On Thu, Oct 13, 2011 at 11:56 PM, ChaoticFluffy
<chaoticfluffy@gmail.com> wrote:
Invalidating someone's life experiences or gender identity is offensive. I'm very sorry that so few people seem to realize the damage that words like that can do, and I'm even sorrier than so many people seem to think that I'm a terrible, offensive person for having pointed out in public that these things can be offensive to real people.
Yes, they do.
I'm greatly discouraged by the feedback I'm getting here, the loudest of which seems to be telling me that if someone makes an offensive comment, it's incredibly rude to tell them they're being offensive.
I hope you're not discouraged. I've seen similar problems when dealing with race related issues. Some one says something racist. Some one else points out the person made a racist comment. The person who gets in trouble isn't the person who made the racist comment, but the person who pointed it out. Why? Because won't you think of the poor racist, and how their feelings are hurt. Don't you realise how offensive it is to be called a racist or told that something they said was racist?
Related to that whole issue of the need to apologise for calling some one out regarding their sexist behaviour, and not in this case but in a wider context for women and what they deal with online and office, involves rape apologists. If you start looking at online news stories that talk about rape, you'll often find variations of them that include "She was asking for it."(Though that does appear to be a theme on WP when women have to deal with problematic men: "That's just WP. Deal with it. Act like a person. The rest of the people (93% male) can and you should be able to do that to.") There has been some rather interesting responses to this including a number of rallies condemning these statements when coming from authority figures. Check out
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlutWalk , which probably has the bare bones for a Good Article if anyone is inspired to take it there.