I really don’t have almost any problem at all with Abigail Thorn making a joke about the word transition, I do however have a problem with the way every trans person who thought it was in bad taste is being characterized as a cruel scold who flew off the handle

What’s more, there’s a lack of understanding norms and precedent here. It’s super common on social media for people to liken hated political figures to gay or trans people, and we are constantly telling people not to do this. It’s an accepted, very normal response.

It’s funny because this links back to Natalie Wynn’s “canceling” discourse. Many people who agreed with her nevertheless repeatedly employ the tactics she criticized, herself included. One of them here is dualism.

Specifically it’s rhetorical dualism, by which one makes a dispute appear to be reducible to only two opposed sides, usually one good and one bad. An example is “the angry trans scolds who canceled Contrapoints” vs. “the good fans who have compassion and didn’t cancel her”

What I have been seeing in the past two days is a dichotomization between “people who sent Abi Thorn death threats over a joke” and “people who aren’t killjoys and thus thought the joke was fine”

Both of these framings are absurdly dishonest, reductive, disparaging, and undermining of normal human emotional responses, and also make out audience reaction to be like a circle of judges instead of what it really is: just people expressing their personal responses

It makes it seem like if you have open dislike, discomfort, or heaven forbid anger about something, that is identical to hurling mud or trying to hurt someone. Emotion is conflated with action, anger is conflated with violence

It also suggests content creators are owed warmth/pleasantness from their audience. You all, this would never fly in publishing. People are allowed to negatively review your book. People are allowed to dislike your videos. They’re allowed to criticize your content.

As it is sometimes said: it’s never the call-out, it’s the double-down. The joke itself is no big deal, idc, whatever,.

The continued storytelling about how touchy and explosive and abusive trans people are, however, is a real problem and it needs to stop.

It needs to stop no matter how many screenshots someone has of antagonistic tweets. It‘s never okay to feed into literal right-wing myths about profoundly oppressed populations. That this needs said at all is staggering and there are zero excuses for anyone, cis or trans.