the womb is pretty much rendered inoperative. Perhaps it's for emphasis.
Despite the criminal intimidation, Xiaxue hasn’t said anything about making a police report and seems more amused than concerned by the awkwardly Photoshopped threat on her life and family.
After all, she has been an online provocateur since 2003, sometimes not even on purpose. What’s another death threat?
On Friday, she uploaded a YouTube video entitled “Xiaxue Vs Rabid Kpop Fans!! Trolling is fun” to explain what happened.
She says she was on the same flight as Monsta X and “nobody actually gave two hoots about them”.
So on arrival at the airport, “everyone at the luggage carousel was actually puzzled because there were screaming teenage girls beyond the gates”.
Xiaxue says in the video: “I got home and I received a tweet from a disgusted Monsta X fan that says I don’t deserve to be on the same flight as them.”
This prompted the host of Youtube series Xiaxue's Guide To Life to google “Monsta X”, which resulted in the tweet:
“I didn’t know who Monsta X is but when I google imaged them, I genuinely thought they were a group of trannies.”She says she woke up the next day to learn that “hell has descended on me” and she had become a “transphobe” and “homophobe” overnight, referring to the somewhat negative response to her tweet.
In the video, she addresses the issue of whether “tranny” is a slur and after citing US drag star RuPaul (“I love the word ‘tranny’”), concludes that “the trans community are still debating it till today”.
This is despite the Inter-University LGBT Network of Singapore releasing a statement in the wake of Xiaxue’s Monsta X tweet that the term “is usually understood by many transgender people as a dehumanising slur” and should be avoided.
But according to Xiaxue, banning offensive words just makes the problem worse. She says: “The solution is to make those words meaningless by refusing to take offence.”
Yah, you anti-Syonan Gallery people. You should have just refused to be offended by the name.
Xiaxue then goes on in the video to gloat about the numerous ways she trolled K-pop fans (and Yahoo News) and delineated how by supporting their idols, the fans are actually “propping up torture” in the K-pop industrial complex.
It’s exhausting.
If you’re a neutral bystander who is not a fan of either Xiaxue or K-pop, whose side would you take?
What a Monsta-rous choice.
It’s like Alien versus Predator.
Whoever wins, we lose.
- Published in The New Paper, 6 March 2017
UPDATE
I received this tweet from Xiaxue:
Hello @sm0ng I hate you for making me google this. #stompisfakenewsnowtoo #isoperativefor5mins pic.twitter.com/GORJsiaRRh— Xiaxue ♥‿♥ (@Xiaxue) March 10, 2017
I replied:
@Xiaxue The tweet wasn't 'I'll make sure to kill you, your baby and the baby in ur womb'— SM Ong (@sm0ng) March 10, 2017
@sm0ng hmmm true.... I don't know why I assumed there must be a baby in the womb— Xiaxue ♥‿♥ (@Xiaxue) March 11, 2017