Emyn a., the candidate who dropped out of this year's election on 26 June, publicly posted on Tumblr at 7:24AM on 28 July 2023 UTC about the conditions around his withdrawal, tying them to dhobikikutti's behavior.

yishaqeni (Emyn) (link, archived):

why i left the otw and ended my board run

i hadn't really wanted to post publically about my leaving of the otw and ending my board run, but there's A Lot going around, and i wanted at least tell my story and my experiences in the org during this time, before i left

i left the org (in part) due to the behaviour of dhobi ki kutti

(for reference, i use she/her pronouns for dhobi ki kutti since i believe those are correct, please let me know if i'm wrong here)

to be clear this was not the only reason - the constant leaking of internal discussions and comments to FFA and DW, the lack of response from board on the ongoing trashfire, the inability of the board to address structural racism, plus the intentionally inflammatory posts made by dhobi ki kutti made me feel incredibly unsafe and contributed to my decision to leave the org entirely.

i’m focusing specifically on the behaviour of dhobi ki kutti because quite frankly the ongoing criticisms and challenges to the org about racism and mistreatment of vols have been analysed to death by other current and former vols, and i stand 100% in solidarity with OTW volunteers, particularly the PAC team, cvols and POC vols who have quite frankly been done dirty by the board.

for full disclosure - i worked in translation where alex was a volmanager. my experience with them was that they could be blunt and brusque, but this (and the way they wrote their bio and pronouns) wasn’t something that bothered me since this is often how people speak in northern ireland and wales where i’ve lived. I can understand that other vols found this to be offputting, and I did not know of how they had spoken to c-vols and the racism displayed until after I left.

the siloing problem was real in the org, and for a lot of folk the first time they realised how poorly particularly cvols and PAC had been treated by members of the board was when people started coming out with their stories of what they experiened while volunteering.

and when we knew and started asking questions, many vols were being stonewalled by board when we were trying to get answers about what happened. folk were posting in the public board chat and getting nowhere, half the board was on hiatus or on holiday. when I left there were only two board members active.

like, this sucked - we were seeing a rising tide of allegations from folk outside the org, and a number of us were getting distinctly unhappy with the behaviour of certain members of both board and legal, and we were getting no answers.

dhobi ki kutti began posting her questions a few weeks before i left. these were questions we were already asking - progress on the 2020 pledge, the treatment of azarias, PAC, POCvols and cvols, etc. however, this also included posts that were deliberately inflammatory, where she would refer to actions she disagreed with with provocative descriptors such as 'disgusting', and was deliberately antagonizing and intimidating to others in the internal chat, particularly when she felt other vols weren't engaging with what she was posting. dhobi ki kutti mocked those who were stressed and uncomfortable by how she was posting in her ccap responsa, but i cannot stress enough how aggressively she was posting about what was happening compared to everyone else, both other POC vols and otherwise

in addition to this, a number of volunteers had begun leaking internal discussions to FFA. I'm not talking about personal stories, but often copy-pastes from other volunteer discussions and internal messages. dhobi ki kutti herself had began posting internal information to her personal dreamwidth and sending this information to other DW users without considering if the people she was posting about were identifiable. it was becoming very clear to me that a significant subset of the otw volunteer base no longer cared about the privacy of other volunteers. dhobi ki kutti has made it clear that she does not care about the privacy of other volunteers so long as she can use statements to discuss structural racism in the org.

and I get why folk thought they had to do that - like we were absolutely being stonewalled in internal channels. one of the things I wanted to do if i was elected on board was to ensure that there was an official complaints process with timescales and set contacts that folk could approach if they had concerns, something that wasn’t just a floating rando Google form that had been sent out before. i wanted to ensure questions posted to board were answered in a timely manner and weren’t just left to rot in the board chat for all eternity. that being said, it was starting to become clear that many vols were angry and upset enough at the silence that they weren't thinking of (or actively disregarding) the privacy and safety of other vols

i had been a vol for over seven years when I left, i had made a lot of friends and talked a lot about myself and my life in different channels, including about my disabilities, neurodivergence and my religion. it was a big step for me to run for board, given that I have a very distinctive name and live in a place with a history of paramilitary and homophobic violence, but this was important for me and I wanted to do it. but the idea that my personal interactions from the last seven years could be selectively posted to places that are and have been explicitly hostile by someone who at that point was being deliberately antagonising was quite frankly terrifying.

