[cw: may contain self-hate triggers for scrupulous or otherwise vulnerable cis people. Please take care of yourself.]
A while back, I was unwillingly eavesdropping on a conversation about how a person “used to be a dude” and speculating about what she looked like “when she was a man.” Annoyed, I complained to a (cis) friend and finished it up with “ugh, we should just ban cis people.”
If you ask TumblrInAction, that makes me a cisphobe and just as bad as transphobes.
I used to work retail. (It turned out I’m too mentally ill for retail work. Oops.) Sometimes, when I finished a shift and someone had yelled at me because I couldn’t take their expired coupon even though if I’d done that I would have lost my job, I would come home and say to my girlfriend “ugh, I hate customers.”
It would probably have been optimally virtuous for me to say “I am frustrated with this one customer that I interacted with, although I recognize that they probably have understandable reasons for behaving the way they did and I am only seeing a tiny slice of their lives and they could be a really nice person otherwise. Also most of the customers I interact with are pleasant individuals and I shouldn’t generalize.”
Frustrated people are very rarely optimally virtuous.
Imagine if someone responded to me saying “customers suck!” with “hey, I’m a customer and I don’t suck! Actually, I’m really nice to everyone who works retail! I even arrange my groceries such that it is easy for people to bag them!” We would not assume that that person is making a reasonable point. Instead, they are being an unsympathetic douche.
In context, my statement does not mean its denotational meaning of “I think everyone who buys anything from a store is terrible”; it means “someone caused me pain! I am upset about this!”
Similarly, if I say “I hate cis people”, I do not actually mean that I hate my family, most of my friends, and every romantic partner I’ve ever had. I mean that I am in pain related to transphobia and this is upsetting me.
Now, let me clarify what I’m not justifying. It is not okay to harm individuals (for instance, by sending them hateful messages). I don’t think it’s right to seriously wish harm on a group of people or to make statements that could easily be interpreted as wishing harm on a group of people. “Ban cis people!” is obviously not a serious policy suggestion; “kill all cis people!” might be. And while it’s okay to say “fuck cis people” when you’re frustrated, I don’t think it’s good to make it part of your identity or create a community where dislike for cis people is socially rewarded– that sets up an environment where bullying is more acceptable.
And this sort of frustration does have negative side effects for some people. I wouldn’t say “ban cis people” on my tumblr for exactly this reason: I have literal-minded friends who would think that this was a serious proposal on my part, cis friends who would worry that they were doing something morally wrong for being cis, and trans friends who would be upset because of the implied insult to their friends, family, and/or past selves. But I wouldn’t blame a different trans person for making a different assessment: that they personally have few enough such friends or enough of a desire for social support on social media that they will make such statements in public.
I think that this is similar to an isolated demand for rigor— an isolated demand for morality. People agree that “bosses suck” is not bullying bosses, that “no one in Florida knows how to drive!” is not an empirical claim that no one in Florida actually knows how to drive, and that “ugh, Tumblr is awful” does not mean that everyone who uses Tumblr is doing something morally wrong. But when it comes to members of marginalized groups, suddenly hurt people have to totally avoid any use of hyperbole. This is ridiculous.
Thing of Things 
(unrelated to the content and sorry for the pedantry) the date on here is different than the date you posted it.
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What is your opinion when someone does a similar thing towards women or transmission people or a specific race etc.?
If I have a bad experience with a female friend or girlfriend and say ‘fuck women, they’re all bitches’, what is your response to that? Or is that misogynistic?
If I have an argument with a trans person about something and say ‘fuck trans people, they’re all crazy” does it also apply here? Or is it transphobic?
If I get mugged by a black person and say “fuck black people, they’re all thugs” is that ok or racist?
I’ve only actually thought the first one and even then I felt guilty about it because I realised it was misogynistic. But maybe it’s not and all of these are fine.
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Autocorrect made trans into transmission, oops.
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I like to think that when I’m frustrated with a girlfriend I can say “fuck women, they’re all bitches” (or something similar), as I’ve done so (well, said similar things, anyway) and am not inclined to think it’s bad. But I knew I was venting, and I think I’m probably under some obligation to make sure that I only vent in such ways around other people that I’m confident know I’m just venting. Which may be a relevant difference between some of the cases; I think it would be hard to find someone who was confused as to whether “I hate customers” was just venting or expressing a sincere belief about all who purchase goods. In some of the other cases, it is more likely that the statements might be made, or interpreted, as literal and sincere, and the more likely that is, the more cautious one should probably be about venting in such ways.
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Yo, fuck transmission people. </easily amused epidemiologist>
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What’s your problem with radio engineers?[/thepunsmustflow]
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Dammit, I have the greatest pun reply, but it’s awkwardly close to the actual experiences of another commenter whom I don’t want to risk triggering. *sadface*
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As a proud stick-shifter… fuck automatic transmission people.
Alternatively: you got a problem with mechanics, buddy?
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> Yo, fuck transmission people.
I believe it would be wiser to avoid fucking transmission people in this case.
Pedantry for the win !
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My rule here is not to say things that a person could reasonably confuse with you seriously believing the thing. If you say “I hate trans people” on your tumblr, I am likely to get confused and think you actually hate trans people, because there are a lot of cis people who hate trans people. If a friend says “I hate trans people” to me in private after a really dumbass argument, then that is a very different situation. Similarly, I think “I hate women” is a perfectly reasonable thing to say to your best friend after a breakup (as long as you don’t follow it with sexist stereotypes about women being overemotional) but a bad thing to say in mixed company at a party.
There’s also the context that there are a lot more trans people with a fair reason to hate trans people than cis people with a fair reason to hate trans people. If you are a cis person who was disowned by your parents for being cis, I’m going to be a lot more understanding. (There are a fair number of men with fair reasons to hate women– male survivors of female abusers, for instance– and I do think feminists should cut them some slack.)
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Most of the “tone policing” criticisms of social justice people are directed at Internet activism at places like Tumblr. It seems like those situations fit your criteria of saying “things that a person could reasonably confuse with you seriously believing the thing” On the Internet, away from face-to-face contact, it is much harder to tell if someone is venting or serious.
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Should the SJ crowd cut slack to a white person who was mugged by a young black man and so hates all young black men? What about a white person who was harassed by black people because he lived in a majority black neighborhood?
It’s okay for a male survivor of female rape to hate women. But, what if he “just” has mother issues, even if his mother wasn’t outright abusive? Is it okay for him to hate women, at least when triggered? What about a guy who had some ordinary bad experiences with women but which were traumatizing to him because the pain was exacerbated by mental illness?
These are honest questions, because I feel like the line is fuzzy for when it is okay to have suspicion or hostility towards a group.
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There are a fair number of men with fair reasons to hate women– male survivors of female abusers, for instance– and I do think feminists should cut them some slack.)
Male survivor here, and I don’t actually agree with this, nor would I with the genders reversed.
Bad generalizations are bad.
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@LTP — If a white person was literally moments ago assaulted by a black person and they let loose with the n-word, I would let it slide. It was a really bad moment for them.
Which, it’s not admirable and it probably reveals some unconscious racism, and maybe the person should work on that. But later, after the immediate trauma has lessened. At that moment right after it happened, leave them alone.
All that said, I think we should apply accurate models of the world when we analyze these things. Which, I know not everyone agrees on how the world is, but so what? This is always the case about everything. If we have object level differences, we can hash them out with evidence.
Trans people, for example, are manifestly oppressed by the vast cis majority. The vast cis majority *is not at all oppressed by trans people not even a little bit don’t be silly*. So when a trans person has reached their last bit of patience with the cis community, cuz of things like jobs and housing and health care and routine verbal abuse and not-quite-routine-but-still-fucking-common physical assault and so on, and then they let loose with a “die you fucking cis scum!”
Well that seems kinda different from the cis lady who is “oppressed” by the fact trans women get to use the women’s room, or maybe her boss yelled at her cuz she insists on calling a trans woman “he.”
Cry me a river cis girl!
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Black men often harass me. They threaten me with violence. Furthermore, my g/f and her roommate were recently assaulted by a black man. He hit them and then pulled a knife. He did this because they rejected his advances. It was hella fucked up. (They actually beat the guy up, which is maybe kinda funny but actually not cuz my g/f is still really traumatized.)
But here’s the thing: this doesn’t seem to have a lot to do with blackness, so it would be kinda nuts to cry out “OMG {n-word}!” White folks mess with us just as much. So when our anger reaches full steam, we can look at the *common element* about who fucks with us.
It’s cis folks mostly. For me, it’s more cis men than cis women, the TERFs notwithstanding. But yeah, mostly it’s cis folks.
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Are there white people who are literally oppressed by black people? Are they here in the US, someone I’m likely to meet? And look, I don’t mean oppressed by *that one guy that one time*, but in general, in their day to day. Are they correct about their oppression, or is this a Fox News style fever dream?
Those seem useful questions to ask, when judging people for their anger. Since, you know, being correct about the world matters.
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@Ozy This kind of faceplants in to Poe’s law. I have a very bad sense of which propositions are sarcastic or venting and which are taken serious by fringe groups.
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“There are a fair number of men with fair reasons to hate women”
I do not think anyone has a reason to hate women in general. My view is “Do not judge harshly lest ye be judged harshly.” So I am fine with cutting people slack for quite alot. But that is different from me thinking that anyone has a decent reason to hate men or women.
