The anti-sex trafficking rhetoric pushed by white anti-sex-work Christians is a moral panic. Like all moral panics it uses the fear mongering of “what about the children!?” to bolster social conservatism. This fear is used to pass conservitizing laws that claim to keep children safe but instead increase criminalization.

It is painful to watch people treat each other horribly. It’s even more painful when the people who are acting bad are familiar to you. For decades I’ve watched straight people on reality dating shows. As a queer person I’ve felt relatively detached from the “reality” portrayed on these shows. In Ultimatum Queer Love the people portrayed on the show were familiar to me. As a queer person I don’t think I’m alone in the feeling that watching queer people in the reality television machine just felt more…real to me. And so did the pain.

I got an email asking a question about the language I used in my article The Secret Joy of Accountability in The Revolution Starts at Home. The questions around how we both talk about and meaningfully engage with people who have caused grievous harm has become more and more central to my work. To that end I wanted to share the question and my response.

Centered self-accountability requires getting to that grounded, rooted and balanced place from which to make observations about what you did so you can make decisions about what you will do in response to the situation, what you will take responsibility for and how.

The foundation for accountability in communities and relationships is self-accountability, that is first doing our own work to be in alignment with our own values and actions on a day to day basis and if/when we are out of alignment figuring out what happened, what was going on for us and what we are going to do about it.  The responses below are meant to be a jumping off point not the last word.