One of the values at the core of my intersectional feminism is solidarity, which means to me: I want my experience of marginalization to make me more compassionate to those who are different than me.
I am nonbinary. I want to use that experience to allow me to relate to binary trans people, who experience gender dysphoria as I do; to gender-non-conforming and LGB people, as well as anyone who’s had a hard time fitting in their gender role, who are harmed as I am by the gender binary and oppositional sexism; to otherkin, people with bodily identity integrity disorder, and some anorexics, who just like me experience proprioceptive hallucinations, what-is-this-body-I’m-looking-at-it’s-not-mine, and weird floating preferences about category membership that don’t connect to any disagreement about empirical facts or fact about how the categories are treated.
Of course, our experiences are not the same. I can get top surgery; an anorexic who has a similar relationship to their weight that I do to my sex characteristics may die if they get the body they prefer. This is a tremendous difference. But I think there is a lot to saying “here, this is the experience I have, let me use this as a tool and a motivation to understand you, person who is very different from me.”
And I’m not saying I’m good at this, mind you. It took me a surprisingly long time to connect “I have this strange preference that I be considered nonbinary, despite agreeing that I possess all the traits typically associated with women and knowing that my life would be far easier if I were a woman” to “I have this strange preference that I be considered nonhuman, despite agreeing that I possess all the traits typically associated with humans and knowing my life would be far easier if I were a human.”
There are costs to this perspective. Right now, the legitimacy of trans people’s genders is very fragile. Most people, even in relatively trans-positive countries, do not see trans people as the genders we identify as. Even fewer people see otherkin as the species they identify as. If the trans movement as a whole said “otherkin with social species dysphoria are just as valid as trans people with social gender dysphoria!”, I’m pretty sure the response of people in general would be “so what you’re saying is that both of you guys are fake?” It wouldn’t do much good.
And a very common way marginalization works is that people have the mistaken belief that Widely Disliked Group A are really all Widely Disliked Group B. If a masculine gay man hears someone say “all gay men are flamers!”, he of course responds “no, we aren’t! I am gay and I’m just a regular guy: I lift weights, drink beer, and don’t know Cabaret from Carousel.” On one hand, his desire to not be mistaken for someone who knows things about musicals is quite reasonable; it’s not a great feeling when people believe inaccurate things about you because of your marginalizations. On the other hand, he is distancing himself from feminine men. In many, perhaps most, cases, the subtext is: “I’m gay, but that’s not bad. Now, being a feminine man, that’s really bad and awful and deserving of derision.” The insult gains its sting from the cultural horror of feminine men; if someone said “gay men all have blue eyes!”, he would be nonplussed, not offended.
A quite natural way of dealing with marginalization is to say “I don’t deserve it. They deserve it.” This can work on an external level– “you shouldn’t use that condescending tone when you talk to a person in a wheelchair, it’s not like they have Down syndrome or something”– but I think it is most pernicious on an internal level.
Neurodivergent people who have high IQs or good academic skills tend to wrap up a lot of our self-esteem in being smart. We go, “I don’t deserve to be treated this way, I’m smart.” We go, “actually, I am better than the people who are being cruel to me, because I’m smart and all those bastards are going to work for me one day.” We go, “I’m not worthless, because I’m smart. If I were this fucked up and I weren’t smart, then I would probably be worthless, but actually I’m an eccentric genius and did you know Albert Einstein didn’t wear socks because he thought they were a waste of time.”
On one hand, we don’t deserve to be treated that way, we aren’t worthless, and we may very well be better than the people who were cruel to us; if this mindset allows us to understand those facts, it is good. It rubs me the wrong way to take away people’s coping mechanisms from them. On the other hand, the whole idea of having to earn not being mistreated is harmful, and it inevitably happens that at some point you’re not the smartest person in the room anymore and if you’ve wrapped up your self-worth in being smart when that happens you suddenly feel like you are really worthless. And, of course, it’s kind of shitty for intellectually disabled people. Intellectually disabled people deserve to have autonomy over their lives and not be bullied or abused, because everyone deserves to have autonomy over their lives and not be bulled or abused. A politics that denies that is harmful to intellectually disabled people.
And… I don’t like doing it. I don’t feel right when I deny my similarities with others, when I refuse to have empathy for people who are like me in order to maintain the shreds of rights or worth we’ve been able to grasp. Which I guess is my true rejection.
Thing of Things 
Once you have solidarity with everyone, is it really solidarity anymore?
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…yes? I mean, there’s a big difference between “I relate to and have solidarity with everyone” and “I hate everyone, they should all die.” Even if you’re relating to/having solidarity with someone who hates group x, and someone else who hates everyone not in group x, you don’t have to agree with them. See: the whole bit with coping mechanisms.
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Thank you for this. I have a lot of thoughts about the way modern activism encourages shrinking our circles of concern, most of them angry. As with all dichotomies, carving this one hurts people in the middle the most. I’ve known many people who see their transness and their otherkin-ness, or their transness and their eating-disorderedness, as intimately related – what are we saying to such people when we say “we accept you for this but not for that”? That they have to pick which aspect they care more about and join a team?
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As a trans otherkin person, thank you.
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@lizardywizard, you were one of the people I had in mind when I wrote that. 🙂
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Oh? 🙂 Do I tumblr-know you? Not recognising the name OH WAIT no I know who you are, my bad! I’m just so used to thinking of you by your URL.
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You seem to be drawing a direct link between “having compassion for a person” and “taking their beliefs seriously”, and I don’t think that can be maintained in a sane and consistent way.
I have compassion for religious people. But I firmly believe that their beliefs are nuts. I don’t think it’s uncompassionate to say so, or even to say it to their faces. As long as I’m not doing it in a manner or context that’s obnoxious. I know they think that I’m nuts, and I expect them to tell me so.
If your compassion is so expansive that you have to take seriously the beliefs of otherkin and Christians and Muslims and communists and anorexics and conspiracy theorists, then it seems to me you don’t really believe in anything, except maybe radical skepticism.
If there were a nearly perfect cure for anorexia, as good as antibiotics for plague, would you vote to force anorexics to take it? I would. I would do so because of my compassion for them and my respect for the value of their life. But by doing so I would be showing a total lack of respect for their beliefs, and acting contrary to their right to body autonomy.
I also think the analogy of trans to otherkin is really bad.
Firstly, gender categories really are fuzzy in ways that species categories are not.
I’ll admit, my first, most gut-level reaction to transexuality is “lol, you are crazy and your gender is fake”. But if I consider the existence of homosexuals and intersexuals, and the effect HRT can apparently have on people’s minds and bodies, then I revise that to “This category is a lot less binary than it looked and trans people are not central examples of either male or female categories”.
On the other hand the species categories “human” and “ferret” are exactly as binary as they look. (maybe one day mad science will change that but today is not that day)
Secondly, social construction theory of gender isn’t entirely nuts. I don’t have to be a blank-slate fundamentalist to acknowledge that “people who are allowed to use to women’s bathroom” and “people who are allowed to wear dresses” are social constructs, and as such, could be constructed better.
Thirdly, it is no great compromise to call a trans woman a “woman”, or to refer to her as “she”. It costs me very little. Because the category is somewhat fuzzy and somewhat socially constructed it does not offend my sense of truth to settle on linguistic conventions that make people happy. It’s not that I’ve endorsed “trans women are really women” as both meaningful and true. It’s that I’ve recognized that there is enough ambiguity there and room for arbitrary choice of language that is desirable to assign it a meaning such that it is true.
On the other hand if you ask me to call a person a ferret you are asking me to lie.
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“On the other hand if you ask me to call a person a ferret you are asking me to lie.”
So?
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Some people have problems with lying. I, for example, make it a point to try to go through life without even making white lies that hurt nobody, because then it’s easier to stick to the truth in more difficult situations.
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“so?”
For otherkin, you might be right. It’s just not very important. Then again I’m really not sure you’re doing people any kindness by playing along with their delusions. That seems patronizing. If someone thinks I’m crazy I’d rather they just said so.
