Twitch streamer Clara ‘Keffals’ Sorrenti raided by armed police in transphobic swatting

nme.com:

Twitch streamer Clara ‘Keffals’ Sorrenti woke up on August 5 to armed police raiding her home, pointing an “assault rifle” in her face.

It follows a campaign of harassment she has experienced whilst streaming on Twitch, and she has now pleaded for help.In a video posted to her YouTube channel (via PC Gamer), Sorrenti detailed a harrowing experience with London (Ontario, Canada) police, where they raided her home, armed, after “every city councilor in the city of Ontario” received an email stating that she possesses an illegal weapon, had killed her mother, and planned to go to City Hall and shoot “every cisgender person” in sight.After being taken into custody, she claims the police took the email seriously despite it being “riddled with grammatical errors” and appearing more like “something a troll would say”.

The email also stated her name, but referred to her as her “dead name” – the term for a transgender person’s birth name. She believes this was an attempt to make the police “humiliate” her.Throughout the course of her “interrogation” by the police, Sorrenti said that the police referred to her as this dead name repeatedly, and when talking to her mother would refer to Sorrenti as her “son”.“The fact that a fake email led to London police services booking me under my dead name reveals the prejudice that many police have towards transgender people,” Sorrenti said, before holding up a property bag clearly labelled “Roberts” which was her surname prior to legally changing it in 2012.