Tags
Confused about what an Intellectual Turing Test is? Click here! Please read, then vote at the end of the post. Feel free to speculate in the comment section about this person’s identity!
What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
I will tend to respect other people’s viewpoints, but only if they seem reasonable as well. I don’t talk to people who seem like idiots or who seem to treat others poorly.
I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with so-called “SJWs”. I disagreed on really minor points – like regarding whether it was a good idea to not read straight white cis men’s books -, and often these disagreements would spark all-caps text accusing me of shedding man-tears, which is pretty rich since at that time I wasn’t identifying as a man (and even now I don’t fully identify as a man). People were immensely rude to me.
I’m not rude to others, and I would prefer that others do the same for me. My viewpoints shouldn’t be dismissed just because I don’t have maximum Oppression Points or whatever; they should be evaluated based on their own merit.
What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
I don’t think that gender is altogether a bad thing, and I fear that gender abolitionists don’t understand what they’re demolishing. Dysphoria’s horrible; but I also think that the most transcendent experiences in my life have been linked to my understanding of my own gender. The ways that I’ve imagined my ideal self in the mirror are in fact deeply connected to typical gender norms- imagining myself as a man in a dress, myself with long hair and looking like a girl, but “actually” being a boy, myself as a lovely femboy. And the way I experience attraction to others- oftentimes the way I perceive someone as attractive or not is directly linked to their gender. Does that make me a sexist? Does that enforce patriarchy? Of course not, and it doesn’t have to.
I would change my opinion here if it was shown that gender relied on patriarchy and that my experiences were the product of something else.
Regarding this, a lot of leftists seem to think that every single member of an identity group agrees with the social justice consensus. This is completely false. Again, like with the man tear thing, it seems like a lot of social justice thinks it can categorize people into a label based on their actions, which I understand is actually a fairly sexist thing!
I would change my opinion on this if every single member of an identity group spontaneously began agreeing on something.
Sexism, by the way, is something that a lot of feminists ignore when it’s against men. Yes, there’s sexism against men. There is misandry. And a lot of times feminism seems to reinforce this message of misandry. Of judging men by their appearances. Of claims of “mansplaining”, as if anyone could tell someone else’s gender socialization or their position of power through a somewhat condescending explanation. Of presumptions that men are rapists and always sex-hungry, which play into the erasure of male rape survivors. Even that people attracted to women – mostly straight men – are inherently predatory or disgusting, which is couched in feminist language like “objectification”.
I would change my opinion on this if it was shown that, as a societal pattern, men were not subject to prejudice, and I would change my opinion on sj’s opinion on this if more feminists and sjs talked about men’s issues.
The whole idea of privilege also doesn’t make sense to me. A lot of social justice norms seem aimed at creating what Julia Serano calls a reverse discourse, this whole idea where privileged people need to shut the hell up and make space for others to talk. And honestly, this can be a really toxic dynamic. There are lots of sj type messages that say “It’s okay if you, an Oppressed Person, get angry with people and hurt them and can’t be civil in an argument”, and I don’t think that’s necessarily wrong, but look, okay, it implies that an Oppressed Person must get angry with people and be uncivil, and it implies that allies, in order to be properly Inclusive, must get angry with people and hurt then and become uncivil, and if you’re not visibly angry and you’re not hurting anyone and you’re civil, then you must be not a real Oppressed Person or not being a good ally or whatever.
And it also implies that, if you say something Oppressive, then clearly you deserve to be spoken harshly to. You deserve to be shamed and shunned and yelled at and all you get to do is apologize and if your opinion still differs then by God you’re an awful person. This is terrifying.
This reverse discourse also results in bad things like how, if a Privileged Person tries to say anything on a given subject, then they’re seen as “talking over” Oppressed People. “Talking over” other people is a horrible concept and it should be retired; the amount of times I’ve seen someone silenced or afraid to speak up because they didn’t want to “talk over” other people far outnumbers the amount of times I’ve seen the concept used to shut up an asshole who truly was speaking over others.
