Hermeneutical Injustice, Not Gaslighting

Tags

abuse tw, language, neurodivergence, not feminism go away, speshul snowflake trans

I have regularly complained about misuse of the term “gaslighting.” Gaslighting is a form of abuse in which a person you trust manipulates you into distrusting your own perceptions, memories, and judgments.

Unfortunately, the Internet has decided that instead “gaslighting” should be used as a synonym for concepts like “lying” or, in particularly irritating cases, “disagreeing with me.” As someone who was abused by gaslighting, I find this incredibly upsetting.

It is not gaslighting when someone contradicts you, or intentionally causes you to doubt your beliefs, or leaves you uncertain of what you believe, or even makes you think that they think you are crazy. Gaslighting is about someone lying to you in a way that causes you to lose trust in your own capabilities as a rational person: your ability to reason, your competence to figure out the truth, your capacity to remember things in a broadly accurate fashion even if you are sometimes fuzzy on details, your knowledge of your own feelings and thoughts and desires. And if your mind is unreliable… well, you’ll have to rely on someone else.

Gaslighting is already confusing and difficult to identify by its very nature, even when people haven’t decided to make the only word we have to refer to this very important concept mean “lying, but like I’m really upset about it.” If “gaslighting” refers to “lying,” it is difficult for people to name their abuse and recognize that what is happening to them is wrong.

(Honestly, using “gaslighting” to refer to someone disagreeing with you is itself kind of gaslight-y. Might want to check that out.)

Many people who want to misuse the term “gaslighting” should just suck it up and use a phrase like “blatantly lying” instead. However, I think sometimes people are gesturing for a concept that really isn’t covered by words like ‘lying.’ They’re gesturing for something structural, a harm done by society rather than by an individual; they’re gesturing for something oppressive, a dynamic related to their presence in a marginalized group; they’re gesturing for something that causes harm to your ability to reason and come to conclusions and trust your own self-knowledge, similarly to how gaslighting does, even if less severe and not perpetuated by a person.

In the name of not striking terms from others’ vocabulary without suitable replacement, I would like to suggest an alternative: hermeneutical injustice.

Hermeneutical injustice is a term invented by philosopher Miranda Fricker in her book Epistemic Injustice. Hermeneutical injustice is the harm caused to a person when they have an experience, but do not have the concepts or frameworks they need to make sense of what their experience is. For example, a man who falls in love with a man, in a society where homosexuality is conceived of as a disgusting perversion with no true affection or love in it, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A woman whose boss keeps plausibly-deniably touching her breasts and telling her that she has a great ass, before the invention of the concept of sexual harassment, experiences a hermeneutical injustice. A man forced into sex who has no concept that men can be raped experiences a hermeneutical injustice.

(Of course, not all cases of hermeneutical injustice are related to a social justice topic: trypophobes of the world suffered a minor hermeneutical injustice before we had a cultural understanding that, for some people, that particular pattern of holes is just horrible.)

The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice is, of course, that you can’t express your feelings or experiences. If you don’t have the concept of “transness” or “sexual harassment” or “misophonia,” you are going to sound like an idiot when you try to explain why something hurts you.

You: “That sound is just BAD, okay. It makes me want to KILL SOMEONE. I want to STAB OUT MY EARDRUMS.”
Them: “This is a kind of unreasonable reaction to forks scraping against a plate. Why do you feel that way?”
You: “I don’t KNOW it just SUCKS.”
Them: “Well, are you sure you’re not just exaggerating?”
You: “AARRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGH.”

Hermeneutical injustice also makes it harder to understand your own experiences. If you don’t have the concept of gender dysphoria, it’s hard to put together your body image issues, your depersonalization, your deep-seated jealousy of women, your desire to wear skirts, and the fact that you never play a male RPG character. Those will all seem like discrete unrelated facts that don’t point to anything.

But the harms of hermeneutical injustice go deeper. There are harms to the individual as a knower: you feel stupid or crazy because you can’t articulate your experiences, and that makes you feel stupid and crazy in general; it is hard to cultivate certain epistemic virtues if you can’t understand yourself and your own mind. And quite often– especially in more serious cases of hermeneutical injustice– there is a harm to your identity. The harm of growing up conceptualizing yourself as a sodomite rather than a gay person; the harm of thinking of yourself as a person who freaks out about normal flirtation instead of a victim of sexual harassment; the harm of having your very sense of self shaped by narratives and concepts that were developed by people who don’t understand people like you at all.

And if you’re harmed by hermeneutical injustice– if the concepts and narratives available don’t describe your experiences, and this makes you feel stupid and crazy and hysterical, and you internalize as descriptions of yourself statements that aren’t true because you don’t have a way of saying the things that are true— well, you might reach for the word “gaslighting” to describe the way it makes you feel. As a way of expressing that this is a very serious harm, that it’s driving you crazy, that your problem is not just lying or disagreement but something more fundamental.

And if you’re in that situation, I hope this essay resolved that piece of hermeneutical injustice, and therefore you can stop perpetuating hermeneutical injustice against me.

Open Thread: Stupid Treatments for Chronic Illness

Tags

disability

A few days ago I read Chronic Tension Headaches: a detailed self-help guide (I highly recommend his site for anyone struggling with chronic pain). In it, the author mentions that one cause of chronic headaches is wearing glasses that don’t fit your prescription.

Since I haven’t had an eye exam in five years, this instantly shot up my list of possible causes of chronic headache. And let me tell you, if I have had daily painful headaches for over a year because I’ve been wearing glasses that don’t fit, I will be overjoyed and will also feel like a complete moron.

I will also be extremely irritated at all my doctors, who saw I was wearing glasses and did not any point go “hey, did you have a recent eye exam? Out-of-date glasses prescriptions can cause daily chronic headache.”