For trans people, oh my god, it matters.
Imagine yourself as someone who generally feels threatened by leftist identity politics. Now imagine how you would feel about trans people if you thought their gender was an delusion.
I tried to write something more explicit than that but (a) It’s just too mean to write down, and (b) the chances that I’d be read in a maximally uncharitable way and called a bigot if I wrote it are too high.
If your imagination isn’t sufficient, take my word for it that trans people’s genders not being a delusion is the difference between ally and transphobe.
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To me, using a certain pronoun for someone actually can feel like lying because my brain instinctively assigns some truth value to “this person is a man”, etc. (That truth value depends on basically all sex/gender cues that someone gives off, as well as what pronouns I first learned for them; for trans people, it’s sometimes right and sometimes wrong.) It takes real effort to use a pronoun that does not feel True. I just think the effort is worth it, because (a) it’s typically less than the hurt trans people feel when misgendered (b) I basically don’t want to impose any discomfort on someone for being trans (c) the effort decreases over time as my brain’s sense of truth catches up to reality.
Which is all to say that for me, whether something feels true is not necessarily directly related to whether it actually is and whether I should act on my feelings, and it’s not even really related to whether the statement in question is based on objective categories.
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I think there is a difference between taking someone’s beliefs seriously and taking someone’s preferences seriously. For example, I agree that there is no meaningful sense in which a ferret otherkin is an actual ferret, however there is no reason a person cannot prefer to have a ferret-like body. This preference is impossible to satisfy until the glorious transhumanist future arrives, but it doesn’t make it invalid. Similarly, people are in principle allowed to have a preference for an extremely thin body, it’s just a preference that happens to be extremely self-harmful in today’s world (i.e conflicting with other, presumably stronger, preferences) which is why it’s usually best to suppress it.
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I more or less stand by most of what Lawrence and Vadim are saying here.
The bottom line is, I believe in the validity of a person’s felt identity (whether it be gender, species, etc.) and their right to alter their body accordingly, wear clothes and be addressed by pronouns that reflect it, etc. The issue of whether or not they are actually a member of the group they identify with is another debate — to some extent a useless debate because it boils down to how we set definitions. I do see a somewhat stronger case for setting gender definitions in accordance with trans people’s identities than for analogously defining what it means to be a member of a species, mainly for reasons that Lawrence touched on above.
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Sorry, I think that was ruder than intended. But we lie all the time in social contexts. If X believes they are a ferret, avoiding insulting them is separate from truly, deeply believing they are in fact a ferret.
(I do agree with you, btw, that otherkin seem fundamentally different from trans people. But I don’t think what we believe really matters. If someone asks you to address/treat them a certain way, it’s just not polite to do otherwise.)
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> If there were a nearly perfect cure for anorexia, as good as antibiotics for plague, would you vote to force anorexics to take it? I would. I would do so because of my compassion for them and my respect for the value of their life. But by doing so I would be showing a total lack of respect for their beliefs, and acting contrary to their right to body autonomy.
I think “respect for the value of their life” when detached from respect for autonomy is very dangerous. Other peoples’ lives are not yours; they do not owe it to you to live them, and you do not respect their lives if you prioritize preserving their continued heartbeat over their preferences, their choices, and their bodily autonomy. If you would force people to take cures that keep them alive because you think that that’s more important than their right to make their own choices, you are not driven by respect for life but by the belief that you own it.
This is the civil version of this comment: the original was “If I could, I would modify you so that you no longer thought this way; if that bothers you, YOU DON’T FUCKING SAY.”
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“you are not driven by respect for life but by the belief that you own it.”
Oh boy, do I hate that argument.
This is the same kind of Randian, incoherently absolutist view of property rights that leads to the worst kinds of deontological libertarianism.
You can not bootstrap a moral ideology from property rights alone!
I value human life and I value body autonomy. I do not derive either value as a corollary of the other. But if they are in direct conflict, I mostly break for life.
Listen, If I thought I owned someone’s life, I would think I have a right to preserve it, if it pleased me to do so. That’s not what I think. I think I have a duty to preserve it, (under some circumstances), whether it pleases me or not.
