in which Tham talks about respectability politics 

So I've been seeing a bunch of posts about trans communit(ies?) shitting on otherkin lately, and I'm just going to go ahead and say this: if you take part in that sort of thing? You're not helping anyone but the people who try to keep you down.

Bigotry is, at its heart, an abusive dynamic applied to an entire section of society, as opposed to individuals like the interpersonal abuse many of us are intimately acquainted with. Abusers do not care how much you try to make them happy, they will only move the goalposts further and further until you've completely bent to their will. Their goal isn't to solve a legitimate problem they have with you, it's to make you suffer.

This dynamic doesn't change when the abuse is less directly personalized.

You don't have anything to gain from trying to appease abusive behavior by throwing other vulnerable groups under the bus in an effort to make yourself fit in. Not only will it likely not help you in the slightest, the only possible victory you can have is to join your oppressors in abusing others. That's not something worth fighting, nor is it justice by any stretch of the imagination.

Next time someone tells you a group of people within your community makes you "look bad" and there's no harm they're doing to anyone else, go after the people telling you that instead.

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