as small as a world and as large as alone

3:33am June 27, 2014

amorpha-system:

solipsistful:

amorpha-system:

solipsistful:

jokes i do not understand: “Lol my headmates are <collection of random characters>”

???

- Ace

It seems to be a hateability thing.

Like people who do it, from what we’ve seen, will often do it in the context of stuff like “My headmates are (collection of random characters), my otherkin type is a Volvo, my gender is a butternut squash, my pronouns are (bunch of randomly typed letters) and I’m demiromanticpolyasexual.”

…And this is the point where, after seeing gender identity incorporated into this type of mockery *repeatedly and consistently*, we start to get really tired of having to preface/disclaimer things all the time with “I know multiples aren’t systematically oppressed, BUT (etc).”  Because there *is* something that people whose main goal is to create troll identities to mock/discredit real people, seem to parse as being similar in all the above.  Even if We Aren’t Systematically Oppressed Like Trans People Are.  At some point we just want to go “okay, this is an established fact, now can we talk about the fact that even if we aren’t, people seem to parse all those things— not identifying with your body, saying your gender or sexuality can’t be easily defined by existing categories, wanting to use a different pronoun for yourself— as being intrinsically related in one giant evil snowball of special snowflakery?”

(…there’s a post out there by someone going on about how they were evilly pulled into believing they were demisexual by evil people who wanted them to believe they were special until they pulled free of the cult of evil demisexuality, or something.  If we have this cult, how come I never got to be part of it? )

-Lilac

I suppose what I really don’t understand is that being hateable makes one’s very existence laughable too. That the punchline to the “my headmates are X, my pronouns are Y” is, well, people, I guess. It’s not just “these people exist; hate them for existing”; it’s “these people exist; laugh.”

- Ace

As far as we can tell, that’s also a lot of it, yeah.  It’s really hard to encapsulate in words, because English doesn’t have a word for it (which kinda suggests that the idea that this is a natural feeling to have towards certain kinds of people, is built into the culture at a deep level).  It’s like, we’re considered hilarious but we’ve also really heard people say things like “Someone should sterilize all these people for their own good, so they can’t breed” or “Someone needs to euthanize these people” or “We should just get them all together and kill them.”  We know someone who got death and rape threats on Something Awful for being trans and an “old school”-style soulbonder.  And other stuff I don’t even want to get into now, like “send this person an email telling them to kill themselves, with detailed suicide instructions.”

Although I think that level of blatant ugliness isn’t reached as often on Tumblr because the way discussion tends to play out here, lets people wrap their hate for us in “justifications” like “you’re stealing sympathy away from people who are oppressed and really deserve it!”  Because they’ve discovered it gets people to agree with them, leave likes on their posts, etc. (…I really wish there was a way to make clear, when you like a post that’s a reply to something nasty, that you like the rebuttal and not the original nasty statement.)

Though we’ve seen the “this person exists, laugh” attitude, also, used towards trans people too.  We read a post somewhere once which mentioned that the main problem with “jokes” like “Lady Gaga is a man” is that the entire “joke” is basically “This person is transgender.  That’s hilarious!” (Or more specifically, it seems like, “This person is pretending to be something other than their ‘real’ gender, which is of course impossible.  That’s hilarious!”)

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