Negotiating Silence

[T D]

Silencing = Using someones personal stories, shares as ammunition to be used as a means of belittling and thereby silencing them. Using gossip, falsehoods, negativity to describe someone and put a negative spin on their character. Telling others that what they say/said isn't pertinent to the topic or bascially doesn't belong in the thread. Trying to convince everyone reading the thread that you are the smartest, most informed, and you must be believed because of this. That if you ID as some certain way, then you must be like all the others who ID that way. Like someone else said earlier, not every butch, transguy, or anyone else are misogynistic pigs, nor do they all think that a "femme is not a femme without a butch", something I'd never even seen or heard about until this site. Interestingly enough some people would certainly color us all as being the same.

It goes on and on and on, the ways this can and does happen are endless. I absolutely do NOT think this is something that we just perceive in our heads, I think it actually happens, often times intentionally, and is quite often directed at specific participants. I've been watching these types of threads for years and years, and they generally end up the same way with the same people doing and saying the same stuff in the same manner.

What this boils down to for me is RESPECT or lack of it. If each person here looked at the other as a person of REAL value I believe they'd have respect for that person. What I often times see instead is someone who has a "need" to somehow prove that they're the smartest, the most informed, the brightest star on the block, and quite frankly it's these very people who make me wonder why they "need" this so much. It just leads me to believe that they're insecure themselves, and need to obtain their security by collecting followers from around them and giving themselves an appearance of superiority.

Again, I'm just saying that respect and/or lack of it is at the bottom of all this for me. I find it very difficult to respect people who don't respect others, or at the very least speak as if they do when responding to other peoples thoughts, views, feelings, experiences, etc.

You know, I've been wanting to say this for a very long time. I've been watching it go on for SOOO long now. I may get a bunch of backlash from having said these things, but bottom line for me is, if you don't give respect you're not going to get much of it back, and if you try to be the smartest kid on the block, it doesn't ensure that you are.

It would be really nice to see people open up more, to be more caring about others here, to be more open to understanding, to be more open to the fact that not everyone in a particular category is the same as the person standing beside them, that each of us has a different way of communicating, that we're all different and we ALL perceive the world differently, and that we're all speaking from OUR perceived worlds!

Stepping down now.

[SuperFemme]

TD, I appreciate your post a lot. I'm glad you felt okay about posting here what you have long wanted to say.

Respect is key, you are right. I hope I haven't intimated that we are just perceiving this in our heads.

I'm wanting to know what we do with it when it happens. I'm hoping we can be the change.

I want to learn.

[Bit]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

This is a great discussion and it helps to better understand that often your posts are about you....

I personally think this point can never be emphasized enough. It's not just Arwen, although that's who Jen was answering---it's US, all of us.

Our posts are ALWAYS about us. It doesn't matter what the subject is or to whom we're speaking; every post we make is a part of us--after all, it came from our minds, right?--and reflects our experiences, our worldview, our own emotional state.

For example, if I post a long rant aimed at XYZ because they said something which really pissed me off, when YOU read it, you aren't really reading anything at all about XYZ (even if you agree with my rant, lol)---what you're reading is actually about Cath, because it came from me.

Depending on the subject of the rant, you're reading maybe the results of the way I was treated in childhood, or maybe the results of an abusive marriage, or maybe the results *yanno I rant the most about the way Butches are treated in public* of my feeling helpless/embarrassed/humiliated/ANGRY/helpless/helpless/helpless when my first partner was humiliated by women in a public restroom who very snidely and loudly pretended in front of a large crowd that they couldn't tell she was a woman because she was wrapped in a man's coat to stay warm in her wheelchair.

Does my example make sense to y'all? I might say someone is acting in a misogynistic way, or a callous way, or any other way, and I might be right----but in the end, my post is actually about how their post ties into other things which have happened to me in the past, things which I might not ever speak about but which surely influence what I say anyway.

This is a natural human trait and I think it's the main reason that we (people who post) so often take someone else's post as if it were ridicule or disrespect. I think this tendency of ours to read everything through a strong filter of our own past experiences is one of the things that leads people to react with such strong emotion to other people's posts.

And to answer Adele's question *cuz I know it's coming! * I think what we can do to change is simply to acknowledge it. If we make it a point to remember that other people's posts are all about them and what has happened in their lives, and if we remember that our responses (especially our anger) come from what happened to us in our own lives, then I think maybe we'll be more inclined to cut each other some slack.

Your Mileage May Vary on this... and that's okay. *smiling*

Also, I never feel like someone answering just one point from another person's post is a form of silencing. I agree with TD's definition of silencing.

[Apocalipstic]

Great post Bit! Yes its true, how we react to things is completely because of our life experiences. We all need to remember that.

And to women who see themselves as bathroom monitors.......
Cynthia uses the Men's room, apparently Men don't look at each other in the bathroom like women do.

[little man]

Originally Posted by apocalipstic

Great post Bit! Yes its true, how we react to things is completely because of our life experiences. We all need to remember that.

And to women who see themselves as bathroom monitors.......
Cynthia uses the Men's room, apparently Men don't look at each other in the bathroom like women do.

they certainly don't. which makes life so much easier.

[Medusa]

Originally Posted by T D

Silencing = Using someones personal stories, shares as ammunition to be used as a means of belittling and thereby silencing them. Using gossip, falsehoods, negativity to describe someone and put a negative spin on their character.

TD, these two sentences resonated so deeply with me right now that it isnt funny.

I also want to add that a person who does this is more often than not speaking from a place of self-negativity. To put energy into trying to hurt/damage/inflict pain on another person by "destroying" their reputation or airing their dirty laundry that was told to them in the privacy of a friendship is a gross display of the WORST kind of ethical lacking in a human being.

I have also always been of the opinion that it says MUCH more about the person airing the laundry or "destroying the reputation" than it does about the person that its being done to.

It, unfortunately, still hurts the person its being done to, no matter how sad/angry/nasty the person who is doing it appears to be to others.

I have much MUCH more to say here but I'll leave it for now.