This is not the first such stupid cause of chronic illness I’ve learned about. For example:

• If you have anxiety, and you drink a lot of coffee, the coffee might be causing your anxiety. It’s a stimulant and stimulants cause anxiety.
• If you are depressed and you live in a place that doesn’t get a lot of light part of the year, try sitting in front of a light box.
• If you are depressed and no antidepressant is working, ask politely if you’ve been screened for hypothyroidism, anemia, and vitamin deficiencies, all of which are known to cause depression.
  • If you’re depressed and you can’t see a doctor, and you are pale, weak, and tired, and experience the compulsion to eat ice or dirt or something else that isn’t food (pica), take an iron supplement and see if it helps.
  • Similarly, try taking a multivitamin and see if it helps.

So I thought this open thread might be a good idea. What are some stupid treatments for chronic illness? When I say “stupid treatments”, I mean:

• It is little-known and medical professionals might not tell you about it (so not medication, therapy for mental illness, etc).
• It is relatively easily testable (so not “try this extremely complicated routine for six months and if it doesn’t work it’s your fault for not adhering to it”).
• It is a treatment, not a thing you should have done three years ago to prevent your chronic illness.
• When you hear about it, it makes you slap yourself on the head and go “duh.”

Since this topic is particularly likely to attract pseudoscience, I would like to lay out the following commenting guidelines:

1. All suggested treatments must fit the definition of “stupid treatment” above.
2. Your suggested treatment can treat at most three things. I will delete all comments about how a particular supplement, diet, or Traditional Chinese Medicine practice can cure everything from low back pain to diabetes to hair loss to insufficiently attractive feet.
3. When talking about diets, all links should be to peer-reviewed scientific studies and not to websites of people advocating for the diet. If weight loss is recommended, you must provide a specific reason to believe that losing weight specifically will help, which is not “everyone knows that being fat is bad for you.”
4. Known pseudoscience and quackery will be deleted at my discretion, unless the commenter both (a) acknowledges that this is pseudoscience and (b) either:
   1. Provides a plausible biological mechanism based on what we know of how the human body works
   2. Links to a systemic review or meta-analysis from a reasonably reputable journal (not The Journal of Acupuncture and Meridian Studies or The Journal of Poetry Therapy) that suggests the treatment will work.

April Fools Post #5

Tags

disability

I am not, I see, the first dimensional traveler to exist in this body. But how can I make you understand the strangeness of your world to me?

Imagine, if you will, a world where everyone is illiterate. There are no books to read; TV shows do not have subtitles; if you want people to know the rules at your local pool, you have to hire a person to stand near the door and explain it to each of them individually. There are a few simple signs– a red octagon means STOP, a yellow triangle means YIELD– but it has never progressed beyond that stage.

But it is not that this world has not invented literacy. Indeed, there are many written languages. However, these are essentially only known by the mute, and those who work with them. Perhaps a child will learn to spell a few words as part of the disability acceptance unit at their school: their name, maybe “mother” and “father,” maybe their favorite color. But if you have the capacity to use speech, in this world, you do not read.

I speak, of course, of the fact that your world does not have sign.

“But we don’t need sign,” you might say. “We can speak.” Certainly! As long as you never go to a concert. Or want to talk during a movie. Or have dinner at a crowded restaurant. Or take care of a newborn who sleeps lightly and wakes up often. Or want to send a message to someone without other people overhearing. Or want to talk at the same time that another person is talking. Or have a migraine, or autism, or any of dozens of conditions that lead to a sensitivity to sound.

Since none of those things are true, in fact, you would benefit a good deal from sign. But inexplicably instead of learning it you all choose to yell at each other at bars. Why.

I can’t believe how rude people in this world are in public spaces. In my world, if you’re in a restaurant or coffeeshop or on a train or an airplane, you automatically switch to signing. That way, everyone can understand what other people are saying, and no one has to overhear random scraps of other people’s conversations, and if you prefer to focus on your book you can.

In my world, half of all people are deaf. There is an pandemic childhood disease– unfortunately, we have had no luck in developing a vaccine– that nearly everyone catches. It is quite harmless and mostly just gives you a few days off school, but a little more than half of all sufferers wind up losing their hearing.

We would never consider the deaf to be disabled. Deafness is an advantage in so many ways. You’d never hire a hearing person to work construction, or in a factory, or at a stadium in any position other than sound engineer: hearing people can’t focus when there are loud noises, and it can lead to hearing damage such as unpleasant ringing sounds. Deaf people have a huge advantage in focusing: they can simply turn off their cochlear implants and zone out. And deaf people can live in cities, where you can hear sounds of construction and cars and your neighbors upstairs. Hearing people find cities very stressful.

And even if there’s not a specific advantage to being deaf, deafness is just… normal. Sure, deaf people have to go to different concerts than hearing people. (At deaf concerts, the music is loud enough to make a hearing person go deaf, because they usually like the vibrations.) Sure, they have to buy TTY devices if they want to use the phone. I have to spend ten minutes looking for my glasses every morning and you wouldn’t call me disabled about it. Some things are genuinely disabling, like chronic pain or using a wheelchair. But you people take an ordinary part of human variation– one that, as many variations do, has both advantages and disadvantages– refuse to accommodate it, and consider it a disability.

In your world, deaf children are often deprived of language in their critical period, because their parents don’t sign. In my world, this never happens. Is the problem deafness, or is the problem the fact that no one uses sign for no reason I can understand?

It’s a petty example, but think about video games. In my world, many first-person shooters include extra information through sound, but also include loud, distracting or unpleasant noises. (You know, the way that it actually happens during wars?) That way, the experience is fair for both deaf and hearing gamers. Your world refuses to make games that deaf players can play on an even field, and then claims that it’s their fault for not being able to hear!

Or think about movies. You CAN put subtitles in movie theaters. I have seen it. Why don’t you put subtitles routinely? Or cars honking. Why do cars honk? You can hear! It is unpleasant for you too! Replacing it with a flashing bright light, as we do, minimizes the effect on innocent bystanders.

Of course, not everything in our society accommodates deaf and hearing people equally. For example, our world’s musicals are traditionally signed and sung at the same time: the singing is what the characters are saying to each other, while the sign conveys their underlying emotions and thoughts. Of course all musicals have subtitles, but the experience is not at all the same.

