Like it literally said “trans people should be able to do whatever the fuck they want with their body, I don’t care, it doesn’t effect me” and like 5 people were like “you ‘don’t care’ about trans people?
This is why I keep quiet on issues like that, someone will always say you are wrong for not having their exact opinion and wording. Had a similar thing when I said a 5 year old boy can wear a dress without being a girl, just let them do what they want.
That isn’t literally what the person said, though. The modlog and profile on hexbear does show that they did also argue to post less about trans support, argued for people showing less support and did not accept when other, trans!, people explained their view and why he ought to chill out at least.
The ban in the mod log is also for 1 day, not eternal. Don’t trust random people when it aligns with your bias.
Sometimes, it’s based on larger patterns of subtle behaviors that wouldn’t be indicative of a problem on their own.
Sometimes, people are doing harmful things by accident because they grew up in a culture where those shitty things are normalized.
Sometimes, people are doing things which would not be harmful on their own, but are associated with negative experiences that are only common for the minority group.
Sometimes, people who have a long history of being timid have gotten fed up with putting themselves down for others’ comfort, so their pendulum swings the other way and we only see the tail end of that.
And yeah, sometimes it’s someone who’s immature or aggressive for unrelated reasons and isn’t thinking super hard about what they’re doing beyond finding a weakness and attacking it. Social media design makes this worse. I think situations where that’s all it is are less common than we think, though.
There’s also often ingroup/outgroup dynamics at play. And what makes it worse is that people who exist outside of the grey area of acceptable behavior, people who are just genuinely cruel, will do something cruel and then retreat and act like they belong in the grey area. They learn the ways that they act when people are genuinely uninformed or confused or curious and they copy them, all the while refusing to back down from the shitty thing they did. It’s kind of a charade put on for onlookers to make the victim look like the aggressor.
For the specific issue you mentioned, the good faith interpretation is that, yes, boys can wear dresses. If that’s the end of it, that’s fine. But “wearing a dress doesn’t make you a girl” is also a common phrase used both by malicious transphobes and by misguided loved ones trying to talk their kids out of being trans. There are many reasons that discussions like these are so hard to get the phrasing’s right on is that we don’t have established social norms to make them easy. The established social norms, in fact, make them actively more difficult. And people are doing gender exploration in a matter of months that would have been spread out over years of their childhood if they’d been allowed to do so. It’s just a lot.
I genuinely hear your frustration. I hope you hear mine. Learning all of this has been a painful process and I hope we can see it get easier in the near future.
This is why I keep quiet on issues like that, someone will always say you are wrong for not having their exact opinion and wording. Had a similar thing when I said a 5 year old boy can wear a dress without being a girl, just let them do what they want.
That isn’t literally what the person said, though. The modlog and profile on hexbear does show that they did also argue to post less about trans support, argued for people showing less support and did not accept when other, trans!, people explained their view and why he ought to chill out at least.
The ban in the mod log is also for 1 day, not eternal. Don’t trust random people when it aligns with your bias.
A lot of it is contextual.
Sometimes, it’s based on larger patterns of subtle behaviors that wouldn’t be indicative of a problem on their own.
Sometimes, people are doing harmful things by accident because they grew up in a culture where those shitty things are normalized.
Sometimes, people are doing things which would not be harmful on their own, but are associated with negative experiences that are only common for the minority group.
Sometimes, people who have a long history of being timid have gotten fed up with putting themselves down for others’ comfort, so their pendulum swings the other way and we only see the tail end of that.
And yeah, sometimes it’s someone who’s immature or aggressive for unrelated reasons and isn’t thinking super hard about what they’re doing beyond finding a weakness and attacking it. Social media design makes this worse. I think situations where that’s all it is are less common than we think, though.
There’s also often ingroup/outgroup dynamics at play. And what makes it worse is that people who exist outside of the grey area of acceptable behavior, people who are just genuinely cruel, will do something cruel and then retreat and act like they belong in the grey area. They learn the ways that they act when people are genuinely uninformed or confused or curious and they copy them, all the while refusing to back down from the shitty thing they did. It’s kind of a charade put on for onlookers to make the victim look like the aggressor.
For the specific issue you mentioned, the good faith interpretation is that, yes, boys can wear dresses. If that’s the end of it, that’s fine. But “wearing a dress doesn’t make you a girl” is also a common phrase used both by malicious transphobes and by misguided loved ones trying to talk their kids out of being trans. There are many reasons that discussions like these are so hard to get the phrasing’s right on is that we don’t have established social norms to make them easy. The established social norms, in fact, make them actively more difficult. And people are doing gender exploration in a matter of months that would have been spread out over years of their childhood if they’d been allowed to do so. It’s just a lot.
I genuinely hear your frustration. I hope you hear mine. Learning all of this has been a painful process and I hope we can see it get easier in the near future.