Some sj seems to really discourage empathy, as well. If someone’s talking about their experiences as a truly oppressed person, then the SJ Norm is for everyone else to shut up unless they’re a member of identity group x. They’re not allowed to relate their own experiences. They’re not allowed to have their own stories or their own connections. They’re allowed to listen and be Good Allies. And of course, there are some places for that. But in real life, conversations need more than one participant. And I’m afraid that this norm will end up making it so people of different backgrounds can’t relate to each other as well, so that there’s this crushing feeling of not-understanding, even if it isn’t necessarily the only option.
This relates to the idea that, if someone isn’t a member of a marginalized group, then it must be okay to hurt them and speak over them. And it also relates to how sometimes the sj-inclined act like power dynamics in the larger society apply to their sj group, when power can actually be distributed quite differently within subcultures.
I would change my opinion on the benefits of this reverse discourse if it appeared to actually aid people, or if sj started using it better.
On a somewhat different note- I really dislike some sj denunciations of capitalism. Capitalism has wrought an immense amount of benefit for the world. It’s one of the only reliable ways to raise countries out of poverty; and it has uplifted something like billions of people. It is the engine of the people’s choices and autonomy. The “crises” of capitalism haven’t been particularly bad compared to the crises before capitalism. It’s only because people don’t multiply that they don’t realize that peasant life and serf life haven’t been that great for peasants and serfs. That the old orders of certain countries have been corrupt and despotic and terrible, and that they have hurt far more poor people than capitalism has. Living standards have almost always gone up after a country industrializes and modernizes.
I would change my opinion on this if it were shown that capitalism was a net bad for the world, or if it were shown that coercion, exploitation, and (actual) imperialism by conquest were inherent aspects of capitalism.
And as for international interventions. I don’t buy that Western countries should always, always stay out of other countries. Maybe preventing genocide or destroying prison camps is imperialistic, but, um, does it matter? Yes, America in particular often has human rights abuses of its own, such as torture or prison camps or nuclear weapons, I’m not denying that, but this hypocrisy isn’t reason to let other countries also have nuclear weapons or prison camps! America, as the only remaining superpower, has a responsibility, as articulated by philosophical perspectives on the Holocaust, to prevent atrocities, even if it hurts her people, even if she must spend billions upon billions of dollars upon defense, even if she has no interests in a given region. The American revolution wasn’t won by Americans- it was won by the French allies.
Explain Gamergate.
Anita Sarkeesian attempted to fund her video game criticism show. She criticized some aspects of video games – like that they portrayed women as rewards or that they didn’t have well-rounded female characters – that definitely had some issues. But she also didn’t seem to give the games a fair chance. She didn’t give any benefit of the doubt – she often seemed to go for the worst possible explanation. And also, like a lot of feminists, she doesn’t seem to question the dogma that women as rewards were Definitely A Bad Thing. Yes, as a societal thing it’s bad, and artistically it’s not very origianl. But in a single game?
It’s not fair to castigate a game, with a target audience of mostly straight men, for having graphics of beautiful women as awards, or even the love of a beautiful woman as an award. If this causes men to view women as lesser-than or as objects in real life, then I think there is likely something more than a video game going on. In general I think this is a larger problem among feminism, to observe patterns of oppression on a general scale and then apply them to individual issues. For a long time I worried that I was pedestalizing and objectifying someone I’d fallen in love with, when these were really just the emotions of love and attraction.
But anyway, it was completely unwarranted that she was attacked in the way she was.
Fisher said:
Sincere.
But only because I respect their right to self-identify. Otherwise, I would have said that this was published in the wrong section.
LikeLike
absurdseagull said:
This person sounds uncannily like me – I would guess they’re the same as SJ #3, since SJ #3 was also a fellow autistic trans woman who I more or less agreed with. Everything written seems awfully sincere one way or another and mimics some of my thoughts on social justice (Though I still identify as SJW and post-capitalist, disagreeing with some of the protections of capitalism).
Because I felt like SJ #3 was an anti-SJ and since this person’s style seems similar, I vote genuine, although perhaps atypical, anti-SJ.
