It's been 2 years since a callout post was made that completely tore my life to shreds. This is a post about community abuse. As much as I am trying to stop talking about it, it is very present for me today and there are some things I would like to make sure I have said.
What had happened was that I had been doing extreme kink with several people despite having no proper training, while in a progressively worsening state of psychosis, and the people I was doing it with didn't feel able to tell me what they did and didn't feel comfortable with. People were telling me not only that there wasn't a problem with how I was doing kink, but that they were actively happy with what we were doing, all the way until december 2023. I caused harm to some people by not communicating well enough around forms of consensual kink that leave permanent marks on people. I deeply regret it and I have worked to make sure that I will never cause harm in the ways that have been explained to me ever again.
In between people first telling me they were upset with my behavior and the post I only communicated with the people involved once. One of my exes met up with me and told me not to say anything while she read me a letter calling me dangerous and saying that because I am in her words "beautiful and charismatic" and because of "who I am and how I am" people hadn't felt comfortable to say no to me. After this, the people involved, who it is worth saying were all part of the same polycule, talked amongst themselves and decided that I had been deliberately abusing people and that I didn't care about consent at all. From there they started calling me a rapist, abuser, predator and so on. I am none of these things. This is purely transmisogyny.
I take responsibility for my part in what happened, but I have never seen the other people do anything but shift more responsibility onto me. For example one person involved was a lot more well off than me and had been giving me money in a sexual context but has publicly mocked the idea that I might have experienced this situation as informal sex work, which I did and the others involved know I did.
One person I had broken up with earlier in the year felt deeply aggrieved by me. Our relationship was not good, and I have talked here before about the time that she assaulted me and her generally coercive behaviour. During this process she started insisting that "every time we had sex was rape" while describing nothing more extreme on my part than poor communication. I believe that her involvement with people who were discussing harm I had caused led everyone to describe everything I had done in the most sinister and extreme terms possible. One person who I never even slept with smoked weed from a bong for the first time at my house and got very high, and later signed the callout against me because of this.
When the post was made, almost all of my colleagues and my friends IRL stopped speaking to me immediately. I was banned from most queer spaces on the grounds that I was a danger to others. My income collapsed and I had to do full service sex work so that I wouldn't lose my home. My long term partner broke up with me though I'm glad to say we're still best friends and talk every day. I was suicidal for months and tried to kill myself several times. I still receive harassment and have been excluded multiple times from organizing spaces, including ones I need access to such as my local renters union, on the ground that people "feel unsafe" over the last 2 years.
When I explained publicly what had happened, my former community mocked and degraded me, insisting that I couldn't have been unwell despite everyone around me at the time knowing that I was having frequent trauma flashbacks, panic attacks, derealization and other extreme symptoms that I talked with people extensively about at the time.
I would be dead if my remaining friends hadn't intervened.
For months I believed what I had been told about myself, and tried desperately to reconcile my own memories with what I had been told. For months my friends told me over and over again that the things we were talking about were not abuse. It took me most of a year to completely see how wrong it was for them to have been using those words about me, in part because I was so distressed by the harm that I did cause. When I talk about this I am categorically not saying that I "did nothing wrong".
How I have been treated and continue to be treated is wrong.
People refuse to speak to me about this situation while insisting that I am removed from spaces, from community, from organisations and from public life generally. There seems to be a persistent idea that I am some sort of dracula who will mind control people if they speak to me at all. This is a convenient way to treat me like I am not a human being and just an object to be endlessly abused and degraded.
I need people to understand that for everyone including other trans women, turning a trans woman into an imaginary monster towards whom limitless violence is acceptable is completely trivial. I caused harm, but it was harm of a nature that required difficult conversations, breakups, and perhaps even being removed from some community spaces. What was done instead has been fueled by a transmisogynistic bogeyman that harms all trans women
I can't get back the things that I have lost over the last two years. Other people can't give them back to me and I'm not asking for them. All I am asking for is that people understand that false accusations happen to trans women all the time, including when there is an original harm being overstated, that they push back when they see people saying these untrue and violent things about me, and that they treat me like a human being. This means if you're someone who has known me and doesn't speak to me but still looks at me online (I know you are there you're not that subtle) you reach out and actually talk to me, and it means more broadly to be able to see me as a person capable of mistakes and harm like everyone else. I am not a different class of person and do not deserve to be treated differently, and as much as I am the class I am in for which I have been treated differently these last 2 years is trans woman.
I remain open to talking to anyone involved, but I find it extremely unlikely that they will ever talk to me. At some point people started not just overstating harm but straightforwardly inventing shit about me to paint me as the most hideous monster possible. I don't see how we would be able to reconcile without them admitting that they have done something to me that is wrong. I don't think that the community reconciliation and accountability ideals that everyone holds up as the way out of this kind of situation are going to happen. It is easier for them to keep imagining a monstrous version of me and eternally reacting to that without ever talking to me. I need people to see that I am human nonetheless.
