Smart DW Pondering re gender and disability

[jesse_the_k]

cosmolinguist explores the gender pitfalls of defining a space as welcoming to "women and non-binary" people. Relevant to my interests because my wonderful comics club membership policy is "cis men have staffed the gates into comics for too long, so they're not welcome in clubMX." We've tried to express that in positive terms — here are the folks who are welcome — but given our rejection from traditional comics circles, essentially (hah!), the quoted negative definition above is what unites us.

people are doing an unreasonable thing in order to achieve a reasonable goal. I'm sure any of us could think about times in our lives that cis men were horrible to us, all the way from #EverydaySexism to actual trauma. And especially when it comes to groups for people who are queer/kinky/polyamorous/anything about sexualities and relationships, safety becomes even more important. But keeping all the cis men out isn't the way to do that. I'm not even saying "not all men," I'm saying "not only cis men." Not all predatory, boundary-crossing, consent-lacking behavior comes from them. Keeping them out is not necessary or sufficient for a space to be safe or welcoming.

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hellofriendsiminthedark precisely captures why disabling metaphor is harmful

In a world where blindness is inherently understood as a debilitating and limiting condition, "you're blind to the red flags" does mean "you're ignorant of the red flags."

In a world where sight is inherently understood to be one of many modes for gathering information, but is also understood to be neutral in value and not in and of itself individually essential in the grand scheme of gathering information and perceiving a legitimate model of the physical world, "you're blind to the red flags" would mean "you may not be able to see the red flags, but you can still intuit their existence. You can still obtain information about their presence using your other senses and other information around you, for example the ways in which the red flags interact tangibly with things you can perceive. You can still understand what a red flag would signify without having to be able to identify that specific denotation of a red flag. You may sense the effects of the red flag using the senses that actually matter in your experience of the world and thus posit their presence just the same as a metaphorically sighted person would by perceiving them through sight."

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