Hello, Im kind of new here and trying to get used to Lemmy and I was wondering about if this is true since I am considering donating on this site to support alternative projects but wanted to hear other users before doing so. That being said, what have been your experiences?
I’ve never found it hard to avoid offending trans people. Just don’t be a dick, be respectful instead.
Well, yeah, I know how to behave. I have a long history of participating in the trans community. I’m not foreign to any of these things.
But none of that matters when the other person misinterprets what you’re saying or what you mean, attributes malice to your words, and refuses to change their perspective when you try to explain, while demanding an apology for what is essentially an innocuous comment as if you killed their cat.
The fact of the matter is that, much like the atheist community that I’ve come to abhor after being a part of it for over a decade, the trans community also has its fair share of crazies. And those aren’t even my words, but the words of a trans friend with whom I used to go to these trans events. He also got fed up with their bullshit and would rant at me about them while sharing screenshots. And even now I try to be more patient than him, but sometimes I think to myself, “holy shit, he was right.”
You see, that’s where I find it much easier than you. If I accidentally offend someone that I really didn’t mean to, especially if they’re in a marginalised group that has had plenty of shit thrown at them for it their whole life, I find it very easy to apologise, back down, maybe try to explain that I didn’t mean it the way they read it, but being careful to very clearly restate my apology for the offence I caused afterwards if I do.
You would rather tell them that they were wrong and that you were right, and you’re prepared to argue it long and hard. I find that completely unnecessary, because I don’t need to win if I didn’t mean to beat them in the first place.
I have difficulty backing down in lots of scenarios but accidentally upsetting someone I didn’t mean to isn’t one of them.
Not how to back down when you didn’t mean to upset people, though.
I think you’re assuming a lot about what the interaction actually was about, how it happened, and why. And you’re assuming that I don’t know what being part of a marginalized group that gets constant shit thrown at feels like.
An apology is not in order when the person is making a big deal out of nothing, making shit up, and reframing what’s being said to defend imaginary people or abstract ideas. Then add to that malice when things don’t go their way. If I had said something about a particular person or something egregious, I would understand, but I said it about a drawing.
You say that because you haven’t met the whiteknights in the community who get upset on behalf of others or lose their shit when others don’t follow their mental models of gender expression/identity. You know how white people will sometimes cry culture appropriation, and the natives are like, “uh, we’re actually ok with that”? Yeah, they exist in the gay world too, and some are vicious and vindictive to the point of being abusive themselves. To me, it sounds like you’re defending a Karen.
As I said elsewhere, it would be unusual for a vast number of folk to not contain annoying or argumentative people, but I worry about tarring a whole category by always bringing up examples of bad behaviour and mentioning the category as part of it.
For example: “There was this manager shouting at all the women that they needed to keep in shape to impress the customers, but he was obviously badly unfit and overweight and dressed really shabbily.” OK story. But “Fat middle aged guys who don’t lift a finger to try to live healthily can be so annoying when they dress badly and then shout at women that they sold keep in shape and to impress clients.” Not OK, makes it about the category of people.
But, clearly I wasn’t there and I didn’t know that you were criticising a drawing!
It sounds like you had a bad experience and whilst I very much don’t want to generalise from it, I also don’t want to belittle it.
Precisely, so let’s not assume things and speak in ways that try to pin it on me. “You should’ve apologized and backed down” is rewarding their shitty behavior.
I get your point about avoiding generalizations, but I wouldn’t call it a category. This is a pattern of behavior from people who think they’re standing up for someone or something, but end up being straight-up toxic by taking social justice to extremes. I’ve even seen it in person, where some asshole crashed our LGBT+ community group because they started accusing another guy of saying something racist when it wasn’t the case. It was needless drama all around because someone decided to be the superhero and save imaginary people.
You usually won’t find it hard to avoid offending people with reasonable expectations. Just don’t be a dick, be respectful instead.
But there can be unreasonable in all groups. You just haven’t met an unreasonable trans person yet.
Although I haven’t either and the depictions I know of might just have been another one of those social stunts, there most probably are a few out there.
Did you downvote your own post?! The scores are +0-1 when I’m seeing it (and the-1 isn’t me).
You’re right about me not meeting an unreasonable trans person. All the trans folks I know or have known in real life are fantastic people who I have a lot of respect for and have gone through a lot of shit from other people. I think it’s worth me doing my best not to add to that and definitely value them as they are.
