This one time I was reading the notes of a post (I know, I know, NEVER read the notes) where someone was talking about how gender-policing negatively affected both cis and trans women. (The post did not minimise the struggle of trans women specifically at all.) Someone in the notes got incredibly angry that they were âappropriating trans womenâs strugglesâ by bringing up cis women at all, and someone else (not the OP) responded to this âtrans women onlyâ person and called them âsheâ -- their gender hadnât been mentioned or indicated at all, it was a guess, probably weighted by the context of the conversation.
Did this person (who turned out to be a trans man) say, âactually Iâm a guyâ and move on? No. They WENT OFF about how this other person in the comments had âmisgendered meâ, like this understandable wrong guess was a malicious act. The other person apologised and attempted to move on, but oh no, that couldnât happen. This was a clear indication that the other person was evil, daring to misgender a trans person (again, this was a completely unintentional wrong guess that was immediately apologised for and not repeated), and not only that, the OP was evil for âallowing their followers to misgender meâ (the OP had not been involved in this conversation at all, nor was their any indication over whether either participant followed them. It was two random Tumblr users having a discussion in the notes of this one post. Nothing to do with OP). This proved that the OP and this person supporting them were evil transphobes, see, and proved that âall women are negatively affected by gender policingâ was an evil transphobic thing to say and shouldnât be talked about.
Was any of this discussion remotely useful for any purpose? No. It was just a derail of a legitimate discussion by someone deciding to invent new transphobia and misogyny so they could use invented victimisation in their personal game of oppression olympics, instead of usefully discussing the actual transphobia and misogyny that the post was about. Someone using their identity as a trap to try to bully random people on the internet via âI think Coolsville sucksâ-style invented attacks when there are very real transphobes and misogynists out there to focus on instead. All it did was make a bunch of people -- including the person stirring up the drama! -- very angry for no reason.
This is happening all the goddamned time on this website. Itâs impossible to have a useful conversation when people in it keep trying to treat parts of their identity like a team of pokemon to defeat the Possibly Less Oppressed Personâs identity instead of actually discussing the relevant issues.
