a hard week of "community"
--------------------------

so normally I keep this for just personal
journaling but I'm going to talk about something
current events

the people reading this likely don't know about
the big mess of this past few weeks but

basically

there's a long-running bad actor in trans spaces

she's a serial predator who tends to pick youngish
newly out trans girls (and has also done just a
wild list of other things including being an fbi
snitch, faking her own death, & just lots of wild
things) by---whenever she's caught---disappearing
and creating a new online identity and starting
the game again

so

what happened

basically she showed up again starting a mastodon
instance billed as a safe place for trans girls to
hang out, form a community, be as sexual and open
as they want, all without judgement or the cruelty
of the misogyny we all face

okay so it took literally a couple of weeks before
she tipped her hand, told another trans woman that
she wasn't allowed to talk about an entirely
*different* bad actor in the community, which then
got a bunch of people looking at this odd person
who came out of nowhere six months ago who had an
oddly familiar set of friends, aesthetic, and
seemed weirdly good at convincing lots of newly
out girls to give her lots of love and devotion

right

so what's the point I'm getting at: I've been
talking around the fact that this woman has done
some really horrifying things. Like it's not hard
to find out who I'm talking about and if you
search her name you'll find multiple long posts
over the last ten years by victims of hers
describing just how goddamn evil she is. I cannot
stress this enough: this woman is a terrifying
person.

When her newest identity got outed you'd expect
people to react with shock and outrage that our
most famous re-occurring missing stair showed up
again

and there was

a little bit

but there was a lot of sides-making,
team-creating, and grand-standing that basically
came down to either "you're wrong it's not her
(even though she admitted it)" or even worse "yeah
so what who cares"

it's the who-cares types that have been kinda hard
on my brain the past week

this mastodon instance technically removed her as
an admin but has otherwise largely rallied behind
her, with the new mods declaring their allegiance
to her, joking about how "the sex cult continues",
or the weirdest one being a pentacostal-style
public prayer for god to smite the enemies that
unveiled the missing-stair's true identity

It's been really surreal because I can't wrap my
head around the people who just don't care. They
don't care that a serial predator who's hurt a lot
of people was lying to get access to new
victims. They're making jokes about "sex cults"
and things like that instead.

And the way I've felt watching this is kind of how
I've felt any time I've come even close to "trans
only communities": that the "it's us against the
world" attitude is so pervasive that no one
actually cares about harm done if it's done by
"one of us".

It's basically replicating the worst of what the
lesbian separatists ended up doing back in the
day, creating such insular "you can trust only us"
environments that there's no way to ever talk
about the bad actors, the predators, the creeps,
or even just the incorrible assholes

I'm a person who's been through too much at the
hands of too many people to ever trust "community"
like this. But so many others happily sign up for
it and revel in it that, I don't know, I feel very
alone a lot of the time.

The "community" I've built so slowly is, instead,
probably like the communities any of us build that
are able to last: lots of disparate individuals
you've met over the years that you've connected
with

And I'm grateful for those connections, I am,
though they're sometimes sparse because I'm bad at
staying in touch when I need it the most---but
that's a topic for another time

But for now, I just wanted to ramble and talk
about how horrified I've been watching all of this
play out. I don't really have a point beyond the
surreality, the feeling of separation from people
who are supposed to be like me, and the deep
sadness I have