meet the elders

What they talkin’ ‘bout?
They ain’t talkin’ ‘bout nothin’. – Kendrick Lamar

So, here I am at my mother-in-law’s house. It’s Christmas time, and my wife’s family is big on the holiday, so naturally, when Judy Collins is doing a Christmas show near her mom, we go. It was a lovely time; honestly, time spent with my mother-in-law usually is. It took me a while to really understand how that family works, but now that I do, it’s an extreme pleasure to get to watch my wife be loved. On our way out the door to go home, she and I stopped and talked about that for a moment—about the way that people constantly miss the things we both see so clearly about her. About the way she is assumed to be working in bad faith, or trying to be provocative before she’s even opened her mouth. But I’m ahead of myself, because it was that morning, after taking a shower, and getting a little early packing done that I walked out into the living room, when my wife handed me her phone.

“You’re not going to like this,” she told me. Reader, I didn’t.

El had gotten a letter from the Northeast Thing’s Special Investigation Committee informing her that she was banned from their event, citing a rule that had simply not been there when it might have been used to consider the targeted harassment levelled at my wife and my community by that event’s president, David Carron. I would love to say I was surprised by this, but I don’t think anyone who’s been paying attention possibly could be.

I have, to this point, kept my tongue. Not that this has stopped multiple people from silently unfriending or blocking me over El’s actions—which is wild for a group of people that spent years not raising an eyebrow at someone whose husband paraded around the event with a confederate flag mug. But I don’t want to flame out of the community, even though I feel its leadership is making cruel and frankly dangerous errors, because I love it, and I’ve loved this event. I have hinted at this in some places, and stated it in others, but my primary work right now—and if you know me, you will know how important my work is to me now that my health is in a place where I can finally do that work—is studying to become a priest of Sága, a goddess of language and divination for whom I keep a small vé at the event. Each year, I’ve run a ritual for her, and have a couple more years worth of ideas for how I’d change and grow that ritual now that I’ve had a couple runs to teach people what to expect from it. The space itself had gravity. We set it up as a social space; a goddess of language needs stories, and stories come from people, not just books. Unsurprisingly, this drew in a mostly young to middle aged queer crowd, several of whom I know have also had seismic spiritual experiences in that vé, in the space I set up and invited my goddess into. I would do and put up with a lot to protect that small haven. I already have.

My only statement on the matter was right after the event, when the only problem was the way my wife’s talk and audience had been treated. We felt good about the event, excited to return, and were bubbling with ideas about what we might like to do for the next one. Yeah, El’s talk had gone, to our minds, inexplicably poorly, but there was no reason to assume that would happen again, right? I’m a music critic, working on a daily review project at the moment, and had leafed a narrative about the event throughout the reviews, which were all cheekily Heathen themed. So, when I was working on my review for the day from my cabin that last morning, I was thinking about the evening before where, yes, this horrible breach of trust had happened, and yes, I was scared and hurt, and moments away from packing the vé up to go home on the spot, but then it seemed like the Spirit of the Community itself rallied to provide me the care I needed to feel safe and okay again.

 A Tyrsman I’d come to really like and trust, and who’d been in the room for the talk, and so had seen the way it had hurt me, came to join me out at the vé–because of course that’s where I escaped to when I felt unsafe; I ran straight to Sága. I think I have even told him as much, but he was absolutely the perfect person to come talk to me in that moment. I’m very uncomfortable with Tyr, and we’d talked about that the previous year at the ritual fire on the last night. He earned a lot of my respect in that conversation, and gave me a new way to consider Tyr. He was a friend, and the exact one I needed right then. Not one of the people who came with me, or one of the people I’d had hanging out at the vé already, but also still a friend. 

I think I might have snapped a little at him, when he walked up. He asked me if I minded him checking on me, and I shot back that sure, he was welcome, I actually liked him, making it a very perplexingly kind snapping at someone, and to his extreme credit, he chuckled at me for it. Thinking of the story now, I am reminded of the very real kinship between Tyr and Fenrir that precedes Tyr’s misjudged actions in binding the wolf, a part of that myth that has always haunted me with its painful poetry. I do not “work with” Fenrir, whatever that would mean, but I have a strong fondness for the figure, and an understanding of the pain of loving the person who is most poised to hurt you. Especially when he’s a cop. That’s what the fireside conversation with this Tyrsman helped me to consider: the way Fenrir loves his brother in Tyr, and the heartbreaking, and all too relatable implications of that love in both directions. So, of course I invited him to sit, and we talked at the vé for what felt like a long time. Not just about the talk—about our respective lives and work, our abusive fathers, and the ways we loved our partners and families. 

If I am spending a lot of words on this moment, it’s because it’s a deeply important one for me. I was not okay, and this Community that I loved, the very spirit of the event itself, had sent the person I needed to talk to me, and he stayed with me until I felt safe again. It did this over and over that evening; more and more people eventually joined us at the vé, offering their sympathies, comfort, and their extreme surprise at the way El’s talk had been treated. A pair of friends, both of whom are in event leadership, waved us down to just chat as we were on our way back to our cabin that evening. These two would, later in the story, silently block or unfriend me on Facebook. I still don’t actually know why. They didn’t talk to us about El’s talk, or if they did it was not much—the comfort they were offering was the casual reassurance of community and friendship. They even chased a bear away from us. Both of them were people who had made a lot of fuss about making sure the event was safe for us in the first place. Yes, this was why I loved this place, and these people, and everything was going to be okay.

I barely slept. Sure, I was going to be okay, but I’d just watched a pair of powerful men inexplicably come to a talk that El had actually gone way out of her way to make sure wasn’t incendiary with the clear intention of starting shit. I was not okay yet. But when I found myself writing about that last day, it wasn’t the attack that stood out; it was the Community. So that’s the part I wrote about that morning. How it held me when I needed to be held, because that’s what community is for and this one had decided I belonged to it. That, for someone who is used to being overlooked, is a profound experience, nearly as big as any of the directly spiritual ones I’d had there, and that’s saying something the year I decided to sit with my goddess and write one of my poems in that empty book I’d carried around for a couple decades–the year that, when I took that book to read my poem to Odin at his vé, a giant flock of black birds settled in to listen.

