#lgbtmazight

[starlightervarda]

So, now that I’ve processed THAT POST and the insanity behind it that made me spend the last week having panic attacks, followed by flashing back to all the traumatic shit I dealt with in the last 10 or so years thanks to people with similar mentalities to the puritanical, power-hungry demons on this site. Except that was in real life, and I can’t handle this crap anymore.

This year, I finally reached the breaking point to the extent that my family had to stop pretending I’m not damaged. I still can’t go to therapy, but I am taking anti-anxiety/depressants now. One of the things that elevated my already-high stress level was The Old Guard fandom and the toxic environment that killed the one joy I had last year.

What was that? Seeing a movie with an un-stereotyped, irreligious, artistic queer North African man who looks like a male version of me. Seeing him in a loving relationship with a fellow Mediterranean, like so many of the couples I grew up around, parents of ethnically mixed friends I had. I came into the TOG fandom, excited, immediately making posts of facts, translations, seeking out other MENA/Mediterranean people to connect with, because fuck has it been lonely.

And I did. Very briefly. Before shit went to hell because of Hélène and her circle of tyrannical friends.

I still can’t believe they were allowed to get away with this.

I went out of my way to write ridiculously detailed posts on MENA culture, history, language and religion, answer so many questions, with links and details that could only come from someone who grew up with this stuff and spoke Arabic. And I had people questioning my validity??? Talking shit about me, bullying me, or even trying to discredit me because I *gasp* stated a fact that upset their racist headcanons.

Meanwhile, a very Americanized Rich White French Woman, was allowed to get away with constantly changing her ethnicity, religion, economic status, skin tone, family history, make up insane contradicting stories of suffering, and claiming oppression points from so many unrelated demographics. Not just that, she got to peddle racist bullshit as fact, frame the Amazigh of Morocco as if they’re Native Americans, all the way down to the claims that her grandfather was a ‘shaman’, when that couldn’t be farther from the truth. That, and applying Black American stereotypes, experiences, and issues to MENA people, especially to herself.

And use the ‘I’m insert minority’ excuse to get away with being an unrepentant monster. 

I smelled a rat ages ago, but any time I expressed it to someone they didn’t believe me, and then when I saw what happened to my friend after he DM’d her as a ‘fellow Moroccan’, the horrific shit that was mobilized against him that chased him off the site, I knew I couldn’t handle what would happen to me if I tried to question her bullshit. The stress this fandom gave me was much more than what I had managed to stomach all these years and I had reached a breaking point.

So, I left. I let them have my only representation in exchange for my sanity. I canceled all my remaining Joe-centric/culture posts and fic ideas for TOG and told myself to never let myself forget that I’m not welcome anywhere.

Oh, and these tweets?

They’re about me and nizarnizarblr, who was run off the site. I’m ‘an anti-arab fanatic’ for saying North Africans aren’t Arabs and that our dialects can be barely intelligible to actual Arabs. And he was a ‘rabid nationalist’ for saying the same things as me. We made large educational posts about OUR part of the world, OUR cultures, OUR experiences and that wasn’t approved by the Western Liberals of Tumblr dot com.

She fucking slandered us on a site known for mass-bullying campaigns and suicide-baiting people, called us these inflammatory terms because we actually knew what we were talking about. She used hot-button political terms to stoke mindless hatred against us, the people she was racefaking as.

This RICH WHITE WESTERN WOMAN hated that there were actual North Africans in the space she wanted to rule over, who could ‘threaten’ her position as the authority and token, and that us contradicting her could get her exposed, so she fucking weaponized her following.

DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DANGEROUS THIS IS? DO I NEED TO EXPLAIN TO YOU HOW RACIST THIS IS? SHE COULD HAVE RUINED OUR LIVES!

The thing that had briefly brought me joy, encouraged me to write two enormous fics after a period of writer’s block, now makes me sick. The one space I should have belonged in could have killed me.

I, someone that actually shares Joe’s background and has been told I look like a female version of him, got suspicion, disrespect, hostility and chased out of the fandom along with fuck knows how many other Brown/Muslim people under the command of the embodiment of privilege and her cronies, that loved getting the platform to abuse others because they used her words as gospel.

Where are they now? The Anglo/North Euro women that appointed themselves the authority on how to write a MENA man, who tried to tell actual MENA/Muslim people in the fandom how he should be portrayed to the extent of organizing smear campaigns against us when we defied their authority? Why are they all suddenly so quiet when you couldn’t pay them to shut them up?

