PLEASE SHARE WIDELY–Circulate this so others can know and protect
themselves and their communities, before she tries to get this taken
down as well
I recently found the courage within myself to speak
publicly about my emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with
Trans Student Educational Resources co-founder and Executive Director
Eli Erlick. Since then, Eli has responded primarily with silence and
secondarily by spreading lies claiming my account is false and somehow
transmisogynistic, hiding behind theory to justify her abuse and doing
injustice to actual violent transmisogyny. I am publicly publishing this
album for all to behold. This album will contain mostly screenshots of
Eli’s admissions of guilt to the abusive behaviors I accuse her of, as
well as documented attempts she has made to bury and discredit my
testimony. She has reported my original post to facebook so I am
compiling any of my text commentary here so I can paste it into a medium
that Eli cannot control and report. I want my voice to be heard and I
want others to be protected.
Here is my original post I made:
Content: Abuse, rape, experiences with mental illness and suicide
***Folks
who want to know how they can support me: If you feel comfortable, I’d
love if you could share the post by copy-pasting because I’m finally in a
place where I feel ready for my voice to be heard to protect others
from having similar experiences with Eli***
With Gender Odyssey
approaching (and I am too disabled to attend) and the release of the new
Tegan and Sara video and the first Trans Youth Leadership Summit, I
want to talk publicly about something for the first time. I want to talk
about queer relationships, abuse, rape, polyamory, exploitation, and
specifically, Eli Erlick. I was in an emotionally, financially, and
sexually abusive relationship with Eli Erlick for over a year and a
half. And it pains me to see her get so much applause when I still
suffer every day from the trauma she has caused me and I struggle to
pull my life together alongside someone else who has suffered from her
abuse.
At the beginning of the 2013 school year, I was a baby
trans person taking Rachel Levin’s Biology, Gender, and Society class to
try to understand more about myself. Eli Erlick, an experienced trans
person with tons of social capital and authority, used this class to
prey on me, a vulnerable new member of the trans community, relentlessly
sexually harassing me for weeks, causing daily panic attacks, until
finally i felt like the only way to make it stop was to give in.
Coercing someone to have sex with you and making them feel like they
cannot safely say no is RAPE. Eli Erlick raped me and continued to
emotionally manipulate me into an abusive polyamorous relationship in
which she exploited my emotional labor and experiences as a trans person
of color to benefit her career and social life and gaslighting me to
believe that our relationship (which she refused to even acknowledge as
one until I tried to break up with her for her abuse) was some sort of
beacon of queer progressiveness.
Polyamorous relationships can
absolutely be abusive. And the kink community is not exempt from rape.
Tops, doms, and sadists ABSOLUTELY need to check themselves. Eli Erlick
is NOT an accountable top, dom, or sadist, but rather is someone who
literally keeps a scorebook of her conquests, originally titled the 100
list, with the intention of expanding her conquest goals each time she
met them. Eli views the bodies she is intimate with as tallies in her
book of conquests to do whatever she wants to their bodies. Keep in mind
that Eli primarily conquests QTPOC and trans people in general. You do
NOT GET TO SEEK OUT A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE SO MUCH TRAUMA WRITTEN
INTO THEIR BODIES WITHOUT APPROACHING SEX WITH THEM IN AN ACCOUNTABLE
WAY. YOU DO NOT GET TO FORCE YOURSELF INTO SOMEONES BODY AND MAKE THEM
FEEL LIKE THEY CANNOT SAY NO TO THE NEXT KINKY OR SADISTIC THING ON YOUR
AGENDA TO DO WITH THEM. Check-ins are not a formality you toss out to
your sexual partner after you have already aggressively started forcing
what you want onto their body. Our bodies are inseparable from the
traumas written into them and if you are going to be in a position of
sexual power you need to account for the traumas of the person who is
entrusting their body to you.
I do not trust Eli Erlick with
vulnerable young trans people, especially trans people of color, looking
for a hero when they never see their experiences represented. I know
that when Eli has an ounce of power over someone, she WILL abuse that
power and exploit their body, mind, and experiences for her own gain and
sense of accomplishment. It is not even a conscious thing she does, but
it is a thing she could consciously watch herself on to prevent herself
from abusing others but she does not care to. The most Eli will ever do
is make superficial changes to cover her tracks and keep people’s
perceptions of her up, not actually change her abusive behaviors to
prevent herself from causing harm to others. I do not trust Eli with
trans people, I do not trust Eli with non-binary people, I do not trust
Eli with people of color, I do not trust Eli with low income people, I
do not trust Eli with disabled and mentally ill people, because I and
others have been on the receiving end of cissexist, binarist, racist,
classist, and ableist abuse from her.
Since day 1 of knowing Eli I
have tried to help her become more accountable as a leader and person. I
have confronted her time and time again, even since I ended our abusive
relationship and we stopped being friends. When I confronted her about
the countless ways she abused and raped me she has acknowledged that she
had done these things and even agreed with me that she was a danger to
our communities. I told her that the accountable thing to do upon
recognizing that she is a compulsive abuser would be to transition TSER
leadership to a QTPOC, especially someone like a trans woman of color,
because of the distinct void in representation and programming for this
community that really could use the funding and resources, and fade
herself out of organizing so she won’t be tempted to abuse her power and
authority in activist/organizing spaces.
