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So I was going to rant this on twitter, but it was getting long. Ergo, I'll put it here.
Years ago I read an article that I wish I could find again, about workplace sexism, and how awful it is specifically for women, but how that doesn't actually mean men are more sexist. It just means men are the majority in many workplaces. And then it did some math that went kind of like this:
First of all, assume everybody in this workplace is straight (just to simplify our numbers.)
Then, assume that one person in ten is a sexist jerkwad who sexually harasses people. This is even across genders, men and women both do it in equal proportion.
Now, imagine a midsize company with 110 employees, 100 men, 10 women. Of those, we obviously have 10 harassing jerk men, one for every woman, so the odds are that they'll manage to harass all or at least most of the women frequently.
Meanwhile there's one lone jerkass woman, who harasses the men, but most of the men may, just by happenstance and the way the odds work out, never be harassed once.
There's the thesis, and it applies to all majority/minority setups. If white people and black people say racist bullshit against each other at the same rate, then even setting aside historical inequalities and institutionalized programs that keep black people down, black people in America are still going to have a shittier experience, because they're the minority.
If trans people say nasty shit about cis people at the same rate that cis people say nasty shit about trans people, then trans people will still be buried in thousands of horrible comments for every one a cis person gets!
Gay people, disabled people, hispanic people, whatever. White people don't have to be worse in order to make white people seem like total shits to those folks.
And then the (certain percentage of) the white/cis/straight/abled people get all up in arms about minority groups trying to create spaces they're not allowed into, but that's not anti-white bigotry, that's just minority groups trying desperately to have a space where they're not those metaphorical ten women who each have a nasty sexist harasser in the company just for them. We have to exclude the majority to get any peace.
Not because white/cis/straight/abled people are bad, just because math!
Years ago I read an article that I wish I could find again, about workplace sexism, and how awful it is specifically for women, but how that doesn't actually mean men are more sexist. It just means men are the majority in many workplaces. And then it did some math that went kind of like this:
First of all, assume everybody in this workplace is straight (just to simplify our numbers.)
Then, assume that one person in ten is a sexist jerkwad who sexually harasses people. This is even across genders, men and women both do it in equal proportion.
Now, imagine a midsize company with 110 employees, 100 men, 10 women. Of those, we obviously have 10 harassing jerk men, one for every woman, so the odds are that they'll manage to harass all or at least most of the women frequently.
Meanwhile there's one lone jerkass woman, who harasses the men, but most of the men may, just by happenstance and the way the odds work out, never be harassed once.
There's the thesis, and it applies to all majority/minority setups. If white people and black people say racist bullshit against each other at the same rate, then even setting aside historical inequalities and institutionalized programs that keep black people down, black people in America are still going to have a shittier experience, because they're the minority.
If trans people say nasty shit about cis people at the same rate that cis people say nasty shit about trans people, then trans people will still be buried in thousands of horrible comments for every one a cis person gets!
Gay people, disabled people, hispanic people, whatever. White people don't have to be worse in order to make white people seem like total shits to those folks.
And then the (certain percentage of) the white/cis/straight/abled people get all up in arms about minority groups trying to create spaces they're not allowed into, but that's not anti-white bigotry, that's just minority groups trying desperately to have a space where they're not those metaphorical ten women who each have a nasty sexist harasser in the company just for them. We have to exclude the majority to get any peace.
Not because white/cis/straight/abled people are bad, just because math!