If there isn’t a word for this line of reasoning, there should be.
“Don’t say [obviously mean thing that serves only to intimidate or belittle a fellow human being due to immutable group membership] because they might also be part of [group your in-group considers worthy of empathy].”
A couple of weeks ago, I saw this argument over and over again in an argument on a blog I follow about bi women. “Be nice to bi girls,” it goes, “because they might not even date cishet males. For example, you could be implying cishetmale collaboration/contamination in women who date only NB people!”
In this case, it’s abuse victims as a subset of some other larger group deemed worthy of being called pieces of shit.
Previously, I’ve seen this as, “don’t make horrible blanket statements about men because trans men might think you’re talking about them!”
This sounds like empathy, but it’s really just a complaint that the lines demarcating unpeople were drawn slightly incorrectly. The fact that you’re declaring open season on any class for what is obviously dehumanizing verbal abuse is the main problem. Not that you might catch up someone with ideological protection in the vitriol. That’s just CYA.
So does a word for this word exist? If not, what should it be?
(Slightly less endorsed, the quasi-inverse of this, in which people argue that their group should not be dehumanized because it contains sub-groups worthy of sympathy. The most painfully common example is repeatedly trotting out the poor socioeconomic state of Hmong immigrants to the US just so the suburban-born sons and daughters of Korean-American middle-managers can use their Asian heritage to play Oppression Olympics.)
