Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.

the Isabel Fall story I think highlights your comments about how the people who often get targeted the most in these purity battles are marginalized people themselves. like, granted, the public didn't actually know Isabel was trans herself when the book was published, but the performative scolding of Fall, including accusing her of being a cis-gender person trolling, or being a Neo-Nazi because the biography accompanying the publication said Fall was "born in 1988", wound up resulting in Isabel being outed on terms other than her own.

to their credit, many of the people who yelled the loudest, like Arinn Dembo, publicly apologized and took accountability for it, but it just feels like everybody is in a crouched position, ready to pounce at all times these days.

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal)

right the isabel fall thing fucked me up for a long time, like she wrote this amazing story and twitter went after her so fucking hard she apparently wound up detransitioning and i'm like shit, well, i better not let anybody read any of _my_ stuff then

yeah, i _am_ in a crouched position ready to pounce at all times. i'm hypervigilant. it's a trauma response. it's not healthy. but trauma responses aren't, like. there for nothing. i'm hypervigilant because i _need_ to be, because there are _legitimate threats_ that marginalized people need to watch out for. and sometimes i do see things as threatening when they're not, really. because they remind me of past things that _were_ threatening. people tell me "assume good intent" sometimes and honestly i don't necessarily have that luxury sometimes. some spaces are, "safe space" for me isn't absolute but relative. twitter was never a particularly "safe space" for me, someone with rejection sensitive dysphoria and a tendency to take things that don't really have anything to do with me very personally, and it's _really_ not safe now. for me it's almost better because being what gets called a "highly sensitive person" things are problems for me that aren't problems for most people, and twitter is now a problem for, like. pretty much everyone? so in an odd way it helps me.

anyway dembo apologized but also as soon as people found out dembo was wrong everybody turned around and dogpiled on _them_ (not sure their pronouns), like, hello, cycle of abuse much? there's this tendency to attribute _malice_ or _ill intent_ in cases where none exists. and you can apologize, but you make a mistake and ever after you're "problematic". it's not like... nobody has to _accept_ dembo's apology, people can be like well that's all well and good but isabel fall's life was kind of ruined by what you did so i'm not sure i wanna like hang out with you, but _they're_ not problematic. the _behavior_ was, i'm not even gonna say "problematic", they did something that seriously negatively affected somebody else's life, they weren't fair to fall, and to me, you know, someone knows that and accepts the consequences, that's the _opposite_ of threatening to me, the opposite of "problematic", because the standard of "don't ever make mistakes" is a shitty standard. my standard is "if you make mistakes can you accept the consequences of those mistakes". which is a pretty fucking high standard on its own, it's asking a lot of people, but at least it's, like, _attainable_.

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also i do wanna clarify with the harry potter thing, even then i'm personally not gonna be like "well you can't be my friend if you like harry potter", particularly because, like, the reality is that most harry potter fans have no fucking clue. they don't. so personally - and this is personal, not everybody is going to do this or has to do this - what i do in those situations is _talk_ about jk rowling, what she's doing, how it's affecting trans people. like again, some of this shit _i_ don't even know why it's "problematic" and i'm more online than i'd like to be.

great post Kate....thank you as always for your insight and thanks for redirecting as needed. always learn a lot from your posts.