Yeah, I’ve heard this response to my argument more times than I care to mention.

Let’s be clear, I don’t want to give off the impression I’m not open to people changing for the better. If you can end bigotry through discussion instead of arguments or worse yet, violence, then obviously that is preferable.

The issue is that for every honest misinformed person I’ve encountered who is open to listening to differing points of view, I’ve easily encountered 10 right wing grifters who are in bad faith trying to distract from the main problem with whataboutisms and other tactics, with the end goal of dehumanizing and ostracizing groups that they perceive as the other, i.e. minorities.

These people are in their adult years, likely grew up in households where they themselves were bullied, harassed, made fun of, and dehumanized. They then went to school where sadly they were likely to have experiences that further eroded their emotional intelligence and ability to connect with anybody who had differing views from them. They then grew up and sought out others who had suffered similar experiences and come to similar misguided conclusions, either online or IRL. These are people who grew up being told that apologizing was a sign of weakness, to never ever admit that they were or ever will be wrong, and to only play at having empathy in order to have a seat at the discussion table where they could then present their ideas as “just asking questions.” When in fact they are trying to sow discord and form a pipeline into their hateful ideology for others who are emotionally vulnerable and open to ideas as to why life didn’t play out for them like they thought it would.

If they lack critical thinking skills and a strong community support structure, these emotionally vulnerable people end up spewing hateful ideology within a few months and it breaks my heart, because usually there’s no coming back for them. They can’t be argued or reasoned with. It’s as if an empathetic child who just needed community died due to abandonment, and some ghoul due to demonic corruption is left in their place.

Its not that I don’t want to believe that people can change for the better. I’ve seen it in myself and others, I know it is real.

But I’ve also been in enough online, and in some cases, offline, spaces to know a bigot when I see one. I can sniff a disingenuous asshole just trying to “ask questions” from a mile away and it always ends up with a bunch of 4chan transphobes either openly or behind closed doors making fun of a minority and in some of the worst cases, planning violence.

My tolerance for even the smallest inkling of hate speech is zero. I’m just done giving these people enough rope to hang people I care about with.