"How people could be marignalized by other people saying they are mentaly ill and that the fact of trying to legitimize their existence is immoral and shouldn't be encouraged ?"
I'm gonna stick with the obvious troll conclusion.
To return to the subject, @GenderNihilismGirdle I found this example with the bone-breaking people very interesting (on the subject and even just as a inspirationnal thing) it's clear that real-life statistics are not a real good point when talking about character in the Realms. I don't think there really as many dragon in real world than in Faerun (hopefully).
I have share an article saying more or less that on this thread. (Write by a trans person in this case) I dunno if you have read it. (I could reshare it, but I dunno if it's a kind of flood or not)
Steven has been marginalized by Joe's remark. Joe might not have meant it to be an oppressive statement, but the result is exactly that: Joe has presented the argument that Joe's existence is the only one that is valid or worth recognizing, and Steven's existence is a flaw that should be corrected.
If Joe wants to express his feelings about bananas, he can do that--but he should also do Steven the courtesy of seeing things from Steven's perspective, and understand that in this case, the expression of Joe's feelings can feel like an attack on Steven's right to exist.
Steven and Joe have much more to worry about than hurt feelings, since I'm going to eat them.
@KcoQuidam Is troll the obvious conclusion to one who disagrees? That's a dangerous path to not listening to what those who don't agree with you 100% as someone completely contrary to you. It lacks nuance.
I'll ignore all the slander, since the assumption I despise human rights of the egalitarian nature is a bit contrarian to transphobia. What I said was that there are places on earth where trans lives are hard to live because they tend to be killed. Nobody has died from the existence of Mizehna (she's a cleric so she can do revivals,) but there are places where trans people do die, and that's not funny! Turning a blind eye to that snidely is not an insult to me, but to those people being persecuted.
Does Mizehna matter in the long run? No, this idea of representation sounds like quotas, and I think quotas are an insult to those involved. To the quota victim, of whatever creed is deemed a 'must have' for the sake of diversity, you may feel like you didn't earn, say, a job, and thus may feel slighted. Coworkers would see that too and say "he only got the job because x." This is also an issue.
So @Wayniac to your disingenuous claim that I don't think trans lives matter and am a one issue person (even though you quoted me talking about at least 5 issues,) that's false, because as far as I'm concerned, all innocent people deserve justice in this world.
Steven and Joe have much more to worry about than hurt feelings, since I'm going to eat them.
I agree, well, partly, cannibalism I would judge, because unlike other hobbies, cannibalism kinda kills people, thus my mantra: "Do whatever you want as long as you don't infringe on the freedoms of others," is hurt because death and pain ruin freedom.
As for representation, why is it so vital? Do many trans people think of Jenner as a representation of them? Should White people see the same for James Holmes, the Colorado shooter? I've heard claims that because most shooters are men thus they represent them, which is unfair and ridiculous.
Want a story that did a trans character with tact? Two and a Half Men (yes seriously) had an episode with a post-op woman sleeping with a main character. After they sleep together, she reveals why things felt kinda funny and he's okay with it.
Similar stuff happened in the game Catherine... nobody's brought it up! NOBODY! How many transphobes attacked that game?
How about Final Fight/Street Fighter's Poison, who if I'm not mistaken, is still packing at some point in the series, not sure if I remember when it stopped.
These representations exist. Do they represent you as individuals? Do they share your ideals, beliefs? Trans people, like all people have a myriad of beliefs, religions, political ideologies and hobbies. Maybe I don't understand representation very well, but wedge tactics are useful to very powerful people to distract us from issues they'd never want us to see, like Panama papers.
The scientists and doctors of World Health Organization classifies transgender behavior as a mental illness. Trying to legitimize a mental illness isn't a good thing to do and is immoral IMO.
You're assuming that scientists and doctors are the supreme authority on both health issues and moral issues. The sad truth is that they are not the ultimate supreme authority on either, even though we would like to think our professionals are.
Consider for a moment saturated fat. Decades ago, Harvard conducted a study and determined that saturated fat was horrible. And so the word spread and our society took on the idea that saturated fat should be avoided completely because it is bad for the heart.