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My intuition is that it’s okay, even if you use mean stereotypes in that venting, if you meet these conditions:
1. The people who you have gone to vent to are not apart of the group you are venting about and the setting is one where you have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
2. You won’t have such negative feelings towards the group once your emotions cool (however long that takes) AND you are self-aware enough to recognize that so you don’t do anything stupid based on those feelings.
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1. is very important, I feel, because ‘obvious venting’ is not obvious all the time. When it comes to neuroatypical/scrupulous/easily triggered people someone will get it wrong, sooner or later, and probably feel horrible.
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What Ozy said. It can be okay *in just the right context*. But on the other hand, this guy is probably actually kinda serious:
http://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/davidbadash/christian_activist_files_ballot_measure_to_execute_all_gay_people_by_bullets_to_the_head
Okay first, that site is outrage porn. I get that. Second, obviously this guy won’t succeed in his legal quest. So fine.
But does anyone here doubt he really wants me dead?
Moreover, people like him are alarmingly common. In fact, given the demographics, the number of evangelicals versus the number of LGBT people — particularly we T’s — I wonder if there aren’t *as many people who want us dead as US*?
It’s kinda fucked up, and sure marriage equity is winning in the courts, in here in my bluestate bubble things are generally fine, but a ton of redstates want to make it illegal for me to use the women’s room. Like really. Real laws. I might have to travel to these states. Plus just cuz I’m in a bluestate does not mean that I am loved. Those who hate me cannot get 51% in the polls. But they often score in the 40’s. That’s a lot of folks who think I suck.
Vast transphobia backed by force of law is really-really-real-real-real.
You all get that, right?
There was a seriously legal challenge before the TX supreme court that would have undermined state laws about gender identity across the board. I’m not sure how it all played out. But it was *very real*.
So “die cis scum” or “fuck cissies!” or whatever — I avoid saying these things, as I think they are unhelpful. Folks hear them and it deepens the divide. Likewise, I would hope most sensible people would avoid saying “dammit women are bitches,” cuz what good does that do? How does that help?
A brief catharsis. Fine, if you need that. But it’s hardly admirable.
On the other hand, a general statement about women or minorities or queers — it has a different force than a statement about cis folks or white people or whatever, because it is backed by *things that really happen* rather than *things that happen inside of right-wing fever dreams*. That matters.
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I’m not sure that’s a useful distinction. For instance, you could say that it’s okay for a blue white guy to say to his blue white guy friend “fuck black people” to vent because what’s “really happening” isn’t happening in his culture, or where he lives if you define it narrowly enough. Or, to reverse it, a Christian could say that trans people saying “fuck Christians” has real force because there are places where there is Christian genocide (post-ISIS northern Iraq, for instance).
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Which is why we have to make an object-level determination about this. The women I am talking about faces the-real-hard transphobia in her day to day. Your average American evangelical faces pretty much zero danger from ISIS, and whatever danger they face is shared by literally everyone in this country. (If ISIS sets off a car bomb in the US, it’s as likely to get me as them. Actually, more likely. I live in a big city. Terrorist bombings have already happened in my town.)
So about those clowns who go on Fox News or whatever and grouse about how Christians are “the real victims” — OMG be serious.
On the other hand, take that working-class trans woman on Tumblr who got evicted last month and now is living with these cis queers who turn out to be transphobic in all kinds of shitty ways. And her workplace sucks and her coworkers mock her and the boss doesn’t care cuz pretty much anybody can fold clothes and stock shelves, but she never could afford college and not many places will hire a fucking tranny. And the TERFs at the queer center say she doesn’t know what it’s like to be a woman and the online nerd-dudes call her a guy and some fucker grabbed her ass on the subway the other night and then spit on her when he heard her voice. And THIS IS FUCKING NORMAL. Average week for a tranny in the city.
So that’s her life and it won’t get much better until she snuffs it and “fuck cis people.” She can suck dicks for money. Probably her best odds.
This story is literally commonplace. I personally know dozens of women stuck like this.
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I guess the Christians in Northern Iraq can say “fuck Muslims” or whatever. It probably won’t help.
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We all got problems, but try to be honest about the circumstances of your life. I never feel much like saying “fuck cis people,” but I’m able to arrange my life so that shitty cis people got little to say.
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I would say both are wrong but it’s more understandable when a trans person says fuck cis people rather than a cis person saying fuck trans people because of the stuff you’ve said. OTOH, trans vs cis is probably the worst disparity there is, way beyond sexism, and probably beyond racism and homophobia. The difference between a woman saying fuck men and a man saying fuck women are much MUCH smaller IMO.
Just due to how few trans people there actually are, and how spread out they are, there’s very little chance of having a bunch of trans people gang up on a cis person for being cis very often. OTOH, with women vs. men or racism, there actually are enough people that you have a non negligible amount of people who are ‘oppressed’ or harmed in the ‘wrong (e.g. woman harming men)’ way by those around them who hate them for those intrinsic things.
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> there’s very little chance of having a bunch of trans people gang up on a cis person for being cis very often.
I thought the entire premise of this post was built around the notion that the Internet makes it very easy for any group to gang up on anyone…
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Fair point about the online thing, I was mainly thinking of meatspace. I think the thing to remember is for online you can usually just stop interacting with them / block them, but you can’t do that in meatspace. But I suppose with dozing and stuff that becomes sort of a meatspace level thing, although I haven’t heard of any cases of that by trans people to a customer person just because they were cis
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>I guess the Christians in Northern Iraq can say “fuck Muslims” or whatever. It probably won’t help.
See, this just seems like a terrible idea that encourages conflict – doesn’t it? Maybe that’s just me.
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So I fully agree that Anti-SJ people are unwilling to take jokes with respect to this and to some extent, it is an isolated demand for rigor. But in opposition to the Florida or Bosses case, I think part of Anti-Sj people’s unhappiness is that vents in the opposite direction, or which could be construed in the opposite direction, are taken literally and treated as horrible (while if you say something bad about lazy employees or New York drivers, you won’t get nearly as bad a response). If you are in a space dominated by gay assholes and you say “fuck gay people” people won’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Now it’s probably true that the probability that the venting is “legitimate” as opposed to just generic outgroup hatred is highly correlated to whether or not the person venting is doing it towards the more or less marginalized groups, but this is not that obviously an isolated demand for rigor here, in general, saying I hate people of a given race/gender/orientation will be viewed very negatively.
I’d probably agree that it’s more reasonable for a woman who just broke up with a man to say “I hate men” then a man who broke up with a woman who broke up with a man to say “I hate women” because misogyny is a more serious problem than misandry, but if you deny that institutional sexism favors men in the US, then it’s completely unclear why you should support such a conclusion.
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Somewhat unrelated point, I’m uncomfortable with the comfort with these because of the ease and regularity with which attacking the privileged group goes to attacking marginalized members of the privileged group. When hearing/reading people vent with some regularity I’ll see the following
straight girls venting about gay men
Non-white people venting about white jews
Terfs venting about trans people*
affluent queers venting about “rednecks and hicks”
In all these the “vent” ends up focusing on a group which clearly lacks relative institutional power and therefore is more liable to suffer harm even if the person who ripped off the latina women was a white jew, I’m going to feel very uncomfortable, this doesn’t always happen but I’ve seen it happen enough that I suspect the groups vents against privileged groups are most likely to harm are those disenfranchised in other ways.
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Feminists venting about “neckbeards?”
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And even if institutional sexism in the US does favor men on average (as I agree it probably does), there are almost certainly some instances where subgroup policies, or a combination of patriarchical gender roles, will end up favoring women. In those instances, it would seem no less reasonable for a man to say in frustration that he hates women.
Of course, because of the overall culture, his statement is much more likely to be misinterpreted. But if you want to ban such statements while agreeing with Ozy’s original post, you should at least be aware that you’ll catch some less-guilty frustrated people.
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Is it actually an isolated demand for rigor when the people you are making the demand to are already doing it themselves in a whole lot of other “isolated” cases?
Demanding that someone not say “fuck cis people”, when they *already* think it’s evil to say “fuck trans people” or “fuck black people” isn’t an *isolated* demand for rigor, it’s just a demand for more consistent rigor.
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As people have already begun saying… is the conclusion that there are situations where a marginalized/oppressed man, after being hurt in interactions with women, is entitled to proclaim: “Fuck women, they are useless”?
I don’t feel like there are, to be honest! I think that our feminist disgust at such appalling displays of bigotry should be extended to other situations where people are “just venting” in public.
Private closed spaces, fine, say whatever the hell you want, you [ethnic slur] [insult]s! But the public sphere cannot be one big “safe space”, because this makes other groups feel unsafe and inevitably a hierarchy emerges of who’s allowed to have what feelings about what group. That’s fucked!
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Is the conclusion of this post that frustrated people often don’t mean what they are saying?
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The conclusion is that people use metonymy, hyperbole and other forms of non literal language.
I’m lucky that I can say “fuck Jesus” because that means I don’t have to say “fuck Christians” when I am too upset to be coherent.
I did used to think “fuck white people” was literal and got very upset. I didn’t respond by yelling, I responded by sincerely believing I was doing something morally wrong. I think it is helpful to explain that things like this are just venting.
