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comment by Quatrarius
Quatrarius  ·  2089 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Breaking: entertainment industry promotes unhealthy views of minority group

choo choo here we go y'all comin to add to the burden of acceptance everywhere





tacocat  ·  2089 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Can you explain what you mean by the burden of acceptance?

Quatrarius  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

the burden of acceptance is, generally speaking, the amount of energy you need to spend on not being a dick per day

back in the day people had a very low burden of acceptance because you could discriminate freely - nowadays the burden of acceptance in the us is much higher because of different groups becoming more culturally and politically powerful

trans people are the newest final straw, where people give up because it's too much of a burden to understand

righties call the burden of acceptance "PC culture": weirdoes making things that used to be perfectly fine into things that make you lose your job or lose your friends, AKA the "why should I have to"s

in MLK's letter from birmingham jail, the white moderates he was talking about were having a tough time with the burden of acceptance - a lot of the young wingies that are being indoctrinated nowadays initially fell into it partly because of the burden of acceptance

kleinbl00  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This. This right here. This is the problem.

I really don't give a fuck. I don't. No fucks given. My five-year-old daughter is now giving clothes to a classmate who switched from "Nick" to "Nicolette" in March and it's whatever. I'm glad her mom is accepting and I'm thankful that the kid is in an environment where everyone's cool with it. But it's like k.d. lang or danah boyd or ee cummings deciding their name is somehow immune from the commonly accepted rules of punctuation. I mean, okay. We'll deal with it. But now every time I write the name "danah boyd" I have to go look it up and see if indeed she's the one that hates capital letters because some pencilneck on the Internet somewhere is gonna score points off me for miscapitalization and you know what? It's not worth it.

We got a memo the other day because we have a contestant of diminutive stature. And we all knew he wasn't a dwarf because fuckin' hell, we're not savages. But he's also not a little person because - and this was made clear to us - he has no genetic markers of dwarfism ("dwarfism" is okay but "dwarf" is not) and therefore we're all fucked if we refer to him as "little." So I can refer to the 6'5 guy of Syrian descent as "little fella" and it's a joke but if I accidentally refer to this individual as "little fella" eyebrows go up and everyone looks to see if the door is open to make sure nobody heard.

You sit there judging everyone because of the concept of "the burden of acceptance" and I get it: it fucking sucks to be an outsider, to have to play 20 questions with everyone you meet, to deal with the dysphoria of gender identity and whatever "burden" the rest of us might experience pales in comparison.

But fuckin' hell we don't have to deal with it with anybody else. My boss (who used to cruise Boston looking for "queers" to beat up, I might add) isn't going to criticize me for calling a girl a girl or an African American an African American. Meanwhile I've observed in-the-room pissing matches between queer educators over wither or not LGBTQIAPK is inclusive or exclusive and us straight white dudes are sitting over here going "apparently I'm an asshole for using a four-letter rather than a nine-letter acronym."

Meanwhile, the President loves taco salads.

So here's my industry - being scolded for not firing Danny Masterson fast enough when Roseanne went from top of the world to bottom of the pile in about 3 hours. And you gotta admit: there's a lot less bandwidth burned when an industry is of white men, for white men by white men.

Nobody pillories the coal mining industry for a lack of diversity.

Quatrarius  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

i started writing a serious reply, but i deleted it, so then i started with an angry reply, but i deleted it, so then i started with a snarky reply, but i deleted it

as a trans person, the circles i wander around in online are the accepting ones generally, and the thing about acceptance is that it's difficult to draw lines around it sometimes - an easier example of this is with a different community of weirdoes, furries

furries are weird. most of them admit that. the thing about admitting your own weirdness is that it looks kind of hypocritical to start excluding other people for being too weird, which is why any community of furries is guaranteed to develop pockets of inflation and shit fetishists, no matter where you go