Now I ask you this... how many people do you think actually read this study vs how many people just took the opinion of "experts" on this issue? And it is fairly reasonable to assume the "experts" know what they're talking about, but in cases like this, it is important to do our background research. Why? Because...
They determined that meat, because it contains high amounts of saturated fat, is bad to consume because saturated fat causes heart disease. How did they determine this? They took a list of foods that they considered "meat" and tested them to see what caused heart disease and cancer. Sure... I'm on board so far.
But what foods were on the list? As it turns out, pizza was on the list. Pizza. Pizza, which contains bread, processed cheese, processed tomato suace, grease, seasonings, etc. Now you might be saying to yourself that this isn't even believe that meat pizza would be considered a meat, but let's also consider that this science was based on previous science which was assumed to be correct. And that previous science stated that there is absolutely zero things wrong with consuming processed cheese, processed break, processed tomato sauce, etc. So in conclusion, since the only thing on pizza that was in question was meat, to the nutritional community, it was acceptable to use that as a platform to test the effects of meat... because everything else had already been "proven" to be, at the very least, not harmful.
Fast forward to 2011 when we, as people, are way better at performing science and we find that over the course of 21 separate scientific studies, once the saturated fat was isolated, not a single study could link saturated fat to elevated levels of heart disease. In fact, the results ended up showing that not only was saturated fat not harmful, but it was the best of the fats when it came to nutrition.
I'm not bringing this up because I'm trying to start a debate on what is or is not good for our bodies or whether saturated fat should be consumed in large quantities. But whether or not you think it's good or bad for you, I think we can all agree that using pizza in a study that is supposed to look at the health impacts of meat is absolutely ridiculous. And the types of people who supported this conclusion are the same types of people who are writing the book on what is healthy, what is unhealthy, what is a disorder, what isn't a disorder, etc.
So it's crazy to base your entire argument on "the scientists and doctors of World Health Organization" when they very clearly are by no means the "experts" that you credit them for being. As people, we should be respectfully questioning our leaders and not take what they have to say at face value, especially when it comes to our own well-being. We should conduct our own research and speak up when we find that something is wrong.
TLDR: Is meat bad for you? I don't know. Maybe. But using pizza as a means for testing that hypothesis is absurd and that's why we shouldn't base our decisions when it comes to health and morals solely on "the scientists and doctors of World Health Organization"
"How people could be marignalized by other people saying they are mentaly ill and that the fact of trying to legitimize their existence is immoral and shouldn't be encouraged ?"
I'm gonna stick with the obvious troll conclusion.
To return to the subject, @GenderNihilismGirdle I found this example with the bone-breaking people very interesting (on the subject and even just as a inspirationnal thing) it's clear that real-life statistics are not a real good point when talking about character in the Realms. I don't think there really as many dragon in real world than in Faerun (hopefully).
I have share an article saying more or less that on this thread. (Write by a trans person in this case) I dunno if you have read it. (I could reshare it, but I dunno if it's a kind of flood or not)
Share away!
I also want to mention, re: that statistics argument, that even keeping to statistics listed for the Forgotten Realms (and there are none on LGBT % anyway), it would make for Really Bad Storytelling to keep to those %.
Just as an example, you can go on the FR wiki and see the numbers and % of racial population per country. Now imagine that Ed Greenwood and TSR/WotC had decided from the very beginning, maintaining their stance to this day, that any novels or pieces of fiction in game products or what have you had been restricted to those percentages. If there had been a rule like "If your novel takes place in a country or city with 95% Humans, then no less than 95% of the primary protagonists in your novel must be humans." Last time I checked, anything higher than around 84% of 6 means a party of six adventurers is going to have to be 100% human no matter how diverse the other chunk of the country or city is, depending on what the rule on rounding is (in which case the threshold is more like 92%).
It would mean many of the iconic novels couldn't have had the distribution of interesting characters they did, and would have knocked many of the most interesting and well-loved non-human characters out before the rough draft stage of writing those novels.
