God you’re insufferable. Fine I’ll bite.

I used gay marriage as a way to help you see similarities.

Answer me one question, real quick: do you think transgender and genderqueer people are oppressed?

He might just not be a native speaker

Interesting! You pointed me towards some new refinement of my linguistic knowledge. Subjunctive casts a wide net and covers a whole bunch of attitudes/opinions and can be used for hypotheticals, counterfactuals, and several other things. Check out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjunctive_mood and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irrealis_mood

Thanks!

It seems more to me like the TQ wants to rid themselves of the LGB with their pronoun tirades and temper tantrums.

Woah, hey, what the fuck? Here I thought you were having a sincere overreaction but no, this is all just transphobia, and possibly homophobia. You’re basically ranting about the whole community being non-monogamous? Sexually deviant?

“Terminally online whiny piss babies”? You want to reject the community? You think they’ve all just had it easy? You live a “lonely rural life” and think you can talk about how people have had it easy? Paint the whole community red like that but it’s okay if you say “(at least by me)”?

Transgender people have had it easy?

Absolutely not with this shit, I do not give you any more benefits of the doubt or good faith. You are hitting all the bigot talking points regardless of what you identify as.

You do not get to divide the community at a time like this. Trying to stir shit up and turn LGB on TQ and vice versa, yeah, you need to GTFO.

It seems more to me like the TQ wants to rid themselves of the LGB with their pronoun tirades and temper tantrums.

Oh… Wow. With all due politeness I request that you please cool it with this rhetoric. It is dangerous. The community needs to band together right now. I’m sympathetic for you but this makes you seem hostile and jaded.

Girl. Read your comment again. Please. It reads like a grandma in the nursing home ranting about how all the kids these days are all premarital hand-holding and being publicly indecent.

Look, I’m poly. I’m in a monogamous relationship, but just because I’m not currenly performing poly-ness doesn’t mean I don’t think and see the world like a poly person. My wife-to-be isn’t poly and I’m not gonna push her. I’m sorry that your friends seem to have pushed you, and I can sympathize since so many poly people seem to use it as a crutch for being a bad partner, but you don’t get to be a dick about it.

Back when I used to live in the rust belt, I had a lesbian coworker who was a big trump supporter as well as a born-again Christian who thinks that gay and trans people are all going to hell. She only does couple stuff with her wife (how she got a wife I will never know) behind closed doors because she doesn’t want to “indoctrinate the children”. That’s our real enemy, if you can call it that: gay people oppressing themselves and dragging each other down with them.

I was a daycare teacher for a while. You know what I do when a kid throws a temper tantrum? I leave them alone until they calm down, and then I treat them like the tantrum didn’t happen. Sometimes they want to tell me what made them upset after, and we can fix it. Sometimes they just need it out of their system. I’m of the opinion that adults are just toddlers with manners. Let the tantrum happen, don’t judge them for it, move tf on.

please have some introspection: you’re being offended over some internet argument and complaining about a whole community. is your respect conditional on never wronging you?

Being offended over every little fucking thing gains one absolutely zero respect.

But this is the modern culture of victim hood.

People think they gain social status by being offended and will make shit up to be offended over.

We got a commenter going around crying racism over sheepooh meme because it is “racist” even after being explained the context. The person. Just kept going on and on lol

“foaming at the mouth!? How dare you!” Proceeds to spray foam fucking everywhere

Calling people “piss baby queers” is not helping your case.

The only ones foaming at the mouth are overprivileged piss baby queers who get OfFeNdEd that they were “misgendered” by a stranger calling them “they” for the first time upon meeting. Aka USING ENGLISH THE WAY ENGLISH WORKS. Not misgendering, not deadnaming, not being intentionally offensive.

Bruh. Your foam is getting everywhere.

Annnd there it is.

At this point, you either need , and I mean need to address your trauma with someone trained for that.

Or, you’re just looking to stir shit

“i swear im not foaming at the mouth”

goes on to say shit like “piss baby queers”

holy shit yeah i was formerly like okay a blanket ban is arguably a lot you should apologize since there was clearly a misunderstanding but maybe blahaj made the right proactive judgement about you. stay away from me. YDI YDI YDI.

As a cis lesbian who’s gender nonconforming, I’ve spent years putting up with their pronoun based faux “oppression” temper tantrums out of an effort to be “accepting” only to watch larger society completely flip on us. Their “fight” makes a mockery out of what came before them. Now we’re under serious physical threat again but yeah, let’s go be pronoun police finding things to get offended by that make us feel important (main character syndrome, thanks iPad babies) rather than fight actual fucking oppression.

I’m a cishet guy, so my perspective is limited to that outside view, and the secondhand perspectives my handful of LGBT friends offer. But everything that I’ve seen and heard myself has pointed towards a greater acceptance of LGBT folk over the course of my 30 years of life, including the past decade. Like antisemitism and other bigotries, the worst and most violent expressions are often not rooted in backsliding of popular sentiment, but that popular sentiment has become widely positive enough to be threatening to conservative cultural forces, but not so strong or universal as to be an automatic death sentence for public bigotry. France was less antisemitic in 1940 than in 1900, yet it is the France of 1940 which cooperated with the Nazis on Jewish genocide.