When I finished, I posted that week’s album reviews to Facebook, friends locked, where most of the heathens I know from that event would be able to see it. It was the only public statement from either of us about it, and it was well received, even among heathens, who saw it for the love letter to their community that it was, even if I’m sure the format was a bit perplexing. 

El had received requests that she post the text of the talk, which she did. David Carron, who will later loudly complain that El didn’t “come to the table,” in the context of a mediation attempt that she was, in fact, not allowed to even know about, and who backed out of his own suggested mediated talk the last day of the event when El tried to take him up on it (without so much as a “but let’s schedule it for a Zoom call in a few days”)—yeah, that David Carron—decides that is the appropriate place to come and try to start the same shit, just slightly warmed over this time. 

Literally, back up: Bro didn’t even have any business even walking into that talk in the first place. He hadn’t come to either of the similar talks that had been allowed to run as planned, and that (coincidentally, I am supposed to believe) were both run by people in event leadership. Bro knew going in that he was not able to emotionally regulate around the word “heresy,” a thing those who know him have happily confirmed is an absolute truth. (Quote basically everyone, “Oh, yeah, that sounds like Dave.”)  Bro’s yelling was not only disruptive, targeted, and insulting, it was nonsense. He was literally responding to the name of the talk and nothing else. He came in with his presumed “gotcha,” and didn’t bother listening to the talk well enough to notice it wasn’t what he thought it would be. It’s hard to change direction that fast, buddy? I might suggest reading the blurb AND the title next time. 

Anyway. David Carron entered that room with malicious intent. And after spitting all over the talk my professional writer wife took time out of her damn work to prepare for his joke of an event, he didn’t want to mediate peace, or talk about or understand what had gone wrong in that room. I honestly couldn’t begin to guess what he did want, but what he did was crash what had been an absolutely delightful comment section where people were finally being allowed to have that discussion that Carron had already crashed once before at NET. There, again, is your fucking malice. There’s your sustained disruption–he followed Elizabeth to a whole different platform to continue his now multi-day campaign of harassment, and threatened to close the whole thing down (again) if we’re not all nice to him right this second. 

That David Carron was being a bully is not, at any point, in dispute. Or if you’d quibble with bully, fine–more often it was worded as anecdotes about people telling Carron he needs to back the fuck off, or quiet support for the text of El’s talk, or shock and horror at the way she and her talk were being treated. No one seems to actually think Carron comes out of this looking like he was in the right. Regardless of how people feel about the way El responded to her treatment, that she was in fact mistreated has not ever actually been questioned.

Notice, I hope, how I have at no point claimed that David Carron is transphobic? It’s weird how every conversation about it devolved into fevered defenses that he’d not been actively transphobic in his harassment. Weird how his “weregild” was taking a nonbinary inclusive language continuing education class for work, and taking more control over the very aspect of his event that he’d just shown he has bad judgement on. I do not see how either of these actions address the complaints I have about his behavior. In fact, these actions appear to spit in the face of those complaints, as if to go out of their way to ignore the fact that my chief complaint was simply that he had been a massive asshole to my wife on literally no provocation.

Like… Bro makes the claim that he is “volunteering for” (as opposed to the more accurate “claiming”) a role on the Workshops committee to better understand what went wrong and keep it from happening again. Later, in the course of running for office in the Troth (because there’s no height he won’t fall upwards to, apparently—did that bit in El’s essay about all your accomplishments being “former” sting, bro?), he repeats this line as if it is an answer to the actual question, which was what he thought went wrong in the first place, mumbling incoherently about how none of the abuse claims that no one levelled at him were ever substantiated. In a story where the person being accused of things like shutting down discussions he doesn’t think should be allowed to happen, unilaterally cutting land use statements from the opening ritual, and simply being unconscionably rude to multiple people (most especially my wife) says that he’s going to keep this from happening again, what bro means is that he’s going to keep the undesirables from being allowed to speak in the first place. Honestly, it’s a damn shame I won’t be able to give my media literacy talk I was thinking about offering next year.

Not to mention that “apology” was neither for any particular action (indeed David Carron would later refuse to answer what it was actually for when directly asked) nor was it to anyone (why this might be is a question no one has needed to bother asking). It was the epitome of the “I’m sorry your feelings got hurt” apology, and every ounce of my being wanted to tell him to sit on his damn apology. It was insincere, and completely misinformed as to what the harm even had been—just like he decided to hallucinate and respond to arguments El had never made in her talk, he hallucinated and responded to complaints we never expressed about his behavior. (And notice, I said “we:” it’s not just me, I’m what the culture feelin,’ as it were. For all that David Carron wants to claim that none of the witness statements showed “evidence of abuse” or whatever he was babbling that time, every one of the witnesses I’ve spoken to about it are absolutely appalled by the Board’s original decision to dismiss El’s concerns, and were already expressing concerns about whether or not this event was a safe place for its queer attendees.) But no, it was at least an admission that perhaps everything had not been handled optimally. That maybe, someone – no idea who, but someone – did something maybe he shouldn’t have in some vague direction. I’d take it. I was, at this point, brokenhearted at least three times over, and I just wanted to let it all go and get on with my very spiritually, socially, and emotionally satisfying relationships within my Community. The Community that had hurt me, my wife, and my queer community, that had handled a lot of things very poorly, but that was still my Community; the one that had come to me in waves after Carron’s still unexplainable fit to make sure I was sustained.

Of course, by this point it had done some damage to my trust. El went to the board with her initial complaint about Carron’s outburst and sustained disruption of her talk. Carron very smugly crows at one point, while conspicuously refusing to actually answer questions, that none of the witness reports showed evidence of abuse. Which feels like a point that’s quite meaningless when abuse, transphobic or otherwise, was not actually the complaint–a point that seems very lost on everyone. No, I suspect that the statements didn’t detail what we all had for lunch either, but I promise you the witness statements did, in fact, detail a sustained, and successful effort by, I want to stress, the event’s president, to shut down around half of El’s talk. She absolutely was bullied—deliberately, as Carron’s every subsequent move has made clear—but that was not what anyone ever addressed in responding to her complaint. 

