It’s Not “Carceral” To Deplatform A Rapist

Consequences are not punishment

Ever since #MeToo in 2017, and especially since the Black uprising in 2020, I have seen more and more people adopt (or at least exploit) abolitionist, transformative justice, and rehabilitative justice frameworks in the context of scene politics. By “scene politics” I mean our approach to power dynamics in local creative and subcultural spaces, like drag scenes, rave scenes, standup, punk, kink, etc. I don’t claim to have all the answers when it comes to navigating conflict and abuse in our semi-private social worlds. But I do have one thing I’d like us to stop immediately, and that’s the vague, uncritical co-optation of the word “carceral.” In most cases, this appears to be part of a bigger confusion between punishment and basic accountability. Resolving this confusion is essential for the integrity of our community spaces, but it isn’t as simple as just reading the right books. If we’re going to address our own patterns of harm effectively, we need to stop divorcing “carceral” from the material reality of the prison industrial complex, and start engaging in far more serious solidarity with the liberation of our neighbors and neighborhoods.

Have you ever dared to suggest that an alleged rapist should get dropped from a bill until they meaningfully respond to their allegations? Have you ever argued that a person who hit their ex-partner should lose access to a scene space that ex frequents? How about that a person should leave an event after receiving allegations of harassment from other present attendees? If so, you may have been accused of being “carceral,” or applying “carceral logic” to your scene politics.

I’ll speak here just for my local context of trans/queer Brooklyn, particularly the transplant-dominated scenes I’m part of that have exploded since the start of the pandemic. I have no notion that my perspective here is universal. I know this problem is bigger than my circles, though, and I hope the insight is useful for people in other cities, and other parts of New York.

My issue is not with the basic drive to identify and root out ways that state authority, policing, and the prison manifest in our scenes. That motivation is good and right. The prison industrial complex shapes every aspect of our moral and political universe. It’s so pervasive that, living within it, we have to put in effort to understand how it works and what it looks like. In good faith, I would like to think this is the motivation behind some leftists’ urge to align basic community accountability with incarceration. 

The problem comes when the material reality of the carceral system undergoes twenty or thirty layers of abstraction and prison becomes nothing more than a rhetorical territory for the scene leftist to pontificate about. Abolitionist ideas come from critical analyses of the prison industrial complex and its manifestations in US culture, which build upon generations of revolutionary feminist thought and the Black radical tradition. Scene leftists then render these theories through a sloppy and uncritical process into a vague, misapplied idea of “carceral logic,” which they use as a cudgel to break any move towards accountability for people who cause harm. This is frequently done by white scene leftists with no material investment in the liberation of actually incarcerated people.

Let me clarify what I mean by “scene leftists.” It’s somewhat in vogue among the radical queers in my own personal context to denigrate scene politics as frivolous and unimportant. I believe it’s naive of us to imagine ourselves as being organized into anything but scenes at the present moment. Most of us are not organized into anything more sophisticated than a scene, though efforts do exist. Local scenes are a major part of how we form larger communities, organized or not. A bunch of trans punks in a basement is not a revolution, but a punk scene can play — and historically has played — a vital grassroots role in forming the kind of coalitional organized power required to drive mass structural change. 

After being displaced from New Hampshire and stumbling into a permanent move to New York, I found my way into a punk scene. Brooklyn Transcore (BKTC) is an organized collective with fourteen years of history, which was recently explored in an excellent oral history zine by documentarian/local punk Antonio Rodriguez. When I showed up to my first tranny punk show in Brooklyn, I’d never taken a dose of estrogen in my life. It was The Dilators opening for Winter Wolf at a bar in East Williamsburg and I went with a girl I met on Lex and her roommate. We would soon become dear friends. I was getting misgendered so frequently at my job that correcting people wasn’t even a viable strategy anymore. I was living in a dogshit sublet with some Swiss asshole who liked to scream at me through my bedroom door. I had gone through a breakup the week before and I had only a handful of local friends.

Transcore was a huge part of what got me on my feet. It’s where I solidified relationships with some of my first trans friends in Brooklyn. When I was threatened out of my subsequent housing situation — not by a cis person this time, but unfortunately another transsexual — it was a BKTC friend who put me up in her spare room. BKTC was the first social environment I’d ever been in that made me believe transitioning was something that could bring direction to my life, rather than set me adrift. Before BKTC, I couldn’t really imagine a future for myself in transition. It took doing poppers at a Punk Island afterparty with like fifty other faggots for me to believe I had a role to play in the world.

Anyone in splash radius of this scene in 2023 knows where this is going. A series of sexual assault allegations, each in the span of about a year, knocked the collective on its ass. It’s been two years since that time, and Brooklyn Transcore is still very much alive. In fact, it’s about to host its own stage at Punk Island for the twelfth year running. But significantly, it no longer holds open meetings and only rarely organizes shows. This step back was an intentional move that organizers decided on for the integrity of BKTC at large, and I take no issue with it — but the absence is apparent. Before those allegations, New York trans punks had a monthly meeting space where we could set goals, form working groups, and start new bands. Such a space is still possible, of course, but as of yet we remain stuck in that setback. We've not put one together. 

