Today I’d like to share with you two quotations. One is from Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights leader whose legacy we honor today. The other is from someone who considers himself the leader of a human rights movement that follows in the footsteps of King.
The first quote:
Sooner or later all the people of the world will have to discover a way to live together in peace, and thereby transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. If this is to be achieved, man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.
The second:
[Name redacted], I hope you are looking forward to our date. I certainly am. … [I]t is clear that you have gone to great lengths to keep your image off the internet.
Nice try.
Is that a threat? No, it is a promise. Big difference.
As we have been saying here for years, the time for collegial, polite discussion and negotiation with these piles of refuse is over. …
We have people working on securing her image. Meantime, $100.00 to the first person who gets us a clear image of her which we can verify. Something large and clear enough to be used as a feature image is preferred.
As you have probably gathered, the first quote comes from Dr. King. It’s from his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, in which he sets forth a powerful argument for the transformative power of nonviolence, which, as he notes, “nonviolence is not sterile passivity, but a powerful moral force which makes for social transformation.”
The second quote comes from Paul Elam of A Voice for Men. I’ve taken the liberty of redacting the name of his target.
Yes, this self-described “humanitarian” is launching yet another campaign of doxxing and intimidation aimed at an ideological enemy who just happens to be female. And once again, as he so notoriously did several years ago, Elam is offering a bounty for the personal information of one of his targets – in this case a clear photograph of her face.
It’s a strategy that draws not on the tactics of Martin Luther King but on those of his enemies – in particular the Ku Klux Klan, which in the 1960s posted “wanted posters” featuring the faces of civil rights activists, including King himself. Some of those whose faces appeared on these “wanted posters,” most famously King himself, were later murdered.
In more recent years, anti-abortion activists have posted similar “wanted posters” featuring the pictures and addresses of doctors who perform abortions – some of whom were themselves later murdered.
Now AVFM has taken up this classic technique of intimidation.
Last year, AVFM activists – including the site’s “activism director” Attila Vinczer — posted hundreds of wanted-style posters of feminist philosophy professor Adele Mercier on and around the campus of Queen’s University in Kingston Ontario. The year before, a Men’s Rights group in Edmonton closely associated with A Voice for Men put up similar posters targeting Lise Gotell, the chair of women’s and gender studies at the University of Alberta.
We can only assume that Elam has a similar campaign in mind for his latest target.
So what are Elam’s charges against this new woman to hate?
According to him, the woman, a professor at Kennesaw State University in Georgia, accused AVFM activist Sage Gerard (aka Victor Zen) of “demonstrat[ing] a desire to kill women” in a complaint she filed with the KSU administration.
Elam has posted the complaint on his website. Her name appears nowhere in the complaint, nor does anything about Gerard wanting to kill women.
[ Clarification: Elam has now posted a separate campus police report about an incident in which Gerard came to the office of the Interdisciplinary Studies department requesting to see the professor; the police report contains her name as well as notes from the officer saying that “she has seen the cartoons, videos and blogs online and believes Gerard demonstrates having violent fantasies about hurting and murdering women.” ]
This anonymous complaint, along with another complaint about Gerard, were evidently triggered by a video Gerard posted last year of a late-night “sticker run” he made on the KSU campus.
The video, which Gerard filmed and narrated on the fly, is more than a little creepy. In it, Gerard describes his preparations for his “activism” as if he were launching some sort of covert operation; at one point he talks about hiding his stickers in the sleeves of his jacket. As he heads out the door to start his stickering, he announces “let’s go fuck with people.”
Gerard clearly sees what he’s doing as a deliberately provocative act. He talks about putting AVFM stickers in places “where they cannot be ignored” and about his desires to “push the boundaries” by plastering them in places they’re really not supposed to be put – most notably in a women’s bathroom where, thankfully, no women were present.
Weirdly, given that he later posted the video on his YouTube channel, Gerard also took steps in the video to conceal his identity and cover his tracks, wiping his fingerprints off of some of the stickers after pasting them in a bathroom. Later, apparently wanting to look as much like a serial killer as possible, he dons latex gloves.
At one point, Gerard jokes about how he’d like to paste one of the stickers over the mouth of a feminist to shut her up.
