@BardicWizard Indeed, most of the answers were at best insensitive and ill informed about your situation and experience, and at their worst, utterly terrible. But to speak of this in terms of “views of the cis-het population” only perpetuates the division we are trying to over turn. Reconciliation in a community happens when the individuals come together and love and understand one another, not by drawing lines in the sand with broad strokes and generalizations.

I'm sorry, but "I don't see color" is not a useful way to overcome stereotypes. It just lets them fester.

There is a very real problem of normalizing white/cis/het/male authority in matters with which they have no experience, and calling that out needs to happen. Those of us who fall into those categories but are working to call out those behaviors, do no one any favors with "not all cishet" arguments.

@Ash The closest you could get here is a chat that's publicly readable but only invited people could talk in.

Nooope.

@ThomasMarkov It doesn’t work that way, and I have experience with that. My elementary school used the “shove all the people involved into the teacher’s room and make them talk it out” method of conflict resolution. Even when the teacher tried to get everyone to get along, it never did much more than foster resentment and make the issue get exacerbated the next time it came up

@Ash i knew one kid who got an “accidental” tetherball to the face once by a kid who’d been involved in conflict resolution with her

Although that only happened once and my school wasn’t actually that bad overall

technically

We had our share of troblue makers but there were usually more nice kids

I'm all for finding common ground and celebrating unity in diversity, but if we try to do it without addressing systemic injustice then any illusion of unity is just forcing the oppressed to shut up.

Yes, we need to be able to talk about views of the cishet population.

To the extent that might make cishet people uncomfortable ... well yeah, it might well, because there can be pretty bad stuff there. That's not a reason not to talk about what happens when non-cishet and cishet people meet.

As someone who ticks almost all the white/cis/het/male/American/nonpoor type boxes, I'm very aware that overcoming the systems and assumptions I'm born into is a life-long work and I'll never be able to say I'm not subject to that environment of privilege, only that I'm on a journey away from it.

It's not about whether individuals are ignorant or bigoted, it's about the systems which normalize and magnify that behavior so that even the "nicest" people who are actively trying to be kind and compassionate... perpetuate harm without even noticing, and become defensive about it being pointed out because we didn't mean to, like that somehow makes the harm disappear.

Rebekah Ingram says all of this much better than I do, but I'm not in a position to track down a quote right now.

So bringing it back to context: the "views of the cis-het population" are, well, these, and we saw them earlier in the year. That might make a cishet person feel uncomfortable, seeing that and recognising that's the group they're in. But the solution isn't "please don't discuss us". It's noticing that, hey, this is what's going on, and if that makes us uncomfortable then maybe we need to do work to change it.

@doppelgreener *isn't

Thanks

Back when pronoun rules came in and I was spending several weeks talking with the moderators about trans issues, which included identifying that there were cisgender moderators and transgender moderators, I received a request from a cisgender moderator to please not keep making this divide with a similar platitude: by keeping on talking about the two groups I'd perpetuate division. ... which was also borne out of discomfort, and also was actually going to do more harm than good if I listened

because it was important to discuss those groups and how we were interacting, and make it clear those groups did exist. ignoring that they existed wasn't going to help us talk about the issues we were facing, it would just make it impossible to discuss commonalities and trends and issues that needed to be discussed.

Differences are not inherently divisive; that's a quality we apply to difference, not an inherent quality. We can choose to celebrate difference instead. That we live in social structures which DO choose to make difference a cause of division is not a reason to stop talking about differences.

yeah

though I will say,... sometimes difference celebration get's,... weird

I'm not saying it's inherently bad

but we need to watch out for how difference is celebrated just like we need to watch out for how it's the opposite

Aye.

I've heard people say the weird phrase "autism is the next phase of human evolution" and that makes me extremely uncomfortable

like, I'm still very much not the same as everyone else and something weirdly specific is expected of me

@trogdor Yeah, it's not cool of them to out you as an X-Man.

lol

well it's never been like, directed at me as I recall

I bet you've never even stopped one crime

though people have also separately outed me

it hasn't been common but that has happened

@BardicWizard this looks like it took actual magic to create

Lucian Kahn wrote a short twitter thread affirming that gender isn’t just one thing, it’s huge & has many parts, and we should be skeptical of claims like “gender is just bla.”

@doppelgreener Thanks for this perspective.

@ThomasMarkov thanks for hearing us out :)