Because it turns out that even just asking that David Carron be held to any standards whatsoever as the fucking president of the Thing was a crime worthy of disdain, and all those strongly worded declarations of friendship and acceptance melted away into fury that Elizabeth simply was being too loud about being mistreated. But it felt like a minority voice, even if it was the voice of the entrenched powers. I would keep my tongue, accept this apology implicitly—I certainly wasn’t going to be explicitly accepting it, but I was willing to let it be, if not good enough, in the past. I had a priesthood to keep designing and working toward, a Community to keep serving, and once a year, a nice little holy space in the second largest Heathen gathering in my country where I can sit with people I love, who are also touched by my strange little language goddess, to share in that experience together, tell our stories, and just exist for a while. Quiet competence. I could do that.

But if we are at the point of this story where this event, after making up one set of rules wholecloth to explain why they couldn’t consider Carron’s behavior from outside of the event as evidence for his intentions during it, turns around and makes up even more rules on the spot to throw one last jab at my wife for not being abused quietly enough, then we’re at the point of the story where I honestly do not know what I’m keeping silent for.

So this letter, the one I didn’t like all the way up at the beginning of this journey, let’s look at it.

December 16, 2024

Dear Elizabeth:

 We write to inform you that your attendance at Northeast Thing in 2025 will not be permitted. This does not extend to other members of your household. 

I think what they mean is “This does not technically extend to other members of your household.” Even outside of the laughable insistence that I am completely welcome in this place that has repeatedly shown its unwillingness to listen when people say they are hurt, and that has been so quick to demonize, cut down, and block out my wife for having the gall to stand up for herself and her community when we were being, as they all agree, shockingly mistreated, it’s moot. I’m disabled, and rely on my wife’s support in physical, real ways that cannot readily be delegated to someone with whom I do not share that level of intimacy and trust, or who is not familiar enough with me to recognize when I need help. Accordingly, I simply do not travel without her. So the effect of banning her from this event (which she already said she was only going to be going to in order to support me) is, in reality, a de facto ban on me. 

Also damn, thats some passive voice.

This decision results from the investigation and adjudication of complaints made against you about a series of public and intentionally malicious activities in which you have persistently engaged against Northeast Thing, its Executive Board, and numerous members of its Planning Committee and wider community – not least of which included thinly veiled personal attacks against upwards of a dozen people and the appending of a targeted curse against the community. 

I love this language. “Intentionally malicious,” like… so many of David Carron’s Knights have swooped in to say he didn’t mean this or he didn’t mean that, as if his intentions were what kept his egregious, actively harmful behavior from being harassment, but they’re perfectly happy to ascribe malice to the person calling it out. 

Because I’ve seen their Facebook posts. I’ve heard how they talk about each other. If they want to start banning people for insulting members of their community they’re not going to have an event left to drive into that charred ground of theirs. I’d make some comment about how it’s striking who counts as a member of the community and who doesn’t, but I worry they’d read it as an accusation of bigotry, and you know their pitchfork arms must be very tired by now.

As for the curse… first of all, I think it’s a little rich to call a cheeky rhetorical device a curse. It’s not as though she was throwing cursed runes into a ritual fire—which is something that’s actually happened at the Thing, to be clear. The section in question is pretty clearly operating in a comedic mode, as evidenced by the fact that its title is a punchline to the way the previous section ended. I’m as woo-oriented a heathen as they get, but to suggest that section displays more malice than anything else in the essay because it’s a “curse” is ridiculous.

Second of all, these curses are not horrifying. Anyone who’s ever been on an overnight train ride has muttered much worse under their breath over much less. The main thing Elizabeth calls for is people to face the consequences of their actions, generally in silly ways like “may this one guy get a splinter” and “may this other guy get rained on.” 

Oooh, so evil.

We have determined that these activities are in direct violation of the Northeast Thing Code of Conduct, specifically point 5 of the Anti- harassment Policy, which can be reviewed here: https://northeastthing.com/code-of-conduct/

I was surprised to see this reference to point 5 of the Anti-harassment policy, as back on September 5th, shortly after El’s harassment complaint was dismissed, the Anti-harassment policy only had four points. Somewhere in the intervening two and a half months the website was quietly updated to include a new, fifth point that states that “While this Code of Conduct is intended to inform the behavior of attendees of the Northeast Thing while at the event, certain exceptions to its application may be made by the Executive Board on a case-by-case basis.” This is particularly astonishing, as one of the justifications for dismissing El’s complaint was a rule that “we cannot enforce the event Code of Conduct based on Facebook posts or commentary from outside of the event itself.” 

When El asked for clarification about this rule, event Treasurer Kat McDermott explicitly said that even a situation as plainly dangerous as “an attendee receiving text messages of a harassing nature from another community member would not be a violation” of the Code of Conduct. McDermott left some wiggle room by saying that the Executive Board could create exceptions on a case by case basis, but this was described in terms of liasing with the camp itself, and seemed clearly to be a response to the massive liability issues implicit in the previous “lol we don’t care about those harassing text messages” rule as opposed to a declaration that the rule only applied when Kat felt like it, though in hindsight I suppose that was pretty naive. More to the point, we’ve had it confirmed to us privately that this interpretation of the Code of Conduct was decided upon during the course of evaluating Elizabeth’s complaint, so it’s pretty astonishing to see it immediately rescinded. 

(Elizabeth also suggested to the board that was first considering her code of conduct complaint that David Carron had, in actual fact, disrupted over half of her talk, and asked might that be covered under the harassment policy suggesting that “sustained disruption” was harassment. McDermott’s response to this was that “all accounts suggest that the first half of your presentation proceeded as planned, without interruption” before King Carron began to yell at everyone, which is a strong candidate for the most baffling statement anyone has made in all of this.)  

