¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Let’s say you’re a high school or college student, and you decide to start a club. Let’s say you’re a marvel comic book fan and you wanna base it on that!
So you get together your comics loving friends and make a club. Well one say someone suggests “Hey can I invite my friends that like DC comics?” and you’re fine with that. It’s still comics, and it’s a topic the pre-existing members can relate to.
Then you have another friend that’s like “Can I invite my friends that just watch the movies?” and you think sure! They already have an interest in the same characters, and you can probably introduce them to the world of comics.
Then another guy wants to invite his friends that like manga. And you think. Well that’s kinda a stretch. It’s not really the same sphere but… It does happen to be a type of comic. So sure. You say yes.
Next thing you know, the comic movie fans wanna invite their general action movie fan friends, and the manga fans want to invite the anime fans they know.
As you keep refusing to put your foot down, more and more people join that aren’t there for the whole reason you made the club, or don’t even know it was a comics club to begin with! Now it’s a big mishmash and you can’t talk about the things you want to, and finding common ground is harder than ever! This isn’t what you wanted…
That’s what happens when you don’t gate keep. Gate keeping isn’t bad. It’s holding to a mission statement. This club exists to discuss comics! And as more disparate communities are added it becomes disjointed and prone to infighting (I’m not saying the anime fans are gonna go to war with the MCU fans but they totally are.)
You need to know where your line is drawn! That’s not evil or bad. That’s just… How it is when you curate or run a community.
This explains my point perfectly omfg
And then there’s ‘medical gatekeeping’ (a ridiculous concept i never knew someone could actually think was a problem) where doctors don’t give treatment to people who don’t have the problem they’re asking for treatment for.
‘Medical gatekeeping’ is like glasses. People with vision problems buy glasses so that they can see better. They wouldn’t be able to see well without the glasses, so they need them and have reason to have them. But some people who can see perfectly look at people with glasses and say “Hey! Those seem cool! I want glasses too!!” And all their perfectly-seeing friends agree. And so do all of their friends. So they all go to the optometrist and ask for glasses.
The optometrist explains that they don’t need glasses since they can already see. “How dare you,” the seeing people exclaim. “We deserve glasses just as much as anyone else! Why would you keep them from us just because we can see?! This is discrimination! END GATEKEEPING!!”
Later, the seeing people return and fake not being able to see well so that they can have glasses too. But then they find that when they put the glasses on, they can’t see well. That’s because the glasses were made to correct something they don’t have- so it has the opposite effect on them.
Let’s say that there’s a decently limited supply of glasses. Now that a bunch of people who don’t need glasses are getting them, there aren’t enough glasses to help everyone who needs them, and those who do get them have to wait far longer than they used to because the queue is clogged with people who don’t need glasses. Now no-one is happy and resources are stolen from those who need them by those who never needed them.
‘Medical gatekeeping’ is so important because medical resources are finite, and when people who don’t need them start taking them, there often isn’t enough for the people who do. And the people who take those resources despite not needing them aren’t even happy anyway, because the resource corrects something they don’t have and causes them more problems because there was nothing that needed correcting.
Wow, what a neat po-
*notices OP’s url*
