GAF in 2014 vs GAF only a few years ago hasn't just changed in tone and demeanor; it's an almost entirely new group of people. I have no idea where to begin with a lot of these new fucks.
The Sarah Silverman thread with the same OP but with 2007 GAF would have been god-tier. An absolute classic read.
I hope this doesn't come across as too glib, but what you've described - "hearing what they want to hear, not fully understanding, or simply not caring about the context of a situation and work on their gut reaction" - is how I'd characterize many of the posts that fall into the broad category of "posts complaining that other people have been offended by something that I think shouldn't have offended them."
I also would qualify that comment you made about the necessity of logic in offense being appropriate. In the abstract, I agree with that. But in the particular, I'd just point out that two different people can interpret the same, say, advertisement differently depending upon what they are bringing to it. For instance, a cisgender person might view that advertisement and view the joke about a sex change as incidental to the mockery of the wage gap as ridiculous; a trans person might also recognize that the joke is incidental to the larger construction of the advertisement while still objecting to it on the basis of, say, feeling hurt by it or feeling that it trivializes their experiences by portraying it in a somewhat frivolous manner or simply the fact that it uses one of the common trope of anti-trans rhetoric (e.g. that trans-men transition in order to gain masculine privilege). This doesn't make them illogical; it means that they're bringing a different set of knowledge and experiences to the conversation, which means that something that reads as innocuous to one reader of a given text will read as offensive to someone else.
I think you'll find that, like most minority communities on GAF, members of TransGAF feel that GAF as a community is hit-or-miss, at best, on their issues. I've felt that way for years as a gay person (witness any thread about the appropriateness of "gay" as an insult to see how many people don't get it - "You just don't get context; it doesn't mean gay like that!"). In this thread I'd submit that the failure to not ask, "Does this offend me?" but rather, "Why might this offend someone who is trans?" is the heart of the problem. In an ideally trans-friendly community, a thread about how trans people find something problematic would have many more posters attempting to step outside of their perspective and consider why someone else might find something offensive, rather than attempting to explain why someone else's emotional reaction is objectively wrong [and therefore not worthy of respect or consideration].
And it's not that hard. Several posters made an attempt to do it; I thought Empty's was one of the better ones. It isn't even that you have to ultimately agree that it is offensive, in terms of feeling offense towards it yourself. I certainly don't. I don't find it personally offensive, because it doesn't have any relevance to my experiences and doesn't touch on an issue that has emotional resonance for me. I can't really say that I have particularly strong feelings for it at all. It's not the dissent that bothers me; it's the condescension, the apparent unwillingness to consider that there are other (perfectly valid) ways of interpreting the same thing.
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