[T D]

Silencing = Using someones personal stories, shares as ammunition to be used as a means of belittling and thereby silencing them. Using gossip, falsehoods, negativity to describe someone and put a negative spin on their character. Telling others that what they say/said isn't pertinent to the topic or bascially doesn't belong in the thread. Trying to convince everyone reading the thread that you are the smartest, most informed, and you must be believed because of this. That if you ID as some certain way, then you must be like all the others who ID that way. Like someone else said earlier, not every butch, transguy, or anyone else are misogynistic pigs, nor do they all think that a "femme is not a femme without a butch", something I'd never even seen or heard about until this site. Interestingly enough some people would certainly color us all as being the same.

It goes on and on and on, the ways this can and does happen are endless. I absolutely do NOT think this is something that we just perceive in our heads, I think it actually happens, often times intentionally, and is quite often directed at specific participants. I've been watching these types of threads for years and years, and they generally end up the same way with the same people doing and saying the same stuff in the same manner.

What this boils down to for me is RESPECT or lack of it. If each person here looked at the other as a person of REAL value I believe they'd have respect for that person. What I often times see instead is someone who has a "need" to somehow prove that they're the smartest, the most informed, the brightest star on the block, and quite frankly it's these very people who make me wonder why they "need" this so much. It just leads me to believe that they're insecure themselves, and need to obtain their security by collecting followers from around them and giving themselves an appearance of superiority.

Again, I'm just saying that respect and/or lack of it is at the bottom of all this for me. I find it very difficult to respect people who don't respect others, or at the very least speak as if they do when responding to other peoples thoughts, views, feelings, experiences, etc.

You know, I've been wanting to say this for a very long time. I've been watching it go on for SOOO long now. I may get a bunch of backlash from having said these things, but bottom line for me is, if you don't give respect you're not going to get much of it back, and if you try to be the smartest kid on the block, it doesn't ensure that you are.

It would be really nice to see people open up more, to be more caring about others here, to be more open to understanding, to be more open to the fact that not everyone in a particular category is the same as the person standing beside them, that each of us has a different way of communicating, that we're all different and we ALL perceive the world differently, and that we're all speaking from OUR perceived worlds!

Stepping down now.