@AppleAmps I think it absolutely plays into it! U have to at bare minimum respect the flow of conversation (one person talks, then u talk, then they get to talk again with full attention not on u bc this is their moment) for a conversation to not devolve into 2 separate monologues yelling at each other.

Social media promotes & rewards the 2 separate monologues over a full conversation that acknowledges the alivedness (not a word but fuck it I'm coining it) of the other person.

So u can have replies to u that don't ask "Hey, I'm confused. What do you mean by xyz?" & instead accuse u of whatever the other person wants to see. Rather than what they would actually see if they'd decenter themselves for 2 goddamn seconds. Which is: "a person who's alive & actually quite similar to me, whose experiences are their own & I cannot speak over that, nor choose which words they're allowed to attribute to their experiences because I do not own them nor the narrative of their life."

Lotta folks love using their misogyny to talk over both trans women's & trans men's experiences, bc with trans women they see someone they should "correct", & with trans men they see someone they should "own." Though u could easily reverse the order of what I said & that also be true— I'm talking dynamics I see often. But I don't see everything going on ever bc I'm not omniscient.

So they wanna pick petty arguments over who's allowed to use what words for their own oppression, telling trans men they're not allowed to choose how their experiences are described, & telling trans women they're just being sensitive when they're actually talking about a real fucking problem going on.

& I genuinely think both of those things wouldn't happen nearly as much (though it still would some) if we all saw the personhood of everyone else, instead of words on a screen that we feel the need to dictate, or people we can choose to ignore because it's inconvenient to havta talk to them when u refuse to get to know them & their experiences.

Live, 1 on 1 conversations in realtime make it harder to choose to dehumanize & otherize folks. Bc u can't filter out what they're saying via software. So they very well may say something u can understand/relate to— & that breaks down the barriers that make the otherizing possible.

I'm basically saying "actually talking to each other is the solution to twitterbrain."