a similar thing can happen when you get to the edges of gender and sex circles: i think i remember you or somebody else on here talking about "pansexuals" or "asexuals" or something (galen)? and how it was silly, but it gets even sillier than those not-silly concepts, i swear - there's people that think they're multiple people in one body (not skitsy people?), or people that think they're reincarnations of past people, or people that map out every specific aspect of their sexual and romantic orientations with like 10 different terms

and i think it's silly too. i have different opinions about the legitimacy / necessary-ness of it all, but generally i just go "okay" and move on with my life because it doesn't particularly affect me

and generally, going "okay" and moving on is essentially all i can do as a single person - i can't control the situation i was born into - all the social isolation and the stunted emotional development and undiagnosed mental illnesses and semi-literally having the wrong body, and things like that, and i think i can go out on a limb here and say you understand this feeling of deep frustration about everything being shit really well

i don't claim to have a worse experience to the point that "nobody understands me, man!" because i understand that you can't compare people's lives like that, problems like that - it would be incredibly, incredibly presumptuous of me to make that judgement and comparison

it does really suck. it sucks a lot. i know that from the outside, it probably seems like a bunch of fuss, or just something overcomplicated - that's what i meant by "burden of acceptance", behind the snark, because it's something that throws up more shit for people to have to deal with, like in your experiences with various stuff as a movie guy / with random educators, and i can see how it might seem ridiculous from the outside because i can see, because of pockets of edge cases within the GSM community, how ridiculous it can look from the inside.

i got kind of pissed earlier at the phrase "sit there judging everyone", but i don't deny that that's what i'm doing - the alternative of rolling over and accepting another frustration is, in some cases, not something i feel like doing

i kind of spent a while writing this, so i forgot whether i actually had a point

i like using GSM (for gender and sexual minorities) because it seems like nobody could have a problem with it, and the letter-adding politics of LGBT-etc (aka legbutts) is something to be avoided given that it's one of the things that every two-bit culture warrior brings up to talk about how shit we are - i have no problems with anybody using any kind of acronym or whatever because i'm not an asshole, and like i said, water off the back or whatever bullshit i actually did say

i guess if i do have a point, it's that yes, i am judging you, but i'm not judging you specifically and nothing is your fault - you're just unhappy because some people make you into an enemy and put words in your mouth because of something you have no control over

which is exactly the problem on my end in the first place, so why would i want to do that the other way around?

a lot of the things in the world are pretty shit and it's frustrating when the shit flies up and gets in your eyes, and your hair, especially if you have long hair

kleinbl00  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

The problem, as I see it, is that other minorities have history and consensus. "Black history month" is a recounting of hundreds of years of overlooked contributions and suffering of a recognized minority. If you're Jewish you've got thousands of years of history and folklore. If you're homosexual you can go back to the ancient Greeks and beyond. You are this, not that, you are this, and that.

The LGBT community has to be an umbrella of inclusiveness of everyone who isn't into straight sex with their original genitals. The LGB part? That shit's sorted. Everything else?

    i like using GSM (for gender and sexual minorities) because it seems like nobody could have a problem with it, and the letter-adding politics of LGBT-etc (aka legbutts) is something to be avoided given that it's one of the things that every two-bit culture warrior brings up to talk about how shit we are - i have no problems with anybody using any kind of acronym or whatever because i'm not an asshole, and like i said, water off the back or whatever bullshit i actually did say

That's your perspective, and I thank you for it, and I guarantee that if I assume the next trans person I meet shares it I'm fucked. Because everyone who's active in the community has an opinion and there isn't a lot of folklore or tradition to lean on.

My wife welcomed and was sought out by the LGBT community in Los Angeles; she helped a lot of same-sex couples have babies. In Seattle she's in with a couple-three prominent LGBT educators and we ran the webpage through the Decoder Ring so that we used completely bias-free language. And I know what passes in LA wouldn't pass in Seattle, and I know what passes in Seattle doesn't pass in LA, and I know that the experience of an outsider attempting to reconcile everyone's chosen pronouns and acronyms is to be a punching bag for getting it wrong always.

