2:13pm March 14, 2014

➸ I think maybe I was right.

youneedacat:

I probably shouldn’t write about my experiences of gender in public.

I also probably shouldn’t read people’s posts about gender.

If I do the first, I piss people off, almost always.

If I do the second, I nearly always run into discussions about how people with my (lack of) gender either don’t…

The issue wasn’t you talking about your experiences with gender. Talking about experiences with gender is great. The problem was that folks hijacked a trans woman’s post, that was talking about a specific issue related to transmisogyny, in order to have this discussion. People who shouldn’t be hijacking things (DFAB folks or basically anyone who isn’t a trans woman). The point about entitlement is in reference to people feeling like they can comment where they wish without thinking about who the spaces are for, and entitlement to join into a discussion that wasn’t meant for them and was actually a derail.

That’s why she wants you to stop. It has nothing to do with your expression of gender or why you need the clothes that you do. It has to do with behaviors and the attitudes that reflect those behaviors.

She has a right to ask you, and other people hijacking her posts for unrelated discussions, to stop doing things that harm her and contribute to the attitudes developing in the nonbinary community that harm trans women.

That’s all well and good, and I think everyone involved in the discussion has acknowledged that maybe we shouldn’t have been there (which has, as far as I know, gone totally unacknowledged by anyone other than the people who’ve said it ourselves).

BUT. There was no signpost up saying why the post was written, what kind of “space” it was written in, what kind of person it was written by, and what the social expectations of people in this so-called “space” was. Normally, when posts are being reblogged all over the place, unless there’s a really obvious sign saying “don’t reblog unless” or “don’t reblog”, then it’s kind of normal for people to add their own thoughts and experiences on the posts. And it’s normal for the topic of the posts to drift around to various tangentially related topics (it’s called “thread drift”, a term that dates back to ancient Usenet days).

And in that circumstance, it is not reasonable to completely blow up at people who had no idea what was going on, were only adding in their own experiences of the world (which is kind of what people do, in discussions, in general), and were in many cases commenting on tangents of tangents of tangents of tangents of tangents. At this point I’ve had people who were not even on that thread, but simply replying on this thread, approached about whether they are taking my side or her side in this argument, and that’s completely unfair to both them and to me.

Meanwhile, it’s gone beyond anything that this started out as, because while I and others her have been literally reading the words that have been said and replying to those words with our own ideas, and then having people reply to those words with their own ideas, and such, the original poster has been running around reading massive amounts of stuff that wasn’t written, into what people were saying, and getting upset at people about it. And that’s not acceptable either. (I could point to multiple specific instances where I said like, one simple sentence, and she read into it five sentences that were not there and were not implied and were not meant, and then responded to me as if I said those five sentences. And I think she’s been doing it to others who replied to me, as well. But I’m not going to go back and do that because I promised not to read her stuff anymore so I won’t be tempted to reply to it.)

She’s got what she wants. I’m not going to reply to any of her stuff again, I doubt Anne will ever be interested in replying to any of her stuff around, and I doubt allies-person is ever going to reply to her stuff again either. She’s got her “space” to do with whatever she wants. All three of us have acknowledged that maybe we shouldn’t have been there.

But all three of us have also expressed, publicly and privately, a great deal of confusion as to how the hell we were supposed to have told all this implicit information that we’re supposed to have magically known and absorbed and responded to. It’s clear from her responses that the original poster both wants other people to read information that she hasn’t written, into her posts, and respond to it, and also that she (incorrectly) reads massive amounts of information into the posts of others. But lots of autistic people can’t do that. And lots of autistic people can’t fucking navigate this morass of unwritten rules about all these “spaces” on tumblr that aren’t marked and aren’t described and aren’t in any way made possible to know where the fuck you are.

I know that there’s a very vocal and obvious subgroup of autistic people who are able to memorize that stuff. I don’t know how they do it, but they clearly do it, constantly.

Like how do you tell what is a “space” that is reserved only for specific people, and how do you tell when it’s reserved only for those specific people, and how do you tell how specific a “space” is being reserved for people? Because even knowing everything you’ve just said I would, reading the original post going down my dashboard, have no possible way of following the rules you and she have set out about how to respond to it. Because that would require reading huge amounts of information that are not actually written into the post. And I can’t do that. Can’t. Ever.

