Read on Twitter
Ran across an exchange that made me think about intent v impact and that things with harmful impact for a group are often called out using language that I think a lot of people intuitively hear as implying a conversation about intent.
For example, calling something transphobic makes it sound like you’re saying it’s motivated by transphobia (intent), when in reality this construction is often used to say it’s harmful to trans people (impact).
I think this leads to people getting defensive about their motivations/identity (I didn’t intend that/I’m not someone who intends that), which reads to the person calling them out as missing the point/being defensive/not caring about the impact their actions have.
It’s probably not that they don’t care, it’s that people do get defensive when they feel misinterpreted/unjustly called out. It’d be easier to reach people in a less threatening/more impactful way if we had language that sounded more like it was explicitly about impact.
“This is harmful to trans people/trans rights” is a thing you can say, but it takes a lot more precious characters. I think a lot of people are comfortable short cutting those things to “transphobic” because they take it as likely an expression of internalized transphobia, but
That’s an unnecessary leap that makes the point much less likely to land. I don’t have an ideal solution, but maybe anticipate that this is a disconnect that using this kind of language can lead to and consider whether it’s worth spelling out your case more clearly.