Luckily, Ed Greenwood and the companies that have held copyright on FR have always had a keen eye for what makes an interesting story and what makes interesting characters, rather than for what makes a statistically plausible piece of graph data parading as fiction.
I don't mean it marginalizes the person's ideas; I mean it marginalizes the person themselves.
An absurdist example:
An apple, Joe, and a banana, Steven, are talking about what it's like being a banana (for context, most fruits are apples in this scenario; bananas are relatively uncommon). The apple says, "I think being a banana is a defect of the apple ideal. We shouldn't be encouraging bananas to embrace this defect."
Joe isn't trying to say that Steven is defective, and they're only saying what they believe, but the message that Steven receives is that to Joe, Steven is defective--and more than that, Steven's being a banana is apparently wrong. Does that mean Steven is unimportant? Does that mean Steven doesn't deserve recognition? Does that mean Steven shouldn't be in the fruit salad?
Steven has been marginalized by Joe's remark. Joe might not have meant it to be an oppressive statement, but the result is exactly that: Joe has presented the argument that Joe's existence is the only one that is valid or worth recognizing, and Steven's existence is a flaw that should be corrected.
I almost didn't believe it until I thought about it twice but you finally said something which which I disagree.
Steven can be marginalized by Joe's remark only if he chooses to be. No person can make another person feel something because our actions and our feelings are choices we make. Steven could have chosen to ignore Joe because Joe often says things which are stupid just to watch other people's reactions.
I know why some people launch attacks at other groups--the combination of ignorance and fear can lead people, especially people in large groups, do really stupid and short-sighted things. That being said, as long as the manner in which you are living your life (not you, personally, Dee, the generic "you"--we really need a less ambiguous word instead of that pronoun) does not negatively impact other people's lives then it doesn't matter how many people may seem to be attacking you. Keep walking the path upon which you are walking because it is the path you chose. I believe the phrase in use these days is "haters gonna hate" (or is that out of date now?). The haters are irrelevant; ignore them when they appear.
@Mathsorcerer That may be true (although it does sound a bit like blaming the victim to me), but in the context of what I was saying, if Joe's saying what he's saying just to be a jerk, he shouldn't be saying it (assuming the conversation is happening on these forums). The reason for that is in the Site Rules: no flaming, no trolling, and Be Excellent To Each Other.
If Joe's not saying it to be a jerk, if he's just saying what he feels, then the example still holds true, because even if Steven doesn't take it personally, if there's another banana walking by who overhears the conversation, they might feel very differently. In a message board setting, there are no "private conversations" that can just be overheard; everything's communal, which means that in a conversation between an apple and a banana, all bananas who walk in on that conversation are going to be faced with that choice: "Take this personally, or ignore it".
The site rules (and good forum etiquette) suggest that if your target audience has to make that choice, you're probably making a mistake in your communication.
but also: while I agree with you in principle, and try to employ that "haters gonna hate" attitude as much as I can as a trans person in this world of trans haters, it's also true that there is very real power in ideas that trickles down to things like the incredibly high unemployment statistics relative to the rest of the population among trans people, particularly trans women, largely because of discriminatory hiring practices which are the net result of all the Joes in the world being normalized enough stances that the Stevens can't get a break, and this is also what the Black Lives Matter movement is trying to call attention to with regard to (among many issues) things like the disproportionate amount of arrests made for the same crimes in America for the black population vs the white one, and when it makes it to court the disproportionate amount of convictions for the same crimes along the same divided lines, showing that the problems of the normalized conversation do extrapolate themselves to systemic issues informed by those normalized discourses
it's worthwhile to challenge those discourses as wrong-headed from the get-go, and wrong-headed from those places "without" power...but no discourse exists or is developed in a vacuum. Power is never absent, everything is inter-related in society to the extent that what shapes people into the people who say those kinds of things are generally systemic things in the first place, so it's worthwhile to consider Joe apples as symptoms of larger apple social forces which are systemic just as much as it is worthwhile to consider those apple social forces to be composed of Joe apples and tacitly Joe-accepting apples, of which those who tell bananas like Steven to ignore Joe apples are basically a part by not challenging these forces in both the macro and micro while these forces still have very real lived impacts on banana lives.
