An Open Letter to Rachel Moss and the Rest of WisCon 32
This, unsurprisingly, got long. I'm putting the text behind a cut to save peoples' screens.
There is a lot of confusion about what happened at WisCon. This was my first trip to WisCon, and my trip began with a red eye flight, so I started the con with a pretty substantial sleep defecit. However, I do have a lot of rather strong feelings about the incidents of harassment, so I’m going to write up what I know. Plenty of other people have written about this, but I wanted there to be a post in which what we all get to see are the actual consequences on some people of the actions of the person in question. I have tried very hard not to cue as fact anything here that I could not personally verify.
Here’s what I know. At some point (please don’t ask me when, the whole con is a blur), I was sitting around having some drinks with some friends, both old and new, toward the end of the con. We were engaging in a very casual post mortem of the con: what went well, which panels didn’t, what we’d like to talk about next year-you know, like you do. Then someone in that group mentioned having heard that one con participant had been spouting fatophobic and transphobic stuff. I think even then there were rumors that it had been significant enough an expression of those forms of hate that the person was escorted out of the con, but I cannot confirm that rumor.
At some unspecified point of time later on Monday night after the Dead Cow party, I found myself in a hotel room with about five other people. Being geeks, we all had our laptops. We were, you know, cruising around, reading fic, generally having a good time, like you do. Then someone found the link to the reposting at SASS. I am perfectly clear on that for two reasons. First, it was only after I got home to California (a day delayed because of weather in Dallas that canceled my flight) that I saw the second half of the post in the google cache linked to by Angry Black Woman (ABW). I mention this because I was in the room with three people who appeared in the photos that were being mocked in the SASS thread, but after I got home, several more people in that room got mentioned in the second half of the post. In fact, I think by the time all was said and done, between the full original post and the SASS thread, everyone in the room but me was mentioned. So, it is fair to say that I’ve actually seen plenty about the way that both the initial post in its google cache form and the SASS thread affected people because I got to watch a lot of it play out in real time as the people whom it happened to saw it, which is frankly an experience I could have lived without. Because I saw how hurt people were in private. That is just not okay. Period.
Now, look. I know that everybody in the United States has a legal right to free speech. I have the legal right to say most things I want to, with a few notable exceptions. But there are legal rights, and then there is common courtesy, and the people at SASS are made of fail on that front. I have read or skimmed every page of that thread. I am perfectly aware that the posters at SASS could give a rat’s ass about common courtesy. I don’t expect it from them.
I do, however, expect better from people who attend WisCon. When I write up my con report, about all the good things that happened and the other less good things, I’m not going to leave out the things that I thought were problematic. But even the people who totally steamed me under the collar at panels (and lo, there were many), were people who were implicitly committed to working toward common courtesy. We might disagree about how to get there; we might be at very different places in the process. But everyone I met at WisCon, including the ones who said really problematic things, were trying. Everyone except for one person: Rachel Moss.
One of the things about the WisCon program book that impressed me was how clearly it laid out that common courtesy was a good thing and that sometimes the needs of one group came into conflict for another. Let me quote from the “Navigating the Crowded Con” section of the pocket program: “Smoke and scents travel quickly, and air won’t move if you ask it to. The hotel uses scented cleaning products, the Gathering features perfume and spices; the Dealers’ room includes incense and old books. Some members need fragrance to manage pain and mood, and some medications have strong scents. For some members, smoke or fragrance triggers asthma, migraine, or illness; these effects are cumulative. We ask that you limit your use of scented products when possible. Washing your hands after smoking makes a difference.”
Now, see that is common courtesy in a situation in which peoples’ definitions of courtesy come into conflict. Some people with issues with scents want to be in a completely scent free zone because scents set off very real health issues. Other people use scents to manage their own health issues. How do you negotiate that conflict? You talk about it openly and try to limit the impact of your issues on other people as best you can. And you warn people who have issues in advance where those issues are most likely to be triggered. You do that regardless of how trivial you think the issue is or how much you dislike the people or group in question because that’s what it means to live in groups. Our conflicting needs and different opinions crash into each other and create conflicts. There isn’t an issue to argue about there; conflict is inevitable. The question is how you deal with that conflict.
The organizers of WisCon thought about the consequences of the actions of the con members and made an effort to foresee reasonable outcomes of various events. This is what grown-ups do.