His behavior in the video and in his interactions with others on campus, as well as his affiliation with AVFM, clearly rattled some on the KSU campus. The anonymous complainant to the KSU administration suggested that Gerard’s actions were creating a “hostile work environment” for some faculty and staff and making students fear for their safety.
Elam has posted the actual complaints, which, in what seems to be a pretty clear violation of privacy, were sent to Gerard with the identity of one of the accusers laid bare. Here’s the anonymous complaint that Elam has attributed to his current target:
Among other similar offenses by the same individual, a KSU student (Sage Gerard) posed as a custodian and entered the women’s bathrooms on campus, placing stickers intended to intimidate women. … Gerard’s behavior indicates contemplation of violence against women (he posts art depicting guns pointed at women’s symbols, as well as other violently anti-feminist themes). His behavior has created a hostile work environment for multiple KSU employees who do not only fear intimidation and harassment, but actual physical violence against themselves and their families. KSU students have also expressed real fears for their own physical safety on campus . . . I do not feel safe on this campus. As an advocate of women, I feel strongly that I am at real risk of becoming the target of violent retaliatory actions perpetrated by Sage Gerard and the organization sponsoring him, A Voice For Men.
Emphasis mine.
The KSU administration investigated these complaints, and concluded that Gerard was not responsible for creating a hostile work environment, and that his speech was protected under the first amendment. The complaints were dismissed; no charges against Gerard were even filed.
He was asked to stay out of women’s bathrooms in the future. And the KSU counsel who prepared the report also had this suggestion:
We do recommend that Mr. Gerard continue to refrain from further contact with the persons who made the hotline reports (or those who Mr. Gerard believes may have made them), to avoid any real or perceived retaliation. In addition, we recommend that Mr. Gerard refrain from further contact with the members of the Interdisciplinary Studies Department to avoid escalating the situation to the point that it becomes a hostile environment in the legal sense.
That’s right. Gerard wasn’t charged with anything. He faced no sanctions. He was simply asked not to contact those on campus he was making uncomfortable.
But apparently this “no contact” request is so offensive to Gerard and his AVFM comrades that they have decided to launch the very retaliation campaign that the KSU complainants were afraid of. Thus, once again, proving their critics have been right to label them a hate group in the first place.
AVFM’s new target joins a long list of women (and a few men) who have been doxxed and/or harassed in retaliation for their “crimes” against Paul Elam’s delicate sensibilities.
Elam started off this parade of harassment shortly after this site started by attempting to get a woman fired from her job at a women’s shelter for a comment she made here in which she wondered aloud if Elam had a criminal record.
Since then, Elam and his AVFM cronies have:
Started Register-Her, a fake “Offenders Registry” designed to vilify and intimidate women. (The site is now in the hands of AVFM defector John Hembling.)
Gleefully participated in the unending harassment of a Canadian feminist that one AVFM author dubbed “little red frothing fornication mouth,” for her crime of … arguing with some AVFM activists at a demonstration once. Unflattering images of “Big Red” at that demonstration have since been plastered all over the internet; she even has a page devoted to her on KnowYourMeme.
Launched a years-long harassment campaign against feminist writer Jessica Valenti. Starting with a 2011 post in which Elam himself attacked her as a “stupid, hateful bitch,” the hate campaign has moved on to labeling her a “child abuser,” posting her personal photos on AVFM without permission, putting her on Register-Her.com, and libeling her by making up inflammatory quotations and attributing them to her. (AVFM’s “social media director” and serial quote-fabricator Janet Bloomfield was evidently permabanned from Twitter for her persistent harassment of Valenti.)
Supported GamerGate’s harassment of cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, with AVFM’s PR whiz Bloomfield doing her part by blatantly libeling her on Twitter.
Launched a campaign of vilification against a Chicago-area “mommy blogger” for writing that she felt uncomfortable with the idea of a male day care staffer taking young girls to the bathroom.
Along with an assortment of white supremacists and online assholes, joined in a hate campaign against a young woman wrongly accused of trashing applications from white guys as a staffer at a college admissions office. Elam declared the woman, by name, to be a “warped by ideology” with “deep seated prejudices that guided her unscrupulous actions.” The blog was a hoax, and the woman Elam so eagerly vilified had nothing to do with it.