And that’s why I’m not going to read any more of her posts. She told me to go away and I’m going away. Everyone involved has acknowledged we shouldn’t have been there. Everyone involved is at this point probably too annoyed and fed up with the whole thing to want to insert ourselves into a situation like that again. So she has what she wants. But unless she puts a signpost on posts like that, I guarantee something like that will happen again the next time she runs across someone who can’t read loads of unwritten rules into every post that comes across their dash.

It’s also hard, even if you can tell something is a “space” that is supposed to be restricted to certain people, to know exactly which people it’s restricted to. Everyone dealing with gender issues? Trans people? Trans women? A specific kind of trans women? If you aren’t incredibly specific about things like that, people are going to have to guess, and they’re going to guess wrong a good portion of the time unless they have a really good social radar of a certain sort. Which I lack, which Anne lacks, which lots of autistic people lack.

Despite everything I’ve just acknowledged, I still have a problem with a lot of what went on, or at least how it went on.

Look at it from my perspective:

I see a post that basically says: "The problem isn’t _______. The problem is actually _______. Here’s another solution (which may not work as well as I think it does).“

I see it, and think "That kind of makes sense as far as it goes. Except, that first thing is a problem for a lot of people. Maybe the OP doesn’t know that. I think I’ll explain.”

I proceed to explain, using my experiences to explain why, in fact, the problem is _______ a lot of the time, and why the solution given won’t necessarily work for us.

I don’t say that the world absolutely has to be run so that it works for me all the time. I don’t say that I even know exactly how the world should be run. I just see an idea, see a potential problem with the idea, and give some information that explains why I think so.

I can’t see that as an unreasonable way to respond to a statement I see, reblogged, going down my dash. I can’t see it as reasonable to assume that I’ll know that the person doesn’t want to hear that there may be people whose experiences conflict with what they are saying. I can’t see it as reasonable to then attribute tons of views to me that I didn’t actually say, at all, whatsoever. I don’t see it as reasonable to blow up at me for responding, or to accuse me of ‘derailing’ a conversation that I didn’t even know could be derailed to begin with, because I had no possible way of knowing that the conversation was meant to be a restricted discussion for a certain kind of people and only welcome to people who agreed with the basic idea in discussion.

Meanwhile, other things happened. I had more ideas that sprang from my first idea. Other people had more ideas that sprang from my first idea. We discussed them. This is what happens on the Internet in general and tumblr in particular.

But then everything we all said was taken to be a direct comment on the original post. The idea of thread drift was not considered. And we were all seen to be 'encroaching’ on a 'space’ that we couldn’t even see existed in the first place because nobody told us it existed in the first place.

So yes. Someone wrote something from their experience, other people replied discussing our experiences (both in direct relation to the original post, and in relation to each other), and then the OP interpreted all of our responses in a way that had very little to do with what we actually said, and a lot to do with community dynamics we aren’t even involved with.

And something like this does happen every time I discuss my experiences with gender, so it’s not amiss for me to say this is a pattern, no matter what the specifics of this particular situation is. Saying that this is a pattern is not the same as saying that this is the exact and only reason she was annoyed with me. But I do think that my experiences with gender do tend to touch a lot of sore points in parts of the trans community – both sore points that are related directly to what my experiences are, and sore points that have nothing to do with my experiences but just sound similar enough that people are liable to get very angry when I bring them up without telling me what they are. And so I went away and commented about that somewhere else where she wouldn’t have to see it unless she wanted to.

At which point people started commenting on what I said, and responding to responses to responses to what I said. And someone wrote a response to a response to a response to a response to a post I made about this issue. At which point nobody was even directly talking about the fight that had happened. And then (I only know this because I saw a response to her) she came into this thread and started asking that person (who was at that point responding to a tangent of a tangent of a tangent) if they agreed with me about another thing that I hadn’t actually said. Which is completely unfair, but I keep seeing it happen here: People who respond to tangents of tangents of tangents are held responsible for what other people have said, just because they’ve replied to replies to replies to replies… and that’s not a good thing to do to people.