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<i “Ban cis people!” is obviously not a serious policy suggestion; “kill all cis people!” might be.
This one sentence undermines what would otherwise be a strong post. This is a complete illusion-of-transparency failure right here. A lot of people who have encountered the less pleasant edges of “social justice” might well think that “ban cis people” is a serious policy suggestion, depending on the context in which they are encountering it.
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Which context is this?
Like, we have a monthly trans women’s picnic around these parts — although we’ve kinda lapsed for winter — but anyway. Guess what! Cis folks are banned. I mean, not even AFAB trans folks are welcome. Nor our partners or friends. It’s for AMAB trans-femme folks only. Yay us!
So yeah I guess it can be a serious policy proposal — for our little monthly gathering in some public park somewhere, where we make lots of tranny jokes and talk about how awkward it is to date dykes.
It’s a really cool scene, but really mostly you’re not missing much. I mean, what would the average cis guy even do?
So what is the context to your “serious policy proposal” to ban cis folks? What does it even look like?
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That was disingenuous. Stop that.
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No it was not. I’m seriously asking what a proposal by trans people to ban cis people would look like? Where do we have that kind of power? In which cases were cis people meaningfully banned? Can you name any? Trans folks get banned by cis folks routinely.
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Absent qualifiers “ban cis people” clearly reads as “make being cisgendered illegal,” not as “exclude cis people from a social function specifically created as social support for trans people.”
Whether you currently have the power to carry out an agenda is not actually relevant to whether it is ethical to make statements advocating that agenda.
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OMG get a grip. Some trans gal ranting about overthrowing the cis majority is a rather different thing from *actual real state legislators working to pass shitty laws about us*. These differences really matter, like in shape of livable lives versus non-livable lives.
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@Veronica: I feel like this is a M&B. The motte is “trans people cannot actually ban cis people.” The bailey is “banning cis people is not a serious policy suggestion” (which is the point Matthew took issue with). No, they can’t actually ban cis people. But an inability to carry out a suggestion doesn’t mean that the suggestion isn’t serious.
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This is a case where the “me too” nature of social media creates problems. One frustrated person’s off the cuff “Fuck X people!” can quickly turn into a whole chorus of tumblr/twitter accounts chanting “Yeah! Fuck X people!”. And the chorus is bound to include at least a few unpleasant folks who take the sentiment more seriously than the original person who was just letting off steam.
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Many of said unpleasant folks are HIGHLY LIKELY to be X people themselves; in certain ways, the *especially* privileged ones who can psychologically and socially afford it…
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You wrote about selective enforcement in yesterday’s article comments. It certainly applies here too.
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You’re arguing for venting by attacking a characteristic about a person that has little or nothing to do with what they did.
That asshole customer acted like an asshole because they’re an asshole, not because they’re a customer. Plenty of customers are not assholes. So, to vent, why not say, “I hate assholes” or “We need to ban asshole customers”
Cis people saying transphobic things are doing so because they’re transphobic. So, instead of “fuck cis people”, how about “fuck transphobes?”
It’s not the venting that anyone minds, it’s making a connection between bad behavior and a trait that is actually not a bad thing.
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Why, yes, that would be optimally virtuous. And your plan for making all upset people optimally virtuous is…?
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Not defending shitty behavior, for starters.
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There’s also space between “optimally virtuous” (as you’re defining it) and “insulting people who did nothing to you to their face.” The most obvious option: Fire free on that one dude.
There. Venting accomplished. And without having to attack anyone on the basis of their immutable group membership, only on the basis of having personally pissed you off.
A secondary option, which you touched on yourself: Vent in a space where the only people who will hear you understand (a) that the things you are proposing/declaring are not actually good/true and (b) that you do not actually mean them.
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@anon
Scrupulosity trigger content warning:
Explain why lacking the extraordinary effort required to never say something suboptimal when sad is more “shitty behaviour” than lacking the extraordinary effort required to give all money not needed for survival to charity. Because they sound about equally hard and the charity one is a life or death thing whereas the suboptimal words is a hurt feelings thing.
( I actually mentally protect myself from mean sj by reminding myself of this thing. It is too hard to never say suboptimal words and if we were gonna impose rules that hard we would also impose the give away all your stuff rule)
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@queenshulamit: Sins of commission are in general regarded as worse than sins of omission, all else being equal. Also, many sins of omission (and some of commission) don’t exist under non-utilitarian moral frameworks. I think that most deontologists and virtue ethicists alike would say that it is wrong to insult people for no good reason, but that it is not wrong to keep more of your money than is required for survival.
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This is mostly what I came here to say, although I’m less confident about it than you are.
What’s the difference in internal mental experience between “Fuck cis people!” and “Fuck transphobes!”, or even “Fuck abusive assholes!”?
Is there a significant difference in experience between criticizing people vs behaviour?
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I think humans like to make generalizations about people based on superficial characteristics–that’s where in-group/out-group stuff comes from–and so it’s more satisfying to say “Fuck customers!” than to say “fuck assholes!”.
As I said in another comment tree, as long as you are in a private space and you aren’t talking to people of that group, I think that sort of venting is okay.
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Another thought: I think a variation of this dynamic plays out in public as well as private discourse. “Fuck [all members of X]” is a classic tabelware fusillade.
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As a long-time veteran of /r/TumblrInAction, I doubt a frustrated trans person saying “ban cis people” would ever make the front page. We prefer to poke fun at bloggers who say things like “if you’re not a feminist, you’re objectively pro-rape” or “I hate it when people sit on my astral tail” or “video games about orcs are secretly racist genocide fantasies” or “gay men are misogynists because they won’t sleep with me”… You get the idea.
Let s/he/they who has never vented cast the first stone. TiA itself is basically a platform for venting against (what we see as) the most toxic social-justice memes.
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Having drifted through TIA once or twice, I’ve seen “fuck cis people” posts on the front page, but they’re things like that super-white “latinx” chick who talks shit about “white people,” proudly speaks incompetent Spanish, and post bitcomics about how she “sometimes doesn’t speak English to cissies” and the like. Or that other (or the same?) one who is “homeless by choice” but likes to post oh-so-persecutedly about how cis dudes walk by her on the sidewalk while she’s trying to sleep, putting her in fear of sexual assault (resulting in her screaming at them, of course).
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Yes. When it comes to members of marginalized groups, hurt people have to totally avoid any use of hyperbole. Because when it comes to members of marginalized groups, hurt people have to totally avoid any use of hyperbole. That’s obtuse, so I’ll make it clear:
When it comes to [non-marginalized people talking about] members of marginalized groups, hurt [non-margalized] people have to totally avoid any use of hyperbole.
When it comes to members of marginalized groups [talking about non-marginalized people], hurt [marginalized] people have to totally avoid any use of hyperbole.
It’s simple reciprocity. The request that society expend effort to ensure that society is a safe space for marginalized groups places the responsibility on marginalized groups to expend effort to ensure that marginalized groups are a safe space for the rest of society. To do otherwise is defection in the prisoner’s dilemma.
Even if you believe that the power dynamics between marginalized and non-marginalized groups excuses such behavior of marginalized groups, you will find it very hard to convince people to cooperate with you while insisting that it’s okay for you to defect against them. And you should be wary of holding such a position, because that is a vector by which horrible behavior sneaks in. You don’t feel “kill all cis people” is acceptable venting, but how do convince those who disagree once you’ve abandoned the Schelling point of “hateful language about gender identity is not okay”?
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The request that society expend effort to ensure that society is a safe space for marginalized groups places the responsibility on marginalized groups to expend effort to ensure that marginalized groups are a safe space for the rest of society. To do otherwise is defection in the prisoner’s dilemma.
I… really don’t think you’ve thought this through. If this is a prisoner’s dilemma, the optimal strategy is tit for tat, and trans people (excluding some fairly obnoxious corners of tumblr) are nowhere near playing tit for tat with cis people. “Cis people should all be trans, it is morally wrong for them to be cis” is tit for tat; “cis men are inherently disgusting and the thought of accidentally being sexually attracted to one is humiliating” is tit for tat; “remembering your pronouns is hard, I’m going to call all of you ‘zie'” is tit for tat; people regularly calling you “cis scum”, not even intending to be offensive, just thinking that’s the proper term, is tit for tat.
I don’t think we should say those things. It is morally wrong to do so. Just because you keep hurting us is no reason for us to hurt you. But Jesus Christ if sometimes we’re frustrated, forgive us!
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>“cis men are inherently disgusting and the thought of accidentally being sexually attracted to one is humiliating” is tit for tat
Let’s be real, we do currently suffer a mild and watered-down form of that.
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Multi: A little bit? But, like, “that person is a TRANS WOMAN” is a joke in a way that “that person is a CIS MAN” never is.
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(“We” as in the whole society; I empathize really v. strongly with cis men but would categorically NEVER call myself one.)
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Yes, yes. And much of this is probably due to slut-shaming; as in, gay men, in less homophobic environments, are probably seen as more valid objects of desire even by non-gay-men than cis-het-men are?
“That chubby brash math nerd chick is so hot, hope she likes me!” seems to be rather more permissible to say than “That chubby sad math nerd guy is so hot, hope he likes me!”. (NOT talking about who is ACTUALLY more likely to be desired or dated!)