Regardless of anything else, I will make the side bet that everything written is sincere.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Eltargrim said:
Whether or not this person is pro- or anti-SJ, they’ve confused the Tropes Against Women Kickstarter debacle with Gamergate. I’m not sure if indicates more towards ignorant-pro or ignorant-anti, however.
LikeLiked by 1 person
jdbreck said:
I also perceived the Tropes Against Women Kickstarter debacle as part of Gamergate. Subsumed into it if not originally a part of it.
LikeLike
Eltargrim said:
I could see it as being an early tremor, perhaps; but at that point we could just as easily point to Doritosgate as providing a pattern of ethics in game journalism. To what extent do we regard precursors to a larger event as part of the larger event? Given that there’s a two-and-a-half year span separating the two, I think it’s fair to regard them as separate events, even though together they may point to a pattern or overall trend.
LikeLike
Aapje said:
I think that GG can only be understood as being part of existing dissatisfactions which came to a head when the last drop filled the bucket.
This is similar to how BLM did not spring into existence from nothing, but did become a mainstream issue after one event that also was that final drop.
LikeLike
liskantope said:
I voted “pro-SJ”, but it’s a gamble. I could very easily be wrong.
The reason I voted as I did is that I find it very plausible for the author to be somewhat of a non-central SJ-er who’s familiar the more outrageous SJ rhetorical behaviors and who also happens to have more right-wing political views in certain arenas. If this is the case, then the author’s strategy was to rail against some of the worst types of SJ rhetoric without making any real attempt to rebut the core of the SJ belief system, plus for good measure picking on certain left-wing political views they happen to genuinely disagree with. If so, well, “find a way to be genuine even while pretending to be on the other side” is a decent strategy which I think was employed quite artfully in this case.
LikeLiked by 3 people
Lawrence D'Anna said:
Obviously sincere. It is maybe possible that someone who considers themselves pro-SJ wrote this as a critique of some SJish things they don’t like. But I don’t think so. I voted real. Either way I would absolutely call them a liberal.
LikeLike
Toggle said:
This one’s fascinating to me. Take this bit:
>“Talking over” other people is a horrible concept and it should be retired; the amount of times I’ve seen someone silenced or afraid to speak up because they didn’t want to “talk over” other people far outnumbers the amount of times I’ve seen the concept used to shut up an asshole who truly was speaking over others.
“It should be retired.” Ozy does this sometimes too, a verbal tic where they speak with the assumption that their preferences are in some sense *meaningful* for SJ discourse norms. It would never even occur to me to critique social justice by dictating behavioral rules at it! And the reaction would be quite negative if I tried- even a critique like ‘[x] causes me to feel distressed and sad’ is basically blood in the water, let alone a flat ‘don’t do [x]’.
So some of the verbal habits here suggest that the author has a lot of ‘social justice points’, insofar as that means something. Not at all what I’d expect from somebody that identifies as an anti. But at the same time, I’m voting sincere. This person seems ASJ in the same way that Martin Luther is anti-Catholic.
LikeLiked by 1 person
absurdseagull said:
I agree about social justice experience.
I think there’s an easy explanation. The fact that the author is trans or gnc suggests that they have experience with social justice ideas. This is not to say that people are trans or gnc because they have experience with SJ ideas. Rather, people who are already trans or gnc tend to seek out other trans/gnc people or spaces that are trans-accepting. Social Justice, despite its flaws, is somewhat accepting of trans people nowadays, at least on the surface (the trans experience is a lot more complex than I think most people are willing to accept). Prominent trans authors like Julie Serano and trans actresses like Laverne Cox are SJW-aligned and activist out of necessity. In light of this, a lack of social justice experience would be more surprising.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Elzh said:
Considering that this was submitted to Ozy’s blog, the author probably picked up that verbal tic from them; I haven’t seen used much in the general sj discourse.
LikeLiked by 1 person
No one said:
The verbal tic that jumped out at me is the ‘answering a question as if someone asked’ thing. The sentence construction of “Sexism, by the way, is something that a lot of feminists ignore when it’s against men. Yes, there’s sexism against men.” is one that I find almost entirely coming from people with very socially safe viewpoints.
