Political Memes

Doubtful you are taking up all the oxygen in the room friend, you are trying to learn about others to cultivate a varied and nuanced opinion. The type of engagement being described here is more specific...

What happens a lot of the time is people coming on and basically trying to tell people what their deal is. I am trans and people in this category of engagement come at me and try to insist things directly to my face about me which simply do not reflect how being trans works. They can't argue me out of my position when it represents my lived reality but they will argue from a position that they are an authority that can tell me what is best for me... Or they argue from a position of a society that just doesn't have time or patience to care and shouldn't need to expend effort to care. They desperately have an opinion because everyone is talking but they get their sources strictly from cis people who talk strictly to other cis people about us because talking to us and letting us tell them what our deal is ourselves is unthinkable. Our accounts if reality are discounted because we are supposed to be delusional and someone else, a cis person, should be making decisions for us. To actually approach us as an authority on what it is like to live our lives is by them considered a radical position.

A lot of it can be easily spotted in how someone had their whiteness pointed out to them or mention how the concept of whiteness operates in society. Basically because whiteness is supposed to be a default just mentioning it tends to make white people uncomfortable to talk about it. That we think about our whiteness as little as possible is a feature of privilege and not a comfort extended to POC who operate in ways that interface with their race regularly. So when we discuss that privilege it brings us in line with the level of conscious awareness POCs tend to have about how their race routinely impacts their experience and rather than seeing that as an equality and sensitivity to be aware of their own whiteness in a space people treat it as a racist attack because we aren't supposed to even be a race - just a raceless default.

Problem is if trans or POC people talk about cisness or whiteness then suddenly there's a hissy fit about how we shouldn't even mention those things. They are treated like slurs because we aren't supposed to notice you're cis and white. It is the thing we cannot speak on... But try being a minority and NOT discussing the majority. Our we don't get to choose how our society operates, the majority does which means every time we leave the house we deal with the majority while members of majority and the minority themselves only gets to see a minority rarely. Our lives are limited by the will of a majority and sometimes that means discomfort, inconvenience or pressure exerted on us by them. You can't talk about us without understanding what you look like from our perspective. So in saying "you can't talk about us!" the burden falls on us because we can't really use comparison or try and utilize what we know of your norms to explain what ours are.

If you are self aware that people who experience a thing directly have insights you can learn from. This guy in the meme isn't you.