s e smith

“Hats off to s.e. for an all-lowercase name and a custom pronoun, though. It's like the SJ version of tricking out a car.”

— Nonny, 2012-07-20 09:17 pm (UTC)

s.e. smith blogs at meloukhia.net, contributes regularly to Tiger Beatdown, a has regular blogging gig at XOJane, and used to contribute to FWD.

This individual is the internet's premiere special snowflake:

• The e.e. cummings–like lack of capitalization goes without saying. (Gentlefailer discussion.)
• smith, who is genderqueer, insists on using "ou" as a personal pronoun; singular “they,” despite a venerable history in English, “bothers me.” Gentlefailer discussion. According to this nonny, the archaic term was used only in a regional dialect of Gloucester. Yet smith supposedly thinks "ou" is more correct because it comes from Middle English.
• smith gets pissy when other people assume ou is female because ou appears to be a cis woman and wears dresses and skirts. Gentlefailer discussion here and here.
• smith also reserves the right to tell other genderqueer people how to label themselves. “Recently, I read a genderqueer person describing ouself as 'female bodied' and after I scraped my jaw off the floor, I started deconstructing this.”
• Ou regularly complains about phrases such as “the war on women,” claiming it should be “the war on uterii.” Despite not identifying as a woman, ou feels entitled to dictate what feminism should and should not focus on, and ou believes it focuses too much on women.
• In a post about asexuality, smith introduced an unwitting world to the term “queerplatonic.” As this nonny put it, “A lot of words without much clarity. Except that asexual people need new words to describe their friendships because other people think they're just friendships. Which they are. But they're specialer than other people's friendships.” (More here.)
• Another post on "queerplatonic partnerships," which was summed up as “My queerplatonic partner and I call ourselves a couple. BUT PEOPLE IGNORANTLY INVITE US TO EVENTS AS A COUPLE WHICH IS A TOTAL DEMONSTRATION OF ROMANTISEXUAL PRIVILEGE.”
• Nonny, who doesn't provide a link, rants about smith's gender essentialism.
• smith never enables comments on ou's posts.
• smith bullshits pretentiously about “trends” in “historical fiction.” Gentlefailer discussion.
• smith, who suffers from depression and other disabilities that ou chooses not to specify, has written,“I love being out with fellow crazy people because we don’t tell each other to be quiet.” In other words, it is OK to act out in public, and the only problem with self-injury is that it makes “ableists” uncomfortable. Ou's post also compares displaying one's self-injury scars to being openly gay.
• According to a smith post on FWD, if your SO has bipolar disorder and cheats on you, it is ableist to be angry with them about it.
• After the July 2012 mass shooting in Aurora, Colorado, smith equated the slang use of the word "crazy" with the violence perpetuated in the movie theater. XOJane's commenters absolutely savaged ou, and ou whined for days on ou's Twitter account (here is a particularly ironic tweet). Gentlefailers discussed this here. A nonny in a different thread: “I love that they employ s.e. smith, because watching ou try to awkwardly reign in the Special Snowflake bullshit in the face of that audience is hilarious.”
• Another XO Jane column about “concern trolling” welfare recipients who use their benefits for strippers or tattoos contained this throwaway gem: “Other people don’t pay their bills or balance their budgets because they’d rather spend their benefits on other things. Whatever. Honestly, that’s their choice.”
• Smith was among the SJW bloggers who started whining about "callout culture" when it finally started coming back to bite them and their friends. (Gentlefailer discussion.)
• Smith was nominated for a Women's Media Center Social Media Award. While the rules do not restrict the award to women only, one nonny said, “I can't help feeling that the reaction over there would have been somewhat different if a cis guy had been nominated though.” Just before the thread was frozen due to a great deal of pronoun wank, one nonny observed:

Guessing Smith to be female when they're wearing a dress: HDU misgender me!

Giving Smith an award for women's social justice: Totally not misgendering or Smith appropriating women's issues in any way, so please vote for me.

The self absorption is dripping off my screen.

It was mentioned in that thread that ou had edited all personal pronouns out of ou's profile to obscure ou's gender. There is more discussion in a later thread, in which is linked this XOJane article in which smith repeatedly says, “I am not a woman” and says ou'd like to buy the domain sesmithisnotalady.com.

• Smith claims that owning a lot of books makes you upper-middle-class. (Rebuttals by authors Elizabeth Bear and Scott Lynch.) Meme discussion.
• Smith declares the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge offensive because the environment, and also because some people don't have enough clean water. Meme discussion.