In general, dance for us is much closer to song than to the abstract artform of your world. The distinction between dance and poetry, in particular, is often not clear: much poetry is intended to be signed, as poetry in your world is often intended to be read aloud. And this reminds me of the complexities of written sign! The way even fiction in written speech uses written sign to talk about what gestures people make, the various ways people have come up with to indicate a shaky hand or an abortive movement, the meaning of whether you use written sign or written speech or switching between them…

This is a tangent and I intend primarily to complain about your universe’s poor design. I have complained about subtitles and video game design, but above all you need to learn sign. I propose an intensive program of education in the nation’s elementary schools: full immersion in ASL from the moment they step into kindergarten. After a generation’s investment, all hearing people will be able to use both speech and sign, and your world will be tremendously improved.

Please ask me any questions you have and I’ll be sure to answer them over the course of today! I hope I will be able to convince you all of the necessity of learning sign and depathologizing deafness.

The Life-Changing Magic Of To Do Lists

Tags

I sometimes know if I'm disabilityblogging, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

Executive functioning is your ability to engage in goal-directed behavior: it includes self-control, planning, intrinsic motivation, emotional regulation, working memory, and focus. Executive function impairments can really fuck up your entire life.

The good news is that, for many people, non-medication coping mechanisms for executive function impairments work really well. The bad news is that the list of non-medication coping mechanisms for executive function impairments looks something like this:

• Put your keys in the exact same place every time.
• Use a to-do list.
• Use a planner.
• Write down events in your calendar along with when they occur.
• Work in a place without distractions.
• Do pomodoros.
• Have a morning and afternoon routine.
• Schedule a specific time to do the thing.

That is, it’s literally all things adults lectured you about when you were a kid and forgot about an important form– again— or didn’t do your homework– again— or can’t find your shoes– again. (Pomodoros are an exception but I feel like they have a certain offputting spiritual similarity.)

It makes sense that that’d be true. Presumably non-medication coping mechanisms for executive dysfunction were independently discovered many times and spread until they became conventional wisdom. Many people have subclinical issues with executive functioning; for genetic reasons, people related to people with serious executive functioning problems are particularly likely to have subclinical issues. They’re trying to  give advice that actually does work.

But it also means that using those coping mechanisms feels like admitting to the people who lectured you as a kid that they were right and actually the problem is that you’re Insufficiently Virtuous and if you only acquired More Virtue then you would be able to solve the problem.

I’m not sure there’s a solution to this problem other than training parents in motivational interviewing, or at least convincing them to give advice at literally any time other than immediately after your child failed to do the thing when they are already full of shame and self-hatred. Seriously, guys. You’re going to give your children lifelong planner-related trauma and they’re going to miss way more doctors’ appointments than they would otherwise.

One problem with non-medication coping mechanisms for executive dysfunction, at least as communicated via parental lecture, is that the things that work for people with moderate to severe executive function issues are usually very very specific. I know several people whose lives literally fell apart when Google shut down Google Inbox,  because they were using those features, and no you can’t just replace it with Gmail Gmail does a different thing. I know a person who can only use Habitica as a to-do list app, because the gamification aspect gives them the internal motivation they would otherwise lack.

I have several times attempted to find One Place Where My Keys And Wallet Live, Such That I Will No Longer Lose Them. However, my first attempts all failed, because I got clever and tried to put my keys and wallet in some place other than the counter next to the front door, which is literally the first flat surface I encounter when I enter the house. If I have to take more than three steps in order to put my keys and wallet in a place, I will not put them there.

People with executive function problems also often have to defend their coping mechanisms with a fervency that seems anal-retentive to people without executive function disorders. For example, many people have to enter a plan into Google Calendar immediately the second they think of it, because if they delay for even five minutes they will never enter it into Google Calendar and they will miss their appointment. Some people have to carry their planners around with them everywhere no matter what, and losing their planner is an emergency of a similar urgency to childbirth. Those who have a routine might have to do exactly the same routine in exactly the same order every day, because if they feed the dog before they drink their tea everything will fall apart and they’ll be in their underwear at 2pm.

(This is another subject on which the parents of children with executive function problems could improve. If your teenager finds something that works for them, things that disrupt it are emergencies and they cannot ‘just do it anyway’. Either prioritize getting them the things they need to handle their executive function problems or don’t lecture them when they forget to do their homework.)

Finally, unless you are very very lucky, non-medication treatments for executive function issues are not going to get you to a neurotypical level of functioning. This is often a grave disappointment to people with executive function problems and their loved ones; what’s the use of all that work if you’re just going to miss appointments and fail to run errands anyway? The answer is that successfully running nine out of ten errands is actually way better than successfully running two out of ten errands. It’s a tremendous improvement in your quality of life and your ability to do things, even if a normal person would be able to do all ten errands. It’s important to compare yourself to where you used to be, not to where other people are right now.

On Stimming and Autistic Authenticity

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[This post was commissioned by one of my patrons, Geoff.]

I stim more now than I did when I was diagnosed, and much more than I did when I was fifteen. I sway, I rock, I flap, I jiggle my leg, I pace, I make satisfying patterns with my fingers. What’s more, some of my autistic body language is clearly copied from other autistic people. I took up flapping when I met an autistic friend who flapped.

It is easy, I think, to assume that you are faking your autism, if these things are true of you. Perhaps you are an autismtrender, or a fake self-diagnoser who is just doing it for attention.

I suggest an alternate explanation. Whether or not they were diagnosed with autism, all autistic people experience a process of normalization. For people who are diagnosed, it’s an explicitly medical process: quiet hands, M&Ms for not stimming, therapeutic and educational goals to extinguish the way our bodies naturally move.

For people who are not diagnosed, the normalization process is subtler, but no less real. I still remember making soothing patterns with my fingers when my father asked, in a tone of disgust, “why are you doing those weird things with your fingers?” and mockingly imitated the way I held them together and separated them. I learned not to make patterns, not to shake my foot when I’m thinking, not to rock or sway when I’m overloaded, not to flap when I experience joy.