And here’s where we get to reason number 2 that I remember perfectly clearly where I was when I saw the thread: I saw the emotional fallout as people who were in the SASS post saw what was being done to them on SASS. I watched as smart, funny, beautiful people were deeply hurt by a bunch of small-minded people without lives or human emotions mocking them for sport. Trust me, as for the targets of that hatred, these are folks whom I’m sure get this all the time, as a number of them have rightly said on livejournal and in other places. The mocking on SASS isn’t really what people are hurt and angered by, especially since the information has come out that it’s possible that the poster at SASS who appeared to be the troll in question might not have been her but a hacked account. (Again, nobody’s yet sure who did what at SASS. Yet. The Google-Fu is strong in this group, and that may also be revealed later. ) For now, I am willing to err on the side of giving the initial troll the benefit of the doubt, but that does not reduce her culpability in this in any way. Even if I write this post as if the poster on SASS using the icon of the photo of the WisCon troll was a fake account, RM does not get a pass on anything.
What people are hurt and angered most by is that someone paid $45 in membership and came into the con with what appears to be the express intent to mock the congoers. And that she saw nothing wrong with posting that mockage to a hateful website.
How do I know that she’s not sorry? I’ve been closely following what she has said in public. She has continued to say in her “apologies” (which read more like her being unhappy than she has been caught and called out on this than anything resembling remorse for her actions) that she thought her original post was funny and that she was not sorry for most of what she wrote. In posts well after the initial Something Awful post was taken down, she has continued to refer to all the con attendees as lesbians, which you know, would totally work for me, since there were plenty of attractive women there, and I’d love to think that they were all part of my community, but it’s clear from her use of the word that she thinks that the word lesbian is an insult. I do not put up with it when people at work use that language around me or when family members do that, even if the people in question are teenagers who think they know everything. I would have hoped a 25 year old graduate student was more mature than that, and most of the ones I know are, but clearly this one isn’t.
I could do nothing but watch as people were wounded not because they were mocked for their size, race, gender, disability, and/or sexuality, but because it happened to them at one of the places where they worked hard to try to create space where they did not have to deal with as much of that shit as they do on a regular basis. I watched them wince as they braced themselves knowing what the kind of people at SASS did for sport and knew that it was only going to get worse. I felt the rage swell as we all realized the level of betrayal of community norms that the person in question had perpetrated.
That is not okay. Nobody should go into a con and photograph people for the express purpose of mocking them. And you sure as hell don’t post that stuff to a place like SomethingAwful and not expect this to happen. And then! And then, you really, really do not continue to use the same kinds of insults in your posts after the fact.
Look, Rachel Moss (aka hypersurfaces and zathlazip) and your ilk, if you don’t like women, fine. You don’t have to. Engage in all the self-hate you want. If you aren’t interested in talking about gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc. in a meaningful way, find another con to go to. Go to Comic Con. That is totally boy space with lots of boy gamers. (Incidentally, there were plenty of gamers at WisCon. You were sitting next to one in one of your panels because you were, I realized belatedly, sitting next to me.) We weren’t there for a gaming convention; we were there for a feminist science fiction convention. We were there because having been to gaming and comic conventions where the fanboys run the show, having been to academic conferences in which the papers of fangrrls are not attended by the fanboys, we wanted a place to express both of those parts of ourselves and not have to defend or justify our right to be both. Perhaps it is unfortunate for you that the con that happens in your geographical neck of the woods isn’t focused the way you wanted it to be focused, but if that’s the case, go to your local comic convention and mock women’s bodies there. Lord knows that too many comic books and games, much as I enjoy them, excel at that. Go. Be with your people.
But do not come into my space and wreck it for us. Because even before this happened, there were plenty of problems with that space. The difference is most of us there who had those problems were strategizing about effective ways to change that. You seemed to have no investment in doing so, which as far as I’m concerned means that you don’t belong there.
As I mentioned before, this was my first WisCon. I attended with several people who had been before, and when we got there on Thursday, one of them immediately made plans to go help with packet stuffing (for people who haven’t been, at registration everybody gets a packet with your badge, your pocket program, and a few other forms. Those packets are assembled partly by official con com members, but also by regular attendees who help out at the beginning of the con.)
