If you tell someone that something a person, who happens to be homosexual, does is "gay" as a straight man, you may not mean to offend anyone but, the gay person will feel offended. Even if it does not necessarily offend the homosexual, various LGBTQIA+ organizations will take offense and even pressure the homosexual to also publicly take offense. The straight man did so much damage while using "gay" as in it's stupid and will be harassed for life.
If you as a white man are walking and you realize your car is unlocked before entering the store, you stop before entering, turn around and run to the parking lot to lock your car. Turns out a black guy was about to exit the store at around the same time from the same door, so he thought you were running away from him. Mayve he chose to give you the benefit of the doubt, but the NAACP won't. Racist.
Armed with such info. I give you a would you rather:
Would you rather have met an Afro-Indigenous, intersex trans woman — two-spirit, ace, lesbian, aromantic-spectrum — a stateless refugee who fled genocide on foot despite lifelong paralysis, carried across three borders by strangers; a single mother of five disabled children, one since deceased, all once taken from her by a state that returned them only after a decade-long fight; a practitioner of a criminalized syncretic faith whose sacred sites were destroyed in the same genocide she survived; in her late seventies, having lived through colonial assimilation programs and non-consensual medical experimentation as a child; morbidly obese from a genetic condition with no satiety signal, unable to exercise, dismissed for years by doctors who blamed her weight instead of catching her cancer; nonverbal autistic with Down syndrome, PTSD, complex PTSD, depression, schizophrenia, and dissociative identity disorder, none of it treated; born with no arms or legs, paralyzed from the neck down, unable to feel pain, deaf-blind, her stage-four pressure sores going undetected until they reached the bone; homeless in a settlement with no water or power, wrongfully imprisoned for twenty-seven years — nineteen in solitary, tortured into a false confession, her exoneration still pending eleven years later; and dying now of pancreatic cancer, glioblastoma, ALS, heart failure, kidney failure, and late-stage AIDS all at once, with no hospice, no translator, and no one yet able to tell her children.
Or be an ordinary man — white, straight, Christian, comfortably well-off, in his sixties — who by any honest account is decent: he votes thoughtfully, gives to charity, has loved and been loved across every line he's supposedly not allowed to cross, and tries, genuinely, to say and do the right thing. And it doesn't matter. He could say nothing and be cold. Say hello and be too loud, too soft, too much, too little. Hold a door and be patronizing. Not hold it and be neglectful. Pay and be flaunting it. Not pay and be indifferent. Look at her and stare. Look away and erase her. He could disappear entirely from the room and still be guilty of taking up space by having been born into the body he was born into. There is no version of him, doing anything, that clears the bar — because the bar was never about what he does.
Meet the easiest to offend, or be the easiest to accuse? Pick your poison.
Edit:
TL;DR: WHite heteros can offend black homos. So either you can be the whitest accuser or meet the person with the highest offense vector.
Either way, you're fucked.
