You’re not obligated to do anything, especially not to help me and others better understand you or make your comments useful.

“The south” ranges from Virginia to Texas. Maybe you lived everywhere and experienced discrimination everywhere.

For me, I grew up in a down of a 1000 people and live just a few hours away in a town with maybe one of the most diverse cultures (including LGBT) in the country.

If I said that because I experienced discrimination in my shitkicker little town that the entire south was similar, that would be wrong, and not very helpful to anyone trying to understand the south.

I suppose you can avoid absolutes and generalizations if you want to help others. But you definitely aren’t obligated to help anyone.

But generalizations jump out at me and annoy me because I’ve frequently encountered jerks saying something about perverts or crime stats and then just fall back on that they were just honestly relating their experience. But there is a difference between my experience and me saying that my experience applies to others. Especially if not backed by data and a suitable generalization.

To be clear, you're accusing me of tarring an entire region for relaying an experience I had in it. I didn't even make any claim that the South is more discriminatory against LGBT people than elsewhere, though if you're going to project that onto me anyway...

I guarantee you apply this kind of radical stance against all generalization in a very selective way. Do you get upset if someone says that Russia is a repressive country? Or that California is expensive?

Even if I were to give my entire life story, you can always feign offense, claiming "city A 20 miles away from city B is totally different, you can't generalize an entire county!" At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with, and even then, isn't it unfair for me to represent the entirety of their person with a single selective moment of their life?

It's like when people hear a statement like you've made they recoil and assume that 100% of your interactions in a region involve discrimination. What they fail to understand is that the rate you experienced discrimination is higher in these areas than in others. It's a probability, it's clear to me from the context that surely not every interaction of yours in the south is bad, but given drawing a random interaction out of a hat, you are more likely to have a bad one living in Virginia than in New York. Given this reality, I wouldn't want to live in the American South either.

There must be some sort of logical block that prevents people from understanding the nuance in these comments, and rushing to defend against absolutes that no one implied existed. I blame a lack of understanding of statistics and probability.

Exactly. I've also experienced discrimination in San Francisco, for what it's worth! But as soon as you make any statement that it tends to be more common in the South (or even if it's merely implied), people end up triggered and rise up in defense of it.

I’m not defending the south, per se, I’m defending statements like “it tends to be more common in the South.”

The experience you described doesn’t seem to me that it justifies saying the south is worse or better than other regions.

The reason why you see people jump in the defend the south is that you are making a general statement about an entire region.

Here’s what I mean. Someone said that midwesterners are nice to people if they are white. Downthread you share that part of the reason you left the south is because of discrimination you experienced and I think you were pointing out that it was odd that people jumped in to defend the south.

It seems reasonable that people would try to more accurately describe the south and share their experiences as well.

Saying people are triggered seems to belittle their input. If I want more input I don’t call you triggered for feeling compelled to share info.

This is totally different if you think that there actually is some higher level of discrimination in the south or midwest or wherever. But I don’t think your anecdote isn’t really that helpful for tarring or exonerating a region. Despite how true or honest it may be.

So, first point: I reject the idea that in my first comment I made any general statements about the South. I recounted a particular experience I had, and some people extrapolated that into a claim that all of the South is uniformly homophobic or some other statement I'm being held to which I didn't make.

If I'm actually making general statements, I would say that big cities in the South are more gay friendly, though they're still impacted by state politics and as you enter the suburbs and especially rural areas you encounter much more bias. Two hours north of Atlanta is much worse than two hours north of San Francisco. If push came to shove, I'd feel more welcomed in Atlanta ITP than in many parts of the Central Valley; but I'm also not particularly interested in grading on a curve. But everyone's mileage will vary, and all the tradeoffs involved are complicated and will differ between different people and even in the same person at different times in their life.

These subtleties are lost, though, because my comment wasn't intended to provide a comprehensive overview of life as an LGBT person in the South, but to counter someone who was writing off someone else's experience as merely a way to feel virtuous about their self instead of anything real. It's a common response to many negative experiences from marginalized groups, so I see it as perfectly natural that I drew on my own experiences to call it out.

> Russia is a repressive country?

This is usually interpreted as a statement about the russian government, which is an abstract entity, unlike "the midwest" which is interpreted as referring to the people living there which is not.

> At some point I'd have to be listing all the individuals I had negative experiences with

This paradox is the subject of "statistics" which resolves this problem with ideas of "representative" samples. I think the issue here is that most people would consider a sample size big enough to represent an area as big as the midwest would exceed the lifetime of any individual, such that no one could prove anything from their own experiences alone.

Being more specific about the locale would help. Nashville is not Atlanta, NOLA is not Tampa when it comes to flavors of discriminatory attitudes - and rural or suburban attitudes are different as well. Describing where you went to for relief also adds even more context.

Not to mention Houston, for instance, is one of the most diverse cities in the entire country -- more diverse than much of CA. It's also one of the largest and most iconic cities of the South.

Houston remains one of the most segregated cities in the entire country.

This page ranks it 18th in that regard: https://cityobservatory.org/most_segregated/

Of note, LA is measured as being more segregated than Houston.

Memo: There's a gradient from liberal urban islands to the surrounding regressive rural areas. With some exceptions.

Surprised?

Not tarring, maybe he was just pointing out the unconscious bias of the statement not being more elusive.