I fear this won't come across in the tone I intend, but genuinely I think that the overwhelming majority (if not all) of accusations of random bullshit against transfeminized and/or colonized people on here would go nowhere if we, collectively, applied an abolitionist framework when we hear about harm taking place.
say you hear about traumatic harm taking place. the information in the post includes the category of harm and the person who did it. (maybe it includes a specific call to action, but usually not.)
carceral first questions:
is this harm severe enough to warrant punishment?
is it true? what is the evidence?
how do I evaluate the evidence? how do I verify it? (how do I plan to convince others that the evidence is both real and meaningfully justifies the proposed punishment?)
the carceral questions leave everyone debating what kinds of harm are worthy of support, combing through people's lives and engaging in obsessive evidence-gathering and surveillance, and turning everyone into mini-prosecutors. this shit makes our spaces into fucking nightmares. we do not have to approach things this way.
abolitionist first questions:
why is the harmed person not the one speaking here? (are the survivors even mentioned? is this even true?) is this person taking agency away from the survivor of harm, denying them the chance to narrate their experience or to ask for specific support? is the speaker cynically using survivors of harm rather than actually helping them?
why does this narrative of harm seem to only include one person, as if a single person is accountable for something like this to happen within a community? is the speaker using a real event in an alarmingly biased way that inhibits restorative justice (which by necessity involves someone's whole community to examine their role and how they could prevent this from happening again)?
why isn't there any indication of what steps have been taken to address the situation so far? how long ago did this happen? what has the accused person's interactions with the survivor been since then? how was the speaker invited into this role? why is there is no attached gofundme or a "support her work on patreon" or any concrete way to help a struggling person get through? (like please know in real life traumatic situations, most survivors need money or resources. it is weird to not see an ask like that when someone is vocally reaching out to their whole community for support after trauma.)
genuinely, the abolitionist string of thoughts gets you all the way to:
"this speaker is either lying wholesale, or they are cynically using someone else's trauma for their own ends while absolutely fucking over the survivor of said trauma, sabotaging the possibility for genuine restorative justice in the person's community, and feeding carceral politics."
you don't even have to start combing through anyone's life to come to this conclusion. you really don't have to do that much work at all. you get all that just from thinking through harm in a way that is:
survivor-centered
with a community-wide accountability lens instead of an individual one*
with the goal of figuring out what the overall restorative justice plan looks like, and how you fit into it in practical terms.**
*(the individual accountability lens is both less effective in preventing harm in the future, and extremely susceptible to use for scapegoating behavior, i.e. more dangerous. if we're serious about ending a particular kind of harm, we owe it to each other, to our entire community, to choose the tool that is more effective and less dangerous.)
**(not with the goal of figuring out how to disavow, label, and morally distance from the accused.)
I beg people to consider using an abolitionist frame going forward. I really think an effort to think this way would dramatically reduce harm in our community.
and if you are reading these words, that means that you are in at least one community with me. we exist in each other's lives and therefore impact and are accountable to each other. that's what I mean by community here. people who have to live our lives around and among each other.
we can make this space more supportive and less dangerous.
