“Trans Icon” Eli Erlick is a Rapist and Abuser and is trying to silence my testimony of her violence against me
PLEASE SHARE WIDELY–Circulate this so others can know and protect themselves and their communities, before she tries to get this taken down as well
I recently found the courage within myself to speak publicly about my emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with Trans Student Educational Resources co-founder and Executive Director Eli Erlick. Since then, Eli has responded primarily with silence and secondarily by spreading lies claiming my account is false and somehow transmisogynistic, hiding behind theory to justify her abuse and doing injustice to actual violent transmisogyny. I am publicly publishing this album for all to behold. This album will contain mostly screenshots of Eli’s admissions of guilt to the abusive behaviors I accuse her of, as well as documented attempts she has made to bury and discredit my testimony. She has reported my original post to facebook so I am compiling any of my text commentary here so I can paste it into a medium that Eli cannot control and report. I want my voice to be heard and I want others to be protected.
Here is my original post I made:
Content: Abuse, rape, experiences with mental illness and suicide
***Folks who want to know how they can support me: If you feel comfortable, I’d love if you could share the post by copy-pasting because I’m finally in a place where I feel ready for my voice to be heard to protect others from having similar experiences with Eli***
With Gender Odyssey approaching (and I am too disabled to attend) and the release of the new Tegan and Sara video and the first Trans Youth Leadership Summit, I want to talk publicly about something for the first time. I want to talk about queer relationships, abuse, rape, polyamory, exploitation, and specifically, Eli Erlick. I was in an emotionally, financially, and sexually abusive relationship with Eli Erlick for over a year and a half. And it pains me to see her get so much applause when I still suffer every day from the trauma she has caused me and I struggle to pull my life together alongside someone else who has suffered from her abuse.
At the beginning of the 2013 school year, I was a baby trans person taking Rachel Levin’s Biology, Gender, and Society class to try to understand more about myself. Eli Erlick, an experienced trans person with tons of social capital and authority, used this class to prey on me, a vulnerable new member of the trans community, relentlessly sexually harassing me for weeks, causing daily panic attacks, until finally i felt like the only way to make it stop was to give in. Coercing someone to have sex with you and making them feel like they cannot safely say no is RAPE. Eli Erlick raped me and continued to emotionally manipulate me into an abusive polyamorous relationship in which she exploited my emotional labor and experiences as a trans person of color to benefit her career and social life and gaslighting me to believe that our relationship (which she refused to even acknowledge as one until I tried to break up with her for her abuse) was some sort of beacon of queer progressiveness.
Polyamorous relationships can absolutely be abusive. And the kink community is not exempt from rape. Tops, doms, and sadists ABSOLUTELY need to check themselves. Eli Erlick is NOT an accountable top, dom, or sadist, but rather is someone who literally keeps a scorebook of her conquests, originally titled the 100 list, with the intention of expanding her conquest goals each time she met them. Eli views the bodies she is intimate with as tallies in her book of conquests to do whatever she wants to their bodies. Keep in mind that Eli primarily conquests QTPOC and trans people in general. You do NOT GET TO SEEK OUT A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE SO MUCH TRAUMA WRITTEN INTO THEIR BODIES WITHOUT APPROACHING SEX WITH THEM IN AN ACCOUNTABLE WAY. YOU DO NOT GET TO FORCE YOURSELF INTO SOMEONES BODY AND MAKE THEM FEEL LIKE THEY CANNOT SAY NO TO THE NEXT KINKY OR SADISTIC THING ON YOUR AGENDA TO DO WITH THEM. Check-ins are not a formality you toss out to your sexual partner after you have already aggressively started forcing what you want onto their body. Our bodies are inseparable from the traumas written into them and if you are going to be in a position of sexual power you need to account for the traumas of the person who is entrusting their body to you.
