“it’s not about you!!!” — A (Not-So) Fast Story On Being Offended On the Internet

I’m gonna meander a bit, so bear with me.

When I was 16 or 17, I was introduced to Tumblr. It was a relatively welcoming ‘community’ at the time, as much as you can have community on a social networking site. I found myself in some rather LGBT-friendly gaming circles and learning about social concepts I’d been sheltered from as a child.

As I used the site more over the years, I learned about gender identities at about the age of 18. A topic that had just barely breached my mind when I was younger, but still was never quite comprehended. Friends started to come out and I started seriously thinking about how I related to the concept of gender. My discomfort with ‘traditionally male’ hobbies and interests made sense if I wasn’t cis. It wasn’t quite the ‘pined for dresses and makeup as a small child’ story you hear, but I was finally able to slowly but surely get to a place (mentally, not quite physically) that I was comfortable with, although it took several years to come to fruition, and likely still isn’t even complete to this day. I’ve switched identities and pronouns a few times and likely will again as I slowly piece together what makes me me.

Fast forward a couple years and you have a certain internet zeitgeist in direct opposition to such ideas. I would pin the blame on a single one, but in all honesty, it was just a matter of time before the internet just… caught up. The idea of the SJW, this non-cis, non-straight individual being triggered at everything and ruining everyone’s fun started to become The Enemy, as it were. Part of me feels silly talking about this because of exactly how silly it really is, when it comes down to it. And talking about it feels like it’s giving it power.

Digressions aside, it most certainly didn’t help that Tumblr’s ‘discourse’ slowly became rather toxic. A lot of early ‘you don’t respect my identity, I don’t respect you’ was warped, turned into very specific ‘you don't respect my narrow concept of this identity, I don’t respect you’, many times blatantly not understanding the concept of intersectionality and throwing certain individuals under the bus. Not to mention the rather upsetting rise of trans-women exclusionary radical feminists (TERFS), some close friends being harrassed by such individuals. I could go on, honestly, but it’d just get redundant.

So Tumblr’s a bust. And the internet’s more or less mocking me everywhere I go. But over time it stops hurting as much. I’m able to tell myself that they’re just idiots lashing out that their bigoted ideals aren’t as socially acceptable anymore. And it helps, especially since most of my friends, if not trans themselves, are very supportive. I start seeing more and more ‘important’ people on the internet come out as trans. A big inspiration was a famous speedrunner by the name of Narcissa Wright. (Since I don’t like assuming audience knowledge even though this is probably only going to be seen by friends, speedrunning is the practice of playing video games with the intent of completing them as fast as possible, with a community focused around cooperation and friendly competition.) Despite all the hatred she received and the emotional turmoil it caused, she still never quite gave up. And it stuck with me.

Jumping forward a year or two, it’s July of 2016. I’m very excited for the bi-annual week-long speedrunning marathon, Summer Games Done Quick. It’s a traditional donation drive marathon, taking donations for big charitable/humanitarian organizations such as MSF, with certain bonus or gimmick runs being added to the schedule as milestones are met. I don’t speedrun myself (although I keep telling myself I want to try), but I always look forward to the events because they’re usually quite entertaining and looking forward to them literally all year makes it feel like a week-long Christmas when it finally comes around. I can’t ever attend in person, of course, but it’s just as exciting to watch the online stream of it. Much to my surprise, this marathon has several transgender runners. Not just one. Four, to be precise. One, in fact, is stated to be genderfluid on her Twitter page, something that made me absolutely thrilled, given my own nonbinary status. And it was amazing. In person, on the event floor, they were just… there. Existing without much comment. But my mind couldn’t help but ask one question.

“When is this going to go wrong?”

