This post by WDI USA volunteer Carol Dansereau was first published on her Substack on June 26th. We are sharing it here with her permission.
Cruelty is Compassion. Ignorance is Strength
The Unitarians have kicked us out. My partner Bruce and I aren’t allowed to go to family camp at Seabeck, Washington, the first week of August anymore.
They say we made people “unsafe.” We supposedly “harmed” trans and nonbinary people, and then we refused to sign a document admitting guilt and agreeing to restrictions on our speech. So, we’re not allowed to attend any more. The Be Kind Brigade has meted out its abject cruelty yet again, and we’ve lost something precious as a result.
We have adored that week in August, eagerly anticipating each year the moment our car would rumble across the bridge over the lagoon and enter our annual Brigadoon. A week of singing, dancing, talking, swimming, playing games, and performing for the world’s most appreciative audience did our hearts good.
Bruce has been going to the August camp for 25 years, and I’ve been going with him since 2007. We’re referred to as “valued members of the community” and Bruce was even awarded the Golden Hand and Heart Award for his contributions.
But that’s all history now. We have been kicked to the curb.
Our Terrible Crimes, as Illuminated by the “Safe Community Team”
The Board of the “Eliot Institute”—the Unitarian Universalist organization that organizes the Seabeck camps—can convene a “Safe Community Team” (SCT) whenever community or individual safety is at risk. They convened one to deal with us.
On May 4th, we received an “invitation” to attend a zoom meeting with the team. It had been determined that our behaviors “may impact individual and community safety.” We held “beliefs that may run contrary to” the Eliot Covenant and the Board’s new “Gender and Sex Diversity Statement.” Here’s the invitation:
The meeting began with us all reading the Eliot Covenant aloud—a Covenant that waxes eloquent about the Eliot commitment to respecting and listening carefully to people of diverse perspectives. Then the team laid out four “incidents” that had led to our being summoned. To say that the descriptions of these incidents were vague is an understatement. Even with additional details included in the sign-this-or-else letter discussed below, here’s the totality of the charges against us:
1) Someone overheard you say something bad. Three anonymous people complained to the Board after the August 2023 camp. They had either spoken with us directly or had overheard us “expressing content” they deemed transphobic and homophobic. We were said to have stated that there are only two genders, and that gender is not a continuum—language we would never use, because we make a point of only using the term “sex” to talk about the sex binary. No other details of what we had supposedly said were forthcoming. One or more of these complainants said that our statements made them feel that August Eliot was “not a safe place for queer folks to be their true selves.” None of these anonymous people would agree to a supervised meeting with us in accordance with Eliot conflict resolution procedures.
2) You wore a harmful T-shirt. An anonymous person or people claimed to have seen us wearing a t-shirt about bathrooms at the August 2023 camp. We don’t own t-shirts about bathrooms. We believe the shirts we had at camp were Bruce’s “Man. Adult Human Male” shirt. My Birdy Rose classic: “Help!!! She’s Thinking Thoughts I Don’t Like! Arrest Her!” And Bruce’s male version of the Birdy Rose shirt.
3) You sent a video someone didn’t like. We sent an email with a video sharing concerns about gender identity ideology to Eliot Board members and various other Elioteers without having been requested to do so! Some recipients claimed we had said “harmful and transphobic” things in this communication. Someone said the video was “misleading.” When asked what specifically was harmful, transphobic, or misleading in our video, the Team members had no response.
Here’s a link to the email we sent. (Click here and here for the videos that were attached to the email.)
4) You misgendered someone. At August Eliot in 2023, Bruce had accidentally used an accurate sex pronoun in a discussion where the referenced trans-identifying individual was not present. (He had been trying to avoid pronouns altogether but slipped and said “she” instead.) The person lodging this complaint against us was the only person whose identity was revealed to us.
That’s it. That’s the evidence against us. Vague anonymous complaints containing obvious errors about what we said and wore. A bizarre twisting of our healthy outreach to community members about our concerns, casting it as somehow sinister. Unsubstantiated claims that our videos contain misleading, transphobic, and harmful statements. Someone miffed that Bruce didn’t use the “preferred pronoun” for an individual who wasn’t even present. And zero discussion, let alone documentation, of any harm we had caused.