Those of us who self-diagnosed with autism or were professionally diagnosed as adults are often those for whom this subtle process of normalization worked best. We are the most dissociated from our natural body language. The research suggests this experience is particularly common among cis female autistic people (and probably, albeit more complicatedly, among transgender autistic people as well).

Being able to pass as nonautistic is an important skill. We live in a world full of people who hate autistic people. Other people find the natural way our bodies move to be upsetting or repulsive to look at. It is not realistic to expect nonautistic people to change, so those of us who can acquire the skill of passing will often be better able to achieve our goals if we can pass.

But the process of normalization, I think, cuts us away from ourselves to some degree. It’s hard to throw myself into experiences, to enter a state of flow, when I’m constantly monitoring myself to see whether the way I move is sufficiently normal. Trying to look at my body the way other people look at it creates anxiety. I don’t have access to the ways of self-soothing that are most natural to me. And creating the beautiful patterns with my fingers is a source of joy.

So I have made, since my diagnosis, an effort to return to the natural way my body moves. And because I have been cut off from it so completely, it sometimes requires looking at other autistic people. Perhaps toe-walking will feel natural and right. Some typically autistic gestures I try do not, and I abandon them; I don’t get anything out of spinning, although I’m glad you guys enjoy it.

Rather than being inauthentic, I think, this is a way of becoming authentic, when we’re raised in a society that cuts us off from ourselves.

PSA: Intrusive Thoughts

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post

[content warning: descriptions of common intrusive thoughts, including sexual violence, suicide, abuse, harm to children, child sexual abuse, etc]

Nearly everyone experiences intrusive thoughts.

An intrusive thought is a random unwanted and unpleasant thought, usually with violent, sexual, or blasphemous themes. A mother might be walking along the stairs carrying her infant and think “I could just throw my infant off the stairs.” A person waiting for the train might have an image of throwing himself in front of the train. A person praying might find “God is evil, God is evil” going through the back of their head. Someone might sometimes experience flashes of what it would be like to have sex with people– even people they don’t otherwise find attractive or even beings they would be horrified to have sex with, such as animals, family members, or children.

These thoughts are totally normal. Nearly everyone experiences them sometimes. In case you’re wondering “hey, what’s up with the thing where I sometimes think about throwing myself in front of the train even though I don’t actually have any desire to throw myself in front of a train and actually it’s kind of weird and upsetting?”, that’s what’s up with it.

I don’t think anyone knows for certain why people have intrusive thoughts. I’ve heard some people claim it’s the “think of a white bear” effect. Normally, you hardly ever think about white bears, unless you are a zoologist, but if you try to avoid thinking about a white bear, then suddenly everything reminds you of white bears. Normal people try to avoid thinking about attempting suicide or throwing their infants off stairs, and sometimes their brains get confused and are like “maybe that means we SHOULD think about throwing infants off stairs?” I don’t know if this is actually true but it seems like a reasonably plausible explanation.

Most people shrug off their intrusive thoughts. However, some people pay a lot of attention to their intrusive thoughts. They worry that having intrusive thoughts may make them bad people. They try to suppress them or perform rituals to get them to go away, which actually only makes them more common. In some cases, this can result in OCD.

The most widely known form of OCD is contamination OCD, OCD about getting contaminated with germs or getting sick. But in fact any of the common subjects of intrusive thoughts can result in OCD, including:

• Suicidal OCD (killing yourself)
• Responsibility OCD (failing to prevent harm to others, accidentally putting someone in danger)
• Sexual orientation OCD (being a different sexual orientation than the one you identify as)
• Harm OCD (doing violence, hurting other people)
• Pedophile OCD (sex with children)
• Religious OCD (blasphemy, failure to follow religious rules)

If you have a bunch of thoughts about hurting yourself or other people or disobeying God, and they’re really scary and distressing, and you’re worried that it makes you a bad person, and sometimes you do things to check whether you’re a bad person or to stop yourself from doing bad things, you might have OCD.

Here are some important things to know if you have OCD:

• Intrusive thoughts are normal and almost everyone has them.
• Having intrusive thoughts does not mean anything about you as a person. Intrusive thoughts about wanting to kill yourself don’t make you suicidal. Intrusive thoughts about hurting other people don’t make you violent. Intrusive thoughts about sex with children don’t make you a pedophile.
• Under some theories, intrusive thoughts actually mean you’re particularly concerned about not doing those things– that’s why your brain is trying to suppress them!
• Pedophiles and violent people do not find their thoughts and urges about the subject distressing.
• Suicidal people generally find something appealing about the concept of suicide, even if they’re also distressed by being suicidal.
• Trying to suppress the thoughts will not help.
• Trying to test whether you are violent, suicidal, pedophilic, etc will not help.
• Avoiding situations where you might be violent, suicidal, pedophilic, etc. also will not help.
• Accepting the thoughts as a normal part of life and allowing them to pass through your brain without judgment will help.

Getting treatment for OCD can improve your quality of life. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to obtain treatment for OCD if you suffer from certain kinds of intrusive thoughts, particularly suicide-related, violent, or pedophilic. Try to seek out care from a therapist who specializes in OCD. If you suffer from suicide-related or violent thoughts, you will generally be safe from hospitalization if you don’t go to a mental hospital and if you are clear that you would never act on your thoughts and that you have many good reasons not to act on them.

I do not know how to avoid triggering mandatory-reporter status if you have pedophile OCD and spend time around children, but I will update this post if any mental health professionals have any advice.

On Laziness

Tags

I have "respond to the rest of the values difference stuff" on my to do list but that is THREE posts and this is ONE post so it happens faster, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rationality

When I was a teenager, I was lazy.

When I was at home during the summer, I didn’t do my chores; instead, I read books all day. My parents were deeply frustrated. They tried everything they could think of to deal with my laziness. They explained in great detail that I needed to contribute to the household. They yelled at me. They punished me for not doing chores. They rewarded me for doing chores.