And sure, events can change their rules. Whatever. They, in fact, needed to make that change, because, as El points out in her essay, their declared approach was contrary to all best practices in handling harassment. But I think it is staggering that they made a ruling on the spot to let their guy get by without so much as the “accountability” she asks for in her original complaint–because yes, that’s literally all she asked for–then immediately walked it back with a silent, unannounced update to the website, so that they could use their new new policy to punish her for getting the accountability they refused to give her peacefully through means that were consistent with the rules as they’d been explained to her.

I do not care one whit if someone thinks El should have been nicer in her essay. It’s not the essay I would have written, but then again I wouldn’t have thought this one would be either; it’s amazing the things that getting backed into a corner do to the number of fucks one has in reserve. And if you’re reading this and you’re still at “oh, but she should have done something else,” I invite you to look at her essay again and figure out what that “something else” should have been. I will not be accepting any answer that reduces to “sit down and be quiet when we’re bullying you,” because no. That is not a fair thing to ask of anyone, especially when their complaint is about the most powerful man in an organization. Beyond that, she’s a writer; she writes things.

Every more “reasonable” step I can think of is something she already tried, and frankly she was a lot more careful and kind than she needed to be at every turn. She stepped back while a community elder and a trusted friend tried to engage in a mediation effort—despite that elder’s inexplicable decision to exclude her from that effort—and then graciously accepted the non-apology that Carron used to grab more power for himself with nothing more than the request, which she termed her own weregild, that perhaps the professional writer and former academic Carron had been so rude to might be added to the committee as well, a request that seemed more likely to improve workshops than giving the guy who fucked up power over them. Couldn’t be me. You all think she’s the one to contend with, but I was never willing to accept that blatant bit of ass-scratching. It was an insult and I was furious. Not with the elder or our friend for enabling it—I believe both of them worked toward the best apology they could get from him, even if I think the decision to cut El out of that mediation was appallingly misguided. No, what I’m furious about is that the apology showed not a shred of understanding of what went wrong. I’m not surprised by that, given David Carron’s half-hallucinated understanding of the world and gossip. But it was galling to see an apology that was framed, cruelly, as “weregild,” not only completely ignored the most harmed party but offered no actual account of what’s being apologized for while being written in a vague, disembodied third person voice. Like, what about this was supposed to be compensation for the damage he’d caused in his stupid one man riot?

But El was willing to shrug and decide it was enough. She did that out of love for me, because she didn’t want me to lose this event that had given me so much. She didn’t write “Exiting the Draugr Castle” until she learned that she’d been refused the weregild she requested, again without anyone actually contacting her about it. Which, sure, again, but like…wouldn’t it have been so much easier to send a message saying, “Hey, so, we think that there’s going to be a vibes problem with your volunteering, but what can we do?” Just like it would have been so much easier for Dave Carron to just say, “Sorry El, I misunderstood, that’s on me”? It’s wild that so many people have said “well you can just come talk to us if you have a problem with us” and yet literally none of them thought to talk to my wife, and several, in fact, have pointedly refused to do so. Motherfuckers are literally breaking up their kindreds instead of accepting some responsibility. 

Because seriously, even rejecting El’s request for weregild didn’t have to be a dealbreaker. She and I would both have accepted the decision to put our friend on the board in her place if anyone had reached out and offered it, instead of just ghosting her and letting the decision to appoint them look like a deliberate snub. But I’m hardly surprised. There were so many blinking neon exit signs through all of this, and literally they just needed to pick one of them. 

We believe that your presence at Northeast Thing 2025 would create a tense, hostile environment that would not foster a frithful event. 

“Create.”

No, but seriously, I’ve heard so many complaints about El being so mean to their friends in her essay, but no one seems to have noticed that she’s not actually saying anything about anyone who hadn’t in some fashion directly wronged her. How is SHE is the one creating a tense, hostile environment when all she’s doing here, under the hood, is pointing out the ways it already was one. Is no one upset about that?

But let’s look at “frith” for a second. It’s an in-community term that gets thrown around a lot.  In fact, it’s David Carron’s “favorite concept in this spiritual tradition,” per one of the questions he wasn’t too cowardly to answer in his campaign for a role in leadership of the Troth.

Carron’s definition here is pretty sound: not “peace,” as in we’re all buddies, but “detente,” as in we’ve put aside our conflict for the sake of a civil shared space. It’s heavily tied to the concept of a capital T Thing, for which a very quick historical definition might be that it was effectively a town hall–the people in a region gathering to get their scores settled, but with no bloodshed. We don’t have to be friends to keep frith with each other—that’s the whole point of the concept—but frith is a guarantee of safety. In fact, after El’s talk went the way of Vikings, the Workshop Coordinator made a joke about how temperatures were high, but in Valhalla we fight every day and get up and go to dinner afterward, as if the presentation room had any right being treated as a battlefield.

But, for once, I agree with Dave; this is, in fact, what community requires, but it sure is a meaningless concept when you achieve it by simply excluding everyone you have beef with. It is unsurprising, I suppose, that Tyr is the god of the Thing; as El notes, he is a liar. 

But Sága isn’t, and El made it clear the terms on which she intended to attend Northeast Thing 2025. She, in fact, promised to maintain that frith that David Carron so loves. She explicitly stated that she was going to stay out of everyone’s way, not attend any events she wasn’t specifically invited to, and focus on taking care of me while being perfectly happy to talk to anyone who wanted to talk to her. I honestly don’t know what she could do to de-escalate tensions via communication better than that.

Your actions have ensured that only those perspectives you favor have permeated the online Heathen sphere while unfairly alienating members of the Northeast Thing community from those spaces. 

Alright, this one is just ridiculous. What in the fuck are they even talking about here? 

I mean, I suppose this is from the people who are afraid that all of this “their friend made a huge mess and it had consequences” thing is the fault of Loki not getting properly told off as his offerings were put in the final fire, as if that makes a lick of sense. For one thing, the talk was before the ritual. Oh, wait, that’s right, the original harassment was never a problem.

