ELECTRICALKAT'S PROFILE

author=alterego
Well, if you don't want people coming and "shit up" discussion, then maybe don't name-drop them? ...Look, if I'm being sincerely honest, I don't care what you believe. I don't care how many of you believe it. And I'd be more than happy to leave you the fuck alone to circle-jerk all day about it (In fact, that was my plan at the beginning of this thread, but eventually enough dumb things were said for me to want to pitch in) if only you were to leave other people the fuck alone. But I have no guarantee of that happening.

This discussion was shitted up long before I entered it, so fuck off with that kthx.

It's not our fault that y'all entered this thread looking to disrupt it. Kindly fuck off with that too.

author=alterego
I can't really speak for anyone else here, but I'd say we don't want to shut down discussion, we want it to be re-framed in a way that does not give you license to boss people around, telling them what they can or cannot do or say, what is or what is not "acceptable" in 2015, which is the right hill to "go die on", or what makes a "decent" human being, and so on and so forth...

There's plenty of room to talk about representation in videogames without going to the extremes. For example, I'm Hispanic, and I would like to see more Hispanic characters in games, that go beyond the a)Drug dealer, b)Mariachi/Bandido c)Lucha Libre wrestler, and my favorite d)Aztec warrior... That alone is enough to spark interesting, meaningful discussions. But to go on a tirade of: "Ugh! Yet another white character, you're supporting white-supremacy, you'll get brown people killed everywhere!" Is not a very productive approach -to say the least- given the difference of opinions that is bound to happen on any -open to the public- space like this.

We can have a discussion on this because some of what you say in the second paragraph I can agree with (and I can already tell where you got a lot of assumptions that I heavily disagree with from which ... is another discussion in itself), while what you began this quote with leads to a really tiresome strawman that I hear all the time from GamerGaters, MRAs, etc. I'm not going to squeeze blood from a stone though if you're just going to repeat yourself though.

author=alterego
Face it, as long as you mix your "progressive" ideas with game development, threads like these remain of public interest. And discussion like these can pop up anywhere; anything and anyone can get the ball rolling... What's going to happen the day a heated discussion like this occurs not on a dedicated thread like this one, but on a non-dedicated thread like the "what are you thinking about" thread? Or in an article? Or in a review? Are you going to "kick out" people from their own game-pages, so others don't feel "unsafe" and can have their ideas go unchallenged? I wonder how far could this site's administration let this rabbit hole go eventually.

What bothers the most is how people keep saying they feel welcome, when no one is telling them: "You're not welcome here". I even urged the OP not to stop playing videogames because I can empathize with her at that level. Yet people in this thread are telling me and others: "You're not welcome here", almost verbatim. Some even calling for mass-bans... Go figure.

This website is owned and maintained by the people who own and maintain this website; it is their choice what happens and is stored on it. Game pages are not owned by the authors of the games; they are rented space from this website.

Yeah, I don't have to explicitly see "You're not welcome here!" to think that there are people on this forum who don't want to treat me like a human being. There is such a thing as implied message with action.

I'm not going to repeat myself again so, whatever. You're operating on a belief that is basically a total caricature of what I really think.

author=Corfaisus
I brought this up a month ago:

author=Corfaisus

author=Feldschlacht IV

author=Corfaisus
Perhaps a new "Social Justice" subforum is in order? One where once you're booted, you're gone for good. Like a staff forum open to the public. Screen out known troublemakers from the beginning; I'm sure we have enough evidence who those people are by now.

I don't think we need to fundamentally alter the structure of the site to maintain standards of discussion. Just foster an environment that breeds intelligence and consideration.

The only way to maintain peace is at gunpoint; I believe someone said that recently. Unless we rounded up the troublesome and mass-banned them, there's no way that we'll be able to successfully "foster an environment that breeds intelligence and consideration".

Unfortunately, I'm beginning to think this is probably the only solution, too. :\ As much as I'd like that not to be the solution--I'm much more of a "Rousseau" believer than a "Hobbes"-ian.

People who don't want to behave will probably never behave, sadly...

author=Sated
If y'all are too stupid to ignore people who you think are trying to derail the thread, y'all deserve to get your thread derailed.

