Denied Freedom of Assembly, Peer Support, & Community
This article is a Stub. Needs quote from 2011 guidelines. Needs more info in addition to the citation.
It's in the ISST-D standards: a stream of cautions about allowing plurals to meet with each other without supervision, like we'll spontaneously combust. Cautions about what to talk about in groups. And cautions about us meeting on our own.
Meanwhile we have our own assemblages of plural people in the hundreds and thousands and while it has its bad moments like when you get 3+ of anyone together in the same space (virtual or physical) overall it works out much better than they'd have you believe.
But this history of negativity about plurals meeting has prevented us from creating our own communities before the Internet. And we're still in the relatively early stages of forming community and figuring out our community's shared goals and boundaries, rules of engagement, language, etc.
But this is one of the many ways we have been suppressed even if under the guise of "for our own good" — it's infantilizing, it's suppression, it's kept us from exploring our own ideas on how to get better, stopped us from organizing and petitioning, and complaining, and figuring out how to improve the industry that should be helping rather than imprisoning or suppressing us.
more later…