But back to El’s magic mindworm powers. Her actions (read: being open about the treatment she and others have received during and after NET 2024) have ensured (so powerful!) that only those perspectives she favors have permeated the “online Heathen Sphere.” This, I have to assume, is about the fact that she’s been active in the Fellowship of Fire and Ice Discord server—a heathen group that’s completely unaffiliated with this event because NET isn’t actually the whole of the Heathen Universe. That server is the one heathen space we’ve felt at all welcome in for months, in a large part because folk there related to our treatment. But perhaps, given how resistant the powers that be have been to considering wrongdoing other than wringing their hands about El’s tone, mind control really is the only explanation they can imagine for why people might agree that the mistreatment everyone seems to agree we suffered was actually a bad thing. But the reality is that Elizabeth has literally zero control over that, or any other “online Heathen sphere.” They, meanwhile, have loads of control over them, as evidenced by the way she was quietly kicked out of the Facebook group where Dave brought wave two of his harassment campaign. Or the way that, even if I were able to return, I can’t actually usefully participate in the vé committee Facebook group–the official planning space for that committee– because there are big holes in the conversation where people who randomly blocked me are supposed to be. Or even just the fact that every time NET comes up in the Fire and Ice Discord they seem to have screenshots within the hour. Which, fine, the Internet is public—we’re not saying anything we wouldn’t say to their faces, or… you know…on a widely read blog, but it sure says a lot about their reach. 

As for “unfairly alienating members of the NET community,” this echoes David Carron’s whining not nearly privately enough that it isn’t being talked about that no one is supporting him through this. Bro is wearing a sports bra, that’s how supported he is. He has had his own personal power structures repeatedly warp themselves into shape just so they can clamp down in formation around him the second he squeals. Literally, the whole reason any of this has happened because Bro needed to be protected from seeing any consequences from his actions as, I repeat once fucking more, the president of this god damned event. Is the problem that Bro had to hear from folk that he was continuing to step in it with every move? Oh, to be so fucking privileged that being gently told in private that you’re in the wrong, and that you should probably stop doing whatever impulsive nonsense pops into your jack-in-the-box of a brain constitutes not being supported. Never mind the fact that there’s no support more profound than people who will hold you accountable because they care about you. Bro has been nothing but supported, and yet he feels entitled to more.  Meanwhile, I’ve still not heard back about whether or not I’m allowed to attend events held by the nearest heathen group.

Or is the complaint just that David Carron’s too ashamed to publicly defend his actions? Actually, wait, let’s just go to the next sentence before we look at that.

These actions do not support your claim that you hope for the continued improvement and evolution of Northeast Thing. 

Is the suggestion that the continued improvement and evolution of Northeast Thing is dependent on not calling out its leadership for bullying? That it’s dependent on a culture of secrecy and on leadership not being accountable to the larger community? No, really, what about El’s essay seems to come from any place other than profound hurt at being betrayed by the leadership of an event she loves?

Actually, that’s a thing I want to touch on before we move on. Can everyone just sit for a second and look at the assumptions they’re making about my wife? Because, like I mused to my mother-in-law, I fundamentally do not understand how so many people seem to miss that she is a very gentle and kind person. Yes, she’s unwilling to be bullied and has a strong sense of justice, but this is Heathenry; these ought to be virtues. “When you see misdeeds, speak out against them, and give your enemies no frith,” right? But perhaps that only counts when the misdeeds are from people you don’t like, and “speak out” means like… at a whisper. I don’t think I’ve seen that version of the poem, though. Maybe it’s in Larrington’s translation.

Do people just think that because she can take care of herself she must not need care? Because even if that weren’t ridiculous, you’d think people might try to avoid making her take care of herself given how little they like it when she does. But more than that, her righteous anger—which, again, is a good thing by the very standards of this faith—is nowhere near the whole of who she is.  

Because when I read that essay—the one that was so full of “malicious intent” it forced the event to make new rules on the spot just to enact a cruel bit of punishment—what I see most glaringly is love and pain. It was written for a broad audience that wouldn’t know the faith, and in fact, were not going to even primarily be pagan, so she had to spend an amount of time talking about the religious experience, the ways that the event and the gods touched her, of the beauty of perplexingly finding yourself a part of a community. She had to explain that love, so that the pain would communicate to that general audience. And here’s the thing–people who aren’t involved with NET directly overwhelmingly did see that love. The majority of responses to her essay were things like “Are you okay?” and “I’m not even religious and I suddenly understand why you might be,” and “Oh god, I’m so sorry that happened to you.” Or move to the un-related heathen community that embraced us in the face of our impending exile, and you get even more clear support and understanding of the emotional reality of being torn down like this.

Honestly—and I haven’t checked this with her, but I bet it’s true—she’d still be perfectly willing to forgive and move on. If David Carron wrote to her tomorrow to say that he was sorry he’d lashed out at her talk and sorry things had gotten this far, and asked if they could try to find a way back, I’m pretty sure she’d thank him for the apology, express similar regret for how things have gone, and get to work trying to restore frith. But that would require talking to her, which is apparently the one thing that’s just a bridge too far for all those promises of trans safety.

And look, I get it. Defensiveness is hard to see through. But the work of looking at the harm caused by yourself or the ones you love is important, and worth doing. Certainly I questioned any of Elizabeth’s decisions while she was writing her essay; she took my concerns under advisement and reworked things to address them. More often, though, I found her rewriting a paragraph for the fourth time on her own initiative, making sure she didn’t hit anyone she wasn’t aiming at or for something that was beside the point. Elizabeth is, in actual fact, a very careful woman, and I wish that people would spend any time speaking to her, instead of just about her, and considering that, perhaps, she is not the monster under their bed after all.

Not holding my breath though.

We sincerely wish you well and hope that this parting of ways serves all parties for the better. 

