Trans Rights are Human Rights
Edit:
I was angry when I made this post. I should have cooled off first but I didn’t, and I apologize for that. Though that does not change the reason for this post, just the way I’m gonna say it:
I’m not, and I don’t think anyone else is, upset if someone doesn’t want to set a pronoun. The anger came from the comments on the other post, the reaction of some people who stated they didn’t care about the issue, but also cared enough to complain about the fact that it was brought up.
They cared that they were being bothered but did not care to show solidarity.
I think that’s supremely fucked up. I know what it’s like to be on the other side of that cruel apathy, and I will not stand to see it directed at my comrades.
this site is pretty supportive. Almost every single post I see has pronoun flair. Don't escalate if you don't have to. People are watching how we act to each other.
Yeah, and acting in zealous and extreme solidarity with our trans comrades is exactly how we should act towards one another. I agree with @QuillQuote that if somebody looks at that post and goes "hmmmm, they care too much about pronouns here, I'd better leave" then I don't want them on this site. Losing transphobes is a feature, not a bug.
I'm not going to participate in increasing the volume of this fight.
And the pronoun flairs are a good feature, but it does not make sense to assume that everybody who doesn't use it is indifferent or worse with regards to trans rights.
Any personal information one might offer about oneself, including preferred pronouns, must be strictly voluntary. There are myriad reasons one might withhold this information, and most of them are not indifference or disdain for Trans people.
Perhaps new users should default to "unspecified." This is different from "they/them" because it specifically means this information has been withheld.
I don’t think I follow, how is posting this an escalation and who would be watching that would be put off by saying do what you can to support your comrades/ TERFs fuck off?
"get the fuck off our site" would be an escalation. The people watching are from I dunno /r/dankleft and chud wreckers. Again, nearly every post I see has prononun flair. I think we should really try to minimize the amount of yelling we do at other users.
because there's already multiple threads about this and it's stirring up more controversy.
Stirring up controversy?
Suppose I should stop saying ACAB lest I stir up controversy among my friends and family
To who? Why?
I do not understand why taking about something important to the community and that clearly needs to be talked about is bad
because it's pointless infighting. and it's pointless infighting that's already happening in multiple spaces.
because you can ban people who are being transphobic already. this is the definition of pointless.
What about the people who are only reacting the way they are because of brain worms they simply never noticed because no one ever pointed it out and helped them work through it to grow as a person?
What about our whole purpose of helping raise consciousness and solidarity?
Not taking about stuff is detrimental to our community. We need to have these discussions because if we don’t how else do you expect anyone to learn if it falls outside their lives experience?
There were some people banned, but plenty of people who were cold to the idea or conceptualized of the ask in a reactionary, narcissistic way, or didn’t comment at all but are reading the discussion and learning a lot they’d never thought about before.
This shit matters.
sure it's helpful to discuss this, that's why people are discussing it in the other threads. this post in particular is the pointless infighting i was referring to
You’re right, I was upset and let it get the better of me. But despite the poor tone I set some good discussion is taking place here at least
Sorry about that
Yes it is a low impact gesture. Did you read the edit? I’m not mad people aren’t doing it, but at how upset some libs got when asked for a favor they didn’t care about
But yeah, I apologize for the title, I was pissed and not leading with my real issues.
based. edit: why are little crybabies mad at someone just declaring trans rights are human rights and asking users to spend 1 second choosing a pronoun? Are you libs really trying to "tone police" wtf lmao
This is what happens when you point out something online leftists could improve on, they feel attacked and get defensive because being good people and good leftists is how many of us identify, so it feels like a challenge to who we are.
Which is just patently ridiculous because we’re all constantly going to have to reflect and question ourselves and our thoughts and actions so we can work towards killing the colonizer that lives in our heads. That’s how we grow.
It’s the reaction to stuff like this being brought up that’s telling to there being a desperately needed conversation.
Also see intelligence based insults for a similar reaction (with the immediate mass discontent and angst, mixed eventually with some substantive criticisms and discussion)
It's hard to learn and grow and not be defensive. I noticed a lot of white people (myself included) going through defensiveness that when antiracism started to become like, a thing white people started paying attention to.
People naturally want to assume they're good, so if you point out where they've made mistakes or treated people poorly (even accidentally), the natural reaction is to defend their psyche and be like "NO U".
