Mister Vimes posted this twitter thread about inclusivity and how he doesn’t recognize geek culture anymore due to all the toxicity, gatekeeping (here’s How to Deal With Geek Gatekeepers, lol) and exclusion that is so pervasive in our communities. This post is from back in 2019, but it is sadly still relevant today. I guess we will just have to keep posting this until people fully get the message. Geek culture should be welcoming and inclusive for everyone. Full stop.
Source: Mister Vimes
I am sorry. I wish I could believe you are being genuine here … but I can’t help but think that if you don’t know the difference by now, then you must be willfully ignorant.
Nobody is THAT stupid!
I’m confused, what do you mean by “you don’t know the difference by now”? The difference between what and what else?
Maybe you should just PRESUME people are genuine and stop being such a cynic. This is YOUR problem. Not his.
“You don’t think like me therefore you are stupid and/or fake.” What an excellent example of the silencing and ostracizing mentioned in the first tweet.
This comment doesn’t even make sense. What “difference don’t they know by now”? Really feels like an angry troll comment.
A perfect example of the kind of person he’s talking about!
Maybe your are an exception, but I have seen too much of these 50+ year old OSR old-guard.
Someone wants to play an Orc because they see their outsider, “primitive” and actively discriminated against status as being quite reminiscent of how American culture has historically portrayed blacks or native americans? You attack them– call them “woke” and “SJWs” and actively seek to punish them.
If someone presents an interpretation of Elves where maybe they don’t sleep every day, but perhaps every several years they go into a long deep sleep and when they emerge they might identify as a different name or gender or subrace and slowly morph to match the new identity. You call it an uninvited intrusion into the game by people who are not welcome.
I could point out so many OSR/Kotaku threads that demonstrate just how alarmingly bigoted D&D players are with hundreds of upvotes supporting the bigotry.
Even something as pretty common-sense as making goblins fay (I mean– mythologically, they always were, weren’t they?) and saying they don’t necessarily have to be evil gets a giant backlash. Because how dare red or yellow skinned people be allowed to be heroes in this game? Only white people are good guys and the rest need to be exterminated from the world!
And, of course, the caveat is that you can be a human of any human skin tone– it’s just that all extra-human good races in the world are explicitly white (with the rare exception like Gold Dwarfs) and all extra-human peoples who aren’t white are universally evil and should be genocided from the world.
So– who exactly are you, buddy? If you are an exception to your pier group, then recognize that you are a major exception to your pier group. But if you have somehow not come into conflict with the overwhelming number of bigots that make up your pier group, I really do have to wonder how you possibly could have made it this far without having come into conflict with them.
Peer
so, don’t you perhaps think he’s speaking to other old, 50 something white dudes to tell them to knock it off? Read again — that’s what I’m hearing here. He’s telling his peers that they’re treating people today like they were treated by society back in the day, and it’s instead important to welcome new people and new ideas.
This is a nonsense wall of text. Your cynicism is YOUR problem, don’t make it *my problem too.*
I generally see that sort of behaviour from younger nerds than from older nerds
Must agree. As a 50+ year old woman who went through the same culture, I was never a “girl nerd” I was just a “gamer”, too. This nonsense came in with the 1990s. The oldest guard are not the worst guard–it’s the younger techbros who dropped during “Revenge of the Nerd” years who have been the problem.
I personally think every group/table is different. Each with it’s own unique ways of thought and play. While I can’t say I agree with them all, I do say that finding a group to mesh well with is as hard as finding the right partner in life. I’m almost 40 and my wife and I co dm all D&D games that we run. I personally love the weird, outside the box ideas as well as figuring out how they would work. The mention of the elf idea in http://gravatar.com/hobgoblyn comment had me intrigued. I personally don’t like to play humans and neither does my wife. It’s the idea the player brings to the table with a character that brings the soul and life of it. As dm it’s our responsibility to make a world and game the players enjoy and want to return to. Games of any kind are meant to be a fun and enjoyable retreat from the “norm” and as such we as dm’s have a very real responsibility to help cultivate a relationship with our players and those that want to maybe see if it’s something they might be interested in. As dm’s we don’t run games because we’re control freaks, at least that’s how it should be. We do it for the love of the hobby and want to see others fall in love with it just like we did. That’s all, the wonder and imagination firing up in a newbie’s eyes for the first time is an amazing thing to witness. I liken it to the pride a parent feels seeing they’re child do something for the first time. As the older generation of gamers and hobbyists we have a responsibility to pass the torch on to the next generation as it was passed to us by someone else. If you’re gate keeping as a way to preserve “the good ol’days” then please stand down and allow the torch to be passed so that it may burn bright in the hands of the future dm’s. The good ol’days never were a thing. Time to let go.