Eventually, my mom happened to write down the chores she wanted me to do on a list. When she came home that night all the chores were done.

Turns out I can’t process auditory information very well.

Whoops.

—

I once had a partner who was lazy. I told him “it’s only fair that we both contribute fifty percent to the household,” and he agreed, and we decided that he would sweep the floor when it was dirty. However, the floor just got dirtier and dirtier. Even when I nagged him to sweep the floor, he’d say “it looks clean enough to me” or– even more frustrating– he’d sweep half the floor and leave the other equally dirty half undone.

Goddamn male-privileged assholes who expect other people to do all the chores while they laze around in their underwear and play video games, this is the 21st century, we believe in equality!

One day I took him and pointed to a pile of dirt and said “do you see this dirt?” He responded with “holy shit! Our floor is extremely dirty!” and immediately got a broom and swept it.

It turns out that while I am constantly low-level stressed by mess, my partner literally just did not see it unless it was explicitly pointed out to him.

Whoops.

—

For most of my life, I’ve been lazy.

I’ve flunked classes and lost jobs and let dishes pile up in the sink until they make towers. My resume has so many holes it looks like it’s made out of Swiss cheese. When I was in college, I was so lazy I flunked a class it was supposed to be literally impossible to flunk, and the only reason I didn’t have to repeat the year was that my adviser pulled strings to get me to graduate because she didn’t want to deal with me anymore. I spent a lot of time hating myself about how lazy I was. My inner monologue usually resembled the following comic:

[Source: Allie Brosh’s book Hyperbole and a Half.]

I talked a good game about knowing I had depression, but secretly I was pretty suspicious that this was all a coverup for my innate lack of moral fiber.

Then I took Zoloft.

Magically, the pill caused my moral fiber to grow in.

Whoops.

—

Last week, I was lazy.

I had been lazy for more than a month. I was too lazy to take my infant son to the library, or to play with him, or to sing to him, or to do anything other than the bare minimum to keep him alive and not crying. I was too lazy to write. I was too lazy to read books. I was certainly too lazy to do work for my job. I spent all my time thinking about how much I wanted to sleep, which was pretty much the laziest thing I could imagine. I spent a lot of time breaking into tears about how miserable being so lazy made me and how I wished I could just willpower myself into wanting to do more things.

Then, I extremely lazily took a nap for three hours last weekend, instead of doing work that I absolutely needed to do because there was a deadline and I had procrastinated on it. I think we can all agree that was the absolute laziest thing I have done in this entire anecdote so far.

I woke up, wrapped up the thing I needed to do in a couple hours, and have been astonishingly productive for the past few days, a fact that is no doubt related to the fact that since then I’ve been making sure to stay in bed for at least eleven hours a day.

It turns out that what I was calling “laziness” was, in fact, chronic sleep deprivation.

Whoops.

—

Scott Alexander recently wrote a post called The Whole City is Center, which has a very extended bit about laziness in it:

Simplicio: I think we’re treating the word “laziness” differently. I’m thinking of “lazy” as a way to communicate a true fact about the world. You agree that the true fact should be communicated by some word, but you’re interpreting “lazy” to mean some sort of awful concept like “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer”. Are you sure this isn’t kind of dumb? Given that we need a word for the first thing, and everyone currently uses “lazy” for it, and we don’t need a word for the second thing because it’s awful, and most people would deny that “lazy” means that, why don’t we just use “lazy” for the very useful purpose it’s served thus far?

Here is my thought. I agree that “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad, and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” is a terrible concept. “Lazy” is how I personally express that concept (well, actually my concept replaces the “and so we should hurt them and make them suffer” with “and so we should be resentful about them forever,” but close enough). That is why I am trying to avoid using the word “lazy”.

Look, if you personally use the word “lazy,” and it doesn’t come along with the connotation of “this person is bad and horrible and I should spend lots of time and energy feeling resentful and bitter about how bad and horrible they are,” and it doesn’t impair your ability to think thoughts like “maybe the reason that I, the person who does all of the nighttime parenting for a six-month-old, can’t do anything and keep fantasizing about sleep is because I am sleep-deprived,” then please keep using the word “lazy.” I encourage you to do so. My one caution is that you should take care about calling other people “lazy” unless you’re really certain that they won’t interpret you as meaning the “bad and horrible” meaning, because it is good to make sure that when you insult people it is deliberate.

Maybe you’re able to voluntarily shift the definitions of words that you use as soon as someone points out to you that the word definition is kind of stupid, no matter how many emotions you have wrapped up in the definition of the word you were originally using. That’s a useful skill. Unfortunately, like many useful skills, such as obstetrics or car repair or leaving the house promptly, I don’t have it. My brain just keeps using the word definition it’s always had.

I fully admit that I am a deeply unreasonable person in this way as in many other ways. However, I observe that when I don’t use the word “lazy,” I am more likely to notice the actual causes of someone avoiding responsibilities, and I am less likely to spend lots of emotional energy seething about how they or I are/am a bad horrible person who deserves to be hated forever. No doubt this is an unreasonable coping mechanism. As an unreasonable person, I often use unreasonable coping mechanisms. But you reasonable people, with your reasonable-person privilege, should not go around saying I shouldn’t use my coping mechanism which I was using just because reasonable people don’t need it.

Now, it might be that I’m totally unique in my unreasonableness here (or perhaps that it’s genetic, because my parents share it). However, I think a similar unreasonableness is actually quite common. Exhibit A: people keep writing blog posts about it.

Scott Alexander later writes:

Simplicio: If you’re right, I worry you’re going up against the euphemism treadmill. If we invent another word to communicate the true fact, like “work-rarely-doer”, then anyone who believes that people who play video games instead of working deserve to suffer will quickly conclude that work-rarely-doers deserve to suffer.

