CW: transphobia
Are any of you dating/partners with a lib? how do you handle it? the woman I’ve been seeing is a lib. The worst of it is that she doesn’t accept that personal pronouns are a thing, so definitely a bit of a transphob. I hope its just because she is just ignorant of the issues, but in other conservations we have she does some impressive level centrism and both-siding so I don’t know. “Slavery wasn’t bad because it was legal, everyone did it, nobody was saying it was bad at the time” etc.
We basically broke up last night, not directly because of these issues, but they are definitely a part of it. I want to be able to be completely mask off with my partner, but I also don’t want to have to get into an argument every time I use “they” in the singular. I have moments of doubt where I worry I’ve fallen into a weird online cult and am now do the “oh, you like (BLANK)? name their last 3 albums,” but with online leftist culture.
Since I do limited praxis, sometimes all of this feels theoretical. But when I open up /r/collapse or chapo.chat, I’d like to have a partner that would be able to see the world as I see it.
Otherwise we have a great time together and are able to have really good conversations. Even that we broke up last night was because she is great at communication and was able to draw this out of me. The conversation was something that I wanted to do, but I don’t know when I would have gotten around to it on my own.
More broadly, how sure are you that you found the person that you want to be with? Did you feel that you compromised/settled? I don’t really believe in romantic love, but maybe its just because I haven’t found it yet.
should I put an ironic closing line, to act cool?
as a black woman i have to date in a more strategic way . In addition to making sure people im dating are very vetted as not being racist, sexist, etc i also have to vet them for not being biased against any other marginalized identities because even if someone is being rude to an identity that isnt mine, the bias is likely to trickle down. Also, as someone who knows how bad it feels when privileged “allies” validate racism, sexism, transphobia, homophobia etc. with their dating habits, im also very aware to not do that.
this isnt criticism or anything OP. Im just bringing this up because i think marginalized communities have kinda advanced the conversation around decolonizing beauty politics/desireability and how allyship can (or shouldnt) be carried over into individualized social behavior, because we have to consider these things when it comes to our social habits.
i do think that part of being anti racist as a white person is not dating a racist. same for any type of marginalized identity. and i think that until privileged people realize that, we have a long way to go.
im happy you dropped the transphobe. i understand too how being an ally who is supposed to deal with privileged people’s shit as a means to potentially change them (instead of making marginalized people have to do that work) can be in conflict with everything i just mentioned though
idk how ethical it is to be pro BLM and give someone head who doesnt believe slavery was that bad…not trying to pass judgement and i am happy you dropped this woman/am sensitive to you understanding people have the ability to change and am sensitive to how my perspective as a black woman who cant afford to play those games is informing this comment to
not tryna catch smoke though
edit: just saw that the person was european so maybe that changes it?
edit edit: lets not paint thinking slavery was excusable as a typical lib phase and one that people can change from using easy “we all grow” rhetoric. theres nothing typical about that…like people can change, but mhmmm im tryna get my partner to stop leaving the dishes out as much and not to stop…doing whatever it is…that OP’s ex was doing
I feel like there’s a lot of ground between dealing with privileged people’s shit to educate them and dating a bigot
i agree im just tryna be nice lol
edit: i am ironically sharing a dr umar meme but some of yall need to unironically hear this : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ISnv2hXzhQ&ab_channel=Az
Yeah, I don’t expect a partner to align with my beliefs perfectly, but damn. Expecting someone to at least not both sides SLAVERY is a pretty low bar! I don’t see how it would be possible to love and respect someone who doesn’t have some baseline beliefs about things like racism, sexism, etc.