I do not trust Eli Erlick with vulnerable young trans people, especially trans people of color, looking for a hero when they never see their experiences represented. I know that when Eli has an ounce of power over someone, she WILL abuse that power and exploit their body, mind, and experiences for her own gain and sense of accomplishment. It is not even a conscious thing she does, but it is a thing she could consciously watch herself on to prevent herself from abusing others but she does not care to. The most Eli will ever do is make superficial changes to cover her tracks and keep people’s perceptions of her up, not actually change her abusive behaviors to prevent herself from causing harm to others. I do not trust Eli with trans people, I do not trust Eli with non-binary people, I do not trust Eli with people of color, I do not trust Eli with low income people, I do not trust Eli with disabled and mentally ill people, because I and others have been on the receiving end of cissexist, binarist, racist, classist, and ableist abuse from her.
Since day 1 of knowing Eli I have tried to help her become more accountable as a leader and person. I have confronted her time and time again, even since I ended our abusive relationship and we stopped being friends. When I confronted her about the countless ways she abused and raped me she has acknowledged that she had done these things and even agreed with me that she was a danger to our communities. I told her that the accountable thing to do upon recognizing that she is a compulsive abuser would be to transition TSER leadership to a QTPOC, especially someone like a trans woman of color, because of the distinct void in representation and programming for this community that really could use the funding and resources, and fade herself out of organizing so she won’t be tempted to abuse her power and authority in activist/organizing spaces.
She AGREED to these things and said she would try to transition to just the academia side, which I told her that I did not think she could do accountably either. Eli could excel and thrive in any liberal capitalist workplace who would be thrilled to have such a cis passing, white, conventionally attractive, high functioning neurotypical token of diversity, and in a workspace like this, she has no power to abuse vulnerable people. As she has failed her promise over and over again she has blocked me out from what she does hoping that I won’t see her continuing to expand her empire and her presence and social capital in organizing spaces to cover up her continued conquesting and exploitation of my communities. But I’m not the only one who sees you and your abusive behavior, Eli.
Since I began voicing my experiences with Eli’s abuse in online QTPOC spaces, countless people have come forward and told me they have had similar experiences in even transient interactions with Eli–fetishization, violent elitism, exploitation of their labor and experiences, predation, as well as rape. Eli is a serial abuser and conquester of our community.
Eli Erlick literally iced me out of her organization because she wanted to silence and contain me and protect her reputation and her freedom to continue expanding her trans empire (and I use empire in the most colonialist violent way) to rape and abuse and exploit without being challenged. Over the summer, while still living in the same apartment, we grew more distant as it grew more and more apparent to me that Eli was incapable of and unwilling to change her abusive ways. Eli took this time to not only take out her feelings about the breakup and losing control of me on our entire household of 4 that summer, she also took this time to stop keeping me in the loop about TSER, even intentionally neglecting to inform me about meetings that were happening in the very livingroom of the apartment we were sharing and ensuring that I would feel so alienated and out of place that at my low capacity I would not have the energy to even assert that I belonged.
When I sent her a 17 page letter detailing every horrifying act of abuse and rape she had committed against me, her immediate response was to remove me from the admin role on TSER’s facebook page and group so that I would not have a chance to expose her and speak the truth to her supporters and those she works with. And without even informing me or giving me a chance to fight it, Eli personally removed me from TSER’s board of directors page on her website and buried my involvement and contributions to the organization.
Eli would not have the radical social capital or academic capital she has today without me. During the year and a half+ that we were together, I painstakingly read, edited, advised, brainstormed, and even sometimes outright wrote every single publication of Eli Erlick’s, from papers to grants to even her social media posts. Every. Single. Day. I performed endless emotional labor to educate Eli on intersectional issues that my and other communities besides her own insular white trans community faces. Every day I faced violence from Eli in the form of negating the insight of me and my community members that I was generous enough to share with her. Being with Eli was 24/7 emotional and also physical labor that I was expected to perform with no acknowledgement of how my disabilities make me incapable of performing to her high expectations.
