Now that BethAnn has admitted to faking Sciencing_Bi, and I'm already seeing people trying to excuse her actions as mental illness, please remember:

Everyone, including people with mental illness, deserves the dignity of moral culpability. Mental illness does not excuse abuse.

She did real harm to real people, and that harm deserves accountability, and her victims deserve justice. As part of that, though, I want us to remember all the ways in which white academic scientists in particular facilitated her racism, bigotry, and abuse.

I've become more involved in this than is appropriate, given the degree of and distribution of harm. A lot of attention has focused on the victims of her deception; we must remember that the broader balance of harm was done to those she intentionally abused, parodied and erased.