In retrospect, this was the best thing I could have done as a newbie. Because when my roommates went to volunteer, I tagged along and volunteered too. What that meant was that even before registration happened, I felt a sense of partial ownership of the con. (I also helped with breakdown after the Gathering. I didn’t volunteer for the rest of the con, but I’m glad I did at least that much.)
At opening ceremonies, the con com members asked all the volunteers to stand up. I felt like a total dweeb standing up since I had barely volunteered, but I was glad I had when the con com members then told the assembly that the people who were sitting down needed to look around and realize that if they weren’t standing up, they should know that without the people who were, the con wouldn’t happen, so they should get themselves involved.
It seems like a small thing, but sometimes small things are symbolically important out of proportion with their perceived size. It might have been my first con, but I was a part of it. I owned it. I had an obligation to work to make it better.
Clearly, the WisCon Troll never felt a part of WisCon. (Perhaps it is therefore inaccurate to call her the WisCon Troll.) I don’t expect people who use hateful mockage for sport at SASS to feel that way. But I do expect the people who pony up the money and go to the con to feel that way, even if they only feel it some of the time.
Were there moments that I didn’t feel a part of it? Sure. Were there people who said things that pissed me off? Sure. Did I mock some people when they said things that I thought were stupid? Sure. I’m only human.
But-and it’s an important but-I mocked things that I thought violated the spirit of the community. I mocked the behavior of people who seemed to still be lacking a clue when it came to say, racism, not the people themselves. And I got involved in ways that would help change the con for the better. Most importantly, I had the good sense not to post that mocking in places where it would spiral out of control.
What I never got from the troll was any sense of how her very public mocking was designed to make the con better or what community values she thought the people in question violated. (This is particularly fascinating since she conflated one person with another fairly often, gave inaccurate physical descriptions of several others, and demonstrated a pretty impressive level of misreading of the political opinions of people in the panel on politics-to say nothing of the utter lack of subtlety in how she read the unspoken dynamics of that panel. More on that in my con report, which probably won’t be done until next week thanks to deadlines at work this week and weekend.)
True, if it turns out that the poster at SASS using her photo in the icon is not her, she did not post the photos that revealed the identities of the people in the photos. But there is no way in hell that that kind of outing was not a foreseeable consequence of her actions, so she bears some culpability that it happened even if she did not do it herself. The people at SASS were going to escalate to doing things that even the WisCon Troll didn’t want them to do. Any idiot who’s been online for more than 3 minutes could have foreseen that, so either she didn’t care or she didn’t think, neither of which is excusable in this case. Whatever personal issues she has with body image do not mitigate that fact.
Moreover, if you are kicked out of a con (or if the collective membership is crying that you should have been when the membership is 1000 people at that con who don’t agree on much else yet are collectively begging for your banning), this is a sign that you have done something wrong. Fannish communities do their best to incorporate as many people as possible; in order to have violated norms so completely that you are exiled and/or shunned, you must have done something of a pretty significant order of magnitude to end up in that position. That should be a sign to stop and think and spend some serious energy reevaluating what precisely got you there. I have seen no proof that such energy is being expended. Moreover, I have seen plenty of proof that the contrary is true.
Based on that, I have no problem in the world with the circulation of her various names to feminist communities, academic networks, and fandom far and wide because her behavior is not acceptable in any of those circles. I do not endorse the circulation of her names because I think death threats are appropriate; clearly, death threats and other threats of physical violence are not. But, Rachel Moss is not a person who should be welcome in fannish, feminist, or academic communities because she clearly has no respect for the norms of those societies. (It is, perhaps, poetic justice that since she violated those norms, other trolls have stooped to that level in their response to her instead of providing whatever kind of approval and validation she sought by mocking us among them; this is why women ought to stick together and support each other instead of allowing other people to play on our differences and divide us. That is the lesson we should be reminded of.)
I am perfectly okay with fandom/academia/feminist communities circulating her various names, and here's why: she went into feminist fannish space and took photographs of people there and posted them in a public place with the specific intent to mock them in ways that completely activated fatophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia, to say nothing of the shameless dismissal of whole categories of disease. In no way and at no time has she demonstrated any remorse about her actions, even after (if the rumors are true) the convention asked her to leave as a result of her actions.
