Last night, we voted to expel two people from our group. It was the right decision. They crossed boundaries, made people uncomfortable, and acted in ways that weren’t safe. But even knowing that, I still felt this weird, lingering guilt. Not because I think they deserve protection, but because I’ve been taught – conditioned – to feel bad anytime someone, especially a man, has to face consequences for their behavior. Like somehow I’m the one being “too much” or “too harsh” just for noticing the harm and not brushing it off.
What I keep circling back to is: I knew something was off from the beginning. I felt it. I couldn’t name it yet, but my body knew. My gut knew. And I didn’t trust it. I’ve had so many experiences where I’ve been gaslit, where my boundaries were ignored, or where I was made to feel like the problem for speaking up – that I’ve learned to question myself before I ever question anyone else.
Trauma makes you hyper-aware. It sharpens your ability to pick up on energy, on tone, on shifts in body language. You start to develop this radar for danger, for red flags, for subtle shifts that others miss. In that way, trauma can gift you with discernment. But the catch is: trauma also makes you doubt yourself. It makes you second-guess whether you’re overreacting, whether you’re reading too much into something, whether you’re going to “ruin everything” by speaking up. So you live in this weird limbo of being incredibly perceptive and also deeply unsure if you’re allowed to trust that perception.
I want to break that cycle. I want to stop treating my instincts like liabilities.
What made this experience different (what honestly shocked me) was that for once, the men around me took it seriously. They didn’t center the feelings of the people who caused harm. They didn’t try to talk me down or tell me it wasn’t a big deal. They didn’t make me be the one to decide what to do, or the one to deliver the accountability. They listened, they believed us, and they acted. And they did it without needing praise or asking us to perform our trauma for them first.
It was the first time I wasn’t made responsible for someone else’s consequences.
But before that decision was made, I felt this deep, gut-level panic… like I was going to get in trouble. Not because I did anything wrong, but because I’ve been trained by experience to expect backlash just for naming harm. That horrible feeling hit me hard: what if I’m seen as dramatic? What if I get blamed? What if speaking up ruins everything? Even in a space where people had asked for honesty, I still braced myself for punishment. Because how many times have I seen that exact dynamic play out? Harm happens, someone speaks up, and somehow they become the problem.
So much of my life has involved trying to explain why something was wrong. Trying to convince people that I was hurt. Trying to “prove” that someone’s behavior crossed a line. But this time, I didn’t have to. They saw it. They believed it. They made the call. And that – as sad as it is to say – was revolutionary for me.
And here’s what’s even more heartbreaking: I’m 26 years old, and this is the first time I’ve ever been in a group of men who actually handled this shit correctly. That shouldn’t be groundbreaking. That should be the bare minimum. But it floored me. It opened up something inside me I didn’t even realize was clenched shut.
It made me realize how low my bar has been, how much harm I’ve tolerated or excused because I didn’t trust that anyone else would back me up. But this time, they did. And I can’t unsee that.
I think a lot about my grandmother lately. She had this sense of discernment that was quiet but unshakable. She didn’t need receipts or consensus. She could feel it in her bones when someone wasn’t right. She trusted that feeling. And I want to learn to trust mine again. Not because I’m broken or paranoid, but because I know what it feels like when something is off. And I deserve to listen to that part of myself without guilt.
This experience raised my standard. Not just for the people I organize with, but for myself. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life justifying red flags or apologizing for my boundaries. I want to live in a way that honors my gut, protects my peace, and trusts that I don’t need to carry the weight of other people’s actions in order to be “good.”
And honestly? What we did last night matters beyond just this one situation. We helped set a standard – not just for ourselves, but for every AFAB or feminine person who comes after us. We’re showing that this kind of accountability is possible. That it doesn’t have to be revolutionary for men to take harm seriously. That people should grow up in a world where they expect men to be held accountable, not fear that they’ll be the one punished for speaking up.
We don’t get to rewrite the past. But we do get to model something better. We get to create the environment we all deserved to grow up in.
And now that I’ve seen it, I won’t settle for anything less.
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