I could guess that this has something to do with the response the speaker is used to, wherein for anti-SJ people it’s less ‘Really? Do men experience sexism?’ and more ‘go educate yourself to be less of a bigot, you don’t even realize how privileged you are!’, but in reality I have no idea why it seems to shake out that way. YMMV.
Oddly, now that the previous commenters mention it, there are a lot of phrasings in here that make it seem like the author is used to actually being listened to, which is… not my experience with voicing dissenting opinions to SJ groups.
I voted pro-SJ on this one because it seems to slow pitch the arguments in ways that can be ‘corrected’ to the proper narrative with a sentence or two.
LikeLiked by 1 person
tcheasdfjkl said:
Toggle, I think the other possibility is the author is anti-SJ enough not to care what SJ thinks of them and is emboldened to issue strong critiques for that reason.
LikeLike
Toggle said:
tcheasdfjkl, it could be. But compare the sentence I quoted earlier to the one found in the gamergate answer:
>But anyway, it was completely unwarranted that she was attacked in the way she was.
Here, we don’t see “GGers should stop attacking her”, just “it is bad that she was attacked.” That’s much more like my relationship with social justice- I think *about* it, I respond to it, I have opinions regarding it structure and consequences, but to make pronouncements at it would be kinda, “Old Man Yells at Cloud”.
LikeLike
Nita said:
“We should retire this tactic” is a reasonable thing to say when you’re talking to peers who share your goals but are doing more harm than good due to using bad methods.
If you perceive them as monsters whose only aim in life is to harm you, then it doesn’t make much sense to say that, of course.
LikeLiked by 1 person
dantobias (@dantobias) said:
I think this is the same person as Pro-SJ #9, given some telltale similarities such as considering GamerGate to center around Anita Sarkeesian (not really true; Zoe Quinn was central to its start, and then it expanded to lots of other things, including Sarkeesian’s critiques, but not centered on that) and their self-description as some sort of genderfluid/intergender/agender. Thus, since I judged the earlier essay as “Pro”, I’ll stick to that here too, even though its anti-SJ position doesn’t look particularly fake (though neither the pro- or anti-SJ positions in these two essays describe a particularly typical stance in either camp).
LikeLiked by 1 person
argleblarglebarglebah said:
I agree that this is the same person as Pro-SJ #9, but since I voted anti on that one and this one seems more convincing I’m sticking with my anti vote.
LikeLike
Aapje said:
This is either an anti-SJ or an outlier-SJ (which this blog attracts IMO). So I’m very convinced that this is sincere, but yet not 100% sure what this person identifies as.
In any case, it is close enough to my beliefs to warrant an anti vote.
LikeLike
tcheasdfjkl said:
This is a kind of weird mix of actually reasonable critiques, things I genuinely disagree with, and critiques that would be reasonable except I don’t think they apply to very many people (starting with gender abolitionism, for one, without the caveat that this is by no means a standard SJ position). This person has a lot of good thoughts but I keep wanting to argue with them about how they’re overapplying their ideas and taking the part as equivalent to the whole (this applies both to their representation of SJ and of GG).
Not sure if this is a pro-SJ person who listed their actual gripes with part of SJ or an anti-SJ person who has had a weird experience of SJ. Voted genuine because I would think someone aware that this is only a partial portrait of SJ would, like, address that somewhere in their essay? But if I’m wrong, wow, OP tricked me by *not* doing enough work.
LikeLike
Maxim Kovalev said:
I could totally imagine a scenario of a transmasculine person first running into “you’re perpetuating transphobia if you want to transition” gender abolitionism, then, while identifying more as a man, and experiencing a shitty combination of men’s, women’s and trans issues, into “lol male tears” feminism, and thus getting massively pissed off at the entire SJ community, while still sharing the overall values.
LikeLiked by 4 people
Lawrence D'Anna said:
“you’re perpetuating transphobia if you want to transition”
Does. Not. Compute.
⁉️
Wut.
How?
A splain?