I think it's okay to have that natural reaction, just you know, also you have to learn to quiet that defensiveness so you can really listen. Here and real life, i want to build community and find common ground with people i don't understand, you know, so we can wage a protracted people's war. That means listening to them and accepting their candid feedback, so we can both grow and understand each other. And it means making little sacrifices that sometimes feel silly from the outside but is deeply important to them. Not really the same scale, as misgendering actually hurts, but if i go to someone's house and they take their shoes off at the door and leave them outside i do that. If they don't eat food in the living room, i do that. If they want to pray before their meal, i'll close my eyes and be respectful. If someone doesn't drink or smoke, i respect that. That's a part of building community that i find very beautiful and heartwarming, we can all get along so well if we choose to and treat each other with basic respect.
I do not understand why anyone cares what anyone else does or doesn't do with their pronouns. This seems like such a meaningless issue to be bothered by. The only thing I've seen is that it's meant to be so that trans people aren't the only ones who have to tell people their pronouns - but they already aren't! It's the internet, and we don't have pictures or speech to identify people off of, so if you're cis and want people to call you by the correct gender, you already have to tell people your pronouns. So the only people who don't list pronouns are people who don't give a shit about what gender people call them, which is cool and good because gender is a fuck. What's the problem, exactly? Is it transphobic if I don't announce my pronouns to everyone I meet?
my response to this in the big thread:
adding to Melon’s response, what cis people (especially cis men on a forum dominated by men) is of interest because they represent the majority and therefore have default status. when people gender each other on this site, they assume they’re talking to a man. that’s seriously off-putting to many of us (less so to trans men, more so to women and NB people), that my mere participation on this forum incorrectly engenders me. on the old sub, I was misgendered more times than I care to count – and even nice replies that hey, I’m actually a girl would uniformly go ignored. so we push cis people to flair the pronouns here to create a new normal: everyone’s pronouns are visible.
why not stop at letting people for whom it’s important do it but not push it on everyone else? no marginalized group/political minority will ever be comfortable with identifying themselves to a majority while the majority continues to enjoy default status. remember that that kind of labeling is always the first thing demanded by fascists who want to eliminate a group of people to get a taste for how and why that kind of ask is seriously problematic.
but also, on a social level, if we’re serious about eliminating patriarchy, we need to do away with the default status of men – on online boards, in every day society, everywhere. this is one more step on that path.
it's not transphobic if you don't announce everywhere you go. as usual, the transphobia is in the reasons why people refuse to do it.
no marginalized group/political minority will ever be comfortable with identifying themselves to a majority while the majority continues to enjoy default status.
I don't understand what you mean by this. Nobody's pronouns identify them as trans, and there are plenty of women, such as yourself, who list their pronouns as "she/her." So trans people don't have to identify themselves as trans, and women seem comfortable identifying themselves as women. If they aren't, and that's the problem, than we should be discussing whether it is sexist rather than whether it is transphobic.
Also, even if everyone assigned pronouns, there's still an option for "any pronoun" which leaves room for a "default" assumption of masculinity. The only way to get rid of that would be to make everyone identify themselves which seems to be exactly the kind of labeling that you're concerned about due to it being demanded by fascists.
I don’t understand what you mean by this. Nobody’s pronouns identify them as trans
I didn't say trans in my post for a reason. default masculinity doesn't hurt trans men. the point is that default masculinity harms everyone who isn't a man. we're not an overwhelmingly male space for no reason and it's things like this that make it hard to exist here as a woman. it's never anything huge enough to complain about but the little things add up.
Also, even if everyone assigned pronouns, there’s still an option for “any pronoun” which leaves room for a “default” assumption of masculinity.
well yeah, people can always choose to be shitty and ignore pronoun markers, too. no one is saying this is a panacea. but it is one step towards dismantling the elements that make so many people uncomfortable in this space.
The only way to get rid of that would be to make everyone identify themselves which seems to be exactly the kind of labeling that you’re concerned about due to it being demanded by fascists.
if everyone is labeled, no one is. my point was about labeling only the political minorities while the majority continues to enjoy default status.
idk like in meatspace it feels like pronouns chanting is a way to single out trans people that are early transition / are nonbinary. like i remember going to DSA meet early on in transition, every cis person reading their pronouns out, and everyone just kinda turning around to me expectantly and i was like 'no i'm not doing that lmao'. cause i dont want everyone to know my business?
