Everyone’s anti-harassment till they have a reason to harass someone
When I made the above post six weeks ago, five people reacted to it. I understand from this post that one of those five is now dead, and that it’s for reasons not-unrelated to what I was complaining about. I didn’t know POSS beyond that single interaction, don’t know what exactly preceded ’eir death, and don’t want to speak where it’s not my place while people in my community who did know ’em are grieving. But nonetheless I feel obliged to elaborate on what I said six weeks ago, because apparently that didn’t magically fix all harassment within our community. So the rest of this is about the general case, not about a specific person. Anytime I say “you” or “some people”, I don’t have any one person in mind; in a way, I have all of us in mind, because this is a collective failure, even by those of us who are trying to be part of the solution.
The general form of my earlier point is this: If you consider yourself against harassment and bullying and abuse, but you make exceptions if you like the person doing it, or you don’t like the person receiving it, or the thing being alleged is just extra bad and it resonates with you in some way, you aren’t really against those things. In fact, the people you criticize as bullies probably see things exactly the way you do; y’all just have different standards for what makes you set aside your half-hearted opposition to harassment.
I’ve said before that the most dangerous idea to ever enter the queer community is that you can’t tell people they’re wrong to be upset about something. This single norm, misappropriated from therapeutic contexts where it has some value within the four walls of a counseling room,[1] has been weaponized to devastating effect when applied to interpersonal conflict within our community. It becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card to believe unverified accusations, feelings of hurt that assume all experienced harm is intended harm, and thinly-veiled bigotry of the sort our community is supposedly so “woke” against. It seems completely lost on a large subset of the queer community that the people most targeted in this way—trans and especially nonbinary, neurodivergent and especially not-just-“regular”-autistic neurodivergent—are the same sorts of people who fascists target, and that often we don’t even know for sure that it isn’t those same fascists starting or amplifying the harassment.
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