Podcast

Empathy Hijacking vs The Movement

Podcast | Audio | Victoria Gugenheim & Esmée discuss the damage manipulation does

Sister Gorgon Victoria joins Esmée to explore the role "empathy hijacking" plays in creating reactionary allies to 'victim' demographics, purity spirals, and radicalization. It's also a favored tactic of abusers and predators inside the BDSM culture.

Most vitally, empathy hijacking deployed within feminist movement or organizations can create breaches of trust and fractures that weaken solidarity and, when very public, weaken the movement's authority and influence.

Rather Suss
Victoria developed this concept a while ago. We’ve been discussing it on and off for over a year. You can hear her first public discussion of it at Beyond Gender, aired April 3, 2025. Since then, a woman named Frankie Hart has used this concept apparently (??) without crediting Victoria for her original observation and analysis. Her self-published book by the title “The Empathy Hijack” has a registered copyright of 2026.

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About Victoria Gugenheim

She is the founder of Women Create International and Painted Powerful, a long time activist and a renowned special effects body artist. She is a frequent contributor to The Gorgon Posse Podcast and A Further Inquiry, where she will soon host the Art to Art podcast.

On Empathy Hijacking

Empathy hijacking is a term for the complex of manipulation tactics a predatory or toxic individual presents to weaponize and exploit another person's compassion. The exact phrase is rarely used peer-reviewed literature. Instead, academic researchers investigate this exact phenomenon under established concepts like the Dark Triad (specifically Machiavellianism and psychopathy), emotional manipulation, weaponized empathy, and altered empathic neural responses.

We are familiar with this manipulation from how it shows up in TRA discourse:

Confronted about toxic behavior or harm they have caused, the individual immediately claims they are being targeted because of their identity markers (e.g., race, gender, neurodivergence, or trauma history).
Individuals or fraudulent organizations fabricate or wildly exaggerate personal crises, claiming they are facing immediate eviction, medical emergencies, or targeted political persecution.
Someone may dominates meetings, organizing spaces, or online threads by constantly centering their own intense emotional distress and trauma, regardless of the agenda.
Hijackers frame any nuance, disagreement on tactics, or standard intellectual skepticism as a direct assault on the safety of marginalized people.