LikeLike
dantobias (@dantobias) said:
Gender is such a minefield in social-justice circles these days that literally any possible position you can hold on it will be strongly offensive to somebody who identifies as pro-SJ.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Maxim Kovalev said:
@Lawrence D’Anna, the idea is that gender is a social construct, which is arbitrarily assigned to people of different sexes. The idea that social roles, pronouns, etc. are assigned according to one’s sex is harmful. And the idea that one must have a certain sex to be allowed to live as a certain gender is a transphobic one. Well then – people who want to live in a gender different from what they were assigned at birth should just do that. If instead of that they’re trying to change their sexual characteristics as much as possible, they’re playing along with the notion that you must have a certain sex to have a certain gender. It’s as if a black person saw all the racism in the society, and instead of challenging it, decided to undergo various medical procedures to make themselves as white as possible. That wouldn’t challenge the notion that black people should be treated poorly, that would only be saying “you shouldn’t treat me personally poorly, but that’s because you should treat me as white, not because you shouldn’t be treating black people poorly.”
Now, I do wanna say that the idea that the desire to transition might be partially informed by the conformity to the societal or internalized ideas about sex-gender link isn’t particularly bollocks. Remember Caitlyn Jenner with her “if you look like a man in a dress you creep people out, and it’s your responsibility to apply effort (and succeed) to look like a woman.” In trans communities on Russian anonymous imageboards there are always very popular threads where questioning people post their photos, and ask “do I have a chance to pass?” People whom the community judges to be passable it encourages to transition, and those whom it doesn’t it calls homophobic slurs and… hmm… discourages. Those who transition nonetheless it calls even more homophobic slurs, and aggressively misgenders, since they don’t believe that non-passing people are entitled to be gendered correctly. Or if you go to the websites of places that offer FFS, voice-altering surgery, electrolysis, and other procedures that were seen as much more integral parts of transitioning in like 90s, and haven’t changed their discourse since then, you’ll see lots of notions along the lines of “every MtF must look as passing as possible – look at how ugly these people looked before our procedure, and how feminine they got after!” So the notion that having certain sex characteristics is a prerequisite to identifying (and being identified) as a certain gender is very much present in the trans communities.
What is bollocks, however, is:
– Ignoring all the evidence that for many many many trans people having their preferred sex characteristics is a terminal rather than instrumental value, and this preference even appears to be hereditary to a large extent.
– Saying that people who are uncomfortable with their assigned gender (but not those who aren’t!) are personally responsible to fight the battle for abolishing gender essentialism, which, short of working cryonics or singularity, is not gonna be won during their lifetime, all while being subjected to immense social pressure and massive dysphoria, instead of exercising their right for body autonomy, and living happily thereafter.
– Equating acquired and mutable. Every person quite clearly acquires native languages, but it’s also clear that it’s absolutely positively impossible to change the set of one’s native languages after the critical period. Likewise, even if it turns out that the desire to medically transition is fully motivated by the acquired notions about the links between sex and gender, it’s by no means guaranteed that it’s possible to unlearn that, and it’d still be very much likely the case that even if in a counterfactual genderless society these people wouldn’t have the desire to transition, having grown up in the actual society, they only have the choice between transitioning and living with debilitating dysphoria.
LikeLiked by 4 people
absurdseagull said:
Gender abolitionism may not seem like a large part of SJ to you. For someone who thinks about gender a lot, which was my experience as a pre-hrt transwoman, it can be integral to their experience of SJ.
I find that a lot of (mostly cis but that’s to be expected) internet SJ discourse can’t really draw the line very well for where they disagree with radfem ideas. As such, they can often end up espousing a neutered down but essentially identical version of the same ideas.
For that reason, I don’t think it would be uncommon for a dmab trans person to at least somewhat associate gender abolition with SJ-ness (also part of why I was so uncomfortable when Lawrence brought up Julie Biddle as a leftist who disagreed with SJ the other day).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Katelyn Ailuros said:
“[A] lot of leftists seem to think that every single member of an identity group agrees with the social justice consensus.” This view is so offensively uncharitable that attributing it to someone else is, itself, offensively uncharitable.
Normally I’d chalk something this ridiculous up to exaggeration, but “I would change my opinion on this if every single member of an identity group spontaneously began agreeing on something” is just plain not compatible with that.
