Competing Access Needs is when two people need incompatible things in order for the same event/service/etc to be accessible to them. This sucks and is hard to deal with.
There's a version of this I see a lot in queer political arguments which I'm going to call Competing Ontological Needs. When two people need the same thing to be in two incompatible ontological categories. Or need the same thing to be logically impossible and not.
Now put like that obviously it's nonsense. Ontological categories are abstractions and where we draw their boundaries doesn't change the facts about the things in them. You can't *need* pluto to be a planet because no physical facts, either about pluto or about anything else, change depending on if pluto is "really" a planet or not.
But people sure do get really really scared and angry when they argue about what categories we should put different people and the things they do in! Obviously it makes sense to say "I categorize myself this way, and if you're not thinking about me with that same abstraction it means we don't understand eachother well which is sad". But the thing I see a lot is more concrete than that.
The common unspoken syllogism is "It is politically acceptable to do bad things to people if they are X, I don't want bad things to happen to me, so I need to not be an X". With variations like "if it was possible for Y to happen then it would be mandatory, Y is bad, thus I need to to not be possible for Y to happen". Or "Z is a good kind of thing to be, I dislike z, therefore z is not a kind of Z"
The fact it's unspoken sucks, because then you get into flaming rows where one party is making the totally pedestrian observation that someone has the characteristics of an X or that Y is totally possible, and the person they're talking to is reacting like this is a threat of immediate violence. Because if the unspoken syllogism were correct it totally would be! The prosecutor who argues that you're a murderer really is trying to commit literal violence against you by this argument! And in the ideal case is even morally correct to do so!
But often the unspoken syllogism doesn't work, or isn't universal, and so people get into arguments in which they need different things to be categorically true. And that sucks because settling arguments like that is even harder than settling ones about facts, and so often the apparent stakes are wildly different between participants.
It'd be really good if more of these could be defused by dismantling the syllogism. It doesn't need to be impossible for someone to change their sexuality, it just needs to not be mandatory. We don't need to argue about if this person is actually a woman, we can just stop doing bad things to her depending on which she is. We don't have to argue if AI can make "art" if we stop treating art as uniquely praiseworthy.
Especially when so many of the syllogisms are actually "in the 80s a political coalition made an argument that depends on X being Y, they won and did a really good thing, thus X must be Y". Which is extra insidious because if we take that as our argument then it's good to argue that X is Y *even if this is false and you know it's false*.
Sadly many of these syllogisms are correct factual descriptions of the political environment many people live in. And as long as that's true there's a genuine clash here which is really hard to escape from.
pixelskylines
germansingergirl
kianamaiart
theartofmadeline
andulkaphoto
baratheonpilled
snowghoul
