A Brief Primer on Benjanun Sriduangkaew

Oh, where to begin…?

If you’ve been around on the internet for a decently long period of time and you’ve been here and there and yonder in fandom spaces, you’ve probably heard of Winterfox. Maybe you didn’t hear about her under that name. Maybe she went by Lesifoere, Acrackedmoon, or Benjanun Sriduangkaew, but no amount of name-changing will ever erase what she’s said and done throughout her long and infamous online career. Known to be particularly vitriolic, “Bee” as she is called within her social circles, has one of the most abysmal online footprints I’ve ever seen which is saying something since I’ve seen some pretty fucked up shit on here. Her history spans many websites, blogs, and social media profiles, some of her earliest indiscretions on Codex while today she continues her reign of terror on BlueSky.

So. Who is Winterfox? Some folks are under the erroneous assumption that Benjanun is her actual name, but that’s still a nom de plume under which she has published several (allegedly mid) fiction stories. Originally, when she adopted this name, she was known in person to be somewhat quiet, unassuming, and polite despite the machinations going on behind the scenes. Eventually, other writers and editors started putting together that Benjanun and the notorious reviewer behind the blog “This Requires Only That You Hate” (“RequiresHate” for short) who was known for being brutal in the very worst of ways, were the same person. Folks who kinda whispered about it were labeled “racist” as the identity of RequiresHate surely could never have been the well-liked and respected up-and-coming author. Surely, these other writers were simply jealous of her successes and wanted to see her fail by connecting her to this odious online troll. But…she was RequiresHate.

Laura J. Mixon, another author who was somewhat removed from the situation, started to put together notes, eventually writing a very long and comprehensive essay that connected Benjanun’s alter egos and peeled back the ugly bits of all of her old antics. The essay ended up winning a Hugo Award as well as dropping a massive bomb all over Bee’s burgeoning career—most of the damage done by revelations of an overwhelming amount of absolutely fucking heinous behavior committed online over decades. On Codex, she was known for her utilization of the “N Word” and her tendency to harass just about anyone, at one point encouraging a 14 year old to expose her breasts or “pre-op cock” and utilizing white supremacist jargon to denigrate Black and Jewish Americans who she considered beneath her and a drag on society as a whole. Notably, in her Codex days, she was openly transphobic and homophobic, calling women “trannies” and using just about any slur possible just to get a reaction. Ironically, she’s not white and she’s not even American, having been born in Thailand to a fantastically rich family. As far as we know from her old posts on Codex, she picked up a fake managerial position that was mainly for show, “working” at one of her uncle’s many hotels as an insufferable and useless little nepobaby. It’s not enough to be rich, you gotta be an asshole too, apparently.

Once Bee learned about social justice, it was over for the rest of us. She started trolling and writing blog posts slinging shit at everyone for any perceived slight she could possibly cook up. The sense of moral righteousness has never truly left her, and she still continues to gain supporters by slinging vitriol and pretending to be the victim when she’s been the perpetrator the whole time. She’s targeted all kinds of other writers in wild attempts to destroy their careers or simply make them upset enough to leave writing spaces for good, finding that the harassment from Bee’s goons is too much for them to handle. One author she targeted was apparently lesser than because she wasn’t “Asian Asian,” and others she suggested should be maimed or killed in various gruesome ways for their often relatively mild transgressions in fiction. One author was allegedly told that she should be raped by dogs while she said of Paolo Bacigalupi, “[…] flay him alive slowly, pour salt, pour acid, dismember and keep alive as long as possible. […] If I see Bacigalupi being beaten in the street I’ll stop to cheer on the attackers and pour some gasoline on him.” Admittedly, she claims that she never told anyone to be raped by dogs, but it’s a tough pill to swallow when we know for a fact that she once told a person, “Suck on a dog's dick and die, you worthless, lobotomized abortion.” (This statement dated March 18th, 2011, about a month before editor Nick Mamatas tweeted about how much he liked RequiredHate’s blog.)

