I've mentioned this a couple of times in other discussions in the past but I feel like it's a good add-on to this discussion.
I got dog-piled 13 years ago on the Dash site and have never forgotten it! LOL
I was in my early 20s and was fairly new to the Butch/Femme dynamic (or at least naming it that, I had always dated masculine women....except for that one girl, and that's a different thread!). Anyway, I found a thread on the Dash site and there was some heated debate going on with more seasoned folks about whether or not Trans men belonged in Butch/Femme space.
YES, that discussions actually happened. YES, people were pissed.
Anyway, I was trying to wade through the cyber-slaps to see what people were actually saying and got so frustrated with the constant negativity and personal jabs that I made some foolish comment like, "Good God, we're all women here! Can't we just get along?"
I was immediately handed my ass by Toughy, Heart, and a couple of other folks!
Oh, I pouted my ass off and was mad as hell!!! How dare these people try to school me on anything! Who were they after all to talk to me like I was stupid!!
Looking back, they weren't rude to me at all. They were, however, very direct (and one of the group was pretty aggressive) and informed me that No, not ALL folks on the site were women and that I needed to think about my remarks and how it erased folks.
And I sat back and was all, "WTF do you mean we aren't all women???? Do we have vaginas or not??"
And then commence my education on how sex organs do not equal gender!
And then commence my education on how Trans men are part of the continuum of gender that I needed to learn about!
And then commence me being really, really reticent to get involved in any heavy discussions for a good long while.
Having your ass handed to you by folks out in the wide open is often not very fun and can even feel humiliating. Thing is, that's just ego talking!
I took that experience and learned from it and consider both Toughy and Heart not only my friends but my elders (in the respect that they were way more knowledgeable about gender and identity than I ever dreamed to be!)
Folks have a choice with how they digest information. They can get really defensive and butthurt and sull up or they can consider the information to see if they think it has any merit. And this isn't saying that everyone who calls you out on something is worthy of listening to, because let's face it, some folks are full of fucking shit and can't examine their own shit much less someone else's.
But if several folks are saying it? It's worth a listen!
There is a line where you can still listen to what folks have to say, respect it as best you can, but not accept it or digest it.
Good example for me is folks who are a certain slant of political party. I might think that folks who wanted Sarah Palin or Donald Trump for President are complete and utter idiots but I'll give them a listen to see why they feel that way. Because not all of them are idiots. Some of them are racists and some of them are sexist assholes and still further, some of them havent done any research at all on what Sarah Palin stands for but think that having a woman anything in political office is a grand thing.
It's always tough to see people defending their right to be racist or sizist. And even harder still when the folks defending their racism try to paint the folks calling them out as "bullies" or a "gang". I think about how much energy it takes to be defensive versus how much energy it takes to just listen.