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(much of this hand-wringing about teh menz on my part is – as I’ve said – my brain telling me that duh, SURELY cis men are much more oppressed than trans women, because it feels so much better and less hurtful to identify as a trans woman after trying to be a cis man :p)
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I do. But I also believe, for example, that “fuck feminists” is a similarly appropriate response to infuriating posts from the feminist blog-o-sphere, and the feminist blog-o-sphere is pretty unforgiving about it. The point I’m trying to make is that it seems like an isolated demand for forgiveness. And it would be significantly easier to just forgive you without reminding you that it’s not cool if I could also be forgiven for my missteps without being called a horrible monster who hates [insert_marginalized_group_here] (thanks, twitter![/sarcasm]).
I also have to point out that I find your classes for tit-for-tat too narrow; society in general allows more wiggle room. Self defense, for example, allows me to use a firearm to defend myself from a knife wielder; I am not obligated to use a knife myself for tit-for-tat to be maintained. You’re focusing on specific instances of disrespect for your gender identity rather than the broader class of disrespecting one’s gender identity. The broader class is a valid interpretation, is probably the one more commonly held by people. This seems especially so since social justice explicitly encodes “respect people’s gender identity”, and not a hodge-podge of “respect the gender identity X” enumerated over a large list of gender identities.
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You guys realize that most cis men are *not* shy, frustrated nerds. Right, you all get that?
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“Tit-for-tat” glosses over a lot. It’s a near-optimal strategy (you can squeeze out a few more points in special cases) in one-on-one iterated PD situations with no prior knowledge, but that’s not a particularly good model of human cooperation; we exist in an incestuous slurry of social interaction, and can communicate with each other, form coalitions, draw inferences from prior behavior, and even read source code in a weak sense. If you’re doing all that and you can assume a reasonably varied and non-pathological ecosystem of agents, you can expect to beat a dumb TFT agent ten times out of ten.
The applications to social justice venting are left as an exercise to the reader.
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I don’t know if this counts as “tit-for-tat”, but still: when you say something like, “it’s ok for me to insult you”, you are signalling disrespect (or possibly outright hatred). People tend to react very poorly to such signaling, and they do tend to respond with disrespect (or hatred) of their own.
It is entirely possible that what you really meant to say was, “I am trying to build a better society which would be more fair to all of its members. I am employing several tactics in order to do so, and one of them is to compensate for the power imbalance in our current society by introducing a power imbalance going in the opposite direction, vis a vis insulting people like you. It’s nothing personal.” Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to say stuff like that without signaling disrespect accidentally. A talented writer or a charismatic politician could pull that off, but very few people are that good.
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@Ozy
“But Jesus Christ if sometimes we’re frustrated, forgive us!”
It is completely understandable to be frustrated. It is completely understandable to not always speak optimally. And if you ask for forgiveness/apologize/whatever-have-you when you do this, it’s relatively easily given.
But that all argues against your original statement, that its perfectly fine to say things that are hurtful, as long as you are only hurting the “right” people (if anyone was hurt at all.)
Because its really, really, really easy to start saying not just “fuck cis people” but also ” fuck black people” (because they are so much less welcoming of trans people) and “fuck Arabs” (because the countries that are home to most Arabs are not welcoming of trans people) and on and on.
This isn’t a slippery slope argument. It’s a “that thought pattern is hurtful” argument.
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Veronica: my brain cannot actually alieve that when an SJ-ish discussion mentions “cis men”, for various reasons, unless the spell is broken by mentioning some stereotypically non-nerdy signifiers about said “cis men” :p
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@ozymandias:
>But, like, “that person is a TRANS WOMAN” is a joke in a way that “that person is a CIS MAN” never is.
It’s … unquestionably a matter of degree, and the A TRANS WOMAN HAHA SO FUNNY things are far, far worse, but I don’t think this statement is actually accurate.
Cis men are stereotyped as stupid, libidinous slobs, and there are indeed jokes based around simply presenting a “typical” man and then going HAHA SO FUNNY.
This is precisely the same phenomenon as presenting an unshaven, muscled cis man in a dress and too much makeup, and saying HAHA A TRANS WOMAN SO FUNNY. It is not nearly as bad. But “that person is a CIS MAN” is a joke in exactly the same way that “this person is a TRANS WOMAN” is.
… I don’t actually have a point, exactly, I just think it’s interesting.
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@MugaSofer: I think you’re misinterpreting Ozy; given the context (“‘cis men are inherently disgusting and the thought of accidentally being sexually attracted to one is humiliating’ is tit for tat”), I’m pretty sure that they were referring to the “oh my god, she has a penis!” trope, not the “this is what a typical trans woman looks like” trope. The latter has a cis male equivalent, the former (for fairly obvious reasons) does not.
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How about the Schelling Point of “suggesting killing people is not OK”
Also, I am cis and most cis people are defecting already. Most cis people are mean to trans people. So if trans people continue to be nice anyway, how does that incentivise cis people being nice?
So its not good, game theoretically, for trans-people-as-a-group to be nice to cis-people-as-a-group. If the two groups were monolithic well co ordinated it would make sense for trans people to be mean to us as a group. But in reality groups are not a hive mind.
Many cis people will be convinced to be nice by logic, once we see trans people are genuinely just people who are unhappy about their assigned gender and wish to live as a different one as opposed to soem weird mean theory about hating God/ getting privilege/ wanting attention/ having a fetish/ whatever.
Also this is off topic but my system 1 forgets Ozy is trans.
System 1: but trans means you changed your pronouns! Ozy has always been a they/zie etc.
System 2: trans means different gender than assigned at birth. People used to think Ozy was a girl.
System 1: No Ozy has been a they since they began existing 2 years ago
System 2: Ozy is not 2 years old
System 1: Ozy was 21 when they began existing
System 2: Ozy began existing 23 years ago that is why they are 23
System 1: no you are silly, I met Ozy 2 years ago so that is when they began existing.
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OK Ozy wrote a better version of what I was trying to say in the time it took to type the comment.
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Most cis people are mean to trans people.
Forgive me if this is overly pedantic, but is this actually true? I mean, I can totally believe that a majority of cis people that any given trans person interacts with are mean to them, but at the same time, the majority of cis people may not ever have (wittingly) met a trans person, have probably never expressed any views about trans people at all, etc. You can argue that there is an environment of malign neglect, given the legal and institutional discrimination that trans people face, but that’s really not how most observers reading “most cis people are mean to trans people” are going to interpret the statement.
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Most cis people in Boston are not mean to me. But then, this:
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Working link.
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I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to apply Prisoner’s Dilemma reasoning to groups, because we tend to model ourselves from an individual perspective, but outgroup members from a collective one.
So a cis person thinks “I don’t defect against trans people, so they shouldn’t defect against me,” while the trans person thinks “Cis people defect against me, therefore I should defect against them,” and they’re both wrong. Or “not even wrong”, really.
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You are smart.
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Eh, I’d say “I don’t defect against trans people, so they shouldn’t defect against me” is perfectly sound, provided that the one in fact does not defect against trans people.
Groups are not entities, they are abstractions. They don’t really exist. Defecting against all members of group X because some (or even many) members of group X are defecting against you is bad strategy, not least because it means that rational behavior for initially non-hostile members of group X is to defect against you as well.
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If it’s bad strategy to auto-defect against Group X members, then it’s also bad strategy to auto-cooperate with them. Their group membership is irrelevant from a game-theoretic perspective; neither player “owes” the other anything as a result of past interactions of other Xers and non-Xers.
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Tit-for-tat with benefit-of-the-doubt does absurdly better in the mirror match.
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I agree with stillnotking’s critique, but I also feel like modeling my interactions with *individual* cis people as prisoner’s dilemmas doesn’t work particularly well, because of splash damage. There’s no way I can respond to someone who thinks that being trans is morally wrong with “no, being cis is morally wrong!” without harming a lot of innocent cis people.
(Although it is amusing to imagine forbidding transphobes from using public bathrooms…)
I think prisoner’s dilemmas are a bad tool for figuring out what to do in this situation.
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Yes, but tit-for-tat with the benefit of the doubt is wholly independent of the group memberships of the players, and considering a group as a single large player is going to introduce the error previously described.
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stillnotking: I disagree, I think. I have priors about how cis people will treat me; if I predict a cis person will defect in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma, or be DefectBot in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, it makes sense for me to act on this information and defect first. (If we’re modeling this as a Prisoner’s Dilemma, which we shouldn’t.)
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@Ozy: That’s a self-fulfilling prophecy; the cis person would apply the same reasoning to you, and then you’re both in a permanent defection loop.
I have the familiar feeling that Martin Luther King put this more eloquently.
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stillnotking: That is an extremely sanctimonious way of pointing out the obvious fact that the equilibrium for one-shot prisoner’s dilemmas is defect/defect.
Following my own advice and not fucking modeling this as a prisoner’s dilemma: I assume that the average cis person is going to be obnoxious, yes. In practice, this means I decide in each interaction whether I’d rather be misgendered or put up with obnoxiousness (as someone who is lucky enough to have the ability to choose). I don’t have enough power to punish obnoxious cis people for being obnoxious to me. Fortunately, I’m fairly introverted and the rationalist community has social norms about respecting trans people, so as long as I mostly socialize within the rationalist community or with cis people I trust to respect me I can usually be gendered correctly and avoid obnoxiousness.