Well, before you start preaching at us from a height, maybe you could refrain from attaching nasty, unwanted labels on people? There is no such thing as “cis-gender”. It is an unscientific, made-up term that is intended to be pejorative – concocted by people who are promoting an ideology. No sane person identifies as “cis-gender”. We are just people, end of story. I reject that label utterly. Tell you what: you don’t put labels on me and I won’t put labels on you, okay?
I am cis-gender. It’s not a pejorative.
You are simply like the folks who hated being called straight because they were “just normal”.
You know, a bigot, outraged that anyone not like you might not consider themselves abnormal.
Also, quick with ableist crap! Any other ugliness you got in there?
You can call yourself a rare, red-beaked cockatoo if you like. That’s your business. But don’t assume you can call other people that. In any case, you have no reasoning or argument at all, do you? Just bigotry and calling people silly names. Feel better now?
Would you also object to being called a homo sapien?
Cis is a scientific term that’s been used for centuries. It means same. Same gender as assigned at birth in this instance. It’s not pejorative, it’s shorthand.
I’m a Eukarya Animal Chordata Mamallia Primate Hominidae Homo Sapiens Sapiens (and so are you presumably) Cisgender Female
Maybe considering “Cisgender” as a pejorative says more about you than it does the people using it.
I don’t normally describe myself that way, but if I’m in a dicussion about gender issues, I’ll refer to myself that way because it’s relevant.
And literally every term, even scientific ones, are “made up”. Calling it “Made up” is just the height of being disingenuous.
And then qualifying something with “No sane person” is equally disingenuous. You have neither authority or moral right to make that proclamation.
And “We are people” is fine. Nobody is implying Cisgendered people aren’t people. It serves the purpose of literally every word – To convey information. Most of our words are not “Scientific”. That doesn’t make them NOT words.
Maybe try examining your own biases and axes you’re grinding.
“Cis-gender” because “our culture’s default setting for gender” is a bit too long.
OMG shut up, you make human beings look like morons with every hateful, bigoted word you post.
WTF, zip it, ya bigoted snowflake. ALL words are made up, doofus. And cisgender IS the scientific term for people whose gender identity matches their body type. You’re an ignorant hateful piece of rubbish.
I remember the exact same outrage about calling people ‘straight’…it’s not about you accepting the label, it’s about you being able to point out the people you’re bigoted against are ‘other’, same as it was with ‘straight’.
People like you *ARE* the problem.
IDIC rules
the very first Worldcon excluded a number of professionals including Frederick Pohl, Cyril M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wolheim along with three others. Science Fiction has always excluded. That being said, the Sad Puppies were annoying and the Rabid Puppies were more obnoxious and odious. Now they were gunning for anyone non-male and non-white. I found and find their bullshit to be worthless, call it the Incel Writers Syndrome or something.
Wow this comment section really says a lot toward your point! Thanks for being a good example. Inclusivity helps all of us have more fun!
Inclusivity means we won’t have only degenerate, White erasing liberal spaces, but also righteous, normal White conservative ones
Not if you have a functional understanding of the paradox of intolerance.
I am 57 and experienced the same as him except I’m Mexican-American if that makes any difference to you. Geeks of our time (late Boomers and GenX) respected the past and works of the past as they were. Yes we certainly had fan fic and slash and all that back then. but we knew all of that was not the original work. This is something that millennials do not seem to accept. Instead of writing new stories with new heroes reflecting values of the modern day, most go backwards looking to the past and playing revisionism. We mis-interpreted the artists intent, throwing in things that were never part of artist the work’s intent. Tolkien, LotR, and Rings of Power come to mind.
