8:49pm May 31, 2014

➸ Since I saw someone posting from the FWD ableist word profiles on here...

kaninchenzero:

se-smith:

youneedacat:

A reminder of some things that FWD always wrote about the ableist word profiles, that practically nobody on tumblr writes or thinks when it comes to discussions of whether a word is ableist:

Ableist Word Profile is an ongoing FWD/Forward series in which…

jesus christ could y’all stop agreeing with tumblr user
youneedacat
on the use of words and power there’s a long history of this person saying shit like this to mean “if you’re arguing with me about transmisogyny it is UNFAIR and MEAN and OPPRESSIVE to mention that you’re a trans woman” asking as a FWD co-founder

Okay I apologise. I didn’t know this. I was going strictly from the context of the post, and there is no way I would agree that shit is okay, and not really any practical way I could have known that context. So I own that error.

I think it’s more than a little shady if we’re using language discussing institutional use of problematic language to couch discussions of why other types of problematic language should not be used.

Could we not use one to defend the other? I object to prescriptivism but there are, in fact, problematic things you DO NOT SAY. Do not use FWD as a tool to defend acts of violence.

There is a difference.

Ty, K0 and I apologise.

Wait just a fucking minute here.

I posted the stuff from FWD, because people were using quotes from FWD to prove why language was ableist and should never ever be used. I think the thing in question was the word ‘lame’.

People are now referring to an argument that I had ages ago and completely forgotten about, and is totally unconnected to FWD, to my use of quotes from FWD, and etc. There are two sides to every story and I’d rather not rehash what happened but from my perspective it went like this:

1. Someone said something about how gender worked for them. It mentioned nothing about transmisogyny in particular. It mentioned nothing about being a trans woman. It just mentioned something about femininity in general.

(This was reblogged through a whole bunch of people, until it came up on my dash through a friend of mine.)

2. I said something about how gender worked for me, that made the proposed solution to the problem, unworkable for me as a genderless person.

3. The other person very suddenly said “You’re telling a trans woman that your experience of gender is more important than hers” or something like that.

Which I hadn’t. I hadn’t even said how to solve the problem or that my solution should work for everyone. I just said why it wouldn’t work for me.

And then nothing I could say made any difference because the person blew up at me, and at everyone who had replied after me. I eventually put her on ignore, because it became clear that there was no right answer other than “Yes I did everything you said I did.”

All of us (most of whom were not cis, by the way) eventually agreed that we should not have been in that discussion, but we also agreed that there was no possible way we could have known that we were having a discussion with a trans woman rather than a general discussion about our experience of gender (and ways to deal with various problems that come up around gender), and therefore that we had no possible way of avoiding being in that situation again.

Two people involved in that conversation decided they just plain would never reblog anything again from anyone they didn’t know. I decided I’d keep blundering through and trying to do the right thing.

Apparently that’s not enough, because whatever you do lives forever on tumblr, and the moment someone frames it as an oppressive act, then you’re the bad guy, forever, no matter what you do. And even if you do something as completely unconnected to that as get into a discussion of ableist language, someone will try to restart a fight that was over weeks if not months ago.

I’ll make this very clear:

MY POST WAS ABOUT ABLEIST LANGUAGE, PERIOD.

It was not about any fight I’ve had with anyone over language in any other context. It was just about ableist language. That’s all.

If anyone is trying to drag FWD into a dispute that doesn’t belong to them, it’s the other person here. I thought the dispute was long over. I had no idea that this was still being dragged out, or that I was developing some kind of ~reputation~ for all of this.

Everyone who ended up on the wrong side of that dispute has apologized. All of us have said that we should not have been in the discussion at all. All of us have expressed extreme puzzlement over how we should have been able to tell that we were even in a discussion of transmisogyny when there were no tags or other indicators that we were discussing transmisogyny or that the OP was a trans woman. All of us have had different reactions to how to stay out of such discussions in the future, but all of us have tried. All but one of us are trans or genderless ourselves, mind you, but I understand that since we’re not trans women we aren’t supposed to be at the center of discussions of transmisogyny. However, the discussion didn’t mention transmisogyny, it only mentioned femininity, so we discussed our experiences with femininity (which was then used against us, we basically got accused of being radfems at one point, the whole thing was extremely bizarre given that we were not even cis ourselves and would never be radfems).

There used to be a tradition on the Internet, that you didn’t take a fight from one forum to another forum. This is the reason for it. Because it destroys community and stories grow in the telling until one incident grows to sound like multiple incidents.

What I remember is that I blundered into a discussion I shouldn’t have been part of, but that had no clear markers showing I should not have been part of it, so I can’t promise I will never blunder into another discussion that seems to be about femininity but turns out to be about transmisogyny. Then instead of noting that I’d blundered into a discussion, the OP, who seemed to be having a bad day, declared something about me Talking Over A Trans Woman On Matters of Transmisogyny, and after that no amount of explanation worked, because the more I said, the more she became convinced I was something I wasn’t. I did say something about it being unfair to characterize the conversation as “You did Thing X to Oppressed Group X” because that immediately polarizes everything and makes people think that things have happened that might not have happened – as is happening in this very discussion right now.

But basically the truth wasn’t good enough. And so I moved on, and so did everyone else involved in the discussion.

