thinking about how inclusivity only works if the people you want to include feel like they should be included
that means if even a single person feels that anyone who is normally welcome shouldn't be included, that group is effectively no longer included
because if any group's inclusion is contested, the only people who will feel like they should be there are the same people who would already think that about other spaces; non-inclusive ones
the two now mean the same thing to that group
for example, there are kinksters who participate in pride, but because of how heavily it gets contested, the only ones there are people already confident they should be
most people who are encouraged to go, but don't already have this confidence to, won't
this means that the same shrinking pool of boisterous kinksters and the people who already would have enough confidence to do this kind of thing outside of pride are the only people who will attend
that group is effectively excluded
i feel like most people here recognize this part--the paradox of tolerance is not new information to most people who can even read this post
but the part that's easy to miss is just how extraordinarily delicate inclusivity can be
for example, not explicitly naming everyone you include can leave enough room for huge swaths of people to doubt they belong and leave enough room for people to debate if they are implicitly supposed to be there, thus effectively excluding the target of their opinions
sometimes small musings about a certain group's inclusion can seem not egregious enough to act on
but even this kind of thing effectively excludes anyone from that group who sees it
after all, they can now see there are people who aren't sure they belong--and that idea was permitted, so who's to say how many people like that will be there?
it's no longer a welcome space
anyway, i guess the tl;dr is that inclusivity is extraordinarily delicate, and if you want to be a good steward of an inclusive space, you need to be extremely purposeful and explicit about what you mean by "inclusive", and how you manage it
otherwise you will accidentally exclude people, and you won't have an easy way to change that after people start using your space
that means inclusivity is actually Extremely Difficult, because you aren't just dealing with policy anymore; you're now dealing with the opinions of this policy by all of your attendees, and their willingness to exclude people who disagree with any part
like, spaces that allow people who want to remove the T from LGBT are no longer inclusive of trans people regardless of any official stances about their inclusion, but spaces who are collectively okay ousting the people with those opinions are