A couple of clarifying points on seemingly authoritative statements in the comments made by less-than-knowledgeable people.
1) Yes, cis is a scientific term; no, it has not been in use for centuries. It also doesn’t mean ‘same’. Specifically, it’s a term employed in biochemistry to describe the alignment of fatty acids within a triglyceride molecule, and it’s only been in use as long as we’ve known about the variability of such alignment. That is all. It describes an alignment in which all of the fatty acids form a neat line along the glyceryl spine of the triglyceride molecule. And since the opposite of a cis-fat is a trans-fat, the term has IRONICALLY, not scientifically, been adopted by the gender theory movement to describe non-trans people.
2) No, the term cis has not been applied in a scientific context to gender, as the current debates around gender are not being led by science. They are being led by critical theorists; and the basis of critical theory is a rejection of the possibility of objectivity. Critical theory gets its name because it’s ‘critical’ of the claim that anything can be objectively demonstrated. It believes that political bias intrudes into every corner of information assessment – even into the objectivity of the Scientific Method. Since that objectivity is the very foundation upon which science is based, that makes critical theory a directly anti-science political philosophy.
Ergo, the debates and use of this scientific term to describe gender are being employed in a manner directly contrary to science, by a philosophical approach that is directly anti-science. Being trained in medical science and well aware of the latest research into the subject, I know the difference between the two theoretical perspectives – and I am not afraid to call it out. Because in the search for truth, we need to know what is objectively true and what is not; and who is speaking from a perspective of science and who is not. Those using the term cis-gender are not.
3) It is not gatekeeping to tell people that their approach is not founded on science, but on politics. It’s also not gatekeeping to exclude a given subset of politics from your gaming table if you feel it’s distressing or disruptive to yourself or to the group you run. HOWEVER. LGBTQ+ people and topics shouldn’t be excluded simply because someone finds the idea that there are real, actual gay and trans people in the world distressing – that is indeed bigotry, and it needs to be squashed flat from the start. An objection to a particular political movement is a different thing to a rejection of others’ humanity and right to be heard and fairly represented at the gaming table.
4) If you think any of what I’ve said reflects an anti-LGBTQ+ or pro-white perspective, then think again. I’m a seemingly-white (though not actually; I’m Romanischal) gay man with a trans sister, and I’m currently running a game in which I’m playing a lesbian Latina immigrant character in a setting based out of Cirencester, England. And my trans sister, by the by, is the only member of my immediate siblings that I can tolerate (and we get along wonderfully despite her politics); so no, definitely no anti-trans sentiments there.
In fact, my single greatest regret for the trans populace is the fact that their cause has been hijacked by people wanting to dismiss science and steamroller over fact in aid of an ideology – which is a path that never ends well. What I would prefer to see is them coming on board with science, and helping the scientific community to find what needs to be found in order to create strategies of best practice in relation to trans identification and subsequent care and social rights for trans people. Because without the science, we’re flailing in the dark, and as like to do damage to the trans community as achieve victories on their behalf.
The word cisgender is the antonym of transgender. The prefix cis is Latin and means on this side of. The term cisgender was coined in 1994 and entered into dictionaries starting in 2015 as a result of changes in social discourse about gender.
citra, cis – on this side of
1) “cis” is an old Latin prepositions meaning “on this side of” or “before” –it takes the accusative noun, and no, it wasn’t invented just to talk about fatty acids! It’s also used in words like cisalpine or cislunars, for starters. More interestingly, it’s from the same ancient proto-Indo-European root as the word “This” (see how they sounds a bit alike?)
2) SOME Critical Theory claims that most things can’t be objectively demonstrated, but that’s not what defines it and it’s definitely not where the name comes from. Critical Theory is the broad set of theoretical approaches to giving critiques of subjects — it refers to different forms of analysis and criticism. (Literary criticism, music criticism, cultural criticism, etc) I have at least a dozen textbooks on Critical Theory and they broad subject textbooks include everything from “Feminist critical theory” to “Marxist critical theory” to “Mythopoesis Critical theory” (which FYI is very conservative) to “Aristotelian Critical theory”…. it’s just a word explaining that one is applying philosophical perspectives to the interpretation of things that are open to interpretation (which to be fair is most things that don’t have to do with hard scientific facts).