After the list of “incidents” had been shared, the Committee played a recording made by a trans-identifying young adult we’ve never met who attends a camp in July we’ve never attended. This individual, the child of one of the SCT members, rambled on vaguely about being horrified that gender critics can be present at Eliot camps. A nonbinary-identifying member of the SCT then expressed agreement with what the July person had said.
At that point, Bruce and I were asked to speak. You can read the statements we made here:
We objected to the entire process and the absurd assertion that we pose a safety hazard, calling this Orwellian and dangerous. We talked about our consistent history of and ongoing commitment to engaging in civil respectful dialogues with people. We pointed out that the Committee’s approach contradicts the Eliot Covenant.
We also said that it was deeply concerning that the Eliot Board had chosen to view us a hazard rather than a resource. It was shocking that the Board had adopted a new affirmation-only gender identity policy without talking with us and others critical of gender ideology. Its decision to make uninformed decisions was particularly problematic in light of extremely important recent developments such as the WPATH Files and the Cass Report. (We doubt the Board had even heard of, let alone considered these and other crucial information.) We noted that the Board’s new affirmation-only policy directly contradicts the Cass recommendations. In other words, it goes against science-based conclusions in the most comprehensive review of the gender affirmation model of care ever done.
When we were finished with our statements, an SCT member thanked us, without responding to the points we had made. “This is about these incidents where people described harm,” she said. “What are you open and willing to do to both repair and then to go forward in a healthy way.” What is the harm that we supposedly have caused, we asked. No clear answer was provided. Unnamed people had said we hurt them, and apparently, therefore we had hurt them, and we needed to repair the harm we’d done.
The SCT member whose child identifies as transgender told us that if people aren’t affirmed in their new identities, they may commit suicide. This was likely said to her when she was figuring out how to respond to her own child’s trans identification. Would you rather have a dead daughter or a live trans son? But the suicide claim is simply bogus. The Cass Review, like all the systematic reviews before it, concluded that there is no credible evidentiary basis for the claim that transitioning improves mental health and decreases suicides. There’s even some evidence that affirmation and transitioning may have the opposite effect. In my statement I had specifically talked about how the Cass Report had laid to rest claims that affirmation and transitioning improve mental health and reduce suicides, but this woman apparently hadn’t caught that.
After more back and forth, the meeting was adjourned, and we all agreed to think about how to move forward.
Bruce and I sent the Team a proposal a few days later. You can read it here:
We urged the Team to issue a statement reiterating the Covenant’s directives about respecting diverse opinions and clarifying that respectful disagreements should not be conflated with making people unsafe. Three weeks later, on June 4th, the Team sent us its own proposal—an outrageous document that should make anyone affiliated with the Eliot Institute and the Unitarian Universalist Church deeply ashamed.
Sign This, or Else: The Safe Community Team’s Way Forward
The document sent to us by the SCT did three things.
- It recounted (with some errors and major omissions) what transpired in the Zoom meeting and laid out the incidents that had placed the target on our backs.
- It issued a formal finding that we had hurt people and shared the warped premises underpinning this irrational and slanderous conclusion. Basically, according to the team, failure to agree with someone about who they are, is de facto harmful. If a person doesn’t agree that trans-identifying males are women, for example, that person is guilty of hurting those males. Our consistent civility was not in dispute. It was just irrelevant. If you engage in wrongthink and you make your wrongthoughts known to anyone, you are causing harm, period. And you must be brought into line. Moreover, just in general, if someone says they’ve been harmed, then they have been harmed.
- It imposed various requirements upon Bruce and me as a condition for attending camp. We were required to:
—“[O]penly acknowledge that it is the right of each person to define who they are.” In the context of the letter’s findings, this was clearly intended to mean that we must agree with their self-definitions.
—Use people’s names and preferred pronouns, including when they are not present. (In order to be able to attend camp, we were willing to go along with this, by avoiding pronouns altogether, though we find a ban on using accurate sex pronouns to be outrageous on multiple levels.)
—Engage in various steps to make sure that our views would be heard only by those who consented to hear them. Before expressing our views to anyone, we would ask if we had permission to do so. We would “move out of earshot of others who have not explicitly consented to engage in the conversation.” (The letter didn’t mention the morning program with large numbers of people in attendance. Would we be allowed to ask questions or make comments like any other person there, despite the requirement that we get permission from people before speaking to them?)