"waaahh these meanies are trying to stop me from shitting up threads i have the right to shit threads up as much as i want!!!"

author=Sated
I'm against dictating who can or can't post in specific threads. If you want to outright ban someone then go ahead, but don't pick and choose where they can or can't post; it's a messy, non-specific way of applying the rules that will probably just lead to confusion.

If people are discussing feminism and your only contribution is to only say "well feminism is WRONg and BAD and blbl ahblah blh" or something to that effect, I don't think you're contributing something useful in the first place.

author=Ratty524
Electrical Kat, keep in mind that Max Mcgee is one person out of the hundred or so who visit this site. Don't take the shitstorms a pocket-full of people brew up as a representation of this community. It's actually gotten much better compared to the WIP era (it was especially so when Max left for a long period at one point), and there are many reasonable, welcoming people here to connect with.

To be honest, Max is one of the most vocal in this thread. There was also Tyranos with this little bit from http://rpgmaker.net/forums/topics/18459/?post=660095#post660095:

author=Tyranos
Sorry for stating reality to you.

Among ... others. As if to try speaking for all women with that assertion and have the hubris to believe they can dictate "reality" for a trans woman. Sorry bucko, you don't get to tell us what your definition of "reality" is. <3

Not to mention other bits from BizarreMonkey, and a few others like SnowOwl who were comparatively "subdued". Golden meaners like alterego don't really help raise my confidence, either. People are allowed to have opinions, of course (I'm nipping this in the bud right now because I know someone is going to bring up the eventual lalala free speech lalala CENSORS!); however, given what I've seen so far it does seem like the community is allowing the same vocal people to come in and shit up threads that could discuss progressive issues like these whenever they pop up. The golden mean fallacies of "well the feminists and the bigots are just as bad as each other!!!" show to me, also, that there are members of this community that wouldn't like discussion at all either because they believe every progressive is bad too!

So no. Max, Tyranos, et. al. are a few members of hundreds, but that they seem to be implicitly allowed to disrupt threads like these is something I can't accept.

author=Liberty
The fact that you report it means that it's not allowed on the site - the reporting is there so that we know where to find infractions in case we miss them. In other words, if anyone does say anything bad about you or others being trans, letting us know allows us to crack down on it as the rules say. But we need to know it's happening before we can do anything.

This thread, however, for for people to talk about such things. It is not aimed at anyone in particular, and while certain people in the thread are less welcoming than others, they are talking in the abstract of their own beliefs, not aimed at anyone in the thread or on the site. In the case that they do press past those boundaries we deal with it.

I've been seeing the last year or so happen more than enough to know what Soli says is more than true.

author=Solitayre
I'm not okay with this. This is a greenlight for people to come in and be as disruptive and disparaging as possible as long as they're very careful to not technically break any rules.

I am very much up for discussion and education of certain issues to people and I've done so many, many times. I am not up for discussion of certain issues with people who will plainly declare that they won't listen, and they will continue to try and mouth off at will whatever reactionary or regressive beliefs in a thread that will go nowhere. I don't have the energy for this and I'd rather spend it on other, much better ventures. Like writing my game's story!

It seems like, from this vantage point, that is going to be allowed to pass whenever any topic related to representation, feminism, progressive issues, etc. arises. I can't see how this is fine at all.

It goes well beyond outright racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobic, etc. Also...

author=Liberty
Sadly, such things don't go that way when certain groups get together. Which is why I quit this topic ages ago and just came back because holy shit, someone posted in it. I thought it'd died already. I was getting funeral rights ready! (Already had a plot dug out, too.)

Frankly, I think it's okay to talk about such things but people get too stupid sometimes, especially when certain others jump in to have their say. Passion is great and all, but it makes for bad discussion when no-one listens to the other.

Yeah, these things won't go well at all when certain groups get together. Because the group that just wants to hold back discussion is allowed to go into these things!

I guess I have a different philosophy of moderation than you, but if there is a topic discussing feminist issues, I don't believe it is appropriate to let posters with super-conservative beliefs come in and see if they can derail the discussion with stuff that feminism is either disproving right now or has disproven long ago. Of course they're going to do that. However do you believe anything useful is going to come from this?

