u/GrapplingHooks_

"Do this thing. Do that thing. Answer that email. Finish that assignment. Prepare this thing. Cook for yourself. Go out to get groceries. Pay this bill. Pay that subscription. Answer this phone call. Reply to that text. Show empathy to people. Remember to switch tasks. Take care of your health. Get enough sleep. Do all your work. Make time for yourself. Make time for your friends. Reach out to friends and family. Be authentic".

This shit is exhausting.

it is a common urge on the internet to engage in contrarianism to any post that feels implicitly "wrong". this tends to mix with neurodiversity to bad results. neurodiverse populations and multicultural populations are likely to articulate things in different ways. people on the internet tend to, in discussions, already not subscribe to the principle of charity (interpreting something someone says in the most agreeable way), and I'm not saying that this is necessarily incorrect. you don't really owe charitable interpretation to fascists. the least charitable interpretation is often against autistic people to silence autistic voices, used against people of color by white people to silence their voices. what this manifests in online is demands for emotional labor from neurodivergent people, second-language speakers, people who speak non-mainstream dialects of languages, whose quirks of communication such as bluntness, directness, different word and syntax choices lead to people automatically interpreting the post in the least charitable way.

as someone pursuing the cause of liberation, I understand the urge to want to "call out" what you perceive as potentially problematic. however, as a disabled person, this impulse ends up being disproportionately applied to people who do not fit a normative way to communicate and you end up with people policing how someone said something instead of what they actually meant.

it is a common response, again, to double down. to say "you implied it" or "your post implied", but to talk about implicit meanings when someone is trying to clarify and directly telling you what they mean, then doubling down on the misinterpretation only serves to exhaust disabled people and waste our time. kill the cop in you before you engage with anything in this community. and with marginalized communities and people in general. a community where people take the worst possible interpretation of what you say and criticize you for it, forcing you to explain yourself is an ableist community. it feels hostile to exist in such a space.

it's important to note that being marginalized does not make you immune to this impulse. we are all subjects of hierarchy and internalize its communication attitudes. autistic people can be ableist to the ways other autistic people communicate, for example.

there is a tactic used by bad faith actors online known as "sealioning" which consists of misinterpretations and asking questions in a way designed to waste peoples' time and energy. it's hard to tell the difference between this and sealioning in many cases, and oftentimes the difference doesn't matter. they both end up in wasted time and energy needing to re-explain our existences over and over again, stopping us from doing more meaningful things. disabled folks already have less time and energy to devote to building things and this just adds strain and stress. things of this nature kind of fit into multiple rules and so this is an expansion clarification of a moderation consideration as opposed to a rule change.

what I am talking about: policing of the way people communicate based on tone, syntax, phrasing, and treating them as if what they said is incorrect without anything they said actually being wrong.

what I am not talking about: calling out bigoted language, pointing out fascist dogwhistles, pointing out actual inaccuracies that aren't based on misinterpretation or misrepresentation, requesting people make language more accessible.

as a point of moderation, we're gonna be watching out for this, because it makes it less fun to be in spaces online where people aren't checking their policing impulses. I don't want to post something only to have to worry about how people will interpret me in the worst possible way and make me have to overexplain things that I wouldn't have had to if the person on the other end of the screen didn't treat me like I ain't human. you shouldn't have to worry about that either, at least in this space.

We recently removed a comment containing the word. While we agree that carceral behavior in not only queer communities but online and offline communities is a problem, and a rising one at that, the language used to evoke the word "genderQueer" is alienating to genderQueer members of out community. On top of that, it's not exactly conducive to our reclamation of queer identity to be weaponizing a word containing "queer". While those who use the term are correctly pointing to a very carceral mentality that's been growing in queer spaces, it is also pretty conservative to blame that mentality on "youth fragility" as opposed to acknowledging that this behavior is community policing, the problem is not that young people are too sensitive, it's that our oppressive systems train us all to be cops in our communities.

Clarify: When I use the term "carceral", I am referring to the fact that the use of the term "tenderQueer" is a derogatory and problematic way to refer to a real rise in carceral behavior in queer communities. I am not saying that exclusion from a space from using the term is being called carceral, that's just free association, we're not seeking "punishment" here.

We're gonna be removing comments containing that word as a pejorative and potentially banning users on that basis going forward.

Not all forms of hate are equal. Hatred levying the force of oppression is not the same as interpersonal hatred. I don't feel safe in environments that can't recognize that difference, in environments that will ostracize me for antipathy towards my oppressors by framing that as "hatred" and equivocate that with the same hatred my oppressors will often have for me.

We should all agree that neurotypicals aren't subject to neuroableism, that there isn't "neurotypicalphobia" even if individual neurodivergent people can often be rather uncharitable or antagonistic towards neurotypicals. This is the entire premise of the sub! We are evil because we do not pretend to disguise our anger at ableism through respectability. Let's not turn around and hold people marginalized by other systems to a different standard.