She AGREED to these
things and said she would try to transition to just the academia side,
which I told her that I did not think she could do accountably either.
Eli could excel and thrive in any liberal capitalist workplace who would
be thrilled to have such a cis passing, white, conventionally
attractive, high functioning neurotypical token of diversity, and in a
workspace like this, she has no power to abuse vulnerable people. As she
has failed her promise over and over again she has blocked me out from
what she does hoping that I won’t see her continuing to expand her
empire and her presence and social capital in organizing spaces to cover
up her continued conquesting and exploitation of my communities. But
I’m not the only one who sees you and your abusive behavior, Eli.
Since
I began voicing my experiences with Eli’s abuse in online QTPOC spaces,
countless people have come forward and told me they have had similar
experiences in even transient interactions with Eli–fetishization,
violent elitism, exploitation of their labor and experiences, predation,
as well as rape. Eli is a serial abuser and conquester of our
community.
Eli Erlick literally iced me out of her organization
because she wanted to silence and contain me and protect her reputation
and her freedom to continue expanding her trans empire (and I use empire
in the most colonialist violent way) to rape and abuse and exploit
without being challenged. Over the summer, while still living in the
same apartment, we grew more distant as it grew more and more apparent
to me that Eli was incapable of and unwilling to change her abusive
ways. Eli took this time to not only take out her feelings about the
breakup and losing control of me on our entire household of 4 that
summer, she also took this time to stop keeping me in the loop about
TSER, even intentionally neglecting to inform me about meetings that
were happening in the very livingroom of the apartment we were sharing
and ensuring that I would feel so alienated and out of place that at my
low capacity I would not have the energy to even assert that I belonged.
When
I sent her a 17 page letter detailing every horrifying act of abuse and
rape she had committed against me, her immediate response was to remove
me from the admin role on TSER’s facebook page and group so that I
would not have a chance to expose her and speak the truth to her
supporters and those she works with. And without even informing me or
giving me a chance to fight it, Eli personally removed me from TSER’s
board of directors page on her website and buried my involvement and
contributions to the organization.
Eli would not have the radical
social capital or academic capital she has today without me. During the
year and a half+ that we were together, I painstakingly read, edited,
advised, brainstormed, and even sometimes outright wrote every single
publication of Eli Erlick’s, from papers to grants to even her social
media posts. Every. Single. Day. I performed endless emotional labor to
educate Eli on intersectional issues that my and other communities
besides her own insular white trans community faces. Every day I faced
violence from Eli in the form of negating the insight of me and my
community members that I was generous enough to share with her. Being
with Eli was 24/7 emotional and also physical labor that I was expected
to perform with no acknowledgement of how my disabilities make me
incapable of performing to her high expectations.
I have struggled
with feelings of suicide for years from the trauma of occupying a body
that society wants to violently stamp out of existence because I’m
mentally ill and disabled, because I’m a person of color, because I’m
queer, because I’m trans, because I’m non-binary, because of years of
abuse. And Eli was a huge contributor of what nearly drove me to suicide
my last official year of college. As my mental health declined, every
day Eli would make me feel ashamed for what I couldn’t do, verbally
attacking me and making me feel like I was never enough or that I was a
waste or that I was crazy for feeling like she was even treating me
unfairly. Eli normalized her abuse and her expectations of my body to
the point of making me feel so ashamed on a daily basis that it grew
more and more tempting to just end it.
Eli was by no means the
only factor in how I was feeling but she certainly sent me spiralling to
a dark place that I luckily have been in the process of pulling myself
out of and healing with my amazing partner Knight. My will to survive
and make a livable life for me and my little family is stronger than
ever before, but I’m still haunted by my trauma from Eli, who every
other day I see pop up in my newsfeed being showered with praise,
attention, and social capital for something she takes credit for that
should be credited to so many communities and individuals she has
leeched herself off of.
This same person who has gained so much
activist and capitalist credit for working with The Trevor Project, a
queer suicide prevention organization, was the person who when I was in
the car with my abusive parent at the peak of a fight about me being
trans with my hand on the car door on a speeding highway chose to
respond to me reaching out for help with the words “I’m on the verge of
committing suicide” by policing my language telling me it was inaccurate
to say that and that it bothered her that I was using incorrect
language to be dramatic.
This same person gaslit me into thinking
my brain was falsifying memories of sexual abuse to deny me the right to
claim survivorship so that I could not identify what she had been doing
to me as rape and sexual abuse.
This same person victim blamed me
and gaslit me for “stereotyping flirtatious people” to deny the way she
sexually harassed me and coerced me into a sexually and emotionally
abusive relationship.
