Late last night, Nick “Nickmercs” Kolcheff – an associate of Guy “Dr Disrespect” Beahm who’s recently done a spectacular job of digging his own grave – got suspended from Twitch. Following months of sustained anti-trans rhetoric that ramped up in recent weeks, the bro-y streamer is finally facing tangible consequences after dropping the T-slur during a stream. On the upside, it seems like he's learned his lesson and plans to turn over a new leaf.
Just kidding.
“Banned for using the word ‘Tranny’ on Twitch,” Kolcheff, who has over 6 million followers on Twitch, wrote on Twitter. “Apparently that’s a derogatory term. That’s on me. Next time I’ll use ‘mental health disorder.’”
This raises a lot of questions about the usefulness of Twitch’s rules in a situation like this. These rules explicitly forbid, among other things, “expressions of contempt, hatred, or disgust based on a protected characteristic” including “statements that a protected group should not exist.” During a recent stream, Kolcheff literally said that trans people do not exist: “There’s no such thing as trans people,” he said while playing Elden Ring. “That’s something that you created. So have fun with your little dream land, but that shit is not even real.”
Other incidents have included a 2023 Pride Month invocation of “leave little children alone” rhetoric in response to transgender rights protesters in Florida – which ultimately led Activision to yank his in-game skin from Call of Duty – and a recent dust-up with Ava Kris Tyson, a close friend of Jimmy “MrBeast” Donaldson who is trans. Tyson was criticizing defenders of Dr Disrespect, which prompted Kolcheff to reply: "You should be ashamed of yourself. Leaving behind your wife & child, to play pretend. One day you’ll wake up and realize what you’ve done."
These are just a few examples of a clear pattern of behavior on Kolcheff’s part, one that stretches back an entire year and demonstrably demonizes a marginalized group. But Twitch only opted to ban him after he used a slur, at which point he responded by immediately giving up the game: Cruel language is just the tip of the iceberg, and the substance behind it is the actual point. Kolcheff wants people to know that he believes trans people are delusional – that a desire to embody a different gender is a disorder, which is factually untrue, by the way – and he’ll keep saying it until he’s blue in the face. The kinds of ideas he’s propagating are much more harmful than an admittedly shitty term; they are what convince people to fear, loathe, and even do violence to trans folks. On and around Twitch, the damage has already been done, and it sure seems like Kolcheff plans to do more.
What happens when Kolcheff returns from what appears to be a temporary suspension? It seems unlikely that Twitch will suddenly start taking action against things Kolcheff has been saying for a year. Meanwhile, he’ll need to be a little savvier about how he says them – he’ll just have to tiptoe around the gargantuan, unmissable minefield that is using a slur – and that’ll be that. That in mind, who is this ban serving? Who benefits from it? Unless Twitch decides to actually enforce its rules when it comes to transphobic dog whistles, plausible deniability be damned, it may as well not be doing anything at all.