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Well, my employer’s policy on restrooms is this: if someone has a problem with trans folks in their chosen bathroom, well they can pretty much stuff it. Pick a different bathroom.
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The correct formulation is:
“I don’t defect against [specific trans person] people, so [specific trans person] shouldn’t defect against me,”
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Idk about King, but Douglas Hofstadter called it superrationality.
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> I assume that the average cis person is going to be obnoxious, yes.
Hmm, that’s interesting. Firstly, I’m a cis person, and obviously I’m obnoxious, so that’s a data point in your favor. But secondly, I personally have the expectation (based on my life experience so far) that any random person I meet is going to be obnoxious — regardless of that person’s gender, race, political affiliation, or whatever.
I am aware of the Typical Mind Fallacy, so I’m curious to find out if other people feel the same way.
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Y’all know the King line was just a dumb throwaway joke, right, not me anointing myself his successor? Relevant username is relevant.
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I feel like “I hate customers” seems a lot more ok because it doesn’t point to a specific group of people – everyone (more or less) is a customer at some point, including whoever is saying it. Changing the statement to something like “Fuck Walmart customers” makes me a lot less ok with it.
I disagree that statements like “tumblr is the worst” aren’t interpreted as criticism against the people that use it. When I spent more time on reddit, I’d get VERY defensive when I heard similar statements about it, and I notice people seem to react similarly to those sorts of criticisms about twitter.
I agree that people venting is normal, but there’s a difference between saying something in private vs on the internet, where it’s signal can be trivially boosted by anyone seeing it. I am more or less equally not ok with the statements “Fuck cis people”, “fuck walmart shoppers”, “fuck reddit”, and “fuck people from florida” being tweeted or tumbld. I (obviously) don’t think any of it should be banned, but I’m in favor of keeping the norms against them strong.
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> But when it comes to members of marginalized groups, suddenly hurt people have to totally avoid any use of hyperbole. This is ridiculous.
I don’t think that’s exactly where the demand is isolated.
Let’s start with the obvious: invert it. Imagine someone applying the rhetorical device “kill all” to a group like “trans people”. No one would find that remotely acceptable. Observe how I don’t feel safe stringing those four words together *inside quotation marks*.
The next obvious thought is that it has something to do with the plausibility of the threat. But the exact same pattern shows up for “damn all X”, “fuck all X”, and “all X suck”, which are impractical, incoherent and not a policy recommendation respectively, regardless of X.
But there is something going on here. Because “kill all customers” is an acceptable bit of hyperbole from a frustrated salesperson.
The big thing I notice there is that “customer” is not a persistent attribute. Tomorrow, you may well be a customer yourself.
A one-way transition isn’t enough. “Kill all children” or “kill all old people” aren’t accepted. A back-and-forth seems to be required.
So what about “kill all bosses”? That one feels iffy to me. In fact, it feels iffy on precisely this rule. If you come from a perspective that some people are Bosses and others are Workers and those classes are fixed, it seems wrong. But if you come from a perspective that the boss is whoever didn’t say “not it” fast enough at the quarterly meeting, it feels fine.
I doubt this covers all the cases, but I can’t quite find a case where it doesn’t.
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“So what about “kill all bosses”? That one feels iffy to me. In fact, it feels iffy on precisely this rule. If you come from a perspective that some people are Bosses and others are Workers and those classes are fixed, it seems wrong. But if you come from a perspective that the boss is whoever didn’t say “not it” fast enough at the quarterly meeting, it feels fine.”
This is how I justify my disconcertingly strong alief in “Kill All Nazis” to myself. As in, I wouldn’t physically assault an *unprovoking* Nazi in a rl situation, I wouldn’t support dangerous laws that are justified by their harm to Nazis… but I really do alieve that avowed Nazis of various kinds suffering physical harm or violence is morally good and a reason to be happy.
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(also I don’t feel this unhealthy obsession towards rapists or child abusers or such)
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strange, i feel that towards child abusers and rapists, but not nazis.
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(content warning for discussion of ISIS atrocities, rape, and war violence)
I would have said I didn’t feel that alief towards anyone before- that it was always better that people be rehabilitated than punished, that all human life should be respected even if they’d done despicable things, etc. I might feel differently on the visceral, emotional level about certain individuals, but never really entire groups. And then ISIS came along, and I started following the conflicts they were involved in. One thing which became clear from following the conflicts in Iraq and Syria on a deeper level than mainstream reporting offers is that ISIS is actually *worse* than I think most people realize. They’re basically rapists, child abusers, and Nazis all rolled into one- I mean, of course they aren’t literally Nazis, there’s lots of important ideological differences, but in terms of the “totalitarian, genocidal organization bent on conquest” part, there’s a striking similarity. Combine that with the fact that they destroy art and history at every chance they get, and with the fact that they have explicitly legalized the rape of women kidnapped by their fighters, along with innumerable other atrocities- well, I’ve found my old views sorely tested.
When it comes to conscious belief, I still would say the best possible outcome, in the case of someone who joins ISIS, is that they get out of the group, recognize the evil they’d done, and seek to make amends- but on the alief level, I have often found myself fervently wishing that the Kurds or whoever else would kill every last one of them. The main thing I feel hearing about ill befalling ISIS members is satisfaction, and I definitely have an alief that it’s a moral good. (Particularly when one very high-level ISIS leader- their top “spiritual advisor”, supposedly- got shot in the head by a Kurdish sniper.) I even noticed my usual squeamishness around gore pretty much vanished when it came to pictures of dead ISIS fighters, though it’s still largely there when it comes to non-ISIS members. I’m not exactly proud of this, but I have a hard time seeing it as much of a moral failing, even if on the conscious level, I still think it’s not exactly optimally virtuous.
These are not really feelings I’ve ever felt before- not on this sort of collective level, at least. They’re the only case where “kill all ” doesn’t seem even slightly fundamentally wrong to me on some level. I’m not totally sure why- they’re intensely evil, but there are other groups that are comparable, and I don’t get the same response to them. I think part of it for me is that ISIS is as powerful and active as they are right now- if they’re reduced to a minor little terrorist group again as opposed to a powerful, conquering entity that rules over millions of people, I wonder if it won’t be such a visceral feeling for me anymore. I suspect I would have felt the same thing about the Nazis if I’d lived in the time of the Third Reich.
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(The “kill all” in the last paragraph was supposed to say “kill all fill-in-the-blank” after it. Forgot that brackets would get read as an html tag…)
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“I suspect I would have felt the same thing about the Nazis if I’d lived in the time of the Third Reich.”
Oh, well, I suppose cultural context matters a lot here. The War is probably the most important founding myth in today’s Russian culture, and almost every family here knows of relatives ~3 generations back who fought or died in it… (My own grand-grandfather fought against the Japanese, though; he was in the navy.)
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“Kill all [politically disfavored group]” has been a staple of politics in general, and the 19th/20th c. left in particular. The alliance between the academic left and social justice may not be entirely coincidental.
Semi-relatedly, I would like to express how warm and fuzzy I feel for not yet encountering the “punching up is OK” argument.
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It seems like “fuck the cis” should be subject to similar expectations of decorum as “fuck my customers” or “fuck my students”. These are fine at a party, questionable in a public venue, and verboten on Twitter. Sometimes you have to vent, but it’s co sidered extremely rude to vent in a context in which the target of your venting is going to overhear you.
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I don’t think “fuck my customers” is necessarily verboten on Twitter? (I mean, perhaps if your account is connected to your real name…)
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My experience is more towards the teaching end, where I’d be risking the sack if I said something like “fuck undergraduates” on Facebook. I think that if I read something along those lines while I myself was an undergrad, I’d have felt somewhat offended even if it were anonymous.
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Essentially, this is only a problem because the venting occurs on a medium in which the message is permanent and visible to everyone, while simultaneously being stripped of tone, non-verbal cues, and almost all context.
It’s like when I tell my wife I’m going to superglue the dog’s ass shut. I wouldn’t *really*, but people on the internet cannot smell the motivation behind the remark (which is probably just as well – I swear that dog’s ass will one day be banned under the Geneva Convention as a chemical weapon).
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I am having mixed feelings about this. When I read through this post I was convinced by that argument. I agreed that expecting people to never make venting statements that expressed hatred of an entire group was an unreasonable standard to expect people to live up to.
Then I remembered I’ve spent my entire life living up to that standard.
I do not express hatred for entire groups of people when I vent. It is something I have trained myself not to do. Whenever I express hatred and anger I always add in tons of qualifiers to make sure everyone knows I’m only talking about a few people, probably not them. Whenever I get really angry at a group of people there is a little voice that reminds me that I am stereotyping and that I cannot reasonably get mad at everyone.
However, I am willing to accept that I might be Typical-Minding here, and that I am unusually good at doing this. The problem is that doing that makes me seem elitist.
I think one thing that might make it easier for me is that I get profoundly embarrassed when I discover I’ve made inaccurate statements about anything. Fear of being embarrassed later helps stop me from making any overly large generalization.
