I could also call the "abuser" card easily (I think anyone can; it's quite a stretchy card). but I've seen so much of this witchhunt, Satanic Panic, antisemitism-style dynamics—where "our" Lebensraum is being secretely penetrated by evil, irredeemable agents of corruption, who are going to target the children and endanger our pure and safe community with illegitimate sex and moral decay, who cannot be trusted no matter what they say or do—whose indeed any efforts at accountability or redress are just further proof that the infiltrator is such a master manipulator, and if you show any sort of nuance at all, why are you a traitor, I mean an "enabler"...? what are *your * skeletons...?—that I have sworn off the word "abuser" altogether, for all the reasons well discussed in the zine "The Broken Teapot".

(SarahZ's new video on "narcissists" taught me something I didn't know: the "survivors of narcissism" scene has a pipeline to demonology, and it's not at all fringe or subtle. This is after all the logical endpoint. The "some people are just bad" worldview is Satanic Panic all the way down.)

Of course for a myriad of reasons people hurt one another and sometimes it's deliberate and sometimes it's a pattern, and of course there's people from whom for a myriad of reasons it's better for you in particular to stay away, or for women in general to stay away, etc. But I've decided that if you want to accuse someone of being problematic, then you ought to name what exactly is the fucking problem. So I don't say, "my stepfather was abusive". I say, "my father was often violent with me, and demanded obedience without reason". I don't say, "Be careful, this person is toxic and manipulative". I say, "this person lied to me about important things when I asked them not to, repeatedly crossed boundaries, never acknowledge the damage they did, and doesn't give me reason to believe that this time they're acting in good faith" etc. Yes that takes much longer to say than "they're abusive". That's the point.

In particular, I want to say a very hearty "fuck you" to the fucked up queer dynamics pointed out by Porpentine, where "community" is a kind of fucked up currency so that support is conditioned on perceived adherence to norms, with the result of incentivising that behaviour where whenever conflict, harm and hurt happens, whichever side calls out "abuse!" first wins, so it becomes a race to get the other side dehumanised, and the queer community equivalent of psychanalists start doing the queer community equivalent of regression hypnosis to rewrite the past and establish that the nonhuman had always been an evil manipulator sociopath doing devil sacrifice of babies. The overriding of humanity, of living bleeding souls, by fucking Discourse, by a bunch of personality tests "top 10 red flags that he was an abuser all along", by this ridiculous keyword-salad of activist-feminist psychobabble. Seriously, fuck all that to hell. I refuse to participate. If my complicity in that meat grinder is what it takes to be supported I'll get support from middle-aged drunks at the bar, thank you.

Refusing the abuser/victim binary opens one up for the complexity of human beings. My father acted like a tyrant at home, cheated on my mom while acting jealous, beat me many times, and hit my mom once. He was also a deeply troubled man from a culture where beating up children is considered normal, who made a sincere effort to treat me better than his parents treated him, who was profoundly proud of my achievements and supported me financially post-divorce, who bitterly regrets raising his hand against my mother, whose troubled relationship with masculinity and aggression is messedly bound up with shame over his own repressed queerness. My mother put herself at a safe distance from him but still holds compassion for that man in her heart, still gets sad when she hears of his self-destructive spiraling. My sister still visits him on holidays and mom sends gifts through her sometimes. I'm not sure if gringo puritanical culture will ever be able to understand holding space in your heart for #problematic people, but I am.