There was no way you could be friends with someone like Hélène, in groupchats with her for months, and praising her to high heaven for giving you ‘sources’ and ‘sensitivity reads’ and not know what kind of person she was. Considering they all were just as vicious and racist, xenophobic and antisemitic, they must have agreed. That’s why they defended her, went around DM’ing people to delete their reblogs of the exposé. It’s not that they didn’t believe the overwhelming amount of evidence, it’s that they were panicking about losing the pedestal she afforded them.

I ASK AGAIN: Why were they so horrible to actual MENA/Mediterranean/Muslim people yet had their head completely up her arse when she claimed to be ALL THREE. What made her so special? Why did she get sanctified while everyone actually part of those demographics was demonized?

They knew. The whole time they knew.  This was all done to give her and her chosen few complete control of a fanbase, where their word was law and any deviation got you witch-hunted out.

Now that their golden goose of consequence-free tyranny had been scratched, they’ve switched to trying to deflect from the point of that post -- that she’s a sickeningly horrible person -- and are making it about the dumbest fandom shit imaginable.

This isn’t about that fucking half-baked movie. This about all the shit she’s done over the years and continued doing within the community that was built around it. Helene and her shithead friends, used her race-faking and lying about every part of her identity and background, and a fictional MENA man as their carte blanche to abuse others, when they HAD NO RIGHT OR SAY IN THE MATTER.

This woman didn’t just spend years lying about being poor to con people out of money, spouting tankie shit, being a genocide denier, a 9/11 truther, cycling through ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, pretending to be like 2 different types of Jewish while being antisemitic, spreading wrong cultural shit she Googled wrong as fact, a racist and a race-faker, who brown-faced and seemed to be bordering on digital blackface as well, I know I’m forgetting a bunch of other shit because HOLY FUCK!

This woman went about everything with a baffling amount of confidence, while I and so many others never disclosed our backgrounds, until this fanbase demanded it, out of the need to feel safe from racial abuse. Yet, she was basically pretending to be me and got popular off it.

She called Marwan Kenzari a slur that makes me sick, that is not a word that comes up randomly, especially the way she used it. It has to be something you say regularly, without hesitation, for it to be the first thing that comes to mind. Also, that image of him? The one that stirred up that hideous response from her? In it he looks like my dad, moustache, brown jacket, cropped hair and all. So, kosomik ya Helene.

The fact that her URL is ‘lgbtmazight’ when she isn’t anything of the sort is sickening. She couldn’t be arsed to check where Marrakech is or what color it was for her racefaking tall tales, or check that there tens of millions of Amazigh people in Morocco alone, or even understand that there are no literal translations, so NO ONE is using tbarkallah as a fucking mic-drop.

Seriously, she put no effort into this and everyone believed her.

And there are people defending her. How evil do you have to be to think there’s nothing wrong with any of this? Stop fucking making it about two fictional characters and think about the REAL PEOPLE THIS HAS AFFECTED!

I hope everyone that tagged her as or used her as a source deletes her posts off their blog, I hope no one recommends her wrong and racist posts as info, I hope anyone who claims she was their ‘sensitivity reader’ removes her name, I hope no one believes any of the shit she said or has their view of MENA people and culture shaped by her.

It’s the least you could do.

[themoonwheniamlost]

Last post I ever want to make about this @/lgbtmazight situation

Please do not harass anyone, no matter what their stance on this is. Please be kind to each other and to yourselves.

Here is a link to the original Post, Here is a link to a great focus/framing statement.

In this post, I’m gonna talk about a few things that I think need context, and then I never want to talk about this again. Okay? Ok.

1. Anyone who is using this situation to try and gain clout/respectability points needs to sit down and shut up. No one should be aiming for recognition. Saying “This needs to go viral/I was right all along,” is very unhelpful. If you were hurt by Len you definitely deserve an apology. But please stop trying to accrue brownie points over this discourse.

2. To the people defending Len. Please stop framing that post as a doxxing attempt. The content from that post is all things that Len made publicly available on the internet. Instead of saying “They pulled up tweets from ten years ago.” What should concern us is that for over ten years, Len has shown a documented history of holding dangerous and hateful political views and has constantly lied about different aspects of their identity.

