i don't know why i'm giving into such disingenuity, but:
you have an s-mod in this thread telling a bisexual person that they don't count as a real queer man when they're talking about being harassed for being a queer man (and managing to vomit really awful racial slurs unnecessarily in the process AND heighten the inaccuracy of the post since non-passing mixed PoC constantly get harassed for theri race, lol) and the person who leads firebot, the place where the most racism, transphobia, and misogyny can be found on smogon dot com, and you really think people are gonna pm you about being harassed? lol. yes, i'd definitely come forward about my experiences to people who would instantly dismiss them and tell me to get a thick skin. as you know, I was a super mod, I had multiple people come to me even when I was just a cong mod because I made an active attempt to set an example and oppose this shit when I saw it. please don't give me this shit like you all don't know it's the case when I made sure plenty of you knew it was the case.
hell, most of you also participated in the nonconsensual distribution of women's nudes or the legitimisation of it. yeah you banned it recently, can't imagine how this community would've been perceived as hostile to women before (especially when many of the prominent female users were subject to frequent harassment, stalking [and not just by creeps you all didn't like but popular users too], objectification, a few attempts to doxx, and misgendering)
also i'm not going to do what minwu said and give you all a list of all the trans women this community shunted out so everyone can drag their names through the mud again and deadname them and call them men and ask intrusive questions about their genitals and whatever, and a lot of the harassment is IRC/sim stuff (but both of those are important to participating in this community as you all acknowledge and the same shit you tolerate on IRC leaks into socialisation forums. to be fair #pokemon is usually a lot nicer than the other channels
last time I checked and all due credit to the auth for that), but the general a) refusal of people to even give the most basic respect to them b) ambient and unapologetic transphobia everywhere you go c) harassment campaigns against trans women (and don't give me that 'it was her personality' shit; sure i'm biased about her personality in that i made the fucking effort to get along with her, even though i fought with cathy the day i met her, and was lucky enough to become her friend, but if it was just her personality why did everyone target her gender, her previous identity, etc. with such passion?). i'm literally just not going to engage with 'what transmisogyny?' from a person who ran a script for years linking a trans woman to her deadname which she requested
with more politeness than was warranted that people not use (and spent years trying to get people to understand) and whose forum is polluted by shit like TIK's thread about trans disclosure or all the general mockery of trans identities, but i will expand:
the general gender scare on this forum (large insecurity about being 'tricked' by a woman with a dick, hunting out 'fake' genders) is enough to terrify a lot of trans people who already endure that shit everywhere they go. people who aren't white and cis shouldn't have to jump through more hoops than everyone else to participate in a competitive pokémon community when they
already have to jump through more hoops than everyone else to participate in society. i'm not expecting you all to suddenly change your minds but if you want to actually put your money when your mouth is then you kinda need to set examples and be a bit more receptive about criticism of the site, maybe? definitely don't gaslight people who have already gone through harassment. i mean, the fact you're all so deadset that slurs are just good fun without consideration that some people don't consider them good fun and anyone who doesn't is the problem is pretty nonconducive (let alone the routine hateful rhetoric of minorities). slurs
do have context and meaning, the context behind the f slur doesnt go away because you use it on a straight person, especially one who's perceived as acting effeminate, and if the ydidn't then why would you use them so disproportionately compared to other insults? why's it gay people and black people and women and trans people and not white cis straight men?
yes I'm sensitive to slurs and everyone knows I'm a drama llama. whatever, it's especially cool when nobody can forget how you behaved when you were fourteen and being abused in two different environments at once. did you ever maybe think it's
natural to react emotionally to things? ever think maybe those slurs are reacted to so badly because they're hurtful and carry massive legacies of history
that doesn't disappear when a person with hegemonic dominance throws them around? ever think maybe those slurs reflect a reality in which bi and gay guys are beaten up and murdered for being queer or disproportionately homeless because their parents kick them out and they can't get jobs, trans women are actually
killed by insecure dudes and subject to police brutality and nonstop misgendering, black people were enslaved and colonised and to this day everyone tells them it's a post-racial society because a few managed to win at capitalism while their communities and homelands are being subjugated, and it's tiresome to hear them when you come online to do something unrelated to your material conditions? lets say i bought your argument about context-sensitivity, which i certainly don't because you don't get to tell people what good fun is especially when you throw slurs at them that will never be used to actually oppress you. why do those slurs get used the most to people to whom they actually 'apply'? why are gay men mocked the most for being gay? why are trans women the ones you all call slurs? why are women the ones you call cunts the most? why are actually black people the ones you call the n-slur the most and make awful jokes to?
