star-anise:

legsdemandias:

I guess the question we need to ask ourselves is….do we turn away one thousand aces, enbies, bisexuals, pansexuals, and micro labeling people in need of safety, protection, acceptance, and education required for them to ease into queer and gay identities comfortably on the off chance that one of them is perhaps maybe a violent and dangerous cishet? 

Do we make this world ad less understanding and less safe world for scared questioning people just because not all of them are really truly queer enough for your tastes? 

My problem is not with the OP, but with the basic statement of the question: Why the fuck do we assume that filtering for LGBT-ness will automatically filter for violence and toxicity?

I see this a lot in “women only” “safe spaces” that exclude men and are then shocked, SHOCKED!!! to find women being violent and aggressive, to find feminist leadership accused of being exploitative to workers and volunteers. I worked at a women’s shelter that would admit the female leader of a gang threatening the life of another woman in shelter, but not allow a kind and supportive brother to show up to help a woman move her furniture.

There’s a huge gaping epistemic flaw when you assume correlation is absolute, that because a group is less likely to be harmful or violent, their members will not be harmful or violent.

You create “safe spaces” not by ensuring all its members meet a certain demographic standard, but by selecting people on the quality of their behaviour and their ability to improve social spaces they are in.

But of course, exclusionists know that. They know that if the entry criteria were, “Do you avoid being verbally and emotionally abusive to people, especially LGBT people,” they’d be kicked out so fast their heads would spin. So it is especially important for them, in protecting their own interests, to keep discussions of “who belongs at Pride” as focused on demographics instead of behaviour as possible.