3:22am June 8, 2014

Why do people care so much about other people’s identity?

youneedacat:

Like, I’ve been going through a lot of different tumblr tags that aren’t even related to each other. But what keeps popping up over and over again, is people becoming completely obsessed with policing each other’s identities. No matter what the identity is — disability, chronic illness, gender (or lack thereof), sexuality, race — there’s always people sitting there who seem to think it’s their gods-given duty to decide where to draw the line for everyone else. And then insult the crap out of anyone on the outside of the lines.

It just seems like a fancy excuse for bullying, to me. I know some of it comes from fear of being treated badly or not taken seriously (“if we let people like THAT in, nobody will believe ME”), that it’s not always as simple as just being a bully. But mostly it looks like bullying to me. Bullying with fancy, elaborate excuses.

And it of course concerns me, because me and most of my friends, we tend to somehow always fall on the outside of most of the lines. Not on purpose, not because we want to be special, but because it just happens that way, all the time. It gets tiring to want to say something about who you are, without having to fight just to be able to say it.

It also tends to come down to misogyny. Like “if we let teenage girls who are ~just being special snowflakes for attention~ in, no one will take us seriously!”

Yeah, misogyny and ageism. I’ve seen it directed at “teenagers” in general, too.

Gah, I remember when I was a teenager saying weird things about myself. Really weird things. Part of being a teenager is exploring your identity, including in some pretty strange ways. If you really are a strange sort of person (autistic, trans, psychiatrically disabled, etc.) then you’re going to explore some much stranger identities than usual. This is not bad, even if it is just exploration. That’s what teenagers are for.