Some discussion on HN prompted me to think some more about this. I'm not really a fan of the term cis. I use it but I'm not really comfortable with it.
I got horrifically burned by Genevieve and her pals. Genevieve had been terribly abused by her parents and I think she was unable to trust me because I was too nice.
In her life, people were only "nice" if they were setting you up for something or if they were looking to get something from you. The idea that someone is just trying to be a decent human being was alien to her.
So after I helped her escape her abusive parents, a few weeks later she kicked me to the curb, which was okay with me, but then she apparently ran around telling lies about me to mutual acquaintances who simply took her word for it and cut me out socially. The same people who were bending over backwards to help her then set about actively making it difficult for me to sort out my problems.
Over the years, I've had a fair number of people impose on me and mistreat me because I was "nice" to them and they seemingly felt they could trust me to do right by them and could not trust anyone else to do right by them, so they wanted to make unreasonable demands on me and also intentionally shaft me as the only way they knew how to somehow make something in their life work.
I understand the logic but it's not a morally defensible position and it's not really a viable path forward.
Some people who have mistreated me in this way have tried to claim it was morally defensible in the name of Christianity. They tried to claim martyring me "for the greater good" -- aka their personal gain -- was somehow justifiable and not simply bad behavior on their part.
I personally feel I am doing the right thing morally and practically to say "I want nothing more to do with the individuals who mistreated me and happen to fit some label or other, but I will take my insights from my interactions with them and use that to inform my writing in hopes of finding better answers for the world at large." instead of becoming racist or homophobic or transphobic or whatever.
Being gay or a person of color or trans or whatever does not somehow make it okay for you to run around intentionally mistreating other people because someone hurt you first. That's a recipe for a broken world where people get to be abusive monsters if they can come up with the right means to justify it.
Trans individuals have a hard problem to solve because what bits you have under your clothes that make you physically male or female is a private matter but how people dress, wear their hair, what pronouns they use, etc. refer back to that directly or indirectly and it's shockingly controversial for there to be a mismatch between your public presentation and your private bits under your clothes.
You can assume that about 99 percent of the people you know have some kind of baggage related to their sexuality and/or gender. You can further assume that unless you are very, very close to them, you may have NO IDEA what they have suffered -- sexual assault, multiple miscarriages, questions about their own sexual orientation, physical assault over some social faux pas and the list goes on.
Sex crimes are particularly socially a big deal and there is disturbingly small steps between social faux pas and sex crime. Most of the world is not interested in pursuing the real solution, which is to improve on social practices for the initial negotiation stages to get to genuinely consenting sex. No, most people just want to get all up in arms and hang a bunch of people high after the fact, as if that somehow solves it when it really doesn't.
A LOT of LGBTQ people seem to have serious trauma from being mistreated for simply being LGBTQ and this makes it especially hard to sort out where to draw certain lines reasonably.
If someone has a severe sunburn and you touch them, they may scream. You didn't hit them but it still hurts anyway and it's not unreasonable for them to want you to NOT DO THAT while they are sunburned.
Technically, touching someone without permission is assault and battery and you shouldn't be touching random strangers for no real reason. If you followed that standard, it would fix this issue without them having to TELL YOU "Please don't do that. It hurts because I have a terrible sunburn."
The reality is a LOT of people feel entitled to touch other people they don't really know and this often has a gendered and/or classist aspect to it. Men tend to initiate touching women. More upper class people often feel entitled to touch poorer people.
The problem is that a lot of LGBTQ things are sort of like a situation where they want to both insist you touch them because it's necessary to some goal of theirs and also scream at you for hurting them.
How do we get to a point where LGBTQ people aren't just screaming at everyone? I don't know, but I think they are sort of inclined to pick fights in a way that may seem to further their goals but which may actually be counterproductive because MOST people will not make the choice I have made to have sympathy for why Genevieve and her associates burned me and wish to try to address the larger societal problem that contributed to them burning me.
A lot of people will just say "Not my problem and these people are mistreating ME and do NOT have the moral high ground here and every trans individual I know has been an unreasonable asshole to me." Being too pushy with people who have not harmed you or who did so "innocently"/inadvertently tends to make enemies, not allies.
I've tried to kind of write about this a little here: If a tree falls in a forest and makes no sound, still it falls.
I tried to do so delicately and diplomatically and blah blah blah. And maybe that's the right way to do that and maybe it's not.
When I had a corporate job, the policy -- which wasn't always followed, mind you -- was that higher ups were not supposed to pick on specific low level gumbies for doing things wrong, such as violating the dress code. Instead, they were supposed to put out a memo to mid-level managers a la "I have noticed an uptick in people wearing X, which is in violation of the dress code." and then managers would go to teams and make general statements reminding people to "Please follow the dress code."
In some cases, I sat there wanting to ask "So, was it ME?" Some of those generic statements had me wondering if I had failed to understand something or other.
People who are doing it wrong without realizing it will tend to need more specific instruction to actually improve.
Being trans is one of those things that inherently causes friction between private and public things. People get upset because, hey, they don't know what bits are between your legs under your clothes and if this is not pertinent to their lives, they may feel imposed upon to have to learn something about your issues.
I understand the impetus to feel like "If only the ENTIRE WORLD standardized something like announcing your pronouns up front, then MY LIFE would be easiser." But I really don't think that's the best way to win over the world at large and get everyone on your side.
I don't know what would be a better approach. I do know that if you learn that doing X amounts to putting out the fire with gasoline it's better to just stand there and watch it burn than to keep dousing it with gasoline.