I can’t tell whether OP is real or fake, but I deeply dislike them either way.
LikeLike
argleblarglebarglebah said:
I am pro-SJ and I’ve noticed that significant numbers of pro-SJ people (particularly new and/or young and/or high privilege SJ people) don’t seem to realize that an identity group can have multiple views on a topic.
e.g. I was once in an argument with a cis person on Tumblr holding a conventional SJ position, where two trans people were both backing me up on my disagreement with the consensus. [The argument was a variation of “is it transphobic to not want to have sex with a trans person?”, but it was long enough ago that I don’t really remember the details.] At one point in the argument she suddenly realized this and apologized, but in a way that seemed like she was changing her view of “what the trans community believes” in general.
This is much less common off of Tumblr and stereotypically Tumblr-like spaces, of course, but if your idea of what SJ discourse looks like comes entirely from the worst parts of Tumblr I can completely understand why someone would think that.
LikeLiked by 6 people
Aapje said:
I think that this is the logical consequence of the idea that all differences between humans are socialized and that this creates almost unavoidable behavior & ideas in certain groups (like toxic masculinity or racism).
If one believes that most men become misogynist due to the environment and most white people become racist due to the same; there is already the claim that entire identity groups share ideas.
At that point, it is more a matter of degree to which one believes that ideas are shared among everyone in the group.
LikeLiked by 1 person
argleblarglebarglebah said:
I don’t think that’s true. I think the real cause is just that if you spend all your time fighting for, e.g., “black people” you can get an idea in your head about what’s good for “black people” which isn’t necessarily reflective of the real complexity of the situation, particularly if you yourself are not black.
If you hear a black person telling you that such-and-such is bad for black people, it takes good judgement and experience to realize that they are only one person and they don’t necessarily speak for everyone. The idea that some policies are good for some black people and not others, or that black people honestly disagree about certain policies, is not that easy if you’re used to always fighting for these entire gestalt communities.
It’s also not just an SJ thing: it’s not rare at all for a pundit to say, for example, that some policy will be good for “the economy” against some other pundit who says it will be bad for “the economy”. Of course, it can be both, and often the research is ambiguous. Or you’ll also often get people (Scott Alexander, notably) treating Republicans and Democrats in this reductive way, as if both parties weren’t composed of lots of different sub-interests who only really agree about voting for the same person at the end of the day. (This gets proven every primary season and yet somehow people seem to forget it again by the general.) Treating large groups of people as gestalts is not unique by any means to social justice.
LikeLiked by 2 people
Aapje said:
I think that there is a big difference between ‘all people in group X believe Y’ and ‘I know what’s best for group X.’ So I think that you are conflating dissimilar (although obviously related) things. My explanation was for people who believe the former, you seem to address the latter.
In general, expressions like ‘best for X’ usually have implicit subjective values. For example, if a person defines a ‘better economy’ as a higher GDP, then eliminating the minimum wage is making a ‘better economy,’ BUT only in their value system.
People who define a ‘better economy’ primarily on a lack of poverty, will think that you get a ‘better economy’ by increasing the minimum wage.
So both people are correctly stating that their (100% conflicting) opinions will make a better economy, they just don’t share the value system and thus use completely different definitions for ‘better’.
These things start to overlap when people assume that all people in a group have the same value system. A slightly less silly, but still nasty belief, is when it’s assumed that the people with a different value system are self-hating (like women who dismiss feminism, Jews who dismiss Zionism, white people who are willing to mingle with other races, etc).
LikeLike
argleblarglebarglebah said:
I am almost certain this is the same person as Social Justice 9 . The style of answer 2 is very similar, they claim to be bigender in both answers, and they give an answer to 3 focused strongly on Anita Sarkeesian in particular.
Because of that, I am both voting anti on this and increasing my confidence in my anti vote on that post. This post seems to be significantly more sincere, and this person seems to understand the anti position a great deal more than the pro position.
LikeLike
jdbreck said:
I voted pro on this one, but I was very much on the fence. The very thing that made me think Pro could also be why I should have said genuine Anti. This writer has definite real experience inside SJ, and many of the criticisms made are ones I happen to agree with. Is this call coming from inside the house? I think so, but maybe it’s coming from someone just on the other side of the front door.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Nita said:
Logically, it does not imply that. But, of course, cultural developments are often not very logical.
