[Content warning for brief discussion of abuse.]
Most of the most obnoxious social justice people have really awful lives.
You see a lot of anti-social-justice people going “oh, those privileged twits on Tumblr without any REAL problems”, but in my experience that’s usually not the case. Instead, you get– say– a trans girl who grows up with crippling dysphoria. Her childhood is pretty awful: her parents are abusive, she’s regularly bullied in school for being ‘gay’, and her church makes it very clear that transness and homosexuality (much less both) mean you need to be tortured for eternity. Eventually, she finds her way into the queer community, where she hopes that she’ll be able to find a home. But even her closest friends laugh at the idea that it would be possible to find cock attractive. She starts dating a trans guy who hits her, and no one believes her, because he’s a trans man, and that’s something cis men do, and didn’t you see his great speech about ending domestic violence? Her friends convince her not to take hormones because it’ll make her body all gross and anyway not transitioning is more radical, which means that she spends three or four unnecessary years dissociating from gender dysphoria. And then she comes on Tumblr, and she sees a trans guy spewing some goddamn male-privileged bullshit, and…
…well, what happens is that she is cruel to some suicidal teenage trans boy who might have kind of silly opinions about “cisphobia” but really didn’t do anything wrong.
A lot of people talk about this like it’s revenge for the wrongs she’s suffered, and I don’t think it usually is. It’s fear. When she reads that trans guy’s post about cisphobia, she thinks, “oh god, it’s here too. I thought I was safe here, but I’m not, not anywhere. I have to protect myself.” Because what happens when you’re in environments where you’re not safe is that you get sensitized to not being safe. You look at things that other people would shrug off and you think “that’s an attack, that person is trying to hurt me”, because in the environments you’re used to they are attacks and people are trying to hurt you.
And once it’s gotten started, it winds up in a self-perpetuating cycle a couple of different ways. Most obviously, even if that trans boy didn’t mean any harm, he’s likely to respond angrily once she tells him to die in a fire, and then that gets added as one more instance of Fucking Trans Dudes Trying To Hurt Me. But there’s also subtler things.
When you feel attacked, it’s really emotionally salient. It sticks around. Conversely, all the things that don’t read as attacks to you fade into memory. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been called awful things by the manosphere, because I don’t care. The manosphere has no ability to hurt me, which makes them calling me a slut funny. On the other hand, I can still get myself worked up in these fits of defensive rage about things some feminist said to me four years ago, how dare she, doesn’t she know that I have always been motivated by the purest and clearest of motives, et cetera et cetera. So of course it’s very easy for me to come to the conclusion that feminists say cruel things all the time, and the manosphere doesn’t– the former I remember much more than the latter.
Another problem is that fear has a way of justifying itself. Take it from your friendly neighborhood phobic: it is truly extraordinary the contortions my brain has managed to get itself into to justify fears that, frankly, don’t make much sense. And so the abuse survivor who found safety, comfort, and validation in the feminist movement says: “the patriarchy teaches men to be entitled, misogynist, and violent– and some of them, tragically, become abusers.” The abuse survivor who found that the feminist movement erased his suffering at best and acted like he abused his abuser at worst says: “the feminists are pushing lies and trying to take over institutions like universities to put into practice their misandrist agenda.”
I’m not saying that either of them is wrong, mind you. Both perspectives have kernels of truth. What I am saying is that as long as she sees him as an entitled misogynist like her abuser, and he sees her as an abuse-denialist misandrist like the women who hurt him when he was trying to get help, they are not exactly going to have a productive conversation.
This sort of fear– the tight defensive angry fear– is destructive of good argument and of empathy. Arguments become soldiers when you’re fighting a war. And you fight a war when you’re being attacked.
In my experience, the most useful conversations have come when I feel like both I and the other person are on Team Truth. I know it’s a useful conversation when I say “hey, I found this study that seems to justify your position, what do you think?” and they respond with “hm, the sample size is shit.” That sort of fluid switching of positions is, in my experience, essential for truth-seeking. Of course, there are multiple problems that make this difficult– for instance, if the person crows about how they won if you say “I thought of an argument in favor of your position”– but an important one is the sense that you’re being attacked.
So are there strategies for reducing one’s amount of defensiveness?
A big one, I think, is just choosing not to engage in conversations with people who make you defensive. This is really hard– all your instincts are screaming ATTACK ATTACK THERE IS AN ENEMY ATTACK– but in practice I think it’s the absolute foundation. Most people are not capable of truth-seeking conversation when they’re in the defensive crouch. You are more likely to say something you’ll regret or behave in a way that goes against your moral standards. Even if you want to convince the person to stop having beliefs that harm you, you’d probably be better at it when you’re calmer (and it is neither necessary nor wise to try to convince every dumbass on the Internet). And, frankly, being defensive isn’t all that fun.
Ranting about the situation to other people is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it can allow you to get your feelings out in a safe way; you can indulge the urge to respond without actually responding. On the other hand, in my experience, sometimes it can strengthen your desire to respond to the person (especially if you think of a really cutting response)– and I’m troubled by the evidence that venting increases anger.
If you decide you want to engage, there’s a skill I used to be much better at than I am right now, which you could call ‘weaponized kindness’. (Unfortunately, developing my ability to feel anger seems to have impaired my ability to use this skill. A decent tradeoff, but still annoying.) Weaponized kindness is being deliberately, flagrantly nice. Make an effort to find the valid points in the other person’s position and concede them. Admit ignorance: be willing to say “but this isn’t my field, so I might be wrong”. Rephrase your sentences until they’re more politic: don’t say “citation?” or– God help me– “[citation needed]”, say “what makes you think that?”
What happens about seventy-five percent of the time when you use weaponized kindness is that the other person backs down, the situation deescalates, and you get to have a conversation like normal people. Whenever this happened to me, I was kind of upset, because I wanted to humiliate them. (Never let it be said I’m a good person.) But I can work off my dislike of the other person privately and return to the conversation when I’m ready.
The other twenty-five percent of the time, they continue to be jerks, and everyone reading the conversation goes “wow, this really nice person is talking to this complete asshole. The nice person must be right.” In which case you win. (You can use this to convince your defensive self to adopt the weaponized kindness strategy.)
Thing of Things 
This makes me think of this study: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html
Where they found the most productive teams are the ones where you can talks without ever feeling defensive.
Co-incidence? I don’t think so.
Is there a name for it when you learn about something and then start seeing it everywhere?
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> Is there a name for it when you learn about something and then start seeing it everywhere?
Yes: the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon
http://www.damninteresting.com/the-baader-meinhof-phenomenon/
(or, more boringly, “frequency illusion”): http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
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I learned to argue like you’re describing a few years ago. It played a big role in shifting the culture of a roleplaying board where I post from one where I was kicked out of threads for (politely and saliently) mentioning male survivors to one where entire threads could be started on the topic. It’s difficult to argue that I’m posting in bad faith when I’m the nice little island in the center of a shit storm.
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You are very much doing the Lord’s Work there, by the way. It’s…well, the venue is what the venue is, but it’s much better these days.
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I try, friend. I’m in and out these days, mostly because my life has been eaten by…actual roleplay.
Mind’s Eye Society: Not even once.
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I’ve previously thought of this defensive social justice attitude like this: “You remind me of somebody else who wasn’t nice to me; that means I am justified being not nice to you.” It’s a poisonous attitude.
I’m not totally on board with the “weaponized kindness” strategy, either, though. It’s patronizing. “Oh, I still hold you in contempt just as much as ever, but I will maintain my courtly demeanor, so that you look even worse by comparison, ho ho ho ho ho.”
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I agree. Being perceived as the “winner” due to performative niceness sounds shitty.
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Evidently I am more of a dickbag than you two.
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You care more about winning, I suspect, which is probably because you feel like you actually have something to lose.
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I’ve done it. I’ve stayed “nice” while other people just freak out with rage. Actually, it’s not too hard, when you’ve spent enough time on both sides of the issue. Anyway, the point is, I don’t feel so good afterwards. In fact, it makes me feel like a phony.
Blah. These days, if something pisses me off, I just kinda say so. If I find something frustrating, I let myself be frustrated.
I try not to kick people when they are down.
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Isn’t that perfectly in line with how Eliezer defined Rationalism?
(As a deontologist, I disagree with him… but on the other hand, niceness is a deontological Good Thing in its own right.)
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Whether it’s patronizing or not depends on how you look at it. I know that it’s more likely to help me achieve my ends than responding with anger, but some of that isn’t just cynical playing to the crowd – it’s recognizing that escalating an argument doesn’t end well for anyone involved, so keeping it calm is a prerequisite for me being able to reach people at all. I’ve lost friends when I’ve lost my temper.
I also don’t like making other people’s lives worse when I have the choice. I would rather someone be kind to me during a disagreement than obviously cruel, so I try to do the same for others.
I get my way more often when I’m nice, but the alternative is unappealing for other reasons as well.
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Look at it this way: you can’t convince these people that you’re an homonormative shitlord that is making the world worse by merely existing. Would you rather they:
a. Engage in a holy crusade to end you, or at least your prospects of happiness
b. Put on a facade of niceness while still holding you in contempt?
I’d rather have b, to be honest. And I believe niceness is pretty addictive, so they might even end up believing it too.
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I think it depends how you use it.
I see it as kind of similar to the strategy of going out of your way to follow every little rule and regulation when advocating for a cause that may receive pushback from the higher-ups (e.g. trying to start a secular student club at a university in the Bible Belt), so that when others try to reject your proposal/case/whatever, they can’t pretend it’s because you used the wrong color of ink or some other triviality.
But that sort of situation is one in which you have less power than your potential adversary. If it’s one where you have greater power, I think weaponized kindness has more potential to come off as patronizing. Aside from power dynamics, I think that, well, if you say things in a patronizing way, of course it is going to come off as patronizing. And it’s going to look patronizing if you pretend to concede points you disagree with rather than actually conceding valid points. But it can also be done without the patronizing.
Besides, I think being polite, respectful, kind, and empathetic in any debate is a good strategy (if you are in a sufficiently good emotional state to handle it), because then you are giving them as little to attack as possible, outside of your actual points and arguments.
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Don’t pretend to concede points you disagree with. Look really hard for points you agree with, and concede them. Very few people are wrong about literally everything.
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Great post.
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It is possible I am just bad at being nice.
But trying to be nice to people who disagreed with me has gone extremely poorly for me. Usually if I present my views in an honest, opn to criticism, way I just get mocked and insulted. For example on one forum people took up making threads parodying my views.
I try to be nicer among rationalists since raitonalists are pretty nice. But in recent years I have started being signifigantly more agressive and especially signifigantly more willing to mock people who attack me. This has definitely lead to an improvement in my life.
Of course n=1.
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Arguing on the internet is performance art. Remember that the person you’re arguing with isn’t who you’re trying to convince – you’re trying to convince everyone else. The person you’re arguing with will, if you do your job right, change their views three to six months from now – but they’re not going to do so in the middle of an argument.
There are a few ways to convince your audience. Mockery plays well to people who already agree with you, and might elevate your status in the community of people who already agree with you – but is it convincing to people who don’t?
Try to think of somebody who has mocked something you agree with. Did it shift your position at all, and if so – which direction?
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I think I am fairly good at many things. But I am also bad at many things, for example art and convincing people of things. After signifigant testing I have concluded it is definitely not in my comparative advantage to try to convince people of my views (ignore the fact that I don’t know if my views are even right!).
I think I argue about things because I, like most people, feel an innate urge to express their views. I don’t really think I am making the world worse when I express my views but I don’t think I am really making the world much better either. However I do think I have given my views enough thought that I deserve to exress them (just as ost other deserve to express their views).
When people mock and attack me I feel hurt. And I feel like I am being hurt for doing something that most people seem somewhat compelled to do. This is not really fair to me. I tried for some time to just “avoid politics” but this was not sustainable (though I have engaged with politics less). Given that “nice stargirl” just got bulllied I feel like “less nice stargirl” is my only realsitic option.
Of course by being unfair I contribute to the problem. But I really see no way around this. My main “solution” is a beleif that people with fundamentally different views just should not talk. In theory it is good to get feedback from the other side but in practice it is very dangerous. Usually if the “other side” gives u good criticism you won’t be able to understand why its a good criticism anyway (since your worldviews diverge alot).
Anyway I think the correct respose is only to be somewhat mocking (but to be very intelctually dishonest). The exact funciton of mockery in political debate is complicated. I think its main effect is, if successful, to reduce the “status” of your opponents. If a community is suffiently hostile to an idea it can be hard for the group of people who DO hold that idea to find each other or develop their ideas and arguments. I personally find mockery useful because it can convey an attitude of “I do not care what you think.” Which is exactly the notion I often want to convey in order to get certain people to stop engaging with me.
Again I try not to be “less nice stargirl” among rationalists. Though I definitely not the nicest rationalist around.
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From what I have read from you, your comments belong to the fairest and most thoughtful. I think that matters more than niceness anyway.
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Obviously people’s experience varies. My experience says that being kind to hostile people is a bad idea where as many rationalist’s experience says the opposite.
However I think. in general, being very unfair and moderately hostile is the best approach to conflict. The reason I beleive this is that Politicians are provably good at gaining support. In my opinion the average politician is moderately hostile towards their intelctual opponents, though not extremely hostile. However the average politician is extremely intelctually dishonest. They are almost never willing to bite bullets or admit flaws in their positions. Conversely they constantly mis-represent their opponent’s positions.
Of course in “safe” situations I suggest following the ideal rationalist norms of being open to criticism, etc. But in hostile situations I think the strongest general advice is to “act like a politician.”
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Possibly a sidetrack, but do you have any ideas about the demographics of the nastier social justice people? I’ve got one friend who likes social justice who thinks the nastier ones are young. I’ve got another friend who hates social justice who thinks the nastier social justice people in racefail (they called it anti-racism then) were around the same age– Millennials, I think– but younger people were less involved.
I’m not sure I’m interested in being less defensive– I’ve become somewhat less defensive, but I’m dubious about taking it on as a project.
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Correction: the friend with the theory about SJs in racefail had an impression that they were born mostly from the early 50s to the 70s.
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As i understand, the community that occurred in is mostly people in that age range. It literally started as one group of friends calling out someone else, and that persons friends responding. The cliques probably bounded the possible ages of the participants.
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The people I know personally, who seem the quickest to freak out and cause a shitstorm, are usually in their 30’s, a few even older. These are people who have been ground-down by really hard shit. They are often marginally-employed, with all kinds of psych and neuro stuff to deal with.
Keep in mind, I’m a trans women who knows a lot of trans women, so obvious selection bias is obvious. But all the same, when people start railing about “SJWs,” in terms of smug, thin-skinned university students, it seldom matches my experience at all.
In addition, I think there is a younger, more impressionable set, who just kinda mimic the more committed crowd. In other words, being loud and always angry is a big attention-getting move, and the always-angry folks can be strangely attractive, since often they are attacking targets you don’t mind seeing attacked. Anyhow, there is this whole performance aspect, where the younger folks try to impress by being really vocal.
It’s a shitty culture. Stay out of it if you can.
The thing is, there are some really good people on the edges. I dunno. It’s hard.
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I’ve utilized this strategy to phenomenal effect. I still occasionally find references to one particular case which happened years ago, which more or less completely nuked the credibility of a blog. (The worst apparently happened after I was asked to leave, and I haven’t returned, so I have no idea what actually transpired.)
I’ve since stopped utilizing the strategy, though, and have shifted to a policy of tone-matching, because I’ve encountered a couple of cases where I won over an audience in spite of being wrong. I’d rather everybody arrive at the correct conclusion than at mine, since hopefully that’s where I’ll end up eventually anyways.
Which is to say: A strategy which works regardless of whether or not you are right might not be the best “team truth” strategy.
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That’s an interesting solution to the problem of winning when you shouldn’t. I’ll have to think about the tradeoffs between potentially being wrong and potentially escalating an argument.
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I think you might be letting social justice off a little too easy. It’s communal toxicity isn’t all individually acting people responding defensively. Communal norms swiftly arise and various bastions of it become well known as the place to hang out if you enjoy being the type of jerk that community is built to endorse and accommodate. On top of that, I think it’s very clear that a lot of the nastier people get cathartic release from being vicious. And on top of THAT…
Some of them can’t help being awful because being awful isn’t a personal choice. It’s built into their beliefs. They can’t choose to be nice because niceness is incompatible with their substantive beliefs about the world.
So about a generation before me, there was this popular (false) belief that if you wanted to house train a dog, you wait for it to defecate indoors, then rub it’s face in it.
A lot of social justice people view the rest if us shmucks this way. Whatever wear say about ourselves, the REAL truth is that we’re just hateful people filled with ‘isms. And the best way forward for social justice is to rub our faces in them. Argumentation and debate, in this view, are only useful if they advance the goal of breaking down our excuses and apologetics, and forcing us to acknowledge our own awfulness. They’re the metaphorical equivalent of the struggle to drag the dog over to it’s excrement in hopes of rubbing it’s face in it.
People who see others this way can’t be nice. They can murder nice and wear it’s skin, but they can’t BE nice.
The astute may notice the remarkable parallel here to Christian presuppositionalist apologetics.
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If that were true, I would expect more assholes in the social justice movement, as opposed to what I actually notice, which is assholes evenly distributed throughout the ideological spectrum.
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You’re not in the class of persons targeted for having their faces rubbed in excrement.
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So what you’re saying is that my queer privilege blinds me to the microaggressions experienced by cisgender heterosexual men?
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Take out the word “micro,” and sure, I guess you could phrase it that way. I mean, invoking “privilege” probably obscures more than it illuminates because all I’m talking about is the tendency not to think of someone as a jerk when their jerk behavior isn’t directed at you, but if you want to conceptualize “privilege” such that, say, “less likely to be called transphobic for bad reasons” is a privilege of being trans, sure, I’m not going to stop you from phrasing things however you’d like. Just so long as you aren’t trying to smuggle in the usual reverse privilege measuring contest connotations.
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I think the distribution is pretty lumpy, but I wouldn’t single out social justice.
I think you see a lot more assholery in ideological communities that are mutually legible to their antagonist communities.
It’s kind of hard for libertarians to get all toxoplasmic with our ideological opponents because Red and Blue reliably fail to distinguish between us and Blue and Red. We’re just kind of off in the corner and pathetically happy when the mainstream conversation even correctly acknowledges we exist.
So more assholery from Red and Blue and feminism and MRA, and less from libertarians and whatever-Sam-Harris-is, and open borders and EA.
I’m a little troubled that all the examples I can think of on the non-asshole side are things I view favorably, and all the things on the other side are things I’m ideologically opposed to.
Maybe I’m blind to the sins of my in-gorups. Or maybe the low-assholeishness groups that I disagree with are illegible to me.
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I am with Patrick. Assuming you want to treat privilege as an unbiased term (instead of a political bludgeon) it should be extremely uncontroversial that queer individuals have a “privilege” of having their dissenting opinions treated with more respect by SJ types.
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I should note there do exist many SJ people who disagree with the claim that “queer people are treated better by SJ types when they express dissenting views.” Such a position is not inconsistent, though I do agree with it.
Though I do think the treatment of amab trans individuals within SJ is very complicated. In many cases an amab queer person may not be treated very nicely if they express dissenting views.
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I second the above, and moreover it was the kafkaesque experience of socially transitioning/becoming more comfortable with a feminine identity, while being called things like “male-aligned” for some absolutely reasonable views, that has inspired a lot of my sustained anger at SJ culture. It has shown such a twisted logic in dealing with me, and I fear it cannot quite help still considering me A Dude. Which is super painful.
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Patrick: Fair enough! Although by an analogous argument you would probably be less likely to notice the douchebaggery directed at queer people, so we are both in a poor epistemological position. 🙂
I do know a lot of people (both relatively privileged and relatively marginalized) who were harmed by social justice and have the sort of reaction I describe in this post to it, and in fact I’ve noticed a lot of discussions that are basically an SJ person and an anti-SJ person patternmatching the other person to someone who hurt them.
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My original response to you was kind of flippant. The more complete response is actually what I wrote to nancylebovitz. The short version is that this is irrelevant. homophobia’s existence does not constitute evidence that social justice isn’t a systemically toxic community encompassing several systemically nasty ideological positions. These things stand on their own.
