Community support and personal responsibility [Note: Content Warning - bigotries]

I caught up with a dear old friend yesterday, someone I met and befriended during my most active advocacy phase of life, and we wound up talking about some of the changes we’ve seen since then. In the main, there seemed to be more support a couple of decades ago between communities - we, to use an older term, “had each others’ backs”. Since then, advocacy has become more corporatised - there is competition between communities (e.g., for “best” standing or status, particularly nationally), defensiveness/lack of personal responsibility, and inappropriate consultation - e.g., asking organisations other than the communities directly involved for their views of things like definitions, which appears, for instance, to have led to one organisation using a definition of gender identity that excludes aspects that have been included by changes to the Sex Discrimination Act in 2013!

I have also come across my first debate on Mastodon that had transphobic aspects - mainly, dinosaurs whingeing about having to use the good manners of being respectful enough to use people’s correct pronouns. I muted the two dinosaurs, but didn’t report it as others had responded quite well, I though, and addressed the issues involved. 

I do have to wonder, though, how long these sorts of issues have to be debated. 

I would hope there isn’t anyone who now genuinely thinks the N word is acceptable, but then there there are some extremely reactionary white supremacists so possibly some do. Similarly, I would hope no-one thinks women should not be working - but, same again, some reactionaries do. And, despite decades of education, legal protection (going back to the 1980s in South Australia), and debate on pronouns, some reactionaries not only refuse to use the correct pronouns, but are so ignorant on grammar that they make remarks about “never using pronouns” - which shows them in a staggeringly bad light. 

In all of these cases, do we need to keep engaging with them on that? At what point do we pass from reasonable education through false claims of not understanding to playing their vicious gaslighting games?

I will have more to write on all this in the coming months after I retire.

 

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Finally, remember: we need to be more human being rather than human doing.