This same person wouldn’t let me transition
the way I needed to because she was more interested in controlling my
body’s attractiveness to her liking. The other trans masculine people
she conquested were allowed to be on testosterone, to have body hair, to
have facial hair, to have deeper voices, to have acne, to have their
pronouns be respected, to be gendered affirmingly with her in public,
but not me, because my willingness to mold myself to her liking was the
thing that made me special to her compared to them. I was stockholmed to
feel like our relationship was some sort of radical queer polyamory
rather than it being abuse and control. I felt like I had to let her
mold me into exactly the type of non-binary trans person she deemed to
her liking, I consistently reassured her I wasn’t being gendered
affirmingly in public so she could keep her queer social capital, I let
her call me she, I let her call my parts whatever she decided they had
to be, I let her relate to my body in ways that made me dysphoric and
triggered me and hurt me and scared me and that I did not actually
consent to. All because she made me feel like I never had the chance to
say no and made me feel like I would be nothing without her because I
was struggling to survive.
Like any other abuser, Eli controlled
my body and what I could do with it in ways that were violent and
traumatizing to me as a non-binary trans person. Any time I would
excitedly wonder what my body hair would look like or what my voice
would sound like on testosterone, Eli would cut me off saying, “Don’t do
T. It’ll make you hairy/gross/unattractive” or “I wouldn’t be as
attracted to you” knowing well that the abusive dynamic of our polyamory
made me really insecure about my attractiveness to her because of how
she would compare me to everyone else and go out of her way to make me
feel less desirable and secure to control me.
This same person
steals the spotlight and the mic away from vulnerable struggling (but
also POWERFUL) communities like trans women of color, disabled trans
people, and so many others who NEED their voices and experiences
represented and their issues addressed EVERY TIME she takes a press
opportunity for her own personal gain.
This same person forced me
to advance her resume by writing almost her ENTIRE PeaceFirst Grant and
helping her appear in a capitalist video segment exploiting queer people
at the expense of my sleep, mental health, and a midterm.
This
same person uses her social capital to intimidate and impress vulnerable
young trans people to gain access to their bodies and a voyeuristic,
exploitative look into the lives of people who are marginalized in ways
she is not.
This same person fetishizes and preys upon queer and
trans people of color, ESPECIALLY Asian Pacific Islander people, who
make up the last 4 serious relationships she’s had and an unbelievable
number of the people in her conquest list. Conquest culture IS rape
culture.
This same person has STOLEN so much of my ideas without
giving me any credit and continues to build and build and capitalize off
of her own reputation while I struggle to survive.
I could go on
and on but it drains me to write even as much as I have and the 17 pages
I sent Eli last year don’t even begin to cover it.
I have spent
today bawling my eyes out about the recent Trans Youth Leadership Summit
that Eli put on with TSER. Because this was MY IDEA. MY IDEA that I was
so passionate about that she SHOT DOWN. MY IDEA that was inspired by
the life changing experiences I had leading trainings with the Asian
American Sponsor Program at Scripps with friends who I love and respect
and grew with. When I was at my lowest in my last formal semester at
Scripps, I was enrolled in a class called Grant Writing for Non-Profits
that I took as a desperate attempt to find something that would give my
life meaning when I was struggling to survive. I desperately needed to
feel like the academics that were sapping so much of my energy and life
force could give back to my survival and the survival of my communities
and because i was the Program Director and Grant Writer for TSER, I came
up with one idea that finally got me excited and hopeful about the
future and my potential as an organizer: a TRANS YOUTH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
for SUMMER 2016 with horizontal leadership structure featuring
collaboration focused around LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES with a
dedicated track for trans people of color. Compare this with Eli’s
description of her TYLS (http://www.transstudent.org/tyls)
I put
every ounce of energy I had toward brainstorming and beginning to write
this grant, even using the last of my ADHD medication to keep my focus
while I did not have health insurance or psychiatrist to prescribe my
meds, to crank out an amazing beginning for a leadership initiative
program that I was so proud and excited about, that gave me hope for my
future. Only to have it be immediately shot down by Eli because she
would rather use my writing abilities to write a grant to open her up a
physical office in LA so that she would have more capitalist credit and
acclaim as a Non-Profit executive. When she shot down my idea I was
devastated, my mental health and any momentum I had the potential to
build crumpled and spiralled. I soon after dropped the class and began a
downward academic and health spiral that had me struggling for my life
against suicide.
To see her now, in summer 2016, STEAL my idea and
remove from it the HISTORY of where my motivation came from with my
communities, the LOVE and CARE I put into my work with my communities,
and the accountability I hoped to give it, as an opportunity to instead
boost her own cred and CONQUEST the attendees. I fear for the number of
trans youth, especially trans youth of color that Eli might have
conquested or raped at her leadership summit. I genuinely am scared and
hurting for the people I never even got a chance to connect with because
not only was I not informed, credited, or invited, but I was driven out
of organizing into burn-out by its corrupt leader. My heart broke today
in ways I didn’t think Eli had the power to do anymore, despite how
many days in a month I wake up in cold sweats and panic from nightmares
of rape trauma from Eli. I know that I probably won’t ever have the
capacity to go back to organizing, vastly because of how tied up in my
trauma it is due to Eli. Its a slap in the face to me as the disabled
QTPOC she abused the most to see all my hard work and care just go
toward Eli’s conquest and empire.
