the mogai community - and adjacent, to be entirely honest - has had a ton of big coiners get called out for having done awful things, or being awful people, or even miniscule tiny little "this person has a problematic kink!!! purity culture, purity culture!!!" what's happening now isn't anything new. we've dealt with it time and time again. so, why is it that it feels like people still lack tact and care? basic etiquette? where does all that "wokeness" and liberation and equity go when someone big in the community is revealed to be an awful person? i'm not quite sure.
if you're not sure what this post is about: i'll be explicit and say it's about what's happening with boygirlfemme. now, i was never really involved with hir; shi existed on a different side of mogaiblr than myself and we never crossed paths. if anything, this whole thing is the most i've heard of boygirlfemme in the time that shi's been involved in the community. if you don't know what's happening with boygirlfemme, the next paragraph will be a tl;dr. before that, some trigger warnings for: mentions of rape, emotional and sexual abuse, transmisogyny, suicide baiting, death threats; if i've forgotten anything else, feel free to leave a comment and i'll add it.
boygirlfemme was accused of rape and emotional abuse by an ex who's shared a google doc with extensive screenshots of dms between them supporting it. on top of that, fawn incorrectly claimed to be native (based on a misunderstanding, according to hir) and has said fetishizing things about trans women. though, shi has acknowledged that those things are fetish-y.
and how has the community been reacting to this? well, people are suicide baiting boygirlfemme, recoining boygirlfemme's terms or worrying about flags (the second as a direct response to the doc!) or telling people to stop using hir terms because shi's a bad person (labels not being tied to their coiners is a whole other topic, but, no you're not a bad person if you keep using proqueer), sending asks to random blogs that have vaguely similar labels (boygirl, femme, tfem) asking if they're boygirlfemme, trying to use boygirlfemme being a bad person to insinuate that people with those stances are bad, among other things. i'm not gonna give a comment on what fawn's done or what the victim has done either. that's not my place. i'm not the victim, i'm not the abuser; i don't get to have a say in this. you don't get to have a say in it either. that's the long and the short of it.
so, what's my issue? let's start from the top and break it down from there.
flags being the priority is frankly appalling and detracting from the situation at hand. i promise you, i understand — i'm a coiner, i use mogai terms, i'm a label collector — but terms and flags are not inherently connected to or representative of the coiner's beliefs. rather, they're a representation of the term that they coined. choosing to use an alternative flag for yourself is perfectly fine. but, other people are not bad people for deciding they still like the original flag. you are not a bad person for using boygirlfemme's terms. but, your first reaction to this should not be worrying about whether or not you're a bad person for using boygirlfemme's flags; it should be on the victim and what the victim is sharing. in fact, it is detracting from the severity of the situation to look at someone sharing the fact that a popular coiner raped them and your reaction is "oh, but what about my flags!?" the alternative flags are not the issue. it is them being people's first reaction.
the insinuation of boygirlfemme's discourse stances somehow being tied to the fact that shi's a rapist is just people trying to further their own agendas and "prove" that people with these stances are awful people. there is no correlation between the fact that fawn happens to be pro-endo, or pro afab tfems & amab tmascs, or any of hir stances with the fact that shi is a rapist. do you understand how crazy that sounds? and why is that what you're worried about, again? why do you seemingly care more about discourse stances over the victim? why are you using this situation to talk about discourse instead of sending support to the victim? or even just the situation itself?
seeing the vile shit people are saying directed towards boygirlfemme makes me doubt any of you have actually taken the time to break down your beliefs past "i'm woke now." you're not a good person for telling someone to kill themself, you're not a good person for saying someone is better off dead, you're not a good person for stalking any new accounts shi makes and sharing them, and you're not a good person for harrassing hir off of any platform shi tries to join. in fact, you should be giving hir the space to try and improve upon hirself from the awful things shi's done, regardless of what it is. if you're taking the time to go tell boygirlfemme to kill hirself, i hope you're taking the time to send actual encouraging and kind words to the victim too. and, i really hope you know it doesn't matter that you're saying these awful things to someone you think is bad; if you're jumping at the opportunity to hate someone, i don't think you actually care about the situation. i think you just wanted an excuse to be able to tell somebody to kill themself.
and - i'm gonna hold your hand when i tell you this - but both abusers and victims deserve separate spaces to recover from either the things they've done or the things they've experienced. this does not mean that the victim needs to forgive the abuser (and in most cases, the victim shouldn't be forgiving the abuser) but this does not mean the abuser needs to sit and wallow in their self-pity for the rest of their life to atone. i know we all love the narrative where the victim gets better and the abuser suffers for eternity, but that is not a reality that you or i should want to live in. i would rather someone recover from and realize that the things they've done are wrong and be able to point that out in others than to continue doing wrong or to kill themself instead. this applies to everyone. you wanna make a world where there are no more abusers? you gotta start giving people the room to understand that they've hurt people and to improve upon themself. and, this isn't to say that people who've done awful things shouldn't get jail time or punished for it; but, the point of jail shouldn't be a punishment, it should be reformation. you should want people to get better so that they don't hurt others. you and i don't get to decide who lives or who dies; that's dystopia shit. life is a human right, you don't get to take that away from someone else.
the thing you might be wondering the most is just... why should i care? why should i care about the feelings of an abuser? of a rapist? i'm going to tell you now that you don't. you don't need to. you don't need to care about fawn, you don't need to care about hir feelings, you don't need to care about anything shi does from here on out; that should be reason enough to stop sending death threats or wishing death or suicide baiting or stalking hir new accounts. it doesn't matter that shi is a rapist - and this is not to defend what shi's done because it's awful and horrible and never should happen to anyone and i really do wish the victim the best - but life is a natural right that everyone is entitled to. if you start wishing death on all rapists, where is the line drawn? what happens when people start accusing people of being a rapist for completely unrelated things? it's already happening - with queer people being seen as groomers - so when you say "all rapists should die," where are you drawing the line? on top of that, if you start advocating for the death of one group: where are you drawing the line for other crimes? what happens when people are wrongly accused of a crime? you and i won't know it's a false accusation. what happens when it's a person of color, who is almost guaranteed to be imprisoned for it? should we just let them kill them, even if the evidence is flimsy, just so you can get closer to a goal of "all rapists should die"? what happens when they start killing people for other crimes—shoplifting, piracy, petty thievery? it's a slippery slope; you start making that "us vs. them" mentality and you won't be able to see past it.
the mogai community is performative at its core; people preach about liberation and equity and reformation and their progressive beliefs, but the moment something actually happens they go down the drain. have you actually done anything to break down the beliefs ingrained in modern culture? or did you just decide because you were already marginalized in some way that it was unnecessary? what i'm asking of you is to forget about the flags for a moment and forget about directing anger and hate towards boygirlfemme and, if you really do believe the victim, go send support to the victim.