After her identity was revealed, she began openly posting or reposting/supporting horrific statements on Twitter under her Benjanun name, suggesting to one man that he should die of AIDS so that the world would be better off without him and openly retweeting posts with slurs for transgender men such as “zippertits” or “birthday boy.” This was also where her rampant antisemitism again reared its ugly head as she began accusing Jewish creators and commenters who disagreed with her to be Zionists even when they were clearly and openly not, choosing to call one Jewish man a “Klansqueer” and a “bleached rat” or a “rodent” just because he dared oppose her often bigoted and transphobic claims. In a related incident, she chose a trans man who had disagreed with her and began lying about his posts and intent, developing an unhinged personal fantasy that he was attempting to inspire a mass shooting event targeting trans women (with less than zero evidence).

When she was redlined under the Soupcan tool which allows transgender users to see who is safe and who has espoused anti-trans rhetoric in the past, Bee’s masses of useful idiot followers began harassing the tool’s owner despite the extention functioning exactly how it was intended. Whether one is transphobic against women or men—it doesn’t make a distinction, and Bee had spent several months cultivating a shockingly large following of trans women to use them as a cudgel against trans men in an effort to divide a community she has absolutely no stake in (presumably for shits and giggles). Those of us who remember her history will recall that this is part of a long-standing modus operandi as it closely resembled the way she had collected Black authors and online personalities to pit them against allegedly “racist” creators (notably more likely to be POC than white) before she abandoned that cause and left her Black supporters swinging in the wind after she got bored with them. The truest misfortune is that Bee’s violent rhetoric and vitriolic personality often attracts birds of a feather, meaning that in her anti-racism phase she picked up notorious critic and hate-blogger Stichomancery (known for such classics as “Social Justice Pokemon of Color” to describe POC caping for their white allies which is super ironic considering her role as attack dog for Winterfox), while in her trans-feminism phase she picked up Sinister_Sophia (also known as “14 Words Sophia” for her adoption of the white supremacist 14 words adapted to serve her own purposes). These virulent sycophants will do anything to feel powerful and seek almost to harness the power Bee seems to have in just getting away with it, whatever “it” happens to be whether that be calling disabled queer people “assigned feeble at birth” or brown muslim creators “shit-covered pigs” or, predictably, cheering the possible COVID deaths of poor Americans due to their perceived inability to afford healthcare.

Nobody is safe around Bee, let’s be clear. She’s got an insidious hatred for anyone and anything and just because she’s pretending to like you now doesn’t mean you won’t be fodder for her next social justice woodchipper in a year or so. It’s difficult for a lot of these people to realize that they’ve been had, but much like Donald Trump, Benjanun simply gives them permission to become their worst selves and for some folks, that temptation proves to be too much to resist. Self-respecting people do not fall for Bee’s bullshit and they certainly don’t go around white knighting for one of the absolute worst people on the internet today. Sadly, this isn’t even an exhaustive explanation of all the things she’s done or said and an article like that might take months and months to compile because of the sheer quantity of her depraved behavior over the years.

Interestingly enough, Winterfox has never sought to go toe-to-toe with me. Maybe it’s because I have compiled a ton of links to testimonies written by authors and researchers. Maybe it’s because I’m a white woman and she’s mostly used to going after more marginalized people because they’re easier to target as they have more vulnerabilities. Every time there’s a new social media, she finds me and blocks me even if I’ve never interacted with her posts. She’s never even spoken about me in any of her various tirades, almost as though she’s afraid of waking a dormant volcano. Unfortunately for her, I simply do not forget things and I wait a little bit here and there and then remind people of her existence and the way she further victimizes communities just for funsies because she’s bored and she doesn’t have anything better to do with her miserable, nepobaby richie rich life than poke at marginalized people online and get them to fight each other for sport. It’s a game for her. It’s never been about anything else. If you don’t know that by now, you will. She doesn’t think you’re a person and she never did.

Please enjoy this small selection of screenshots I’ve collected.