i don't disagree with the ccap that was sent to dhobi ki kutti, because the way she had been acting while I was in the org was incredibly incendiary and far outside the bounds of normal discourse. this could've been campaigned on without the leaking of internal discussions and making vols feel unsafe and stressed. dhobi ki kutti decided this was not something she wanted to do, and this is the consequence.

the right to privacy while volunteering his something that was and is incredibly important to me. dhobi ki kutti can talk about how righteous she is for posting like this, she can mock and belittle how the privacy policy is to protect ‘abusers’, but the privacy policy is in place to protect vols and she was being incredibly cavalier with what and how she was posting. it’s to protect vols like me who live in countries with a living memory of sectarian and homophobic violence, it’s to protect cvols who live in a country where they can be prosecuted for accessing certain OTW projects, it’s to protect people who could be at risk of harm for engaging with what is widely perceived as queer explicit content.

at the time of leaving, i felt like i couldn’t trust anyone. i did not feel heard by the board, and i felt like the concerns of vols were being completely ignored. i felt i couldn’t post anything in the chat for fear someone would post it contextlessly in a DW community that has often been hostile. i didn’t even know if private messages to my friends in the org were safe. this was as a direct result of the behaviour of dhobi ki kutti, the silence of the board and the actions of other volunteers who kept leaking information to FFA and DW.

so this is the reason that i left. i didn’t want to leave, but being in a position where i had to choose between volunteering for a project i love and support and being put at risk by other volunteers who did not care about my safety sucked, ad at the end of the day i ended up not having a choice at all.

#otw politics#diary.txt#otw wank#otw racism#otw election

stopthatimp's commentary is provided here, as Emyn responds to it directly:

i don't disagree with the ccap that was sent to dhobi ki kutti, because the way she had been acting while I was in the org was incredibly incendiary and far outside the bounds of normal discourse. this could've been campaigned on without the leaking of internal discussions and making vols feel unsafe and stressed. dhobi ki kutti decided this was not something she wanted to do, and this is the consequence.

No comment on the rest of this but I’d like to point out the callousness and cruelty inherent in saying you agree with the CCAP sent to Kutti, a document that is wildly out of step with every disciplinary document I’ve personally ever seen, including one I wrote for a direct report who told me, at work, about her “eugenics baby”, and failed to produce a single deliverable over her 3-month tenure.

The document sent to Kutti was written in such a way as to make supposedly real policy violations completely non-actionable: there are no specific details regarding when Kutti violated certain policies, and there are no specific standards for correcting the behavior. Additionally, a large portion of the document is devoted to non-actionable tone policing - as your post seems to be!

You make the judgement that Kutti is caught up in righteousness and then dismiss her choices as careless or made in bad faith, contrasting with what I assume is your flattering self-image as a Board candidate:

this could've been campaigned on without the leaking of internal discussions and making vols feel unsafe and stressed. dhobi ki kutti decided this was not something she wanted to do, and this is the consequence.
An expectation for total information embargo, including basic information like “what policies does the OTW have”, is ridiculous. It goes beyond what many NGOs require of their volunteers, including NGOs whose work is significantly more sensitive than the OTW’s. But on top of that, it’s just fucking shitty. You admit in the post that OTW volunteers were/are stressed and unhappy. That makes perfect sense. Why then have you devoted hundreds of words to attacking a single volunteer whose methods you disagree with? A volunteer who is in fact experiencing persistent racism within the org, informing her decisions? And with a post that repeatedly implies your position of living under a homophobic government is somehow not also Kutti’s position, that your interest in respect and safety is worth more than Kutti’s?