Based on posts that I am reasonably sure she herself committed, I am perfectly convinced that she represents a threat to our safety in fannish/feminist space. I have seen nothing that will convince me that she will not go right out and do this again. Her own issues, whatever they may be, may in fact call for compassion from us, and I am trying very hard to keep that in mind, but compassion asks that we understand where she is coming from, not that we do not speak out about the wrongness or her actions and how those actions hurt others, nor does it dictate that we must welcome her back into our communities until she has made progress on controlling the behaviors that led to that pain, regardless of the source of her acting out.
Let me give you a hypothetical. I still think, like cereta, that if the WisCon Troll RM were in my workplace, and I were asked to write a letter of rec, I would want to know about this, because if I endorsed her without knowing about this and then she did this again, it would be my professional reputation on the line. Plenty of people at WisCon are academics so that’s less of a hypothetical situation than it might first seem.
In addition, I think the move to circulate her name is as much about making sure she is not allowed to pass freely into safe fannish and feminist spaces in order to do this again as it is vengeance. I would not feel safe with her at any convention I attend, and I think everyone in fandom/feminist circles has the right to know who she is so we can protect ourselves from this behavior.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the idea that women need to have the backs of other women, especially in fannish spaces. I was thrilled to get to WisCon and get my little “Proprietary Boobs” and “Backup” ribbons to wear on my badge as a physical way of marking my frustration with the insane debacle known as the Open Source Boob Project. However, I am sad that we so quickly had an opportunity to put those promises to support other women who were being hurt into practice. I am proud of how so many people whom I had not met before WisCon, whom I now consider friends, responded swiftly and smartly to this assault on our space. I am deeply disappointed that that assault was instigated not by a man but by another woman who should have been standing shoulder to shoulder with us and our allies, regardless of their sex or complicated expression of gender, instead of attacking us. I hope that Rachel Moss and other people who think like she did will learn from this; but I also plan to work to change structures so that it’ll be harder for her or anyone else to do this or something like this in the future. No, we can’t stop it entirely; that’s not the point. The point is for us to do what people at WisCon have done for decades before I got there: speak out when something is not okay, support each other when someone else hurts us, and continue to celebrate ourselves when too much of the rest of the world will not. That’s my obligation as a new member of the community, and I hope everyone who was there will take that away from WisCon 32.
There is a lot of confusion about what happened at WisCon. This was my first trip to WisCon, and my trip began with a red eye flight, so I started the con with a pretty substantial sleep defecit. However, I do have a lot of rather strong feelings about the incidents of harassment, so I’m going to write up what I know. Plenty of other people have written about this, but I wanted there to be a post in which what we all get to see are the actual consequences on some people of the actions of the person in question. I have tried very hard not to cue as fact anything here that I could not personally verify.
Here’s what I know. At some point (please don’t ask me when, the whole con is a blur), I was sitting around having some drinks with some friends, both old and new, toward the end of the con. We were engaging in a very casual post mortem of the con: what went well, which panels didn’t, what we’d like to talk about next year-you know, like you do. Then someone in that group mentioned having heard that one con participant had been spouting fatophobic and transphobic stuff. I think even then there were rumors that it had been significant enough an expression of those forms of hate that the person was escorted out of the con, but I cannot confirm that rumor.
At some unspecified point of time later on Monday night after the Dead Cow party, I found myself in a hotel room with about five other people. Being geeks, we all had our laptops. We were, you know, cruising around, reading fic, generally having a good time, like you do. Then someone found the link to the reposting at SASS. I am perfectly clear on that for two reasons. First, it was only after I got home to California (a day delayed because of weather in Dallas that canceled my flight) that I saw the second half of the post in the google cache linked to by Angry Black Woman (ABW). I mention this because I was in the room with three people who appeared in the photos that were being mocked in the SASS thread, but after I got home, several more people in that room got mentioned in the second half of the post. In fact, I think by the time all was said and done, between the full original post and the SASS thread, everyone in the room but me was mentioned. So, it is fair to say that I’ve actually seen plenty about the way that both the initial post in its google cache form and the SASS thread affected people because I got to watch a lot of it play out in real time as the people whom it happened to saw it, which is frankly an experience I could have lived without. Because I saw how hurt people were in private. That is just not okay. Period.
