Social media, misogyny and age

 

I am going to talk about a slightly different subject here, age, and not just any age, but women's age.

One of the little projects I have is researching trans-gender medical studies as it's a topic I am interesting in and it helps the LGBTQ+ community to have verified facts about themselves and others.

I know there are many trans-women, trans-men and cis-gender men and women who are active in pushing real information out there. It's this last group I want to focus on, cis-gender women. I will address cis-gender women as just “Women” going forwards as I'll not be cross referencing with any other gender.

Women when they get old loose some of their younger cute features and those can start to work negatively against them. Age in general does this too, your face starts to sag a little, wrinkles start showing, fat distributes in areas that a woman in her 50+ age group just can't workout 'off'. Some woman genetically never maybe looked like that pretty little thing next door either and has been fighting self image for most of her life. Makeup has been her friend, and her crutch. Through-out the years, many women fight self image issues, those elusive selfies that some women can just snap once and voila. She has to snap, snap, snap …..... why the f**k do I look like sh*t !! snap snap, oh finally !! You understand where I am coming from, I suffer from this very same problem. Some of this is purely an internal self image issue, sometimes its a physically reality. When we get old, this gets progressively worse, both as an internal self image problem and the physical self presenting as old. There is of course the fact that this is inevitable, and women should age gracefully. Years ago, this was easier, but in the 21^st century, this is not always the case with social media.

Back to my original sentence related to LGBTQ. Some of us are active on social media pushing facts, this puts us in the cross hairs of people who assume too much about what they think they know about the subject matter they are defending with fallacy narratives and the targeting of LGBTQ supporters, particularly women as being male, simply due to (1) commenting on LGBTQ content (2) having a female name. The side effect of this online bullying is some users will simply troll through profiles and if you happen to be older and slightly masc or even younger and masc looking, you are then harassed as being male. For a woman who already has self image issues and likely been bullied all her life, particularly in school, this causes significant mental distress.

These people assume some women they are harassing online are in fact males, i.e. trans-women. They assume that because a trans-woman was born biologically male that they have male toughness, they do not, fare from it, they have a very similar mental function to a biological woman and as such has feelings that are hurt the exact same. But that is besides the point, these people are maybe 20% of the time attacking biological women. Even if she shows a medical record that is redacted, or her first drivers license at age 15, or whatever other evidence she has, these people do not care, they keep their assumptions against that woman, in other words, they suffer from “belief perseverance” which is a cognitive bias where they cling desperately to their original belief, this being that the person they are harassing is a male and not female, and regardless of supporting evidence to the contrary.

These people cannot be reasoned with, they are mentally broken and really need to seek a therapist as it causes psychological discomfort.

Unfortunately this is a really common issue now with the current political positions being pushed given people the false affirmation to engage in such harassment of women. If you are receiving such abuse online, screen shot ALL the harassment. If it has occurred across multiple times, this legally is stalking. If it is causing you mental anguish, then, while I am not offering legal advice, you are within your rights to take aforementioned documentation and file a police report. If you are not a subscriber to META on Facebook, sign up. If your other social media platform has suitable support, use it. Either way, file a support ticket for harassment, supply the police report or court order. Get the platform to remove the user. Remember, if you just block them, they will move on to someone else. This solves nothing. Remove them entirely.