Furthermore, If I ever become dangerously self destructive, and someone has the capacity to rescue me from that, I very much want that to happen. Even if future-me doesn’t want it to happen. That doesn’t mean I think anyone own’s my life.
“If I could, I would modify you so that you no longer thought this way; if that bothers you, YOU DON’T FUCKING SAY.”
That’s fair.
I’d rather you were a moral pluralist like me but I think it would be very wrong to forcibly modify you to turn you into one. I don’t think it would be wrong to modify you to prevent your self-destruction.
But, hopefully we can at least agree that if we’re going to attempt to modify each other we will only do so via responsible authorities duly appointed by as legitimate a government as we can manage, which we will attempt to influence via peaceful debate and activism. 🙂
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@ Lawrence D’Anna
Do you want to preserve life though, or happiness/satisfaction? Like if someone lives in constant excruciating pain or debilitating depression, there’s no reasonable chance of fixing that within their lifetime, and therefore they want to die, that seems to be a very reasonable and understandable preference.
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It makes sense to me that, if someone has a stated preference to the effect “should I change in a way that makes me self-destructive, and there’s a way to change me back, do it”, this would have weight in your moral system. It does in mine as well. That is different than saying that people having heartbeats is such an intrinsic good that no desire or preference of the person involved could possible countervene everyone else’s duty to keep their heart beating.
If you believe it a duty, not a right, then you’re right, you don’t believe /you/ own me; you just believe that Intrinsic Rightness owns both of us. What makes it a claim of ownership, rather than of investment or concern or competing interest, is that it is apparently much stronger than any conceivable interest of the person themself.
People can decide they’re willing to run some risk of death for other ends that they value, including ends which you don’t value. Curing them of valuing those ends because you value their life more is wrong. Believing you have the right to cure them of valuing those ends can only happen if you don’t think they own themselves, whether you believe you own them or that society owns them or that Intrinsic Rightness does. I do not think they ought to be more okay with it because you believe you have the duty in addition to the right to control them in that way.
I also think it’s unfair to say that your stance is, unlike mine, in favor of moral pluralism; we both oppose moral pluralism and are merely deciding on a price. You believe that we have a duty to nonconsensually modify people who have “bad” preferences about their body that are more important to them than their life (such as some anorexics); I believe we have a duty to modify people who think they have that duty so that they stop thinking that. (I don’t actually think that; it is my first reaction to people claiming that they get to modify my preferences because of the inherent goodness of a thing I do not value.)
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“People can decide they’re willing to run some risk of death for other ends that they value, including ends which you don’t value. Curing them of valuing those ends because you value their life more is wrong. Believing you have the right to cure them of valuing those ends can only happen if you don’t think they own themselves, whether you believe you own them or that society owns them or that Intrinsic Rightness does. I do not think they ought to be more okay with it because you believe you have the duty in addition to the right to control them in that way.”
I’d suggest tabooing “ownership”. It doesn’t seem helpful in this discussion. “Intrinsic Rightness owns both of us” is an especially strong indicator.
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@Maxim
oops, I didn’t mean to imply any absolutist stance on life. I would not endorse forcing someone to live a life of torment because life trumps all. Presumably our putative anorexic could live a life of happiness and satisfaction if they do not starve to death.
@theunitofcaring
So in your system, whether we stand by and let an anorexic kill themselves turns on whether or not they thought ahead and gave us permission beforehand? Even if we can save them without any serious side effects and they can live a perfectly normal life if we do?
Why, in your language does now-me “own” future-me enough to offer such permission?
What about children, when do they come into their “self-ownership” sufficiently to make such decisions? What if they turn anorexic first?
I put “own” in scare quotes because I completely reject its use here. I think property is the wrong concept to use to think about these questions and any way you try to paraphrase my beliefs about this will be inaccurate if you use the word “own”.
“What makes it a claim of ownership, rather than of investment or concern or competing interest, is that it is apparently much stronger than any conceivable interest of the person themself.”
