8:17pm December 23, 2013

Speaking of things that are completely ludicrous…

Where/when/how/why do people who devote huge amounts of their time to trolling and mocking the social justice community, or what they perceive the SJ community to be, get the idea that the SJ community in general or the Tumblr SJ community in particular, is accepting of things like otherkin, fictivity, and plurality, and that the SJ community spends huge amounts of time defending people who identify that way? Sometimes to the point of apparently thinking that people who identify as those things actually created the SJ community?

And for the record, while we don’t consider ourselves part of the SJ community, we’re definitely not part of “anti-SJ” either. But as far as we can tell, people who identify as things like otherkin, fictive, or plural— even if those things actually need have nothing to do with each other— get a very chilly reception from the actual SJ community at best, if they aren’t being outright attacked for allegedly “claiming to be oppressed” (even if no one ever said that, or just a handful of people who didn’t have a really good perspective on things said it or something like it).

Honestly, what we see is more like people with particular hateable identities who are trying to find ways to wedge those identities into some very elaborate widgets/ideologies/whatever you call them, viewing the entire world in terms of discrete categories, and using very specific types of language that are actually pretty limited for describing all the complex ways that various types of oppression can work and interact but keep being used anyway. Or to put it more concisely, they’re using the same types of language as the SJ community to try to carve out a place for themselves as a category amongst all these other designated categories, but are not really getting a great reception from the community, are certainly not central to the “mainstream” version of it, and definitely did not create the various communities that are referred to as the social justice community nowadays. It’s more like being the kid everyone hates, hanging around the edge of where all the other kids are playing hoping that someone will invite you in, as opposed to the other kids deciding to chase you away while throwing basketballs at your head. And yet it seems to be extremely common for trolls to make fun of what they think “SJWs” are, by coming up with stuff like “I’M SANDWICHKIN, CHECK YOUR PRIVILEGE, STOP OPPRESSING ME.”

(…the more things change, the more it seems they really do stay the same, sometimes, especially when you end up all over again with things like self-proclaimed “DID experts” fighting other “experts” who insist it’s a debunked psychogenic illness blah blah blah, on forums that exist just to snark people. Even though both sides hate you and neither have really bothered to read much of anything you actually say. We remember the Anachronic Army’s website getting linked on some snark forum in the late 90s and people making comments like “SHE SAYS SHE HAS THOUSANDS OF PERSONALITIES, HOW CAN ANYONE CLAIM TO BE ABUSED THAT MUCH.” Going off the assumption of “higher numbers = more abuse,” even though the Army themselves said they weren’t trauma-split, though they were also open about having trauma in their past.)

Notes: