Every day I see people attempting to have arguments with hardcore bigots, and it always frustrates the hell out of me, because otherwise very smart and savvy people just cannot get their head around the fact that when you are exchanging words with a bigoted zealot, you are never

having a conversation. You are always being exploited to push their agenda.

This is an absolute. It doesn't matter what you say, it doesn't matter how cleverly you set up a gotcha. Nothing you say has any impact on anything, and the creep you are shouting at is just weaponizing

absolutely every word coming out of your mouth, your tone, and also scoring points for every little evil thing they slip out that you don't catch.

You absolutely need to train yourself to think of such people's provocations like the gom jabbar from Dune. Your every instinct is

telling you that this is a confrontation and you to defend yourself or verbally hit back. And you need to just focus on your learned wisdom that literally the best thing you can do is absolutely nothing (or since we're talking about twitter trolls, report and block the offender).

Of course, if I were just asking you to take my word for this, you'd just be putting blind faith in this do nothing plan and that's never a good idea. So let me see if I can use today's case in point as an example without promoting the propaganda contained within.

We had a troll

popping up to shout some gibberish about public changing rooms.

Now, right there, the thing to do, again, is refuse to engage at all with this troll. Why? Because there is absolutely nothing to gain from having that argument.

There is no person present to be swayed directly.

Those arguing with the troll have no audience to convince. There is frankly no audience that needs convincing, beyond those situations where bigots push for discriminatory legislation. This is not such a situation, and if it was, you wouldn't need to have a debate, because you'd

have access to the hard stop that the status quo is just fine thanks, and all objections to it are based in lies that have been publicly exposed: https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2018/12/07/anti-trans-group-bathroom-predator-myth/

Here's the other thing though. The troll ALSO is not in a position to make any real progress pushing that

argument. The person being shouted at is a trans woman, who knows damn well that she's hearing an argument with absolutely zero merit, and everyone else is on the same page. The people to shout at to push for bans there would be politicians and lawyers etc.

The troll knows this.

Bringing up changing rooms is, for this troll, simply a convenient wedge to shove in and get trans people engaging. The actual goal his particular troll has in this particular conversation is nicely explained by this word cloud someone jumped in with. Which I really should credit

to someone with the handle country_jim who probably doesn't need the headache of actually being tagged here, because this sort of thing actually is a really excellent way to discuss trolls of this nature.

For those who aren't familiar, this is a data visualization tool, where in

this case we are feeding in every single word of what this particular troll account has been used to post on twitter, count up how often they use every word they have ever used, and present the most commonly used words in sizes proportionate to their usage.

What we can clearly

see in this image then is that this particular troll says "male-bodied" and "penis" more than literally any other word. Like don't even focus on how huge those are, look at how tiny super common words like "don't" and "I've" are relative to those. And of course the barely visible

visible "trans" down in the corner.

It's transparently obvious that this account is used more or less exclusively to insert these very large words into as many conversations as possible, as often as possible. And indeed having a look at the "conversation" this troll was engaging

in, absolutely every single post being made is flatly ignoring literally everything anyone is saying, demanding they don't change the subject, and demanding answers to questions phrased in such a way that they can only be answered if one first grants a pile of disgusting bigoted

nonsense gibberish as interchangeable with "trans women" and of course all the inherently weaponized baggage included.

I'm not going to say pushing for that is the ONLY thing this troll is trying to get out of this, because as I've said before- https://twitter.com/SecretGamerGrrl/status/967865368298573824 this hate

group in particular is so obsessed with cramming so much hate and misinformation into every damn word that they've lost the ability to speak in anything resembling normal human language.

Legitimizing these particular code-words though is certainly A goal here, and one which just

inherently gets advanced by the very act of responding, at all. If you actually formally cede the ground, that's a win. If you don't, but you're still responding, that's still a win, because the structure of twitter then promotes the baiting to wider audiences and more general

exposure.

Plus hey, if nothing else, and not even the tiniest bit of ideological ground was in play to gain, this ended up spilling onto my feed, and I'm a trans woman targeted by this asshole who genuinely never wants to see that sort of crap again for as long as I live thanks.

So again. Be like the protagonist of the weird old work of science fiction here. When you see this sort of hateful garbage, resist those instincts and just keep your hands still.