Published an article falsely accusing a male feminist blogger of being a “confessed rapist,” because, as Elam puts it, “karma is a BITCH.” (AVFM’s defense? It was being “satirical.”)
Accused a former AVFM staffer, with no evidence, of absconding with money donated for a men’s shelter.
Attacked feminist and skeptic Rebecca Watson on numerous occasions, including a post from Elam in which he used the term “whore” several dozen times.
And of course AVFM has accused me of everything from starting Reddit’s terrible BeatingWomen subreddit to somehow faking my site’s traffic stats on Alexa. (AVFM has never even bothered to provide “evidence” for any of their various accusations against me, perhaps because none of them are even remotely true.) Elam has posted bizarre sexual fantasies involving me, called me a pervert, and publicly suggested that I kill myself. One of AVFMs most, er, enthusiastic activists once left me a creepy, threatening voicemail at 1:38 AM. And AVFM “activism director” Attila L. Vinczer has tried to dox me, with somewhat comic results.
This isn’t even close to an exhaustive list of AVFM’s assorted retaliatory campaigns against feminists and other critics.
AVFM has made it very clear to the world – through its actions and its rhetoric – that if someone starts putting up AVFM posters or stickers on your campus or in your neighborhood, you have every reason to worry.
AVFM is not a civil or human rights group by any stretch of the imagination. It is a hate group, plain and simple, less akin to Martin Luther King Jr. than it is to those who so stubbornly fought against him.
NOTE: Here is Sage Gerard’s (aka Victor Zen’s) video of his sticker “activism.” You can probably see why people found it a little unsettling.
“The problem is when anyone takes advantage of the fact trans women are horribly marginalized and uses that as a bludgeon to silence cis women who may well have experienced mistreatment at the hands of a woman who happen to be trans.
That’s not to say there aren’t cis women who reinforce transphobic ideas that are harmful to trans women. There are and they do. That’s not OK. That’s another problem.
That doesn’t make using “transphobe” and “TERF” as a silencing tactic against women critical of trans individuals valid.”
Okay, maybe it’s just me, but the only time I ever see cis women relating anecdotes about “a TRANS woman did this to me [or usually someone else] and she was TRANS”, it’s in the same conversation as “they’re invading our spaces” and “they have residual male privilege” and “what about women born women” and “but our bathrooms” and “how dare you label me as cis without my permission”.
If there’s someone in a community making it unsafe, especially by being a manipulative shit and preying on people’s insecurities/sense of fairness to coerce sex from them, name that person. Don’t make them into a proxy for every other person in their demographic.
@katz:
Oh… no, that’s definitely not what I meant at all. If you’re trying to make a judgement before looking at the particular situation, you kinda have to look at the historical context. It’d be kinda silly to ignore history for that. If you’re trying to put a particular situation into a larger context, that context has to include history.
And since you brought up likelihood, note that I said history can tell us what to expect.
This is kinda hard for me to explain, but I’m talking about when you’re trying to decide if a particular person in a particular situation is silencing. The argument “this man is silencing this woman, I know this because men have silenced women often throughout history,” or “this woman couldn’t possibly be silencing this man, I know this because it’s been the other way around throughout history” is a bad one.
It’s a narrow point, but I feel like I’ve seen people making arguments similar to that. When it comes to trans women and cis women, which have a less-clear privilege dynamic than that of men and women, those types of arguments have the effect of saying “it’s impossible that this particular person could be acting a certain way, because they are part of X group and historically yadda yadda yadda.” I view that line of argument as unhelpful.
Thanks, emilygoddess.
We’ve got a couple problems here but I figure if we all make an effort to listen and not take advantage of one another’s willingness to look out for vulnerable people we can be a dynamic discussion group where people aren’t afraid to share and sometimes toes get stepped on but we listen to criticism, learn and move on without major hostility.
A few people have voted with their feet in response to the comment section’s general attitude towards trans folk and transphobia. We should examine that and take it seriously. We should also take seriously the attitude that vulnerable individuals are entitled to being catered to to the extent they’re free from criticism and you’re labelled a hater if you do criticise them. Ally being excused for aggressive rudeness also made a lot of us feel unwelcome and nearly caused a mass exodus.
