I did not realize I was already speaking until I was neck-deep in it, and so I will speak. I have friends who have very wisely and with great love counselled me to stay silent, keep my head down, a…
M Sereno (Likhain) and I followed each other on Twitter for a time, after I’d signal boosted a crowdfunding effort to help her and her partner get through a difficult time, and it turned out that we already have some mutual connections.
About a month back, I found that she’d blocked me, and Twitter being Twitter, I didn’t know if it was deliberate or not, seeing as her partner hadn’t blocked me. Then, a few days later, her partner did block me.
I suspected, at the time, that it’s because I was, and remain, sympathetic to Benjanun Sriduangkaew, in that I find so much of the narrative tainted by disingenuous putative “victims” whose agenda is not about redress or restitution but about silencing a critic. Now I know that it’s why she blocked me.
I know, for a fact, that Bee hurt a lot of people.
I also know, for a fact, that in addition to the people she named specifically in her public apologies, she’s apologized directly to a number of people, in private.
And I also know that a number of people, acting out of motives I can only guess but I suspect to be less than magnanimous, are using her history as a bludgeon to silence, to justify their racism. I know that on FFA, anyone who has critical things to say about Mixon’s blog post gets branded as anti-white, no matter how critical they are of Bee’s past actions. (I figure it’s only a matter of time until Abigail Nussbaum gets added to their list of apostates heretics “WF supporters” for this post.)
And Likhain speaks of how supportive and wonderful FFA has been.
It’s kind of funny. I got an email a month or so back, from some anonymous person using a one-shot burner email, a clumsy, inept, and downright laughable attempt to drive a wedge between myself and Bee, based on my being a trans woman and Bee having dropped some transphobic slurs on a notoriously toxic video game forum roughly four years ago. Bee, whose stories prominently and frequently feature trans and non-binary characters, typically in normalizing representation.
Bee’s no saint, no angel. But she’s not the person she was when she was making scarily violent jokes and rhetoric about white men and women over racist, appropriative material. And when she was that person, she was ceasing to be the person who jumped on and personally insulted everyone whose tastes she disagreed with, the person who drove numerous users out of an LJ community.
Bee may be scary, and still caustic at times, but I trust her far more than I trust FFA.
Why?
FFA isn’t a person. It’s a group, a group whose membership is unknown (save for the people who publicly identify themselves as members), and thus there’s no guarantee of constancy or unity.
I’m glad that Likhain has found support there. But I don’t trust them not to turn on her should she say something in so-called namespace that FFA doesn’t like. They’re perfectly willing to forgive past toxic behavior, and, more importantly, ignore present toxic behavior, as long as said toxic behavior is targeted at the “right” people (read: whoever FFA has decided they’re obligated to hate).