Eli Erlick is an abuser and
rapist. Not someone who has ANY business being a leader for such a
vulnerable community. I urge you all who read this and find it in
yourself to believe what I say and recognize how serious my testimony is
to pressure Eli to step down from organizing in a community she refuses
to learn how to be accountable to.
—————————————————————————————-
Screenshot taken by Alex
Sennello, rightful co-founder of Trans Student Educational Resources, of
the private TSER leadership group. I was a Board Member, Program
Director, and Grant Writer for TSER during my year and a half+ long
emotionally, sexually, and financially abusive relationship with its
executive director Eli Erlick. On November 2nd I sent her a 17 page
long, 12 pt Times New Roman, 1x1x1 inch margin letter detailing all the
horrible acts of abuse and rape that I had the capacity to recount to
Eli. Her response was to begin removing me from TSER’s facebook page
admins, the private leadership group, and the leadership page on TSER’s
official website, cutting me out of the group and burying my involvement
and contributions. I was unaware until this point that Eli had actually
BLOCKED me from the leadership group, in an OBVIOUS attempt to silence
me and prevent me from sharing my testimony of her abusive behavior with
those she works with.
Eli has responded with cowardice, silence,
and lies since I made my post about her abuse a few days ago. She is
hiding behind theory, wielding very REAL concepts like transmisogyny as
buzzwords to silence me. Eli is the perfect example of how social
justice spaces often replicate violence and abuse by using theory as a
weapon. Throughout our whole relationship, Eli would use theory to “put
me in my place” whenever I would try to address her abusive behavior,
gaslighting me to think that because I was a trans masculine person and
she was a trans woman that her abuse was justified, systemically
impossible, or otherwise me just being overdramatic and crazy. This is
ESPECIALLY VIOLENT to me as a mentally ill non-binary trans person of
color to use a THEORETICAL power dynamic to deny very REAL power
dynamics of abuse that put her in the ACTUAL position of power over me,
to the point of threatening my mental health and safety. Eli is trying
to claim that my testimony of how she raped and abused me is fake,
exaggerated, and transmisogynist.
I urge you all to look at the evidence.
The
interactions at the beginning of November are her response to my 17
page letter detailing to her all the horrifying acts of rape and abuse
she had committed against me. I thought it was genuine remorse and I was
genuinely removed but her attempts to silence and discredit me have
made it clear that this was nothing but a manipulative farce to gain
favor with me. I am disgusted.
Eli sent me a brief and seemingly
heartfelt response expressing remorse for her abusive behavior,
admitting guilt to what I had accused her of in my letter. Her signs of
remorse were clearly nothing more than emotional manipulation given how
she has chosen to respond to my recent testimony.
CW: Rape Just a couple examples of the acts of rape and abuse committed by Eli that I detail in my graphic 17 page letter to her A therapist Eli pays to exonerate her from guilt and accountability clearly is no accountability at all.
As
my anxiety and trauma was deepened by her clear lack of action and
accountability since I confronted her, I tried multiple times to reach
out to Eli in as professional and civilized a manner as possible (which
is more than what anyone is ever obligated to do with an abuser and
rapist)
Jan 24th Eli does not respond to my very serious message.
Her only response is to remove me from the admins of TSER and presumably
this is when she blocked me from the leadership page.
My friend
sent Eli an article on how to be accountable when you realize you are an
abuser. Eli thanked her for sending her the article and proceeded to do
nothing discussed in it.
I expected early on that Eli would do
her typical gaslighting and emotional manipulation to make me out to be
the aggressor in this situation. I was very careful in my messages,
despite my pain and rage, not to say anything that Eli could twist into
me being a crazy vindictive ex looking to tarnish her reputation.
Reading my private messages to her it is exceedingly clear my motivation
lies only with protecting my community from an abuser.
Multiple
people had at this point reached out to me saying that they had had
similar experiences with Eli. This number has increased significantly as
time has passed.
CW: rape These are only some of the things
Eli has done to me. I still wake up from traumatic nightmares. I still
have flashbacks even when I am having loving consensual sex with my
partner. Eli has caused me real PTSD and I know I am not the only one.
Eli
admits she is guilty of what I accuse her of. She denies none of it.
She even claims she wants to move toward accountability. All of this is
clearly lies given her current response.
I was more than
reasonable with Eli in any of our communications, still trying to see
the best in her and making the mistake of trusting her lies, which she
only said to appease me so that I would not be a threat to her
reputation, which she further ensured by taking away my avenues of
sharing my experiences by blocking me out of TSER
Eli acknowledges
how well and intimately I knew and understood her and claims to be
moved by my accounts and wants to change her abusive behaviors.