@Cyberwulf
I have seen cis women bludgeon other cis women with the TERF label, for actions unrelated to anything you’re describing. One representative example was a young-ish woman who was fairly new to feminism and who made a transphobic Tumblr post, was told that it was transphobic, and immediately retracted it and issued an unconditional apology for having not realized the transphobia of it. Apparently that = TERF today.
Okay, she made a mistake. The post was pretty transphobic. She didn’t realize it before that was pointed out, and she promised to do better. That’s not what TERF means. TERF means that the person’s feminism is predicated on a certain degree of gender essentialism, that all women share a certain feminine experience that trans women cannot share, therefore trans women are not really women. Being young and stupid is not the same as being a TERF, but the TERF label was smacked onto her anyway, by cis women and not even by trans women.
TERF is real, and it’s bad, but the term can be used inappropriately.
I’m with you, Cyberwulf. Sadly, I think some of that “a TRANS woman did this to me [or usually someone else] and she was TRANS” stuff has happened here, which is regrettable to say the least. I agree, it’s usually just part of the “they’re invading our spaces/harming our daughters” narrative.
What some of us feel occurred in the comment section on this blog though was a case of criticising someone’s conduct with no relevance whatsoever to their identity as trans and, in response, being told we only took issue with them because they’re trans and we’re transphobes and how dare we criticise the marginalized.
I agree though that as soon as people start circulating anecdotes of “This one time a trans woman did a bad thing” we should be skeptical. Shitty things done by people belonging to marginalized groups shouldn’t be linked back to their marginalized status.
May I return to ableism for a moment?
I remember the first time on this board that I was really upset by ableist language. I was a lurker then, and someone (I believe he was quickly banned) essentially said that they were afraid of being falsely accused of rape by some BPD chick.
(BPD=borderline personality disorder)
At that point, BPD was my latest diagnosis, which I was fairly resistant to. I was apparently okay with having depression and anxiety, but having a “borderline personality”? And then seeing that used as shorthand for “b*tches be cr*zy” (I don’t want to use the words, but that’s totally what was being said) was a fucking sucker punch. I felt nauseous and hot and wanted to post to give this jackass a piece of my mind but the thread had long since moved past.
So I let it go. Just like I let it go when the receptionist at my psychiatrist’s office made a joke about killing herself (REALLY??!?). Just like I let it go when a coworker asked if I went anywhere on vacation when I returned from sick leave/4 weeks at psychiatric day hospital.
I don’t want someone else to just have to let something go if it can be helped. That may be too much to ask but that doesn’t mean I can’t try to use inclusive language and try to avoid punching anyone with my words.
Thanks for listening.
Let’s try to avoid turning this thread into another thread of doom… Keep it meta!
@cyberwulf:
In this case, I don’t believe the commenters brought up the “a TRANS woman did this and she was TRANS” thing as part of a larger anti-trans discussion. It was brought up because they thought they had to prove that people from a marginalized group could behave badly too, so criticizing one member of that group should be fine.
I mean, doing so revealed transphobic attitudes they held, but it came up originally in what could have been a very benign argument.
This was actually, in my opinion, one of the best examples of how people in the thread of doom were arguing against people that weren’t in the room.
And, as previously stated, Ally didn’t say that and I don’t think it’s what she meant. She suggested cis lesbians who don’t want sex with trans women might be transphobic. Others said, while potentially true, that reasoning is used by some very unpleasant individuals to shame and coerce women into sex. Ally said she was being compared to a rapist and shortly thereafter left, saying the negative attitudes towards the way she conducts herself here were the result of transphobia.
I think you put it really well, kirbywarp – the ability to criticise individuals who are trans did result in some transphobic attitudes being revealed. I feel the pendulum swung from “You’re not allowed to criticise a trans individual because they’re vulnerable and marginalized in society at large” to, unfortunately, “You’re allowed generalise about trans individuals based on the bad behaviour of one or few of them”. Too far.
Marinerachel: I think you’ve got it spot on with that last paragraph.
Policy, never mind. There’s already recent drama, and I never meant to drag on, I just threw out what was on my mind and maybe I shouldn’t have. It’s not important. Thank you for trying to understand though. (not sarcasm)
@marinerachel,
I think that you’ve summed everything up really well here, and I think that you provided a lot of good perspective on the biological aspects of sex back there.
