As a trans woman, anything you say that is even slightly negative will be remembered, misconstrued, blown out of proportion, and used against you months later. You have to be a perfectly smiley acquiescent angel at all times if you want to avoid this.
One of the subplots in the trans support organisation saga involved the group Instagram account. Bob, who started the group, was really passionate about art, and he wanted every single Instagram post (e.g. announcing the date of the next meeting) to feature original artwork by the volunteers. Unfortunately most of us were not particularly good at or interested in art, and we joined because we wanted to help the community, not because we wanted to showcase our art.
Anyway, over time Bob became increasingly stressed with the workload of running something like this. He started to express frustration that none of the rest of us were contributing artwork because the "original artwork" policy meant he was having to make the artwork himself every month.
So I wrote a message explaining, from the perspective of someone with more experience running things like this, he was putting far too much pressure on himself and was just going to burn out. I said a group that is imperfect but can run for years is better than a perfect group that collapses because you burn out in a couple of months. I said original artwork was a "nice to have" but not "essential" part of a trans support organisation, and it was great that it made us stand out from the crowd, but if it's causing him too much stress we can always re-use old art or make a bland post with no art at all.
He got upset with this, said that the art was really important to him, and I was denigrating what to him was the most important part of the group: the art. I said conciliatory words and we moved on (I assumed) with no hard feelings.
Bob quit a few months later for unrelated reasons, I continued to run the group for months with occasional help from Charlie (another volunteer and friend of Bob), and then one day suddenly found that I had been locked out of the Instagram and email accounts. It turned out Bob had mentally reframed my concern for his burnout 6 months earlier as "I think Instagram is a waste of time", and thought it was unfair that I should get to keep using something that he set up and I had said was useless, thus even though he was no longer involved in the group at all he kicked me out of it. And Charlie, being his friend, agreed that it was hypocritical of me to keep using Instagram when I had criticised it for being useless. I had to carefully explain, without getting annoyed, that I never said Instagram was useless, only that Bob's mental health should take priority over the "original artwork" policy.
But it made no difference. I, the only person trying to continue to provide community support at this point, was being kicked out by someone who had left months earlier, due to the classic transmisogynistic one-two punch of misconstruing your words and then blowing them out of all proportion. I never said Instagram was useless, and even if I had, would it have been proportionate to effectively close down a valuable community resource over it?
Perhaps what I should've done was say, "Yes, Bob, I'm very sorry we're not pulling our weight with the art, I will learn to draw at once so we can be the best support organisation in the world! You're the boss š«”" and then go back to washing the dishes alone like I always did after meetings, while Bob was doing the actually important community support work of thinking about his next piece of art. I think Bob would've preferred it that way.
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stormborns
titsay
origamiaround
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theartofmadeline