I
try so hard to give Eli undue credit for how she has handled me because I
want to believe that there is good in her and that she might actually
want to be a better person
Eli admits that distancing herself from organizing would be a good thing given her tendency to abuse others with her power
This is what Alex Sennello posted in the TSER Facebook group
Including my original post that I made exposing Eli with the goal of protecting others from having similar experiences with her
PLEASE SHARE WIDELY–Circulate this so others can know and protect
themselves and their communities, before she tries to get this taken
down as well
I recently found the courage within myself to speak
publicly about my emotionally and sexually abusive relationship with
Trans Student Educational Resources co-founder and Executive Director
Eli Erlick. Since then, Eli has responded primarily with silence and
secondarily by spreading lies claiming my account is false and somehow
transmisogynistic, hiding behind theory to justify her abuse and doing
injustice to actual violent transmisogyny. I am publicly publishing this
album for all to behold. This album will contain mostly screenshots of
Eli’s admissions of guilt to the abusive behaviors I accuse her of, as
well as documented attempts she has made to bury and discredit my
testimony. She has reported my original post to facebook so I am
compiling any of my text commentary here so I can paste it into a medium
that Eli cannot control and report. I want my voice to be heard and I
want others to be protected.
Here is my original post I made:
Content: Abuse, rape, experiences with mental illness and suicide
***Folks
who want to know how they can support me: If you feel comfortable, I’d
love if you could share the post by copy-pasting because I’m finally in a
place where I feel ready for my voice to be heard to protect others
from having similar experiences with Eli***
With Gender Odyssey
approaching (and I am too disabled to attend) and the release of the new
Tegan and Sara video and the first Trans Youth Leadership Summit, I
want to talk publicly about something for the first time. I want to talk
about queer relationships, abuse, rape, polyamory, exploitation, and
specifically, Eli Erlick. I was in an emotionally, financially, and
sexually abusive relationship with Eli Erlick for over a year and a
half. And it pains me to see her get so much applause when I still
suffer every day from the trauma she has caused me and I struggle to
pull my life together alongside someone else who has suffered from her
abuse.
At the beginning of the 2013 school year, I was a baby
trans person taking Rachel Levin’s Biology, Gender, and Society class to
try to understand more about myself. Eli Erlick, an experienced trans
person with tons of social capital and authority, used this class to
prey on me, a vulnerable new member of the trans community, relentlessly
sexually harassing me for weeks, causing daily panic attacks, until
finally i felt like the only way to make it stop was to give in.
Coercing someone to have sex with you and making them feel like they
cannot safely say no is RAPE. Eli Erlick raped me and continued to
emotionally manipulate me into an abusive polyamorous relationship in
which she exploited my emotional labor and experiences as a trans person
of color to benefit her career and social life and gaslighting me to
believe that our relationship (which she refused to even acknowledge as
one until I tried to break up with her for her abuse) was some sort of
beacon of queer progressiveness.
Polyamorous relationships can
absolutely be abusive. And the kink community is not exempt from rape.
Tops, doms, and sadists ABSOLUTELY need to check themselves. Eli Erlick
is NOT an accountable top, dom, or sadist, but rather is someone who
literally keeps a scorebook of her conquests, originally titled the 100
list, with the intention of expanding her conquest goals each time she
met them. Eli views the bodies she is intimate with as tallies in her
book of conquests to do whatever she wants to their bodies. Keep in mind
that Eli primarily conquests QTPOC and trans people in general. You do
NOT GET TO SEEK OUT A GROUP OF PEOPLE WHO HAVE SO MUCH TRAUMA WRITTEN
INTO THEIR BODIES WITHOUT APPROACHING SEX WITH THEM IN AN ACCOUNTABLE
WAY. YOU DO NOT GET TO FORCE YOURSELF INTO SOMEONES BODY AND MAKE THEM
FEEL LIKE THEY CANNOT SAY NO TO THE NEXT KINKY OR SADISTIC THING ON YOUR
AGENDA TO DO WITH THEM. Check-ins are not a formality you toss out to
your sexual partner after you have already aggressively started forcing
what you want onto their body. Our bodies are inseparable from the
traumas written into them and if you are going to be in a position of
sexual power you need to account for the traumas of the person who is
entrusting their body to you.
I do not trust Eli Erlick with
vulnerable young trans people, especially trans people of color, looking
for a hero when they never see their experiences represented. I know
that when Eli has an ounce of power over someone, she WILL abuse that
power and exploit their body, mind, and experiences for her own gain and
sense of accomplishment. It is not even a conscious thing she does, but
it is a thing she could consciously watch herself on to prevent herself
from abusing others but she does not care to. The most Eli will ever do
is make superficial changes to cover her tracks and keep people’s
perceptions of her up, not actually change her abusive behaviors to
prevent herself from causing harm to others. I do not trust Eli with
trans people, I do not trust Eli with non-binary people, I do not trust
Eli with people of color, I do not trust Eli with low income people, I
do not trust Eli with disabled and mentally ill people, because I and
others have been on the receiving end of cissexist, binarist, racist,
classist, and ableist abuse from her.
Since day 1 of knowing Eli I
have tried to help her become more accountable as a leader and person. I
have confronted her time and time again, even since I ended our abusive
relationship and we stopped being friends. When I confronted her about
the countless ways she abused and raped me she has acknowledged that she
had done these things and even agreed with me that she was a danger to
our communities. I told her that the accountable thing to do upon
recognizing that she is a compulsive abuser would be to transition TSER
leadership to a QTPOC, especially someone like a trans woman of color,
because of the distinct void in representation and programming for this
community that really could use the funding and resources, and fade
herself out of organizing so she won’t be tempted to abuse her power and
authority in activist/organizing spaces.
