ext_119910 ([identity profile] nodesignation.livejournal.com) wrote in [personal profile] clovehitched 2009-07-21 06:55 pm (UTC)

I appreciated reading this. It always dissapoints me to see "retaliatory" oppression. It's a clear pattern that I see in many different community spaces. I've encoutnered:

a cis woman who thought it was appropriate to hatefully mispronoun a genderqueer person because they had caused an accident that sent her to the hospital.

trans folks who try to explain to HBS people that their genders are just as invalid as any other trans persons, and do so in the "taste of their own medicine" way by repeatedly telling them that their biology and body morphology means that they are "really" their birth assigned gender.

White queers who respond to homophobic men of color by portraying them as violent "ghetto" "thug" and so on.

In all cases, the problem with "retaliatory" oppression is the same problem with all oppressive remarks, they impact more than just the individual(s) you are arguing with. In this case, there were too many inapropriate statements being used by people with more than two perspectives on the issue. As others have pointed out here, one of the consequences is that legitimate conerns get forgotten and left out as people try to figure who did what wrong. And too many people cannot separate out the discussion of which "side's" behavior is wrong from the discussion of which "side's" perspective is right.

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