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I think individuals choosing not to use inaccurate hyperbole when they vent is great! My post is strictly against having doing that as a social norm (and, in particular, as a social norm directed disproportionately against members of marginalized groups).
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It’s understandable that sometimes people need to vent. But two caveats:
– Venting in public on broadcast media seems more harmful than doing it privately with friends who understand what you mean (as many have already mentioned).
– The right way to think about it is that excess stereotyping when venting is an understandable moral failure rather than morally neutral or even praiseworthy. Parts of the Social Justice community seem to have established a norm where venting against privileged groups may not be criticized under any circumstances, and is even seen as a praiseworthy display of righteous anger. Valorizing public displays of anger, and discouraging criticism of them on any grounds, seems like a very bad social norm. It’s bad not only for the target of the venting, but also for bystanders who are uncomfortable around frequent displays of strong hostility.
So if someone wants to say “ban cis people” in a moment of frustration that’s not the worst thing, but when that results in a flood of praise and encouragement from their community, it’s probably indicative of a bad social dynamic.
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I’ve never, to my recollection, said anything along the lines of “fuck [large social group]”; but I have had an experience that might be analogous in some ways.
I used to develop for a niche online game, small enough that you’ve probably never heard of it but large enough to have evolved its own weird little user culture separate from that if its developers. There wasn’t any clean separation between devs and mods, so a lot of my job ended up involving mod stuff: generally meaning punishing people for a variety of more-or-less petty infractions.
Now, we’d managed to build for ourselves a truly messed-up, adversarial relationship with our playerbase; the details are unimportant. This was frustrating. I ended up saying things like “fuck players” a lot.
I felt justified in doing so then. I still feel justified in retrospect. But I was wrong in a deeper sense than simple justification. The problem wasn’t the players; the problem was the adversarial culture. Yes, there were players who were deliberately causing problems, not just following their incentives; yes, they were making me miserable; and yes, I couldn’t effectively do anything about them for reasons too complicated to list here. But by venting, by giving in to frustration, by targeting them in the inadequate ways I could, I was making the dev/player relationship more adversarial. Causing more problems for myself.
I’m not trying to preach appeasement. There are problems that only get solved by stomping on people. But when you’re dealing with a group conflict, and the retaliation isn’t going to actually solve the problem, I’ve learned the hard way that it’s best to think twice or more.
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The natural response to your comment is, “Ok, how do I know when stomping on people won’t actually solve the problem ?”
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That’s a hard question in general, but when said stomping consists of venting over the Internet, it gets much easier.
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Unfortunately, the line that separates “venting over the Internet” from “organizing a public shaming campaign that destroys lives” is very thin. It’s even possible to cross it by accident, nowadays.
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I think maybe Nornagest is saying that “venting over the Internet” will never solve any actual problems, therefore it’s probably never justified.
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I try not to apply my ethical standards to everyone on Earth (we’ve all got our own shit going on, and part of what I demand of myself is to remember that I’m very probably wrong, which causes a weird glitch when I demand that other people remember that they may be wrong), but I can say that I think a world in which no one engages in this kind of hyperbole is closer to the world that I want to live in than one in which everyone engages in it.
Personally, I feel like vomiting when I hear “fuck cis scum,” and I’m trans.
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In my mind venting is about context. It’s one thing to vent in a private place with friends and family members since those people are likely to understand you and support you. But why would anyone need to vent in a public space were complete strangers can here you? Why would anyone expect emotional support from random strangers they don’t know? Commonsense should tell someone that venting in a public space were potentially thousands of people can hear you and become angry is a bad idea. So its hard for me to believe that people who vent in public spaces where they can generate maximum controversy and maximum offense are merely venting.
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It depends. A lot of people treat tumblrs as private spaces– like, if you look at my tumblr you can find me having suicidal ideation yesterday, which I wouldn’t put here. That’s just what the social norms of personal tumblrs are like. I don’t think that’s a bad thing: it’s basically a very large group conversation.
Unfortunately, sometimes that privacy doesn’t end up working: because of how Tumblr is structured, a post intended to be read by your hundred followers and that 9,999/10,000 times would only be read by your hundred followers can wound up being read by fifty thousand people. That’s unfortunate, but I don’t think it makes sense to blame OP.
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Does tumblr not have a friends-only setting for posts?
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No, because it’s a total garbage website.
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Why . . . why do people use it? It seems like every possible feature of tumblr is designed to maximize the possibility for toxoplasma[1]. No distinction between reblogs and comments, inability to properly follow a multi-person discussion because reblog-with-comment notes are mixed with reblog-without-comment notes and like notes, stacked discussions in reblogs by default, and no private posts? What about it is good?
To be fair, I created a tumblr so I could reply to posts that are only on tumblr (replying to shit that’s interesting but that I disagree with borders on a compulsion for me), but I’d never use it to post anything that’s not a reply. And yet people do. Why?
[1] Totally stealing this idea from Scott, of course.
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@Osberend
Maybe it’s useful for art sharing?
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It’s not quite as awful for discussion as Twitter?
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Okay, fair, but that just leaves the question of why anyone uses it for anything but art sharing.
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@Osberend
Beats me! I don’t even find it useful for art!
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@ozymandias: True, but there are other options! WordPress! Livejournal! Blogger! G+! Even Facebook!
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I really hate it when people “vent” like this. When people say things like “fuck all men,” “I hate feminists,” “republicans are idiots” or “4chan users are racist” they are badly insulting my friends. Sometimes I can manage to roll with it and stay calm. But I really do not enjoy people insulting my friends and tacitly expecting me to find this funny or uplifting. Its terribly offputting to imagine how my friend would feel if ze could hear this stuff.
I do not think “its ok to vent about outgroups” is a good social norm. The norm makes it very easy for stereotypes to form. In today’s society there seems to be a ton of misconceptions and tensions between races, sexes, politcial views, etc. I think a social norm that makes hatred for the evil outgroup easier is a bad idea.
Though my general attitude is “Judge not lest ye be Judged.” So I am not going to fault people for venting. Though I often try to politiely discourage people from doing it near me.
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See, I think of allowing venting as making *true* hatred less likely. If you make it taboo to vent about out-groups, the frustrations and bad experiences will build and build until they boil over and lead the person to do some really bad shit. If they vent among friends, they get it out of their system and can go on with their lives without taking it out on members of the out group.
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Some counterpoints:
1) The current consensus seems to be that venting makes people less angry not angrier
2) Toxic ideologies often develop in echo chambers. In situations where people are hating on the outgroup ideas often escalate in virulence. Take this lovely example from the redpill. First someone posted an article called “Woman the most responsible teenager in the Householder.” Initially some people thought this was going a little far but it was mostly positively received. It eventually got stickied on r/redpill. Of course by now the article is 100% accepted and even considered too moderate by many! Lots of people argue “most responsible teenager” is giving women too much credit. This dynamic seems to play out in alot of communities.
Disclaimer:
People cannot be perfectly kind all the time. Especially not when they are hurt.
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venting makes people less angry not angrier
I disagree. I vaguely recall my intro psych class mentioning that giving into anger makes it easier to do so in the future, counter to the catharsis hypothesis. My limited knowledge of neuroscience agrees (neurons that fire together wire together; behavior is habit-forming). My personal anecdote finds that I get less angry by minimizing the browser and doing something else than if I write an angry post.
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I don’t worry about the one trans woman who *just can’t take another indignity* and lashes out — cuz honestly if you expect her not to sometimes lash out then you have completely unrealistic notions of how people work. So whatever. If your judgements are based on bogus perceptions then your judgements will suck.
So like, maps and territories or something.
Anyway, the problem is when this gets to be a community thing and “don’t ever tone police anyone ever no matter what or you’re just as bad as the transmisogynistic cissie fucks” is like *an actual thing people say*. In fact, such a conversation is happening on my FB page right now. Really. So I pointed out the both Julia Serano and Katherine Cross say *the thing we’re not supposed to say* and calling Serano “transmisogynistic” is kinda silly since she more or less invented the term.
And I’m pretty sure that Katherine Cross is literally a magical girl with a cool lacy femme-goth costume and a glowing gem that becomes a magic staff that shoots colorful battle rays when she bellows awkwardly phrased commands. Plus she has a talking ferret that guides her in her fight against evil.
Anyway, so yeah. “Die cis scum” — it’s one thing as personal catharsis, but it can suck as a community norm. And the trans-femme political community really does have some sucky norms right now.
On the other hand, tone policing is an actual thing and it ain’t no good either, and boring dualities like “you get to call me cissie so I get to call you tranny” is pretty much a dead end and anyone who says that probably sucks eggs. And really, this is stuff trans folks need to figure out and cis folks should probably stay out of it. Getting involved won’t help.
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Yeah stupid edit button. I meant to write “venting makes people angrier.” Which makes sense as its filled under counteproint.
Gahhhhh. Edit butoooooon!
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So it seems like we have a few competing solutions on the table, regarding the question of, “when is it ok to say ‘fuck all members of group X'”:
1). It’s only ok to say that if your own group is less privileged than X. You need to conduct a thorough analysis of all of your and your target’s privilege axes before issuing the statement.
2). It’s never ok to say “fuck all members of group X”. People will always misconstrue your statement, taking it to be a call to action as opposed to just an expression of frustration.