Now, look. I know that everybody in the United States has a legal right to free speech. I have the legal right to say most things I want to, with a few notable exceptions. But there are legal rights, and then there is common courtesy, and the people at SASS are made of fail on that front. I have read or skimmed every page of that thread. I am perfectly aware that the posters at SASS could give a rat’s ass about common courtesy. I don’t expect it from them.
I do, however, expect better from people who attend WisCon. When I write up my con report, about all the good things that happened and the other less good things, I’m not going to leave out the things that I thought were problematic. But even the people who totally steamed me under the collar at panels (and lo, there were many), were people who were implicitly committed to working toward common courtesy. We might disagree about how to get there; we might be at very different places in the process. But everyone I met at WisCon, including the ones who said really problematic things, were trying. Everyone except for one person: Rachel Moss.
One of the things about the WisCon program book that impressed me was how clearly it laid out that common courtesy was a good thing and that sometimes the needs of one group came into conflict for another. Let me quote from the “Navigating the Crowded Con” section of the pocket program: “Smoke and scents travel quickly, and air won’t move if you ask it to. The hotel uses scented cleaning products, the Gathering features perfume and spices; the Dealers’ room includes incense and old books. Some members need fragrance to manage pain and mood, and some medications have strong scents. For some members, smoke or fragrance triggers asthma, migraine, or illness; these effects are cumulative. We ask that you limit your use of scented products when possible. Washing your hands after smoking makes a difference.”
Now, see that is common courtesy in a situation in which peoples’ definitions of courtesy come into conflict. Some people with issues with scents want to be in a completely scent free zone because scents set off very real health issues. Other people use scents to manage their own health issues. How do you negotiate that conflict? You talk about it openly and try to limit the impact of your issues on other people as best you can. And you warn people who have issues in advance where those issues are most likely to be triggered. You do that regardless of how trivial you think the issue is or how much you dislike the people or group in question because that’s what it means to live in groups. Our conflicting needs and different opinions crash into each other and create conflicts. There isn’t an issue to argue about there; conflict is inevitable. The question is how you deal with that conflict.
The organizers of WisCon thought about the consequences of the actions of the con members and made an effort to foresee reasonable outcomes of various events. This is what grown-ups do.
And here’s where we get to reason number 2 that I remember perfectly clearly where I was when I saw the thread: I saw the emotional fallout as people who were in the SASS post saw what was being done to them on SASS. I watched as smart, funny, beautiful people were deeply hurt by a bunch of small-minded people without lives or human emotions mocking them for sport. Trust me, as for the targets of that hatred, these are folks whom I’m sure get this all the time, as a number of them have rightly said on livejournal and in other places. The mocking on SASS isn’t really what people are hurt and angered by, especially since the information has come out that it’s possible that the poster at SASS who appeared to be the troll in question might not have been her but a hacked account. (Again, nobody’s yet sure who did what at SASS. Yet. The Google-Fu is strong in this group, and that may also be revealed later. ) For now, I am willing to err on the side of giving the initial troll the benefit of the doubt, but that does not reduce her culpability in this in any way. Even if I write this post as if the poster on SASS using the icon of the photo of the WisCon troll was a fake account, RM does not get a pass on anything.
What people are hurt and angered most by is that someone paid $45 in membership and came into the con with what appears to be the express intent to mock the congoers. And that she saw nothing wrong with posting that mockage to a hateful website.
How do I know that she’s not sorry? I’ve been closely following what she has said in public. She has continued to say in her “apologies” (which read more like her being unhappy than she has been caught and called out on this than anything resembling remorse for her actions) that she thought her original post was funny and that she was not sorry for most of what she wrote. In posts well after the initial Something Awful post was taken down, she has continued to refer to all the con attendees as lesbians, which you know, would totally work for me, since there were plenty of attractive women there, and I’d love to think that they were all part of my community, but it’s clear from her use of the word that she thinks that the word lesbian is an insult. I do not put up with it when people at work use that language around me or when family members do that, even if the people in question are teenagers who think they know everything. I would have hoped a 25 year old graduate student was more mature than that, and most of the ones I know are, but clearly this one isn’t.
I could do nothing but watch as people were wounded not because they were mocked for their size, race, gender, disability, and/or sexuality, but because it happened to them at one of the places where they worked hard to try to create space where they did not have to deal with as much of that shit as they do on a regular basis. I watched them wince as they braced themselves knowing what the kind of people at SASS did for sport and knew that it was only going to get worse. I felt the rage swell as we all realized the level of betrayal of community norms that the person in question had perpetrated.