I get that’s not a big fucking comfort when the result is still potentially genocide, but I don’t know that pronoun fights have had the effect you think they have, nor that popular opinion has reversed course rather than the still-recordbreaking level of LGBT support simply being insufficient against an outburst of the hatred that was never completely put out, and which still rules a sizable and energetic minority in this country.

As an older bi guy I understand the frustration they feel but I believe the entire point of the collective struggles of the LGBT+ rights movement was to make life easier for kids. Why woukd anyone want a child to go through the fear of violence so many of us had growing up?

Likewise with the crazy pills thing. Thanks for being normal and actually reading stuff.

Those aren’t in direct response to each other, but the disingenuousness of it is rather typical of your posting.

You are welcome here buddy. I get where you are coming from and I used to think in a similar way to you about this topic. I also think dialogue is much more appropriate than sanctions and wild accusations in this sort of situation.

The gay liberation movement was in some ways a very socially conservative branch of queer activism that sought social acceptance for gay men and women, primarily. The approach we took (I’m 50 years old btw) was to adopt mainstream concepts like the gender binary and monogamous marriage and then advocate to extend those concepts to include gay relationships. The truly subversive queer activism of the late 60s and 70s turned into a quest for acceptance rather than a quest to disrupt the status quo. I don’t mean to minimize the achievements of the gay liberation movement, but in reality it did very little for trans folk and did little to challenge existing social structures. It did of course benefit gay men and women, and that should not be discounted. But it was never really about trans rights.

Younger trans folk are more ambitious. They tend to view the success of gay liberation as a capitulation to the mainstream. They could have gone the same route of minimal resistance to the status quo and just advocated for acceptance of trans men and trans women. But instead they are seeking to tear down the tyranny of the gender binary, which is very much so a social construct, albeit distantly rooted in biology. Anthropologists and sociologists have long studied the performativity of gender, and how it is mostly tied to social expectations and norms within a culture rather than any sort of biological essentialism.

So in a way, young trans folk are simply carrying on the tradition of queer radicalism that the gays abandoned in our quest for social acceptance. And I admire them for that. Do I think it will ever lead to a mainstreaming of trans identities? Not really, to be honest. But that isn’t necessarily the goal here. The goal is more to carve out a space for trans folk where they can play with the idea of identity and gender, in order to deconstruct it and challenge it, and to evolve our culture in a humanistic way, rather than clinging to social norms like they are somehow not systems of oppression and discipline ala Foucault.

The question fundamentally is whether it’s better to conform to social expectations to fit in at the expense of giving up on the more radical project of changing culture, or whether it’s best to reject the status quo and simply invent your own culture and spaces. While there is a pragmatism to the former that makes a certain sort of sense, there’s also a bravery and radicalism centred around the latter project that I find more exciting and meaningful.

I’d also point out that this isn’t an either/or scenario. We can enjoy the benefit of gay liberation while also supporting the younger generation to challenge the very social structures that oppress us all.

One key example would be that in the 60s and 70s queer folk and feminists were calling for the abolition of marriage, not for it to be extended to gay people. The marriage abolitionists were much more radical, socially. And many young queer folk (based on my understanding) feel that gender abolition would be a positive step to ending gender apartheid. I’ve gotta say that it took me a while to come around to it, but I’m on board with that objective, even to the point where I’m considering changing my pronouns to they/them.

I don’t really understand why we need a massive extension of gender pronouns to achieve this objective, since if everyone became they/them that would be a good outcome imo. But that’s just my personal opinion. I can see how you can also undermine gender apartheid by making the concept of gender so diverse that it undermines the primacy of the male and female categories. It’s just another way to skin the cat.

In this specific case, I’d say it’s PTB + YDI. I don’t like the militant way in which some trans folk label anyone with a slightly different take on these topics as “transphobic”. How are you ever gonna build support and understanding by insta-jumping to bad faith conclusions at the slightest sign of dissent with the group-think? But then again, trans folk are entitled to a safe space where they can freely explore their identity without constantly having to defend themselves.

That’s lot of words to say I hear you, I acknowledge your experience, and I share some of your concerns. But I also think blaming vulnerable populations for the political climate right now is completely unfair and uncalled for. Trans folks aren’t undermining gay liberation, they are just trying a different approach, and they don’t want to have to conform to social expectations in order to be accepted. They want to be accepted on their own terms, and I acknowledge their bravery in doing so, despite the push-back.

Your loss friend. I tried to help.

There must be a default pronoun for unknown gender in order for the language to function. If not they, then what? Should we default to masculine pronouns like in Spanish?

Absolutely. You did nothing wrong here.

identify as dead inside

Wow, rude. Why you gotta call me out like that.

well “it” is universally thought to be objectifying and a pronoun non gratis. except for the select few who choose to go by that for … reasons i guess. whatever floats their boat.

IDK, this would force closeted trans people either to out themselves or misgender themselves. Not everyone is in a position where it’s safe to be themselves, even online.