Not any conceivable interest, just this one. “competing interests” is exactly how i’d put it. I’m not saying the value of a life outweighs any conceivable interest of the person, I’m saying it outweighs an anorexics interest in being thin.
It seems to me like you’re the one saying no conceivable interest can trump stated preferences and body autonomy. Is that right?
How far are you willing to go with that?
If we had a perfect cure for heroin addiction, could we force that on people?
Can we fix a two year old with congenital insensitivity to pain?
Do you believe in a positive duty not to let people starve? And a body-autonomy right to reproduction? What if that leads to a malthusian situation? (I’m not saying I think that is likely but its an empirical question, so please accept the hypothetical) Are we required to convert every available resource into more humans until we run out and everyone starves?
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I mean, I’m a consequentialist. I think we are obligated to do the best thing (so, no to creating so many people they all starve). I also think that as long as we’re using human-level reasoning, we should notice how every time we throw personal autonomy out the window it fails to make things better in the way we thought it would, and how governments that have more license to force people to take drugs are not, broadly, better governments, and we should conclude that, instead of doing whatever we personally think is best for others no matter how profound a violation of them, we should go off their preferences as best as we can.
Like, in practice, you realize that the “we have to stop heroin addicts for their own good” mindset led to making all drugs illegal to the point of utter insanity, right? As a heuristic personal autonomy performs so much better than paternalism it’s not even competitive.
So yes, no involuntary cures for heroin. I expect most heroin addicts would agree to a cure, but if they don’t they have the right to continue being addicted to heroin.
We can do medical procedures on kids too young to consent, but we do this too much (circumcision, genital corrective surgery on intersex kids) and this is probably because we are too far on the paternalism end of the autonomy/paternalism spectrum.
We don’t have positive duties to do things with harmful consequences: if the consequence of helping starving people was that everyone in the world starved, we wouldn’t have a positive duty to do that. Notice that every time in reality people have convinced themselves that sterilizing people involuntarily was necessary, they just ended up sterilizing a lot of people and causing tons of sadness, distrust of doctors, and a rich world with a fertility rate below replacement.
In my system, we try to convince people with anorexia to take the cure. We try to figure out their reasons for not taking the cure and offer them treatment alternatives that they don’t have that objection to. In practice this will work fine, because anorexics have not had their decision-making faculties consumed by gremlins and are still rational people capable of making decisions, and they mostly prefer not to die. And if they do prefer to die, it’s usually for other reasons like depression (which is highly comorbid).
{This part contains fatphobia, sort of.}
In my world a doctor says “here is a cure!” and I say “I don’t want to lose my preference to be thin. I realize it is problematic but I prefer having it to not having it; modifying myself to not care about my weight at all is terrifying to me. I decline.” and the doctor says “the cure will not modify you to not care about your weight, it will modify you to care about your weight as much as normal people” and I say “two-thirds of normal people are overweight; I am not okay with a two-thirds chance of being overweight, no thank you”
And the doctor says “okay, will you take a cure that cures your inability to accurately perceive your own body?” and I say “yes definitely.” and the doctor says “and one which causes you to not feel anxiety about food?” and I say “you’re on” and the doctor says “and one which causes you to feel happy in your current body?” and I say “yes sure” and the doctor says “and one which makes you feel good after eating”and I say “no.”
And the doctor says “why not?” and I say “then I might eat a lot, and I prefer not to do that because I’m likelier to end up overweight”. And the doctor says “this cure is specified to be perfect so maybe it can do something like “you feel good about eating iff you weigh less than the minimum healthy weight for a person your height?” and I say “…yes, okay.”
And we go through everything like that and come up with a solution.
In your world I never go to the doctor at all, because they will cure me and that’s not acceptable to me. I come up with a convincing explanation for the weight loss and no one guesses until I have seriously damaged my heart and longevity, whereupon I probably collapse in the middle of class and they force the cure on me and, unless the cure also modifies my preference not to have my mind altered against my will, I am really deeply bothered by this for the rest of my life and probably spend a lot of time researching how I can undo nonconsensual mind modification and trying to act in a way that the ‘me’ who was corrected would have wanted (that is what I would do if I learned today that I had been modified against my will, even in a direction that made my life better).