That is not okay. Nobody should go into a con and photograph people for the express purpose of mocking them. And you sure as hell don’t post that stuff to a place like SomethingAwful and not expect this to happen. And then! And then, you really, really do not continue to use the same kinds of insults in your posts after the fact.
Look, Rachel Moss (aka hypersurfaces and zathlazip) and your ilk, if you don’t like women, fine. You don’t have to. Engage in all the self-hate you want. If you aren’t interested in talking about gender, race, sexuality, ability, etc. in a meaningful way, find another con to go to. Go to Comic Con. That is totally boy space with lots of boy gamers. (Incidentally, there were plenty of gamers at WisCon. You were sitting next to one in one of your panels because you were, I realized belatedly, sitting next to me.) We weren’t there for a gaming convention; we were there for a feminist science fiction convention. We were there because having been to gaming and comic conventions where the fanboys run the show, having been to academic conferences in which the papers of fangrrls are not attended by the fanboys, we wanted a place to express both of those parts of ourselves and not have to defend or justify our right to be both. Perhaps it is unfortunate for you that the con that happens in your geographical neck of the woods isn’t focused the way you wanted it to be focused, but if that’s the case, go to your local comic convention and mock women’s bodies there. Lord knows that too many comic books and games, much as I enjoy them, excel at that. Go. Be with your people.
But do not come into my space and wreck it for us. Because even before this happened, there were plenty of problems with that space. The difference is most of us there who had those problems were strategizing about effective ways to change that. You seemed to have no investment in doing so, which as far as I’m concerned means that you don’t belong there.
As I mentioned before, this was my first WisCon. I attended with several people who had been before, and when we got there on Thursday, one of them immediately made plans to go help with packet stuffing (for people who haven’t been, at registration everybody gets a packet with your badge, your pocket program, and a few other forms. Those packets are assembled partly by official con com members, but also by regular attendees who help out at the beginning of the con.)
In retrospect, this was the best thing I could have done as a newbie. Because when my roommates went to volunteer, I tagged along and volunteered too. What that meant was that even before registration happened, I felt a sense of partial ownership of the con. (I also helped with breakdown after the Gathering. I didn’t volunteer for the rest of the con, but I’m glad I did at least that much.)
At opening ceremonies, the con com members asked all the volunteers to stand up. I felt like a total dweeb standing up since I had barely volunteered, but I was glad I had when the con com members then told the assembly that the people who were sitting down needed to look around and realize that if they weren’t standing up, they should know that without the people who were, the con wouldn’t happen, so they should get themselves involved.
It seems like a small thing, but sometimes small things are symbolically important out of proportion with their perceived size. It might have been my first con, but I was a part of it. I owned it. I had an obligation to work to make it better.
Clearly, the WisCon Troll never felt a part of WisCon. (Perhaps it is therefore inaccurate to call her the WisCon Troll.) I don’t expect people who use hateful mockage for sport at SASS to feel that way. But I do expect the people who pony up the money and go to the con to feel that way, even if they only feel it some of the time.
Were there moments that I didn’t feel a part of it? Sure. Were there people who said things that pissed me off? Sure. Did I mock some people when they said things that I thought were stupid? Sure. I’m only human.
But-and it’s an important but-I mocked things that I thought violated the spirit of the community. I mocked the behavior of people who seemed to still be lacking a clue when it came to say, racism, not the people themselves. And I got involved in ways that would help change the con for the better. Most importantly, I had the good sense not to post that mocking in places where it would spiral out of control.
What I never got from the troll was any sense of how her very public mocking was designed to make the con better or what community values she thought the people in question violated. (This is particularly fascinating since she conflated one person with another fairly often, gave inaccurate physical descriptions of several others, and demonstrated a pretty impressive level of misreading of the political opinions of people in the panel on politics-to say nothing of the utter lack of subtlety in how she read the unspoken dynamics of that panel. More on that in my con report, which probably won’t be done until next week thanks to deadlines at work this week and weekend.)