Apparently, over time, in some parts of the internet, this has since become a thing I habitually do to trans women, even though I don’t recall having gotten into any other fights with trans women about transmisogyny, ever.

Also people with FWD, if you don’t recognize me? Mel Baggs, formerly known as Amanda, otherwise known as Ballastexistenz, otherwise known as someone you’ve known for awhile, worked semi-closely with for awhile and hopefully trust that even if I’ve done things wrong (which I certainly have, and I’ve admitted the wrong I’ve done in this instance), I’m far from cis myself and have made no habit of using language issues to say trans women are mean? Hopefully you know me better than to simply take someone’s word that I’ve done something so awful that I shouldn’t be listened to even on issues that have nothing to do with being trans. (Oh and I have a 10+ year history in the trans community as a genderless person myself. I know that gives me privilege over trans women in some contexts. But I’m not cis and I’m not a radfem and my views are not influenced by radfems and my goal in life is not to abolish gender.)

I do think one trans woman was unnecessarily mean to me (and I think it was manipulative for her to frame the entire issue as oppressive and then continue escalating it as much as possible when it was more a case of serious misunderstanding), but I chalked it up to a bad day and hoped it would blow over. I don’t think trans women in general are mean and would never say such a thing. And I don’t habitually talk about the way trans women use language, at all, so I don’t even know where that comes from.

Other than the fact that on tumblr, there’s this thing that happens, where if something happens once, then people act like it happens habitually. So you can do something wrong, once. And then people will say, not, “Here is a person who did something wrong, once.” But “Here is a person who habitually does something wrong.” And then they elaborate on it and make up details that don’t even exist in the real world and it becomes a big thing with your reputation and you lose relationships with people you care about. And all possibly over one misstep.

And I’d really fucking like if we could discuss one thing at a time here. Because I was trying to discuss the way people on tumblr use the FWD Ableist Word Profiles to show that words are ableist and should never be used, instead of using them as the guidelines they were meant to be. And that’s all I was doing. And I’d really, really appreciate it if people could grasp that instead of dragging into it every fight I’ve ever had with anyone on tumblr.

Because honestly, face it – every single one of us in this conversation has done things that are wrong. Every single one of us has entered into conversations we didn’t know, weren’t for us, because they weren’t marked as not for us in even the slightest way. Every single one of us has hurt people. Every single one of us has done oppressive things. If we were judged only for that side of things, then all of us would be worthless wastes of space who should never be listened to on any matter at all.

And maybe that’s fine for parts of the tumblr echo chambers, but it’s not fine with me. It ruins relationships, it ruins alliances, it ruins the ability for people to get together and get things done without excess drama. And I’d hate to think that everything I’ve done with FWD in the past is eliminated because I got in a fight with someone who seemed to be having a really bad day, and someone has now blown that one fight up into a legend of many fights over many days, which didn’t actually happen. Have none of you gotten into fights? Have none of you done things you regretted? Have none of you accidentally stepped into territory you didn’t belong, because it wasn’t clearly marked? Seriously?

Anyway, all this was about was ableism in language. All it was about. I’m sorry to have to rehash the details of the rest of it.

But if you walked into a discussion where you saw someone saying “I don’t think it works to just abolish femininity because…” and then you said “Actually femininity is a problem for me because I’m nongendered and it affects me in this and that way…” I doubt you’d know you were talking about transmisogyny either without clear markings that weren’t there. In hindsight, I can see a million ways I could have done it better, but hindsight isn’t what you’re acting on in realtime. I generally process words as they come, I don’t add in connotations that aren’t there, and maybe someone who was better at connotations would have smelled that the conversation was about transmisogyny. I honestly thought I was talking to a cis woman and that my views as a genderless/trans person might be important. I was wrong on both counts. But there was no way to know, and that’s what I keep coming back to, is how can you avoid doing it again if there’s no way to know? I want to avoid doing wrong things, I want to avoid doing things like that again, but I can’t, so I just have to accept that I’m going to accrue a reputation for blundering in where I don’t belong. I hope most people will recognize why this happens rather than immediately framing it as oppression in action. Especially because autism has a huge part to play here (all three of us who blundered in? autistic people, two of us genderless autistic people, there’s a pattern there to be found too).

Anyway, I had hoped that entire thing was dead. I had no idea that from one fight I’d accrued an entire reputation. Honestly I think it’s a waste of time and energy for anyone to be thinking about me that hard. I’m not a threat. But from the moment it happened, it was like this spiral of weirdness was set in motion that nothing could undo, nothing, because most of it was based on assumptions about things that had never happened.

I’m going to try not to talk about this any further. I’ve said my piece. I just hope that the folks at FWD won’t be so fast to judge me now that they know I’m someone they’ve worked with, someone they’ve trusted, and not someone liable to do the things I’ve been accused of doing here.

Generally what I say is what I mean and what I mean is what I say. And what I mean here is – everything in this entire thread is about the misuse of FWD’s Ableist Word Profiles by people on tumblr who use them in a prescriptivist way. That’s all. All. All. It has nothing to do with trans issues of any kind. Hopefully the people from FWD know me well enough to at least take my word that, whatever mistakes I’ve made, this reputation I’m accruing in some circles is a gross echo-chamber-infused exaggeration of an unfortunate incident, nothing more.

Notes: