I am going to make a thread that is pretty open and vulnerable and something I've only talked to about with a few people. And I'm talking about this because of the current things happening on TTRPG Twitter. And this will probably get me in trouble because of the current climate.

But you know what? This is something I think is important. And it is not a conversation we are having...and there never seems to be the right time and you never want to detract from other things or make things more difficult and etc. There are many reasons why I don't talk.

There are many reasons why I think this Tweet thread will not be well received. And maybe this will cause people to call for me to be cancelled. But that will probably prove my point. Here we go. And, as usual, this is probably going to be in my usual academic/personal mix.

So the topic: Believe the Victims and Cancel the Abusers.

This is what we are hearing everywhere right now. And that is a good thing right? Of course it is?

But how do we assess who is the Victim and who is the Abuser. How do we know who to believe?

I want to posit that who we see as a victim and who we see as an abuser can also be colored by race, gender, sexuality, class, and other structures of power.

So let me talk about an experience of abuse I experienced.

CW: I'm going to talk about emotional abuse, sexual abuse, trauma, racism, and gender ideas and all sorts of things like that.

For those who don't know, I'm a transexual mixed black man who comes from a working class background and especially at the time had muscular enough build. I'm also not 18 anymore.

So, let's go to the last time I dated. It was 18 years ago. Yep, you read that right.

I had just finished my first year of medical transition and was living my life in the world, but was also, internally, a bit vulnerable because I was still working out maneuvering the world in a new context. I ended up dating a white woman who was in my friend circle.

She also had a higher class background than me, and, this is relevant, she was a survivor of sexual abuse.

We dated three months. I tried to break up with her after the first month. The first month was her taking out her trauma on me. She was terribly emotionally abusive.

She was abusive in ways that were very, very damaging to me, and in ways that still linger in the back of my brain here and then. I'll only speak on some of it. But it was bad. She took delight in harming me because she felt it was empowering or somehow--I don't know.

I tried to address some of these things. I asked her to stop outing me as trans to random people I didn't even know without my consent just because she didn't want people to think she wasn't a lesbian (she was bi, but closeted about being bi, becasue of biphobia in queer spaces).

She told me that me asking not to out me without my consent was abusive. Because I was invalidating her identity.
She required me to lie to her parents about the nature of our relationship. Her parents thought she was a lesbian and it was easier for life for them to think that.

So I had to be closeted about our relationship around her parents and that involved being forced to hide in an actual closet once. This was a thing that really upset me after my history of being forced in the closet in the Army. This was bad for my mental well being.

When I brought this up she told me it was abusive for me to try to force her to tell her parents about our relationship...I just didn't want to sleep over at her place and have to sneak out in the morning. She thought that was abusive and controlling.

She would always tell me that all men are trash and that the world would be better off if all men were killed. There was a lot of regular attacks on men--and by extension me. I know she was dealing with trauma so I mostly took all of her regular attacks that I should be dead.

She seemed to need to be able to abuse me as some means of getting control of her past. And I tried to be understanding of what she was going through. But it started to put me in a depression spiral. So I asked her to stop.

I said I understood that you need to vent. I understand that it is important. But, this is hurting me. Could you maybe have these sorts of conversations with your girlfriends rather than with me? Her response was? That me asking that was gaslighting, controlling and abusive.

So I tried to make it work. To be supportive. And I took more of this emotional abuse. After a month, I said...look...I don't think this relationship is working. It doesn't seem to be working for you and it really isn't working for me. So...I think we should break up.

Her response? She told me that if I broke up with her, that would be against her consent...and that wold make me a rapist for breaking up with her. So I didn't. I stayed in that relationship for another two months of increasing emotional abuse.

That relationship only ended because when she told me she wanted to go back to college that the best place for her would be a college really far away....and it was the best place for her...but I also knew that if she went away, she'd break up with me and I'd be free.

And that is what happened. She broke up with me and went away. And I was free from a terribly abusive relationship that still lingers with me 18 years later.

Now before you say, "That is so terrible, we believe you."
Don't. Because you wouldn't have.

Why? Because she's a white woman and I'm a black man. She would tell you that I was gaslighting and controlling and therefore abusive and you would have believed her and you would have moved to cancel me. And I knew that, and that is what kept me in that abusive relationship.

We can say to believe all victims...but our society has embedded in it the idea that some people can't be victims and some people can't be predators. White women are framed as helpless victims...this is part of white supremacist patriarchy to control white women and oppress POC.

