Absolutely agreed on this- we're tired of community expectations being thrown into the mix.
At the end of the day, we think that labels should be options, not expectations. Folks should be able to try them out and use them if they want, and to not use those labels if they don't want to. There's this huge expectation in some corners of the plural community to use specific labels regardless of whether someone wants to or not, and there's a sense that people aren't allowed to decide what to call themselves. It's a useful tool when choice is given, but it's stopped feeling like a choice in a lot of spaces and has become as expected as giving someone your name. Heck, a lot of introduction formats we've come across in chats required origin and other labels to be listed, which was... yikes. No thanks.
We could ramble on about this for a bit, but it's a significant part of why we don't use a lot of community terminology if we can help it. It's not a helpful tool for us anymore, just a bunch of expectations.
Hope the emotional pain scale goes down, that's never pleasant.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2021-04-27 01:50 am (UTC)At the end of the day, we think that labels should be options, not expectations. Folks should be able to try them out and use them if they want, and to not use those labels if they don't want to. There's this huge expectation in some corners of the plural community to use specific labels regardless of whether someone wants to or not, and there's a sense that people aren't allowed to decide what to call themselves. It's a useful tool when choice is given, but it's stopped feeling like a choice in a lot of spaces and has become as expected as giving someone your name. Heck, a lot of introduction formats we've come across in chats required origin and other labels to be listed, which was... yikes. No thanks.
We could ramble on about this for a bit, but it's a significant part of why we don't use a lot of community terminology if we can help it. It's not a helpful tool for us anymore, just a bunch of expectations.
Hope the emotional pain scale goes down, that's never pleasant.