Maybe I don't understand representation very well, but wedge tactics are useful to very powerful people to distract us from issues they'd never want us to see, like Panama papers.
Maybe I don't understand representation very well, but wedge tactics are useful to very powerful people to distract us from issues they'd never want us to see, like Panama papers.
And murder rates for trans women, trans women of colour in particular, are higher than any other part of the LGBT umbrella and much, much higher than the general population. We die a lot, by our own hands and others, in a world which has many people telling others (and telling us) that we're something defective or damaged or broken or aberrant or sub-human.
I used the employment example to be a bit gentler about it, given that @Mathsorcerer wasn't coming at this from a transphobic place like some other users I could name in this thread.
@Dee and @GenderNihilismGirdle fair points, indeed. My primary problem is that I treat everyone equally and I expect everyone else to do the same even though I know they often do not. The other problem is my outlook itself. I can say things like "don't take things personally", "mind your own business", and "don't tell other people how to live their lives" *but* logic dictates that I follow my own principles--I cannot tell other people *not* to take things personally and I cannot tell other people to ignore the haters. I am in charge of me, not anyone else.
No, I don't suffer from transphobia...or any other phobia, now that I think about it. I may sometimes come across as a little detached or I may phrase things not quite as diplomatically as I would like but my goal was to try and present an optional mindset which might help some people cope with things that are going to occur from time to time in life.
We may not walk the same path but if I see someone else trip you on purpose and I can offer a hand to get you back on your feet I will do so.
@Mathsorcerer Personal responsibility is a big thing! I do consider myself personally responsible for my inactions as well as my actions though, and so if I pass by and try to ignore someone being belittled or dehumanized in a public space it's generally because I feel I would be at risk to do so, or because I feel my contribution might make things worse rather than better.
I agree with @Dee that this is definitely a public, common space, and as such people should definitely be avoiding saying the kinds of things other people might feel the need to stand up against as dehumanizing or otherwise Being That Way (as in "Why you gotta be that way?"), since that's not cool in a public space, and there are plenty of examples to be found of people standing up for people being harassed and pushed around in public spaces to let us know it's a perfectly reasonable reaction. Moderators are here to make sure people adhere to a standard that precludes that being necessary, since this is also a place we enter having agreed to not Be That Way while we're here beforehand, so I think it's fair when people find it upsetting that someone in this space is Being That Way even if in the course of walking around in the real world they might be expecting it and steeled for it, or if in the context of a private personal attack they might be inclined to ignore the person and move on. Context is important, and the site forces you to accept rules before you can post for a good reason (and this is all aside from the infinite mosaic of human perspectives within which we find how and why people do or don't react to things, a mosaic within which I appreciate you sharing your little piece of coloured glass with us!).
Given that I am a mod on another forum--I haven't linked to it here because I didn't want to step on any toes or cross any lines--I know exactly what you mean.
I must admit that there are voices here I really would like to show up on my forum, though. It has gone a little quiet lately and some new voices and perspectives would liven the place quite nicely.
I must admit that there are voices here I really would like to show up on my forum, though. It has gone a little quiet lately and some new voices and perspectives would liven the place quite nicely.
Easy solution - just start private messaging people to post on your forums.
You can treat it like an Avenger coalition. You can assemble the team you need for the given situation and either have the heroes come the defense of someone OR release the goon squad on the unsuspecting troll.
@Mathsorcerer I frequently plug RPGCrossing.com as a great site for Play-by-post gaming (since that's where I got my start). If you ever do want to plug your site, shoot me a PM and we can talk about it more that way.
But I think we're getting off topic again--although this thread's gone through a number of sea-changes since it started. I'm wondering if now would be an appropriate time to put it to bed? Y'all tell me what you'd all prefer. I don't see any rules being broken, but it's going on 21 pages and the topic seems to have run its course.
Unless someone else feels the need to keep some relevant branch of this conversation going, I think we've pretty well seen attempts to reinforce or rebut the OP in nearly every configuration we needed to (and several more besides) since the thread began.
