The People Who Will Cancel You Agree with 99 Out of 100 Things You Say

The hall of mirrors that is Cancel Culture

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[Hi, I’m Mia. I found consent through Intimacy Coordination and fell in love with it so much that I decided to dedicate my life to making it as widely available as possible. I come to this work with the lens of decades of chronic illness which deeply informs how I think about consent, the mind-gut connection, and what it means to feel your boundaries in the language of the body. And I love a good run-on sentence.]

Social media is a place where blue haired pansexuals named Soap hate nobody more than other blue haired pansexuals named Soap. They will make a pdf manual to distribute to friends about what they’re allowed to say, where they’re allowed to go, and who they’re allowed to talk to in order to “be in community” (lol) with them. They’ll tell you “dumb is an ableist slur”with #ACAB #BLM in their IG bio lines.

I have a lot of compassion for the Soaps. I used to be a Soap. I policed my friends’ language and behavior, believing that it was my responsibility with my privilege to educate and advocate on behalf of others with less privilege than me no matter what. I followed in the footsteps of hypervigilant dogmatic friends (whose friendship was entirely conditional and contingent upon what I said, where I went, and who I talked to) who promoted this behavior. These were people who had rigid beliefs about what was right and wrong whether it was about trans issues, race, accountability, or anything else. I will be un-soaping myself for a while.

It's my opinion that this kind of policing on the left poses an incredibly high bar to clear for those who many claim to be trying to help: primarily the working class, formerly incarcerated people, neurodivergent people, and people who don’t have access to higher education. To use some of the Soaps’ language, this kind of policing behavior is actually ableist and classist. (*Guttural sigh.*)

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What I’ve found is that all too often, it’s these same people who say they’re committed to change and abolition who will fight with their proverbial neighbors before they consider having conversations with people who don’t know what pronouns even are, who have the power to install accessibility measures, who work in government, schools, and so on. They’d rather police the people closest to them with whom they should be fighting alongside. The people who will cancel you agree with 99 out of 100 things you say. (For more on this listen to my podcast, You’re Doing It Wrong.)