Lo and behold, it went wrong immediately. Twitch’s stream chatrooms are infamous for being awful, offensive, and downright disgusting. And this was no exception. Slurs were thrown around carelessly. Most messages were deliberately misgendering the runners. Of course, none of them could see these messages during their allotted time in the marathon. But I most certainly could. And everyone else could. Everyone in the audience at home who saw a little of themselves in the runners. As somewhat of a hasty fix, the moderators for the chat changed the chat to emote-only mode. Twitch has a set of stock emotes and several custom ones for those who subscribe to certain channels. So obviously, the workaround to not using words is to use emotes like this, implying the runner is, as many love to insist about trans people, a man in a wig or whatnot.

I could talk about how each message said in that chat is tied to an account, yet won’t get banned. I could talk about the fact that there is a very prominent history of Twitch moderation doing very little about blatant racism and bigotry, yet bans people that simply get on their bad side. I could talk about how much of a band-aid fix the emote-only chat was, and that measures could have easily been taken to stop this. I could very well talk about how those runners will feel when they come back home, after the hype dies down and see what was said to them during their runs.

I can’t vouch for it since I’ve never actually used it but I will directly mention the fact that there is a chat filter system built in when you stream on twitch that you can set up yourself! And if you don’t want to do that, there is global filter list, one that quite assuredly has many of the words said that night in the list.

The funny part is that I’m not even blaming GDQ staff. It’s somehow offensive these days to stop people from being awful. It’s censorship, apparently. I don’t blame them for being slow to act when this is the community you’re catering to, as sad as this is. And looking at the response, just to limiting chat to emote-only, is as much an indication of this as anything.

Discussion afterwards was of the ‘stop being so offended’ flavor, as usual. A Reddit thread on the topic led to the screenshot at the top of the page. And it was a common sentiment too. Many were saying that it simply ‘wasnt about (us)’. That Twitch chat is Twitch chat and that saying bigoted things is simply ‘how it is’. That we shouldn’t make everything political. I’m sick of being told that wanting respect as a human being is political. That my entire existance is political. This event that I was looking forward to all goddamn year was spoiled to some extent, and it’s apparently my own fault.

I can’t comprehend how it isn’t ‘about me’. I just don’t understand the thought process of being told that vitriol spewed at people like me has nothing to do with me. That it’s just a funny joke for people to laugh at, as if making something a ‘joke’ instantly makes it fine, despite the fact that people like me are killed for who we are. But me bringing that up would just be met with apathy.

Apparently a small, ten-second shout-out to someone justifies it and makes it ‘about you’, according to these people. Let’s ignore the fact that it wasn’t the girl who even said anything. Ignore the fact that nobody said a fucking thing about him. It’s our fault for being offended.

In all honesty, I don’t know what point I’m trying to make. Maybe I’m trying to caution people not to get complacent. But that’s too cynical. Maybe it’s just to assure people that this kind of stuff just… happens and that it’s not changing anytime soon. But that’s complacent in and of itself.

I think my point is… that we all need to be less accepting of this rhetoric. To preach compassion and understanding and try to shut this sort of stuff out of your life. A friend of mine has a saying.

“Do no harm but take no shit.”

And I think that’s how you kind of have to go about these things. And like I said earlier, I think this sort of thing is hard for big names like GDQ to take a stance on just because of the nature of dependence on donations. And it’s not instantaneous. It’s a sea-change. One that we all need to fight to make happen. We need to try to make others understand that being offended isn’t a ‘gotcha’ for the offender. That it’s not something that makes someone automatically wrong. It’s a hard path, but one that I really think has to be taken. Hopefully we can get some big-name internet people decrying such behavior. I want to see a future where they can’t just go ‘you turned into an SJW’ and leave, because there’s nowhere to go for them, because everyone is one of their dreaded ‘SJW’s.

At any rate, I’ll still watch GDQ next year. And I’ll hope that this experience didn’t ruin the event for the trans runners, or discourage trans people from trying to enter the community. All I can really hope is that next year I won’t have to ask that question in my head and I won’t have to dread how the community reacts to trans individuals simply existing in the same space as they do.