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My observation is that there are a range of temperaments in Social Justice. Many of the people aren’t assholes, but they have a ideology which supports and encourages assholism and has no tools for supporting decent behavior.
On the one hand, I think Requires Hate was completely in line with Social Justice theory. On the other hand, Laura Mixon believes (as far as I can tell) that Requires Hate betrayed Social Justice ideals.
On yet another hand, one of my friends who identifies with Social Justice listened to me rant about how awful Social Justice is because she’d picked up the belief of listening to angry people.
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>My observation is that there are a range of temperaments in Social Justice. Many of the people aren’t assholes, but they have a ideology which supports and encourages assholism and has no tools for supporting decent behavior.
This is pretty close to what I’m trying to express.
It bugs me somewhat that the standard social justice response to “your community is systemically toxic and here’s why and how” is to argue that toxicity exists everywhere. That’s not even an answer. And if it were an answer to charges of systemic problems, well, we’d need to burn all of social justice down and salt the earth.
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Actually, one of the reasons I read much more of racefail than was good for me was that I was fascinated by how awful it was. I’d never seen anything so toxic before. (In retrospect, this seems like a crazy reaction, but oh well….)
I’ve wondered if there’s anything unrelated that’s as awful Social Justice. Objectivists? They talk in code. White supremicists? Maybe, but I can’t bear to read much of their stuff. It may be of interest that the Stormfront forum has a pretty strict courtesy code.
I think I’m seeing people who oppose Social Justice picking up some of its bad habits, like inferring the worst motivations from tiny clues.
I find myself somewhat sympathetic to social justice people because they aren’t entirely making their own choices– they’re in the grip of a bad memeplex which is *very* good at defending itself.
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Requires Hate was really mean and wrong about quite a few things, but she is a very effective writer in some ways and got me realize the intellectual shallowness of a lot of nerd culture more than just about anyone else has done.
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Itsabeast: how so? I’m reluctant to read Requires Hate myself because I suspect it would stress me out, but I’m interested in insightful outside views of nerd culture, even if they’re unflattering.
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After I came out as trans I found myself gravitating to some social-justice-y kind of spaces, and falling into the orbit of some pretty loud, inflexible, and angry people. These spaces, these people — they can be attractive when you’re new. One feels swept up by big truths. But time passes, and you see little things that seem wrong, overreactions that hit too hard, the wrong target getting stomped, our own tools turned back on ourselves. One learns to tread lightly, to hold in what one wants to say. In short, these situations were toxic. The people at the center of these orbits were messed up. It was a “bad scene.”
But all the same, they were often very smart. They often had many real insights on how power works in society. While listening to their counter-message, one begins to see how the assumed opinions of “thoughtful and objective caring liberal men” are often based on a completely unwillingness of those men to look outside their skin. But such men have voice, which can drown out any dissenting voices from people-like-us.
So yeah, I have no doubt that Requires Hate probably said some interesting things. I have no doubt that someone could learn much by coming to her material with fresh eyes.
But still! OMG she was a mess. She hurt people, deeply and directly.
At root it is the failure of the “tone argument” to arrive in a stable, useful place. When smug, white liberals say “tut tut” to our anger (never mind when conservatives do), yeah they can fuck off. But when we turn these tool on ourselves, and we lionize only the most angry responses — well obvious failure modes are obvious.
On the other hand, did you expect this to be easy? Did you expect “niceness” to work?
Have you fucking heard of Stonewall?
On the other hand, Stonewall alone did not achieve gay liberation. It’s complicated.
Did you expect it not to be complicated?
There are no bright lines. There are no simple rules that will work across the grand flow of history. Different times, different situations, will respond to different tactics.
But Requires Hate? OMG she was a seriously wrong turn. Anything good she said, you could have found the same from a less nakedly awful human being. Character matters.
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I hate it when people use weaponized kindness. They’re signaling that they’re too dangerous for it to be possible to reason with them. So sometimes I exclude them from anything I can and leave everything else that has them. Or if I have something I want to accomplish, I might be incredibly patronizing in an illegible way that they won’t figure out.
