#(in b4 'some of us have disabilities' yeah‚ me too! i emailed my representatives the other day! there's stuff you can do!)

[aeide-thea]

very much an off-the-cuff post so there may well be bugs, i'm still workshopping my thinking here, but—

i seem to see posts fairly regularly in which a member of some marginalized group A is objecting to attempts by less marginalized group B to make connections between discrimination against A and harm experienced by B (the main thing i have in mind here is when people attempt to align themselves with visibly-trans people by pointing out the ways that transphobic legislation also impacts gnc cis people, theatrical crossdressing, &c, but there are definitely also examples along other axes)—

and like. the main objection i've seen from A is 'why do they have to connect my experience to their experience in order to care about it? why can't they just agree that i shouldn't be discriminated against as a matter of, like, compassion for fellow humanity?'

and this reaction does honestly always just seem a little, idk, naive to me?? like, i don't know, it's gotten very popular ime to complain about normies' clumsy attempts to Understand Instead of Just Accepting [this feels potentially linked to like. the way many of us now prefer silently clicking 'like' to producing our own original, maybe clumsy, responses? but don't @ me on that point], probably because a lot of the time they aren't genuinely seeking to Understand but just to point out all the ways our queerness &c doesn't fit their received (unexaminedly conservative) understanding of the world, which feels to us (very reasonably!) like renewed pressure from the establishment to make ourselves fit that established framework, and so we resist… but at the same time, idk, maybe i'm just outing myself as lesser-than-thou here, but for every sort of person i was raised to distrust and have since arrived at genuine loving acceptance/appreciation of, it's involved first coming to understand their frame of reference at least a little? not to say that there isn't a place for shutting up and listening while you're still working to understand, because there definitely is! but i do kind of think this idea that's become popular in certain liberal circles of like, 'you don't have to understand my experience, you just have to respect it,' is fine and true for keeping peace with strangers, but really isn't a recipe for winning friends or influencing people—it's a recipe for keeping people at arm's length where they can't hit you. and then people turn around and want to apply that rule to coalition-building, and get all shocked-pikachu-face when others seek to identify more active points of connection.

...

another ~Radical Objection to Liberal Approaches~ i've seen, though often not specifically in this context (of discussing the way attempts to oppress A have knock-on effects for B), is like—'there's no point in deconstructing their logic because it's fundamentally illogical! insert that sartre quote abt anti-semites!' and like. no, there's absolutely no point in debating their logic with them. but fundamentally when people assert a logical resistance to bigoted positions they are not doing it to Own The Bigots, imo, or at any rate shouldn't be; they're (we're) doing it to reaffirm the basis of their/our own camp's position, namely, we see your knee-jerk fears and reject them; we substitute instead a patient allegiance to logic, that reasons its way into compassion.

that said, obviously there's a conversation to be had here about, like, platforming bad positions, and to what extent deconstructing them is implicitly platforming them! but. i do think that complaining that logic won't win over bigots is missing the very fundamental point that the logic isn't for the bigots: it's for us. we're talking to ourselves; we're affirming ourselves. and yeah, we need to understand that this sort of intra-party discussion doesn't, on its own, constitute sufficient activism! messages need to be communicated beyond the bounds of the party! but i do think i disagree that there's no place for it.

#anyway i'm just sticking this all under a cut bc it got very long and i didn't arrive at a nice tidy overarching conclusion #but i guess i just think like. i'm not convinced that resisting people's attempts to understand a struggle as linked with theirs #is ever going to be a strategy that makes any sense— #i just think it's coming from a place of woundedness that wants its pain to be Seen and Matter In Itself #and not get ignored until someone else is also impacted #and like. that's SO emotionally valid! god! but also like. that's feelings and not a basis for politics??? #and the second point here— #which honestly could've been its own post; i was just thinking abt the two points together bc i saw a post that made them together— #really feels to me like. showing up at an internal org meeting and then complaining that it doesn't constitute effective public messaging #like yeah‚ people pass posts around on here that aren't gonna convince conservatives #but like. (a) how much convincing of conservatives do you really think is gonna happen on tumblr anyway? #and also (b) then make your own posts that *are* angled at convincing conservatives! or‚ you know‚ do something that isn't posting! #(in b4 'some of us have disabilities' yeah‚ me too! i emailed my representatives the other day! there's stuff you can do!) #but like. everybody just wants to critique other people's efforts (and obviously as per this very post i'm not immune!) #when it's like. most of what we're doing *isn't* activism—what it could be is the tentative social basis for a real coalition #on which activism could then be founded #but most of us would rather suspiciously snipingly in-fight than let these tentative social filaments thicken into binding ties! #anyway. a great example of a post by someone with adhd that will probably be prohibitively difficult for other ppl with adhd to read!