OK, this sounds like a fairly typical nice rationalist-adjacent person very frustrated by genuinely frustrating things. I think there are plenty of people like that* reading ToT, and the criticisms are very detailed and personal. Therefore, sincere.
* There are also plenty of pro-SJ people with similar core beliefs around here, but I think their anti-SJ impersonation would sound less hurt and less vulnerable.
LikeLiked by 2 people
memeticengineer said:
The confusing thing is that a nearly identical essay could be a sincere pro-SJ person too.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Autolykos said:
I notice that I am confused. It is a well argued, credible and sane position, and I even agree with large parts of it. But it still looks fake to me. Yet I can’t put my finger on anything specific. Well, I could probably nitpick some minor details, but none of them would be my true objection. It’s probably some minor detail about the writing style being “from the wrong bubble”, but being that way very consistently.
Voted Pro, and not even feeling that unsure about it – just very confused.
LikeLike
Rhand said:
It’s an Anti, but I think he’s pretending to be trans to trick us into thinking he’s a pro.
I think he’s an anti because he strawmans social justice views on economic issues. Social justice is largely fine with capitalism and neoliberalism, and they deride those that focus on economic issues as “brocialists” and “manarchists.” Social justice does not register economics as an issue of importance-instead, it is a distraction from exigent concerns like bathroom bills. If it were a pro, he wouldn’t have even brought up capitalism.
For the record, I agree that capitalism is a categorically superior economic system to anything else. But I always considered economic issues, whatever side you’re on, to be the most important thing.
LikeLike
Nita said:
But why would they do that? Both sincere and insincere answers should try to pass for sincere, right?
LikeLiked by 2 people
Aapje said:
Do you think this because you believe that trans people cannot be anti; or do you think that the answer shows signs of this person not being trans?
LikeLike
Rhand said:
I’m pretty opposed to social justice, but for all its faults, SJ is very welcoming of trans people, and gives them a lot of help that they may need given that they face numerous psychiatric comorbidities.
I think it’s natural for trans people to gravitate towards social justice communities because they have a rational self-interest to do so. The only time one would oppose it is if they have a more compelling reason to favor the status quo (eg Caitlyn Jenner, seeking to preserve her vast wealth/status/fame).
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aapje said:
I agree that trans people would often naturally gravitate to the debate, given that they will almost certainly be quite unhappy with the gender policing they experience somewhere (or everywhere) on their journey. I disagree that this means that they would necessarily land on the pro-side or that they would be particularly welcome on the SJ side. There is quite a bit of dislike of trans people on the pro-SJ side (TERF).
Schala is an example of a trans woman who is fairly active in the SJ debate and who is anti. In her case, she seems to have been very upset with the gender policing she experienced in her male life (especially due to her inability to live up to the demands) and after she transitioned, she still had strong empathy with men who also have trouble living up to the male gender role. This made her views most consistent with the men’s rights movement.
LikeLiked by 1 person
ozymandias said:
Anti people can also be transgender. AFAIK, no one has yet lied about biographical details in the ITT.
LikeLiked by 3 people
tcheasdfjkl said:
I think both OP and you strawman SJ’s views on economics. Quite a lot of SJs do in fact have a major focus on economic policies that are supposed to help poor people, and many do actively dislike capitalism or at least talk as though they do. But it’s not at all universal, either.
LikeLike
Rhand said:
I don’t think I’m strawmanning. I read social justice forums, and many people mock what they call the “But what about class” argument. They state that a focus on class is “white privilege,” “male privilege,” etc. They complain that socialists and progressives and “Berniebros” have misogynist tendencies, etc.
I agree that there is a small core of committed socialISTS who focus on both economic and social issues, and they intersect with social justice communities. But I think the vast majority of social justice folk don’t see capitalism and neoliberalism as exigent issues.
A big reason for this is that social justice is a predominately American movement, and America has no real tradition of strong labor or socialist power blocs. So instead, the major issues in America are based on culture wars and identity politics.