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Why not just escalate the being-nice arms race? What’s the worst that could happen? You might wind up respecting each other?
Seriously though, the worst case if everyone adopts this strategy is you build a pluralistic community in which people can tolerate each other and cooperate even though they don’t really respect each other. The best case scenario is you actually converge.
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“What’s the worst that could happen? You might wind up respecting each other?”
The ability to perform niceness is not a quality I respect. If there are two individuals, one of whom is conveying hateful ideas in a calm and well-mannered demeanour, the other of whom is crudely and confrontationally conveying progressive and egalitarian ideas, I will respect the latter. And I’ll feel the former doesn’t really respect me, since they think that I’m the sort of person who values style (good manners and gracious speech) over substance (ideas).
I mean, we’re all familiar with the whole ‘tone argument’ dynamic, right?
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For what it’s worth I’ve been on a forum where one of the (~five) nicest and most thoughtful people was a neonazi (you can guess what was the average level of niceness there) and one of the least nice was an outspoken atheist (that is, someone I actually agree with). For the first guy I was able to find the arguments that most of the things he wants work better if we have equality rather than nazism. The second was just making things worse.
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The part about weaponized kindness I could take or leave, but the part about defensiveness hit me like a ton of bricks. Because even reading this post makes me wonder if casting two trans men as villains isn’t just another sneaky soldier in the war, of which I have been on the front lines many times, to make female-assigned people shrink themselves ever smaller and become ever shakier in their identities, and to snuff out trans men completely by their own hands. What I’ve found to be helpful is remembering that triggers you seek out tend to decrease the fear response while triggers sprung on you unexpectedly tend to increase it. Put another way: you actually do deserve to be safe, somewhere.
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Ah, I wasn’t the only one who had that reaction around how trans men are described. I didn’t want to comment because the irony of responding to a post about defensiveness with what’s essentially defensiveness curdled any desire to point it out.
Since you did, though…
It’s not easy reading a post about proper etiquette when dating trans women that’s shortly followed by one where trans men are the cause of trans women’s pain. It’s not like we don’t have the same etiquette problems – it was made explicitly clear to me when I was first coming out that I would never be found attractive except as a pity fuck from a few bisexual women, and only then if I was lucky, an assumption that’s proven mostly accurate. I’m also accustomed to being ignored and used as a scapegoat by the trans community: Whenever something nice happens to us, progress suddenly becomes a zero sum game. For example, there was a comment on the ‘Etiquette’ post about how queer porn with trans men in it is an unimpressive example of being trans friendly…but don’t we count for friendliness, too?
I’m really tired of this kind of paranoia. I have to ‘weaponize’ my kindness to sit through any discussions about trans men, because forcing myself to slow down long enough to be nice helps ease my anger.
I’m not sure what the solution here is. The most pernicious kinds of irrational anger are the ones that have grounding in reality. I can see the collateral damage caused by my ideological opponents (and even allies) who can’t escape their own hurts, but even that doesn’t wipe my own slate clean. Talking about it helps, I guess, or at least it’s helping in this moment.
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(I’m not a trans man. My best friend, who I love dearly, who I am afraid of losing, is a trans man.)
Yeah, I was agreeing with Ozy’s analysis. I think there are some stories which harmfully distort reality, but I wouldn’t put the post in that category. (After all, who gets treated cruelly by the queer community despite also being treated cruelly everywhere else?)
My comment was an “unloading”–I don’t think that’s inaccurate–but I guess I was also trying to make the point by example that it’s okay to be openly defensive. I’m not ashamed of being defensive. I have something to goddamn defend. I want to wield that defensiveness in a way that doesn’t harm people who have their own wounds or people who are trying to make things better, but I think “don’t be defensive” would be neither an achievable goal nor even an admirable one. I don’t think pretending not to feel what we feel tends to work out very well.
“Whenever something nice happens to us, progress suddenly becomes a zero sum game.”
I know exactly what you’re talking about, and I am so, so sorry.
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P.S. If it helps, the person who is by far the hottest person I know is a trans man.
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Hey Quincy, I’m glad my guesses on what you meant weren’t too far off the mark. Thank you for the support, too. 🙂
I’d like to hear more of what you have to say around how and when it’s a good idea to be defensive, if you’re willing to talk about it.