I honestly think the first world is better. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that respecting autonomy does better.
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In general, I’m more persuaded by UoC’s arguments in this exchange, but I found “we should notice how every time we throw personal autonomy out the window it fails to make things better in the way we thought it would” surprising because it’s such an absolute statement, and one with obvious exceptions.
I mean, nothing is perfect, and all things can have unexpected consequences. But lead abatement is something that wouldn’t happen without government regulations forcing people to do things they don’t want to do, which in turn reduces lead poisoning in future populations. Similar arguments can be made for clean air laws, and for similar “tragedy of the commons” situations.
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I think Kelsey might have had an implicit “for their own good, not because they are doing things that harm others” clause. Heroin addiction and anorexia are both not directly harmful to other people.
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“I think Kelsey might have had an implicit “for their own good, not because they are doing things that harm others” clause.”
Oh, that makes sense. If so, never mind. 🙂
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@theunitofcaring
I pretty much agree with everything you said.
I think I thought to myself that I had constructed a starker hypothetical than I really had. All of your points on the practicalities of it are spot-on.
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@Barry, yeah, Ozy said it as I’d intended: no laws against things that only harm yourself, laws against things that harm other people are totally okay. (But it can’t be symbolic harm and it’d better be substantive. Trans people don’t harm me because in ~bathrooms~; heroin addicts don’t harm me because lots of them steal things, people with eating disorders aren’t bad influences on the children.)
@Lawrence yeah, sorry, I should’ve lead with the “autonomy: best heuristic” thing and not the “grrrr I belong to ME” reaction
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The “respect personal autonomy and don’t be paternalistic as long as people are only harming themselves” doesn’t work unless you also assume that the harm people inflict on themselves in no way imposes any moral obligations on others or on society to mitigate that harm, and in no way or at least minimally inflicts emotional damage on others. Without that assumption, the people in question are still harming others, in a very direct and literal way.
Trivial example- normally we might think that no one has the right to force John Doe to get a job. But if John Doe’s voluntary refusal to get a job morally obligates society to feed and shelter him, and practically obligates his ex wife Jane Roe to shoulder the full cost of feeding and sheltering his children, then apparently his voluntary refusal to find paying work is, literally, picking at least two pockets. As such, libertarian and anti paternalism arguments are inapplicable on their own terms.
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If you were to call a hirsute gay man a “bear”, would it be a lie? No, because the word bear can also mean hirsute gay man.
In the process of a few short years, we’ve decided that “woman” can and should be used to refer to people who consider their self-identity that of a woman, regardless of appearance, genitalia, chromosomes, etc. Why can we not also use species words that way, if it otherwise helps people and picks no one’s pocket?
(Incidentally, I know of no otherkin who will insist you call them a ferret. The qualifier “ferret otherkin” is perfectly fine, and isn’t a lie since otherkin literally means “someone who believes or feels themselves in some way to be a non-human creature or identifies as one”.)
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I think it comes down to the idea that many day-to-day uses of the word “woman” can be improved by including “trans women”, but as far as I know nobody has ever used the word “bear” or “ferret” in to refer to carnivorans in such a way that their usage would be improved in any way by including gay men or otherkin.
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I’d like to second Lawrence D’Ana’s comment. Sometimes I feel like we live in a world of young Werthers. Suppose my friend Werther loves Charlotte, who is married and uninterested. It’s part of his identity that he loves Charlotte, and he says his life is worthless if he doesn’t get together with Charlotte. But personally, having been in love several times unsuccessfully and a couple of times quite successfully, I think that Werther will fall in love again soon enough. If I’m somebody that Werther trusts, then I think the right thing for me to do is to share my experience with him and tell him that his present experience is probably going to change. Of course his nature may be different from mine, but we are both human, and my personal experience, as well as modern psychology, tells me that if one is capable of falling in love with one person, they are almost always capable of falling in love with someone else. Sharing my experience may not change his mind, but it may give him a little push in the direction of being happier, and may potentially save him from depression and suicide (spoilers!)
