TW: STORYTIME
I'm not sure if this is in the right section, so please assist if you believe that this is in the wrong place.
As a bit of a preface, since this is about SJWs, I kind of have to lay out my "profile" of my identity so to speak. I'm a developer but I'm on this work/education plan which means I don't get paid as much as my coworkers… yet. I'm a woman in body who doesn't really identify as any particular gender who has autism. All of these things I usually don't give two shits about. Also, I have a coworker friend who is gay and also has a ??? gender identity. BECAUSE REASONS. He is also among the sperg kind.
Anyways, so I have been really tight on cash lately, and I recently had to take my little birdie to the vet, which basically anally evacuated by bank account. So two women I work with, a woman in her 40's (been with the company 1.5 years) and another who is I think about 30 years old (been with the company 9 months) decide to pitch in. They're both very nice people so I'm really happy about their generosity.
So they take me out to lunch. Which is fine and dandy, I guess. We go out to a local restaurant and we're just talking about things, and then suddenly the conversation takes a nosedive.
We had a hiccup before the real game, in which I was talking about how at my last job a parent told me to "Oh, you can ignore him, he's autistic". This is something that made me boil ever since that happened (I told the customer that I was autistic and they promptly shut their fucking mouth). Both of them were trying to defend this behaviour (???) by claiming that the parents were "trying to fit in" or "having a disabled child has many challenges" (as if I wouldn't know what it's like to live in a family with disabled children). Older one has disabled daughter, I told her, "would you ever say that it's okay for other people to ignore your daughter because she has a disability?" "Well no but-" I'm sorry, there are no buts, you do not tell other people that you can "ignore" your child because they have a disability. I swear to god that kid probably thinks he's worthless with that sort of attitude. Anyways…
Then it all started with misogyny. And it all went down to fuckville from there.
Younger chick starts talking about how she feels that one of her superiors is misogynistic. Her claims seem to be based in a genuine problem, at first. Some things that she claimed that this individual was doing would definitely be listed as "misogynistic", and I noticed this kind of attitude myself with this particular individual. I usually brushed it aside as a bit of callous humour, a sort of "you really shouldn't say that but its not the end of the world" kind of deal. But I could see why she was frustrated.
She had been working on a project for some time and received no acknowledgement for it in a company wide email, while her manager took most of the credit – another legitimate complaint. But then the conversation dug deeper.
She starts going on about "strong women", which is a concept that I quite honestly loathe. I challenge this directly. I tell her, "some people are just different, women don't need to be strong to be good women". She begins to get increasingly aggressive in her language with me. She starts going on a tangent about how "women are told to be weak". I tried to tell her that "those who are forced into a state of submission are abused, but not everyone is strong" but she silenced me, ignored me.
It's worth noting that one of the most frustrating things about my autism is that I have much trouble turning my thoughts into words, especially things relating to emotions. I have explained this in the past and it leads to things like stuttering, going on and on, and confusing verbage. I describe it as "my interpreter is on strike". The fact that these people wouldn't just let me finish and actually debate me as opposed to shoving an inconvenient position under the rug absolutely infuriated me. It should be noted that everyone else has had the patience to converse with me and does not talk over me, unless I'm "ranting in circles" and they put what I meant to say more succinctly.
She began to state that women needed a "strong female role model" in order to be strong. I was deeply offended by this statement. I had always been an extremely headstrong individual who was always very competitive, very ambitious, and very "strong". For those who may be confused to why this is so upsetting, it's essentially erasing my own strength, ambition and basically who I am as a person for an idea that takes that all away from me as a person and says that "I couldn't be that inherently". In these people's eyes, I cannot just be a strong lady, I have to be a strong lady who was strong because I held someone's hand. Bull-fucking-shit.
She began to claim that all men are inherently misogynistic. This also was a huge fucking anger point for me. This essentially paints men with a stain that they cannot remove because of who they are born as. I tried to refute this but I was silenced and ignored. To make this point even more offensive, she claimed that "the worst thing about dealing with this is that they are so grown in their ways that they will never change". Holy fucking Christ on a popcicle. Not ONLY this, but she claimed that her manager was "inherently misogynistic" as well, but then soon later stated that he would be a "friend and advocate" for her. WTF.
She then began to sort people into little "gender boxes" – men are like this, women are like this. I wouldn't say I have dysphoria, but if the feeling I felt when she kept going on about that was any sort of dysphoria, then holy shit do I feel bad for you transgender peeps. As a teenager I came to the realization that I'm not really a "woman" or a "man" in a gender sense but just a smear and I've always been content with that part of me (on older sites I list myself as "androgynous" if the gender is a fill-in, and I would switch the genders for the lulz to annoy people). Most people are fine with that, in fact, the men that I work with (you know, the "misogynists by default") are aware of it and they completely agree with that sort of identity. I never really thought it was that important until this conversation, and they just kept going. About how men are made into teh evilz, and how women are weak and blah blah blah. It was genuinely making me feel extremely uncomfortable. I was about to walk outside and leave, especially considering that I was repeatedly silenced.
The other woman was essentially a yes man, she wasn't really contributing too much to the conversation other than "yes" or repeating what was stated earlier.
She then began to talk about how evil this one guy was because he made jokes about being effeminate. She described this as "crudely homophobic behaviour". This one I really couldn't react to, not really considering myself to be "gay" (that shit is weird though when you're technically NB). This ended up being hilariously ironic later, but I tried to explain to her that "this dude isn't homophobic" and "he's kind of a joker and doesn't know when it hurts your feelings". Nothing gelled. By this point the older chick even chimed in, saying "I really don't think he means any harm". Thing is, at this company we take discrimination really fucking seriously and I was genuinely worried that she would go to HR and try to stir some shit. We've both been unable to talk but I'm going to let him know ASAP so he can avoid that fate – he's a good guy. She continued to go on about how he was "an animal" and how his manager (the same one she called a friend and advocate) should "train him not to do that". It was every bit as dehumanizing as it sounds here.
We went into older chick's van, and then drove back. They were joking about how they "took so much time chatting up" that they forgot to take me to the store for food, which was the original intent. I wouldn't be so upset if the contents were far less bigoted.
The icing on the cake was when they continued to talk about the supposedly homophobic coworker and how the older chick explained that she would say "I have a gay brother" to try to make people STFU even if she didn't have them. She explained "if I had that kind of family then I'd be completely neurotic!" or something along those lines. Again I was deeply upset by this.
Thing is, I'm a very talkative person. I tend to be very chatty and upbeat, and even have the tendency to "overtake" a conversation – I just have a very imposing nature. Throughout this whole thing, I was silent. I felt incredibly uncomfortable with their attitudes towards their coworkers, and especially towards the implications they were saying towards various figments of who I was.
(continued in next post)