(Some people who are bullied go on to be bullies, but far, far, far from all, and statistically, yes, there should be some trans people who are unreasonable or bullies, and I think I’ve encountered an unreasonable trans person on lemmy, but I will only ever criticise the mean things they say or their politics, never their gender or presentation.)
Generally, I don’t understand why people think that trans folk haven’t had enough criticism, “explaining”, social rejection, etc etc etc.
Considering there was a 17 hours gap, it’s quite possible that someone had the time to read and downvote it before you saw it.
And I get it, there are quite a few people who don’t like people that don’t perform fake values.
One of the depictions of unreasonable trans people was a video that came up in the beginning of the this trend of trans people coming out + a lot of people getting medical treatments related to their gender identity.
It was some tall, brown coloured, athletically muscular “man” (because he looked mostly like a man, apart from the lipstick, which might as well have been just a man wearing lipstick, to those around him) loudly complaining about something in a restaurant, while the staff tried to de-escalate. One of the staff members then calls him (her?) “Sir”, to which (s)he then became melodramatic. Although the chap didn’t end up telling others what (s)he wanted to be called, until the very end of the video.
Now, it might have been someone with a genuine problem, that was just not captured in the video, but could also have been someone just trying to gather hatred towards a community that hadn’t even been formed yet.
But of course, I have had a depiction of trans(-ish?) people long before the trend started on the US internet. It is of groups of people (called “ladyboys” by English reporters, but there has been a colloquial term) who are often hermaphrodites, but could also be eunuchs.
The story about them I was told as a child, was that they come in groups during marriages, asking for exorbitant (but somewhat payable) amounts of money and ‘make a scene’ if not paid. The scene they make would be stuff like public nudity, with obscene looking displays, or going around cursing people (which some person told me that they actually work).
To me, that looked like just some begging+harassment ring. Add to that, an anecdote of one my relatives having been casually molested in public as a child by them, made me think pretty lowly of them.
Those groups seem to have died down now (I think?), which maybe partially because the Government officially recognised the third gender (quite a while ago actually, since I see it in govt. forms) and apart from them getting access to education (the Govt. funded kind, meant for poor people, because if one is rich, being in a minority is just a minor inconvenience as far as “means” go), also getting some reservation quota for certain menial jobs, if they were to not find work normally.
And then there was the depiction of a hermaphrodite in the pretty popular cartoon (anime) “Kochikame”, which made me think that Japan had been ahead in this kind of thing, as the depicted person was normally working as an officer.
Yeah, but on my instance, anything you post automatically has a +1 from yourself, which you must have removed.
Your takes on trans people and intersex people seem to all be from concern trolling media and third hand stories. Trans people are like witches that hand out curses that cause harm? I think your skepticism alarm should be going off.
For the record, molesting children is absolutely not OK under any circumstances. I forget what the statistics are, but I remember that the number of incidents of trans people being sex offenders is far lower than you would expect from the prevalence of trans people and of sex offending in the general population.
It seems to me that you were fed a lot of negative stereotypes of trans and intersex people when you were young, and I worry that you are interpreting finding the lack of evidence of any of this in the real world now that you are older as a change in the world when it might be wiser to take it as evidence that the negative stereotypes were always sensational, overblown and inaccurate.
When I said that - some person told me that they actually work - I didn’t mean to say that I believed that part.
Although I understand that I didn’t mention that multiple times in capital words (because I didn’t feel the need to), just because some of the poor trans people banded with some poor eunuchs to make a cult, of which I have a bad impression, that doesn’t mean, I have said impression for trans people all over the world.
I was mostly just giving a list of past events, and they most definitely don’t tell my current thoughts, which I feel, the last 2 paragraphs should have explained well enough.
I have once even gone pretty far into explaining how important I consider, not to have prejudice, which even got quite a bit of backlash and a ban from a community. So I am not going to put the effort into reiterating it over here.
But of course, anyone may feel free to label me as anti-trans or whatever anyone may feel like and I may feel free to consider them an unreasonable person.
I didn’t downvote my post, I just un-upvoted it. It is possible to downvote it and that would give me a -1 from myself.
Why unupvote it? Do you normally do that? Is it a principal? Or was it just that one?
I started that mainly because it felt weird that a comment I wrote, had a blue up, when I didn’t do it.
Now I consider upvoting something as a way to emphasise the post/comment and not upvoting all my comments makes me show a point when I do upvote something that I wrote.
It is really just for myself though, as a single upvote doesn’t really matter and others are not really seeing if I am the one that has upvoted it. You can call it a compulsion, I suppose.
Interesting. I like it enough to give it my upvote.