I got horrifically burned by Genevieve and her pals. Genevieve had been terribly abused by her parents and I think she was unable to trust me because I was too nice.
In her life, people were only "nice" if they were setting you up for something or if they were looking to get something from you. The idea that someone is just trying to be a decent human being was alien to her.
So after I helped her escape her abusive parents, a few weeks later she kicked me to the curb, which was okay with me, but then she apparently ran around telling lies about me to mutual acquaintances who simply took her word for it and cut me out socially. The same people who were bending over backwards to help her then set about actively making it difficult for me to sort out my problems.
Over the years, I've had a fair number of people impose on me and mistreat me because I was "nice" to them and they seemingly felt they could trust me to do right by them and could not trust anyone else to do right by them, so they wanted to make unreasonable demands on me and also intentionally shaft me as the only way they knew how to somehow make something in their life work.
I understand the logic but it's not a morally defensible position and it's not really a viable path forward.
Some people who have mistreated me in this way have tried to claim it was morally defensible in the name of Christianity. They tried to claim martyring me "for the greater good" -- aka their personal gain -- was somehow justifiable and not simply bad behavior on their part.
I personally feel I am doing the right thing morally and practically to say "I want nothing more to do with the individuals who mistreated me and happen to fit some label or other, but I will take my insights from my interactions with them and use that to inform my writing in hopes of finding better answers for the world at large." instead of becoming racist or homophobic or transphobic or whatever.
Being gay or a person of color or trans or whatever does not somehow make it okay for you to run around intentionally mistreating other people because someone hurt you first. That's a recipe for a broken world where people get to be abusive monsters if they can come up with the right means to justify it.
Trans individuals have a hard problem to solve because what bits you have under your clothes that make you physically male or female is a private matter but how people dress, wear their hair, what pronouns they use, etc. refer back to that directly or indirectly and it's shockingly controversial for there to be a mismatch between your public presentation and your private bits under your clothes.
You can assume that about 99 percent of the people you know have some kind of baggage related to their sexuality and/or gender. You can further assume that unless you are very, very close to them, you may have NO IDEA what they have suffered -- sexual assault, multiple miscarriages, questions about their own sexual orientation, physical assault over some social faux pas and the list goes on.
Sex crimes are particularly socially a big deal and there is disturbingly small steps between social faux pas and sex crime. Most of the world is not interested in pursuing the real solution, which is to improve on social practices for the initial negotiation stages to get to genuinely consenting sex. No, most people just want to get all up in arms and hang a bunch of people high after the fact, as if that somehow solves it when it really doesn't.
A LOT of LGBTQ people seem to have serious trauma from being mistreated for simply being LGBTQ and this makes it especially hard to sort out where to draw certain lines reasonably.
If someone has a severe sunburn and you touch them, they may scream. You didn't hit them but it still hurts anyway and it's not unreasonable for them to want you to NOT DO THAT while they are sunburned.
Technically, touching someone without permission is assault and battery and you shouldn't be touching random strangers for no real reason. If you followed that standard, it would fix this issue without them having to TELL YOU "Please don't do that. It hurts because I have a terrible sunburn."
The reality is a LOT of people feel entitled to touch other people they don't really know and this often has a gendered and/or classist aspect to it. Men tend to initiate touching women. More upper class people often feel entitled to touch poorer people.
The problem is that a lot of LGBTQ things are sort of like a situation where they want to both insist you touch them because it's necessary to some goal of theirs and also scream at you for hurting them.
How do we get to a point where LGBTQ people aren't just screaming at everyone? I don't know, but I think they are sort of inclined to pick fights in a way that may seem to further their goals but which may actually be counterproductive because MOST people will not make the choice I have made to have sympathy for why Genevieve and her associates burned me and wish to try to address the larger societal problem that contributed to them burning me.
A lot of people will just say "Not my problem and these people are mistreating ME and do NOT have the moral high ground here and every trans individual I know has been an unreasonable asshole to me." Being too pushy with people who have not harmed you or who did so "innocently"/inadvertently tends to make enemies, not allies.
I've tried to kind of write about this a little here: If a tree falls in a forest and makes no sound, still it falls.
I tried to do so delicately and diplomatically and blah blah blah. And maybe that's the right way to do that and maybe it's not.
When I had a corporate job, the policy -- which wasn't always followed, mind you -- was that higher ups were not supposed to pick on specific low level gumbies for doing things wrong, such as violating the dress code. Instead, they were supposed to put out a memo to mid-level managers a la "I have noticed an uptick in people wearing X, which is in violation of the dress code." and then managers would go to teams and make general statements reminding people to "Please follow the dress code."
In some cases, I sat there wanting to ask "So, was it ME?" Some of those generic statements had me wondering if I had failed to understand something or other.
People who are doing it wrong without realizing it will tend to need more specific instruction to actually improve.
Being trans is one of those things that inherently causes friction between private and public things. People get upset because, hey, they don't know what bits are between your legs under your clothes and if this is not pertinent to their lives, they may feel imposed upon to have to learn something about your issues.
I understand the impetus to feel like "If only the ENTIRE WORLD standardized something like announcing your pronouns up front, then MY LIFE would be easiser." But I really don't think that's the best way to win over the world at large and get everyone on your side.
I don't know what would be a better approach. I do know that if you learn that doing X amounts to putting out the fire with gasoline it's better to just stand there and watch it burn than to keep dousing it with gasoline.