I imagine that European social justice advocates have more of a focus on class and socialism.
LikeLike
tcheasdfjkl said:
@Rhand
I’m sure you’re accurately describing the SJ people you read. It just doesn’t square with my experience, so I think your impression is really incomplete.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Aapje said:
Both of you can be correct, if you live in different bubbles, your respective experiences can differ quite a bit. It can also differ if you define SJ differently.
Note that Rhand never said ‘most,’ so his/her claim is not even that strong. A subset of at least 30% can be reasonably called ‘many people’ in my eyes and I would be hugely surprised if the SJ people who don’t seriously care about class* are less than that.
* That requires real empathy with poor white men, who don’t ‘score’ any other oppression points. Lip service is not enough.
LikeLike
Walter said:
This is the first one that I’ll bite on as not genuine.
I talked to the ASJ King (We are tight folks, it is so cool) and he told me that our official response to the “man tears” accusation is that it is pretty exactly the equivalent of the BS patriarchy “you are hysterical” nonsense that ladies have been putting up with for a zillion years. I’d also accept some variation on “what does that even mean?”. Responding with “jokes on them, I don’t identify as a man”, isn’t precisely how we do.
Also, on #1…it is a rare ASJ who can resist biting on “Our discourse norms are ‘truth, though the heavens fall'”. Like, on any given topic one side has the naively better beliefs. Usually it is SJ, as their default stance is “bigotry is bad”. But on discourse norms they are stuck elaborately justifying the speech policing that the worst parts of the movement get up to, and we can just hoist the banner of virtue. You don’t get a lot of easy pitches as team ASJ, and this entrant declined to swing at one.
In #2 they reference Julia Serrano, and the concept of “reverse discourse”, which I wasn’t familiar with . I googled it and found a page where the word “invisibiliize” is used unironically. Reading a bit of Julia’s body of work, it felt like some very advanced, very inside baseball discussion of topics that aren’t really in our bailiwick.
Also, their list of things about SJ that they dislike in #2 are a list of things that I can readily imagine an SJ disliking. Like, do y’all want to abolish the notion of gender, hate capitalism, etc? I’m so conservative that my spirit animal is a riot cop, and it would never occur to me to ascribe these positions to the SJ movement.
I feel like this entrant is SJ, but is skeeved out by the worst parts of the movement, and has written an ASJ entry by basically channeling a version of themself who identifies as opposing the movement because of these issues. It feels like fixing the things that they have a problem with in #2 gives us a better SJ, whereas our objections (sad to admit) are rarely grounded in the desire to improve the SJ movement.
Golly, I wrote a lot about that. I think that rejecting ASJ entries makes me feel like a gatekeeper, so I go into a lot more detail to try and make it clear that that’s not me.
Anyway,
Walter’s ASJ picks
#1: ASJ, unsure
#2: ASJ, certain
#3: ASJ, certain
#4: ASJ, unsure
#5: ASJ, certain
#6: SJ, certain
LikeLiked by 3 people
rash92 said:
I think that they are either pro-SJ oe anti-SJ but used to be pro-SJ. I voted sincere anti-SJ and I thi k it’s the latter but its defi itely close.
If they’re anti-SJ theyre certainly an unconventional one and I think that and the ‘inside baseball’ stuff comes from being ex pro-SJ.
LikeLike
ADifferentAnonymous said:
I hope this person reveals their identity after this is over. I would like to read their blog.
LikeLike
San said:
I don’t buy that anyone actually involved in pro-SJ would think of gender abolitionism as an SJ position, rather than an ideology that will get you called a TERF and ostracized from SJ circles even if you try to approach it from a trans-friendly perspective and/or are trans yourself. OTOH I could easily see someone who’s anti-SJ believing that. So I have to conclude this one’s a real anti-SJ person.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Pingback: SJ and Anti-SJ ITT: The Results! | Thing of Things
Pingback: But What About Teh Menz? — an Intersectional Analysis of Misandry, Men’s Rights, and Feminism – The Reconstructionist
Pingback: Intellectual Turing Test: A Reflection – The Reconstructionist