About the ContraPoints Situation

The Hangout Discuss
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So, one of my favourite YouTubers of all time is ContraPoints. If you don’t know her, she’s a binary trans woman and she does a lot of videos that serve to educate and deradicalise people. I love her!

Recently, she shared an experience about her issues with “woke” crowds and how they can cause her more harm than good.

She basically said that when a group of people go through their pronouns because she’s present, it’s distressing to her because it highlights the fact that she’s clockable. She acknowledged that this is an important practice for nonbinary people but expressed that it was at the minor expense of binary trans people.

Obviously Twitter lost it. And I’m really upset that they did. I’m upset for so many reasons. For one (and I’m writing a blog post on this soon), leftists have a really bad habit of attacking minorities and people who genuinely want to help when they make an honest mistake instead of the actual bigots out there. They tend to be a lot more harsh on the people who are trying than those who are actually bigoted. That disgusts me.

But also, why can’t she express her distress and experiences as a trans person without being harassed off the whole bloody platform? She deleted her Twitter! I hate cancel culture because it allows people like Pewdiepie to still keep being relevant while it cancels people who actually want to help.

She wasn’t advocating for us to stop introducing ourselves with pronouns. She was saying when it’s done for her sake, it shows that she’s ambiguous enough that people have to ask, which sets her dysphoria off. That’s fair enough. There is a solution to this. We could make introducing pronouns common even in completely cisgender places! Then it would be fine simply because that’s how things are done. Not because there’s a trans person present.

So moving forward, I’m never going to force people to introduce their pronouns, but if you wanna help your trans and nonbinary friends out there, please consider filling out the pronouns section of the profiles on here if you haven’t already. I hope we can make this one space where everyone is treated the same regardless of gender identity

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Let’s stop making pronouns about whether you’re trans or not. Everyone has them. Why not share them? It takes a few extra seconds and helps so, so many people

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Yeah, it’s one of those things where it shouldn’t be a half measure. It should be all one way or all the other. Everyone should introduce themselves with pronouns, or no-one should until it becomes relevant.

Doing it because there’s someone ambiguous in the room is a bit wishy-washy anyway tbh

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I can completely understand how it would be distressing to her! I mean, it’s like someone’s basically saying “I have no clue if this person has a binary gender or not, so I’m going to make sure everyone introduces their gender so I don’t have to single them out”. It’s a lot nicer than the alternative, but Natalie never said it wasn’t nice or polite. It’s doing it for her sake that’s the problem

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Exactly, and that is understandable. Also in a lot of cases it can come off as quite disingenuous. The classic, ‘oh, with people identifying as toasters and whatnot, I guess we need to do a roundtable of everyone’s preferred pronouns’. Like, that isn’t how she meant it, but that’s how a lot of people - cis people mostly - view it. And that’s also an issue.

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I retweeted someone saying something very apt.

It doesn’t matter who you are. Harassing a trans person for sharing their trans experiences is transphobic

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Yeah, sounds like the definition of transphobic to me

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Yeah. And with the way pronouns are treated now, I’d be offended too if someone made a whole group of people do pronouns and then stared at me pointedly when it came to my chance to answer.

Are you saying that you only did this because of me? Are you therefore saying I don’t look like a woman?

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A completely different attitude to, say “so everyone. It’s standard company practice to introduce your name, pronouns and an interesting fact about yourself”. That’s nothing about her and therefore I would assume it would be less triggering.

And it’s better for NB people, too. I mean, it’s always going to be a good thing that people automatically think of pronouns. That gives them an opportunity to introduce theirs without being seen as weird

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I 100% agree. I think if pronouns were just a natural part of introductions this would be a bit of a non-issue. I know I’d be all for it, it’s not exactly hard to say ‘I go by he/him’ if someone wants an introduction. It’s also not hard to keep someone’s pronouns straight either, despite what some people may think. It’s an active choice to misgender people, I’m sorry, but it’s true =P

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I don’t agree 100%. As someone who knew a guy from my school as a girl since I was 3, it took me a few months to get the pronouns straight when he came out at 15. I meant well, but I was young, didn’t understand what exactly he was going through and I just couldn’t get used to it after 13 years of knowing him. I got used to it eventually, but it did take some reconditioning

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That’s the only situation I’d let slide. I’m a weirdo, I got used to my cousin’s transition really quickly. But I wasn’t young, to be fair.

