https://lemmy.nz/post/18610200/13255360
This user describes how most of the women-centered communities on Lemmy were shut down due to harassment of their members.
Another user adds “We need a safe space, but most of the women I know on here don’t have the time or energy to moderate it. And there’s so few of us, it feels like it’s not worth the effort anyway.”
I do want to respect your experience and help to address the root problems leading to it.
That’s why I am asking and engaging in this conversation: to be better informed and to help others subvert hate in this hate-filled time.
I’m also an odd case, as an intersex person who was socially raised (predominantly) male but in recent years transitioned to female mostly to avoid harassment. I get so much less hate when I’m perceived as a woman that your experience is somewhat foreign to me. Whether presenting as a man or as a woman, I get hate overwhelmingly from women. Women in our society are hate-filled and angry and don’t know how to process emotions like discomfort caused by their intersexphobia nearly as well as men do.
A curated collection of the worst examples meets the definition of cherry picking. Cherry picking doesn’t mean that your argument is invalid, just that there is missing context from the rest of the distribution of interactions. Any sufficiently large community will have enough assholes that bad behavior can be cherry picked from the extreme end of the distribution to be used as examples if someone wants to paint the whole community in a bad light.
That said, the extreme and cherry-picked examples are still a problem that need to be taken seriously. My life is an extreme and cherry-picked example that runs counter to the common narrative from “feminists” who think that blocking and ostracizing dissenting voices is a solution, instead of recognizing that reaction as exclusive and anti-diversity. I understand that extreme/unusual or cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously and considered as edge cases. I am not trying to dismiss you, although my word choice last night maybe could have been more explicit on this point. I’m sorry. What I’m trying to communicate is that I need to better understand the problem (in context) to be able to help be part of the solution.
We need a better solution, and I want to help work towards that. I believe that starts with discussions like this one.
Yeah okay thanks i guess it just comes off really not nice for you to say that.
if you posted a list of the worst incidents in your experience of abuse, i truly doubt you would love my response to be calling you a cherry picker. even if you don’t mean it, it looks like siding with the abuser. it’s NOT cherry picking to tell my literal own damn story of what i deal with. if you truly mean differently, maybe choose different words
Any list of my experiences of abuse is a fundamentally cherry-picked list because my experiences are so far outside (what feminists claim to be) the norm.
I am explicitly calling myself a cherry picker and would have no problem with you doing the same. Everyone else sees my problems that way. It’s just the truth.
I mean what I said.
EDIT: and to be clear, that includes my statement that even cherry-picked examples need to be taken seriously, however within proper context. I see that you’ve already downvoted me and probably moved on. I’m taking your lived experiences seriously, and you aren’t taking mine seriously. I hope you will reconsider if you actually want to solve the root of the problems that we both are experiencing.
This situation seems to have spiraled a bit—I logged off for a few hours and came back to a bunch of DMs from you.
I want to make it clear that I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. However, this conversation has reached a point where it’s no longer productive.
You wouldn’t go to the comments of a person of color as they share their experiences and feelings about racism and say, “I only ever see cherry-picked examples like you have here.” But that’s essentially what you said to me about gender-based abuse. That kind of comment is: a) dismissive and encourages others to doubt the stories of victims, and b) a conversation-ender.
What you communicated to me is that my lived experience isn’t enough for you. As someone with a normal life and not a researcher, I have no way to provide the additional “data” you seem to require.
Ok, since you brought up my two short DMs, I’ll post them here for public consumption.
I am very much trying to continue the conversation that you started about experiences of gender-based abuse by adding variety of experience from a very different perspective that contrast with the cherry-picked list that you provided of things you read online that resonated with your preconceptions. My examples are cherry-picked from my life; yours are cherry-picked from lemmy.
I am repeatedly echoing the sentiment of your original post: that we need to talk about and understand these things if we want to learn and grow. It’s how humans share data.
You claim that I am being dismissive only because the cherry picked examples from my life experience come from an opposite tail of the distribution of gender-based abuse as your list. I can’t help where my life experiences lie on this distribution, but I can share them (as you did) to provide some additional data that helps to fill out the range of the population.
You are dismissing me by saying that my experiences must be shared in bad faith to be dismissive/encourage doubt/end conversations. Please re-read my words. They are trying to communicate that I DESPERATELY want a conversation on this topic so that we can all learn and grow from each others’ experiences. Just because my experiences are different from yours does not make them bad-faith.
From your behavior, I’m starting to suspect that this is projection and that you are a bad-faith troll who refuses to engage with others if they have different life experiences. However, I don’t believe that yet because you and I have had several other conversations in various other comments sections over the past year which have been good and productive and I have grown to like you.
I want a productive conversation on this topic, yet you only seem to want to dismiss my perspective. This runs contrary to our past interactions. Please, I’m trying to have a productive conversation.
That said, the examples you give aren’t your personal lived experience as much as extreme examples of sexism that you’ve stumbled across on this site and curated. The examples that I’m giving are genuine and personal lived experience as a gender minority (neither male or female) rather than things I read online. I don’t think that that makes one set of examples more valid than the other, just that these fact make your most recent comment seem highly hypocritical. You are replying to a minority trying to share their experiences and feelings by dismissing me, encouraging others to doubt me, and ending the conversation without engaging with our differences of life experience. Then you accuse me of doing that instead of actually engaging with my perspective. Please reconsider. I’ll end this here, but if you want to have an honest and genuine discussion about how to solve the issue of gender-based abuse that you brought up, my DMs are always open.
i just don’t want to bud. you ruined all the good i could have gotten from this conversation before it even started.
Genuinely not trying to. Genuinely trying to be productive.
Good luck trying to solve social issues alone, friend.
dont worry im not alone i have plenty of people in my corner who dont spam me with weird begging behavior when i stop interacting with them
to be clear you seem nice you are just being offputting and weird doing this negging behavior- if this was a real life relationship i would cut ties with you immediately. please chill tf out.
I’m only begging because I’m desperate to be welcome in your corner and I’m desperate for solidarity and I’m desperate for anyone with your class of experiences to be willing to listen and engage with anything outside of your own goddamn echo chamber bubble.
There’s beauty and longing in desperation, it means that you’ve not given up.
I’m sorry that you’re so lacking in empathy.