I hope that makes you happy, 'cause there's just no turning back

This all started with some yahoo in Apple Fall's chat asking about a "makeover":

[11:05] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): Does [Sxxxxx] plan to answer whether it's home redesign or avatar redesign?
[11:05] Exx Rxxxxx: apparently not
[11:05] Exx Rxxxxx: lol
[11:05] Exx Rxxxxx: so I think we have our answer
[11:06] Axxxx Dxxxxx: maybe th plan is to get Lindens ...

Meet Ms. A., today's problem child.

[11:06] Exx Rxxxxx: I doubt it
[11:06] Bxxxx Axxxxxxxx: he's going group to group with that, maybe hacked
[11:06] Exx Rxxxxx: OH well then likely
[11:06] Ixxxx Mxxxx: They asked in a men's clothing/body group
[11:06] Exx Rxxxxx: hadn't seen the name pop up in any other group myself
[11:07] Axxxx Dxxxxx: was said here
[11:07] Exx Rxxxxx: exactly, only group I saw it in
[11:07] Axxxx Dxxxxx: I give up
[11:07] sxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Rxxxxxxxx: I messaged them offering to help and got no answer, so it might be a hacked account, but who knows for sure!
[11:07] Munro (irish.munro): Well they're blocked along with some guy named [Exxx] who spams daily.
[11:09] Axxxx Dxxxxx: why refer to one person as they them?

Oh, here we go.

[11:11] sxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Rxxxxxxxx: Are you asking me that, [Axxxx]?
[11:11] Axxxx Dxxxxx: two did the same
[11:11] Axxxx Dxxxxx: and it was a he who made the original question
[11:11] Axxxx Dxxxxx: I just wonder
[11:12] Axxxx Dxxxxx: Maybe I could get wiser

I doubt it, based on later commentary.

[11:12] sxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Rxxxxxxxx: It doesn't seem odd to me as a person could be them, just as many people could be them. It doesn't always mean more then one.
[11:13] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): [Axxxx], do not start with the they/them not singular nonsense. Thanks. It's been in singular usage since the 15th century.

Was this rude? To me, no. To Ms. A., maybe. I will say it was curt. I am beyond sick of explaining this to people who are just using it as another way to discriminate.

[11:13] Axxxx Dxxxxx: pardon me?
[11:13] Axxxx Dxxxxx: I ask cause one person cant be plural

Without bringing up DID, there's no way to really break that misconception down, but as far as they/them usage, it's not just plural usage. It's also in singular usage with a long history of being so.

But she IMed me in a huff.

[11:14] Axxxx Dxxxxx: dont tlle me I speak nonsense
[11:14] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr) smiles
[11:14] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): Then don't start up with they/them cannot be singular

I mean, that is, at the least, clear, innit?

But back to the group chat:

[11:15] sxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Rxxxxxxxx: I think she is just curios Emilly.

She could be. She could honestly just be curious. Orrrrr, she could be an anti-feminist insisting that no one can be a 'they', that everyone must be a male or a female. Possibly followed by 'I don't use pronouns', which is ridiculous on the face of it.

Trigger-happy on this issue? You damn betcha. I deal with this nigh on the daily on Twitter at this point.

[11:16] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): It's not used as a plural in context.

Back to the IM:

[11:16] Axxxx Dxxxxx: ok then I am stupid
[11:16] Axxxx Dxxxxx: thanks

Didn't call you stupid, Ms. A., just argumentative on a silly issue.

[11:16] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): Shakespeare used it consistently in his plays. We also have other surviving documents from England and France at that time.
[11:18] Axxxx Dxxxxx: French used 'Them'?

Now, I was wrong here. I thought there were surviving documents, but apparently the 'them' usage in France is of recent derivation. That was an error on my part.

[11:19] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): Yes.
[11:19] Axxxx Dxxxxx: you speak nonsense - and you are rude
[11:19] Axxxx Dxxxxx: sure Them is French
[11:19] Axxxx Dxxxxx: naturallement

She was right here--in terms of 'them' not being a historical pronoun in the French language. Jury's still out for me on whether I was rude, but eh, it's all in the perception, I guess.

Back to main chat:

[11:19] Exx Rxxxxx: they/them does not always indicate plural
[11:19] Exx Rxxxxx: sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn't
[11:20] Exx Rxxxxx: it can be a single person's preferred pronouns
[11:20] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): It can be.

Back to the IM:

[11:20] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr):

"French traditional pronouns are il (male), elle (female), ils (plural), elles (plural refering exclusively to female ppl or things).
The most common NB, neutral pronoun is "iel", that can be spelled iels, iell, ielle, ille, illes...
I also know ppl who go by ol, al, ul and yul."

I was quoting from a Connexion France article on the introduction of nonbinary pronouns.

[11:21] Axxxx Dxxxxx: and you know how to insult people
[11:21] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-12-15/they-singular-grammar-transgender-history
[11:21] Axxxx Dxxxxx: (busy response): If you see this - you are in some real bad company ...

Ah, she blocked me. I figured I'd keep going with what I found, and then close the window, which is what I did.

[11:21] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002748.html
[11:21] Axxxx Dxxxxx: (busy response): If you see this - you are in some real bad company ...
[11:21] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): https://nyulocal.com/shakespeare-used-the-singular-they-and-so-should-you-6452240ca9e0
[11:21] Axxxx Dxxxxx: (busy response): If you see this - you are in some real bad company ...

And then I went back to the group chat.

[11:21] Exx Rxxxxx: in fact, it is not bad practice to default to those pronouns unless someone has specified otherwise
[11:22] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): https://phys.org/news/2020-01-chronicles-history-gender-neutral-pronouns-shakespeare.html
[11:22] sxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Rxxxxxxxx: I think that may in fact be what I did - I just defaulted to using 'them'
[11:22] Axxxx Dxxxxx: now we speak gender something and political correctness
[11:22] Emilly Shatner-Orr (emilly.orr): It's not political correctness, [Axxxx], it's common courtesy.
[11:27] Dxxxx Hxxxxxx: Ding................ding

After this, chat went silent for a bit. I had no intention of continuing. She's welcome to stay tucked snug into her safe misconceptions.

must it take a life for hateful eyes to glisten once again?

This video mostly speaks to rifts in the YouTube atheist community, but there's a great list near the end of things that I think are worthwhile for mending broken fences in any community that's suffering.

The lessons learned that Jim, the speaker for Atheist Edge, presents:

1. Thicken our skins. Even insults aimed at us don't have to actually hurt us. Or, as Patrick Swayze put it in Roadhouse, when one of the bouncers asked, "Well, what if someone calls my momma a whore?", turn the question back on itself. "Is she?" was his answer. Face that down. Are we the horrible thing they called us? If we're not, let it go.
2. Identify trolls from people who are just emotionally attached to an idea. Watch the patterns. People who are emotionally committed, and potentially not thinking, may sound like trolls, but at some point, they will play their hand. We will see that whatever is on the table, is an issue they really identify with.
   Trolls don't. Trolls are just looking for a reaction. They're poking the bear to hear it roar. And they get immense satisfaction when the bear roars. Don't give it to them. Disengage, do not interact to the best of our abilities. We won't change the mind of a troll, because they aren't emotionally invested. They're just dropping insults to see what works and what doesn't.
3. This one I'm guilty of--don't unfriend the people against us and our opinions, don't block them, don't insult them behind their backs online. Things get heated, but if the only voices we're hearing are ones that 100% agree with our own, we are not growing and adapting to the world we live in. "If you create an echo chamber for yourself, it's even more harmful in the long run", he said, than maintaining contact with people who offend, enrage, or hurt us. (This is not easy advice to take, because we are consistently told that for self-care and emotional stability reasons, it's good, and sometimes vital, to cut off toxic people around us. I still believe that some people cannot, or are not willing to, change, and in those cases, maybe walking away is the only option we have. But to the best of our ability, try to keep the lines of communication open.)
4. To that end, reach out and extend an olive branch to the other side, if we can. Be open to hearing from them. (This is also hard, admittedly, because some people just mix like gasoline and flame. But we must try to do our best.)
5. No name-calling. This one I'm also guilty of; I try not to, because it is childish, and it makes me think I'm descending to their level, not elevating the discourse back to rationality. But try to keep this in mind. Look at how foolish Donald Trump sounds with his endless parade of nicknames for people he doesn't like. If a man holding the highest office in the land sounds like a fool when he bleats about "Lyin' Ted", "Crooked Hillary" and "Crazy Joe Biden", how am I going to sound by retorting with "Moron-in-Chief" or "President Cheeto"? None of these terms are purely accurate; most are designed to strike at someone on some level just for a reaction. (Can we say trollish behavior?) Can we at least stop slinging mud at each other and just communicate?
6. Try to find common ground. Some issues are by their nature polarizing, and right now, our current political and social climate makes it far too easy to other those who disagree with us. We are not talking to aliens born seventeen million light years away. We're talking to people who breathe the same air we do, cry the way we do, bleed red the way we do. Even if it has to come down to nothing more than that, even if there is no other common ground to meet upon, we always have at least that one salient point: we are speaking to other hominids who were born on this planet. And if we take the time to look deeper, we may find we have more in common than just air and iron.
7. One-sided conversations aren't good, either. We need to give our opponents time to respond, and we need to offer them the dignity of honestly hearing them out. If we truly don't understand their points, repeat them back to them, with an added "Am I understanding you correctly?" And sure, this may take a while, in person, on social media, in emails sent back and forth. Some things cannot be easily resolved, it will take time. Let it take that time.
8. Be aware of how we're speaking, how we're phrasing things to people, especially if we're speaking across the aisle on a divisive point. Personally, I know it's very difficult for me not to sound sarcastic, and it takes a tremendous effort--both in real life and online--to rein in the snark. Take a break, breathe, disengage for a while until we're not speaking from that place of pure emotion, and able again to speak from a place of logic and reason.
9. He brought up a concept called "steelmanning"--he defined it as, when we take another person's opinion that is diametrically opposed to ours, and explain it back to them in a way where they completely understand what we're saying. This is also diametrically opposed to a "straw man" argument, also known as an ad hominem attack, where we pick apart what we consider is a weak point in someone else's argument, and misrepresent what they said on that one point just to knock down that one point. When we prove to someone with a differing opinion that we understand that opinion, then and only then can we give constructive criticism on the particulars of that opinion.
10. Make a list of all of our currently held positions, on all issues--social, political, psychological, emotional, cultural--every opinion we have that we might be wrong about. Write it down. Refer back to it. Read it over now and again. Revise it when it needs revising. And keep this point in mind as well: if we cannot think of a single thing that we might be wrong about, then we have stagnated to the point of mental death, or at least thought ossification. If we cannot be budged on any issue we feel is important to our emotional well-being, then we are intractable and unwilling to change in any way. We'd be better served by picking lilies and laying down at that point, because we are no longer growing, thinking, evolving lifeforms.
11. Keep in mind, too, that the reason some of these people may be hostile towards us, is that we--or more likely, people who hold similar opinions to ours--are hostile to them. It's a basic self-defense mechanism. Get bit once, heal. Get bit twice, be grumpy about it, and heal. See someone who might be coming close to bite a third time--bite them first. It's a primal reaction, but we need to be better than that.
12. Realize that they may never have dealt with anyone, one on one, who holds dissimilar opinions. We have to be the ambassadors for our own communities, our own beliefs, our own ideals. And we must do our best to be the best version of ourselves when we realize we are in the ambassadorial position.
13. Lastly, understand that we don't have to be at each other's throats to disagree. We can hold fundamentally different opinions and still be able to communicate, as long as we are willing to communicate. Catholics and Protestants get along in Ireland, and they have a long and bloody history that, in many places, is still etched into the brick and stone of the walls around them. For the most part, Japan is one of our allies now, and they have every single reason (potentially NSFW images) to hate us forever.

None of these rules, guidelines, whatever, are easy things to do. Some are incredibly difficult to do, because we are not just thinking beings, but feeling ones. And ordinarily, there's nothing wrong with having emotions. The problem is when we get swamped by our emotions and cannot think clearly. The moment that happens, we are back in the cave, shaking clubs at the unknown dark. We have to hold on to our reason, to our calm, as much as we can, for as long as we can. Another thing Patrick Swayze said in Roadhouse: "Be nice." There may come a time when we can no longer be nice, but until that point, be nice. Be polite. Be cool. Never forget we are speaking to another human being, with feelings of their own. We need to keep thinking as clearly as we can if we ever hope to mend the breaches that divide us.

Because as long as we are standing on opposite sides of the fence, we can't accomplish anything. We have to at least be willing to meet on neutral ground, and talk things out. And sure, it won't work with everybody. But we will never know who it will work with if we never try in the first place.