Lily or Harmony was not the one who asked for Bambi’s persona to be identified as queer in the images and in Barbados those laws are rarely enforced and under review. I watched the whole shit show play out. Lily might be a lot of things but she does not have a conservative background. She grew up in foster care and spent much of her life homeless. She obviously has a serious set of challenges and issues but it still doesn’t make sense to me why she did this. This article does a great job of illustrating all that is wrong with the sw movement. There’s a lot of room for improvement here. Just wondering why Peech wasn’t asked to participate in the roundtable or the other few black and Latina sex workers that have contributed to tItsandsass that people would actually be able to verify who they are?

And the woman was very gracious about it, wasn’t whorephobic at all. Justifiably enraged, but she didn’t lash out.

I’ve just been advised that @##bambi is the woman who was catfished’s Instagram name and so she is associated it. I’ll talk to the author of this post about what to do about this.

Hi, I am confused about this is as the woman whose photo was appropriated’s name was clearly not Bambi. Please advise. “Bambi” was entirely an invention, and I feel that the POC who were hurt by this have a right to discuss the fabrication of this WOC identity.

Let’s keep the accountability focused on Lily, rather than the names of woc (and twoc) whose identities have been appropriated.

Thank you.

And I’ll chime in on the mental illness part, as a former sex worker and life-long crazy person whose illness sometimes gets very severe: nope. Mental illness can lower your inhibitions, warp your perceptions, and thereby effect your relationships, but it can’t change your pre-existing value systems in such a way that a mental breakdown will make you a whole new type of person. You don’t *suddenly become* someone who engages in a months-long campaign of racial psychological abuse in intimate online relationships with actual women of color and perpetrates a huge racist scam bent on breaking the only trust system a community has in the face of violence– unless those aspects of your personality were already there somewhere.

What I’m saying is what’s in the title: it’s racism. She did it because of internal racist values and because of allll the external racism Peechington Marie describes here. Further speculation as to the minutiae of her motivations is useless at this distance except as a way to distract from that racism. So let’s not.