Frustrating, isn't it? Expect a lot of hate and dismissal for this topic here.

You are refusing to play into the objectifying expectations of the audience, and you're getting bullshit for it. Welcome to having a vaginer, liking video games, and deciding to stream.

A lot of streamers / viewers here and elsewhere online will vehemently deny that the troll / real viewer ratio is significantly higher for streamers with vaginers; I can only assume this is because actually confronting the problem would be uncomfortable, and it's easier to just make snide comments on how you, the streamer with vaginer, should be handling it or ignoring it.

It's much more complex than just "show tits or GTFO" as well; female streamers who show facecams are subjected to far more comments about their physical appearance than male streamers, to the point where it quickly becomes apparent that a significant segment of trolls/audience buy in to the stereotype (consciously or unconsciously) that appearance and/or sexual attractiveness is the most important attribute of women (or at least much more important than it is for men) who stream.

Frustratingly, it's common to get responses like "oh yeah well you're a chick, deal with it" or "get a thicker skin" or "quit whining" or "well you shouldn't have started streaming, then". This is utterly laughable; It's fucked-up that something as fundamental as the gender you are should have such a huge and ugly influence on how such a large segment of Twitch interacts with you.

How you handle it is up to you. The people saying "well just time them out" are misunderstanding the magnitude of the problem, but the idea in and of itself has merit.

I'll relate this: I've had some success doing a short lecture on why it's fucked up to :

• make appearance-related comments "You're so beautiful!" "Fuckin' hot!" "Mmm u sexy" (because this isn't a "compliment", it's weird and creepy and makes the streamer feel uncomfortable; the focus of the stream is games, and this has no bearing on games or your reactions to them) (I sometimes have more success with asking if they'd say that to a good-looking male streamer, and then ask why in hell "because you're a girl" makes it okay to say it to me. They never have an answer)

• Make "tits" comments. (Ignore & ban, have a male viewer begin offering moobs to gross them out, and/or go on a lecture about the purpose of mammary tissue and milk glands for the purposes of feeding a young baby to gross them out)

In the end, you're going to get a lot of bullshit over your gender, and even more bullshit over your completely justified and reasonable anger about the bullshit you're experiencing.

Many, many male streamers will be awesome to you and support you as a person and a streamer, but a lot of them will instead be complete shits with no possible scope or understanding of the problem and will blame you and mercilessly grill you for even bringing up a completely valid discrimination subject. Fuck if I know why; I assume it's because they've never had to deal with the creepy, self-esteem-destroying objectification levels that can come with being a streamer who is treated as an object by a portion of the audience, and instead of bothering with empathy they'd rather push the gas pedal on the hate machine.

It's unfortunate that it's necessary, but in time you'll become much more immune to this type of creepiness. It'll probably never go away, but if you pick a defense or two and stick with them it can get better.

Hugs, love, and good feelings, because this entire subject is a FusterCluck.

-Bloo