What we should be focused on is the people that Len has hurt and the ways Len has misled our community. The only person who should be defending Len is Len. Speaking of,

3. Re- the subject of the silence of big blogs/ A new Discord server.

A few days ago, I was invited to be a part of a small discord group that was dedicated to “nuanced discussions and recreating the inviting spirit of the TOG fandom” from last summer. I accepted and was surprised to see some of the biggest names in fandom.

Four days ago the mods put out an announcement that a post had been made about one of their mods and that ALL of the accusations were false. And they then asked everyone in the server not to engage with the post at all. I didn’t even see the post until someone sent it to me directly.

The mods framed this call for silence as a way to keep Len and her family safe. As if anyone engaging with the post was directly putting Len in danger, rather than to face the fact Len was the person who put that much personal information online.

The mods in this discord did not allow for any discussion about this situation in the general server. So anyone who was concerned or had questions had to go directly and separately to the mods. How then do we know who has the same concerns as us? You don’t. In this server, a culture of silence has allowed Lens Closest Mutuals (a group of mostly white women) to act as a PR team that fields any and all concerns from people in the server.

The mods assured me that Len had done video calls with them and showed proper “documentation of their family,” to prove that Len is who she says she is. Which version of Len, is who she says she is? No one answered this question.

When I expressed my concerns to the mods, I got a stock response filled with defections, straw man arguments, red herrings as well as various statements that appealed to moral superiority and conflated separate identity terms all at once. I argued against all of their points and the response that I got was that if I was going to continue “not seeing eye to eye about the need for Len’s safety,” then I would be removed from the group.

I removed myself. I won’t ever stay in a group where one person's mental health is put on a pedestal above all the ways they have hurt and wronged others.

3.A - Please be wary of these White and White-passing women talking about what is and isn't racist. The people who claim that these accusations against Len will drive PoC out of fandom. As a whole ass Black and Indigenous woman, NO. What pushes PoC out of fandom is allowing people w/o racialized lived experiences to be the arbitrators of whether or not something is racist.

4. If an argument is made in bad faith but turns out to be true, it doesn’t mean that the accused should get away with everything just because someone accused them with ill intent. In this case, intent means nothing. Len has lied and holds terrible views. The end.

5. Race, Ethnicity, nationality, familial origin, religious background, class, and cultural upbringing are all different aspects of identity. Over the last ten years, Len has a documented history of lying about ALL OF THESE ASPECTS.

6. No one hates Len for being White-passing. However, you cannot be White-passing and “constantly racialized” at the same time. That's not possible because Race is what is read onto your body. If you are Read as White, and if you are allowed to exist in White spaces, you are not racialized. So which narrative is true?

7. I think that the aspect of race is one of the least important things in this to focus on. Len is a genocide denier, steals aspects of different religions, cultures, and lived experiences as their own. On top of this Len has made themselves a pillar/authority in TOG fandom while constantly lying to all of us, causing harm and posing as the authority on all things Maghrebi.

8. This news has already upset the fandom's past and present in ways we can't go back from. I know I personally feel really guilty for having ever followed this person. But again, the only person responsible for Len’s actions is Len. I'm simply dedicated to being more discerning in the future.

I know that a lot of us are angry. But I think there are ways for us to be angry and still kind. We have learned that someone close to us holds hateful views, but we don't have to act in hatred.

It goes back to the source material that brought us together right? In a terrible situation, we can still do some good. Still build bonds in honesty and nuance. Maybe I’m being naive, but I want to believe that our fandom can grow from this.

We're about to get a sequel! Let's get rid of the bad and move forward as a community. "Shit, Let's start a band."

[lgbtracefaker]

LGBTmazight: an update across fandoms

Apparently, our original post has now spread to the Kpop side of Twitter, which is not something we predicted, and we received screenshots of tweets regarding that.

Len has spent years being active in and writing for various Kpop fandoms, going by "figure8", "8figures", "8loops", "junmotions", and other similar nicknames. The Old Guard was and still is a very small fandom, and it's very obvious that she took advantage of a space that she could easily colonize. She played up her Moroccan ancestry a couple of months after the movie came out, changed her Tumblr URL, pretended she was fully Moroccan for a couple of weeks, and wrote "informative" posts regarding North African culture.

