as small as a world and as large as alone

2:04pm June 17, 2014

andromedalogic:

People really, really hate when people talk a certain way here on tumblr.

By “a certain way” I mean all the ways that do not fit under a kind of talking steeped in a particular cliquey social context.

A lot of talk about language accessibility focuses on plain language, and not using so much jargon, which is important. But there’s also this use of — social jargon? Of prescriptive and exclusive tones, certain tones are acceptable and others are not.

Things that make SJ discussions inaccessible, that don’t have to do with the hardness or exclusivity of words:

• valuing sarcasm, snark, and a kind of condescending in-the-know tone over a matter-of-fact one
• assuming things about people’s lived experiences from the way they talk, and ignoring the content of what they’re saying
• a culture of ridicule for minor transgressions
• making fun of people for asking questions
• not taking a person’s statement seriously because that statement is phrased using different words or logic than the kind you espouse
• not accepting words like “nice” and “mean”, “good” and “bad” as appropriate moral judgments — something being “mean” is not enough to make it bad, and it’s assumed that a person using the word “mean” should either use the word “oppressive,” or doesn’t think oppression is bad.
• disbelief when people express opinions that aren’t the opinions you expect them to have
• laughing at people who don’t understand sarcasm or snark, and refusing to explain it to them
• assuming there is no dissent about a particular topic among the people in a given community, or if there is dissent, those who dissent “don’t count” or are not worth listening to, or have drunk some kind of societal kool-aid.

Also reading things into everything a person says.  

Yesterday I got into a very frustrating conversation in which I tried to point out, in a matter-of-fact fashion, something that I thought was a self-evident fact about the world.

For pointing it out, I got ridiculed.  People assumed I’d been called out and was just pissy about that, and laughed at me for this imaginary call-out.  Several people immediately assumed that I was writing about a topic that I hadn’t said a single damn word about, and that I had specific beliefs about that topic that I would never in a million years hold.  Even one person who actually was communicating in good faith got wrapped up in that until they saw what my actual opinion was.

And then after all that, there was a post that I literally can’t make myself read again because it makes my head spin how many weird little silencing tactics were embedded in it.

One of those tactics though that really concerns me, was basically, “You shouldn’t write about a topic unless you cover every possible facet of that topic and every possible group of people affected by that topic.  If you don’t do this, then your writing is worthless and can be ignored.”

Another one basically was, “Some people have it worse than you, so you shouldn’t even talk about your problems.”  [There were a lot of assumptions embedded in who had it worse than who. They basically assumed a lot based on group membership rather than on individual experience.]

Another one was to minimize the problems I described as much as possible.  Because I had said it was “annoying” to be assumed to have male privilege on the basis of DFAB status, there was this snarky commentary about how much worse DMAB trans people have it, so much worse than just being annoyed, you know.  And this felt deliberate.  It felt like they were deliberately pretending that the only consequence of the problems I was talking about was ‘annoyance’, so that they could then dismiss the seriousness of the problem.

And then they did this really weird thing that I don’t even have a name for, where they spun around all these words and ideas and stuff to make it sound like I was completely wrong in the first place.  Like as a DFAB genderless person that I do somehow have male privilege (I can’t replicate their argument because it wasn’t about things that made sense, it was about the skillful juggling of ideas and words in a particular way that I’m unable to do myself).  And therefore that any complaint I have about being confused with a trans man is not valid in the first place.

And they did all of these things, at once, intertwined with each other.  It made conversation impossible.  It was as if, once they realized they could no longer rip me to shreds for an idea that I clearly didn’t have, they just neatly ripped to shreds all the rest of my ideas and left the mess on the floor for me to clean up.

The very last tactic deeply bothered me, too.  Because it wasn’t like they were actually looking at the situation and trying to understand it.  It was as if they were trying to find a way to win at all costs.  And the way to win at all costs was to juggle a bunch of words and jargon and ideas, like doing a complicated math problem.

And I see this being done all the time – people in some parts of the SJ community are extremely skilled at a certain kind of idea-juggling.  Sometimes the idea-juggling is used to rip an opponent’s ideas to shreds.  But sometimes it’s used to either make the opponent seem more privileged, or make themselves seem more oppressed, or both.  

But it’s dishonest.  It’s not about communicating.  It’s about winning.

I have no possible use for a conversation with someone who is merely trying to win.  I have no possible use for a conversation where someone is deliberately mocking me, or deliberately planting in other people’s minds the idea that I’ve said something I haven’t said.

It wasn’t just this conversation – I’ve had several conversations recently where someone has said something along the lines of “I get this feel from the OP that…” and then they go on to describe something that was never actually said in the original post, nor that I would ever even mean, nor… anything.  And then after they say that, everyone else suddenly treats it as if the original poster actually did say, or mean, whatever that person is thinking we meant.  It’s a very weird social phenomenon and very frustrating when you happen to be that original poster, and know that if you had meant what they say, you’d have said it.

Anyway, all of these things make it very hard for me to have conversations in certain parts of the SJ community, even when I want to.  All of my conversations are about exchanging information and communicating with people.  I can’t handle conversations that are about winning and one-upmanship and status.

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