okay so yesterday a longtime tumblr mutual of mine and twitter friend messaged me to tell me that there's this trans girl in the uk (i, too, am in the uk) struggling with gender stuff and feeling isolated. she says that she "might benefit from talking to someone who’s been recently dealing with this stuff themselves" and asks to introduce us. and i go yeah, of course! because that sounds reasonable and i'm always down to try and be a helpful presence. my friend tweets us an introduction to one another. a single glance in at her twitter feed and i realise the situation has been sorely misrepresented. 90% of her feed from this entire week is an endless rapid-fire string of tweets about how 'all her friends leave her', frequent suicidal ideation, shooting down all advice or suggestion that things can be okay, and everything from vaguing to outright namedropping people who can't deal with the responsibility she tries to hand them for herself (and the fact she'll combine this with periodic softblocking and basically amazing levels of push-pull) despite the Bad Person For You red flags waving, i do message her, because we've been literally introduced to one another and i didn't want to look rude. i just kind of hope that my natural social awkwardnss will kill this exchange before it goes anywhere.... 5 messages in to this girl - 1 for hello, 2 for 'ahaha how do conversation' and the rest for a brief exchange about pokemon go - she cuts in to go this is not the person i expected to receive given that my friend treated us like we have common ground?? and she's followed my tumblr for years, she has heard about what my mother is like (why would you willingly put me around someone who constantly makes casual suicidal comments????) and how prone i am as a result to getting sucked in by people who want to be dependent on me, because i can and will will hold myself responsible for other people's happiness/emotional stability. and she's given me someone who sets out lures for me to go 'nnnnnooooo it's okay! it's okay let me help you through this' and then presumably i'm her Personal Therapist For Life until she softblocks me for not being able to be around on one occasion. and if her feed had been more innocuous and she'd chatted pokego with me for a bit longer, the hook might have worked. and that would not have been healthy in any way. how do i tell this friend that this was Not Okay? like, even if i didn't have the issues i have, handing me over as an advice-giver to someone who asks for help and reassurance only to persistently reject it is...unwise, right? i'm not overreacting to this?
.-. The most charitable interpretation I can come up with is that your friend is completely oblivious. Little bit unfortunate that she assumes trans = mutual interests but hey. Probably well-meaning. Right, well, step one, stop talking to Miss Manipulation. You've only messaged her a couple times, so hopefully she hasn't latched onto you yet. Step two, gently tell Obliviousa that you appreciate her efforts, but you just don't think this is going to work while Miss Manipulation is in such a bad place mental-health-wise. This is more than just talking about trans issues, this is someone who needs real professional help and you're not equipped to give it without hurting yourself in the process.
Your friend knew this person first and hasn't cut contact with them yet, which means two things: a) Friend is feeling burned-out themselves by the toxic behaviors you mention b) Friend either doesn't know or hasn't internalized how toxic these behaviors are. I think you want to explain to Friend exactly what this person is doing, why it's bad for the people who try to help her, and why it's especially bad for you. You can't give an oblivious person a complete education in spotting toxic people in one conversation, but if you can at least get Friend thinking about the possible problems, the rate of "hey go make friends with this asshat" will go down.
Good plans all around, thank you. Now I just have to figure how the hell to format this message to sensitively describe what Envy (the tweeter i was matched with) is doing in a way that shows that I respect she's dealing with Serious Crap but also how she's interacting with people is unhealthy and it was a bad idea to hand her to me or to anyone who isn't a professional. In fairness to TwitterFriend, she is also trans (assuming for a second that I am trans) and she knows I'm a very willing practical advice station for folks looking for advice or pointers in the right direction. But given that she'd already engaged Envy on her anxieties around pursuing transition and had hit the great wall of i'm-going-to-shut-down-every-suggestion-with-my-wave-of-relentless-negativity, I'm not sure how she thought I'd be able to do any better just because I'm also in the UK. @TheSeer I don't know whether TwitterFriend is even 'in contact' to speak of, I'm hoping she just stumbled across her through a search or something. I've kind of crossed my fingers that she didn't view her feed before passing her to me or something (as unlikely as that is).
Ah sorry, I assumed the mutual thing was transness rather than UKness, my bad. Good luck, hope it works out :c
If that turns out to be the case, "Please don't set me up with people you don't know" is an entirely reasonable boundary to set. (Seriously, who does that?)
