[mkr-hn]

>> "losing track of what behavior is publicly acceptable in the ever changing Overton window."

A good skill to cultivate for this worry is listening without interrupting or judging when you get feedback. Often what someone who feels hurt wants, regardless of the merit of that hurt, is to feel heard. Listening is timeless.

"I don't fully understand, but I hear you."

Sometimes the best you can do is get someone to move you out of their enemy bucket, but that's often enough. I'm often on the other side of that because there are parts of me that people don't get, but often feel qualified to speak on. The things they say aren't what hurt. It's the often aggressive refusal to accept the limits of their knowledge and experience that hurts. Hubris is the timeless enemy of listening.

Real-world example: there was a now-closed Mastodon instance where it came out that the admin did a long, rambly thread where she confidently explained AMAB nonbinary people are just trans women who are too cowardly to transition. There's an interesting discussion to be had on how to define "woman" and where people draw the line on identifying as nonbinary vs woman vs nonbinary woman, but it doesn't start with a thread like that.

[jerf]

Unfortunately, in terms of staying in the Overton window, that advice is useless. You give good advice at how not to annoy one particular person, but the entire problem is that when speaking in public, everyone gets a crack at accusing you. It doesn't even have to be based on truth; they can accuse based on misunderstandings. They can accuse based on deliberate misunderstandings, because they have other reasons to take you down, or just simply see a chance to be a hero at your expense. As weezin also shares in a sibling post, you can be attacked for not doing something. It doesn't matter how kind you are to one person, you can't do that for hundreds at a time, let alone to the millions that a wrong tweet can reach.

In modern parlance, your post amounts to victim blaming. You can't simultaneously engage with thousands of people in any manner that all of those thousands will find acceptable. That's always been true; the change is the belief in a large number of powerful subcultures that they have a right to be engaged with in manners they find acceptable, by people they've never heard of, in interactions they aren't really a part of except that they happened to be within broadcast range, in the worst cases that they possibly even actively sought out precisely because it would give them something to be angry about. (I'm not accusing everybody of doing that. I think it's rare, most people have better things to do with their time. But there only has to be a few to be a problem.) In the long term, this is an impossible standard.

[weezin]

Thank you for sharing, I think what I'm also worried about is lack of sharing, for example the black squares on instagram. I was called out for not posting one (I had 1 picture on IG from 3 years ago). Although I imagine that wouldn't have happened had I deleted IG prior. I just can see "I don't fully understand" when asked about something will become willful ignorance to people that deem the context unavoidable.

[mkr-hn]

I think I'll have to take my own advice and say that, within the limits of my experience hanging out with lots of other marginalized people, this isn't something I see. It mostly seems to come from Well-Intentioned Allies™ outside the worlds I inhabit, and the people who aggro at folks who don't make the gesture are a subset of that.

What I do for gestures aimed at marginalizations I don't share is listen to the people they're aimed at, but that can be hard if you aren't in a community where they exist in sufficient numbers and are comfortable sharing for a broad cross-section of opinions. I didn't even know any other out and vocal queer people until I started hanging out with furries, and even they have trouble making space for people of color to be out and vocal.

I don't have a good solution to finding that cross-section, so I can see how getting off social media entirely is the safest path.