I’m also really sorry about overreacting to the “cis privilege doesn’t exist” and “trans women don’t need mammograms because they’re really men” types of arguments that Shiraz made in the last thread. I realize that in responding to those, it came across as though I was defending Donna L.’s behavior whereas I only meant to react to what I perceived to be transphobia. By doing so, I recognize that I probably encouraged Donna L. to continue attacking other commenters, especially Kittehserf. I didn’t mean to do that, but intentions aren’t magic, and I know that I contributed to the shitstorm.
…In that case I was completely misinterpreting what you meant, which explains why your argument didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Oops.
@Tracy, kittehserf did indeed appreciate that. 🙂
For my part I hope it wasn’t too difficult to clean up. lol
@Cyberwulf,
We did name her. Many times. She came back and brought an attack dog with her. I agree some things that have been said here have leaned transphobic, but a lot of the links and examples that were brought up weren’t to tar trans women all with the same brush; it was in response to the feeling like people thought they could do no wrong. Even when Valerie Keefe came here, some people assumed she wasn’t really trans because her behaviour was so awful. But of course trans people are people and that means there are assholes and predators in their midst just like in any other group. Trying to pretend otherwise is dehumanizing to trans people and is an erasure of people who have been victimized by someone who happened to trans (someone very close to me has been, by the way). Some people aren’t okay with that, and aren’t okay with being called a TERF for pointing that out. I for one am not okay with it either.
Um, no one? Where did I say anyone was? I was talking about discussions I had about the Charlie Hebdo shooting with others and how, oftentimes, they’d silence anyone who just brought up that their material may’ve been problematic. Because it is often excused with things like “satire” – which has become common with MRAs and those sympathetic to them.
For one thing, it’d be nice if you bothered to fully read my comments instead of assuming I’m just “harping” on them for no reason. Secondly, I brought it up because many – including Elam himself – have used the “it’s satire!” excuse to smoke-screen things like the “Bash A Bitch Month”. It’s become a convenient term for bigoted individuals to claim they’re making their comments “ironically” after being called out on it.
Again, it’d be nice if you read my comments carefully and didn’t jump to conclusions. I get this thread is hard to follow, but I’d like it if you at least bothered to quote what you are referring to than just replying with no actual point of reference.
I’m amazed that simply pointing out that a magazine’s material might be problematic is considered “victim-blaming”, when no one has said that they brought it upon themselves. I am simply pointing out that some of the veneration they are getting, especially from people who never heard of it or read it or capable of speaking French, might be wrong-headed. Those same people are hypocritical enough to silence others who bring up the problematic material on many of the same bases, even though there are French-speaking individuals who’ve taken issue with the magazine before.
Except I’m not criticizing them, I’m criticizing their work – there’s a difference. The fact you are making that statement is proving my point, people are making knee-jerk reactions to such observation instead of bothering to read them.
Except I’m not speaking ill of anyone – that’s your assumption – if anything, it is simply of their work I am speaking ill of at all. That doesn’t reflect my opinion on the people who made them, since I didn’t know them at all and thus can’t really say. I had no idea about the magazine’s content when the shooting occurred and thus had no opinion, others brought it up with me – including one Francophone friend from Quebec, who could read it – and I reevaluated the situation and how others were responding to it.
fibi
I thought you were spot on.
Funnily enough I found that a male voice – see kirbywarp’s contributions if you have the stamina to revisit the Thread of Doom – was really really helpful. Because it was male. They had no dog in the argument between two groups of women — one lot cis, the other lot trans women.
——
As for the ableism language. Away from here I quite often use the jokey type of language, even though it’s more about political events or policies rather than accusing individuals of being inadequate or wrong or unworthy. Expressions like mad as a box of frogs or kangaroos loose in the top paddock can soften the impact of the awfulness of the things that Toxic Tony and his bumbling group of incompetents get up to while they play at governing Australia.
But here, in this place, there are all sorts people with all kinds of possible vulnerabilities that we should avoid. If the cost of that is missing out on a couple of totally unnecessary jokes, then it’s a price worth paying.
