This is the second of three kick-off posts on my blog, which are meant to reflect on the events leading up to its launch and on my departure from Fate and Challenge (FCA). In my farewell post there (Wayback Machine) I wrote of two main reasons: a lack of coordination within the team and disagreements about the kind of political activism our organization should engage in. The farewell text can also be found here on my website.
I think I’ve written enough about the ability and willingness to reach and maintain agreements: the same decisions had to be renegotiated again and again, and even written arrangements were sometimes treated as loose recommendations by some. With these conditions, I hadn't been doing well in the FCA team for some time. Until the fall of 2022, I still had the illusion that this might somehow be resolved amicably soon. But things weren't moving forward and so I stopped running into this wall and turned the corner to continue on my own path instead. Leaving an loved organization behind is one of the strongest forms of protest possible.
During the same period, the relation to “Mascha” (from the [GSA forum][gsa]) also changed. In 2016, we became friends and have done some promising joint educational work. We had planned to do much more but things went quiet in 2018. Later her behavior became so toxic that I made a final attempt at mediation with the board members of FCA present. When that didn’t lead to any insight on her side either, there was nothing left but to terminate my long-standing friendship and cooperation with her. (I won't go into details, as I expect the same from Mascha) This only had a limited connection with my departure from FCA, but her strong influence on the team is one of the factors that have led to its unbearable condition in my opinion.
As for political activism, I wrote about “divergent views”. I have received feedback that my farewell message was unclear on this point. So I’ll go into more detail here.
According to my observations, our discrimination has slowly but steadily decreased somewhat until 2016/17, but then this trend reversed. Until now the situation of pedophiles and their supporters has gotten a lot worse, especially in terms of freedom of speech. This causes helplessness, fear and anger in many people affected by this. In me too. What could be more obvious than doing something about it? To demand a change in unfair conditions?
It is understandable that requests were made to FCA as an association to use our position for concrete demands on politicians. As a respectable organization within the community and probably the oldest project of its kind, FCA has simply become THE place to go for German-speakers.
Around the beginning of November 2022, the association was informed at very short notice of an upcoming conference of the state ministers of justice, at which criticism of the recent tightening of criminal law was to be discussed. As a reminder: earlier the German government had passed laws against “sex dolls with a childlike appearance”, the definition of “child pornographic content” had been drastically expanded and the penalties for these and related offenses had been significantly increased. All against the advice of specialists that had been brought in specifically for consultations regarding these laws. Gilgamesh, a committed and eloquent GSA forum member, suggested writing to the ministries to present some arguments and also provided a very good draft for such a letter. Caspar immediately agreed and, under considerable time pressure, worked with NewMan to rewrite the draft to reflect what he believed to be the consensus within the team/association. Within a few days, they sent it out to the ministers of justice of the German federal states on behalf of the association.
All that happened…
Leon and I felt like we were being treated like air by this approach. I also felt publicly humiliated because my objection had been ignored. In addition, I mistakenly felt even more hurt: at the time, I assumed that we had established a veto rule in our moderation guidelines for emergencies involving major technical disagreements, so that a member of the board could stop any action taken by the association with immediate effect—until the board formally convened and made a new democratic decision. But there is no such rule. Years later, I can no longer understand how exactly this misunderstanding came about. As I understand it, the most experienced people should be on the board and have the opportunity to intervene quickly if they see the association on a problematic course.
At the time, it seemed to me Caspar was going at it as if there was no tomorrow: only after the letter was sent did he respond to my messages again. I discussed the events with him and with NewMan in a long phone call. NewMan told me at the time that he didn't know anything about my veto and had acted with Caspar in the belief that everything was fine. As I recall, it became clear to me during the conversation that they, along with a few other forum and association members, saw the role of the Fate and Challenge Association as intervening even more directly in politics than before, with concrete demands against discriminatory laws. NewMan denies this stance today.
I disagree. Why?
My view of the political system is shaped by my faith. That's a big reason why I parted ways with the FCA team: I cannot reconcile the expansion of our work in a political direction (as I understood it in that phone call) with my Christian beliefs and conscience. Jesus said that his servants should “not be a part of the world” and he himself focussed his life's work on just one single task (preaching the “good news”), although he certainly would have been more than qualified to address many other social issues of his time. In his way he did address a lot of them – hypocrisy, predjudice, nationalism, sexism – but his priority lay somewhere else. I understand this along with other details from the New Testament as a call not to interfere in political matters beyond activities similar like civil education.
Admittedly, however, this is only relevant to me personally.
For FCA as an organization, I also see substantial secular reasons to give clear priority to the path of support and education over further political engagement. Reasons apart from not wanting to lose me. When I thought about the nature of these reasons in November 2022, the phrase “the journey is the destination” came to my mind very often and I began to write a narration about it. The difference I see between direct support work and working on the political-legal situation: one approach brings positive results right from the very first step, the other only later and possibly not at all. You can find this tale here under the title “Flowers along the way” .
Democracy and the Rule of Law are undoubtedly valuable assets in our society. But politics is also notoriously dishonest, corrupt, slow and conflicted. At FCA, too, we had begun to leave team meetings with only a minimal consensus and the uneasy feeling that we were producing far more compromises than genuine cooperation.
The endeavor to improve politics in a deliberate manner works in a fundamentally different way to self-help and (in my opinion) wears out even extremely committed people, often leaving them burnt out or disillusioned. It takes a lot of work, there is a lot of potential to fall out, you often work with frustrating, sometimes bad compromises and it is unclear whether you will achieve success for yourself and others or even get nothing worthwhile in return.
In short: a lot of effort and frustration for unlikely maybe-successes.
The core objectives of Fate and Challenge have always included self-help, education and destigmatization. I have wanted to drastically expand on these since 2016 and to operate them more professionally in the future: developing educational material/workshops and proactively approaching disseminators and institutions. I thought that the addition of a forum and more team members would distribute the workload and thus create the capacity to do more. These plans were always approved verbally by the team, even when we later founded the association. Nevertheless, for years I only saw two such actions—and a whole lot of one-off initiatives. The daily operation of the forum, the attacks of 2018, users who pushed our team to its limits, internal disagreements – that took up all of our time and energy. And then you bring in politics as an additional drain on resources? Or prioritize new, uncoordinated personal ambitions over this expansion of FCA’s core goals?
I view these “core objectives” as so important, as they are something where we can reach people directly and definitely make a difference. They are largely independent of most legal changes, even if such changes can of course make it easier or more difficult to work in this area. A person who gains an important insight through peer-support—no legislation in the world can ever take it away from them! Although such a commitment is challenging, it also gives back a lot of energy and encouragement.
In short: worthwhile efforts and definite successes.
(I have published more detailed thoughts on the comparison of self-help and political work at Kinder im Herzen already in summer 2023. I may revise this article for M2C at a later date based on the feedback I received there).
If someone offers you a bag of money and someone else offers you a bag that might contain money, which one would you take? It's obvious, right?
Given the choice of following a path where a reward may be waiting at the end, or one where the path itself is the goal and rewards both me and others, I clearly choose the second option. To plant flowers along the way already.
For these reasons and even more, it would have been important for me to leave direct political endeavors to other organizations (or to the private efforts of my team mates), but to clearly focus the work of FCA on self-help, raising awareness and education in accordance with the saying “A cobbler should stick to his last” and further expand our activities in this area.
I hope this makes my position and my decisions of the past 2-3 years a little clearer.
Transparency note: At FCA's request, some sections of this text have been revised. Most recently in January 2026.
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