3). It’s always ok to say “fuck all members of group X”, but when you hear someone say that about your own group, you need to give them a benefit of the doubt. It’s possible they’re not evil, but only frustrated.
4). It’s always ok to say “fuck all members of group X”, and if someone from group X is offended, it’s their problem.
As I see it, solution #1 is the most socially just option, but it’s also pretty much impossible to implement in practice, so I can’t support it. Solution #3 would normally be ok, but it seems like lots of social justice people are explicitly opposed to it (due to the obvious abuse potential), so it’s out as well. We’re left with #2 vs. #4, and of these, #2 seems like the better option.
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“Solution #3 would normally be ok, but it seems like lots of social justice people are explicitly opposed to it”
Isn’t basically everyone outside the SJ community explicitly opposed to that? Most people in the real world would call you racist if you said “fuck white people.”
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“And while it’s okay to say “fuck cis people” when you’re frustrated, I don’t think it’s good to make it part of your identity or create a community where dislike for cis people is socially rewarded– that sets up an environment where bullying is more acceptable.”
I think this covers most of it. “Fuck cis people” can mean one of three things, and most people are actually pretty decent at discerning context.
As the rare “it’s been a horrible day and fuck you $group_of_people for making it that way”, it’s totally understandable. Butting in with tone policing is like saying #alllivesmatter. It’s an attempt to silence and throw one’s weight around.
“Fuck you $group_of_people” as a regular statement and sentiment that the person has internalized will, at the very least, make them tedious when they get going. This happens whether it’s your grandma who insists that liberals are destroying the country, or your uncle who says the same thing about conservatives. “Tedious” turns into “troubling” when there’s any way for the person to make life more difficult for said $group_of_people.
Where it really gets dangerous is when a person makes that sentiment core to their identity, and starts to actively look for/build groups devoted to that level of hatred. Relative social privilege may affect the damage that can be done. But when someone reaches the level where they actively seek out groups to support their hate, I don’t think it needs to be explained why that’s a bad thing.
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My intuition is that the acceptability of blanket insults to an affiliation group is inversely proportional to the plausibility that the speaker is really serious about it. We don’t get mad when gay people offhandedly make gay jokes, because we know it’s not truly out of malice. Neither am I too upset at “kill all cis people,” because it’s such an obviously, cartoonishly ludicrous desire that I can’t even imagine anyone entertaining the idea seriously. “Kill the vast majority of humanity?” It’s comical.
When people deride groups in ways that could plausibly reflect their true beliefs, it starts to become offensive. Possibly because we subconsciously sense that it risks introducing a socially accepted foothold for actual bigots (or whatever) to get their digs in. Lots of subversive comedy dances on the edge of leaving the audience wondering, “…but does he really mean it?”
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A problem with this is that one could plausibly infer that someone isn’t serious about the exact thing they’re saying, but is serious about a weaker version of it. Killing all trans people is just as cartoonishly ludicrous as killing all cis people. But if someone says that, they may not have a plan to kill all trans people, but they *may* have a plan to harm (in ways short of killing) a lot of trans people (but not all of them).
Likewise, someone who claims to want to kill all men probably doesn’t really want to kill all men, but on the other hand, that statement may be an exaggeration of a real desire to start doing bad things to random men who happen to be in reach. Doing bad things is not as severe as killing, and doing it to a few random targets isn’t as severe as doing it to all of them, but that doesn’t mean I’d be safe from this person, even if the danger just consists of, oh, teaching a class and not fairly grading the male students.
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Ima be the only guy who agrees with Ozy. Privilege is actually a thing. People saying “fuck cis people” does me zero harm, cuz, lolz who cares? So forgiving someone who yells it in anger is no big deal. But me yelling “fuck trans people” would probably upset them. My care should be heightened as a result. May seem kind of crappy, but as Louis CK has pointed out- I’m white, you can’t even hurt my feelings. That matters.
There’s probably norm-destruction issues, but I don’t think those are hair trigger.
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Having had more time to think about the blog post, I still disagree with it. I’m in favor of forgiveness, but forgiving people means they did something to forgive. My disagreement with the post stems entirely from the assertion that there isn’t anything that needs to be forgiven.
One of the things I realized is that we don’t take “bosses suck” seriously because we don’t take people complaining about their bosses seriously in general. We know employers and employees are in a contentious relationship and that this generates a large amount of animosity, so we discount most of what gets said by one group about the other. On the other hand, we’re supposed to take trans people complaining about cis oppression seriously despite the obvious conflict of interest; discounting what marginalized people say because they’re “just overreacting” is one of those privilege things that bad people do. Telling me to use my judgement (along with some fuzzy guide-lines) skirts much too closely to setting me up for failure.
Having a unified front in defense of hateful language means I can’t use support of hateful language as an indicator of vice. Which makes finding virtuous social justice people to debate with harder. And also less pleasant, because now even virtuous people will use hateful language.
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“We know employers and employees are in a contentious relationship and that this generates a large amount of animosity, so we discount most of what gets said by one group about the other.”
No, I think it’s definitely only discounted in one direction. Imagine the reaction if some employees were to go out in public with signs that say “fuck bosses” versus the reaction if some employers were to go out in public and say “fuck working people”.
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I think the key to understanding Ozy’s post is that it is not, despite the title, actually -defending- “fuck cis people” so much as excusing it.
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@Royal Night Guard
I think there’s a substantial difference between between publicly decrying a group of people, and griping about them in a private space. I’m am 99.9% sure upper management complains about their employees to each other behind closed doors. I don’t think this gets taken any more seriously than employees complaining about their employers behind closed doors.
@kalvarnsen
Right, and my point is that I reserve the right to withhold forgiveness when I feel an individual is not suffering from akrasia but is just an asshole.
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@kalvarnsen:
When you say ‘excuse’ I understand ‘arguing in favor of not having to change, because seriously it wasn’t that bad, get off my back’.
I understood it more to be like ‘It was sub-optimal, I’ll try to do better, hold off on the smear campaign.’.
Although what you said could just as well mean the second one, too. Which was it?
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Godzillarissa: As a utilitarian, I believe that everyone constantly fails morally. My saying “fuck cis people” is a moral failure in the same way, although of much lesser magnitude, than my drinking milk, failing to donate 100% of my income to charity, flying to visit my parents on Christmas, and sometimes being too depressed to work. And yet my response to someone saying “you flew to visit your parents on Christmas! EVILDOER!” is not “it was suboptimal, I’ll try to do better”, but “…I am not going to change that, seriously it’s not that bad, get off my back.”
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@Godzillarissa: Hadn’t got that far in my analysis, sorry. I just meant that Ozy doesn’t actually think saying “Fuck cis scum” is a good thing or even neutral thing, which to me means zhe is not really defending it. Exactly to what degree she is not defending it is something I don’t have a firm position on.
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Why would you “defend” something like “fuck cis people”?
“Fuck cis people” isn’t a person. It has no thoughts, no feelings. It just kinda sits there on the screen.
Doesn’t move much, unless I scroll with the mouse.
That said, I do defend *people*. Some of those people I defend are the sort who might on occasion say “fuck cis people,” like maybe for some kinda at-the-time-understandable reason.
Hell yeah I’ll defend them.
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1. I am remarkably unconcerned with stringent guidelines for the identification of virtuous people. I think anyone with a passing familiarity with internet trolls on moderated boards should know why.
2. Cis and trans people aren’t in a contentious relationship? Of course they are! Cis people regularly misgender trans people, or treat their self identities as unreal or invalid. And trans people return the favor, actually. Cis people have a gendered social structure, trans people want it changed in ways that accommodate them at the expense of cis interests. Both sides use moral language to castigate the other for not ceding ground, and to deny the legitimacy of the others position. There is an actual dispute about social norms, with moral valence and abuse on an individual and group level. It’s not just a contentious dispute, it’s acrimonious.
3. The opposite of “don’t discount what marginalized people have to say” is not “endorse the fundamental attribution error.”
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1. I am remarkably unconcerned with stringent guidelines for the identification of virtuous people. I think anyone with a passing familiarity with internet trolls on moderated boards should know why.
And yet there are stringent guidelines for the identification of virtuous people so long as those people are cis, straight, and white. But not for the non-cis, the non-straight, or the non-white. My issue is the isolated demand for stringent guidelines for the identification of virtuous people. It’s fine that you are unconcerned with stringent guidelines for the identification of virtuous people. Be consistent with your unconcern with stringent guidelines for the identification of virtuous people. Unless you don’t care about persuading people like me, which is fine, I guess, but it seems to be sabotaging efforts at convincing people like me of the correctness of your position.
And for the record, I’m happy to be forgiving about mistakes regarding consistency. So long as we all agree that there are mistakes going on. Hypocrisy turns signal into noise, and I much prefer signal to noise. Your lack of concern is not persuasive on why I should also lack concern.
@patrick
“Cis people have a gendered social structure, trans people want it changed in ways that accommodate them at the expense of cis interests. ”
What? The “accommodations” trans individuals want do not seem very harmful to cis people at all. Many cis people have a friend or family member who is some flavor of trans (I think the percentage of people identifying as trans would go up alot if the social and medical situation improved). I think if most cis people better understood the situation they would be 100% happy to “accommodate” trans people. Cis people care about their friends and family. And they care about feeling like a decent person. These concerns do not overrule all self interest in al cases. But the costs to cis people to “accommodate” trans people are incredibly tiny.