Signed,

Northeast Thing Special Investigation Committee

You will not find any mention of a Special Investigation Committee on the Northeast Thing website, and given that it’s “Investigation,” singular, I can only assume its solitary purpose is kicking my wife out of the event. Its members were all on the planning committee, and I’m given to understand it was made up of volunteers from that pool. (Which is fucked, by the way? Like, this wasn’t how it went in practice, but man, “who’s most eager to punish El” is a hell of a question to ask when selecting her jury.) 

Let me be clear here: this is a completely revamped complaint procedure from the one that acquitted David Carron, where they invented a rule barring them from even considering the implications his outside actions had on the way he behaved at that talk. The board of Elders themselves investigated that one, by asking a handful of folk for witness statements–I was never asked for one. I suppose I was considered too close to the situation, but as I was also someone who had been actively hurt by the actions of David Carron I felt like I had as much a right to be heard as anyone else, and it’s not like I was demanding that my statement be taken as the only word on what had happened. El’s theory at the time was that I’d not been asked because they knew I’d been hurt, and were giving me space. I’d had the only public statement, after all, in my album reviews post, and it was one detailing that hurt in a very personal way. I even knew I was likely to come up in some of the statements; I am usually a reserved person, but I had been visibly upset during the talk when I asked why this inexplicable thing was happening and the fact that I’d, as my wife points out, ran out of talk in tears immediately after was actually pretty notable to anyone who knew me, as plenty of the people likely to be asked would.

As I put it in the opening of my statement, “I understand that I’m in no way independent, but obviously I was quite strongly affected by what happened, and I’d like to put my statement on the record as well so that you do not have to rely entirely on third party speculation about what I might have thought or felt.” This seemed a safe and reasonable framing to me, and after all, it’s  not like I was going to get punished for offering a statement, when I would have been well within my rights to send my own official complaint. I am, actually, a significantly different person than my wife.

I do not know if it was even read. I certainly didn’t get any kind of reply. I ended my statement by thanking them for “the obvious care with which they were approaching this,” and one of the things that still just hurts the most is that I meant that.

This time, it was fancy NET letterhead (or the email equivalent of such), and a volunteer based Special Investigation Committee, which hilariously, is not actually the body that their hastily amended code of conduct empowers to decide if conduct outside the event can be considered. That’s supposed to be the Executive Board, aka the Elders—the five people who sit on the board of the nonprofit that controls the money. Did they ever actually take a vote to make an exception to their code of conduct to punish Elizabeth? I couldn’t tell you, but if they did I’m sure it’s in the minutes they’re legally required to take as a nonprofit, since if there’s one thing you can count on Heathens for it’s competence, transparency, and a functional system of rules that aren’t simply made up on the fly and then ignored anyway.

Annie Cúglas Humphrey, PhD (they/them) 

[Names redacted]

Operating under the assumption that it was, as per the rules, the Elders who voted to make an exception to the code of conduct’s limited scope, and that the Special Investigation Committee merely evaluated the evidence under the newly implemented standard, I’ve blacked out the names of the committee members for this essay, aside from one, who I will discuss in a minute. I spent a lot of time going back and forth on this decision, because on the one hand a couple of the names here are of people I would call friends, and I understand how voting bodies work–no one committee member is personally responsible for how any of this has gone, and this platform is not a Heathen in-community discussion forum so the names would have little meaning to anyone.

On the other hand, I find the idea of letting a Special Investigation Committee remain a Secret Special Investigation Committee a deep affront to my personal principles. So here’s my compromise: If you are a member of a relevant community and desire this information, message me privately and I will happily tell you who volunteered to be on the committee to make this cursed, cruel, and hypocritical decision. All the rest of you need to know on the topic is that they were all members of the planning board, which is the super-group of all the subcommittees, and whose membership can be seen on the Northeast Thing website.

I did leave one name, though, Annie Cúglas Humphrey, PhD, as they are not only on the planning committee, they’re one of the Elders—the body that both handled and dismissed El’s complaint and then, at least if their own rules were followed, voted to make an exception to the rule they’d used to protect David Carron in order to punish her.  And I do, at the end of the day, feel a large event’s executive board ought to be held to a higher standard, both of conduct and transparency.

Annie is someone I do not know particularly well, although we’ve had various polite interactions over the years. As such, I will not be making any claims as to their motives or intentions. What I can tell you about is their actions and words.

They were the original point person for Elizabeth’s complaint, taking lead on the emails with her about those proceedings. The messages were polite and formal, which is reasonable. They disappeared when El asked for clarification on the negative ruling, which seemed to have been responding to a completely different complaint than the one El had made, and further communication switched to Kat McDermott, who swanned in with her usual hostile and condescending tone. I’m acutely familiar with that condescension, as I’ve had to deal with her in the vé planning committee—the one of these such committees that works differently than the others, on account of every vé keeper needing to be present in it. 

See, Kat runs the Rán vé. For those who are unfamiliar with Heathen entities, this is a very strange choice—Rán is a giantess, the class of gods usually construed as monsters, and is a goddess associated with the drowning depths of the ocean. Now, as I’ve heard it Kat just views her as a sexy mermaid goddess, and one with apparently abysmal standards, as more than a minute spent in that vé will reveal when the actually quite neat ambient track of ocean noise she plays in it resets with a second of hard silence because she couldn’t be bothered to find one that loops. Regardless, I have no problem with Rán’s inclusion—that’s not my game. But when her vé-keeper turned out to be one of the loudest voices decrying the inclusion of “entities of pure destruction” (the language this group habitually uses to describe Fenrir–the son of Loki, and god of being angry about being betrayed) in the vé-stead, it was as flooring as it was typical of every future interaction I’ve had with her.

Annie, though, has played their cards close to their chest, mostly only commenting publicly to be annoyed that they’ve been asked to do leadership for this large event they are on the executive board of. During one of David Carron’s online temper tantrums, a new friend and trans member of the community tagged several people in event leadership in a comment expressing dismay at their silence and asking them for comment. 

