L'ignorance, deuxieme prise4
You seem to use the word “ignorant” as a shield, Matt. “Someone better explain it to me, because otherwise, geez louise, I’ll never learn and forever be ignorant. NotmyfaultI’mjustignorant.”
So, to answer: How can an ignorant person do the right thing? Educate yourself. Become LESS ignorant. While the Internet is full of rants and it can be hard to take someone’s opinion seriously when it’s followed by “*^@^&!^%@”, there are resources besides the Internet that are easily available.
Go to the Ottawa Public Library website and type in “transsexual” in the search bar (http://ottawa.bibliocommons.com). There are 63 items that appear and all of them are about either stories of trans* individuals or factual books about trans* people in our world.Hell, I’ll lend you a book. It’s called “Luna” and it’s by Julie Anne Peters. It’s about a girl and her biologically male sister.
There are people out there explaining it in a “relatively reasonable” manner. You just have to go listen to them. You can’t just sit back and complain about people not taking the time to explain things when you are not taking the time and effort to understand. And you should take the time to understand. It’s IMPORTANT.
Accidentally pressuring a game character to change her portrayed gender doesn’t make you a “bad person”. Especially since it seems like there’s some debate (judging by the comments) about whether the author’s right on that aspect. But if you end up never taking the chance to learn about the many other facets of sexuality and identity that are out there, you may continue to pass through life with a biased vision of “everyone I see is hetero and as born at birth except when proven otherwise”.
And that may, in the end, really hurt someone close to you. I guess, when that happens, you can always say, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t know. I just don’t think that way.”
But…this says that you didn’t even acknowledge the possibility they could be different from you.
A lack of education about the subject sends a couple messages:
a) you don’t care
b) they’re not important enough to care about
So, go to the library and get yourself a book.
blah blah blah click above to read original
The fact that I used ignorant in at least three different ways in the original post probably makes it hard to keep track of what I was trying to say. Reflects poorly on me as a writer, too, but anyway. Mostly I was refering to different degrees of not-knowing. To my mind, the three different uses are: knowing nothing at all, not knowing enough, and knowing only as much as one can know without experiencing something first-hand. The third is the most problematic, because it’s as knowledgeable as most people can get - but it may still cause a lot of unintentional problems. I just feel like there’s probably some portion that’s always going to be out of the realm of my understanding, no matter how much I may learn.
An illustrative example: I very rarely have “feelings” as such, and that’s really hard for me to completely wrap my head around. Playing a fun video game/reading a good book/etc. almost always feels the same, to me, as watching a sad scene in a movie. I still have emotions, mind you, because I know from experience that I behave angrily, happily, etc. I just don’t have (m)any cues to tell me what emotional state I’m in. Broadly speaking, anyway, most of the time I have to think back and make explicit judgements on my emotions instead of just “feeling” them. I’ve asked a few people, and this doesn’t seem to be the case for them, so it’s probably not just me subscribing to poetic hyperbole about what emotions should be like.
You can read the sentence “I don’t feel my emotions about 90% of the time” as much as you like. You can think about what might follow from that, maybe try to imagine it. That’s what I’ve done thus far as I read the article and the original comments (and a few other things in the past). But it’s actually pretty hard for me to even sort out what, exactly, my own experience even is - I’ve needed other people to tell me in the past that I was clearly angry, jealous, and so on. Figuring out what exactly I have, and what exactly I lack, is hard because I don’t know how else life could be. It’s hard to keep track of at times, and often I’m too busy thinking about other things to be consciously aware of how I’m feeling.
I’m trying to explain this, really, insofar as I understand it and in the clearest way that I can. Hopefully it helps you, the “feelings” endowed reader, imagine what it could be like. I imagine this is the case for most trans people, as well. But I’m not convinced many people can truly, completely understand either of these things - grok them - without experiencing them. Perhaps some extraordinary people have the emotional/social depth to grok the concept from a description in text. But I don’t consider myself one of those people, and so I feel like there will always be something I don’t quite get about gender and sexuality issues. I’d certainly rather understand to my maximum capacity (perhaps some 60-80% of grokking) than understand nothing at all. I’m just worried that the remaining percentage will lead to the majority of well-intended mistakes, each of which would likely be an independent learning experience. So that’s what I was really wondering about - without living that life myself, even knowing a lot of things second-hand, I just might not know when I’ve done something wrong.
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Truth be told, I’m legitimately upset by the idea of having done the wrong thing in Persona 4. As in, it bothers me to imagine trying to help someone I care about but actually just subtly hurting them. One of the problems is mine - that I didn’t know enough to think that there was a different way to read the situation. The other is just the limited interaction you’re allowed in the game, mostly along the lines of “choose Option A, B, or C” where one of the options is always “right” according to the game. To even advance your relationship with Naoto, you pretty much have to tell the game what it wants to hear. Unlike with actual people, you can’t ask a video game character what they want. You have to impose more of yourself on the situation, unless you’re aiming for maximum gameplay benefit.
As far as explaining things to me, what I had in mind in terms of was something like Dys4ia. It's a game (of sorts) by a transgendered woman who goes by Anna Anthropy, which covers the events around her decision to undergo hormone therapy. I feel like it was a great way for Anna Anthropy to tell her story. It’s quick to play and a few of the scenes are more striking, to me, than words alone would have been. I get the idea, a little bit more than I did before. And I wish that all the effort that goes into arguing with people on the internet could be turned into something more useful, like Dys4ia. It just seems like a waste of everyone’s time for knowledgeable folks to respond in anger and start a futile cycle of retaliation, instead of explaining to people how/why they have the wrong idea. Far be it for me to tell people they can’t be upset, obviously, but it makes me a little bit sad to see people getting themselves worked up like this. It just begs for them to be upset again by the exact same people, saying the exact same things, the next time the discussion comes up.
Anyway, I’d be happy to read books and inch my way closer to the limit of my understanding (if there is one). Truth be told, I have literally never in my life independently thought “I should find a book about this topic.” For better or for worse, I’m a child of the internet age. It works pretty well for the topics I consume the most information on - there’s very few good books about the things that flow through my RSS reader on a daily basis. Seems I was led astray in this case, because the quality of discourse in my corner of the online world isn’t that great. Not surprising, since it’s probably full of folks like myself. Scary to consider how much we can hear what we want to hear, these days. Best not to stare into that abyss for too long, lest it stare back and undermine some of the more basic beliefs in your beautiful foundationalist inverted-pyramid (or otherwise ruin your favourite epistemic visualization).
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