the increasing tendency in the last few years to use identities and descriptors as defensive statements or like, Marks Of Innocence is. really fucking odd. like, rather than 'I didn't do that and your statement is false', it's 'you're literally attacking a trans person'; i've seen people write 'i'm literally a minor' to try and avoid being held responsible for any type of action. i don't know! i find it really strange. it's possible to be vulnerable or to be from a minority group and also, additionally, be an asshole.
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 ‘appropriating trans women’s struggles’ by bringing up cis women at all, and someone else (not the OP) responded to this ‘trans women only’ person and called them ‘she’ -- their gender hadn’t 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, ‘actually I’m a guy’ and move on? No. They WENT OFF about how this other person in the comments had ‘misgendered me’, like this understandable wrong guess was a malicious act. The other person apologised and attempted to move on, but oh no, that couldn’t 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 ‘allowing their followers to misgender me’ (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 ‘all women are negatively affected by gender policing’ was an evil transphobic thing to say and shouldn’t 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 ‘I think Coolsville sucks’-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. It’s 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 Person’s identity instead of actually discussing the relevant issues.
