Good afternoon to all!
There are some things that have happened recently in some of the online communities which I have been involved with for quite a few years at this point (one being slightly more left-leaning, while the other I would consider to be quite centrist most of the time). These events began with an individual (Person A) calling another individual out (Person B) for what I can only describe as potential hate speech. The only problem is, that hate speech was little more than a pronoun section filled out in an, admittedly, suspect way. Person B had previously said some things that were a bit questionable in the eyes of the community as a whole, but had never actually came out and outright attacked anyone for their beliefs/rights, etc (that I can recall anyway). As such, I personally never identified them as a threat to the community. We all have our own beliefs and what-not, and we are entitled to them. Even if the majority of people think they are wrong. That’s what the whole free will/agency part of life is about. It’s what you do with those beliefs that matters. If someone doesn’t like that, they can ignore the other party. This situation was discussed in an adjacent online community that I was also a member of and I had expressed my concern that it could likely spiral out of control if things kept up.
So, Person A began to beat around the bush regarding how Person B filled out their pronoun section. Person B, essentially said to knock it off. Person A persisted. There was some back and forth for a bit. They eventually got up the courage to ask Person B directly about if they were anti-trans or not. Nothing was achieved by Person A, other than seemingly getting pissed off. Then I stepped in (more aptly, I stepped in it).
Now, I wasn’t a mod or admin person in either community (though apparently some thought that I was?). I’m just someone who doesn’t like people being shit upon for something as insignificant as two words in a profile section that could be there for any reason (which we didn’t know, could’ve been a joke, could’ve been that it sounded cool and they went with it, whatever). There’s nothing wrong with giving someone the benefit of the doubt if they haven’t made any real declarations about where they stand on specific, high-tension, topics. And the topic we’re talking about here today is transphobia.
My stepping in involved me calling both parties out for the ways they each handled this:
- Person A was called out for preemptively attacking with little to no provocation from the other side.
- Person B was called out for not being able to give a simple yes/no/fuck you to the accusations being leveled at them.
The results: Person B never got back to me with a response. I’m assuming that either the point was driven home, or they wrote me off completely. Fair, either way.
Person A was another story altogether. They decided to double-down. Hell, I’d even say triple-down to the Nth degree in this case.
Now, my initial response to both persons did start with “Hey, y’all are going to be butthurt about this”. I’m completely fine with people not agreeing with my position on things, but thought that what had happened was not conducive to the environment we were in. In my response I had said some things that I hadn’t accounted for, such as some people fearing physical violence. Yeah, my initial response to the situation ended with me saying that if either party was in front of me, that I’d slap them both up side the head for being so dumb. I’m not a violent person and I would never actually do that. I am a very facetious person at times and say things in ways that may not always be appropriate. There is also the lack of proper filtering as I’m saying things in the heat of the moment.
Person A pushed back hard against what I had said. Primarily the part about slapping them. They wanted an apology. I did acknowledge that what I had said was inconsiderate and that I would issue one for my misstep about using terms of physical violence in my response. Being as this situation was blowing up across two separate Discord channels simultaneously, I was a bit overloaded with how to do that. Apologies should mean something, and include details about the problem at hand. There was some mention that I should remove my post, which is a non-starter for me. I don’t remove or retract things I’ve said online, but I would gladly reply to my original post with said apology. What good is an apology if people can’t see what I was apologizing for if I removed the offending piece? That’s transparency on my part.
Anyways, this would take me a bit of time to formulate something that wasn’t offensive again.
A few minutes later, the demand that I apologize came down the pipe again. Followed closely by name calling from Person A. That’s when I hit the brakes. I called them on that and placed conditions on the apology. You want an apology and can’t be bothered to wait for it to arrive? On top of that you had originally asked me to do delete what I had said and now you’re calling me names to get what you want? That shit doesn’t fly with me. Person A was told that their apology would come once they backed the fuck off of their ego-trip.
The disagreement continued for hours. Person B was offline for all of this and so I ended up trying to defend someone who couldn’t defend themselves. Even going as far as inserting information about past versions of myself, and how I previously could have been a much worse person than Person B was because of my views on the LGBTQ+ community back in the day. Also that without surrounding myself with people from these online communities, that I would likely still be in that mindset today. It’s my position that being surrounded by people with different mindsets than my own, had helped me to become the better person I am today. I also believe that that is something that EVERYONE is entitled to.
Some other folks on the server came out and completely invalidated my own experiences, making mention that they had an interest in how the mind works, etc. I would say that their interest in “the mind” is amateur at best. Having spoken with professionals in the field (hey, we all need therapy), I can tell you that it is frowned upon in the field to invalidate someone else’s experiences because you don’t agree with them. Experience is what makes each of us, us. To invalidate those, invalidates that person, and that is one hell of a shit move indeed.
It should be mentioned that throughout this argument that 2 or 3 people (including someone who wasn’t even on the server where this all began, and thereby not having all of the info needed) were taking partial screenshots (partial being the operative word, cutting parts of a sentence off doesn’t show my whole side of the argument) of my parts of the conversation and posting them in response to things I said to somehow try to prove me wrong in my thinking. There were also many instances where people “quoted” what I had said, but that they actually ended up taking what I had said, re-jigged the wording to fit their argument against me, and then putting quotation marks around it. Both of these are fine examples of straw man arguments.
This is why I never remove things I’ve said from the internet. Why remove evidence? You’re just proving that your argument is for argument’s sake at that point.
We don’t know where everyone is in their own personal life journeys. We can make assumptions, but as I like to say; assumptions are the mother of all fuck-ups. Unless Person B is coming out that all trans folk should die, why provoke them? That’s entrapment.
Chaos, of course, ensues.