Sophisticus: Then let’s not invent something like “work-rarely-doer”. Let’s just say things like “You shouldn’t have Larry as a dog-sitter, because due to some social or psychological issue he usually plays video games instead of doing difficult tasks.”

Simplicio: I think people are naturally going to try to compress that concept. You can try to stop them, but I think you’ll fail. And I think insofar as you can communicate the concept at all, people are going to think less of Larry because of it. It’s possible you can slightly decrease the degree to which people think less of Larry, but only by slightly decreasing their ability to communicate useful information.

This is true. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis doesn’t really work. I can prevent myself from using the concept “a person who avoids responsibilities in a way not caused by anything whatsoever except being bad” by not letting myself use the word “lazy” and– if I observe the concept attaching itself to another word– adding that word to the blacklist too. I can’t prevent everyone else from using that concept by blacklisting the word: anyone who doubts it should see the snarl some people can put on the word “transgender.” Nevertheless, I have two objections to Scott’s argument.

First, most people do not have a particularly sophisticated ontology of language, so when they say “laziness doesn’t exist” they mean “the concept we unreasonable people use the word ‘laziness’ to describe doesn’t exist”. Scott Alexander actually agrees with their point.

Second, even if it wouldn’t work that well if everyone adopted it, if I personally adopt it, then I am less likely to be chronically sleep deprived for several weeks because I think taking a nap would be Extremely Lazy and that if I am going to be lazy I should at least have the grace to be conscious so I can hate myself about it. This is a win. Since I am not a Kantian, I do not have to go “hmm, well, this works for me, but if I check it against the categorical imperative it probably wouldn’t work for everyone, guess I’m going to have to be sleep-deprived until I have a failure of willpower and take a nap anyway.”

Scott Alexander has talked a lot about the typical mind fallacy and how it’s a mistake to assume that everyone is the same as we are. Unfortunately, awareness of a fallacy doesn’t necessarily stop you from falling victim to it. (As I know very well, because as I said above I am a deeply unreasonable person.) Scott is a very reasonable person, with reasonable coping mechanisms; he should not in this way generalize to those of us who behave in stupid and counterproductive ways constantly and are desperately trying to figure out how not to.

Universal Design for Parenting

Tags

disability, neurodivergence, ozy blog post, parenting

Due to family history, I have a child at higher risk of certain disabilities: mood disorders, borderline personality disorder, ADHD, and autism spectrum conditions. Even if I don’t have a child who is disabled enough by these conditions to qualify for a diagnosis, they may have subclinical symptoms.

So there’s sort of an interesting question, which is how– as a parent– you deal with knowing that your child is at elevated risk of having one of these conditions.

My philosophy as a prospective parent has been affected by the principles of universal design. Basically, it is much easier and less expensive to design things ahead of time with the needs of disabled people in mind, rather than to retrofit a building or an object which was designed without thinking about disabled people. Think about architecture. If you’re planning for disabled people ahead of time, you can incorporate a ramp into the original blueprint and build it along with everything else. If you wait until the first person with a wheelchair wants to use your building (or until regulations require you to let them in), then retrofitting is probably going to be really expensive, result in an ugly and awkwardly positioned ramp, and require you to close the building for six months for construction.

I think there’s a similar thing for parenting disabled children. Parents of disabled children often grieve the loss of their expectations and hopes for their child. In some tragic cases, the parents become bitter and angry at their children for not being the children they wanted, in some cases going so far as to accuse the children of ruining their lives. Discovering a child is disabled involves a major reworking of a number of aspects of family life, whether that means setting aside time for physical therapy with your child each day, learning techniques to manage your emotionally or developmentally disabled child’s meltdowns, searching for wheelchair dance lessons, or simply shuttling your child from appointment to appointment.

There’s also a cost for the children. Children with many disabilities– particularly invisible disabilities– may go undiagnosed for years, in which time their needs are not accommodated, they aren’t learning the skills they need to succeed as disabled people, and they may acquire toxic shame and anxiety that follows them for the rest of their lives. In some cases, a lifelong disability may not be diagnosed until the person is an adult, in which case they’ve gone through their entire childhood without appropriate accommodations or support.

Universal design for parenting doesn’t mean assuming that all children are disabled: of course, even in families with a history of disability, many children will be abled. But it does mean parenting in a way that would be good parenting whether the child is disabled or not.

For instance, I’ve mentally prepared myself for the prospect that my child is disabled, including forms of disability I might otherwise have a particularly hard time dealing with (such as intellectual disability, the child being nonverbal, or violent meltdowns). I’ve talked to my husband about disability to make sure we share the same values, the same way I would talk about other parenting issues like discipline or education or screen time. My children are at risk of childhood-onset depression, so I’m taking the perhaps unusual step of proactively taking them to psychological checkups. Hopefully, they will feel comfortable talking about their symptoms with a therapist, even if they don’t want to bring them up with a doctor. (Of course, I am not going to look at my children’s therapy records; since children have no legal right to confidentiality, it’s particularly important for parents to be conscientious about allowing them their privacy.)

There are also some accommodations I can implement without a disability. I can make a particular effort to validate my children’s feelings, because invalidating environments tend to exacerbate symptoms in children with a genetic predisposition to borderline personality disorder. I can proactively teach emotional regulation skills. If it seems like my child might benefit from social stories or visual schedules, commonly used to help autistic children, I can use them. I can purchase toys that help develop fine and gross motor skills, which autistic children are particularly likely to have trouble with. I can have a daily routine, which helps children with ADHD and autism. I can avoid shaming my child for forgetting or losing things, which leads to the comorbid anxiety that causes so many problems for adults with ADHD. I can try giving children clear instructions (“put your toys on the shelf,” not “clean your room”), which helps children with ADHD remember things.

Naturally, I haven’t done universal design for parenting for every conceivable disability. For instance, there is a step outside my front door, even though this would be inaccessible for a child who uses a wheelchair. I haven’t learned ASL, even though Deaf children with access to sign language have higher academic performance, and have no intentions of raising my children bilingually in sign and English. That’s because both of those would be fairly costly for me– I’d have to move, I’d have to learn a new language– and I have no reason to expect my children are any more likely than average to be Deaf or use wheelchairs. But I think if your child has an above-average chance of having certain disabilities, it’s worth it to be prepared.

