If you’re on the fence and it feels like the only people who listen to you with respect and sympathy are the anti-trans people
This is what people just don’t seem to understand. The “you’re 150% with us and declaring it on every turn, or you’re against us” rule just makes completely normal people end against them.
This really goes for every kind of issue that may come up, not even just for the typical “left-right” feud bullshit.
The thing is, it’s not even required to be nice and keep explaining shit or whatever - there’s always the option on an individual level to just ignore stuff.
Like with the joke in this story - no, you don’t need to be the police to immediately report and flag everything that’s 10% over the line. You don’t need to see red all the time. Just ignore it and move the fuck on, you’re not getting any extra social credits for beings overly sensitive and protective.
The obvious counterargument is “well if you ignore everything, they win”, but that’s still just the same paranoia, the same dividing between us and everyone else, the same overprotectiveness. You don’t have to let everything pass, that doesn’t mean you have to police everything everything either.
Besides there will always be a ton of people willing to do online vigilantism, so you’re really totally fine to just ignore most things and not run to the mod about everything.
It’s like those zero-tolerance policies in some schools (American schools of course, where else) where forgetting a pink plastic water gun or a nail clipper in their backpack can get a 10yo kid arrested and expelled. It’s not helping anything, it’s not addressing the actual problem, it singles out random people as examples, and it just makes everyone hate you.
be careful of ‘whataboutism’ so hey, fun tight rope
If I see someone using the term whataboutism, I know there’s no discussion to be had with them. Another originally sensible word that has been destroyed by overuse. I’ve been accused of whataboutism by just adding some extra information about a game console history. Holy shit. You can tell that person’s entire mission in life is to just scope the internet of any sign of disagreement about anything they find holy, no matter how trivial.