In General, Dear Readers

In general, dear readers…

Whenever you encounter a woman that history seems determined to define by a “negative” feature, whether that be her looks (“The Flanders Mare”) or her mental health (“Joan the Mad” or “Bloody Mary”) or her love life (“The Great Whore”), that’s...

The Six Wives of Henry VIII

Wasn’t done…

THIS. Is humanity.

tw: cissexism, misogyny/objectification of women, vulgar language, rape, (pure idiocy)

So here is what went down this morning.

As most of you are probably aware, Chelsea Manning publicly addressed the media to say that she is a trans* individual. She made it very clear what her preferred pronouns were. Now, most of you also probably know that as soon as major news organizations picked up on this story, a giant chunk of them failed to use those preferred pronouns, and a bunch of people made all sorts of gross cissexist comments.

This article by Meredith Clark was a lot better than most that I had seen because Clark actually wanted to do this right. Therefore, it was her article that I shared on Facebook this morning (The Guardian’s article showed up on my feed shortly after I made the initial post).

I don’t generally like it when people shame other people for what they said on Facebook threads. I generally don’t think it’s fair to those people to post their comments on a different platform and let them be humiliated as a result. But the conversation that unfolded after I posted this link was one that I have to share in response to everyone who has told me today that I’m taking this “way too seriously” and that they “get it” and that I “don’t need to drill it into their heads.”

Because guess what - bigots exist. What a shocker. And they do stupid things, like deleting all their comments afterward so it makes everyone else in the thread look stupid. Well, unbeknownst to Blake, I screenshotted every part of the conversation as we went along because I figured he would pull something like that at the end. And yeah, he deleted his comments and rapidly turned to grotesquely offensive personal attacks.

After that, I blocked him - that’s why those last few comments you see don’t have an icon. I blocked him before he could finish what he was saying AND before he could delete the offending words.

So anyway, the bottom line of this discussion was this: You don’t have to respect Chelsea Manning or her actions. But you do not get to use gender identity as a tool to oppress her, nor do you get to deny her basic rights and humanity.

And a tip? Don’t be a bigot.

Color key: Blake - red, me - blue, Shanthi - purple, Shelbie - green, Shona - yellow.

The thread continued a little longer after we blocked Blake, but it was mostly just to wrap up the conversation. After all, it wasn’t really an intellectual discussion. It was us versus a bunch of inflammatory, bigotry-filled comments.

Addendum: While we tried our best to argue our views, we do not speak on behalf of the trans* community. Therefore, if you have a comment/question/suggestion about the way we handled this - or if you notice that we ourselves were cissexist in how we handled this - please let us know. We do not personally know what Chelsea Manning’s decision means for the trans* community and would be more than glad to be educated on that matter.

This gif will be the death of me. They’re English subtitles of the Chinese version.