And heck, even if some branch of this feels like a worthy thing to expand on maybe the Off Topic forums could be a place to @ relevant posters in this thread for thoughts related to that branch-off.
I really got a lot out of the conversations going on within this thread since I first added my voice to it, and I'm glad to see so many other LGBT people showing their love in this thread for the Baldur's Gate games and providing well thought out critical viewpoints on trans representation! Of course I'm glad for the other participation in this thread, but it means something to me personally to see us trans folks in particular represented in this thread, no matter whether we agreed or disagreed along the way!
I really got a lot out of the conversations going on within this thread since I first added my voice to it, and I'm glad to see so many other LGBT people showing their love in this thread for the Baldur's Gate games and providing well thought out critical viewpoints on trans representation! Of course I'm glad for the other participation in this thread, but it means something to me personally to see us trans folks in particular represented in this thread, no matter whether we agreed or disagreed along the way!
gg (good gab) everyone
Same here for me. (And the #Beamlluminati is definitly perfect)
Comments
I'm gonna stick with the obvious troll conclusion.
To return to the subject, @GenderNihilismGirdle I found this example with the bone-breaking people very interesting (on the subject and even just as a inspirationnal thing) it's clear that real-life statistics are not a real good point when talking about character in the Realms. I don't think there really as many dragon in real world than in Faerun (hopefully).
I have share an article saying more or less that on this thread. (Write by a trans person in this case) I dunno if you have read it. (I could reshare it, but I dunno if it's a kind of flood or not)
I'll ignore all the slander, since the assumption I despise human rights of the egalitarian nature is a bit contrarian to transphobia. What I said was that there are places on earth where trans lives are hard to live because they tend to be killed. Nobody has died from the existence of Mizehna (she's a cleric so she can do revivals,) but there are places where trans people do die, and that's not funny! Turning a blind eye to that snidely is not an insult to me, but to those people being persecuted.
Does Mizehna matter in the long run? No, this idea of representation sounds like quotas, and I think quotas are an insult to those involved. To the quota victim, of whatever creed is deemed a 'must have' for the sake of diversity, you may feel like you didn't earn, say, a job, and thus may feel slighted. Coworkers would see that too and say "he only got the job because x." This is also an issue.
So @Wayniac to your disingenuous claim that I don't think trans lives matter and am a one issue person (even though you quoted me talking about at least 5 issues,) that's false, because as far as I'm concerned, all innocent people deserve justice in this world. I agree, well, partly, cannibalism I would judge, because unlike other hobbies, cannibalism kinda kills people, thus my mantra: "Do whatever you want as long as you don't infringe on the freedoms of others," is hurt because death and pain ruin freedom.
As for representation, why is it so vital? Do many trans people think of Jenner as a representation of them?
Should White people see the same for James Holmes, the Colorado shooter? I've heard claims that because most shooters are men thus they represent them, which is unfair and ridiculous.
Want a story that did a trans character with tact? Two and a Half Men (yes seriously) had an episode with a post-op woman sleeping with a main character. After they sleep together, she reveals why things felt kinda funny and he's okay with it.
Similar stuff happened in the game Catherine... nobody's brought it up! NOBODY! How many transphobes attacked that game?
How about Final Fight/Street Fighter's Poison, who if I'm not mistaken, is still packing at some point in the series, not sure if I remember when it stopped.
These representations exist. Do they represent you as individuals? Do they share your ideals, beliefs? Trans people, like all people have a myriad of beliefs, religions, political ideologies and hobbies. Maybe I don't understand representation very well, but wedge tactics are useful to very powerful people to distract us from issues they'd never want us to see, like Panama papers.
Consider for a moment saturated fat. Decades ago, Harvard conducted a study and determined that saturated fat was horrible. And so the word spread and our society took on the idea that saturated fat should be avoided completely because it is bad for the heart.
Now I ask you this... how many people do you think actually read this study vs how many people just took the opinion of "experts" on this issue? And it is fairly reasonable to assume the "experts" know what they're talking about, but in cases like this, it is important to do our background research. Why? Because...