A funny thing as it all fell apart: all sides of the conflict were appealing to a common rhetorical baseline of abolition, transformative justice, and rehabilitative justice. With each wave of reaction, backlash, and counter-backlash, earnest queers cited the same talking points — often much paraphrased — from writers like Kai Cheng Thom, Sarah Schulman, adrienne maree brown, and Mariame Kaba, not to mention anti-cancel culture influencers like Clementine Morrigan who process down ideas from those writers for an Instagram audience. In the wake of one person’s allegations, I remember, a minor social media clash happened where a friend of the accused made a story post claiming that exile and public callouts are punitive tactics rooted in carceral logic. Meanwhile, somebody close to the survivor made their own post underlining the urgent need to use all options available to us for accountability in the scene, precisely because independent problem-solving is so necessary under a cruel and ineffective criminal legal system. 

I believe the main problem here is a conflation of consequences with punishment, and in turn, punishment with carcerality. This conflation is super convenient for the parties alleged to have caused harm. It confuses and freezes up any meaningful effort to pursue accountability, and at least implicitly, shifts blame onto the accuser for being a bad leftist.  Here’s an excerpt from a 2018 interview between two of the authors I mentioned above, adrienne maree brown and Mariame Kaba, that helps capture this idea:

We might say that accountability, in its most basic definition, means consequences for a person’s actions.

The threat of being labeled carceral, or even sometimes a narc or a cop, is so pervasive that it frequently prevents us from even attempting to hold each other accountable in cases of serious harm. The general failure of punks in (what was then known as) the Brooklyn Transcore scene to effectively rally around survivors and demand accountability from the people alleged to have assaulted other queers, was in large part a result of this confusion between consequence and punishment. This failure reflects a lack of clarity in our politics and a lack of conviction in our praxis. Crucially, the dysfunction here cannot be described as simple “confusion.”

The deeper problem here is a failure, mainly by white scene leftists like myself, to meaningfully engage with abolition as a movement for the liberation of incarcerated people, rooted in the struggle of Black and Brown people under the criminal legal system. 

Put another way, you know what’s carceral? Bitch, jail. What if we pulled back for a second and started with that. Here’s a point where we do need to recognize our scenes as small, humble things, not indicative of the bigger picture of our oppression and only circumstantially useful in our liberation. A given artist’s performance career may be personally important to them, but we should have the perspective to recognize that this cannot be the center of our politics. That artist’s platform at a show space is not revolutionary. Their deplatforming following allegations of rape or abuse is not counter-revolutionary. This is not a word game or a metaphor. These are important questions, yeah, but we need to keep our eye on the ball.

While New Yorkers are being sent to Trump’s concentration camp in El Salvador, Eric Adams has greenlit ICE operations at Rikers Island. As of May 2025, five people have died at Rikers in the current year for a total of thirty-eight deaths that we know of during the Adams administration. Meanwhile, with the city on track to completely fail in its legally binding plan to close Rikers by 2027, the Borough-Based Jails Project is surging forward with plans to create four new jails in every borough but Staten Island, drastically increasing the city’s capacity to incarcerate. That means we could very well be getting duped by city government into multiplying our jails rather than closing them, like they fucking said they were gonna do. 

They have already poured concrete at the site of the new Brooklyn jail on 275 Atlantic Avenue. Construction is underway as I type this.

Queer joy is not enough: our scenes should work to stop fascists from killing us and our neighbors. This should not be a secondary goal. Both for the sake of those of us who experience interpersonal violence — which, let’s be real, is everyone — and for the sake of those of us who experience state violence, we need to actualize our commitment to abolition beyond a crude rhetorical appeal here and there when a friend gets accused of rape.

I’m convinced that, as long as our scene politics remain stuck in the theoretical debates of liberal arts school transplants, we will not have a functional model to address harm in the queer/trans community. Our liberation is tied up in the liberation of all of our neighbors, queer or not, irrespective of scene and even identity. We learn to care for ourselves by caring for others; also by reading theory and developing our principles, yeah, but more importantly by maintaining a consistent abolitionist praxis. This means moving critically and decisively to keep ourselves safe, whether from the state or from the mistakes of hurt people in our own ranks. 

There are cop and ICE watches in neighborhoods all over the city. There’s legal assistance, if you or someone you know is a lawyer. There’s a movement to stop the new Cop City in Queens. There is a growing movement to Stop Brooklyn Jail, emerging out of longstanding abolitionist efforts within the movement to Shut Down Rikers, whose message has been co-opted by a city government completely uninterested in making good on that aim. There’s letter writing events where you can get in direct correspondence with your incarcerated neighbors. If you're already in contact with someone incarcerated, there are infinite possibilities to provide direct aid to people inside, raising money for commissary and legal fees. There are regularly meeting, longstanding jail support efforts in Brooklyn and beyond. Get on a secure line (not a Meta platform) and start looking!

Meanwhile, we need to get to a place in our scene politics where we can respond to serious in-group conflict with confidence and decisiveness. Accept that there must be consequences for our actions. Accountability demands consequences of some kind, and consequences are not necessarily punishments. We are all fucked up; we’re bound to hurt each other, sometimes very badly. If we expect to have the communal integrity to take on any big challenge and win, we need to get our house in order — even as we look beyond it to the liberation of our neighbors. With all the love in the world, this means not booking rapists who refuse to take accountability, not tolerating sexual harassment in our spaces, and maybe dropping that DJ who hits her partners from her spot at the trans event.

This is messy and hard for everybody involved, but in the vital, humble context of a queer scene, it’s a great start. 

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