I have struggled with feelings of suicide for years from the trauma of occupying a body that society wants to violently stamp out of existence because I’m mentally ill and disabled, because I’m a person of color, because I’m queer, because I’m trans, because I’m non-binary, because of years of abuse. And Eli was a huge contributor of what nearly drove me to suicide my last official year of college. As my mental health declined, every day Eli would make me feel ashamed for what I couldn’t do, verbally attacking me and making me feel like I was never enough or that I was a waste or that I was crazy for feeling like she was even treating me unfairly. Eli normalized her abuse and her expectations of my body to the point of making me feel so ashamed on a daily basis that it grew more and more tempting to just end it.
Eli was by no means the only factor in how I was feeling but she certainly sent me spiralling to a dark place that I luckily have been in the process of pulling myself out of and healing with my amazing partner Knight. My will to survive and make a livable life for me and my little family is stronger than ever before, but I’m still haunted by my trauma from Eli, who every other day I see pop up in my newsfeed being showered with praise, attention, and social capital for something she takes credit for that should be credited to so many communities and individuals she has leeched herself off of.
This same person who has gained so much activist and capitalist credit for working with The Trevor Project, a queer suicide prevention organization, was the person who when I was in the car with my abusive parent at the peak of a fight about me being trans with my hand on the car door on a speeding highway chose to respond to me reaching out for help with the words “I’m on the verge of committing suicide” by policing my language telling me it was inaccurate to say that and that it bothered her that I was using incorrect language to be dramatic.
This same person gaslit me into thinking my brain was falsifying memories of sexual abuse to deny me the right to claim survivorship so that I could not identify what she had been doing to me as rape and sexual abuse.
This same person victim blamed me and gaslit me for “stereotyping flirtatious people” to deny the way she sexually harassed me and coerced me into a sexually and emotionally abusive relationship.
This same person wouldn’t let me transition the way I needed to because she was more interested in controlling my body’s attractiveness to her liking. The other trans masculine people she conquested were allowed to be on testosterone, to have body hair, to have facial hair, to have deeper voices, to have acne, to have their pronouns be respected, to be gendered affirmingly with her in public, but not me, because my willingness to mold myself to her liking was the thing that made me special to her compared to them. I was stockholmed to feel like our relationship was some sort of radical queer polyamory rather than it being abuse and control. I felt like I had to let her mold me into exactly the type of non-binary trans person she deemed to her liking, I consistently reassured her I wasn’t being gendered affirmingly in public so she could keep her queer social capital, I let her call me she, I let her call my parts whatever she decided they had to be, I let her relate to my body in ways that made me dysphoric and triggered me and hurt me and scared me and that I did not actually consent to. All because she made me feel like I never had the chance to say no and made me feel like I would be nothing without her because I was struggling to survive.
Like any other abuser, Eli controlled my body and what I could do with it in ways that were violent and traumatizing to me as a non-binary trans person. Any time I would excitedly wonder what my body hair would look like or what my voice would sound like on testosterone, Eli would cut me off saying, “Don’t do T. It’ll make you hairy/gross/unattractive” or “I wouldn’t be as attracted to you” knowing well that the abusive dynamic of our polyamory made me really insecure about my attractiveness to her because of how she would compare me to everyone else and go out of her way to make me feel less desirable and secure to control me.
This same person steals the spotlight and the mic away from vulnerable struggling (but also POWERFUL) communities like trans women of color, disabled trans people, and so many others who NEED their voices and experiences represented and their issues addressed EVERY TIME she takes a press opportunity for her own personal gain.
This same person forced me to advance her resume by writing almost her ENTIRE PeaceFirst Grant and helping her appear in a capitalist video segment exploiting queer people at the expense of my sleep, mental health, and a midterm.
This same person uses her social capital to intimidate and impress vulnerable young trans people to gain access to their bodies and a voyeuristic, exploitative look into the lives of people who are marginalized in ways she is not.