To use an extreme example to illustrate a point, it's like allowing neo-Nazis into a discussion about discrimination against Jewish people. That just isn't going to work and letting this pass is only going to prove to Jewish people that neo-Nazis are implicitly allowed to go freely about with their beliefs. And let Jewish people feel that they are not welcome in such a forum, despite any veneer of "accepting community" that is painted.

You have to control your community or it ends up collapsing in on itself.

It's not really this thread alone, but that something like this can seemingly pop up, anytime. There are other places and forums that specifically prohibit this kind of hate that honestly I would recommend over here to people who are marginalized, sadly. :\

As much as I'd like to..... Until that last topic, I kind of liked this place.

Anyway I don't mean to speak overly bad of RMN? It's something I've learned from friends and spending enough time seeing people I know hurt. Safe spaces really count for so much. It's why the "code of conduct" concept is spreading fast in open source communities etc.

(note: this is going to be a huge rant. please read it in its entirety if you are interested. if someone asks me about something i had addressed here already or in a post before, i swear i am going to flip a table the rmn gem)

What hima is saying about this being damaging and building up is, basically, what I had tried to drive at before. I was pretty sarcastic in a lot of my responses, but that is mostly because it seemed so incredulous in my view to see a lot of people apparently defending calunio's assumed right to portray transsexuals as he did.

I want to make it clear (I did say this before, but I'll say it again) that I am not against comedy of transgender people. For an example of transgender comedy done properly (though this example is more comedy/drama, but nevertheless), I would recommend the film Transamerica. It has many moments where transsexuals are poked fun at without being yet another series of sigh-inducing face palm "lol trap jokes".

Now, I'm going to go into why I discouraged the word "tranny" being thrown around so casually to begin with.

CAVE_DOG, kentona, Demicrasius, and everyone else: You are probably seeing tranny from a vastly different perspective than how I do. I heard arguments stating that tranny was not on the same level as nigger, or possibly faggot, or other such pejoratives. CAVE_DOG had mentioned that it is used more as a fetishizing word than something with violent connotations, and that it needed more of a history to be considered on the same level. That isn't the case here...and I'm going to go into full bloody detail as to why.

Transsexuals often have a very tough time today merging into society, because of a LOT of factors. One of them is obvious...body/mind dysphoria, where the gender of one's mind vastly differs from the sex of one's body. Some people try to solve this by convincing themselves that their mind is at fault, and so they try to resolve it by repressing their feelings.

This has generally been proven to not work, sometimes with very bad repercussions. At best, these feelings would later manifest as feelings of self-worthlessness, being out-of-place, or self-hatred. At worst, they could drive you to commit suicide.

Most others, especially today, seek to undergo hormone replacement therapy and, eventually, various surgeries and removals in order to better represent themselves as their desired sex. It isn't perfect; things like your DNA will always haunt you as to what you were born as. It's the best that we have, though, and we try to live with it.

Another problem, also, is the reconciling of how you feel versus how you have grown up to be; how you have been socialized. In many cases, there are mental barriers and assumed masks transsexuals put on themselves that have to be broken. You are basically fighting a lifetime of conditioning to be something that you never truly felt like.

That was background; now, let me get into the problem. Gays, lesbians, and to some extent bisexuals (there is an entire segment that could be written about bisexuals, but that would be off-topic here; I will just say that even in the LGBT community, bisexuals are having an extremely tough time being accepted) have only recently been starting to be recognized as normal in society. We have global movements now for same-sex marriage, and these movements are making great progress with each year.

I remember a little under two decades ago, when I was constantly told that being homosexual was a disease. I remember teachers in my grammar school telling me that having gay sex would be an instant ticket to Hell, and that it was on the same level as rape.

Arguably...the same movement has not been so kind or progressive to transsexuals. I absolutely do not mean to slight anyone here who is LGB/supportive and believes in transsexual rights, but this is a fact about how the general movement has treated us. In New York City's LGBT center, for example, a support group that is hosted there had to fight tooth-and-nail to even have a discussion space larger than a refuse closet. Now, if we cannot find sanctuary in a movement that was created to defend queer people of all types, where can we find it then?