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Hello, I do eventually reply to things, sorry it took me forever.
Re: defensiveness. I am classifying defensiveness as an emotion, which means I believe these things about it:
-you can’t choose whether to experience or not
-it is not morally wrong (because of the above)
-recognizing that you’re experiencing it when you are tends to benefit you
-communicating that you’re experiencing it when you’re experiencing it intensely tends to benefit you and your relationships with the people around you
Specific to this scenario, the reason I expressed my defensiveness in relation to this post was:
-to inform Ozy of the impact of their writing on their readers, information they can do as they please with
-to inform people like you that I had the same reaction; I hope that helps you
-to clarify to myself what I’m feeling and practice self-clarity and communication
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Look, I had to pick *some* example, and any case of “person mistreated by members of Group lashes out at innocent members of Group” is probably going to have some members of Group feeling hurt by it. (Or a bunch of people in the comments going “Yeah! That’s exactly what those douchebags do!”, which is far worse.)
Obviously, the vast majority of trans men do not abuse anybody.
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You’re right, Ozy – this isn’t a situation where you can escape using an example that will hit someone right in the paranoia. What I was trying to get at – and I think Quincy was as well – was an unloading of how we experience the fear and defensiveness you described in your post. We’re agreeing with your analysis.
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Ah, cool. 🙂
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@Ortvin Sarapuu
I couldn’t disagree more strongly. What you’ve said is the opposite of my values.
What is morally significant about a person is how they conduct themselves in the world, not the abstractions represented in their mind. The only way a belief can make you a better person is if it causes you to act as a better person.
Being nasty in the service of “good” ideas is fragile, because what if you’re wrong. If you argue for bad ideas in a nice way, maybe someone will take the time to convince you and fix your thinking. If you argue for bad ideas in a nasty way, you’re just a villain.
Treating people with kindness isn’t style, it’s the sine qua non of a moral existence.
https://popehat.com/2016/03/12/marc-randazza-violence/
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@Lawrence: “Being nasty in the service of “good” ideas is fragile, because what if you’re wrong.”
Being polite doesn’t insulate you from the consequences of being wrong. If I believe (for example) that blue eyed people are humans like the rest of us, and blue eyed people are actually innately violent and rapacious, it’s a problem regardless of whether I advocate for the rights of blue eyed people using politeness or confrontation.
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I feel like after the sea lions comic – http://wondermark.com/1k62/ – the answer is not gonna be “wow, this really nice person is talking to this complete asshole,” but rather “wow, this shitlord is totally sealioning our rightfully outraged sibling-in-arms. Yell at him!”
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There’s no one “the answer”. Online arguments can have a wide audience.
And I think this is an example of expecting bad behavior from everyone in a group based on the behavior of just some of its members.
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Good point! Wether you agree with the stance of the author or not, I guess the sealion-comic is about weaponised correctness, which is similar, but probably not as effective, as weaponised kindness.
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Does anybody else find it amusing that since it coined the term, the comic is literally about how criticizing sea-lions makes them sea-lion you.
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I used to be so much better at weaponized kindness when I lived in the south and was arguing against the right. Living in the bay area and arguing with the left I feel like I have a super weapon trained against me and I get pattern matched into say much worse things than I actually said.
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Are there public examples of people using weaponized niceness against the left. The “niceness wielder” really needs to be male and ideally also at least one of straight/white. I think its also better if the person is not openly trans-male.
Of course there are many people to argue against. But given the readership many people on this blog’s many “group to argue with” is “SJ people.” I would be interested in seeing this technique in practice when the user is not among the groups SJ is predisposed to be nice to.
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I don’t understand. Is trans-male considered a right-wing, anti-social-justice identity now?
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@Lawrence
Sometimes, yes.
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> The other twenty-five percent of the time, they continue to be jerks, and everyone reading the conversation goes “wow, this really nice person is talking to this complete asshole. The nice person must be right.” In which case you win.
Some caveats:
– You may in a way win the argument – but nobody will tell you so.
– You will likely not be seen as strong. Especially not by your opponent.
If that is OK for you, then fine, use it.
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