She AGREED to these
things and said she would try to transition to just the academia side,
which I told her that I did not think she could do accountably either.
Eli could excel and thrive in any liberal capitalist workplace who would
be thrilled to have such a cis passing, white, conventionally
attractive, high functioning neurotypical token of diversity, and in a
workspace like this, she has no power to abuse vulnerable people. As she
has failed her promise over and over again she has blocked me out from
what she does hoping that I won’t see her continuing to expand her
empire and her presence and social capital in organizing spaces to cover
up her continued conquesting and exploitation of my communities. But
I’m not the only one who sees you and your abusive behavior, Eli.
Since
I began voicing my experiences with Eli’s abuse in online QTPOC spaces,
countless people have come forward and told me they have had similar
experiences in even transient interactions with Eli–fetishization,
violent elitism, exploitation of their labor and experiences, predation,
as well as rape. Eli is a serial abuser and conquester of our
community.
Eli Erlick literally iced me out of her organization
because she wanted to silence and contain me and protect her reputation
and her freedom to continue expanding her trans empire (and I use empire
in the most colonialist violent way) to rape and abuse and exploit
without being challenged. Over the summer, while still living in the
same apartment, we grew more distant as it grew more and more apparent
to me that Eli was incapable of and unwilling to change her abusive
ways. Eli took this time to not only take out her feelings about the
breakup and losing control of me on our entire household of 4 that
summer, she also took this time to stop keeping me in the loop about
TSER, even intentionally neglecting to inform me about meetings that
were happening in the very livingroom of the apartment we were sharing
and ensuring that I would feel so alienated and out of place that at my
low capacity I would not have the energy to even assert that I belonged.
When
I sent her a 17 page letter detailing every horrifying act of abuse and
rape she had committed against me, her immediate response was to remove
me from the admin role on TSER’s facebook page and group so that I
would not have a chance to expose her and speak the truth to her
supporters and those she works with. And without even informing me or
giving me a chance to fight it, Eli personally removed me from TSER’s
board of directors page on her website and buried my involvement and
contributions to the organization.
Eli would not have the radical
social capital or academic capital she has today without me. During the
year and a half+ that we were together, I painstakingly read, edited,
advised, brainstormed, and even sometimes outright wrote every single
publication of Eli Erlick’s, from papers to grants to even her social
media posts. Every. Single. Day. I performed endless emotional labor to
educate Eli on intersectional issues that my and other communities
besides her own insular white trans community faces. Every day I faced
violence from Eli in the form of negating the insight of me and my
community members that I was generous enough to share with her. Being
with Eli was 24/7 emotional and also physical labor that I was expected
to perform with no acknowledgement of how my disabilities make me
incapable of performing to her high expectations.
I have struggled
with feelings of suicide for years from the trauma of occupying a body
that society wants to violently stamp out of existence because I’m
mentally ill and disabled, because I’m a person of color, because I’m
queer, because I’m trans, because I’m non-binary, because of years of
abuse. And Eli was a huge contributor of what nearly drove me to suicide
my last official year of college. As my mental health declined, every
day Eli would make me feel ashamed for what I couldn’t do, verbally
attacking me and making me feel like I was never enough or that I was a
waste or that I was crazy for feeling like she was even treating me
unfairly. Eli normalized her abuse and her expectations of my body to
the point of making me feel so ashamed on a daily basis that it grew
more and more tempting to just end it.
Eli was by no means the
only factor in how I was feeling but she certainly sent me spiralling to
a dark place that I luckily have been in the process of pulling myself
out of and healing with my amazing partner Knight. My will to survive
and make a livable life for me and my little family is stronger than
ever before, but I’m still haunted by my trauma from Eli, who every
other day I see pop up in my newsfeed being showered with praise,
attention, and social capital for something she takes credit for that
should be credited to so many communities and individuals she has
leeched herself off of.
This same person who has gained so much
activist and capitalist credit for working with The Trevor Project, a
queer suicide prevention organization, was the person who when I was in
the car with my abusive parent at the peak of a fight about me being
trans with my hand on the car door on a speeding highway chose to
respond to me reaching out for help with the words “I’m on the verge of
committing suicide” by policing my language telling me it was inaccurate
to say that and that it bothered her that I was using incorrect
language to be dramatic.
This same person gaslit me into thinking
my brain was falsifying memories of sexual abuse to deny me the right to
claim survivorship so that I could not identify what she had been doing
to me as rape and sexual abuse.
This same person victim blamed me
and gaslit me for “stereotyping flirtatious people” to deny the way she
sexually harassed me and coerced me into a sexually and emotionally
abusive relationship.
