CW: transphobia

Are any of you dating/partners with a lib? how do you handle it? the woman I've been seeing is a lib. The worst of it is that she doesn't accept that personal pronouns are a thing, so definitely a bit of a transphob. I hope its just because she is just ignorant of the issues, but in other conservations we have she does some impressive level centrism and both-siding so I don't know. "Slavery wasn't bad because it was legal, everyone did it, nobody was saying it was bad at the time" etc.

We basically broke up last night, not directly because of these issues, but they are definitely a part of it. I want to be able to be completely mask off with my partner, but I also don't want to have to get into an argument every time I use "they" in the singular. I have moments of doubt where I worry I've fallen into a weird online cult and am now do the "oh, you like (BLANK)? name their last 3 albums," but with online leftist culture.

Since I do limited praxis, sometimes all of this feels theoretical. But when I open up /r/collapse or chapo.chat, I'd like to have a partner that would be able to see the world as I see it.

Otherwise we have a great time together and are able to have really good conversations. Even that we broke up last night was because she is great at communication and was able to draw this out of me. The conversation was something that I wanted to do, but I don't know when I would have gotten around to it on my own.

More broadly, how sure are you that you found the person that you want to be with? Did you feel that you compromised/settled? I don't really believe in romantic love, but maybe its just because I haven't found it yet.

should I put an ironic closing line, to act cool?

    • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
      ·
      4 years ago

      My favorite part about this take is that, not only were some Europeans/Americans like "uh folks slavery is Not Good" since it (meaning the Atlantic slave trade) literally started in roughly 1500, but the slaves themselves knew it was bad and would have said as much if anybody asked them/bothered to write it down?! Why were slave owners so afraid of slave revolts? Because they knew the slaves wanted to free themselves, because the slaves thought slavery was bad! Slaves were humans too, and obviously would have said it was bad.

      EDIT: Best critiques of slavery right at the beginning come from Spanish friars, including Bartolomé de las Casas and Tomás de Mercado. I don't need to list the countless slave rebellions, but Equiano and Douglass are two great former slaves-turned writers who also wrote about how slavery was Very Bad as they were former slaves.

      • Not_irony [he/him]
        ·
        4 years ago

        Legality =/= morality is a very basic concept that escapes a lot of people, I'm finding

    • star_wraith [he/him]
      ·
      4 years ago

      And not even correct, there were people who thought it was bad at the time. Even the awful French emancipated slaves in Haiti only a few years after the US ratified it's slaver constitution.