This same person fetishizes and preys upon queer and trans people of color, ESPECIALLY Asian Pacific Islander people, who make up the last 4 serious relationships she’s had and an unbelievable number of the people in her conquest list. Conquest culture IS rape culture.
This same person has STOLEN so much of my ideas without giving me any credit and continues to build and build and capitalize off of her own reputation while I struggle to survive.
I could go on and on but it drains me to write even as much as I have and the 17 pages I sent Eli last year don’t even begin to cover it.
I have spent today bawling my eyes out about the recent Trans Youth Leadership Summit that Eli put on with TSER. Because this was MY IDEA. MY IDEA that I was so passionate about that she SHOT DOWN. MY IDEA that was inspired by the life changing experiences I had leading trainings with the Asian American Sponsor Program at Scripps with friends who I love and respect and grew with. When I was at my lowest in my last formal semester at Scripps, I was enrolled in a class called Grant Writing for Non-Profits that I took as a desperate attempt to find something that would give my life meaning when I was struggling to survive. I desperately needed to feel like the academics that were sapping so much of my energy and life force could give back to my survival and the survival of my communities and because i was the Program Director and Grant Writer for TSER, I came up with one idea that finally got me excited and hopeful about the future and my potential as an organizer: a TRANS YOUTH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT for SUMMER 2016 with horizontal leadership structure featuring collaboration focused around LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES with a dedicated track for trans people of color. Compare this with Eli’s description of her TYLS (http://www.transstudent.org/tyls)
I put every ounce of energy I had toward brainstorming and beginning to write this grant, even using the last of my ADHD medication to keep my focus while I did not have health insurance or psychiatrist to prescribe my meds, to crank out an amazing beginning for a leadership initiative program that I was so proud and excited about, that gave me hope for my future. Only to have it be immediately shot down by Eli because she would rather use my writing abilities to write a grant to open her up a physical office in LA so that she would have more capitalist credit and acclaim as a Non-Profit executive. When she shot down my idea I was devastated, my mental health and any momentum I had the potential to build crumpled and spiralled. I soon after dropped the class and began a downward academic and health spiral that had me struggling for my life against suicide.
To see her now, in summer 2016, STEAL my idea and remove from it the HISTORY of where my motivation came from with my communities, the LOVE and CARE I put into my work with my communities, and the accountability I hoped to give it, as an opportunity to instead boost her own cred and CONQUEST the attendees. I fear for the number of trans youth, especially trans youth of color that Eli might have conquested or raped at her leadership summit. I genuinely am scared and hurting for the people I never even got a chance to connect with because not only was I not informed, credited, or invited, but I was driven out of organizing into burn-out by its corrupt leader. My heart broke today in ways I didn’t think Eli had the power to do anymore, despite how many days in a month I wake up in cold sweats and panic from nightmares of rape trauma from Eli. I know that I probably won’t ever have the capacity to go back to organizing, vastly because of how tied up in my trauma it is due to Eli. Its a slap in the face to me as the disabled QTPOC she abused the most to see all my hard work and care just go toward Eli’s conquest and empire.
Eli Erlick is an abuser and rapist. Not someone who has ANY business being a leader for such a vulnerable community. I urge you all who read this and find it in yourself to believe what I say and recognize how serious my testimony is to pressure Eli to step down from organizing in a community she refuses to learn how to be accountable to.
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Screenshot taken by Alex Sennello, rightful co-founder of Trans Student Educational Resources, of the private TSER leadership group. I was a Board Member, Program Director, and Grant Writer for TSER during my year and a half+ long emotionally, sexually, and financially abusive relationship with its executive director Eli Erlick. On November 2nd I sent her a 17 page long, 12 pt Times New Roman, 1x1x1 inch margin letter detailing all the horrible acts of abuse and rape that I had the capacity to recount to Eli. Her response was to begin removing me from TSER’s facebook page admins, the private leadership group, and the leadership page on TSER’s official website, cutting me out of the group and burying my involvement and contributions. I was unaware until this point that Eli had actually BLOCKED me from the leadership group, in an OBVIOUS attempt to silence me and prevent me from sharing my testimony of her abusive behavior with those she works with.
