as small as a world and as large as alone

7:42pm April 19, 2015

fullyarticulatedgoldskeleton:

How funny is it that that comic illustrating exactly what happens in call-out culture immediately got a response that said ‘guys the person who made this is a confirmed abuser’ with no sources, receipts, or further elaboration?

As if using the word ‘confirmed’ should just be good enough for everyone

Yeah seriously.

And even if they were, the cartoon was perfect.

And people can and do say similar things about me when I criticize that stuff – “Sie’s an abuser,” “Sie’s a transmisogynist,” or whatever.  When… no.  Like, I get why they think those things, but still, no.  Not at all.  Not whatsoever.  And even if I was, it would not warrant the social repercussions that I’ve received already – people encouraging others not to reblog my posts, people telling me never to reblog their posts again when all I reblogged was a cute Scottish Fold kitten, people telling each other stories about me that grow in the telling until one negative interaction with a trans woman (that was really just three autistic people, two of us genderless, one a cis woman, drastically misreading some social cues) becomes “Sie hates/treats badly trans women” in the plural.  I hate that.  And I hate that she’s become so vengeful that she goes around spreading that story when to me it was like… something that happened ages ago and we all did our best to apologize, so why continue the fight?  I don’t have the energy for that kind of thing, so I try to ignore it, but I hate that I run up against unnecessary obstacles because of it.

It’s like the conversation we had awhile back where it’s like…

I pick up a chair in order to move it so I can sit out of people’s way.

Someone grabs the chair from me and loudly pronounces that I am a “chair thrower” and will always be a “chair thrower” and that I “was clearly going to throw that chair” and she’d just rescued everyone else from my “violence”.

Everyone present begins to remember me as someone who *habitually* throws chairs, even though I wasn’t going to throw the chair in the first place, and even if I had thrown the chair, it would’ve been once, not the many, many times implied by the language people used.

I actually was a habitual chair thrower at one point, but this is a hypothetical example, not meant to reflect my real life.  But I did stop throwing chairs, and if throwing chairs were an SJ no-no people would still treat me as if I was “a violent behavior problem” (which is actually how I heard a staff guy refer to one of his clients), perpetually, forever, because people don’t ever change, apparently, and it’s okay to treat them like dirt if they ever made a mistake, let alone a habitual one.  

This does happen in the DD system all the time.  I have never thrown anything at anyone since moving to Vermont, but my reputation followed me anyway and they tried to put me in residential care as a “danger to staff” with absolutely no evidence that this was a good idea.  I appealed. I won. But my new case manager spent years undoing the rumors spread by my old case manager.  

Another rumor was that I was always firing staff, when I’d had the same staff person for four years before moving here… forever in human service terms.  And I tend to retain staff longer than most people, because people genuinely like me, and I’m not violent anymore, so I’m pretty easy to take care of for the most part.  My last two staff people who were there long-term were something like 4 to 6 years.  Also very rare in this field.  Right now the longest-term staff has been here a year and a half I think (brain sketchy on time because delirium), and that feels like not very long compared to the last two long-term ones.

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