Thoughts About ABA

Tags

aba tw, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

I am an autistic parent, which means I have a relatively high chance of having an autistic child, which means I’ve started thinking about early-intervention treatments for autism. (After all, autism is often diagnosed as early as eighteen months, and I’m not exactly going to have time to do research when I have an infant.)

Many of my friends disapprove of applied behavioral analysis (ABA), one of the most commonly used treatments for autism. I am inclined to be more sympathetic, I think, for several reasons. First, it claims to be the most evidence-based treatment for autism. (As far as I can tell, this is true but complicated; more on that later.) If a treatment is evidence-based I’m always going to take a second look. Second, many of the groups that advocate against ABA support discredited pseudoscience such as facilitated communication, which makes me not trust their judgment very much. Third, I have a natural tendency not to want to admit beliefs that will make my friends mad at me, and “I think this therapy you think is abusive is actually fine” might make people mad at me.

That said, setting those worries aside, I have some concerns about ABA. I welcome opinions from people with more knowledge about ABA.

The evidence is not that great. It’s true that ABA is the most evidence-based autism treatment. As far as I can tell, it gets this status because most autism treatments fall into the category “untested but plausible,” with occasional excursions into the land of “what, no, there is literally no reason to think that would work, the fuck is wrong with you.” (This is a somewhat puzzling state of affairs, because we do spend lots of money funding autism research, and we can’t spend that much money trying to give fruit flies autism.)

This is a fairly representative list of studies of ABA as an autism treatment. Note that no studies follow the children until adulthood. Most have sample sizes of twenty to fifty children. And that’s not even including the really embarrassing stuff: the study of the Early Start Denver Model used parent report for many of its outcome measures even though the parents knew which group their children were in.

I understand that an appropriately blinded randomized controlled trial with a reasonable sample size that follows children to adulthood is really expensive. However, if you’re going to talk about how your treatment is evidence-based, this is the sort of thing that is necessary. The evidence for ABA at this point is less “gold standard” and more “plausible in early, exploratory trials.”

So I feel justified in having other qualms.

Response to adverse event reports. Many autistic adults report that they have PTSD and depression from their experience of ABA. That doesn’t mean that ABA necessarily causes PTSD and depression– perhaps it’s a coincidence, or perhaps they had unusually bad therapists. But I think if lots of people are saying “your therapy gave me depression,” the only ethical thing to do is go “wait, holy shit, we need to study this.”

In my anecdotal experience, I have not seen ABA supporters say this. Instead, I have seen many ABA supporters say that people reporting adverse mental health consequences are pseudoscientists who hate evidence-based medicine, which is not the way you respond to people saying your therapy gave them PTSD.

I have seen some ABA supporters argue that perhaps it causes PTSD and depression among the “high-functioning,” which seems like a really dumb argument. First of all, the whole point of your therapy is that it turns autistic people with high support needs into autistic people with lower support needs; maybe those people have low support needs because your therapy worked. Second, a lot of people with very high support needs can’t communicate in sign, speech, written language, etc., so of course they’re not going to be saying “ABA is terrible and I got depression from it,” even if it gave literally 100% of them depression.

Normalization. I don’t mean to say that faking nonautistic is not a useful skill. It opens more options to autistic people: while many people (including myself) find that faking nonautistic is not worth the cost, I’m not going to impose that on everyone. Many people want to work jobs or have relationships that require them to fake nonautistic, and it’s good to give them that option.

However, in my opinion, it is also not a skill it makes sense to teach people who presently can’t function very well. If a person does not have use of language (whether spoken, written, sign, or through use of AAC), has a severely limited diet that may cause them nutritional deficiencies, regularly experiences meltdowns, self-injures or harms others, or experiences one of the many other severe impairments that can be caused by autism, those need to be the #1 priority. For that matter, if a person is anxious or depressed, has low self-esteem, has executive function issues that mean they can’t meet their goals, or can’t understand nonautistic behavior, then those issues need to be the priority. Only once all of those have been sorted out does it make sense to concentrate on eye contact.

And yet in many ABA programs eye contact is one of the first things worked on, even in autistic children with severe difficulties functioning. It seems to me that this is less about giving autistic people options and more about saying that autistic ways of being are inherently worse than nonautistic ways of being. That is not a therapy I can get behind.

“Effective” is one of those words that depends on your values. Effective for what? Regularly beating your children is a very effective way of making them so scared of you that they instantly and quietly obey; I don’t want to beat my kids in part because I think that’s a terrible fucking goal. And turning autistic children into facsimiles of nonautistic children is also a terrible fucking goal.

Aversives. Fortunately, the use of aversives has been phased out in ABA treatment. In addition to the physical abuse of children (I think it should be fairly obvious why this is objectionable), aversives sometimes included things like taste aversives, which don’t seem that bad to nonautistics. However, as an autistic person, being forced to eat something I have a severe taste aversion to is literal torture. It is wrong to do that to a child.

However, Lovaas’s original randomized controlled trial of ABA for autism did include the use of aversives. How do you know that aversives weren’t the active ingredient? Therefore, this change (which is very positive) makes the evidence base for ABA even more limited.

Prompt dependence. As far as I know, prompt dependence has not been studied in autistic people, and any claims about it should be taken with appropriate grains of salt. But, anecdotally, it is a very common experience among autistic people to find yourself doing things because other people or the environment prompts you to, without actually intending to do it. Sometimes prompt dependence is helpful (I personally use it to get work done). Sometimes it is very unhelpful, as when you find yourself doing something that you don’t want to do or that is even harmful to you.

I am concerned that many forms of ABA, by rewarding specific behaviors in response to prompts, would increase prompt dependence in autistic children. It would certainly not teach the essential life skill of noticing that you’re doing something because you’re being prompted to do so and being able to do something else.