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I spent time with him pretty much every day of my life and I have really fond memories of him when he was still identifying by his assigned gender, so I struggled a little. Especially because it was the first time I’d even heard the word “transgender”! I hope I never caused him any unnecessary dysphoria, looking back!

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It didn’t help that this was in a girls school where I rarely needed to use he/him pronouns unless we were talking about teachers :grimacing:

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Yeah a lot of stuff compounded to making that situation difficult.

But if someone were to introduce themselves to you with specific pronouns, I see no reason why it would be difficult to stick to them.

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So I agree 100% with pronouns just being a part of introductions

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Yeah it doesn’t actually take any extra effort to use preferred pronouns! They’re usually one syllable anyway, so not even less calories saying the word :joy:

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Also to be a little more on topic. Good lord Twitter has some incredibly toxic communities these days. And it’s not even cordoned off communities, they infest every facet of the site. It’s rough

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I didn’t know anything about this situation(or YouTuber) but I think you explained it well enough for me to formulate an opinion.

That is a valid experience and I don’t think she should be silenced for admitting that. I think “woke” people need to realize that just because they have good intentions, doesn’t mean everything they do is perfect. People (of all political persuasions honestly), need to listen and figure out how to grow from there.

I agree! Even in liberal circles, you’ll still see this kind of view, “look at us being inclusive of people’s ridiculous gender identities” (also looking at you, TERFs, giving feminism a bad name).

I’m not proud to admit it, but I did not really like the use of they/them for a while and thought pronoun stuff was a bit ridiculous. Not that my opinion mattered to anyone but a group of (cis, binary, liberal women, which goes without saying pretty much) friends I remember complaining to, but I feel like I just didn’t get it. I’m not sure when or why it clicked exactly, but then I regretted saying sh*tty stuff to my friends and have since apologized and explained why I was wrong, trying to get them to agree to my new point of view rather than my old, outdated one.

For me, I was internalizing my misogyny so much that I didn’t like that female-presenting people were not identifying as women. I thought that it was unfair for non-binary, femme-presenting people to like “get out” of the negative sh*t of being a woman and thought that they should have to because I have to. It was the same kind of mentality that continues ridiculous practices like hazing or people not being sympathetic to kids protesting the high cost of uni in the US. Also not to mention, dead wrong, since identifying as non-binary is even harder than being a woman in this society. So yeah, I was silly.

Anyway, I realized the errors of my ways fairly late (this was all in my 20s), so I think that the younger generation kind of understands this better and more implicitly, but it will take more self-reflection and conversations to get older people on board. Or younger people who haven’t yet met a trans or non-binary person, since empathy increases when you can put a face with the whole cause.

1000% on board with this. Making people feel included is worth the negligible extra effort it would take. I think it’s mostly an education and empathy problem for those in power and more discussion is needed to help fix this!

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I think we all made mistakes like this in the past, this is the moment where the toxic left-leaning person on Twitter would attack you for talking about outdated viewpoints you used to hold. I used to be quite over the whole non-binary thing too, I’m ngl. Once upon a time I was even dubious about whether or not I should be compassionate towards trans people. Yes, that was a dark time for 13yo Deluge.

But, I think it’s important to say I’m happy you managed to get out of that mindset. There’ll never be anything wrong with understanding and compassion, especially to those who are in need of some. Trans, non-binary, and LGBTQ+ people in general are in need of compassion as much now as ever. It’s good to look back on the mistakes we made in our youth to be reminded that opinions like these shift and change. As they should! :smiley:

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