Eli has responded with cowardice, silence, and lies since I made my post about her abuse a few days ago. She is hiding behind theory, wielding very REAL concepts like transmisogyny as buzzwords to silence me. Eli is the perfect example of how social justice spaces often replicate violence and abuse by using theory as a weapon. Throughout our whole relationship, Eli would use theory to “put me in my place” whenever I would try to address her abusive behavior, gaslighting me to think that because I was a trans masculine person and she was a trans woman that her abuse was justified, systemically impossible, or otherwise me just being overdramatic and crazy. This is ESPECIALLY VIOLENT to me as a mentally ill non-binary trans person of color to use a THEORETICAL power dynamic to deny very REAL power dynamics of abuse that put her in the ACTUAL position of power over me, to the point of threatening my mental health and safety. Eli is trying to claim that my testimony of how she raped and abused me is fake, exaggerated, and transmisogynist.
I urge you all to look at the evidence.
The interactions at the beginning of November are her response to my 17 page letter detailing to her all the horrifying acts of rape and abuse she had committed against me. I thought it was genuine remorse and I was genuinely removed but her attempts to silence and discredit me have made it clear that this was nothing but a manipulative farce to gain favor with me. I am disgusted.
Eli sent me a brief and seemingly heartfelt response expressing remorse for her abusive behavior, admitting guilt to what I had accused her of in my letter. Her signs of remorse were clearly nothing more than emotional manipulation given how she has chosen to respond to my recent testimony.
CW: Rape Just a couple examples of the acts of rape and abuse committed by Eli that I detail in my graphic 17 page letter to her A therapist Eli pays to exonerate her from guilt and accountability clearly is no accountability at all.
As my anxiety and trauma was deepened by her clear lack of action and accountability since I confronted her, I tried multiple times to reach out to Eli in as professional and civilized a manner as possible (which is more than what anyone is ever obligated to do with an abuser and rapist)
Jan 24th Eli does not respond to my very serious message. Her only response is to remove me from the admins of TSER and presumably this is when she blocked me from the leadership page.
My friend sent Eli an article on how to be accountable when you realize you are an abuser. Eli thanked her for sending her the article and proceeded to do nothing discussed in it.
I expected early on that Eli would do her typical gaslighting and emotional manipulation to make me out to be the aggressor in this situation. I was very careful in my messages, despite my pain and rage, not to say anything that Eli could twist into me being a crazy vindictive ex looking to tarnish her reputation. Reading my private messages to her it is exceedingly clear my motivation lies only with protecting my community from an abuser.
Multiple people had at this point reached out to me saying that they had had similar experiences with Eli. This number has increased significantly as time has passed.
CW: rape These are only some of the things Eli has done to me. I still wake up from traumatic nightmares. I still have flashbacks even when I am having loving consensual sex with my partner. Eli has caused me real PTSD and I know I am not the only one.
Eli admits she is guilty of what I accuse her of. She denies none of it. She even claims she wants to move toward accountability. All of this is clearly lies given her current response.
I was more than reasonable with Eli in any of our communications, still trying to see the best in her and making the mistake of trusting her lies, which she only said to appease me so that I would not be a threat to her reputation, which she further ensured by taking away my avenues of sharing my experiences by blocking me out of TSER
Eli acknowledges how well and intimately I knew and understood her and claims to be moved by my accounts and wants to change her abusive behaviors.
I try so hard to give Eli undue credit for how she has handled me because I want to believe that there is good in her and that she might actually want to be a better person
Eli admits that distancing herself from organizing would be a good thing given her tendency to abuse others with her power
This is what Alex Sennello posted in the TSER Facebook group
Including my original post that I made exposing Eli with the goal of protecting others from having similar experiences with her
