Punching down...
Jan. 10th, 2019 06:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
which_chickUnder the cut is a an example of humor that punches down. It's one of mine and I should honestly know better. But... Nevermind. I should know better.
In a comment reply, I mentioned my horse Bird, stated that "he identifies as brown" and then provided the following picture as proof:
Okay, so this was mildly amusing, maybe, to a certain segment, but it was not the appropriate thing to do. Here's why, and the explanation takes a while so settle in.
Right now, transgender people are, near as I can tell, working like hell to get the fact that they fucking exist and are a Real Group Of Real People who, just as much as the rest of us, deserve The Right To Not Be Summarily Killed. Their struggle for the right to exist is an ongoing, hard-fought battle that they haven't clearly won yet. Picking on transgender people from my cisgender position is punching down. It's an asshole* move.
Right, right, you're a friend to the trans community or whatever. Go liberal you. What does any of this have to do with your dipshit of a horse?
When I claim that my habitually filthy horse "identifies as brown", I'm co-opting language that the trans community sometimes uses in their self-descriptions and which sometimes appears in their struggle for real world rights and recognition. It's also language that opponents of trans rights have used, scathingly, to point out their belief that trans people aren't really who they say they are. Yeah. They do that. A lot.
But it's just words! Sounds pretty snowflake to me...
No. My horse is a horse. I do not honestly believe he has enough of an internal intelligence to identify as brown. But, if I DID honestly believe that he identified as brown and had a deep and abiding dysphoria around the way the world saw him as a grey horse, then it would be my duty as his owner/parent to help him be brown in a way that best matched his internal intelligence about himself. (Is he a bay? A liver chestnut? A seal brown? How much Clairol do you need for a horse...?) Since I'm not doing that, probably I'm going somewhere else with this whole identify as brown comment.
My next picture of him was this one:
If my horse was truly trans-color (NOT A REAL THING) and thought of himself as brown, this would be a particularly hurtful picture of him to post. I think it's pretty clear here that I'm not going in the direction of "he's trans-color and I fully support his color identity."
So, I was thinking about it on the way home from work today. The comment is only funny (insofar as it is funny) because it plays on the reader's knowledge of and awareness of the usage "identifies as..." and is counting on the reader being willing to play along. Not only that, it banks on the fact that the reader will be of the mindset that (a) of course, my horse is not REALLY brown and (b) it's funny that he TRIES to be brown.
The problem here is that this is the usage of "identifies as" that opponents of trans rights employ to deprive trans people of their sense of selves, of their identities, of their right to live as the people that they are. That usage of "identifies as" is NOT OK in my book. It's not representative of the sort of person I want to be. In short, using "identifies as" to make fun of my mud-colored grey horse reaffirms and validates a toxic and unhelpful mindset about transgender people. Not following? Take what I said about my horse and apply it and its accompanying mindset to a transgender person: Yeah, XXX identifies as a girl (but he's not, not really, and it's funny that he tries to be because of how ineffective his efforts are).
See the assholery now? Please say you can see the assholery.
I see the assholery, anyway. Fuckin' a, I can't UN-SEE the assholery. Damn it.
Also, side note, Hannah Gadsby has really complicated humor for me.
*I am trying to be better about not-male-language. I would have said "a dick move" but I'm over here tryna do better.
In a comment reply, I mentioned my horse Bird, stated that "he identifies as brown" and then provided the following picture as proof:
Okay, so this was mildly amusing, maybe, to a certain segment, but it was not the appropriate thing to do. Here's why, and the explanation takes a while so settle in.
Right now, transgender people are, near as I can tell, working like hell to get the fact that they fucking exist and are a Real Group Of Real People who, just as much as the rest of us, deserve The Right To Not Be Summarily Killed. Their struggle for the right to exist is an ongoing, hard-fought battle that they haven't clearly won yet. Picking on transgender people from my cisgender position is punching down. It's an asshole* move.
Right, right, you're a friend to the trans community or whatever. Go liberal you. What does any of this have to do with your dipshit of a horse?
When I claim that my habitually filthy horse "identifies as brown", I'm co-opting language that the trans community sometimes uses in their self-descriptions and which sometimes appears in their struggle for real world rights and recognition. It's also language that opponents of trans rights have used, scathingly, to point out their belief that trans people aren't really who they say they are. Yeah. They do that. A lot.
But it's just words! Sounds pretty snowflake to me...
No. My horse is a horse. I do not honestly believe he has enough of an internal intelligence to identify as brown. But, if I DID honestly believe that he identified as brown and had a deep and abiding dysphoria around the way the world saw him as a grey horse, then it would be my duty as his owner/parent to help him be brown in a way that best matched his internal intelligence about himself. (Is he a bay? A liver chestnut? A seal brown? How much Clairol do you need for a horse...?) Since I'm not doing that, probably I'm going somewhere else with this whole identify as brown comment.
My next picture of him was this one:
If my horse was truly trans-color (NOT A REAL THING) and thought of himself as brown, this would be a particularly hurtful picture of him to post. I think it's pretty clear here that I'm not going in the direction of "he's trans-color and I fully support his color identity."
So, I was thinking about it on the way home from work today. The comment is only funny (insofar as it is funny) because it plays on the reader's knowledge of and awareness of the usage "identifies as..." and is counting on the reader being willing to play along. Not only that, it banks on the fact that the reader will be of the mindset that (a) of course, my horse is not REALLY brown and (b) it's funny that he TRIES to be brown.
The problem here is that this is the usage of "identifies as" that opponents of trans rights employ to deprive trans people of their sense of selves, of their identities, of their right to live as the people that they are. That usage of "identifies as" is NOT OK in my book. It's not representative of the sort of person I want to be. In short, using "identifies as" to make fun of my mud-colored grey horse reaffirms and validates a toxic and unhelpful mindset about transgender people. Not following? Take what I said about my horse and apply it and its accompanying mindset to a transgender person: Yeah, XXX identifies as a girl (but he's not, not really, and it's funny that he tries to be because of how ineffective his efforts are).
See the assholery now? Please say you can see the assholery.
I see the assholery, anyway. Fuckin' a, I can't UN-SEE the assholery. Damn it.
Also, side note, Hannah Gadsby has really complicated humor for me.
*I am trying to be better about not-male-language. I would have said "a dick move" but I'm over here tryna do better.
