Spent some time reading through my fediverse stream and catching up on various kinds of terminology, gender relationships, human relationships… Sometimes it seems like I’ve been hiding in a cave all these years… words like swerf and terf were new to me, and what’s harder, understanding them often requires going more deeply into what people say about them, and then trying to make an evaluation. Then I learned, also from my stream, about Glenn Greenwald’s mutual embrace with right-wing media, and the acrimony between him and Micah lee and others. Again, hiding in a cave.

But that’s exactly why I make the effort to follow alternative social media, in order to become familiar with ideas, attitudes and happenings that I might not pick up in my normal reading of the news, where I often read just the main stories or those in my special areas of interest.

Meanwhile, even following just 45 people from my Mastodon account, I’m growing weary of all the back-and-forth resulting from the minor exodus from Twitter and the major ripple it’s causing for all the Mastodon people.

Part of my weariness comes from the fact that I don’t relate to Mastodon as a well-loved community. For me, it’s mainly a source of information. On Hubzilla there was a greater sense of community, actually. Maybe I should go back there, because although theoretically it’s all one Fediverse, some of those I knew on Hubzilla don’t interact much with the Mastodon crowd; in fact don’t particularly appreciate Mastodon at all. And since ActivityPub is just one of the protocols that Hubzilla can interact with, there isn’t the conception that ActivityPub itself constitutes the Fediverse. I like that.

Anyway, getting back to those gender words, I think I choose to be liberal… and catholic (in its older definition): two much-maligned terms. I don’t really care how people choose to self-identify. Their gender-identity is their own business; their sexuality, or lack of it, is their own concern too. From one of the articles I read, I liked one of the definitions for “queer”, i.e. we are are all “queer” – in that, to a greater or a lesser extent, our gender-identity and sexual responses are all located at different places on various spectrums, such as kind, quality, degree, taste, quantity, etc. and as such we are all unique: based partly on our genes, partly on our conditioning.

We can ask questions, as some radical feminists apparently do, about why a trans person might mimic and reinforce ingrained feminine or masculine stereotypes. We can wonder, for example, how men often adopt sexual behaviour that demeans women (or vice versa). Maybe we should add a subclause that “our sexuality is our own business – but only as long as doesn’t cause harm“?

But it’s hard to make such categorical statements about an area where we are all hurting each other constantly, either physically, emotionally or psychologically. Who can actually say that they have never hurt another person as a result of a love relationship? All we can do is expand our understanding, tolerance and compassion. Also our vigilance: because pedophiles, rapists and other abusers do still need to be locked up or rehabilitated – that’s for everyone’s safety.

Returning to the question of those ornery journalists; it’s like with other professions. There are ideals, and then there are various forms of pollution like money and ego, pride and prestige. It seems that all you need to do to create poison is to add a billionaire or two to the mixture. That’s sure to wake up all the sleeping demons. The Midas touch.