——
A special thread for a discussion? Possibly. My suggestion would be that it has to be closely monitored and moderated. If that means that David has to close the thread to comments overnight or when he’s away from the computer (as Scalzi does quite often), then that’s the way to go. The inability to comment exactly when and where you want to is worth it if David’s keeping on top of it. Also it’s about policy and management of his bog, so he should be able to respond to comments as they come in and talk about what is doable and/or sensible from his point of view.
Thanks @Alex:)
@katz:
Don’t even worry about it. Rereading the convo, I realized that my first comment to you along this topic definitely could have sounded like I was against the whole idea of historical context, especially since the way you brought was more broad and not directly the narrow way I object to. Sorry about that.
@Mildlymagnificant:
I’m really happy that people found my comments helpful. 🙂 I’d be sad if people found them helpful just because I was a man though… Hopefully anyone who wasn’t directly involved in the convo (like all the people who were trying to diffuse the argument with kitty pics) could have said the same thing and be heard.
I’ve gone back and forth about posting several times, producing teal deer in massive quantity and then just deleting the whole herd. I was in the mix for the first doomthread and I still have some residual discomfort, and though I initially had some positive hopes, when I saw that DoomThread2 was essentially the result of brigading, I sorta threw up my hands in disgust and despair.
First, I’m not going to deny or apologize for the fact that some transphobic stuff came up in both instances. It’s there, it’s bad and we (as a larger feminist community) need to find a way to deal with that. It’s particularly painful for me for some personal reasons that would require a whole extra herd to unpack, but the result is that I tended to shut down when the conversation got really nasty. I found marinerachel and Alex’s most recent comments the most helpful to me in framing my thoughts, and those are what made me decide to post this (assuming I do).
So, yes, some transphobic attitudes were revealed, and several commenters have felt that they had to leave as a result. And that’s not good and it’s not right, and we have to confront that. But if you can’t acknowledge that the use or even the threat of being labeled a TERF is also being used to silence people and even to drive them (including commenters with a long history of being generous, engaging, and interesting people who were also often helpful to others) away from commenting here, then you are not being intellectually honest.
To stretch the rules a bit for a moment (bear with me or mod please delete this passage?), I have a friend who reblogged a couple of costume outfits on her tumblr, and it turned out that the original posts were from someone who seemed pretty TERFy to me in retrospect, once I went and took a look at her blog. But my friend reblogged cosplay pictures, she didn’t offer the original blogger her support for anything other than sewing expertise. And she was HOUNDED for it. She was endlessly threatened with rape and murder, and ultimately she was doxxed and forced to pull her entire web presence down, and she’s still worried that, since she works in professional theater costuming in a major market city, the overspill will damage her career.
Now, this was done by a very small group, so before anyone takes issue with generalizing, I acknowledge that this was done by a microscopically small subset (brigading activists) of an already small subset (tumblr users) in an already limited community (activists) in a larger but still limited demographic. But when she tried to explain the situation, universally she received the response of “well, you signal boosted for a TERF, so what did you expect?”
Just to be clear, my friend was hounded off the internet, which she relies on as part of her livelihood, because she appreciated some embroidery. Not because she had read that tumblr closely enough to understand and agree with the user’s theory AND THEN SIGNAL BOOSTED THAT THEORY, but because she admired some needlework. Even if she did something wrong in reblogging pictures of some dresses (and you are gonna have to work hard to convince me she did), at worst this was a mistake, a completely understandable error in judgement. She was treated like it was a crime against humanity.
Okay, back to obeying the rules, meta; and limited to people in the room.
daintydougal put it really well
How does this not count as actual, real silencing? People who are not trans exclusionary in any way are in fact silenced or harassed not for actual transphobic speech or behavior, but for being, however tenuously, connected to such speech or behavior. It happens, and whether it’s trans activists or not (and as someone pointed out upthread, it can even be other people acting on behalf of the trans community but it’s no less real) the consequences can be devastating for the individual. That creates a climate where people who are onboard with the movement and genuinely in good faith being silenced because of a not unjustified fear of reaping the whirlwind if they make a mistake.