Love to, uh, have my own agency dictated to me by mods of a shitposting site??
The further this assinine undergraduate drama plays out, the more I'm convinced that Amber was 100% right and that anyone who swears by Chapo while shunning Cumtown is simply not to be trusted, full stop.
When I was growing up, gay people were only really around as the butt of a joke in a comedy show and while not technically illegal, gay people could not get married or adopt etc.
We're watching trans people go through something similar to this in their struggle for recognition and rights, but not identical of course.
I really like how Chapo seems to be a decent space for trans people on the internet, but yeah that's a very low bar indeed.
It seems like a decent number of trans people are of the opinion that we should have pronoun tags here. It's less than ten second's effort on my part and there's a convincing argument for it that I won't repeat cos others in this thread have put it better than me. It's not that hard to do something this simple to help out our friends.
Yeah, it’s pinned on main, it was an ask that peeps set their pronouns in solidarity with trans/nb comrades and some people reacted quite poorly to such a simple ask
Yeah I don't understand why people would have a problem with that
>not selecting pronouns is equivalent to not supporting trans people
Huh, okay. That's certainly the kind of leap of logic I would expect from actual republican rhetoric (I'm pretty sure they actually did this kind of leap in logic about the military so...), not a big tent leftist gathering shitposting forum. But what would I know, i'm just a random person on the goddamn internet.
I was angry when I made the post and should have taken more care with my wording, I apologize for that.
I’m not, and I don’t think anyone else is, upset if someone doesn’t want to set a pronoun. The anger came from the comments on the other post, the reaction of some people who stated they didn’t care about the issue, but also cared enough to complain about the fact that it was brought up.
They cared that they were being bothered but did not care to show solidarity.
I think that’s supremely fucked up
Hell yeah!
And I think everyone would agree it’s also okay not to even set one if, for whatever reason, you aren’t comfortable setting one.
Isn’t the whole point of this thread telling people to “get the fuck off our site” if they don’t set pronouns?
It was when I made it, because I was angry and made the mistake of posting without cooling off. I’ll make an edit quick.
Though it is definitely telling TERFs to fuck off (to be clear I’m not linking not setting a pronoun with being a TERF, that’s ridiculous)
I wasn’t super comfortable at first but it’s not a big deal really and I’m keeping it vague
Exactly! I was upset because of people who didn’t care and also opposed it without any good reason to.
I don’t expect people seeing that post to immediately go set a pronoun, I just expect them to, if it’s not something they’ve ever thought about or encountered before, think about it a little. Ideally if they have no reason not to, they’d set a pronoun, but It’s not a declaration of being a transphobe to not do so.
It wasn’t my post, it’s pinned on main, the pronouns announcement
Good luck
Great point but why stop there? Let's respect the full spectrum and at least include zie/zim/zer, sie/sie/hir, ve/ver/vis, te/ter/tem, and ey/em/eir. The limited list can be improved upon.
There is a request thread for getting more pronouns added.
this has always been the plan. _ i actually just pushed a bunch of neopronouns live for selection
do any enby people here use neopronouns irl? i havent met anyone irl that uses them over they
That is unfortunate.
Is the app a lot better than just using your browser? I’m using the chrome app rn and it’s pretty bearable so far imo
i think the downvotes could be more that they dont like this because it's gatekeeping and overly aggressive. just ask nicely and assume the best - if people give you shitty responses complain about that, not that people aren't setting a tag on a site
my understanding from other comments here is that the OP is upset about another post where people aren't setting their preferred pronoun tags
Thanks comrade. I just get so frustrated when I see poor displays like that from chapo, it’s a real gut punch. but I can’t be takin it out on folks that’s not fair
Internet is rough. Hard to read tone, hard to know what the other person is going through. Maybe they've had a hard shitty day and they're lashing out. Maybe mental health issues. Maybe they're intoxicated.
We're generally all here for unification. Sometimes people haven't made it fully down the pipeline, and I've noticed trans issues tend to be the last and final step towards being a progressive ally. People can really struggle with it, especially because in many parts of the country it's very uncommon to ever meet or interact with trans people.
