@MarkAmery I would answer, truthfully, but I am exhausted with being asked to explain myself over and over for the past week. There are some deep flaws in the messages you've sent me that run deeper than a pronoun issue.
user206222
5:15 PM
And that's really the problem. Pronouns aren't the issue, but vocal advocacy against using they/them like you would any other pronoun betrays a deeper lack of understanding about who trans people are.
user206222
This isn't really the cachet answer, though. People don't like to be told, "you've misunderstood this, so please just do it and then learn on your own time." People want the answer to be justified, and that puts us in the position of having to justify it to every person we meet.
user206222
So what I'm essentially saying is: You know less than you think you do. Give us the benefit of the doubt and use they/them pronouns as you would any other, without asking us to teach you, to explain, to justify, to defend. And then, maybe once we're on human respect terms, we can talk about gender and what it actually means.
3
user206222
I realize I'm essentially skirting past everything you've written, but truthfully, it's just not a discussion worth having yet.
@OrangeDog I perfectly understand, I didn't take it that way.
user206222
> “The function, the very serious function of racism, is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is.
user206222
5:22 PM
> Someone says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.” -Toni Morrison
I think one (perhaps unsolvable) problem with this dilemma is that the internet is fundamentally impersonal, and teaches you at every turn to take nothing on faith, to verify everything said to you. To avoid being burned, everyone acquires a high amount of natural skepticism
@Magisch I think it's worth recasting this in the light of a deliberate structure of power. There is already skepticism about minorities groups in the public eye; whenever we pop up in public conversation, that skepticism turns laser-like. There's a reason it has reconstructed itself so virulently in the modern internet culture.
@Magisch not just that, but the agents of doubt know how to manipulate the conversation to insist on proof that is impossible tangibly get. They know this which is why they do it.
Imagine casually mentioning that and then you spend the next 2 hours in discussion to validate your existence. Tiring if nothing else. But it's a natural function of the amount of distrust and natural defensiveness the internet breeds in everybody
I wish I had a solution to it. My only way of dealing with it is to hide away every extraneous detail about myself. To pass as uninteresting as possible. Because I don't have the emotional energy to justify myself every hour of every day. It never stops.
user206222
Also: just like with racism, people who aren't trans are gonna have to grapple with the fact that they have transphobia within them. But it comes in degrees, and thinking about it as a binary "you are or are not capital-T Transphobic" is a lil reductive. Asking us to defend ourselves is a transphobia. It's not the same as, for example, purposefully advocating damaging information, which has also happened over the past week, though I don't think by your hand.
what is a "troll"? i've always thought of trolling as a to point out hypocrisy (make everyone play by the same rules), but it has been mentioned to me that trolls, or trolling can be darker than that.
Hey @Aza I'm on mobile and not going to be on here for more than a second, but I wouldn't mind your feedback on my edit to my resignation post. Does that clarification help it sound less like ridicule? Even a little less? I'll check replies later, thanks.
@Magisch I have a friend that didn't understand what I said when I explained that I have to live with the fact that people I know and am friends with could literally be the people at a pogrom tomorrow where I die... it took them awhile to get that things aren't always simple.
user206222
@Caleb Nah, you're digging the hole deeper. Just being bluntly honest.
Sometimes it is acceptable to use he, man, dude irrespective of the gender or species, but it is informal and rather frowned upon. e.g. They found a whale in Dublin bay yesterday, he is dead now.
Some people default to thinking people online are male. A fewer number default to female, and an even fewer number have been online enough to internalize not defaulting to any gender.
I'd be worried people might start getting offended "my profile says I'm a them, but this person called me a he" if you put pronoun info in profiles
user206222
There's also a dynamic to Twitter pronouns. If you list 'em it keeps hostile people outta your mentions, because they see pronouns and nope out. Even if you're not trans.
@MikeTheLiar We had a problem in my community with moderator benefiting their own questions, there's nothing you can really do other than call them out on it and let time pass
If you've seen me around you already know which side of this I'm on. That's irrelevant. I'm not having a debate here if it can't be kept civil, and a debate that turned nasty in the first 5 messages is not one that's going to stay civil.
@Bart yep. Sad part was that when he got 90 his mental capabilities were kind of gone but strange enough he would still singalong all his lyrics when a piano played one of his tunes.
