As a person who has been bullied in the workplace for reasons that had nothing to do with my protected class status, I can promise you that I have no tolerance for workplace bullying, and would never imply otherwise.

I think for me the key to all of this is the “this hurts, stop hurting me” characterization of the situation. I think that it’s far too easy for people to lose sight of that, as you say, and the more you think of people as groups instead of individuals the easier it is to lose sight of it. For me, the key is to think of people as _people_ as opposed to members of a this group or that group, precisely because most people are memebers of multiple groups at once.

From that viewpoint, telling someone who is hurting that their hurt matters less because they “deserve” it due to belonging to some group (whether that group be women, men, straight, gay, old, young, whatever) seems completely uncalled for. So does telling them that they’re just too uneducated to understand why their hurt matters less. And yet we as a society do this all the time. We’ve done it and are doing it on the basis of race, we’ve done it and are doing it to children, we’ve done it and are doing it based on pretty much any group affiliation we can think of.

And yet I don’t see us really trying to teach children to really focus on people as individuals and try to understand how we are all alike instead of trying to put everyone into neat groups. And that’s unfortunate, because as long as that continues the problems you point out can’t disappear….

Much to my (leftwing Jewish) mother’s disappointment (about Israel), being a victim doesn’t necessarily make one more virtuous or empathetic or wiser. It just makes one a victim. One can be a sexist bullied nerd, an exploited poor white who holds fast to being superior to blacks, a homophobic or classist feminist, a transphobic gay rights advocate, a black who sees no analogy between gay marriage and interracial marriage rights, etc.

I want to show compassion for the experiences of anybody who has experienced childhood trauma. But, as you’ve mentioned, the topic usually comes up while someone is actively participating in viciousness, i.e. “I can be awful to you because people were awful to me as a kid.” In the case of this comment, and only using the context provided in the comment itself, the observation was certainly naive but not mean-spirited, like it usually is when I see the “a lot of geeky people were bullied as kids” comment.

That said, in the case of naive comments, I certainly have my days where “No.” is what I’d say instead.

As for it being difficult to get people to realize it’s not an argument, the only people truly responsible for improving the skills of terrible listeners are terrible listeners.