Long story short. Eventually the name-calling from Person A (or their group, can’t recall exactly who atm) towards me, began to include the word bigot (fun!). You know your position is compromised when you have to start name-calling.
I asked what would be done in a hypothetical situation, where they and a large dude built like a brick shithouse, were out in public and they called the bigger dude out just for assuming that that person was anti-trans. Parameters were no weapons and no backup for either side. Just them preemptively calling someone out based on some theory that hadn’t been proven. Their response was that hypotheticals don’t exist. To which I rebutted that simulations exist, and that they should substitute that word instead and then respond.
Instant deflection achieved! The only response to that was them, once again, asking where my apology from earlier was. Pretty sure I made my point clear on the apology thing at the start of all of this. Unless that was all a dream. Wait! Was it!? This whole situation is just surreal at this point. The point about the street confrontation between this person and fake Arny Schwarzenegger was if you probably wouldn’t do it in person, then why did you do it here. Analogies are a thing. They are useful. But I suppose ignorance is bliss too, amiright?
Person A eventually got to the point where they literally said that everyone of the mindset that all anti-trans-folk are bad should be thrown in front of a train.
! HARD FUCKING STOP RIGHT THERE !
I made the point that Person A just went to the extreme far end of things and called them on not seeing the parallels between what they had just said and what some transphobic people want for trans people. It’s the same damn thing, just on the opposite side!
Many hours later, other folks (some of them mods) began to pump the brakes. The arguments had become cyclical and clearly weren’t getting anywhere. I’m glad that they did. I’m not the type of person to standby and watch someone on the attack, while that person at the same time cannot see their own errors in logic (initially it was just a lack of tact on their part that drew my attention). Once someone has drawn my ire, it’s never a good time for anyone. I don’t back down from a challenge easily.
Anyways, I let it rest for a bit.
I went back a little bit later and tried to calmly state my piece (once again, prefaced with a warning that not all would appreciate what I was going to say). This was for closure on my part, and was stated as such. Going over the in’s and out’s of what happened. In closing, I told Person A to do what they got to get over this (I can’t recall the exact wording, but it was along the lines of go outside, hate me forever, tell me to get fucked, eat shit, get laid, whatever you gotta do) and that I was dropping it. It seems that the offended parties only read the “eat shit” part. 
Let’s spiral some more, shall we?!!?!?!?!?
And, I did something that will likely be remembered for time immemorial. I told the 3 people that were coming at me (2 of which are apparently trans-folk) that I know where I stand regarding LGBTQ+ people. That they deserve to be protected, just as any other person on this planet. But, also that THEY (the people in this argument) had lost me as an ally. My wording regarding that was probably not the best, looking back at it, but it needed to be said. Clarification here for anyone that cares; that doesn’t mean that if I saw them being beat up on the street that I wouldn’t help, but that as far as any attacks online were concerned, they could fight their own battles and I would no longer assist those specific people.
Well, there goes the neighborhood! Again!
I was looking to lay this to rest, and they wanted to persist with their end of things. I guess peace never was an option.
Person A also apparently thought me using gif’s was dumb in my arguments (childish was actually what was said about that). All I have to say is that Discord and most other online platforms have gif capabilities built it. I’m also fluent in gif, so why not use some animated images to help convey what I’m thinking? Me typing at speed in the heat of the moment was never a strong suit of mine anyways. Accusations of trying to “bury” the argument in a wall of gifs were leveled at me. Which is pretty dumb when you consider that people interested in those details could just scroll up to find all the text (it is the internet after all). Any text following the argument would “bury” things too, and it was the general chat channel, so that would happen eventually anyways. Not really sure what their argument was there. Mods were called in by Person A to deal with me because they can’t fight their own battles anymore it seems (this, despite my warning of using gif’s to respond to the situation after I laid it to rest and Person A kept pushing).
Anywayyyyyysssssssssss! After thinking about the situation long and hard, I’ve come to the conclusion that neither community is where I need to be anymore. It is evident that there has been some slippage in what is considered an appropriate response to fairly insignificant shit in the grand scheme of things. Hell, some people have even completely blocked me because of this, it seems. Which is really dismaying because I was part of these places for years and the one community even helped me tremendously over a very large and dark chunk of my adult life where I actually was a bigot that hated people who weren’t straight.
Funny how no one ever stopped to see if I may even fall somewhere along the acronym for non-straight folk. Not that it’s anyone’s goddamned business either way.
To Person A, you have definitely outed yourself as an extremist. I don’t care what side of the left-right spectrum you’re on, if you’re an extremist you don’t matter to me. Far right or far left? Doesn’t really matter. Just like in statistics, the outliers are removed.
If you’re seeing everything as an attack, there’s this new thing called therapy that all the cool kids are talking about, and it does wonders! You should maybe look into that (not from some amateur on the internet either. Like, go to an actual, trained and licensed professional who knows what they’re doing).
Finally, there is a much higher likelihood of my launching a tactical nuclear weapon at you, versus my tracking your hair-triggered ass to the other side of the planet (or even just the other side of town) and slapping you upside the head. You fucked around, and you found out.
Now, in all fairness, the above doesn’t include the names of specific people (other than yours truly), channels & server names, physical locations, etc. for obvious reasons. There’s also a bunch of stuff not said because, holy fuck, this is one big wall o’text! Anyone involved, you know who you are. You know how you reacted. I’m not on those servers any longer, but rest assured, I have copies of the conversations from both servers in fabulous 2.7K video saved locally for my own records. If you want to persist in further bullshit antics, please, go ahead.
Disclaimer: The above mentioned videos and transcripts WILL NOT be released to ANY party except for mods/admins on those servers if, for some magical reason, the original records aren’t viewable anymore.
maltosekincaid.com 