We got some paperwork that used "LGBTQQIAAP!" and I had to ask what the "!" meant. I was informed it referred to two-spirit individuals (but not third gender. Then I had to ask what two-spirit individuals were. Then I was told that two-spirit individuals are Native Americans who fulfill a third gender role in life or in certain ceremonial capacities. I said "oh, you mean bardaches" because fuckin' hell we studied Navajo gender fluidity in 8th grade because mine was a progressive school.

You'd think I said "you mean faggots." No bonus points whatsoever for being familiar with Navajo culture as it pertains to transgender individuals. Because I'd used the term my teacher taught me 20 years ago in an attempt to be diverse, I was an unalloyed racist homophobe all of a sudden.

I honestly believe that the homophobes have an easier time dealing with transgender issues because they just grit their teeth and pretend transgender people are sick and can therefore be disregarded. Those of us who try to get the terminology right are the ones who get lambasted for trying because if you can brow-beat someone into agreeing with your interpretation you've made it stronger than your rivals'.

I put a social worker through grad school about 20 years ago. She got tested on transgender vs. transsexual... after being informed that whatever their preconceptions were, they were wrong by default because they weren't transgendered. Now? Now Facebook has 51 gender options. It's one thing to correctly address A or B. It's quite another when the alphabet doesn't contain your options. And I know not everyone insists on that much granularity, but if you assume that not everyone insists on that much granularity...

...you're a bigot.

Especially if you're a straight white male.

Quatrarius  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

there are plenty of cultures with traditions of third-gender people, but they're mostly the ones that got killed off or pushed to the side - there's an interesting connection between siberian shamanism and third-gender people, for example

you were unlucky there to stumble into the separate clusterfuck of "man, natives are kind of pissed about the whole misrepresentation and genocide thing and don't like their shit being called by european names" - "bardache" is an old french word for the "bottom" in a gay relationship and it seems to be eventually derived from an arabic word for "slave"

there's a language that i'm really interested in in the canadian northwest that i knew as "slavey" or "slave" with or without an acute accent on the e - turns out the name literally comes from "esclave", or slave in french, which is a calque from cree - that's the problem with asking the wrong locals what everything is called, because the cree were like "we enslave these people, so we call them slaves" and now essentially all the academic writing about these people uses that name too

they prefer "Dene" - fun fact: lots do, including Navajo - "Diné", right?

i appreciate the fact that you're still trying to sort stuff out - despite that, i find it hard to pat you (or anyone) on the back too hard for the effort

kleinbl00  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    i appreciate the fact that you're still trying to sort stuff out - despite that, i find it hard to pat you (or anyone) on the back too hard for the effort

You need to. Everybody needs to.

Privileged and unempathetic, I know. But let's work from the assumption that in a free society that values diversity, you're 100% entitled to recognition and acceptance. I am obligated by the bounds of common courtesy to use your pronouns of choice without comment or complaint. If you sneeze, the polite thing is to say "bless you" or "gesundheit" or something similar. And in response, the polite thing is to say "thank you."

The LGBT community is in no mood to say "thank you."

I totally understand why and I empathize with the viewpoint. It's a pain in the ass to be gender-nonconforming and there's a whole bunch of gender-conforming people actively making it worse. But without social acknowledgement of the efforts made at acceptance, cis people will avoid situations where they're required to be uncomfortable.

"Thanks for putting in the effort" is manners. Integrating GSM members into the broader community requires effort - by both sides, for sure. But it ain't a GSM society and things will go better if us assholes in the majority are allowed a few warm fuzzies every now and then rather than knowing our every interaction is subject to a secret eyeroll and venting somewhere on the internet.

tacocat  ·  2088 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I just got off the phone with my mom and part of the conversation was how often I have to shrug off casual disrespect from family members caused by being a member of several groups that are unrelated to the topic at hand

Thank you for explaining. I understand I don't look like this concept could apply to me so I'll try to use my education on it wisely