Your gender or sexual orientation doesn’t invalidate your opinion (nor validate it).

That’s correct but not the full picture.

What matters here is more than just the validity of the opinion; it’s also weighting the impact of a potential ban, when you don’t really know if it’s justified or not. Both a false positive (unjust ban) and a false negative (not banned when they should) are bad, but which is worse? This depends on the gravity of the reason (gatekeeping vs. bigotry) but also your target audience (gender diverse people vs. someone who is not gender diverse).

Also note that Blahaj admins are not from USA, they’re from Australia. I’m not from USA either (I’m from South America.) I’m not sure on how much siege mentality applies in either case.

I really feel like the old fight is over. I openly walked hand in hand with my boyfriend in 1996 in Sydney and didn’t even get strange looks let alone shouting or hitting

Boys who acted gay in my all boys high school in the 90s did get bullied for acting gay about as much as I got bullied for having the wrong accent, so pretty bad.

I think it’s fair for the youth today to try and improve less significant issues when they feel safe, and I don’t think I have seen people told off for using they/them/themself when they don’t know someone’s pronouns because they have never met before

It’s also the trans people who are getting overt threats from the US government more so than gays, they also rely on hormone therapy and government could deny that usage, driving them to black market hormones and a lot of suicides

You’ve got a lot of “kids these days don’t know how good they have it!” energy, and it’s really not helping you here or anywhere.

Seriously, you’re complaining about these people fighting all the wrong battles, but here you are still fighting in that exact battle? In your eyes, they’re wasting their time turning on each other… but here you are screaming at them and about them? Do you think the things you are saying in this thread will prevent discrimination and violence? Do you think you’re changing minds?

I understand you’re rightfully pissed off about a lot of things. But you really are drawing a line in your life and saying "I struggled. They didn’t. They don’t have the right to question me. Which isn’t necessarily true and also isn’t a very productive line of reasoning.

I think if you’d expressed yourself a bit more reasonably you’d probably be fine expressing the general sentiment that some segment of the queer community is overly focused on performative actions and calling out people who aren’t toeing the line of ideological purity over real world gains in rights and acceptance. You can express criticism in a measured way or you can try to use it as a means to insult and inflict insecurity and hurt. Those are very different things.

It’s the difference between “hey idiot, I ordered this without ketchup, make it again” and “hi, sorry, this wasn’t supposed to have ketchup on it”. One is abusive and unreasonable, the other is a polite way of getting your point across. Dr House is funny to watch on TV, but he’s not a model for effective communication in the real world. If you focus on being as angry and unpleasant as humanly possible at every turn, people will ignore you and shut you out regardless of whether you would be making a good point.

It costs you nothing to find a slightly diplomatic way to make your point, but being overly harsh about it may cost you everything.

The uh scare quotes aren’t really helping your case. Being queer doesn’t mean you automatically understand the seriousness of other queer people’s concerns and it also doesn’t mean you’re free of bigotry.

Consider like lgbt erasure from official histories, many people scoffed at concerns like this and thought it was hysterical pearl clutching to make a big deal about whether or not someone’s sexuality was mentioned or whatever. Others will tell you it literally saved their lives knowing that people like them existed in the past.

I don’t think it’s that hard to just be kind, and if you can’t be kind be funny and then block them and move on :P

You’re 100% right that I’m not feeling the anger you queer people are feeling. And, again, I agree with the core of what you’re saying. It boils down to “goddammit can’t those bloody kids get their priorities right???”, doesn’t it?

And even with your anger being justified, and even with the core of your complain being spot on, there’s still gatekeeping there. And it’s completely extraneous to what you’re likely trying to say. You could say the same stuff that you’re saying without it.

And the people who hate you queer people would still do it regardless of pronouns. It’s just an excuse from their part; the actual reason why they hate you is that you’re subversive (and that’s a good thing). Once they remember “hey, trans and gender non-conforming people exist”, all that “God, then man, then woman” hierarchy goes down the bloody drain. Without those kids talking about pronouns they’d pick on something else. Like they already do, their go out of their way to make shit up about you.

[Regardless of agreeing or disagreeing I genuinely wish that you stay safe. And the kids too - even if acc. to you their priorities might be out of place, they still deserve safety.]

Honestly fuck the younger queers.

These piss babies deserve the violence coming towards them that my generation sacrificed majorly to fight against since they wanna pretend to be oppressed let them taste real oppression.

I am a 40+ queer gal.

You were never wrong that using they/them pronouns for someone you don’t know (or don’t remember) isn’t misgendering someone. You were right about that.

I understand you are angry about the ban and that people didn’t seem to understand the point you were making about pronouns, but the way you are escalating your responses to any criticism has gotten out of hand. Look at what you just wrote: “fuck the younger queers” and they “deserve violence”?

This is not okay. This is abusive behavior toward an entire group of people.

The issue now isn’t about they/them pronouns. The issue now is you sound like a danger to young queer people in this moment. You are who they should be afraid of right now.

No one disagrees with their main point: that “they” is fine when you don’t know the person’s gender, not even the person they incorrectly thought they were disagreeing with in the comment that got them banned