—If someone at camp were to say that they were harmed by our words, we would be forbidden to argue that the person was not actually harmed. In other words, in such encounters we were to be presumed guilty, rather than innocent. We would be required to engage “constructively” with those accusing us of harm “to repair relationships and move forward in a healthy way,” asking “what the person needs for repair” and promising to “do better the next time.”
—If we didn’t abide by the agreement we had signed in any way, we could be immediately expelled from camp.
In other words, were we to attend camp, it would be under the shadow of a formal finding that we had hurt people. We would be subjected to requirements that wouldn’t apply to any other camper and on any other topic. Because our views are considered by camp leaders to be shameful and dangerous, we would need to talk in hushed tones, obsequiously confirming that we had consent to speak, looking over our shoulders constantly to make sure that our “horrible” words were not overheard by others.
Most importantly, the very core of our concerns—our disagreement with sex self-ID—had been declared inherently harmful by the SCT. It would be impossible to discuss our objections to gender identity ideology in light of that declaration. Given the “no debate” mindset of so many “trans rights activists” and “trans allies”—a mindset amply demonstrated by the SCT process we had already endured—we would almost certainly be denounced as causing harm the second we opened our mouths. If those denouncing us agreed to “engage collaboratively” with us to “move forward in a healthy way”—which is a very big if —they would be empowered to demand that we promise to never express our gender critical thoughts again.
The SCT’s letter indicated that whether we could attend camp or be part of the community at all depended on our willingness to sign. It said:
“….we regret that you will not be welcome to join us at camp or Eliot-related activities unless and until you are able to conform to these behavioral expectations. If you do agree and sign, and then later you do not adhere to these expectations, you may be asked to leave camp immediately or otherwise cease participation in Eliot activities.”
On June 9th, we sent a reply calling for major changes to the document that would enable us to sign it. Our letter explained why conflating failure to agree to sex self-ID with harm, and excluding people on that basis, is irrational and dangerous. It pointed to various examples of identities SCT and Board members would likely agree should not be affirmed. It detailed how an affirmation-only approach leads to terrible outcomes, both in terms of who is affirmed and in terms of who is excluded from camp. Here’s our June 9th letter:
On June 21st, the SCT finally replied to our June 9th letter. If we did not sign their statement as they had written it, we would be expelled. “Speech that invalidates the expressed identity of another is not respectful,” they told us. They simply ignored, as they had all along, the arguments we made, the examples we gave, and the questions we asked about the logical outcomes of their position. They referred vaguely to the supposed marginalization of trans-identifying people and alleged rampant injustice born by them in the wider world, having heard only the “trans rights” version of the facts on those matters. We were given no opportunity to debunk the myths about murder rates and discrimination they doubtlessly relied upon. Here’ the June 21st letter solidifying our expulsion:
Let me make sure you understand what has happened. Bruce and I have never threatened or assaulted trans- or nonbinary-identifying people, and never would. We have never objected to gender nonconformity, and in fact, have fought against sexist stereotypes throughout our lives. We have never sought to get trans- or nonbinary-identifying individuals ejected from camp. We are eager to eat, sing, dance, talk, and play at camp with anyone who wants to do those things with us, including people with trans or nonbinary identities. These facts are not in question.
Our sole crime—the basis of our expulsion—is that we do not agree that a male who “identifies” as a woman, is a woman, and vice versa. We don’t believe that declaring oneself nonbinary erases the reality of a person’s sex. While we support the right of each adult to believe whatever they want on these matters, we object to the imposition of these feelings-based circular definitions on other people. Eliot leaders have decided to declare failure to agree with sex-self-ID as de facto harmful, and therefore an appropriate basis for banishing us. This is outrageous.
Farewell to August Camp, Farewell to our Former Community
Bruce and I have never been anything but polite and respectful with each and every person we’ve interacted with at August Eliot. And we have dearly loved people in the Eliot community. But spurred on by bullies, and embracing censorship and ignorance, leaders of that community, have unjustly expelled us.
So, it’s time to say goodbye. Goodbye to rising at 6:45 a.m. with others to make our way to the swim dock, snarling like polar bears to the steady and escalating beat of a drum, until we plunged into the icy lagoon, in a cataclysm of shrieks and laughter. Goodbye to hours on the inn porch weaving exquisite harmonies with lovely women and the occasional lovely man as well. Goodbye to being a part of the intrepid groups of people, who somehow pulled together and performed within a week the fractured musicals Bruce wrote.
