Once again I met the ignorance...

[TheSkronkDonkey]

There are few things I detest more than ignorant judgementalism.

Sadly, it is rampant ... because ignorance is rampant.

Just the other day, I was sifting through a 100+ page discussion of homosexuality on another board. Now, I only read the most recent few pages in any detail, but I saw one person who thought he was being open-minded and was trying to argue that sexuality exists along a spectrum. An agreeable position, perhaps. One problem: he put heterosexuality at one end and homosexuality at the other. To my mind, that's an insidious false dichotomy, where the concept of sexual modality falls between two superficial extremes. On another board, I used the term "pansexuality" and nobody appeared to know what it meant. Just the opposite. Several of them revelled in their ignorance and used their gang mentality to mock me.

Then you have a bisexual person at another board who had always struck me as fair and reasonable, until he said that "flaming queens" disgust him. The best one is a friend of mine's comment just the other week. We were at his house casually flipping TV channels when an advert came on for a programme featuring transsexual models (can't remember specifics). I don't recall what was said in the advert, other than it provoked my friend into making an horrifically bigoted comment: "You can tell it's a man because of the deep voice." Naturally, I was pretty pissed and proceeded to set him right, but he shut me out at the first instant and dryly remarked we weren't going to get into a conversation about transsexuality at ten minutes to midnight. What a lovely way to curtail discussion and avoid facing his gross idiocy. It's kinda pained me to write out that last story, not least because this is a guy I've known half my life.

Then there was the time a uni flatmate rhetorically said, "Isn't it disgusting?" in a flat-out reference to transsexuality and transgenderism. Or the very recent time a girl at work was flipping through a magazine and started laughing at a story about a person who'd just had SRS. I could go on and on, but this shit is seriously depressing. Heck, there was even a more recent time when another girl at work laughed at me for ten minutes straight (arousing a LOT of unwarranted attention, to say the least) because she touched my arm and it was prickly. About a week before, I decided to shave my lower arms because I wanted totally smooth skin. Apparently, this was not only weird, but the comedy highlight of her year. Never mind the fact that women routinely shave their legs, men their faces, more and more people get skin waxes and ... oh, why am I defending myself here?

Prejudice seems rampant in the human animal and only the slightest differences are needed as a pretext for in-out group discrimination. I think John Lennon was onto something with "bagism". I'd like to think the solution is education, which it must be, but that is only part of it. How do you combat the fundamental ills of human nature and stop people discriminating when we respond subjectively to the world and build our aesthetic, moral and intellectual plateaus accordingly?