Trans Twitch streamer Keffals is ready to return home

Trans streamers say Sorrenti’s activism matters

As Sorrenti and Murray explored the convention center, they met up with other streamers who had supported Sorrenti throughout the Kiwi Farms campaign. 

Gwen “Schmoople” Montgomery, a streamer who describes her platform as an “LGBTQ+ safe space,” befriended Sorrenti through Twitch and met her for the first time in person during the convention. She made an appearance on Sorrenti’s stream when they ran into each other at the convention’s marketplace, known as Artist Alley. 

“It was really tough,” Montgomery said of seeing what Sorrenti had gone through over the past few months. “I couldn’t imagine a stronger person to go through it … And I’m so proud of her for being able to do that.” 

Murray likens Sorrenti’s campaign against Kiwi Farms to her past experience working in international human rights law. Sorrenti’s team spent weeks collecting evidence, archiving “everything as soon as it was posted” and documenting the threats “in a way that a court would accept it.” 

“It was interesting seeing the front of my apartment building on 4chan,” Murray added. 

Other victories followed Cloudflare dropping Kiwi Farms. The internet archive site Wayback Machine removed Kiwi Farms from its records, and Google delisted it from search results. The security service hCaptcha also dropped the site. After Cloudflare stopped servicing it, Kiwi Farms moved to Russian servers, where it was quickly shuttered again when web-hosting provider DDos-Guard also terminated services. 

“There’s a chilling effect on these kinds of sites … If they ever get too cocky, people will start speaking up about them,” Sorrenti said. “And we know now that service providers do not want to host these kinds of sites. It’s terrible publicity for them to keep up.”  

I don’t feel like I’m that big of a streamer…but then in the sphere of trans streamers, I’m one of the biggest ones.”

-clara sorrenti, known as keffals

Kiwi Farms has struggled to maintain relevance since, and on Sept. 18 sputtered to a halt again, when the site was hacked. In a message on the site, Kiwi Farms founder Joshua Moon told users to assume that their passwords, emails and any IP used on their Kiwi Farm accounts had been leaked. Moon said that his own admin account was compromised in the breach. 

Though Sorrenti’s viewership is a fraction of other major streamers, the Kiwi Farms harassment and her propensity for confronting conservatives online has boosted her as one of the most well-known trans creators on Twitch. 

“I don’t feel like I’m that big of a streamer — I look at people like Hasan [Piker], or any of the bigger politics streamers. Like, I’m tiny,” Sorrenti said. “But then in the sphere of trans streamers, I’m one of the biggest ones, which is both cool but also, in a way, kind of sad because the bar is very low.”

Sorrenti’s platform may be smaller than any mainstream Twitch partner’s, but her impact is felt within the realm of trans creators. 

Early into her stream at TwitchCon, Sorrenti stopped by the Trans Lifeline booth, where the organization’s charity stream coordinator Amanda Stevens told viewers about micro grant programs to provide trans feminine people with gender-affirming care. 

“It’s really huge,” Stevens said of Sorrenti’s appearance at the booth. “I take the opinion that any streamer of any size is really important. Especially right now, where Keffals has a lot of eyes on her. It’s so important to be able to collaborate with other trans streamers of that size.”

Sorrenti poses at Hasan Piker’s TwitchCon booth.NBC News

Annie Roberts, a Twitch ambassador, noted the increase of the trans streamers on the platform in recent years. Five years ago, she said, trans creators were harassed off the platform entirely. Though many trans creators still face disproportionate harassment now, the trans community has blossomed online.

“When I first started streaming three years ago, trans representation was kind of dry,” Roberts said after taking a photo with Sorrenti. “And that’s kind of the reason I got into streaming a little bit. So it’s really cool that you can be a mainstream streamer and still be trans and it’s like, not a big deal.” 

Navigating life after blowing up online

The weeks following the August swatting incident have been a “whirlwind,” Sorrenti said.

In the midst of the harassment, Sorrenti and her then-fiancé ended their relationship. Their separation was “unrelated” to the doxxing and swatting attempts, but Sorrenti said the threats against the couple severely affected her ex’s mental health.

“It was actually really relieving for me, because anyone who is closely associated with me has to do the same sort of things I do,” Sorrenti said of the breakup. “And it’s not fair. It’s really painful, that just being associated with me means you have to take all these precautions, and you can’t just live like a normal person.”

The immense scrutiny she was under was isolating, Sorrenti said, and the fact that so few could relate to her only compounded the loneliness. She became even closer to the creators who moderate her channel and make up her executive staff, because they too were doxxed by Kiwi Farms users for working with her.

When her campaign to take down Kiwi Farms started gaining traction, Sorrenti came under fire for her social media posts, which some Twitter users criticized as ableist and microaggressive.

She was widely criticized for making a crass joke earlier this year, which some users said was offensive toward autistic people. The tweet was taken out of context, Sorrenti said, and fueled accusations of predatory behavior and being a “groomer.” The term implies that a person is a pedophile, and has been used in homophobic rhetoric in conservative spaces to associate LGBTQ people with being a danger to children.

Aaron Barnett, a streamer known as Enny who also works on Sorrenti’s executive team, described the criticism as disproportionate to Sorrenti’s actual viewership.