True, if it turns out that the poster at SASS using her photo in the icon is not her, she did not post the photos that revealed the identities of the people in the photos. But there is no way in hell that that kind of outing was not a foreseeable consequence of her actions, so she bears some culpability that it happened even if she did not do it herself. The people at SASS were going to escalate to doing things that even the WisCon Troll didn’t want them to do. Any idiot who’s been online for more than 3 minutes could have foreseen that, so either she didn’t care or she didn’t think, neither of which is excusable in this case. Whatever personal issues she has with body image do not mitigate that fact.
Moreover, if you are kicked out of a con (or if the collective membership is crying that you should have been when the membership is 1000 people at that con who don’t agree on much else yet are collectively begging for your banning), this is a sign that you have done something wrong. Fannish communities do their best to incorporate as many people as possible; in order to have violated norms so completely that you are exiled and/or shunned, you must have done something of a pretty significant order of magnitude to end up in that position. That should be a sign to stop and think and spend some serious energy reevaluating what precisely got you there. I have seen no proof that such energy is being expended. Moreover, I have seen plenty of proof that the contrary is true.
Based on that, I have no problem in the world with the circulation of her various names to feminist communities, academic networks, and fandom far and wide because her behavior is not acceptable in any of those circles. I do not endorse the circulation of her names because I think death threats are appropriate; clearly, death threats and other threats of physical violence are not. But, Rachel Moss is not a person who should be welcome in fannish, feminist, or academic communities because she clearly has no respect for the norms of those societies. (It is, perhaps, poetic justice that since she violated those norms, other trolls have stooped to that level in their response to her instead of providing whatever kind of approval and validation she sought by mocking us among them; this is why women ought to stick together and support each other instead of allowing other people to play on our differences and divide us. That is the lesson we should be reminded of.)
I am perfectly okay with fandom/academia/feminist communities circulating her various names, and here's why: she went into feminist fannish space and took photographs of people there and posted them in a public place with the specific intent to mock them in ways that completely activated fatophobia, transphobia, racism, misogyny, ableism, and homophobia, to say nothing of the shameless dismissal of whole categories of disease. In no way and at no time has she demonstrated any remorse about her actions, even after (if the rumors are true) the convention asked her to leave as a result of her actions.
Based on posts that I am reasonably sure she herself committed, I am perfectly convinced that she represents a threat to our safety in fannish/feminist space. I have seen nothing that will convince me that she will not go right out and do this again. Her own issues, whatever they may be, may in fact call for compassion from us, and I am trying very hard to keep that in mind, but compassion asks that we understand where she is coming from, not that we do not speak out about the wrongness or her actions and how those actions hurt others, nor does it dictate that we must welcome her back into our communities until she has made progress on controlling the behaviors that led to that pain, regardless of the source of her acting out.
Let me give you a hypothetical. I still think, like cereta, that if the WisCon Troll RM were in my workplace, and I were asked to write a letter of rec, I would want to know about this, because if I endorsed her without knowing about this and then she did this again, it would be my professional reputation on the line. Plenty of people at WisCon are academics so that’s less of a hypothetical situation than it might first seem.
In addition, I think the move to circulate her name is as much about making sure she is not allowed to pass freely into safe fannish and feminist spaces in order to do this again as it is vengeance. I would not feel safe with her at any convention I attend, and I think everyone in fandom/feminist circles has the right to know who she is so we can protect ourselves from this behavior.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the idea that women need to have the backs of other women, especially in fannish spaces. I was thrilled to get to WisCon and get my little “Proprietary Boobs” and “Backup” ribbons to wear on my badge as a physical way of marking my frustration with the insane debacle known as the Open Source Boob Project. However, I am sad that we so quickly had an opportunity to put those promises to support other women who were being hurt into practice. I am proud of how so many people whom I had not met before WisCon, whom I now consider friends, responded swiftly and smartly to this assault on our space. I am deeply disappointed that that assault was instigated not by a man but by another woman who should have been standing shoulder to shoulder with us and our allies, regardless of their sex or complicated expression of gender, instead of attacking us. I hope that Rachel Moss and other people who think like she did will learn from this; but I also plan to work to change structures so that it’ll be harder for her or anyone else to do this or something like this in the future. No, we can’t stop it entirely; that’s not the point. The point is for us to do what people at WisCon have done for decades before I got there: speak out when something is not okay, support each other when someone else hurts us, and continue to celebrate ourselves when too much of the rest of the world will not. That’s my obligation as a new member of the community, and I hope everyone who was there will take that away from WisCon 32.