I imagine there is quite alot of conflict between cis people and some trans activists. And especially I think there is a massive conflict between cis men and the SJ movement. But the SJ movement does not speak for trans people and its agenda does not represent the goals of most trans people.
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@patrick – I agree with stargirlprincess and I would go further. Trans rights actively help cis people! When we learn to understand that your genitals are not your gender and your gender is not your hobbies or manner of dress, this will also help cis people who feel restricted by gender roles. I’m not saying that that’s the main reason to support trans rights – trans people are people (obviously) and all people should be treated well. But a society that treats trans people well will also treat cis people who break gender roles well, and most cis people want to break gender roles some of the time. (And even those who don’t want to break gender roles don’t LOSE anything by having the option available.)
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@Ozy: The conversation seems to have gone on to other topics, but I wanted to say that I didn’t really think of ‘flying to visit my family’ being in the same category as something that can just be not said. I do know someone that does think it’s in the same category, though, so maybe it’s more difficult than I thought…
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Stargirlprincess- I am neither qualified nor situated to distinguish between the interests of trans people, of trans activists, or pro trans SJs.
Queenshalumit- I think the belief that good politics have only winners and never losers is a dangerous delusion. I view politics not as zero sum, but certainly as an area where arithmetic is required. People want different things. Sometimes you have to tell someone that a policy or social norm that makes them unhappy is something they’ll have to accept- perhaps someone else needs it more, perhaps the thing they’re unhappy about isn’t reasonable, etc- this is part of life.
This is true broadly, but the specific issue I had in mind was micro aggressions that occur not out of hostility, but because of the “glitch in the matrix” feeling we encounter when we run across a significant exception to the social norms by which we live. Double takes on a bus, etc. Anyone who can’t see how changing the world to avoid that would incur costs for cis people (such as, I dunno, the literal destruction of the concept of “cis” as a presumed status) is guilty of a fairly large failure of empathy. Maybe it’s needed, I can’t say, that’s “asking me about morality in the year 2200” territory where I’m sure things will be radically different but lack the capacity to judge.
One of the least fortunate consequences of political “there are only winners and no ones interests are truly at odds” Utopianism is that it makes anyone who even acknowledges that the opposition has feelings and interests look like a traitor to the cause or like they’re in need if reeducation as to the wonders of the universally awesome party line, accepted as it is by all except those who have been brainwashed by patriarchy or cis hegemony or whatever. Well, the Utopianism isn’t real, and that’s not what’s happening.
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But the costs to cis people to “accommodate” trans people are incredibly tiny.
I have a pet peeve disagreement here in regards personal pronouns. Personal pronouns are not a tiny cost. They’re tiny if I never have to use any; they’re tiny if I only have to deal with a small handful of people who want them. When it gets to 10 people, it’s now mentally taxing. When it’s 20 people, I’m probably going to mess it up a lot. 100? Lost cause. Every single person on the globe entitled to their own set of personal pronouns or else I’m erasing their identity? Might as well cry “Havoc” and let slip the dogs of war, because that’s utter bedlam.
I don’t want to misgender trans people. I don’t want to play a pronoun-based memory game with up to 7 billion pronouns (and their conjugations!). My solution is to focus on singular “they” and heavier use of proper nouns (always referring to Ozy by “Ozy” avoids misgendering Ozy because Ozy is always of gender “Ozy”, though Ozy may not be of gender “past Ozy” or “future Ozy”; “Ozy” is also always properly conjugated). This seems to avoid misgendering people, but isn’t personal pronouns.
I get the sense form the social justice community I’m still bad just because I don’t respect personal pronouns. Even Ozy seems to imply that. Though from what I recall Ozy is a postgenderist and therefor I would infer that Ozy finds my position on pronouns agreeable; that I’m just picking up on imprecise language meant for people who deliberately misgender Ozy and I should not take it personally because I do not personally engage in such behavior.
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I think that people should accept at least one of “he”, “she” or “they” in addition to any other pronoun sets they prefer. I take a dim view of people who think it is too complicated to remember that I am in the third category, but if you do I’m fine. I don’t object to the existence of preferred pronouns in general; in my experience, most nonbinary people do, in fact, take one of “he”, “she”, or “they”, and telling people about their preferences is no different from telling people about their nickname preferences.
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It was probably foolish of me to imply there are no disadvantages for cis people for the acceptance of trans people. But I do believe the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for everyone. I also think Ozy was saying that people who use wrong pronouns on purpose are bad,since I know in the past they have said you are not a bad person if you try your best and mess up on pronouns by accident.
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One of the least fortunate consequences of political “there are only winners and no ones interests are truly at odds” Utopianism is that it makes anyone who even acknowledges that the opposition has feelings and interests look like a traitor to the cause or like they’re in need if reeducation as to the wonders of the universally awesome party line, accepted as it is by all except those who have been brainwashed by patriarchy or cis hegemony or whatever.
It also has weird failure modes when you recognize that it’s not true. I remember reading an article a while back that was making the point that shifting from a model of relationships (especially but not exclusively marriages) that is based on individuals fulfilling the duties of pre-established roles that they inherit without any choice in the matter to a model based on individuals’ ongoing choices does actually hurt people (who tend, unsurprisingly, to be quite opposed to it as a result), even though it is on balance a good thing.
The author noted the odd frequency of this utopian delusion on the left, and mentioned that he’d[1] pointed this basic fact out to a progressive friend, who had responded “So what are you saying, we should just give up?” And he commented on how remarkable this was, that she should be so used to associating her (and, in this case, his) position’s virtue with its supposedly benefiting everyone that she was unable to hear the reality that her the social changes she supported were hurting some of her self-avowed enemies as anything but a moral condemnation.
Another article I read suggested that a reasonable definition of fundamentalism, in a broad sense, might be the belief that there are no hard moral questions, because there are no tradeoffs. The author stated that he had come to this conclusion in an interesting fashion: After some interesting observations about children’s books, he had started making a 2×2 diagram for each book that he read, with “Good for Self” or “Bad for Self” on one axis, and “Good for Others” or “Bad for Others” on the other, and to put words like “selfishness” and “courage” into the appropriate boxes, based on how the book used them. And he happened to notice that an old Anabaptist tract and one of Ayn Rand’s essays shared an interesting property: Every single word landed along the main diagonal, even though which box a given word landed in was almost universally reversed when going from one to the other!
[1] I think I’m getting the genders right here, but I might be misremembering.
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When we learn to understand that your genitals are not your gender
This seems self-evidently contrary to the interests of those whose genitals are the primary determinants of their respective genders.
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@Stargirl: Well said on all fronts.
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I’m a white male cishet, and I disagree, because on top of my being a cishet, I also happen to crossdress full time (I’m hugely motivated to do so for reasons unknown to me; I can reflect on that from the positions of introspection and behaviorism, but don’t have a definitive answer, so currently I just label it as a final value). While my experience is certainly different from that of trans people, and I would be having having hard time making any statements about it (aside from the cases where it’s obviously different, like with pronouns: trans people are constantly being misgendered, while for me it’s not a problem, since I’m very much fine either way (“she” is very flattering, although not genuine, “he” is genuine – both work)), I do suspect that in some cases it could potentially be somewhat similar to the experience of trans people whose apparent gender don’t match their identity and/or gender expression – social pressure in restrooms and other gender-segregated places, strangers’ stares, prejudice in housing market, and in case of not-so-liberal areas, having to either conform to gender norms, or seriously risking to be assaulted. However, this whole usage of “cis” as a synonym for “transphobic” hugely invalidates that experience. I do acknowledge that my ability to safely crossdress in SF Bay Area and be overall very welcome to do so is an externality of the efforts of feminists and LGBT rights activists, but it’s exactly an externality. Even if both of the communities will probably say that they care about my problems if asked directly, I’m decidedly not a central example of what they care about, and I don’t feel particularly welcome in either of them. Crossdresser communities aren’t much help either, since they’re more typically concerned with doing so in the privacy of their home, and maybe occasionally wandering outside, but no more than that.
I do realize that since my case appears to be quite rare even compared to these already minority groups, so it’s only natural that they’re primarily interested in solving the problems that affect more people, and in more serious ways – in the worst case I can just dress in men’s clothes and be fine, while there’s no way to easily alleviate the problems of trans people. Furthermore, since walking into safe spaces and making the discussion about your problems is a douchebag move, I’m not even complaining, aside from this one time. Anyway, my life is good enough to not be in a particular need of support. However, I hope that somewhat explains why such statements feel to me like a very genuine and personal “fuck you” rather than “OK, these people are venting about something genuinely horrible, and they’re not doing me any real harm, so I should STFU.”
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I just want to vent my non-ironic frustration with people making overgeneralizations. I’m not going to believe it’s okay to do so in most circumstances. Hyperbolas are also bad, though less so. A person may vent however they want, but shouldn’t expect that I’ll be okay with this way of expressing their feelings around me any more than with other stuff not allowed to do when venting. It doesn’t matter if I’m a member of the group in question. This is not an isolated demand of rigor as if I overgeneralize I believe I deserve all the scorn as well. Probably this behavior just triggers me. Sorry.
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