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Boosted by soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker"):
bri7@treehouse.systems ("Luci Bitchface Angerfoot") wrote:
5 cognitive biases leftist online communities routinely use to smuggle in transphobia and transmisogyny
- base rate neglect
The bias where undue attention is given to attributes of a specific case while ignoring the base population rate of those attributes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base%5Frate%5Ffallacy
- availability bias
the false belief that the examples you personally have seen and are aware of are statistically valuable and significant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability%5Fheuristic
- out group homogeniety bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Out-group%5Fhomogeneity
the belief that all members of a minority group are all identical and share a community, a hivemind, shared decision making, and therefore should all share accountability for what any specific member does
this one is a real red flag in leftist spaces cos i have seen it so unevenly applied to the trans community in so many situations that would be very obviously seen as bigotry if applied to any other minority group; the belief that white trans women have a special and heightened responsibility to “call in” our sisters - seperate and greater than the responsibility any cis white person has- betrays a bunch of false and transphobic beliefs about trans women in general
- Denominator Neglect
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denominator%5Fneglect
people focus on the total number of problematic trans people they see and never put it into the context of the total number of trans people that exist, including the ones they don’t notice or pay any attention to because they are specifically not a problem and you might not even know they are trans.
It’s awareness of THIS bias in cis people that drives some of us trannies to be vocally visible, and even to draw the complaint fhat we’ve “made it our whole personality” because we know if we don’t you cissy fuckers are gonna try and tell us the 5 visible bigoted assholes amongst us represents the entire community
- Disproportionate scrutiny / Hypervisibility
Far from being a privelege, this one means that if any one of us fucks up even slightly, it becomes a huge internet drama, while cis people can fuck up in the same ways and it’s just a day ending in “y”
this is all not to say that trans people being nazis, racist or bigoted isn’t a problem; just that it isn’t a problem that is *special* and specific to trans women. The “trans” part isn’t relevant and doing special callouts of a person’s minority attributes is itself, a virulent form of transphobia that nevertheless is casually accepted in our communities