Goodbye to heartfelt talks in the meeting house or during walks in the woods. To birdwatching with friends. To getting up the nerve to play one of my songs at the coffee house, and to always being glad that I’d done so, despite my nerves. Goodbye to wild dancing at the tea-dance and the final dance. To tie-dyed clothes hung on the lines across the lawn. And so much more.
Perhaps our former friends will miss what we brought to camp. Will smile remembering the year I organized the “Olympic Gold Medal Binational Swim Team” act for the talent show stage, and how it was so funny that people informed me afterwards that they had wet their pants laughing. Perhaps they will long for one of Bruce’s musicals or his jokes, or the sound of his guitar in the bands he took a lead role in pulling together for the dances. Perhaps they will miss the insights we offered on political issues.
And perhaps, despite the lies that will be circulated about the threat we pose to safety, they will realize how insane those accusations are. And they will see that omitting our voices and expertise on gender identity issues is a grave mistake—one that does a huge disservice to everyone at camp, and not just us.
To Those Who Still Go to Unitarian Camps: What You Can’t Say
To those reading this who haven’t been barred from attending Unitarian camps, you may want to know what you can and can’t say, if you want to avoid expulsion.
Do you look at the male swimmer Lia Thomas winning a women’s NCAA national championship trophy, and think, “no, that’s not right”? Do you recognize that males have obvious physical advantages over women in most sports, as is established unequivocally by sports statistics?
Well, too bad. You can’t say that it’s unfair for Thomas to race with the women. Nor can you object to high school males taking trophies from girls in track meets in at least five different states this spring. Doing either of these things would challenge the premise that anyone who identifies as a woman, is a woman, entitled to whatever “other” women have. Don’t forget, failing to validate people’s self-declared identities is hurtful, and therefore forbidden in the brave new Unitarian world.
Do you feel an urge to stand in solidarity with women imprisoned near Seabeck—most of them survivors of male violence—who are experiencing PTSD and can’t sleep at night because there are trans-identifying males in their cells? Repress that urge. Agreeing with the female prisoners that those males are men is a no-no. Maintaining that female prisons should be truly female-only makes you a transphobe in some people’s eyes, and transphobes are not welcome at camp.
Do you have concerns about the claim that children know who they are and what’s best for themselves, and that it is the job of adults to unquestioningly affirm their identities? Do you have concerns about the link between affirmation and children undergoing invasive medical procedures with devastating lifelong consequences? Are your concerns exacerbated by high rates of mental illness, autism, and sexual trauma, among children who identify as trans? All these concerns and others like them must never be voiced. To voice them is to violate the central premise of the new Eliot policies: all gender identities are inherently real and must be affirmed.
Do you find Dylan Mulvaney’s perception of what it means to “be a girl” to be based in the vilest sexist stereotypes imaginable? Does hearing that someone is a man because she “thinks like a man” remind you of sexist remarks about women’s mental capacities dominant in days of old? Don’t talk about these thoughts at camp or where anyone from the Eliot community may hear you. The Safe Community Team has said that “[s]peech that invalidates the expressed identity of another is not respectful” and is grounds for banishment. You must affirm all identities, regardless of sexist stereotypes you affirm along with them.
Does it bug you that lesbians who won’t date trans-identifying men are being punished severely for their so-called “genital fetishes?” Adjust your thinking if you want to attend camp. Opposite sex individuals pressuring lesbians are not opposite sex at all, by virtue of self identification. Failing to agree with that means you are not respecting “trans women’s” identities.
Did you watch our video or read articles we’ve written like this and this, and did these trigger in you any doubts about the Eliot Board’s decision to promote gender ideology and eject its critics? The safer strategy would have been striving for ignorance of anything beyond the narrative presented at camp. If wrongthink now resides in your mind, you must be sure to not accidentally verbalize it. Challenges to gender ideology are forbidden.
Unitarians: Siding with Bullies and Ignorance.
The irony of it all, of course, is this: the Eliot Board and Safe Community Team believe that they’re fostering inclusion. They’re not. They’re opting to exclude long-time members based on absurd accusations. They’re opting to exclude anybody who doesn’t agree with gender identity ideology—gender critics, most Muslims and people of other religious faiths for whom sex-based privacy is important, and others.
