US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), while not attempting to convince Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to vote to end the government shutdown, spent the long weekend helping an English gamer raise over a quarter of a million dollars for a trans charity devoted to supporting young people going through gender dysphoria, or the feeling that your gender identity is mismatched with your biological sex.
“Trans rights are civil rights are human rights,” Representative Ocasio-Cortez said during the broadcast of the twenty-year-old game Donkey Kong 64. “We wouldn’t be talking about bathrooms at all if everyone just washed their hands and minded their own business.”
Even the hosts of the stream were shocked by its success, which originally had a donation goal of just $30,000 for the entirety of the days-long event.
“I maybe have fantasized about anything remotely like this ever happening in my life, and even they do not compare to what has happened. It’s been amazing, and just…wow,” said the gamer, who goes by H.Bomberguy, when asked what he thought of the stream’s runaway donations.
Why the trans charity event happened
The event began after Irish television writer Graham Linehan urged his followers to join an email campaign opposed to a British National Lottery grant of £500,000 to a trans charity called Mermaids, which caused the organization to “undertake a review of this grant.”
In reaction to the news, the British YouTube personality known as H.Bomberguy, who runs an account with just over 300,000 subscribers, announced that he would record himself play a two-decade-old video game and broadcast it over Twitch, and send all viewer donations to the Mermaids charity.
“Graham Linehan, a comedy writer who did some work on a good show 20 years ago who happens to be a very normal man who’s just very angry about trans people all day nowadays went on Mumsnet and told them to email a lady from the National Lottery en masse and now the funding is under review,” H.Bomberguy explained in his announcement. “So well done, Graham! You have a massive audience and the power to choose to fight for progress in all the many forms we need in the world right now and you used it to make sure some children won’t have access to helpful resources.”
After 57 straight hours of playing “Donkey Kong 64” without sleeping, the gamer had raised more than $340,000 for the trans charity, and had completed 100 percent of game’s many challenges. The stream reached $50,000 in its first 24 hours, but it was a Tweet by Representative Ocasio-Cortez that drew significant attention to charity event. Shortly after, the Congresswoman joined the Twitch broadcast to discuss the state of trans issues in America and around the world.
“The trans community faces a crisis when it comes to housing and healthcare, like most people in America,” Representative Ocasio-Cortez said at hour 50 of the marathon Twitch stream. “But with the added level of discrimination, it makes these issues much more acute in their crises than they usually are on average for other people. It’s important that we do talk about these issues in an economic frame, but not let go of the fact that discrimination is a core reason for economic hardship.”
If you’d like to use this as a good moment to support the queer community, there’s a charity twitch stream going on for @Mermaids_Gender: https://t.co/vCvvqRhAwb
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) January 20, 2019
Her appearance on the quarter-million dollar trans charity stream came after American television writer Aaron Sorkin criticized freshman Democratic Congresspeople for “acting like young people.”
Ocasio-Cortez discussed a number of other issues during her brief appearance on the Twitch broadcast, including the continuing government shutdown and her policy of refusing to compromise on Donald Trump’s demand for funding for a border wall, or indeed anything.
“If we caved on this, no matter what the request was, then we’re legitimizing the tactic of holding people’s paychecks hostage,” she said.
Even so, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez admitted that she is not an expert on all of the matters that she spoke about.
“Donkey Kong 64 is outside my wheelhouse,” she said in response to H.Bomberguy’s request for help in beating the game’s factory level. “I never owned an N64, but I do believe that it’s the best system out of all of them.”