They determined that meat, because it contains high amounts of saturated fat, is bad to consume because saturated fat causes heart disease. How did they determine this? They took a list of foods that they considered "meat" and tested them to see what caused heart disease and cancer. Sure... I'm on board so far.
But what foods were on the list? As it turns out, pizza was on the list. Pizza. Pizza, which contains bread, processed cheese, processed tomato suace, grease, seasonings, etc. Now you might be saying to yourself that this isn't even believe that meat pizza would be considered a meat, but let's also consider that this science was based on previous science which was assumed to be correct. And that previous science stated that there is absolutely zero things wrong with consuming processed cheese, processed break, processed tomato sauce, etc. So in conclusion, since the only thing on pizza that was in question was meat, to the nutritional community, it was acceptable to use that as a platform to test the effects of meat... because everything else had already been "proven" to be, at the very least, not harmful.
Fast forward to 2011 when we, as people, are way better at performing science and we find that over the course of 21 separate scientific studies, once the saturated fat was isolated, not a single study could link saturated fat to elevated levels of heart disease. In fact, the results ended up showing that not only was saturated fat not harmful, but it was the best of the fats when it came to nutrition.
I'm not bringing this up because I'm trying to start a debate on what is or is not good for our bodies or whether saturated fat should be consumed in large quantities. But whether or not you think it's good or bad for you, I think we can all agree that using pizza in a study that is supposed to look at the health impacts of meat is absolutely ridiculous. And the types of people who supported this conclusion are the same types of people who are writing the book on what is healthy, what is unhealthy, what is a disorder, what isn't a disorder, etc.
So it's crazy to base your entire argument on "the scientists and doctors of World Health Organization" when they very clearly are by no means the "experts" that you credit them for being. As people, we should be respectfully questioning our leaders and not take what they have to say at face value, especially when it comes to our own well-being. We should conduct our own research and speak up when we find that something is wrong.
TLDR: Is meat bad for you? I don't know. Maybe. But using pizza as a means for testing that hypothesis is absurd and that's why we shouldn't base our decisions when it comes to health and morals solely on "the scientists and doctors of World Health Organization"
I also want to mention, re: that statistics argument, that even keeping to statistics listed for the Forgotten Realms (and there are none on LGBT % anyway), it would make for Really Bad Storytelling to keep to those %.
Just as an example, you can go on the FR wiki and see the numbers and % of racial population per country. Now imagine that Ed Greenwood and TSR/WotC had decided from the very beginning, maintaining their stance to this day, that any novels or pieces of fiction in game products or what have you had been restricted to those percentages. If there had been a rule like "If your novel takes place in a country or city with 95% Humans, then no less than 95% of the primary protagonists in your novel must be humans." Last time I checked, anything higher than around 84% of 6 means a party of six adventurers is going to have to be 100% human no matter how diverse the other chunk of the country or city is, depending on what the rule on rounding is (in which case the threshold is more like 92%).
It would mean many of the iconic novels couldn't have had the distribution of interesting characters they did, and would have knocked many of the most interesting and well-loved non-human characters out before the rough draft stage of writing those novels.
Luckily, Ed Greenwood and the companies that have held copyright on FR have always had a keen eye for what makes an interesting story and what makes interesting characters, rather than for what makes a statistically plausible piece of graph data parading as fiction.
Steven can be marginalized by Joe's remark only if he chooses to be. No person can make another person feel something because our actions and our feelings are choices we make. Steven could have chosen to ignore Joe because Joe often says things which are stupid just to watch other people's reactions.
I know why some people launch attacks at other groups--the combination of ignorance and fear can lead people, especially people in large groups, do really stupid and short-sighted things. That being said, as long as the manner in which you are living your life (not you, personally, Dee, the generic "you"--we really need a less ambiguous word instead of that pronoun) does not negatively impact other people's lives then it doesn't matter how many people may seem to be attacking you. Keep walking the path upon which you are walking because it is the path you chose. I believe the phrase in use these days is "haters gonna hate" (or is that out of date now?). The haters are irrelevant; ignore them when they appear.