Now suppose my friend Werther loves Charlie instead of Charlotte, but gay relationships happen to not be accepted in our society. I could tell him, based on my personal experience, not to worry because he’ll fall in love with a girl soon enough. It so happens that I would be wrong: we have at this point accumulated overwhelming evidence, both scientific and circumstantial, that an exclusively gay man cannot fall in love or have a fulfilling sexual relationship with a woman.
What is the overarching pattern that these two examples demonstrate? I would say that it’s Ozy’s favorite maxim that generalizations don’t work. The generalization “all things to do with identity and partner preference are changeable” is wrong and dangerous, and the generalization “all things to do with identity and partner preference are immutable and not to be questioned” is also wrong and dangerous (for example I think there’s a common belief that pedophilia is an immutable sexual preference, which while it may be true in some cases does not seem to me to be sufficiently well-understood at the moment for such generalizations). The fact that society has seamlessly transitioned from one generalization to the other is, to me, just the usual crowd-of-humans tendency to reduce complex multifaceted questions to small quantities of cutely general bits. I think that the new generalization is in most cases better than the old one (as it counteracts the irrational “ugh, this is weird!” gut reflex), but its canonicity bothers me, and I will question any form of solidarity that proscribes constructive questioning of other people’s experience.
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Yeah, I agree.
There are some situations where I will not express solidarity–usually because it’s too much of a distraction from the main point. Or maybe I don’t know much about the group, and think I’d be as likely to do harm as to do good. In this situation, I simply avoid contrasting myself with those other groups.
Otherkin are a case in point, because I know very little about them, and the topic consistently derails conversations. My solution is simply not to bring them up, either explicitly or implicitly.
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> If the trans movement as a whole said “otherkin with social species dysphoria are just as valid as trans people with social gender dysphoria!”, I’m pretty sure the response of people in general would be “so what you’re saying is that both of you guys are fake?” It wouldn’t do much good.
So, what is the trans movement supposed to do when otherkin groups very loudly start saying this, and saying that it’s wrong for trans people to say otherwise? Should the trans movement start sabotaging itself by making this alliance? Why? Do they have special obligations to otherkin groups that other organizations don’t?
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Yep, this is my life now…
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Another example is the “good fatty” argument that goes on in fat acceptance circles. Many fat people who eat “healthy” and exercise regularly object to the stereotype that fat people do nothing all day but sit on a sofa eating big macs, and that’s understandable. But for fat people who don’t eat “healthy” food or exercise regularly, it can feel like they’re being thrown under the bus, and that’s also understandable.
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Thoughts on, for lack of a better term, extrapolated solidarity? I can’t think of a good example right now, but the thought process is “I have experienced [very minor thing] which seems analogous to [very serious thing] that other people experience, so I can kind of extrapolate and understand how that might feel and why, even if I can’t fully appreciate it.”
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I believe that, as with many approaches to empathy, it can be very useful as long as it’s not taken too far or based on absolutist assumptions. For me, it’s pretty much an essential strategy for finding the sympathy needed to provide good emotional support. On the other hand, I’ve been both on the giving and the receiving end of extrapolated solidarity taken too far (“Yeah, that’s so much like [much smaller thing I’ve had to deal with]!” and then proceeding to make the discussion all about oneself).
I happened to be writing about this exact thing on my Tumblr just hours before Ozy’s post came up. I’ll blockquote, since somehow I’ve never been able to figure out how to link to an individual Tumblr post.
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I also reacted pretty negatively to that comic, for similar reasons. There is nothing about the difference between human and AI in that comics universe that would justify what Bubbles said. Her earlier reasoning was straight forward- she suffers, but other AIs suffer as much or more without breaking down like she does, therefore she is weak. You can substitute literally any group in for AI in that sentence and it continues to have the same meaning. The experience of finding out that at least some other people can withstand something that genuinely upsets you was included in this comic precisely because it is so universal.
