Gaywallet (they/it)

I’m gay

  • 15 Posts
  • 84 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: January 28th, 2022

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  • Beehaw may not be the right space for you if you’re unable to consider context. Beehaw is explicitly a community, a safe space, and somewhere where context absolutely matters. We don’t believe it’s possible to have a healthy community where people don’t see each other as complex humans. We talk about this, quite a bit in our docs, for example in the the doc titled Beehaw is a community we talk about how community is a necessary part of this platform and in the doc titled Beehaw, Lemmy, and A Vision of the Fediverse we talk about how we want to be more like a village than we do a train station (and link to a fantastic article about this) and that’s a direct reflection of the importance of social ties and connections to running a healthy community.

    I’m certainly not saying that you should leave, but I am typing all of this up because I need you to understand what our values are around here. Some of your content and your interactions have already been reported by multiple people - I mention this because I think it’s a reflection of your attitude towards your purpose here and how you are interacting with the space. I’ve advised others to hold on taking moderator actions because I know adapting to and interfacing with a community and that this process can often be bumpy- we wish to give people good faith when it is deserved, but that is predicated on a willingness to engage in good faith with the community. If that is not how you wish to interact with social media, that is your decision and we will respect it, but this is not a place where we allow that kind of behavior.







  • Everytime discussions like this pop up, I can’t help but ponder upon how other people view language. Words are not universal. Perhaps it’s my neurodivergence or the fact that I’ve studied language, but I’ve always found it odd that others can prescribe such meaning to a single word, or for a word to have a strict definition absent context. I don’t know a single word in any language which only has a single definition- nearly every word has multiple definitions because it’s a reflection of how language is abstract. We create words to convey ideas, which are often ethereal in nature- they often lack clear boundaries.

    But more than that, we internalize definitions much more often than we look them up. We use language based on how the people around us use language. We pick up their sayings, the slang they use, the way they structure grammar, the things they emphasize and minimize, and the words they borrow from other languages. Any slur that’s been used on you is something you will carry with you and will hold more weight that slurs which are used on others because the experience is tied to an emotional state. But it goes further than that, happy words which are tied to happy memories will have a different connotation than happy words which you’ve never used or never been exposed to. Language is inherently human and therefore inherently emotionally charged and socially defined.

    Unfortunately you can never control how others use language. How you view a word cannot be the same as everyone else, because they haven’t lived your life. For some, weird may be empowering - a way to step into and own their eccentricity and difference; a celebration of diversity. Some may have never heard it used in the contexts you’ve mentioned. Others still may have experienced both othering and reclamation. Ultimately language will continue to be used whether you are comfortable with it or not. I’ve personally found that leaning into language which has been used against me negatively has helped to disempower it and the more I reclaim that language the less it bothers me and the more I view it as a source of pride.