As we have already mentioned, this pattern of pretending to be a certain ethnicity was not exclusive to The Old Guard. She has been doing it for years, and one of the examples can be found in the main post, namely in the screenshot where she said that her grandmother was of Romani origins so she could lecture people on Dick Grayson's racial identity. She did a very similar thing in the Seventeen fandom, and possibly others.

On Twitter, she said in late 2013 and for some time after that that at least part of the Greek side of her family is native of Smyrna, a Greek city that is now part of Turkey and was destroyed in 1922 at the end of the Greco-Turkish War. She was adamant that Smyrna is not Turkish, and found it offensive when people would refer to it as such, displaying a great amount of pride specifically in the fact that she was descendant of the survivors of the Great Fire of Smyrna (in other words, always made sure that her Twitter followers knew that she is of Greek origins):

(link)

This is why it was a surprise, initially, to discover that on CuriousCat (a second profile called "eightfigures" that she has deleted little after the post was posted) she would define herself as being from "Asia Minor". That definition is often understood to mean "Turkey", and no one who is so proud of being Greek and so against Turkey would normally define themselves as such. It took a moment to realize she was using that convoluted definition because she was in various Kpop fandoms at the time, and was doing the same thing she would do in TOG months later: using fine-print definitions to gain power and school others in how to properly write the culture of the fandom she was interested in. In this case, she tried to pass of her supposed "Anatolian Greek" ancestry she also occasionally deployed to say that she was not "white on both sides" as her being Asian.

For someone who claims to have spent the past years being loud and proud of her North African, specifically Riffian Moroccan Amazigh origins, it sure is weird that she was suddenly shy about this side of her identity to the point of hiding it completely.

However, she didn't stop there. Not only did she use brownface in TOG, but she appears to have used digital yellowface in the Kpop fandom, as these tweets we have received mention. Because of their length, they are under the cut.

[snipergirl21]

My thoughts on THAT post

I’m breaking my “no more discourse” rule - I think the last proper one I reblogged was in April - to talk about this post that’s been going around the TOG fandom for the past few days. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. (Incidentally, I’m days away from marking my first year on Tumblr. Yay!)

Just so we’re clear where I am coming from, I don’t like LGBTmazight. I’ve never interacted with her directly, but she has attacked friends I have made in this fandom with insults and (in my opinion, unfair) accusations. So my dislike comes from the fact that I’ve had a front seat to the aftermath.

You may have seen other people talking about how she - a supposed champion of POC and MENA people - has been instrumental in making the fandom a toxic place for them? Well, I can attest to that. I personally know people of MENA, Italian, Latin American, Southeast Asian and Jewish descent who’ve been the targets of harassment by her and her followers. Merely for disagreeing with her opinion, or just for the cardinal sin of being on “the other side”. And this has been going on for the better part of the past year.

And after all that, to find out that this is just the latest episode in years of faking her life experiences and identity? That her authority in the fandom - which she used as her shield, her source of power - was based on lies? 

LGBTmazight, do you have any idea what you’ve done? How many people have left this fandom because of the attacks you have instigated and egged on? How many angry, frustrated and scared people you have left in your wake? How many voices that were lost? Are you even the least bit sorry for some of them?

And incidentally, to her defenders, please stop trying to deflect from the issue by wholesale accusing people who interacted with the post of being Top!Joe stans, or racists. If you really want to talk racism, LGBTmazight has been one of the leading promoters of the phrase “POC can be racist too” in this fandom, and her followers took this as a greenlight to bully the ‘bad POCs’ just because their ‘good POC’ friend said so. And that is why the racefaking really cuts deep.

BUT ... the last thing this fandom needs is a situation where both sides mindlessly accuse the other of racism. So please, just listen to what people are saying and asking of you. An apology would do a lot to heal the wounds in this fandom. And then maybe we can go back to our respective corners and just focus on creating more content. Because I believe this fandom is worth saving.

[giotanner]

you wonder why blogs are silent???? Someone was borderline DOXED/HAD AN ANONYMOUS BLOG CREATED TO "EXPOSE" THEM for being too "white" looking. this behavior is so fucking psychotic looking that OTHER FANDOMS are talking about us behind our backs. Star Wars fandom is mocking us!! STAR WARS. THE FANDOM THAT DROVE JOHN BOYEGA TO QUIT SOCIAL MEDIA BECAUSE OF ABUSE.