If Joe's not saying it to be a jerk, if he's just saying what he feels, then the example still holds true, because even if Steven doesn't take it personally, if there's another banana walking by who overhears the conversation, they might feel very differently. In a message board setting, there are no "private conversations" that can just be overheard; everything's communal, which means that in a conversation between an apple and a banana, all bananas who walk in on that conversation are going to be faced with that choice: "Take this personally, or ignore it".
The site rules (and good forum etiquette) suggest that if your target audience has to make that choice, you're probably making a mistake in your communication.
but also: while I agree with you in principle, and try to employ that "haters gonna hate" attitude as much as I can as a trans person in this world of trans haters, it's also true that there is very real power in ideas that trickles down to things like the incredibly high unemployment statistics relative to the rest of the population among trans people, particularly trans women, largely because of discriminatory hiring practices which are the net result of all the Joes in the world being normalized enough stances that the Stevens can't get a break, and this is also what the Black Lives Matter movement is trying to call attention to with regard to (among many issues) things like the disproportionate amount of arrests made for the same crimes in America for the black population vs the white one, and when it makes it to court the disproportionate amount of convictions for the same crimes along the same divided lines, showing that the problems of the normalized conversation do extrapolate themselves to systemic issues informed by those normalized discourses
it's worthwhile to challenge those discourses as wrong-headed from the get-go, and wrong-headed from those places "without" power...but no discourse exists or is developed in a vacuum. Power is never absent, everything is inter-related in society to the extent that what shapes people into the people who say those kinds of things are generally systemic things in the first place, so it's worthwhile to consider Joe apples as symptoms of larger apple social forces which are systemic just as much as it is worthwhile to consider those apple social forces to be composed of Joe apples and tacitly Joe-accepting apples, of which those who tell bananas like Steven to ignore Joe apples are basically a part by not challenging these forces in both the macro and micro while these forces still have very real lived impacts on banana lives.
I used the employment example to be a bit gentler about it, given that @Mathsorcerer wasn't coming at this from a transphobic place like some other users I could name in this thread.
No, I don't suffer from transphobia...or any other phobia, now that I think about it. I may sometimes come across as a little detached or I may phrase things not quite as diplomatically as I would like but my goal was to try and present an optional mindset which might help some people cope with things that are going to occur from time to time in life.
We may not walk the same path but if I see someone else trip you on purpose and I can offer a hand to get you back on your feet I will do so.
I agree with @Dee that this is definitely a public, common space, and as such people should definitely be avoiding saying the kinds of things other people might feel the need to stand up against as dehumanizing or otherwise Being That Way (as in "Why you gotta be that way?"), since that's not cool in a public space, and there are plenty of examples to be found of people standing up for people being harassed and pushed around in public spaces to let us know it's a perfectly reasonable reaction. Moderators are here to make sure people adhere to a standard that precludes that being necessary, since this is also a place we enter having agreed to not Be That Way while we're here beforehand, so I think it's fair when people find it upsetting that someone in this space is Being That Way even if in the course of walking around in the real world they might be expecting it and steeled for it, or if in the context of a private personal attack they might be inclined to ignore the person and move on. Context is important, and the site forces you to accept rules before you can post for a good reason (and this is all aside from the infinite mosaic of human perspectives within which we find how and why people do or don't react to things, a mosaic within which I appreciate you sharing your little piece of coloured glass with us!).
I must admit that there are voices here I really would like to show up on my forum, though. It has gone a little quiet lately and some new voices and perspectives would liven the place quite nicely.
You can treat it like an Avenger coalition. You can assemble the team you need for the given situation and either have the heroes come the defense of someone OR release the goon squad on the unsuspecting troll.
But I think we're getting off topic again--although this thread's gone through a number of sea-changes since it started. I'm wondering if now would be an appropriate time to put it to bed? Y'all tell me what you'd all prefer. I don't see any rules being broken, but it's going on 21 pages and the topic seems to have run its course.
And heck, even if some branch of this feels like a worthy thing to expand on maybe the Off Topic forums could be a place to @ relevant posters in this thread for thoughts related to that branch-off.
Just my 2 coppers on that one.
gg (good gab) everyone
(I'll DM you the link).
Thank for people here who have participated.