Wharncliffe | 22 | white | TME | she/they

People are conflating empathy with compassion. When morons on the internet preach about empathy, they're actually speaking about compassion. Compassion is what makes you want to help ease someone's suffering, not empathy.

The definitions of sympathy/empathy/compassion feel like they've gotten mixed up or made synonymous because nobody likes to look up what words mean before they use them. All they are is sympathy is "I'm sorry you feel that way," empathy is "I understand what you're feeling" or just being able to put yourself in another person's shoes, and compassion is "what can I do to help you?" Obviously these are simplified definitions, but you can see how they differ. The only real similarity is that they're responses to someone in pain.

Empathy also just feels easy. It's easy to fake empathy at least on a surface level. Having or preaching about empathy feels like the psychological equivalent to "thoughts and prayers" to me now. A meaningless thing to make you feel like a good person without actually having to get up and do something. Compassion might actually require you to go out of your way to take care of someone, to even (God forbid, I know) inconvenience yourself to make sure someone you care about is okay.

The gay people who "don't make it their whole personality" to appeal to the right, the people who realized they weren't trans so they label themselves "detransitioners" and make it their life mission to strip actual trans people of their rights to autonomy, people who are all too eager to throw neopronoun users, GNC trans people, and others they deem "weird" under the bus and use as a scapegoat because "they're the reason our community isn't taken seriously", other queers who refuse to listen to women (especially trans women) or people of color about issues they face within the community.

The idea of a man in a white supremacist nation is one who sees women as inferior, if not just entirely subhuman. He gets what he wants when he wants it and women never tell him "no". This idea is so deeply ingrained that I would argue most people, if not all, regardless of gender identity grow up with some degree of misogynist mentalities that must be actively unearned. I don't think policing women on how they speak about the men who happily benefit from and perpetuate systemic misogyny is what you should be focusing on.