He also implored them to reach out to the most affected members of the community, listing Elizabeth, and myself, as well as a couple others. I can’t speak for anyone else there, but of those he tags, none reached out to me at that time, although two were privately kind to me about non-related topics when I reached out to them. One has been both an absolute rock solid friend and leader, and has since reached out when they wanted to make sure that we didn’t mistake their leaving Facebook as their having blocked us. This was a relevant concern, seeing as the two that were privately kind to me blocked El after being told that El had “doxed” the Associate President of the Troth by sharing nothing about him that can not easily be seen on the Troth’s website, alongside his name and a photograph of his face; Now, this is not actually what doxing is. At worst, she embarrassed him by showing him and a few other completely redacted people in the responses throwing those petty pot shots I mentioned earlier. Believing that blatant lie as truth, they both silently blocked her—I believe the language they used was that doxing him was was “beyond the pale.” Nice to know something is, I guess. Although all that said, he’s apparently decided that he actually does like that “frith” thing after all, and is going about being a damn professional—he notably unblocked El when she asked to join the Troth Facebook group, and has been being perfectly civil in the couple communities where we overlap. For those keeping score, that’s a hell of a lot better than “nothing,” which seems the prevailing standard. 

But back to the rest of the leaders that got tagged: One had by this point already blocked El for posting to Facebook about her complaint being dismissed, and has since blocked me for fuck knows what. Actually, she’s on the exec board so I’ll name her—that was Sara Perrault, aka the Tyrswoman. One had been so afraid of non-existent conflict that before any of this harassment complaint business even began he refused to look at an entirely kind and conciliatory message from El—a story she tells with memorable detail in her essay. One was Kat, who has since also silently blocked me and, incredibly, around half of the trans attendees of the event in general (and isn’t even the only planning committee member to do so), but who is, I’m sure, definitely 100% not transphobic or anything. The last were Annie and the guy who’d been workshop coordinator last year.

(It strikes me that there’s one executive board member I haven’t named—Erika Wren. They’re the aforementioned “absolute rock solid friend,” who has repeatedly held space for both of our pains, and is a credit both to the event and to Loki. If anyone else in leadership had, at any point, tried out “listen to Erika” as a strategy we would not be here today.)

As for responses: one guy says he wasn’t there, didn’t see anything, and wasn’t going to look–he complains that the tag is “blasting him,” as if asking event leadership for comment on something that’s happened at their event is a personal attack. (In fact, this was a common sentiment. Everyone seemed to take “being asked for comment” as a veiled insult to their honor, much like “this had an outsized negative effect on the trans members of this community,” was tantamount to claiming that they were all transphobic bigots) He explains that he doesn’t really like online communication, so he would be available for comment in person at the event next year. I suppose that’s when El should convey her message too? Oh. Wait.

Another wants more time to consider—please understand their lack of commentary isn’t a lack of care, they’ve just not had time to consider yet. Presumably they’re still considering, and it’s because of how busy it’s keeping them that they actively declined to offer any support or guidance when El messaged them, literally begging for help trying to reconcile her need not to be bullied with her desire to remain a part of the community. 

One works personally very hard to maintain the safety of NET (a claim I absolutely believe from her, actually), trusts the board of Elders to have known what they were doing, and asks for patience. She hopes this clarifies her stance. It did not, it turns out, but she did eventually decide that “weregild” should be sought, and did the work of setting up that mediation, and her actions speak loudly there.

But Annie’s response was wild even by the standards of shockingly deficient leadership shown throughout this thread. Annie explains to us that “as an openly trans person, by the way,” they ran for the board because their autism meant they wanted a real-life space for their family to attend annually. They, like so many here, simply do not do online conversations, and being an Elder of a in-person, five-day event simply should not mean they have any responsibility to the safety and running of the event, nor to the confidence the attendants may have in their own safety. In fact, “I apologize my autism doesn’t also spare me time for personally assuaging you that I am a capable leader.” How dare the guy asking community leaders for help not just know that, I guess, as a completely new member of the community watching its leadership stunningly fail to demonstrate any capability. They continue that it is unreasonable to expect a teacher and parent with autism and sleep deprivation to be responding to people “in real time,” (which was not a thing that had been asked for—it’s not like there weren’t several days in which we got crickets from anyone in leadership save for David Carron’s impressive commitment to seeing how much of his foot he could fit in his mouth at one time. But I digress.) and that they “will not be engaging further.”

Somewhere between telling my friend that they have no responsibility to the community and that we ought to just believe them that they’re good at their job, I got very confused. And that’s before you ask why they brought up their “openly trans” status in the first place, if not to undermine the other trans voices in their community expressing very real pain and confusion. I would also note that I share Elizabeth’s concerns about having a cis-passing nonbinary person position themselves as understanding the concerns of a visibly trans woman. Even if I were confident in Annie’s good faith—and they’ve not exactly made that easy—their experience of being trans is very different from that of someone who is read as trans in all of their social interactions, whether they want to be or not, and I say that as someone who has spent time living in both roles. 

Anyway, those are the Elders. The guy who bullied my wife out of the event, two people so contemptuous of Elizabeth that they felt the need to pre-emptively block her family along with her, a person who will not be engaging further, and a single, solitary friend for whom my heart breaks that they have to deal with all this shit. And the latter four were the ones who got to decide whether the first one bullied my wife. If democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding on dinner, frith is apparently two Tyrsmen and a wolf deciding who’s being uppity.

Speaking of Elizabeth’s concerns, when I asked her if she had any comment she’d like to make, she offered the following:

Well, I think my primary statement is just that I didn’t write this essay, do not have any plans to write more about heathenry, and do not want to write more about heathenry. They legitimately can’t fire me, I quit. It was low-key spectacular. Contrary to Penn’s epigraph, they’re talking about it so much they’re writing from Iceland asking if they fucked my therapist. 

But since I’m being asked for the record as it were, there are two things that I would point out about the recent statement by the Special Investigation Committee—a name that sounds as though it should be the subject of some late nineties X-Files knockoff. You could even call it Northeast Thing.

