Part of the reason why SJ tends to think its conclusions are the only ones has to do with how it frames dissent. Check out this constantly mutating phrase, which I’ve seen restated more ways than I can count: “No, Becky, I can’t just be friends with people who disagree about whether people like me should live.”
It makes some sense, to classify disagreements about favorite ice cream differently from disagreements about genocide. And yeah, I think it provides a real reason not to keep members of the alt-right as friends just because you could have fine discussions about ice cream. But SJ also loves to make another move: the elevation of symbolic, discursive, or abstract harms to actual ones.
The examples are numerous: abusive ships -> promote real abuse, not using a preferred pronouns -> othering -> the high rate of suicide in trans people. And the maddening part is that I think all of those “->”s can be replaced with “cause” without actually harming the truth value of the sentence. But SJ never asks, “how strong is that causal linkage” or “how often does it occur.” The question bores it. Someone out there somewhere has had a conversation where their Reylo shipper friend failed to notice the signs of abuse in the first party’s relationship because they read so much romanticized abuse and got a little blurry on which parts of that kinda romance are unacceptable in the real world.*
But these are often rare occurrences and their contributions are minor. SJ doesn’t care. Symbolic harms lead to real ones, and “how often” and “how directly” aren’t worth examining because establishing those facts would take research and time and science and falsifiability. That’s a lot of work just to get to the real purpose of your thinkpiece and no one has time to wait for the gears of study to turn when there are Takes to write!
So suddenly, a whole lot of disagreements about discursive, symbolic, and microaggressive matters aren’t disagreements about minor things but are, by the Transmutative Power of Promoting Abstract Harms to Lethal Ones, disagreements about life and death (so often phrased “disagreements about whether people like me should live” just to make the argument extra-personal).
And so it goes with dissent: there is no minor dissent within SJ, there is only callousness-verging-on-lethal-intent.
*I have a whole extra chunk of thoughts on how SJ’s “what about the children” re: abusive shipping has everything to do with imagining children as perfectly impressionable blank slates as a way of inflating the numbers on how often these causal chains follow.
Oh my god, this is exactly it.
I can’t be friends with someone who literally wants me dead. I can be friends with someone who holds false beliefs about gay or disabled people, because it’s possible to hold hair raisingly terrible beliefs and believe you are being good and kind in doing so.
Conflating these two things is a bad idea.
If you mean “I have personal boundaries,” just say that. It’s a perfectly cromulent sentence.
So for my AP United States History class we have to write a research paper; my topic is the gay rights movement in America. Today I began reading one of the books that I chose as a source
And I opened it up to the dedication page and found this
And if you don’t think that’s one of the sweetest and most romantic things ever then get out of my face
Ok, for the record, the author of this book, Jonathan Rauch, is a friend of my family, I’ve known him since I was a little kid, and I am here to tell you all that he and Michael have been together for 20-odd years now, got married in 2010, and remain to this day obviously, excessively, and adorably in love.
Anyway, they’re cute. Thought y’all would want to know.
I didn’t add explicitly in that little history infodump earlier, but yes that helps illustrate the moral backdrop leading to the gradual development of racialized chattel slavery in British Virginia. Whose system a number of later colonies drew from.
(In short: Divide and conquer tactics to avoid larger scale revolt against the whole abusive setup. And it unfortunately mostly worked.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, Virginia’s rulers faced a problem that no other New World colony had ever faced before, nor ever would again. They had about 15,000 adult colonists. Of these, roughly 9,000 were involuntary laborers. About 7,000 of the 9,000 Virginians held in bondage were of European descent and 2,000 were of Native American and/or African ancestry.17 In order to suppress rebellion, Virginia had to create a free yeoman class virtually overnight. They did not have enough time to grow one. They did not even have time to train one. Somehow, they had to split about 5,000 instantly recognizable yeomen from the total forced-labor population, so as to wind up with just as many Virginians with a stake in suppressing servile insurrection as there were in fomenting it. Again, what was unique was that 7,000 of the 9,000 Virginians held in bondage were Europeans.)
That site has some other interesting essays, BTW.
More history which kinda helps explain why things are how they are now.
[ETA: This also helps illustrate why I have absolutely no patience with the folks who want to bring up the existence of indentured servants they usually have no connection to as some sort of bizarre racist gotcha. That was not a good situation in any way, but things just kept getting so much uglier from that baseline of exploitation.]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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