🪐 I’m sorry y’all, I know the absolute last thing anyone wants at this point is another fuckin statement on the meta. But there are things I just can’t leave unsaid. And things I just cannot remain neutral on.

I’m a little late to this meta largely because of TLA being mistakenly targeted in a bizarre antifeminist meta against us. Luckily diplomacy prevailed and we only ended up losing a few instances who I’m surprised still federated with us in the first place given their politics. So after going through that, you might reasonably think that we of all instances have a good reason not to trust the mods of kitsunes.club, who almost erroneously blocked us and got us blocked by others, and who are also one of the seven instances initially announcing their defederation of woem.men last week.

However, despite all that, grooming is a very serious accusation, one that warrants our attention as an Admin. I realized that my systers have never been unbiased in this. We were, as a system, acting on blind loyalty to someone we thought was our friend. It’s a character flaw we will own up to. But this time, it was time for someone in this head, someone on this Admin team, to actually take a serious, objective look at this situation. Accordingly, I launched my own investigation. I read every bit of evidence I could get my eyes on, from the accusers and the defenders. I had long, hard conversations with people close to the situation.

I know a lot of you are confused about this. And that’s okay. It’s been chaotic, a lot of it has happened behind closed doors. There’s a lot of important info that you haven’t seen because everything about this is so intimate and personal to the people involved. You aren’t wrong to want to see evidence for an accusation this serious. I guarantee the problem is not that people care too much about evidence.

And if I’m being honest, the seven instances who put out that callout a week ago have fucked up pretty bad at it. By tying up serious allegations with what appear to be trivial offenses like an autistic running an account that makes fun of neurotypicals, or just running a matrix server, without the important context that it was the server the initial grooming happened in. Y’all weren’t wrong in reading this like it looked ridiculous. And deleting Ashten’s response post from transfem.social was a pretty big mistake. Amber has also acknowledged these fuckups. But despite this mishandling, the derisive comments about people asking to see evidence as if that’s a bad thing, and of course one of the acting instances fucking up and almost defederating us for being too feminist, this is still a serious issue.

So I did the work to delve into it. This is one of those hard things I consider it my job as an Admin to do for my community. And these are the findings of my investigation. To the best of my knowledge, this is what happened:

The story starts about a year ago. A lot of transfem admins from different circles were just getting to know each other as we counterorganized a widespread transmisogynist push to mass defederate just about every transfem-owned instance in sight. Some girls we got to know around that time were Hanna and Ashten.

February 2024, a huge problem came to light. Hanna was grooming minors in the woem.men matrix server. It was Ashten who exposed Hanna, her fiancée, and broke up with her and kicked her out of her house (or intended to, but she left on her own first. Ashten lied to us about that. It’s a small thing but it’s relevant as part of a bigger picture). Ashten had been involved too. They had gone so far as making plans together for one of these girls to move in with them (though, not until she turned 18). Ashten revealed she had been a victim of Hanna’s abuse too, and was manipulated into being a part of what was going on. We were all–victims and bystanders–quick to accept this and forgive Ashten’s involvement, because after all she had been abused, and she had been the one to put a stop to it all, we thought.

Ashten continued a close relationship with two girls who she and Hanna had groomed (I won’t name them here, they’ve been through enough, please just leave them alone). They formed a mother/daughter type bond, having all survived Hanna’s abuse together. Ashten’s goddaughters. These were young trans girls, in abusive or otherwise not great family living situations, isolated and dependent on online spaces for community. They had a need for a mother figure and Ashten was the one to fill it. Later, Ashten grew uncomfortable with the godmother relationship, when each of them had grown too attached to her. Ashten then ended those relationships. That was the version of events a lot of us knew at the time.

Protecting and caring for these girls was a major priority for our communities. It should be. Our trans youth must be supported, if we don’t support them who will? It seemed Ashten had done everything she should have, according to Ashten. However, the girls in question said otherwise. Both of them have since come out with accusations of grooming against Ashten. They tell the story differently than she does–a version of the story where Ashten manipulated them and continued the pattern of grooming. Many people, hearing their side, have called Ashten’s entire story into question. Did she really expose Hanna to protect the girls, or to protect herself? This is a question we may never know the true answer to. All we have is the evidence available and the words of those involved.

Summer 2024. A girl named Caitlin, a user of woem.men, was grooming minors. One of her targets was one of Hanna’s victims, one of Ashten’s goddaughters. According to Ashten’s account, she tried to put a stop to this. Knowing what was going on, she stayed quiet for a little while, in order not to lose the victim’s trust and isolate her. She invited Caitlin into her discord server to keep an eye on her. Many have since questioned this–why invite a known groomer into a space that contained minors? Why not immediately ban her from the instance? Ultimately, the victim got away from Caitlin without moving in with her. It seemed Ashten’s attempts to protect the survivor had succeeded. But were her actions appropriate? Many think not, but I find it to be a complicated issue. Surely inviting her into the discord was a mistake, but merely approaching a delicate situation cautiously so as not to lose the trust of the person in danger is reasonable and can save lives. Think what you will about that incident, it’s all in the past and was resolved without catastrophe, but to many, it bears an important message–that Ashten shouldn’t be trusted to run a community, especially one with minors in it.

These were the two major incidents in question. There are other things–Ashten defending someone caught with a phone full of CSAM (actual, not just drawings)–Ashten discrediting the two survivors, accusing them of plotting to turn everyone against her–woem.men’s Trust and Safety admin leaving and not being replaced. Ashten and woem.men were under a lot of fire for all of this, all year pretty much. And I can tell you every attempt was made to mediate and resolve this without a public spectacle that puts the victims’ trauma on display and also invites the prying eyes of our enemies–transphobes who are quick to jump at a chance to paint us all as pedophiles. Knowing this, every transfem involved ought to have known the stakes of making a wrong accusation, and still so many have come forward. The alliance of admins we all met each other in, the Sincerity Alliance, created to protect ourselves and our sisters from bad faith attacks by transmisogynists, effectively turned into a yearlong mediation attempt of this one single conflict, between Ashten and the girls accusing her of grooming. Mediation was tried, we tried so hard to prevent it coming to this. This mediation ultimately failed, which is why this is all spilling out into the public eye in the worst way now. It’s a catastrophe.

The survivors are young trans girls who have both definitively been victims of grooming, whether or not we include Ashten. Survivors truly are not likely to make false accusations, and when they do, it will almost always connect to a power gradient (for example, a cis man falsely accusing a trans woman of sexual assault, or a white woman falsely accusing a black man). In this case, the accusers were on the lower end of the power gradient in the equation–they were minors, and Ashten was in her upper 20s, and all of them were transfem. I truly have no good reason not to believe them. As a youth-liberationist, who tries to be conscious of perpetuating adult supremacy, I believe them. And having read all the evidence I can–the direct exports of message logs, endless screenshots, long documents–and talking directly to one of the survivors, I find that the evidence supports their version of events.

Ashen tells a different story, however–that one of these girls has masterminded a months-long plot to destroy her. Having talked to this girl personally in the last few days, I really didn’t get that impression, but rather that of someone who had moved on from this and just wants to finally put it all behind her. Rumors and conspiracy theories have circulated both blaming the victims and stranger tales yet–like that the small hosting provider nulled.llc was scheming to buy out all of trans fedi (that’s beyond absurd, it’s a tiny operation run by a working class trans woman who doesn’t even profit from it).

My conclusions: Whether Ashten did all or any of this with malicious intent, whether Ashten was even aware that her actions were matching a pattern of grooming, we can never know that for sure. But I do believe the survivors that it indeed happened. Based on the message logs, it was always the minor in the relationship who initiated talks about boundaries. The adult should have been doing that from the beginning. At the very least, she was careless, and made serious mistakes.

If you are hesitant to accept this without having seen all the evidence and done all the work I have to try to get to the bottom of this, that’s honestly perfectly reasonable. It is not wrong to ask for evidence. You do not have to take a side in this unbelievably messy conflict.

I also don’t believe that, on the surface, everything Ashten did was wrong. Being a supportive adult figure to a young trans girl is a good thing that we should all be doing if able, a great many of them do not have that in their lives. We also must, as a community, be vigilant to make sure this kind of thing does’t enable abuse. But this does not mean it is wrong for an adult to ever talk to a minor, or even to talk about sex, in an educational context. We must also avoid the reactionary trap of puritanism, and remain feminist. We must not let this incident make us all afraid to even talk to a minor, that is not going to produce any kind of healthy and safe trans community. Being supportive and encouraging to a young trans person, helping them learn about transition, HRT, surgery, and sex-ed, this is not grooming, and it’s vital to do these things to help prevent grooming. But I also believe Ashten’s relationship with these girls was different from that. It is only when boundaries are not set, or when they are crossed, that anything wrong has occurred. I believe this to be the case here. You can decide for yourself.

What do we do about this? I’m not here to tell you that. If you feel you need to defederate woem.men to keep your instance safe, or if you feel you should stay federated to avoid isolating a large population of vulnerable trans girls with a potentially dangerous person (it’s also important to note, in either case, that woem.men no longer allows minors), or if you don’t believe the allegations at all, that ain’t really my problem. I don’t participate in fedi block, to the point I can’t even type the full word through my instance’s wordfilters. I don’t believe defederation solves our problems, it only isolates us all from each other more. But run your own instances. Make your own decisions. Whatever you do, just please take this matter seriously, give it the attention it deserves, don’t let the mistakes of a few instances cause you to dismiss this out of hand. And please don’t turn reactionary over it and turn this into a witch hunt that goes far beyond its scope. Remember that abuse happens in every community, absolutely every one. The fact it is more visible here means we are doing something about it, not that we are worse than other communities.

All that there is to be said has been said. My final thoughts on this long ordeal: everyone involved in this is marginalized, oppressed, abused, hurt, traumatized, and human. Do what you need to do to keep your community safe. Let whisper networks do what they do best. The fascist country this all took place in does not have anyone’s best interests at heart–the state’s model of justice will only create more suffering for our people. Let’s finally let this end, and let the victims move on with their lives. And let’s all do better in the future, recognize the warning signs early, and protect our sisters.

~winter-type-06 Saturn

Resources:

Defederation announcement from one of the seven instances that posted it: transfem.social/notes/a1palerj…

Ashten’s response (also includes response to previous round of these allegations): docs.google.com/document/d/173…

Discord message logs (published by survivor with consent): transfem.social/notes/a1y47mta…

Selected passages from above document: transfem.social/notes/a1y4dddl…

Other relevant links and info within this thread: kitsunes.club/notes/a1qmdgo7cs