And the proper response, that not everyone is the same and not everyone responds to similar stress identically, and this does not imply that those who become upset are “weak” in any meaningful way, applies in all circumstances. Bubbles response was self indulgent and unfair to Fae. Of course, that can be written off as Bubbles continuing to react with slightly destructive knee jerk defensiveness, unfairly pushing away a friend… but I’m not sure whether the author sees it that way. He might… I just genuinely don’t know.
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Yes, that’s the biggest irony: a lot of the recent storylines involving mistreatment of AIs are clearly meant to parallel oppression of various other groups which do exist in the world we live in.
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Thank you so, so much for this.
I feel like the inevitable singling out of otherkin in the comments is a good example of why we so desperately need solidarity, and at the same time why people don’t want to give it to us; it’s a vicious cycle. You’re not respected so people are wary of respecting you because then they won’t be respected either.
It takes courage to stand up and say no to that. But it’s the only way things change, and I appreciate it.
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Another aspect is that once you commit publicly to a position it’s hard to move.
If you’ve got a marginalized group, say gay people campaigning for the right to marry and their opposition make absurd strawmen “If we allow this then what’s next? Someone demanding to marry their toaster?!?!”
To which the campaigners reasonably respond that the opposition are being idiots, and that no, nobody is trying to marry their toaster and no it doesn’t make any sense to compare that to gay marriage and it’s an utterly absurd idea anyway.
Later they win their fight.
Then out of the woodwork comes a subculture sincerely demanding the right to marry their toasters and for it to be recognized in law.
Should the people who were campaigning earlier now recant on their earlier statements that it is absurd and support the toaster campaigners?
Does taking a slightly unusual position require you to support everyone who takes an even more unusual one?
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“Does taking a slightly unusual position require you to support everyone who takes an even more unusual one?”
No. But if you want me to take you seriously, the answer to both questions should be derived from a consistent set of principles. Preferably in a way that would allow me to deduce your stance on Toaster-marriage before the issue cropped up.
FTR: I’m all for getting the state out of the marriage business altogether; and for the private side of things: If anyone wants to create a ritual that could be meaningfully described as “marrying a willing person to a toaster”, go for it!
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No, but I feel like before a group defends itself with “it would be absurd to do X, why are you comparing absurd thing to our reasonable request”, it should ask itself whether there are likely to be any X-doers out there and whether X actually does any harm, and needs to be publicly branded absurd in order for people to make their point.
I feel like it’s possible to say “no, that’s not what we’re asking. That’s tangential to our position. We are asking for blah blah blah” without saying “and of course if we wanted to do X we’d be flaming lunatics, hahaha!” I understand the political value of “you and I can both agree this is ker-razy so you can sympathise with me and think my demands are reasonable, right?”, except that a) it throws people under the bus and b) I don’t see it changing that many minds to begin with.
I mean, people who make the toasters argument already oppose gay marriage, they’re not just opposing it because they think it might lead to marrying toasters. If you explain that you are not, in fact, in support of toaster-marriage and you think it’s absurd, that’s not going to make them go, “oh, okay, then you’re suddenly reasonable!” It’s a straw man and they know it.
Now, as far as I know no one is campaigning for the right to marry their toaster legally, because although some people are objectum-sexuals, sharing the legal benefits of marriage with an object wouldn’t make a lot of sense. Objectum-sexuals probably do just draw up their own rituals, and I think that’s fine unless we hear from them otherwise.
There are, however, otherkin out there with species dysphoria saying that we’d like to be taken seriously, and while it’s not necessary to include us in the trans fight, especially since it’s an entirely different set of needs and changes that we’d want, I’d like to not see us thrown under the bus in arguments as a rhetorical way to make a point look more reasonable.
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And if it does come up that objectum sexuals want some of the benefits of marriage (their toaster partner being able to visit them in the hospital?) I am quite on board with them receiving any such benefits which make sense.
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Agreed. I would absolutely be in support of an objectum sexual being allowed to have their beloved object with them in the hospital, providing it can be there without causing safety issues for other patients or staff.
As far as I know hospitals don’t bar you from having personal objects, so it seems a bit of a moot point, but I certainly support their right to have such an object there. (Though I support that right in general, whether or not the object is your partner – comfort objects, for example.)
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