I am and always have been pretty open about myself and who I am. I state most of what people need to know about me on my about page, I’m known to be pretty talkative and open towards anyone who approaches me with good faith, and I am pretty responsive to emails and messages on social media when people reach out and want to talk to me. With that said, a lot of aspects of who I am and what I am passionate about conflict with each other, often needlessly so. While these conflicts are often internal – recently, they have become external and caused me a great deal of personal harm. The purpose of this statement is to try to reconcile this conflict to the best of my ability as well as to alleviate misconceptions and false perceptions which I feel are responsible for a great deal of that harm.
I am a transgender woman, and my process of coming out was extremely non-linear and rooted in a lot of trauma. I wrote about parts of it in length but what I did not write about was the trauma portion as I felt it was nobody’s business and I did not want to expose myself to attacks by being vulnerable with the general public. I am a survivor of sexual assault (once at a young age on school property, once by a former partner), my older brother suddenly passed away when I was twelve, I suffered extreme bullying in high school to the point I would have what could only be described as “severe autistic meltdowns”, I was portrayed in a mockumentary, and I was falsely arrested at age eighteen (and thankfully had the charges dropped) for successfully defending myself from a group-initiated physical attack. As a result, it took quite a while for me to come out as trans and then when I finally did come out I had to creatively fight the state of Georgia in order to get an ID issued with my proper gender marker. I have the emotional scars to show for it and have a myriad of mental health diagnoses including major depressive disorder, complex post traumatic stress disorder, and even other specified dissociative disorder (yes, I’m part of a plural system).
As somebody who was, and in many ways still is, among one of the most vulnerable populations in society and subjected to routine abuse, I have become very passionate about combating it. Children and animals often do not have the resources or tools to fight against abuse and historically our justice system has done nothing but fail them and allow abuse to proliferate. As a therian, I noticed that while many organizations and people exist to combat harm to children – horrific abuse of animals has much less exposure and resources dedicated to fighting it. As a result, I dedicate a significant portion of my time working to halt the sexual abuse of animals. My work involves the identification of animal sexual abuse perpetrators, utilizing my social network to remove them from spaces where they can gain access to victims, and occasionally results in their prosecution — which is apparently the source of the conflict mentioned at the beginning of this article.
Recently, I have found myself ostracized from various queer circles for my work due to what those initiating the ostracization would call “deep disagreements about justice systems”. I would argue that we do not have as many disagreements as my critics think we do: I despise the prison industrial complex, I distrust police (having been falsely arrested in the past) and find the vast amount of funding they have sickening, and I believe the US should adopt models of rehabilitation that are being practiced in countries like Norway and even go many steps further. However, where the actual disagreement occurs, is that I am of the opinion abusers who are unwilling to reform absolutely need to cease having access to victims. If I attempt to cause that result myself through direct action, I risk being victimized by the same justice system we all are criticizing and ultimately the abuser will be free to abuse again whenever they heal from whatever injury I may inflict upon them.
As a result, my strategy has been to put two “bads” against each other with one obvious winner prevailing, resulting in at least some reduction of harm. The benefit of a person being isolated from society is that while isolated, they can not continue to harm that society. In other words, at minimum, a zoosadist sitting in prison is at least unable to have access to animals to harm while sitting there. The people I go after, by the way, are zoosadists: people who gain sexual pleasure from torturing animals — that’s literally the entirety of who I go after. I don’t like it and I wish there were better options than continue to feed a system which I do not support, but the alternative of just letting horrific abuse that I am aware of continue to proliferate in protest of an unjust system seems, in itself, unjust. I am capable of learning and changing opinions, as I did in 2022 when I publicly disavowed predator sting operations because of their lack of effectiveness & the harm they do to marginalized communities – but I ask, in this case, what is the alternative? The one thing I will /not/ do, is ignore abuse and allow it to continue — that is simply not a reasonable cost of protesting the system.
I have been nothing but open, honest, and showing of good faith. I invite those who wish to deprive me of community to do the same: I’m open to comments or discussion.
first
second