This is racism, pure and simple. But it’s also just flat-out wrong. Even if Kutti were, in fact, willfully violating people’s privacy for no good reason and with no thought or consideration ahead of time, the CCAP as written would still be inappropriate, poorly constructed, and flagrantly racist.

I’m glad you’re out of the running, frankly.

yishaqeni (Emyn) (link, archived):

i am open to you describing how you would address a volunteer who has been consistently and persistently combative and intimidating to other vols

a volunteer who followed current board members across the chat system to ask why they were posting in the hobby chats instead of immediately answering leading and aggressively worded questions that she posted

a volunteer who deliberately used inflammatory language to create an unpleasant and unsafe working space

a volunteer who intentionally linked the fannish identity and the irl identity of another board candidate, a board candidate who was the victim of an alarmist harassment campaign (this was not a false claim, she did in fact do that)

a volunteer who intentionally and repeatedly leaked internal docs and personal conversations to dreamwidth and others external to the org, to the extent that volunteers did not feel safe posting in the chat

there is being angry, and plenty of folk in org chat were angry. if i was tone policing because she was angry, then fair enough

but this was being so persistently combative and aggressive in leaking information that she made other volunteers including myself feel unsafe, and then she mocked volunteers' feelings when her behaviour was called out in her ccap responsa

you ask me why i'm targeting a single volunteer. i wrote about dhobi ki kutti because she is one of the loudest voices in this discussion and she was one of the explicit reasons why i left. i wrote about her because she tried to make out that the ccap was issued solely to stop her from continuing her anti-racism campaign, when she had in fact been incredibly incendiary and combative towards numerous volunteers, and had leaked information with no regard for basic volunteer privacy and safety

i'm not going to get into the personal safety olympics or who has experienced The Worst Treatment in the org. dhobi ki kutti intentionally behaved in a manner that made other volunteers uncomfortable and unsafe, including volunteers she claimed to be speaking for, and then attempted to minimize and hide the fact that she'd done it

stopthatimp's rebuttal can be found here (full conversation cloned on FFA)

dhobikikutti's response

dhobikikutti has since made a rebuttal here:

Racism within the OTW

In 2020, when I asked the OTW Board to document the conversation around #BlackLivesMatter, and racism, and they put it off, I started gathering evidence. I had an idea of writing a report, a thorough, researched, documented argument that could prove to anyone without a vested interest in denying it, that the Organisation for Transformative Works was infected, from top to bottom, with structural racism.

This post is not that report. I had not intended to become active in the org because I had already learned that it was futile, but in May 2023 I saw fellow and ex volunteers being abused by a hostile management, and there was no way I could keep quiet about it. I focussed on victim advocacy, and on uncovering facts by asking questions in public, so that there was a documentation that other volunteers could look towards. In the process, I became a target of the kind of relentless racialised microaggressions that wear you down, no matter how prepared you are. And then of course the org decided to escalate with the macro aggression of sending me a CCAP, the kind of blatantly racist written proof that, to anyone outside the org, was a piece of evidence beyond any doubt.

But of course, within the org, white volunteers are still busy debating its merits, and my misdeeds, and how much really, is merely a failure of process, rather than a success of the system that racism supports. A former Board candidate has blamed his resignation from the org on my observed and insinuated behaviour. (ETA: In a later posted accusation it seems that he has confused me with another PoC. Supposedly OTW's colourblind text based environment is supposed to prevent this kind of thing, and yet here we are.)

I knew that the outcome of pressing for accountability would be hostility and that if I were going to delve deep into racialised critique of the org, I would be punished for it. I may in the future post a complete list of the questions I have asked, less for people to litigate my tone, and more because they are issues worth following up on. I don't care to defend myself in further detail, beyond stating, for the record, that the only org information I have shared publicly is what I have copied to this blog.

But since I am not able to set a report before the org, or the larger fannish community, I do want to present a summary of what I know to be true. Because while I appreciate the support I have received (both within and outside the org) since I disclosed the CCAP, the racism that pervades each committee of the OTW is entrenched, and affects many volunteers of colour in ways much worse than it ever has me. It extends far beyond the current and recently resigned Board members, and is entrenched in both formal processes of how things get done or not, as well as in the informal, pervasive culture that shapes conversation in org spaces.

