as small as a world and as large as alone

12:38pm April 3, 2014

lichgem:

campdracula5eva:

tweezing:

• reblogging TERFs?
• even if the post isnt transphobic?
• ur validating their opinions and perpetuating them as being credible figures in the feminist movement
• so just dont do it :-)
• or ur completely shit :-)

If I ever reblog a twerf, let me know.

I’m not actually capable of keeping up to date on who is or isn’t a TERF. I don’t do extensive background checks on the OP of every thing I reblog. And I don’t like the kind of hypervigilance against friends and acquaintances this sort of thing promotes. I’m stating this for the benefit of my followers: I don’t participate in this kind of thing.

I don’t participate in this kind of thing either.  In fact, I find it pretty offensive and disgusting.  I don’t believe it’s possible to sum up a person by their level of ideological purity, and then decide that because they hold some beliefs I consider offensive, then nothing they have to say is ever of value.

I’m not even capable of discerning all these things about a person and then working out whether or not I’m “supposed to” reblog them.  But even if I could, I wouldn’t do it.  I don’t find it okay to judge a person based on who they reblog, who their friends are, etc.  I also don’t find it okay to judge everything a person says based on the fact that they also happen to hold offensive or oppressive viewpoints.

Here’s the thing:

All of us hold offensive and oppressive viewpoints.  All of us have views, and do things, that hurt other people and contribute to oppression.  All of us have bad things about ourselves that we will not change even when confronted about it.  

Pretending that some people are so bad that you must completely isolate them and exclude them in order to not be tainted by their moral impurity, and the rest of us are somehow okay to reblog even though all of us hold views that can be just as bad… I don’t even have the words to describe how wrong it is.

Give me any person who believes in doing this to people, and look hard enough, and you will find beliefs that are plenty destructive and oppressive in and of themselves.  And then where do you stop?  Who is pure enough to avoid this kind of ostracism?  Nobody, in the end.  If anyone believes they are free of oppressive, destructive ideas, or that they would become free of them if someone pointed those ideas out, they are deluding themselves.

I can’t do this.

I have a hard enough time when I reblog a quote or something, and the quote turns out to be a quote that happened to be part of an offensive article or something.  Like that’s already beyond my cognitive capacity to screen for.  I sure as hell can’t figure out who I’m quoting and whether they meet the Tumblr Standard of Ideological Purity.

But even if I could do this, I won’t do this.

To me this is right up there with the thing where if your friend is *ist in any way, you’re supposed to either convert them to your point of view, or drop them as your friend.  No matter what else they’ve done for you, no matter what kind of relationship you have with them, no matter how important they are in your life, you’re supposed to disregard everything but the fact that they hold a viewpoint that is oppressive, and choose your friendships entirely on that basis.

This is just as bad as that.

It reduces people to whether they have offensive or destructive viewpoints in one area.  It reduces all these wonderful, complex, important things about a person, to whether they pass or fail a test of ideological purity.

And after all that reducing is done, then it means that unless they decide to agree with you, then they must be shunned and ostracized.  And anyone who associates with them (even by reblogging) is then tainted by their association.  And sometimes, then, even the people who reblog things, even things that have nothing to do with the area of ideological impurity, are subject to the same sort of ultimatums.

And that’s horrible.  It’s beyond horrible.

This is not a way to help people, it is not a way to create change, it’s just disgusting and horrible.

I’ll say it right up front:  I will inevitably reblog people who are ideologically impure in all kinds of ways.  Even if I wanted to avoid it, I couldn’t.  And I also don’t want to avoid it, because I’m not that kind of person.  Additionally, I will inevitably have friends who are ideologically impure in all kinds of ways.  And certainly, I myself am ideologically impure.  When I say ideologically impure, I don’t mean necessarily being a TERF (which I’m not, at all), I just mean holding viewpoints that are considered beyond the pale by whoever makes the ever-shifting mess of rules about these things.

If you can’t handle that, don’t read me.  I’m not going to play these kinds of social games.  Because that’s all they are: social games, status games, they’re not about helping anyone, not really.  And I’m not going to pretend that doing this is helpful, or that it’s not massively harmful.

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