Here is a video from someone (not me) who talks about EXACTLY that:



(by the way...I'm going to come out and say it, yes I am transsexual myself)

I'm sure that many of you know about the bullshit concept of "gay panic"; that finding out about someone being gay "naturally" causes you to feel like murdering them...or actually do it. There is a variant for transsexuals, except the difference between this and gay panic goes back to how we merge into society. It is not easy for transsexuals to do this. We have to not only change our visual appearance, but also change how we sound.

A trans friend of mine once said to me that your voice is 50% of how someone perceives you; a girl could have a masculine-ish bone structure, but if she sounded like a girl and spoke like a girl, then a large part of your mind would confirm her to be a girl (although I suppose there could still be doubts, but the point remains). As I well know, changing your voice is an extremely uphill battle. Some transsexuals unfortunately cannot, and probably could never finish that process. It's unfortunate as shit, but it's how it is.

This is where I get into why tranny ... shemale ... he-she ... "trap" ... why these can be, and very often are EXTREMELY offensive and degrading to transsexuals, and transgendered people in general. (I could go into the differences between transgender and transsexual later if someone wants me to.)

I know people who have encountered lowlifes that have tried to kill them, because they were suspected of being trans. The friend that I mentioned above is one of them; she was, unfortunately, forced to defend herself against rapist-murderers who especially used these pejoratives against her. I, myself, have been called these and sometimes harassed, though thankfully this was among the anonymity of the Internet. Now you might say, this is something that every minority and oppressed group sometimes faces, so why should it be any different for transsexuals?

To that I counter with...our justice systems. There was a time when coming out to the police that you were gay or lesbian would cause you to be beaten or wrongfully imprisoned; thank God that is dying fast. Unfortunately, and I say this again, transsexuals have not gained that kind of headway. I even hear in New York City of all places that transsexuals are sometimes singled out by the cops. What the fuck, guys? This is supposed to be New York City!

Shall I also mention for redundancy that many police departments are unlikely to pursue cases with transpeople as the victim? More so unlikely than many other minorities?

So with a lot of LGBs being against the Ts, random lowlifes and the cops sometimes threatening to ruin our lives or kill us, and let's not forget about the politicians always making laws about silly little things like transsexuals not being allowed to enter bathrooms of their desired gender... Who can honestly say that I and many other transsexuals am being overly high-strung by not thinking of "tranny" like you do? Am I forgetting something here?

Oh...right... The feminists.

I am not going to say much about this at the moment, because I've read multiple writings about the topic and the question of what group exactly in feminism is transphobic is still muddy to me. What I will say though, is that there are so-called "feminists" who believe that women-born-with-a-penis are not "real" women. (lol let's not even get into how this excludes intersexed girls too) I mentioned sometime ago the Michigan "Womyn's" Music Festival; a festival that was meant for "womyn-born-womyn".

The subtle insinuation that transwomen are fake aside, it goes to show just how badly this has poisoned certain feminist circles. There was once even an occasion where a "hitlist" was made of "suspected" transsexuals who had snuck in and attended anyway. Perhaps, CAVE_DOG, you can give me more details about this phenomenon, because you are more closely involved with feminist circles than I am.

I'm going to conclude this epic rant by saying that, yes, I do sound angry. I am very angry. Not at Polymorphous Perversity specifically, but at how our image seems to just be "we are traps, we are traps, ho ho we are traps!" in much of the media, even outside of games. I cannot think of a single game now that yet portrays transsexuals in a positive light without a subtle insult to our identity. (I hear about Atlus games like Persona 4 and Catherine, but they are not exactly positive either. I could elaborate more on these in another post if you would like, but not right now.)

That's why depictions like this and trap jokes are serious, and they need to be counterbalanced. Whether calunio did this intentionally or not, I will not render a judgement. But, if you want to include transgendered characters in your games, please do the trans community a huge favor and RESEARCH! I would LOVE to see a good trans character in a game's story some time in the future. I am even writing a story, myself, that is pretty much ABOUT one. Just, please... Watch out for these pitfalls. You honestly do not want to perpetuate this stereotype any further than it is.

And well, I've also had a pretty bad day today. So, that's another reason why I am emotional about it now. Thank you for reading.