No, the only thing psycothic is a white RICH GIRL who invented a DIFFERENT LIFE (poor, harassed by police, with skin so brown and dark that people did racism against her, full of her culture moroccan-greek-mediterranean) to be the paladin of MENA people/POC, the leading expert in TOG fandom about Yusuf, a MENA character. All this to have the attention.

This is psycothic: to be a racefaker, xenophobic person, who WANTS TO TEACH us when she is only a rich fake woke and a racist who harassed REAL MENA PEOPLE i know.

Ciao.

[fromthefishbowl]

Hello, I just saw your post. I'm so sorry you had to deal with all the death threats and harassments in this fandom. But just want to say from my perspective as a POC in the US, I really appreciate the different viewpoints that you and other Italians and MENA and Jewish people bring to this fandom. (part1)

The TOG fandom has this incredibly bizarre phenomenon of a bunch of mostly white highly educated middle class people in the Anglosphere shouting antiracist rhetoric AT actual POCs, and trying to force *check notes* Italians into confessing their gu8ilt of *check notes* being white (which, I mean, are you really telling me that the Ukranians and Polish immigrants I encounter are the same as Anglo-Americans who's been here for generations?) (part 2)

I actually don't think any of the rhetoric that this race faker and her supporters (including many big name blogs that are currentl y silent) keep shouting about is about actual social justice for POCs, or even sexual positions or what have you - it's about power and control they want to shape cultural narratives that suit their viewpoints - all despite the repeated and loud rebuttals from actual MENA people in the fandom. (part3)

And because they think they're more enlightened, they don't listen to actual POCs or any views that are different from their own, ever. The whole thing is, I find, incredibly patronizing and condescending, and ultimately, alienating for me as a POC in the US. In the end I wonder who they've helped, aside from their own ego. Anyway, just want to give you a shout-out . I'm glad you exist in this fandom. (final)

Long question, so I had to write a long answer.

Yes, that "bizarre phenomenon" you mention is also what I noticed months ago; the rant post I wrote about it got me blocked and vagueblogged by a lot of big-name blogs in the fandom lmao. None of them actually had the galls to come and talk to me directly, though. Which... if you vague about someone, at least give them time to see the post?? Otherwise what's the point???

The whole "Italians are white" thing made me want to rip my hair out. Not even in the US, Italian immigrants were considered to be white, and last year I asked a couple of American friends if they consider me white, and they told me "I think you're probably Hispanic" and "I just think you're Italian".

We have been mingling with other Med countries for thousands of years. Sicily was an Islamic Kingdom for three-hundred years and the first battles for the territory began two-hundred years before that, and a lot of Italian words descend from Arabic. We have always been in the business of MENA countries and vice-versa. This... forced separation they try to create between us and North African countries is just... it's crazy. And when we would point out that is not how it works, we'd get swarmed by a bunch of angry Anglos/Americans/Northern Europeans insulting us for not following proper US American etiquette regarding race or ethnicity or whatever.

No, I don't think that any of the discourse in this fandom is actually about social justice or making sure that Joe is well written. It was just a bunch of people who wanted a reason to, and I quote a mutual, colonize this fandom space with their bullshit. They wanted us to follow the stereotypes they see in movies.

If the whole point was to educate us about racism in fandom spaces, then they wouldn't be this silent right now or excusing her actions. There's literal proof that she faked her life experiences to have brownie points to use in fandom and that she took the real murder of a man and removed the actual victims of that story of police violence to make herself the protagonist. Who the fuck does that and is still considered a good person??? How can you consider her a good person after reading that???

I wonder how much disinformation she has spread about North Africa in these months, how much stuff she copied and pasted from random websites and fed to her followers pretending that she had learned it out of experience.

I don't know if you'll read this answer, but I thank you very much for dropping it in my inbox. This fandom is hell, but it's nice to see that some people have sunk their teeth in it.

[gamebird]

Seeing as how LGBTmazight’s primary accounts appear to have been deleted:

Someone willing to race-fake is willing to sock-puppet.

For more information on sock-puppetry, see Fanlore’s article here. That’s all fairly dated, but it goes to show lgbtmazight isn’t special or a unique case. It’s not a thing wrong with TOG fandom specifically. It’s just a thing that happens.

Here’s a Wikipedia article about the same thing, showing it’s larger than even just fandom.

[grecoromanyaoi]

i am but a len lgbtmazight fan account