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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8653001" data-attributes="member: 5142">Thanks for expanding your point. This rings close to my own speculative guesses. You make the development and learning of jargon within communities sound far more malicious and nefarious than it often is. There is a lot of jargon, for example, that exists for knitting, including styles of weaves, knots, stitching patterns, materials, etc. The fact that I may have to learn this jargon if I participated in this hobby or community doesn't inherently mean that it's a form of gatekeeping. That seems like a bit of a stretch. If someone in a knitting circle belittled me for not knowing the jargon, however, that would be gatekeeping. Me having to apply a modicum of effort to learn a knitting term so I am not ignorant of it when I keep encountering it doesn't really strike me as gatekeeping. Likewise, my partner is trans. There is jargon used in trans communities that they use that I don't necessarily know or readily recognize, and the jargon tends to diverge between FTM and MTF sub-communities. I don't think that this jargon exists to gatekeep. I think that it would be unfair to construe the idea that I may have to go out of my way to educate myself on this jargon or ask my partner about a term's meaning as the trans community trying to gatekeep. Jargon can certainly be used as a tool to gatekeep, but that doesn't mean that jargon either develops in communities for the purpose of gatekeeping or that learning community-specific jargon is inherently a gatekeeping practice. I do think that there is a difference between me not knowing a particular piece of jargon a community uses and learning about it as part of participating in the community's discourse and the community using my ignorance of that jargon as a means of excluding me. I certainly grant you that there can be murky areas with this, but I don't think that adopting an approach that sees any learning jargon as gatekeeping. It casts too wide of a net.</blockquote>

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