This same person wouldn’t let me transition
the way I needed to because she was more interested in controlling my
body’s attractiveness to her liking. The other trans masculine people
she conquested were allowed to be on testosterone, to have body hair, to
have facial hair, to have deeper voices, to have acne, to have their
pronouns be respected, to be gendered affirmingly with her in public,
but not me, because my willingness to mold myself to her liking was the
thing that made me special to her compared to them. I was stockholmed to
feel like our relationship was some sort of radical queer polyamory
rather than it being abuse and control. I felt like I had to let her
mold me into exactly the type of non-binary trans person she deemed to
her liking, I consistently reassured her I wasn’t being gendered
affirmingly in public so she could keep her queer social capital, I let
her call me she, I let her call my parts whatever she decided they had
to be, I let her relate to my body in ways that made me dysphoric and
triggered me and hurt me and scared me and that I did not actually
consent to. All because she made me feel like I never had the chance to
say no and made me feel like I would be nothing without her because I
was struggling to survive.
Like any other abuser, Eli controlled
my body and what I could do with it in ways that were violent and
traumatizing to me as a non-binary trans person. Any time I would
excitedly wonder what my body hair would look like or what my voice
would sound like on testosterone, Eli would cut me off saying, “Don’t do
T. It’ll make you hairy/gross/unattractive” or “I wouldn’t be as
attracted to you” knowing well that the abusive dynamic of our polyamory
made me really insecure about my attractiveness to her because of how
she would compare me to everyone else and go out of her way to make me
feel less desirable and secure to control me.
This same person
steals the spotlight and the mic away from vulnerable struggling (but
also POWERFUL) communities like trans women of color, disabled trans
people, and so many others who NEED their voices and experiences
represented and their issues addressed EVERY TIME she takes a press
opportunity for her own personal gain.
This same person forced me
to advance her resume by writing almost her ENTIRE PeaceFirst Grant and
helping her appear in a capitalist video segment exploiting queer people
at the expense of my sleep, mental health, and a midterm.
This
same person uses her social capital to intimidate and impress vulnerable
young trans people to gain access to their bodies and a voyeuristic,
exploitative look into the lives of people who are marginalized in ways
she is not.
This same person fetishizes and preys upon queer and
trans people of color, ESPECIALLY Asian Pacific Islander people, who
make up the last 4 serious relationships she’s had and an unbelievable
number of the people in her conquest list. Conquest culture IS rape
culture.
This same person has STOLEN so much of my ideas without
giving me any credit and continues to build and build and capitalize off
of her own reputation while I struggle to survive.
I could go on
and on but it drains me to write even as much as I have and the 17 pages
I sent Eli last year don’t even begin to cover it.
I have spent
today bawling my eyes out about the recent Trans Youth Leadership Summit
that Eli put on with TSER. Because this was MY IDEA. MY IDEA that I was
so passionate about that she SHOT DOWN. MY IDEA that was inspired by
the life changing experiences I had leading trainings with the Asian
American Sponsor Program at Scripps with friends who I love and respect
and grew with. When I was at my lowest in my last formal semester at
Scripps, I was enrolled in a class called Grant Writing for Non-Profits
that I took as a desperate attempt to find something that would give my
life meaning when I was struggling to survive. I desperately needed to
feel like the academics that were sapping so much of my energy and life
force could give back to my survival and the survival of my communities
and because i was the Program Director and Grant Writer for TSER, I came
up with one idea that finally got me excited and hopeful about the
future and my potential as an organizer: a TRANS YOUTH LEADERSHIP SUMMIT
for SUMMER 2016 with horizontal leadership structure featuring
collaboration focused around LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT INITIATIVES with a
dedicated track for trans people of color. Compare this with Eli’s
description of her TYLS (http://www.transstudent.org/tyls)
I put
every ounce of energy I had toward brainstorming and beginning to write
this grant, even using the last of my ADHD medication to keep my focus
while I did not have health insurance or psychiatrist to prescribe my
meds, to crank out an amazing beginning for a leadership initiative
program that I was so proud and excited about, that gave me hope for my
future. Only to have it be immediately shot down by Eli because she
would rather use my writing abilities to write a grant to open her up a
physical office in LA so that she would have more capitalist credit and
acclaim as a Non-Profit executive. When she shot down my idea I was
devastated, my mental health and any momentum I had the potential to
build crumpled and spiralled. I soon after dropped the class and began a
downward academic and health spiral that had me struggling for my life
against suicide.
To see her now, in summer 2016, STEAL my idea and
remove from it the HISTORY of where my motivation came from with my
communities, the LOVE and CARE I put into my work with my communities,
and the accountability I hoped to give it, as an opportunity to instead
boost her own cred and CONQUEST the attendees. I fear for the number of
trans youth, especially trans youth of color that Eli might have
conquested or raped at her leadership summit. I genuinely am scared and
hurting for the people I never even got a chance to connect with because
not only was I not informed, credited, or invited, but I was driven out
of organizing into burn-out by its corrupt leader. My heart broke today
in ways I didn’t think Eli had the power to do anymore, despite how
many days in a month I wake up in cold sweats and panic from nightmares
of rape trauma from Eli. I know that I probably won’t ever have the
capacity to go back to organizing, vastly because of how tied up in my
trauma it is due to Eli. Its a slap in the face to me as the disabled
QTPOC she abused the most to see all my hard work and care just go
toward Eli’s conquest and empire.
