I problem I feel causes a lot of discourse(tm) is the fact that people are unable to graduate to like the 201 course on the topic, hell not even a 102 course sometimes.
What I mean by that is you can learn the basics of something, attempt to build on top of that and move forward... And people will rush in to argue the basics.
To compare this with my time as a college tutor, I fucking loved helping people with essays at that point in their life. They had learned the basics in high school and by the time they got to me they understood construction and punctuation, and I got to tell them that now was when they could break the rules and start developing a style. But I'm imagining if instead of that I had to simply belabor the basics only, no it's never appropriate to use an em dash in an essay actually. You can't get personal, etc.
Things become so completely reductive because I may understand the basics of a topic I'm discussing, hell I'm usually in agreement with them, but I'm wanting to find different ways to engage with things or engage despite those pitfalls... And I get people getting mad and telling me things I already know?
The purpose of learning is to challenge your way of thinking or help you grow and view things in a new lens, not to block off paths saying, no- only bad people talk about this.
Particularly in public-facing Gender, Writing, Game Making / Game Hobby discourse, we have been stuck in the Forever Eternal 101 Course for decades. Every 2 months, a new crop of Expert Freshmen (and some bad-faith actors posing as wide-eyed freshmen because it's super easy to do so, apparently) rush in and start tearing down every attempt to move on to a 102-level conversation.
It is wearying and sometimes I wonder why I'm in any of these spaces anymore.
This also leads to you to the REALLY FUN aspect of writing where you have to do a paragraph or two before anything to try and show that yes... I understand the basics. I feel like this is part of why so many pieces are forced to begin with writers showing their credentials even if those are just "hey im queer" to show that you have some experience because if you don't do that people will just assume you crawled from the primordium with some take.
It's not exhausting at all when you want to express some way you are feeling or share a design you think is fun and then immediately have to start going okay, what do I need to add to keep people from tearing this down? How can I make people understand I know the base level topics they are going to bring up. It's so much extra work you have to do because people CANNOT engage with good faith and as exhausting as it is, it is also so much better than dealing with getting torn down?
But the work is still exhausting and it leads to you frequently looking at something you wanna write and getting burned out at the thought of it. It's better to not.
I've been thinking about this a lot ever since 2018 or 2019 when I realized that someone arguing with me in my replies about who is allowed to identify certain ways and was posturing as the smartest and most left person but didn't know what a social construct is. I had spent eight years deeply enmeshed in "X is a social construct" being like, such common knowledge it's a meme... but actually there's always going to be new people born and newly coming out as queer or trans or discovering left wing analysis and entering this world at any age with no knowledge of any of the prior conversations we had already had over and over years ago.
I think this is maybe a big reason academics cloister themselves and have systems of degrees and in group language you have learn that's inaccessible to outsiders. It's gatekeeping that causes socioeconomic barriers yes, but it also creates a floor of shared knowledge for a given conversation. You must already know this much about a topic to join this conversation. This allows you to move past the basics.
Since in the wide open internet possibly anyone with zero knowledge might misunderstand your post and force you back to arguing about basics while they insult you and demean you or even try to cancel you then everyone gets extremely defensive off the bat and it gets really tedious reading the same caveats and baseline axioms reasserted over and over and over in every sentence.
I recently read I hope we choose love by Kai Cheng Thom and it was a pretty decent read but the first essay literally includes a bulleted list of beliefs that she feels she has to reassure to us that she believes in because she has absolutely no trust in the reader to give her good faith. It ends up reading like a social media post. Why can't her years of experience as an activist, writer, and social worker deeply embedded in trans communities be enough for us as readers to trust her?
People love my essays but whenever I read my own stuff I'm always noticing how many paragraphs are about what I am not saying. It is likewise writing the assumes very poor reading comprehension and prior knowledge. Expected on social media, unfortunately.