Even as they speak about kindness and compassion, the Board and the Safe Community Team are engaging in an act of utter cruelty. Such acts are typical of the gender identity “Be Kind Brigade.” We are not the only people who have been torn from beloved communities. Nor is the Eliot community the only one we’ve lost over this issue. In fact, one of our major concerns about gender ideology is its cult-like ability to persuade people to be mean to others, including people they love. Gender ideology is tearing families and communities apart. It is isolating and demoralizing people in a world where there’s already far too much isolation and demoralization going on.
A popular yard sign says: “Kindness is everything.” But it isn’t. One must strive to be informed as well. In the absence of being informed, those who wish to be kind can end up advocating things that accomplish precisely the opposite of what they want.
This is what is happening with Gender Identity Ideology. The Unitarians who expelled us fervently believe that they are on the side of advancing justice, fighting sexist stereotypes, fighting homophobia, and helping children to be healthy and thrive. On each of these fronts, they are dead wrong. They would understand that if they sat down and spoke with people like Bruce and me and read our materials and those of others like us.
Similarly, Eliot leaders fervently believe that they are protecting powerless trans-identifying people from bullies. An objective examination of what’s been going on around this issue in general, and what happened in our case specifically, reveals that those leaders are siding with the bullies, not against them. The Safe Community Team and the Eliot Board have become the bullies.
Eliot leaders believe they are modeling respectful behavior towards people who identify as trans or nonbinary. But what message does their utter disrespect towards Bruce and me actually send to those individuals? It tells them that they are too fragile to ever be able to face the reality that some people don’t agree with their self-perceptions. That they’re too weak to survive hearing views from people who have perspectives different from their own. It doesn’t get more disrespectful than that.
Eliot leaders are also telling those who identify as trans or nonbinary: “You’re so fragile, that we’ll evict anyone who upsets you. Just say the word, and they’ll be gone.” This is not the vision of what it means to empower vulnerable individuals—of what it means to be a force for social justice—that should be advanced by Unitarians or anyone else. This is not the vision that should be presented as laudatory to children in our communities.
Eliot leaders have been completely captured by gender identity ideology. They are forcing it down the throats of all who attend their camps, banning those who object. They are integrating promotion of gender identity tenets into everything they do, including most disturbingly, the children’s program. And they are doing all of this while intentionally hearing only the voices of trans “rights” activists and their allies.
They made no effort to talk with us or other gender critics who have extensive knowledge about this topic before they adopted their new affirmation-only gender identity policy. They appear to be not only ignorant of extremely important developments in our world bearing on this issue (which you can read about in my recent article here), but proudly so. Given what is at stake, especially with respect to children, the Board’s decision to remain uninformed is extremely reckless.
Conclusion
Bruce and I are very sad to lose our long-time community. I wept while typing the Farewell section above. As we age, and as we grapple with issues like impending nuclear war, the situation in Gaza, and ecological crises, losing this community is a major blow. Losing our beloved annual respite from the world is painful.
Nonetheless, if we had a chance to do things over again, we wouldn’t change a thing. We had no choice but to speak up. We are principled human beings who care about civil rights and protecting children from harm. Eliot is going in the wrong direction, and we had to say so.
We could not and will not abandon the victims of gender ideology, such as the women imprisoned near Seabeck. We could not and will not be part of the huge harm visited upon children via gender identity. We could not and will not agree that 2+2=5 in order to retain our spot in a community we have loved.
May those who remain in the Eliot community and within the larger Unitarian world, find the courage to look closely at the full picture of what is happening in the name of gender identity ideology. May you find the courage to join us in challenging that ideology.
If you are affiliated with the Unitarians or have considered affiliation, please, express your outrage regarding what has been done to us. Send messages to [email protected] and address them to the Eliot Board of Directors.
P.S. Here is a link to an Open Letter to Unitarians that Bruce and I are publishing.
P.P.S. For old time’s sake and for Elioteers reading this article, here’s a photo of me singing about ecological degradation to the tune of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables several years ago. I was Mother Earth, pleading with a future Eliot community to better protect the planet. Bruce (on the left) and others in the photo were playing future August campers in this scene. The musical was written and directed by Bruce.
P. P.P.S. To those attending Unitarian camps, don’t forget to:
and