Eli Erlick is an abuser and
rapist. Not someone who has ANY business being a leader for such a
vulnerable community. I urge you all who read this and find it in
yourself to believe what I say and recognize how serious my testimony is
to pressure Eli to step down from organizing in a community she refuses
to learn how to be accountable to.
—————————————————————————————-
Screenshot taken by Alex
Sennello, rightful co-founder of Trans Student Educational Resources, of
the private TSER leadership group. I was a Board Member, Program
Director, and Grant Writer for TSER during my year and a half+ long
emotionally, sexually, and financially abusive relationship with its
executive director Eli Erlick. On November 2nd I sent her a 17 page
long, 12 pt Times New Roman, 1x1x1 inch margin letter detailing all the
horrible acts of abuse and rape that I had the capacity to recount to
Eli. Her response was to begin removing me from TSER’s facebook page
admins, the private leadership group, and the leadership page on TSER’s
official website, cutting me out of the group and burying my involvement
and contributions. I was unaware until this point that Eli had actually
BLOCKED me from the leadership group, in an OBVIOUS attempt to silence
me and prevent me from sharing my testimony of her abusive behavior with
those she works with.
Eli has responded with cowardice, silence,
and lies since I made my post about her abuse a few days ago. She is
hiding behind theory, wielding very REAL concepts like transmisogyny as
buzzwords to silence me. Eli is the perfect example of how social
justice spaces often replicate violence and abuse by using theory as a
weapon. Throughout our whole relationship, Eli would use theory to “put
me in my place” whenever I would try to address her abusive behavior,
gaslighting me to think that because I was a trans masculine person and
she was a trans woman that her abuse was justified, systemically
impossible, or otherwise me just being overdramatic and crazy. This is
ESPECIALLY VIOLENT to me as a mentally ill non-binary trans person of
color to use a THEORETICAL power dynamic to deny very REAL power
dynamics of abuse that put her in the ACTUAL position of power over me,
to the point of threatening my mental health and safety. Eli is trying
to claim that my testimony of how she raped and abused me is fake,
exaggerated, and transmisogynist.
I urge you all to look at the evidence.
The
interactions at the beginning of November are her response to my 17
page letter detailing to her all the horrifying acts of rape and abuse
she had committed against me. I thought it was genuine remorse and I was
genuinely removed but her attempts to silence and discredit me have
made it clear that this was nothing but a manipulative farce to gain
favor with me. I am disgusted.
Eli sent me a brief and seemingly
heartfelt response expressing remorse for her abusive behavior,
admitting guilt to what I had accused her of in my letter. Her signs of
remorse were clearly nothing more than emotional manipulation given how
she has chosen to respond to my recent testimony.
CW: Rape Just a couple examples of the acts of rape and abuse committed by Eli that I detail in my graphic 17 page letter to her A therapist Eli pays to exonerate her from guilt and accountability clearly is no accountability at all.
As
my anxiety and trauma was deepened by her clear lack of action and
accountability since I confronted her, I tried multiple times to reach
out to Eli in as professional and civilized a manner as possible (which
is more than what anyone is ever obligated to do with an abuser and
rapist)
Jan 24th Eli does not respond to my very serious message.
Her only response is to remove me from the admins of TSER and presumably
this is when she blocked me from the leadership page.
My friend
sent Eli an article on how to be accountable when you realize you are an
abuser. Eli thanked her for sending her the article and proceeded to do
nothing discussed in it.
I expected early on that Eli would do
her typical gaslighting and emotional manipulation to make me out to be
the aggressor in this situation. I was very careful in my messages,
despite my pain and rage, not to say anything that Eli could twist into
me being a crazy vindictive ex looking to tarnish her reputation.
Reading my private messages to her it is exceedingly clear my motivation
lies only with protecting my community from an abuser.
Multiple
people had at this point reached out to me saying that they had had
similar experiences with Eli. This number has increased significantly as
time has passed.
CW: rape These are only some of the things
Eli has done to me. I still wake up from traumatic nightmares. I still
have flashbacks even when I am having loving consensual sex with my
partner. Eli has caused me real PTSD and I know I am not the only one.
Eli
admits she is guilty of what I accuse her of. She denies none of it.
She even claims she wants to move toward accountability. All of this is
clearly lies given her current response.
I was more than
reasonable with Eli in any of our communications, still trying to see
the best in her and making the mistake of trusting her lies, which she
only said to appease me so that I would not be a threat to her
reputation, which she further ensured by taking away my avenues of
sharing my experiences by blocking me out of TSER
Eli acknowledges
how well and intimately I knew and understood her and claims to be
moved by my accounts and wants to change her abusive behaviors.
I
try so hard to give Eli undue credit for how she has handled me because I
want to believe that there is good in her and that she might actually
want to be a better person
Eli admits that distancing herself from organizing would be a good thing given her tendency to abuse others with her power
This is what Alex Sennello posted in the TSER Facebook group
Including my original post that I made exposing Eli with the goal of protecting others from having similar experiences with her
Celtyradfem 