Confession: there's a bit of selfishness in my reply. I hope you can forgive it. If a trans person had taken offense, then I would have had to put on the mod hat and break up an unnecessary fight, when I'd rather overanalyze the comic instead.
Once you're a mod, the mod hat is on, whether you mean to wear it or not. I understand the tricky bits, but I'm not sure how anything is served to prevent potential offense by being preemptively offensive.
I don't think that was your intent, but then neither was your characterization of my post related to my intent. Is it presumption of guilt?
Not to beat the horse to death, but there's a simple and fundamental reason I object to the tone and justification of "Careful Thinking." Applied to your response, careful thinking could have avoided offending me. But is that reasonable?
I've mentioned before that I find trigger warnings distasteful. I think I used the context that it really would be reasonable to expect "Trigger warning: Macro shots of spiders." No one does that. Arachniphobes are fucked. Well, having someone phrase something such that they, intent or not, presume to tell me what I mean is a big fat trigger. A trigger for enough years of childhood mental and physical abuse that I don't remember much of my youth, and I find myself having to ask people, "did that happen? How the hell did that even start?"
There isn't a turn of phrase that hasn't been weaponized. There's no gesture that isn't painful for someone. But if we try to respect that, we have no choice but to stop communicating, entirely. I don't have a perfect world answer. All I have is a point.
In regards to referring to Claire as male at some point, or formerly male. A politer and more accurate way of putting it was that she was perceived as male. That established how she was treated without invalidating either her lived experience or her identity. Which for most trans people sets in and they can verbalize it by the age of 4-5. Usually long before they are given the ability to express that identity. As one of the forum transgender folk, I wasn't offended by the statement. A little saddened at the all to common inaccurate phrasing of it. But I guessed at what the intention behind it was meant to be.
The intent was to force the reader into image conflict. The purpose of that conflict was to underscore the unconscious bias people carry with respect to gender.
I'm sorry to have inflected sadness as well.
Here's the thing. Whether you divined my specific intent, you recognized what I was saying. Just as I recognized that you are discussing gender, despite the fact that you use the words "male or formerly male." Male isn't a gender term except at a remove of implicit assumption: If A is male, A must be a man or boy. Except, if you accept gender as construct, you know that A being male tells you nothing about whether A is a man or boy.
That's why I used the word "man," in addition to "shock value." The construct of gender comes on multiple levels, perception, and identity among them. Now, I could read your use of the word "male" as having specific intent to convey the specific meaning of that word. It would be technically true of Claire, on a genetic level, now. Or I can just go with what I know you mean.
But what if I found it offensive, even knowing your intent? I'd probably be in my rights to say something about it. But, circle back to the above, does "Careful thinking" apply? If so, what's the meter stick for careful look like? There's obvious stuff that fits "not careful" just like there's stuff that's obviously pornography. The longer I think about it, the more it seems to me that the only distinction between "Careful thinking" and "not obviously careless thinking" is same as that between art and "not obviously porn": I know it when I see it.
In a subjective world, that's fodder for arguments and nothing more.
I suppose one could use the "reasonable person" test. It's how most handle that particular conflict. To me, that's hypocrisy. It's using the tyranny of the majority to justify action taken in the name of defending people oppressed by the tyranny of the majority. As an oppressed person myself, I find that distasteful. Others' mileage may vary. I certainly see the potential for satisfaction in giving 'em a taste of their own medicine.
Claire is a woman. A "she." Is she a "she" in same sense that the U.S.S. Enterprise is a "she"? Am I a "he" in the same sense that the former Soviet aircraft carrier Kiev is a "he"? Generally, I take the idea of gender as construct to the logical extension, so my answer is yes. But I suspect a lot of people never considered the question and are rather conflicted, at the least. If they aren't outright rejecting the idea. That's the essentialism of tying sex to gender. That was what I intended to exploit by choosing the word "man" over "presented as" or "perceived by others to be."
As I said, I'm open to criticism about that choice. I'm just upset by the characterization of said choice as careless and the implication that it meant to disparage.
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Topic: WCDT: 2821-2825 (27 - 31 October 2014) Weekly Comic Discussion Thread (Read 79632 times)