(Speaking of which, I’m not interested in trying to make people choose sides. I don’t care how close to me you are, you can pick any side you want, or don’t pick a side at all, and I’m not going to be offended. I find the whole act of trying to make people pick sides in these things really destructive. Plus I’m not even sure what side I’m on, or whether I have a side, so yeah.)

So basically, I can totally agree, and I know Anne agrees, that as genderless people then there are conversations among trans women that we shouldn’t be a part of. I know allies-person agrees that as a cis woman maybe she shouldn’t have been involved at all. But I’m also pretty sure that none of the three of us would have been able to tell that we shouldn’t have been involved, from the content of the original post. And people who reblogged my responses, or reblogged responses to my responses, and so on, definitely couldn’t have known. Because on tumblr, in general, people have conversations unless it’s clearly marked “don’t have a conversation here” or “certain kinds of people should not be involved in this conversation”. Like sometimes I can tell that a conversation is a conversation for a specific kind of person, but other times it’s incredibly hard to tell, and in this case I’d have no clue, even if presented with the same kind of post again. Which is extremely frustrating when you’re actively trying to do the right thing, but know that there’s no possible way you can.

Generally if I see a conversation involving gender, then I see no reason not to insert my experiences with gender unless there are extremely clear lines being drawn as to which people’s experiences with gender are the most important there. There aren’t even clear lines of advantage in the trans community, like there are in some communities – it’s more a situation where different people have different kinds of advantages over other people, in different situations.

And in order for something to be “a derail”, there has to be a clear idea that the original thing is the sort of thing that can be derailed. And there wasn’t. Like, I thought this was just a situation where people were exchanging ideas about something. Nobody gave any indication that it was supposed to be that the original idea was being discussed as reality that needs to then be discussed without actually debating it, not as a possible idea about reality that can be discussed as to whether it’s true. And if you don’t give that indication, again, people are going to say whatever they’re going to say, they’re not going to restrict it to a discussion where the idea is taken as reality. (I’m not sure the words for what I mean here, hopefully I’m getting it across. Like, there are some contexts where you don’t want people to contradict an idea, you want to flesh it out and have others help your flesh it out. There are other contexts where it’s okay to contradict the idea. Most people in most settings assume you’re dealing with the second context unless you specifically say it’s the first. And if you’re assuming that something is the second context, then contradicting it isn’t “derailing” it, it’s discussing it. If you don’t know where the rails are, you can’t possibly know you’re taking something off the rails, and it’s not fair to expect people to know that unless things are much clearer than they were here.)

Also, I really don’t like the way this is being handled. I can see a rift is going to form between me and the OP, however much I don’t want it to be there. Because the demands being made, the things I’m supposed to acknowledge, are not realistic ones to make, because half the things attributed to me aren’t real. And the parts I will acknowledge – like that I probably shouldn’t have been there, and that I can see why what I did looked like some other things I wasn’t actually doing – are little help, because I can’t guarantee I won’t be there again by accident unless I totally avoid her, which I’m now trying to do. I just hope this doesn’t go beyond me and her. I’ve seen things start out with two people getting into a tiff over something like this, and then everyone else feeling like they have to line up and take sides. And then like five years later everyone’s still saying “Jenny’s a horrible person because she treats disabled people badly, don’t trust her” or something (and equivalent things said in the other direction), when most of the people saying it don’t remember what actually happened, many of them weren’t even there, and now there’s this rift between two groups of people and… I don’t want to see that happen here. I’m not sure it will, but even a rift between two people is unnecessary. And I see the above happen constantly, rifts within rifts within rifts until everyone is in pieces, and it’s horrible.

But a lot of this was avoidable. We could have just had a discussion about it, and either come to an agreement or decided we disagreed, and then moved on without all this mess involved. This isn't big enough for everything that’s unfolding, to be unfolding. The lack of a sense of scale in parts of tumblr really scares me in a lot of ways. This is at most a misunderstanding combined with a mild disagreement, not… what it’s being made into.

If, after posting this, I see it condensed into “yuck, youneedacat believes __________” where “_______________” is some gross distortion of what I said, then I’m through. There’s only so much of this I can tolerate, I have too many other things to do.

At any rate, everyone involved has acknowledged that maybe we shouldn’t have been there, but that we had no way of knowing that the ordinary rules of conversation didn’t apply. Can we move on yet?

Notes: