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incite, transparency, accountability, and transmisogyny

with all the stuff happening with COV4 and related, i dug up incite!’s history of transmisogyny the other day. perhaps the easiest to find link about the issue is this one. which broadly describes the issue and what happened.

first things first, how did i know that this event even existed? voz mentioned in on twitter a few years ago. pretty much one of the first things i ever heard about INCITE! is this incidence of their transmisogyny and their continued transmisogyny. you’ll note from the post i linked to that voz was one of the people (one of the few twoc) actually involved with this. so i side with her on this.

after i tweeted about this little bit of history, emi koyama tweeted at me that she was also involved and to let me know there were public discussions and responses from incite on the blog “questionning transphobia” which is where Queen Emily originally called out INCITE! for the clinic. this blog, unfortunately, is no longer available and wasn’t archived by the internet archive. emi said that she will – after obtaining permission – be posting some of the response/email that she has from the same time period. which is great.

however. HOWEVER.

one thing that my digging made clear is that queen emily posted a ‘response’ that was an email. this confirms and holds true that INCITE!’s response was through back channel discussion. something which is also confirmed since the INCITE! national website AND the INCITE! blog have zero mention of this issue or their response to it.

this is NOT my idea of ‘public’ or ‘transparent’. nor is it my idea of an organization holding itself accountable to past mistakes and the people they’ve harmed.

the fact that this kind of critically important bit of INCITE!’s history is being eroded by linkrot and the way that the internet really DOES forget… the fact that even finding out this much took an hour of digging to flesh out the story and understand what happened. the fact that incite national has no statement or recognition that this happened….

yeah. i don’t trust it or them. not when recent events show that back channel discussions to do damage control and their deep concern over the ~brand~ tells me that this is part of a larger pattern of how the org operates and behaves.

the thing that gets me about back channel discussions is that if you look into other big things that happened in online feminism, it is usually WHITE FEMINISTS doing this sort of thing. that rather than airing the dirty laundry and CLEANING it, they are stuff it under the rug and hoping no one notices or remembers. like. i’m super fucking happy that emi is willing to spend the time and effort to dig up old emails and (maybe) post parts of it. but the point i’m making is that she shouldn’t have to.