long-winded good-faith interpretation of the original
A female sex worker was complaining about a female police officer being harsh with her. This was compared to male judges being harsh to fathers in custody hearings.
The intended meaning was “Gender A is harsh to gender A, gender B to gender B, provably/hypothetically the A and B pairings are less harsh with each other”. Provably in the custody case, hypothetically in the sex worker reporting a crime case. (We only have an anecdote about that, the officer might simply have generally been an asshole. Could be tested with an implicit bias questionnaire on a larger population or such ask a social scientist not a stemlord like me)
None of it was about comparing rape to custody, that’s a waffle. Rule of thumb: If it sounds like someone implied something completely outrageous do a triple take you probably missed what they said.
Which might say something about your own reading comprehension, but I don’t know what.
Have you ever considered whether such a question can be considered an accusation. “Am I reading this right” cannot only be understood as a simple question, but “Retract that at once”. For that reason throwing such things out willy-nilly is toxic to conversation, it’s the exact opposite of “assume good faith”, two or three such comments in a row and you have a spiral and then you have twitter.
Whether I could read your mind as to which of the meanings you intended is irrelevant to the fact that it needed calling out to prevent a spiral. If you really simply want to ask whether you’ve missed something, “I don’t believe this is what you meant to say but I’m completely lost” or such would be a safe way to go about it.
And it’s always beneficial to try to find a good-faith interpretation, btw, even if you’re for sure dealing with an abhorrent commentor, or a random troll: Replying to the good-faith interpretation instead of what they meant to say is ludicrously disarming. They don’t know how to deal with it. Their hate goes unheard, the conversation becomes positive, it’s ultimate verbal aikido. (And just for the record no I’m not claiming I’m always doing it).