POC women are not believed to be helpless victims. They are less likely to be believe. Men are seen as predators and they are less likely to believed. POC are seen as predators and they are less likely to be believed. Poor people are less likely to be believed.

White powerful men are generally believed over everyone, including white women. That is part of rape culture. But you know what is part of white supremacy? A white woman lying saying that Emmett Til whistled at her and that being the pretext for a pair of white men to kill him.

Men are abused. But we tell men that they should not speak on it because it is distracting from "real" victims, or make it more difficult for "real" victims (and that mean non-men). Women are also abusers. But saying so is seen as harming social justice causes.

All this does is tell some classes of victims...that while we believe victims...we don't believe you. You should be silent. You don't fit our idea of what a victim looks like. So we will believe the person who better fits our sexist, racist, classist, etc. idea of victims.

I'm not saying "Don't believe victims."
But I am saying that you don't always know who the victim is. And the easy scripts we have can often work to help enable predators who don't look like our societal vision of what a predator looks like...which is biased.

Some others on my feed have noted that in the people coming forward right now, very few of them are women of color...especially black women. And they asked you to reflect on why. The answer is because of a long racist history of not seeing black women and WOC as being...

"virtuous" enough to be able to be victims in the first place...so they are not believed. This is also the case with Native Women.

And look, I still make excuses for my abuser based on having internalized these notions.

I think...well she was a survivor and she has trauma and she needed to process and and and and...
and...no one would believe me over her if she said I was a controlling abuser because I was asking, politely, not to abuse me.

And if this woman, who I haven't seen in 18 year popped up on this here TTRPG twitter and made a big thread about how terrible I was because I was controlling and emotionally manipulative, etc...and that I should be cancelled because of it...you would all jump to believe her.

You would tell her she was valid. And when I tried to defend myself, you wouldn't believe me because she better fits what our society thinks of as a victim than I do. And then, you would help enable her to further harm me by separating me from my online community.

I'm lucky that she doesn't hang out here, and that she broke up with me in the end. But I know, 100%, that in this current climate--it doesn't actually matter all those things she did to me, including sexual coercion framed as helping her heal that I still can't talk about.

Why? Because our social framing allows her to be validated as a victim and therefore worthy of being believed...and does not allow me to be validated as a victim and therefore I will never be believed.

And I think about that a lot right now.

And also the social framing of white women as perpetual victims is not progressive! It is part of patriarchal logic used to control and punish women.

Framing men as always predators may seem liberatory but it feeds toxic masculinity.

I know people are hurting. And people are in pain. I know people have been victimized and abused.

And yes, believe victims!

But, are you so sure who the victims are? And have you thought about how societies biases inform the knee jerk reaction of who that is?

And what is even considered abuse is framed by society. If you don't consider a person fully human or fully worthy of empathy or as a predator based on their whatever...then bad things happening to them are often just not considered abuse...rather "what they deserve."

In the Jim Crow South it would have been considered emotionally traumatizing to a white woman to have a black man say hello to her. And I'm sure she was traumatized. But larger society did not consider Jim Crow to be emotionally traumatizing to black people. They couldn't be.

There was no one to believe them or to validate their trauma...it was inconceivable.

Anyway, I'm beginning to tangent and ramble now. But I suppose I want to say that how we understand our experiences is framed by our place in kyriarchy.

What counts as abuse is historically and culturally dependent and framed by our place in kyriarchy. Who gets validated as a victim who can be believed is framed by our place in kyriarchy.

And we on some level know this. I sure as heck do. I know that I'm not supposed to say any of the things that I'm tweeting right now. I know that to name abuse as man at the hands of a woman in this moment will get me vilified and probably called to be canceled.

You all who have read this far, I want you to know, in the last 2-3 weeks, I have had a very large number of men disclose to me the ways they have been sexually, physically, and emotionally abused by women. And all of them stay silent. Because we know that we are supposed to.

We know that if we want to be progressive and supportive...we aren't supposed to speak. Just like I "knew" that I wasn't supposed to break up with a woman who abused me terribly for 3 months in a vulnerable time in my life...because doing so would make me the villain.

One thing about being trans is I lived both being seen as a woman by society and now living my truth as a man...a black man in the US. And I'm going to tell you, the differences are not always what you think. But that isn't always what people want to hear. There is complexity.

ETA one thing I think is very important: Do NOT use white women, who for all their white privilege are still oppressed under patriarchy, as an easy scapegoat in this conversation. This notion of the pure white woman victim is ultimately a tool of white supremacist patriarchy.