I agree that we have to push back against transphobic speech and behavior, but we can’t go so far as to allow one group of women to universally shout down and silence another group of women, no matter where anyone may sit on a relative scale of privilege. We have to find a way to be kind to other people’s mistakes. And, as uncomfortable as it may be, we also have to find a way to let other people be to feel what they feel and think what they think so long as their behavior fits the community’s standards.
I know this is possible on other issues, because, despite the occasional flounce when someone is corrected, we’ve gotten there about things like abelism. Good people can think and feel bad things. And sometimes we can’t change those thoughts or feelings, sometimes the best we can do is tell them that their actions are hurting people, including people they care about, and ask that they stop.
We (as feminists broadly, and as local communities) can’t tolerate brigading and thoughtpolicing belief over behavior. We can’t require purity tests on every aspect of our personal beliefs. We can’t tolerate a community where ANY one group gets to assert (with the backing of the rest either explicitly, or implicitly though silence) that I make inadvertent mistakes but YOU are mean and evil, that I am just asking for respect but YOU are silencing, that I am automatically acting in good faith and YOU are a troll (especially in the face of a long history of participation and many examples of good faith in the past). That way lies factionalizing, and fracture, and the ultimate irrelevance and ineffectiveness of a movement.
Apologies for loosing that herd, many many thanks if you made it all the way through.
‘Reaping the whirlwind’ is spot on gillyrosebee. My experience of people (including myself) making mistakes here is that there is a quick nudge in the right direction (and I have never witnessed ‘dogpiling as some whiners like to claim) but it seems like if someone were to make a mistake regarding trans issues then it would be like BOOM GAME OVER MAN GAME OVER. But I can remember a time when it wasn’t like that *soft music starts playing* in a different thread of doom I said something Ally didn’t like, so I apologised then she said something I didn’t like, and she apologised and that could potentially have been the end of it but because things had been bubbling for so long it all erupted out of no where.
Hmm. Went off on a tangent.
I was also going to say regarding the social hierarchy stuff, I wonder if anyone really feels like a ‘true member’ I think a lot of people who post possibly have anxiety issues that can translate to online interactions. I know I’m always embarrassingly excited if someone has read what I’ve written on here and I doubt that’s an uncommon feeling, it’s just that everyone assumes that everyone else is much more ‘with it’ than themselves?
I don’t know. Just some thoughts. Barging in from elsewhere and demanding change is never cool though. That’s just a fact.
@gillyrosebee, you have just concisely articulated my feelings about that thread. Thank you.
gillyrosebee, thank you for your voice. I’ve created flocks on flocks, too; they’re clogging up my phone memory and not doing much else.
I don’t want to dive too deep into anything, because this whole thing has truly been a mindfuck for me. I will add to (and echo) gillyrosebee’s statement, though, because it hits home for me and is something that my mind is trying to work out.
I think a great amount of the issue around all of this is that, on either extreme side of the argument, there is an assumption that one stance silences the other, discredits their lived experience, and works in opposition to their goals and core beliefs.
The problem that I am trying to reconcile in my own head is how to facilitate a space in authentic expression is allowed for all voices.
I will also add that I would like a thread (and as mildlymagnificent suggested, a closely-moderated one, if David and the Mod Squad are willing) in which we are able to explore this.
Did you just out yourself as a fan of Aliens? If so, come sit by me!
I don’t know if I think “social hierarchy” is a way I’d like to frame it. I like the idea of considering track record earning folks the benefit of the doubt in some cases, but I do see that people who have been here for a long time and who invest a lot of effort into commenting regularly tend to be offered respect in terms of attention and sometimes deference (for good and for ill).
I also admit to having “favorites” here, because I found them interesting or insightful or witty or particularly snarky (I adore a good snark), and checking in to see what those folks have to say on a given topic. I suppose that behavior, aggregated, translates to a hierarchy.
WatermelonSugar, that’s exactly it. It all hits so close to home. But if we can do it for ableism and religion I don’t see why it can’t be possible to do it for this too. Conversation is important and as long as everyone is civil and productive I don’t think it should matter what their core beliefs are? But maybe it does to some people. I suppose if someone had showed a racist sentiment no matter how slight it wouldn’t matter how courteous they were…
HMMMMMM
http://www.somegif.com/gifs/1361344236265670214.GIF
“concisely” LOL, but thanks.