Hypersensitivity to Hypersensitivity

I would like to start with story if I could.  A few months ago, I was conducting one of my daily Facebook browses just before the federal intellectual.  As I scrolled down the page, I got caught on an article that had been shared regarding trans folk receiving voting cards with the wrong name and gender marked on them.  Caring more about this than the person’s lengthy status to accompany the article, I clicked on the article.  It was as I expected- did not go into much detail, touched on that it had happened to many transgender people in the Calgary area, they were extremely angry about it, and there was also a statement from someone in the community who touched on the long federal level process that is required to have a name and/or gender change, insinuating the difficulty of mis-gendering someone on their voter card.  Let it be noted here I have no intentions of minimizing a much larger issue by skimming over the details.  I closed the article and proceeded to read the status attached to the article.  The white, cis-gendered middle class person who had shared the article began as such: “Why are we still talking about this shit?!?”  They continued to call society “hypersensitive” because people are crying “victim” at anything.  The person then proceeded to tell Facebook that they’ve had their name misspelt many times on their voter card, as they know many other people who have as well; therefore, it’s something that happens all the time.  

This left me reeling for a number of reasons. Great job equating someone else’s problem to “shit,” person.  Not only does saying someone is crying “victim” at anything appropriate a traumatic experience that does not belong to you, it also helps to enforce a dangerous hierarchy of victimhood- regulated systemically.  Possibly, my favorite part of the entire article was their closing sentiments: “Why can’t we spread love instead of all this hate?  You can string me up for this but it is something that angers me.”  The former statement proved to be even more false than the latter because in the person’s attempt to spread love, they actually only exacerbated a structurally enforced system of oppression. But largely, the umbrella issue for me was the calling of society, particularly the people in the article, “hypersensitive.”  My belief is that as soon as you call any group or individual “hypersensitive” you are taking their experiences, which you neither know anything about nor have ever experienced, and saying they are not as bad, or that bad. 

To expand upon this, I’ve thought a lot about trigger warnings this week. And I’ve decided this issue of hypersensitivity to be a lot more structurally rooted than I thought before. The world we live in has grown to the point where we are no longer able to choose what we are exposed to.  It’s not hyper-sensitivity, it’s hyper-exposure.  This opens doors to a ready made, constant feed of possible triggers- some with warnings and others without.  However, the conflicting discourse surrounding trigger warnings involves a hypersensitivity to hypersensitivity of sorts.  I spent a lot of time this week reorganizing everything I thought I had already decided about trigger warnings and hypersensitivity.  We are just arriving at a place where we can talk about structural oppressions, why would anyone want to dismantle this before it has even taken off?