I have resigned and requested the deletion of my account in MAP Support Club. I no longer have faith or trust in the leadership of MAP Support Club for reasons that are mostly confidential to staff channels in MAP Support Club.

With that being said, here is what I will share because I think these items do need a whistleblower:

• MAP Support Club senior staff are slow to make obvious moderation decisions, if they’re made at all, even when failure to do so puts the community’s safety at risk. Every single detail is put to a vote, which contributes to the slowness.
• I have pushed for safeguarding policy and more transparent staff moderation policies/procedures, which have been sat on for over a year with nothing being implemented or discussed, even while it would speed up moderation decisions.
• MAP Support Club staff have repeatedly resisted implementing a rule whereby staff members are not allowed to go off-platform with minor members, which is common to many youth-serving organizations. While this has not yet caused any serious issue, not implementing such a rule is irresponsible and so is actively fighting it.
• New members aren’t vetted as carefully as they should be and concerns are dismissed or disregarded. Part of this is lack of staff, but only a small part.
• The senior staff team alienated two returning guides that had been there less than two weeks to the point they resigned.
• I don’t feel supported by the senior leadership of MAP Support Club and I don’t feel their decisions are transparent, responsible, or safe for the community. I know I’m not alone in that.

There are many more reasons why I am resigning that I cannot go into detail on because it would put the community’s member’s safety at risk. I have spent a lot of time, money, and effort advocating for the MAP community and rather than receiving support or the community coming together to organize against the unjustified bigotry, people insist on scrutinizing such advocates such that any decision made feels like the wrong one – while doing nothing productive besides. It isn’t worth the anguish and frustration. When you put as much time, money, and effort into things as I have, you expect the people you’re doing it for to support you and help you along the way. The MAP community and MAP Support Club especially has not done that. I’m exhausted, frustrated, and just plain done. I can’t support others when I’m this disillusioned and exhausted.

MAP Support Club has no reasonable accountability. There is no process by which I can make a reasonable appeal to someone in charge and have my concerns heard and quickly acted on. That leaves me the only recourse of calling out what I believe are failures on the part of the leadership team in this public manner. I believe it would be irresponsible to observe these failures and stay silent about these failures. I would hope that the staff focus on righting these wrongs rather than grandstanding to MAP Support Club members.

If ventures like MAP Support Club are to succeed long term, they need a proper organizational structure with clearly defined rules, policies, and procedures that people are familiar with and follow, where the entire staff team takes the initiative to get things done rather than relying so heavily on a single person’s contribution. MAP Support Club had periods in the last two years where it would have been wiser to make many channels read-only and stop accepting invites to give staff time and space to put those structures in place. They chose not to. Organization and leadership should be the proper next steps, not joking about a coup or being dictator. Advocacy and support is serious work and the more hands that help improve things for everybody. I don’t know if that can happen with the current team without some serious hard work and fresh perspectives that are heard and actioned.

I am done advocating for minor-attracted people, I am done in MAP Support Club, and I sincerely hope they can get their shit together so that minor-attracted people can get the support and civility we deserve. Continuing these failures will continue to make that an uphill battle. Someone else will need to take over Pedophiles About Pedophilia in the next year.

To those of you who believe in MAP Support Club and the idea of better supports for minor-attracted people, I think there are a lot of cultural things that must change in order to make that idea a reality. I feel like I’m failing you by resigning, at the same time I have tried for years to beg the community to better support its most prominent advocates and to organize better to be more effective, to no avail and little concrete action. There is no teamwork, there is the hard work of single individuals like Bly, Ender, and myself and those people stay in it until we burn out. This is not a healthy environment to do advocacy work in and that must change.

To the antis, haters, and people who think there’s something nefarious going on behind the scenes: If you want to help protect children, go actually learn the issue before you talk out of your asshole. If you can’t put in the time, then fuck you and keep your mouth shut. Keeping people from support or demanding support that’s unethical isn’t protecting children, it’s making primary prevention work harder.