In 2020 the conversations and actions surrounding BlackLivesMatter were racist, as was the way the org treated those of us challenging the white leadership. (Both the BIPOC volunteers who I was in conversation with at the time have since left the org, but in private conversations confirmed their assessment of the org as “so damn racist idek”.) I can confirm that the transcript leaked from an org-wide Board meeting is accurate, and that the treatment that Black volunteer received was not the only time they faced such racist working conditions. They also shared information with me about other Black volunteers who had been driven out by the org’s hostile racial conditions.

In 2020 again, the conversations and actions surrounding the Chinese language were racist, as was the way the org treated the Chinese speaking volunteers. I can confirm that the various summaries linked here are broadly accurate, albeit confused in some minor details. I also want to stress that the racism that Chinese volunteers have faced is not limited to any one Board member or chair. I have both been told and have observed specific incidents and repeated patterns perpetuated by more than one Board member and Chair.

In 2023 the conversations and actions surrounding the proposed Weibo account shut-down were (breathtakingly) racist. There is a small summary of it publicly available here, as well as an account of a recently resigned Board Member’s explicit racism here, but it does not convey in any way the sheer scale of labour that Chinese speaking volunteers put into their statements of protest. It also does not communicate the complete apathy of the board, whose empty apologies contained neither accountability nor restitution. It also does not convey the total silence from the Communications chair, under whose purview the Weibo account falls and from Translation Chairs, in whose committee the largest number of cvols belong. (A briefly appointed co-chair posted an apology to the Weibo mods and larger cvol community, to which the current comms chair did not co-sign on to. Soon after, the co-chair stepped down.)

The level of dehumanising indifference and contempt that the OTW culture of whiteness breeds towards the experiences of racism that volunteers of colour must deal with is higher than the average English-based fannish community. For a professional non-profit with a stated value of inclusiveness, it is abysmal.

It is not just that almost every person in a position of power in the org is white—it is that they are utterly unequipped with the tools to diffuse their whiteness as a vector of systemic discrimination. Some flounder in learned helplessness, others are belligerently hostile to reform. All have collectively abdicated their responsibility in taking leadership to fix the problems they have caused.

I share this now because I want everyone who says they care about racism within the OTW to recognise the severity of the problem. Two Board directors resigning rather than holding their fellow director accountable, and said ex-director continuing to remain in multiple committees, with not a word said officially and publicly that these events are in any way related to racism, is a symptom, not a solution.

And I especially want everyone to understand the weight of resistance that Anh, Qiao and Zixin will be working under when they take their seats on the Board. Expecting more from them than from their white counterparts is unjust, and it is imperative to constantly call out the unequal burden of racism that they have to carry.

I do not, myself, have any hope for reform from the OTW, and I have no further interest in subjecting myself to its endless racism. But I want to validate the labour of the volunteers of colour who are carrying on working under hostile conditions, for the sake of providing a safe and welcoming haven of transformative works to their fellow international and marginalised communities. Their ability to survive and organise in itself is an act of commendable resistance.

dhobikikutti goes on to clarify that Emyn's claim of her "refer[ring] to actions she disagreed with with provocative descriptors such as 'disgusting'" was specifically about the treatment of azarias: (link)

"And @ board? On a personal level - finding out what you took the responsibility to ask [personal profile] azarias to do, that the board and the Legal advisors of the board told her it was her job to not delete the content that a CSEM distributing user had created, but that she was supposed to comb through it all to only remove the bits that were illegal - that disgusts me. The fact that you all think this is an acceptable thing to ask of anyone disgusts me.
What is it going to take to shake you out of your inaction here?"

ETA 30/07/2023: dhobikikutti has additionally clarified: (link)

For the record, I have never spoken about Audrey even once, internally or externally, and I don't know any other name or handle of theirs than the one they have been using publicly.

Emyn has not made any followup comments at this time.