I’m late and if someone has already pointed this out, excuse me, and I’mma keep this so simple I shouldn’t require much punctuation, but
Your entire post reeks of arrogance
The same arrogance underlying positivism itself (your “objectivity”)
To acknowledge that every scientific endeavour includes bias is hardly revolutionary or groundbreaking
What critical theory did was expand on that principle by exploring other sources of bias
And lo, what did we discover? The limitations of human perspective cannot be as easily overcome as we thought
“Politics” is a means of social communication and societal self-administration
Chimps have politics
The negative connotation you apply to the term and the concept that it represents an intrusive property into the field of “objective science” reflects your ignorance, your bias
Political framing is a source of bias in scientific efforts
Political ideology dictates scientific agendas through funding, control of disemtionation of results, even the social acceptability of certain kinds of inquiry
And the strife for equity is an inherently political endeavour, one which every social science identifies as a prosocial struggle societies engage in to foster their betterment; ie inclusivity is an “objectively” good thing societies should have a large degree of
Science is not an unbiased, objective tool in that struggle
In fact, science and politics are inextricably linked, so to “accuse” a scientifically based principle of being purely politically based “instead” is nearly absurd
For example
Your claim that “cisgender” is an intrinsically political term reflects this principle
As there is more than enough research from multiple scientific perspectives supporting the “creation” of this “made up” term
For other example
Critical theory is itself a scientific endeavour, a paradigm within social science research and political theory
To reject the entire perspective because it presents challenges to positivism is to assert the reign of positivism in the face of valid and reliable research that reasonably concludes that our past claims of “objectivity” deserve a great deal of interrogation
Single f’rinstance: phrenology
Wait here’s another: eugenics
Wait here’s another: social Darwinism
All kinds of “sciences” and “objective measures” have concluded findings so biased that political ideology would seem to be driving every step of the research process
And yet those were often totally ingenuously good-faith efforts to perceive Truth
This is why we need critical theory
To remind us that once upon a time, we htought that head shape was an objective way of measuring intelligence
That the effort to remove undesirable traits from the genetic pool through social engineering was simply a scientific approach to promoting species survival
(Rather than an intrinsically political effort governed by the gardener’s choice of what traits are ‘plants’ and what traits are ‘weeds’)
That anything that takes the struggle for survival out of the hands of the forces of nature beyond our control kinda misunderstands Darwinian evolutionary theory
(You aren’t the decider of what “fittest” looks like
(And the idea that you or your group are deciders is an inherently political claim of authority, an assertion of your right to implement a means of societal control)
Critical theory allows us to perceive these mistakes of bias and trace their impact to current causes and conditions of harms done to humans that humans may have the ability to rectify
It empowers a self-corrective scientific endeavour: the embrace of paradigms that facilitate more ethical research moving forward
To claim that you possess the ability to perceive Truth through scientific endeavor *without* the embrace of or at least response to critical theoretical approaches is, again, arrogant
Whole communities of scientists have respected the paradigms of critical theory and social structural analysis
The academy has been enlivened and invigorated through respect of these paradigms
I invite you to join us – even if you choose to reject this paradigm insofar as your own (inherently political) beliefs and perceptions are concerned, join the dialogue that acknowledges the validity and reliability of the perspective and its contributions over recent decades to the many sciences and wrestles with the nature of its findings
I’ve lost count of how many established Marvel & DC characters (most originally-created DECADES ago!) have been retconned as gay or bi at this point.
Worse still, “being gay” instantly becomes their most defining characteristic (oftentimes, their ONLY personality trait of note).. and because minorities can NEVER be seen as the bad guy in what passes for modern writing, it also severely limits character dynamics. This same philosophy holds true for lazy race- and gender-swaps of existing superheroes.
This isn’t inclusion, it’s pandering.. and it simultaneously ruins both previous lore (the most sacred part of nerd culture for many people) AND future storytelling.