Founder, Human, Target:

The Auditing of a Non-Binary Leader in an Anti-Racist Space

The Container

For nearly two years, I built and held a container. Its purpose was specific, its framing clear: a community for European Americans, to do the granular, uncomfortable, and necessary work of deconstructing the white supremacy woven into our thoughts, our reflexes, and our nation. This was not a therapy room. It was a community of practice. We found educators, held workshops, shared readings, and built networks of mutual aid. The community was the goal; healing was a byproduct of the shared, outward-facing labor and the genuine connection that labor forged.

An incredible, hard-won trust formed the walls of this container. Members would message me not only about the work, but to ask, “How are you doing?” My leadership was stewardship, my authority was relational, and my humanity—including my identity as a non-binary person—was a known and integral part of the ecosystem. It was a covenant, built on the understanding that we would show up for the work and for each other.

In three months, the trust has been torched.

The container built to hold our collective struggle is now the weapon in a private one. I am no longer a facilitator, but a perpetual defendant. What I have learned, at great personal cost, is a brutal lesson in modern movement politics: some people join a community to nurture it. Others join to autopsy it.

The Unequal Ledger: Accountability as Extraction

The word “accountability” hangs in the air now, thick with accusation. It has been severed from its true meaning—a mutual contract for repair that strengthens bonds—and weaponized into its opposite: a system of unilateral extraction.

The labor of this community is concrete: designing curricula, facilitating fraught discussions, managing logistics, and holding the emotional center of a group confronting its own poison. For a year, I modeled this labor and pleaded for others to share it. The original covenant was built on that shared effort.

The new dynamic inverts this. Some members critique the structure but refuse to build. Demanding unearned access to educators, which is not mine to give, and resources cultivated over years, as if these relationships were a public utility to be tapped, not bonds of mutual respect to be earned. The implicit demand is clear: “Extract the fruits of your labor for our benefit, while we stand apart and judge the quality of the harvest.”

Worse, they audit the very mechanism of my work. They edit my communications, dissect my facilitation choices, and turn steering meetings into tribunals. I am asked to be infinitely accountable for the process while they accept zero responsibility for the substance or their own accountability. This is not accountability. This is a profoundly unequal ledger. I am expected to make endless withdrawals of my labor and spirit into an account from which few deposit. I am on trial for being the only one doing the work.

The Founder as Paradox: When Identity Becomes the Weapon

This is where the analysis must deepen, moving from frustrating group dynamics to the underlying pathology. To ask if this is an issue with having a non-binary founder is to ask the central question. The answer is a resounding, painful yes.

In the white, cisgender imagination, even a progressive one, leadership often carries an unexamined archetype: it is cisgender, traditionally authoritative, and commands a certain deference. As a non-binary founder, I am a category error in this social programming. A marginalized person is not “supposed” to hold this much unambiguous, founding authority, especially in a space about their moral reckoning. The relentless scrutiny is an unconscious attempt to resolve this dissonance, to pressure me into a more familiar, compliant form.

My identity is not ignored; it is weaponized.

• Hyper-Scrutiny as Othering: The constant correction of my tone and decisions marks me as “different,” someone whose natural mode of leadership must be continuously edited to fit a cis-normative standard.

• Demanding Care While Denying My Humanity: They insist I “consider their humanity” in every interaction—a classic demand placed on marginalized people to center the dominant group’s comfort. Yet, my own humanity is rendered irrelevant, my pain illegitimate, because I am framed solely as “the founder,” a position of power that, in their view, cancels out my marginalization. This is cis-supremacy in action, isolating identity from context to maintain a hierarchy.

• “Accountability” as a Biased Stress Test: The demands are a gauntlet run designed for me alone. The goal is to see if I will crack, conform, or quit—thereby “proving” I was never “strong enough” to lead and restoring the expected social order.

This is the cruelest irony: a group formed to dismantle white supremacy is perfectly replicating the logic of supremacy along gender lines. They understand dominance as an abstract theory about race, but fail to recognize it as a lived structure they are currently enacting. Cisnormativity, cloaked in the language of anti-racist accountability, is conducting a silent coup.

Photo by Jimmy Chan

The Call: From Unequal Ledger to Shared Covenant

A community that cannot distinguish between holding a leader accountable and holding a human being hostage is not a failed community; it is a community facing its defining choice. The easy path is the audit—the dissection, the scapegoating, the silent watching. The hard, pro-humanity path is the repair of the covenant.

This is not my choice to make alone. It is the group’s collective responsibility. But the silence of the majority is a vote for the status quo. To those who remember the original trust, who have sent a caring message, or who simply feel the chill in the room: your intervention is now the work.

The call to action is this:

1. Name the Dynamic Publicly. The first person to say, "This feels like a trial, not a dialogue," breaks the spell. It must not be me. It has to be you.

2. Re-center Labor. When a critique of process is voiced, the immediate next question must be: "How will you help build the alternative?" Shift the currency from criticism to contribution.

3. Instate a Rule of Reciprocity. Propose this: For every piece of critical feedback offered, we must first be able to name one thing we are actively doing to build the community, and one act of care we have offered. This ties accountability to investment.

4. Interrogate the Bias. Have the courage to ask, aloud: "Are we holding our founder to a standard we would not apply to a cisgender leader? Is our scrutiny proportionate, or is it a demand for perfection born of our own discomfort?"

I did not build a container to be its first sacrifice. I built it to be proof that a different way is possible. That we can confront the poison in our history without brewing new poisons in our midst.

The audit has been exhaustive. The findings are in. The ledger is unequal, the trust is bleeding, and the founder is human. The question is no longer what is happening, but what will we, collectively, do about it?

The path of the audit leads to an empty room, a dissected mission, and another story of a marginalized leader burned out by their own allies. The path of the repaired covenant is harder. It requires humility from the critical, courage from the silent, and a renewed, fierce protection of everyone’s humanity; especially of those we have wrongly cast as symbols instead of people.

I am choosing the path of the covenant. I am here, doing the work. The call to action is for you to join me on that harder, human path, not as my judges, but as my co-builders once more.