I don't like that so much animosity shows up in a lot of disagreements, and it seems like that's being kind of thrown under the rug sometimes recently because of the whole gender issue topic.
I agree that people should be able to be themselves and not have to worry about their gender identities causing them issues here. I genuinely want this to be a place for everybody. I think one of the main things we can take from the last few days, just looking at people in the Twitter thread, is that the majority of people here don't want to hurt one another and really love this community. It's sad that people were so affected by what's happened that a lot of them aren't even here right now.
That said, I keep seeing stuff like this.
Leod wrote:The solution is as simple as not denying people their identity for no reason other than "they were mean to me".
Not that there really are valid reasons.
It should be of no surprise that people will respond angrily to that, and righteously so.
Yet a lot of issues are caused by aggression aimed at people who aren't denying others their identities. I personally took a lot of crap in the original pronouns thread when I was just asking questions. I really don't mean to offend anybody and if I do that I just want to be given a calm explanation of what I did. Yeah, I'm a white, straight cisgendered male who hasn't gone through much in terms of discrimination at all. It doesn't mean I'm out to hurt anyone, and honestly the way that thread went down has kept me out of any serious discussion here for a few days. I also think GlitchedGhost's thread was made with the best intentions (and certainly no hate or discrimination in mind,) and look what happened there.
It's not a black and white "these people are wrong and these people are right," kind of thing. I think Horikawa has the right idea with how talking to other people about touchy subjects should work, so I'm not going to just go repeating all of that.