Don't do stuff when drunk
So, I got home rather drunk on Friday night and decided (like all us sad bloggers tend to do) to check my logs. Aside from the usual flurry of referrals from my profile on URNotAlone, I noticed a couple from an URL that looked like they were from some sort of message board.
Never one to miss an opportunity to investigate what is being said about oneself, I registered and found a rather interesting general (non transgendered) message board full of rather smart and interesting people discussing life, the universe, everything, really.
The link actually came from a discussion about Caroline Cossey which referred to my article on that well known and high profile transsexual. The ensuing debate was describing the (to us) hoary old issue of honesty. In essence, is a transgendered person being actively and unethically dishonest by not revealing his or her birth gender?
This discussion is as old as the hills in our community. Most of us never have to worry about this as we have as much chance of passing as the proverbial snowflake in that rather warm place below (where liars reportedly end up, coincidentally).
For example, in the Second Life resident forums, the topic crops up with almost nauseating regularity, and often leads to some sickeningly bipartisan trollfests from which no partricipants ever emerge with credit.
(This is why I generally avoid message boards - just simply because they are the online equivalent of a bunch of angry drivers trapped in hot cars in a traffic jam, and it's usually only a matter of time before someone goes postal and starts a 50 page troll fest. Oh the anger, the frustration, the anonymity, the safe distance... we've all been there)
But anyway, drunk as I was, I decided to offer up my advice and opinions and made the following posting:
Well for a while, it was fine, there was some interesting debate going on, some negative, some positive, and I felt generally that people were welcoming in the right way. I even got some private messages from people sending me words of welcome, which was nice.
Then this afternoon, notification of this reply popped into my mailbox:
A couple of posts later he went on to argue that actually trans people should be convicted of rape in these instances.
It really really upset me.
Intolerance always does, especially as the crime he is referring to led to the particularly awful murder of a young trans teenager, Gwen Araujo.
The last example of trolling that upset me this much was the personal attack I received on flickr on my birthday.
I know, I know. I should be big enough by now to be able to rise above this sort of thing but I've got into so many disheartening and exhausting battles in the past with the trolls to really want to involve myself in any more - which is why I tend to walk away if I encounter them.
So I posted as much, made my farewells and left the forum.
The moral of the story is that you should never try to do anything as dangerous as driving or posting in a forum when drunk. Stick to weblogging.
You know it makes sense.
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