as for internet lawlessness, cookie, you've probably been on the internet longer than me (unlike most people in this thread i'm willing to bet), but you realise ancient internet discourse actually revolved around respect and decency, right? like netiquette is super old for a reason? and when people who didn't abide by that flooded into places like usenet they invented a name for it because they couldn't stand the immaturity? that most communities have
outgrown their fetishism for lawlessness? im also sure its super important to the fourteen year olds that join this site these days to preserve the internet hegemony of the early 2000s (like, when they were born), that definitely explains their vitriolic reactions to anyone who isn't them. couldn't just be that white supremacy etc. are still very real power structures. super hypocritical for a site with this type of political swing to appeal to tradition, lol. you're all so afraid of 'feminazis' as if even women somehow held power over men? tumblrinas? okay i guess coming across queer teenagers figuring out their identity is equivalently distressing to having to read 'ironic' slurs, calls for genocide, rape threats, etc. all day, you win the thick skin contest!
and don't give me that shit that feminazis and tumblrinas distorted the words 'privilege' and 'trigger'. yeah some of them dont understand, that makes them exactly like you all, who care very deeply about privilege and triggering i'm sure and seek to learn about these concepts so you can improve society. my whole family unit (me/brother/i) has PTSD, its people who make stupid jokes about the concept of triggering itself that makes it hard to talk about in these spaces because anxiety disorders, dysphoria, etc. are frequently belittled and turned into comic relief by edgelords. if you cared about the distortion of those words then you'd give credence to the concepts and not further drag them through the dirt. so, i don't buy it.
as for 'stain on the movement that gave birth to them', lets just give me a little credit and suggest that I probably know more about the history of feminism than most people itt. did you all know one of the key arguments of a lot of suffragettes was that if black men should vote, it was bad to make white women inferior to them and therefore white women were entitled to suffrage (never mind, you know, black women). did you know margaret sanger, the famous sex education and abortion activist, linked up with eugenicists to promote contraception because black people (whom she equated cognitively to chimpanzees) didn't have 'sexual control'? what about second-wave feminism, the movement that continued the tradition of prioritising the liberation of cis white women and advocate for the eradication and abuse of trans women? yeah I have a lot of issues with liberal feminism but its definitely not that they're trying to be inclusive and intersectional.
have you considered the reason you're surrounded by yes-men is because the ones who think its gross as fuck are mostly all gone (and incredulous at this thread) because none of you would take them seriously if they did come forward about what its like for a lot of minorities to be on this site? this is a site that viciously mocks vulnerability and sincerity, why would anyone ever come forward? why would anyone come forward to be told they have to take responsibility for their feelings (as if they weren't, as if they didn't have to constantly) so you all don't have to be made uncomfortable by the existence of trans people and feminists or examine your predilection for antiblackness? it's 'sad' I hid my race from even my best friends for years (because my best friends on irc literally said shit unironically like my people are cannibals), but I didn't 'take responsibility' for my feelings by concealing my reactions to that kind of racism for years? which of course is completely healthy, responsible behaviour, to automatically blame yourself for being attacked and not being down with slurs and suppress your feelings, and I totally recommend it if you want to replicate the psychological experience of being bullied at high school or domestically abused.
you all know I have a shit life, this doesn't need to turn into a comparison of battlescars, but I'd say getting this far when I was harassed just as badly everywhere else is suggestive that maybe I don't have paper-thin skin and maybe I actually just don't want to be needlessly harassed in online spaces. or maybe you need a thicker skin about criticism of your site and hegemony? maybe the reason i'm posting this is because I
have a thick skin, hmmmm, and because I took responsibility for my discomfort and sought to make this a better space for myself and others. the fact I'm alive, working towards my degree still, and go to therapy every week in an attempt to, how do we say it,
take responsibility for my emotional reactions and improve my psychological health, is really a testament to how thick my skin is, not the fact that I'm not willing to put up with this shit.
MikeDawg said:
I don't think that the community is completely innocent, though. Underrepresented minorities (think mental disabilities, etc.) are subject to more sincere ignorance, which is unfortunate.
I'd buy this 'sincerity' aspect if people made any attempt to correct their ignorance instead of just denying it exists
also minwu's derision towards this site's pathological terror of trans women is not remotely equivalent to slurs so I don't buy the moral high ground aspect of it either. btw most of the crap on this site was in social forums and irc, the pokémon forums were a lot chiller, nobody (afaik, sorry if I'm wrong) gets harassed like this in smeargle's studio, I never condoned it in the smog, it didn't happen much in c&c, 'cause the general standard of conduct is high enough in those forums that most of the low-hanging fruit gets deleted, kids were shitty in wi-fi sometimes but I always saw the mods proactively dealing with that
this post is admittedly incoherent because I wrote it in a non-linear order, sorry