Firstly, as a matter of factual record, I did not “append a targeted curse against the community.” For one thing, that was not an appendix, that was a climax. Come on. You literally signed the letter with your PhD in the humanities. Do better than this. For another, and more importantly, it very specifically was not targeted at the community, which is in fact hailed at the end of the section in question. To the extent that I think that section can be accurately described as a “curse” at all, it was aimed at specific people who had wronged me or who were sufficiently annoying that I didn’t mind using them to beef out the rhetorical structure of giving everyone but David Carron a snarky but anonymizing nickname. The degree of malice expressed was a wish for people to suffer, and I quote, “entertaining mishaps.” The specific fates I wished upon people were things like an extremely inside joke about the fact that one of them had scared off a bear while we were chatting at the Thing and a playful account of being eternally rained on that is, I feel confident, not actually within my abilities to ask of any god or monster. Unless someone wants to argue that wishing for someone to get a splinter is a threat of violence—and I wouldn’t put it past these clowns—the worst thing I called for was the destruction of David Carron’s immortal soul in the context of a religion neither he nor I believe in. Most importantly, I did not “target” the event at large—a rhetorical line I was quite deliberate about. I called out specific people I viewed as poor leaders while actively wishing for the community to get something closer to the event that I believed it deserved.

I mention this for two reasons. First, I believe that when someone accuses you of something you didn’t do it is best to address the claims. Second, the community I have been accused of cursing remains a thing that, for all the committee’s insistence to the contrary, I genuinely care about. So, for the record, Northeast Thing is an event full of great people being badly served by corrupt, incompetent, and immature leadership. I wish those people and the event itself no ill whatsoever, and to the extent that I wish any ill upon the people who are letting it down, this is strictly limited to things that are broadly kinda funny.

Secondly, I would like to add to Penn’s observation that this is a de facto ban on him. Penn’s disability is known to the Northeast Thing planning committee—it’s information we disclose every year when registering in the course of requesting the accommodations Penn needs to remain healthy through the event. So when I said in the essay that I would be attending the Thing because Penn was, they were already aware of the full reason for this. As I also made clear, I did not want to be involved with the event at large—I wanted to go take care of my disabled husband while he fulfilled his spiritual calling as a Priest of Sága, and to catch up with the dozen or two people who remain actively my friends in that community. Moreover, two members of the Special Investigation Committee are themselves disabled and reliant on a partner at the event, and so would have understood that, despite their protestations to the contrary, Penn was the primary person this decision would affect.

Notably, this was not the first time something like this had happened. When I made my harassment complaint against David Carron, the thing he did that actually crossed the line was to take to the Internet and crow about how he had nobly stayed around to take care of anyone who might have been hurt after my talk while I ran off—claims he repeated when I asked him what he was actually apologizing for and what he had learned from the experience during a candidate forum for the Troth board elections. As I noted in “Exiting the Draugr Castle” and have reiterated on several other occasions, some in front of David Carron, the reason I hurried out of the talk—in marked contrast to how I would ordinarily behave after giving a workshop—was because his actions had so upset Penn that he’d left the room in tears the second it ended. Whatever duties I owed the audience of my talk in that moment were plainly dwarfed by my duty to go find and take care of my fucking husband—a fact that, if David Carron did not understand, he has as little place being a family lawyer as he does being in a position of power within the heathen community. The fact that he chased me from the event to Facebook in order to wave that in my face was what took his actions from merely being a jerk at my talk to creating a tense, hostile environment that did not foster a frithful event. 

To be explicit: the specific thing that prompted my harassment complaint—the thing that fucking dipshit they’re calling a president has gone to such spectacular lengths to refuse to address—was the decision to weaponize my disabled husband against me. I do not for a moment believe it to have been an accident that his Special Investigation Committee has repeated the trick.

Beyond this, hm. Hang on, let me look through the lore for a good quote.

Ah. Here we go. “Fuck y’all faggots, I don’t trust y’all faggots, I wave one finger and thump y’all faggots like mmm, field goal, punt y’all faggots, they punk y’all faggots, nobody never took my food.” Huh. Must be that Larrington thing Penn was talking about.

Anyway, I’m going to go compile the greatest edition of the works of William Blake ever published and have nothing to do with you dismaying freaks. Leave me alone and let my husband be a heathen before you disgrace yourselves further. 

Take it home, Priest of Sága.

Yeah, all right, one more time for the people at the back: Northeast Thing is a beautiful event, full of lovely people who I gladly consider my friends. Even the ones who have hurt me in this fucking  mess are people I have loved and will continue to consider my friends until they force me to do otherwise. The Community I got to build around my strange little language goddess has been one of the most spiritually fulfilling turns in my life, and even if I am never allowed to serve that Community again, I will take my memories of that event with a heart full of love as well as pain. I can’t regret going, or regret the friends l made there—that would be to deny too large a part of who I have become, and I am proud of who I have become, in large part because of this event.

But the Northeast Thing is not a safe event for its most vulnerable population right now, and that’s by design. Leadership is secretive about their moves, rules change directions like a Willy Wonka elevator, and there is just too much intentional malice baked into too much of its leadership. That I would happily have kept going, kept my head down, and just worked toward offering the event a space that over the two years I’ve tended it has bloomed into something unspeakably meaningful to myself, and to at least several others, is not even in question. But the fact is that even when I was planning to go back, it was with the absolute knowledge that were I to be harassed or attacked at that event I would have no recourse. The idea of reaching out to ask for help with my own safety is laughable—I have no desire to deal with the aftermath of harassment alongside an executive board attacking me for it, and I’ve been given no reason to have faith that if whoever harmed me was older than me, or more well known, then I would not incur the wrath of the community myself. Hell, I am only married to the troublesome victim—I’ve said nothing up to now, and I’ve already gotten shoved out the door by a shocking number of people I had thought better of. Nuh-uh. Not happening. This was already gonna have to be a “we keep us safe” kinda deal. But now that the sheer depth of this cover-up has been made clear, I do not think even that is wise. 

So here it is: I am calling for a trans boycott of Northeast Thing. Until concrete steps are taken to ensure that nobody is going to be treated the way my wife and I have been treated, no trans person or, frankly, trans ally should be having anything to do with this event. It is simply not safe.