Amount of time spent in therapy. ABA often involves twenty to forty hours a week of therapy. This seems to me to be an excessive workload for a toddler, particularly when you consider that therapy is stressful and requires a lot of energy, so the remaining hours are unlikely to be high-quality hours. When does the child get to play? I don’t just mean this as a “play is fun and it is mean to deprive developmentally disabled children of the opportunity to play.” The current scientific consensus is that play improves social skills and executive function. (See, for instance, this report from the American Academy of Pediatrics.) Those are exactly the things autistic children are impaired in. Without strong evidence of efficacy, it seems ill-advised to give children so much therapy that their play time is limited.

Behaviorism. Unlike many autism advocates, I do think that there’s an appropriate role for behaviorism as one component of therapy for mental disorders. However, pure behaviorism has been rejected in most areas of psychology. Patients with mood disorders and personality disorders receive therapy with both a cognitive and a behavioral element (and often with other elements, such as mindfulness). Experts no longer advise not comforting crying infants for fear that it would incentivize the child to cry; indeed, comforting crying infants is often recommended as a way to build attachment. Many people are concerned that extrinsic rewards of the sort promoted by behaviorists may decrease intrinsic motivation and ultimately lead to lower performance. We understand the importance of social learning and attachment in children’s psychology.

And yet here we are treating autism with pure Skinnerian behaviorism. I have no doubt that pure Skinnerian behaviorism is effective for some things– it works quite well for phobias– but I would be really really surprised if it were the correct treatment for a complex condition like autism. Teaching children to say “hi, what’s your name?” in response to someone saying “hi” is not actually teaching any useful social cognition. There is, in fact, a difference between people and chatbots.

I don’t know what my ideal autism early-intervention program would look like. Certainly it would be customized to the child. Maybe there’d be a big play component. Maybe there’d be work on building attachment between the child and caregivers. Maybe there’d be age-appropriate cognitive therapy (despite the difficulties in providing cognitive therapy to children without language). Maybe children could play at a play group with both autistic children and neurotypical children who have been taught how to play with autistic children, so they could build social skills in an easier environment. (The neurotypical children seem like they ought to be easier to teach than the autistic children, anyway, since they’re the ones without social impairments.) Maybe there would be a lot of occupational therapy to help with motor skills, feeding, speech, sensory sensitivities, and other common areas of impairment. Maybe children would be taught to identify their needs and self-advocate. It is hard to know without more study. But I feel like pure behaviorism is not it.

On Peter Singer, Anna Stubblefield, and Rape

Tags

neurodivergence, ozy blog post, rape tw

[content warning: ableism, rape apologism, bestiality, rape of children]

Anna Stubblefield has succeeded at the dubious achievement of simultaneously being a rapist three different ways at the same time.

First, Stubblefield used facilitated communication, a discredited way of communicating with nonverbal disabled people, to speak with DJ. Assuming for the sake of argument that facilitated communication works, she was literally his only means of communicating with the outside world; DJ did not successfully use facilitated communication with his family. His ability to get a GED, read books, even say what he wanted for dinner, was entirely dependent on her continued support. This creates a power imbalance in which sex cannot happen ethically. If she had been responsible, she would have said “I have feelings for you too, but we can’t explore them until you have another long-term facilitator who’s able to work with you.” (She would have also checked his desire for sex with her with another, naive facilitator, as is done when a disabled person who uses facilitated communication accuses someone of sexual abuse.)

Of course, facilitated communication does not work; according to the best scientific evidence, facilitated communication works something like a Oujia board, and what you get out of it is what the facilitator put in. So she raped him in a second fashion, by having sex with a nonverbal disabled person without taking the appropriate measures to ensure that he fully consented, instead relying on a pseudoscientific communication technique.

The third way that Stubblefield raped DJ is by ignoring his nonverbal communication: when she kissed him, he sat up, left the bed, and scooted out of the room. She then proceeded to perform oral sex on him. While she believed this was okay because his facilitated communication said he consented, given that facilitated communication does not work, our only means of understanding his preferences implies he did not want this.

Peter Singer has written a controversial editorial about Stubblefield’s case. Several parts of this editorial have been condemned throughout the effective altruist community: for instance, Singer’s defense of the pseudoscientific facilitated communication technique and his failure to mention either the first or the third ways in which Stubblefield raped DJ. However, one passage from his editorial has led to a great deal of argumentation:

A central issue in the trial was whether D.J. is profoundly cognitively impaired, as the prosecution contended and the court seemed to accept, or is competent cognitively but unable to communicate his thoughts without highly skilled assistance, as the defense contended. If we assume that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, we should concede that he cannot understand the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation. These are, after all, difficult to articulate even for persons of normal cognitive capacity. In that case, he is incapable of giving or withholding informed consent to sexual relations; indeed, he may lack the concept of consent altogether.

This does not exclude the possibility that he was wronged by Stubblefield, but it makes it less clear what the nature of the wrong might be. It seems reasonable to assume that the experience was pleasurable to him; for even if he is cognitively impaired, he was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him. On the assumption that he is profoundly cognitively impaired, therefore, it seems that if Stubblefield wronged or harmed him, it must have been in a way that he is incapable of understanding and that affected his experience only pleasurably.

This is not exactly what one would call the most lucidly written passage. Several people I respect, including Kelsey and Scott Alexander, have interpreted it differently than I do; they believe the passage says that it is theoretically possible for disabled people who can’t use language to consent to sex. I certainly hope that Singer was trying to say that and failing miserably, and I hope that he edits the article to clarify given the controversy he has engendered.

However, in the overall context of Singer’s work, I believe that a more reasonable and charitable (in that it accurately reflects Singer’s beliefs) interpretation is that Singer believes there is nothing wrong with having sex with a disabled person who can’t use language, regardless of their consent, as long as violence is not used.

Peter Singer regularly compares severely disabled people to animals; one of his most commonly used arguments in favor of animal welfare is that one would not torture a severely disabled person with the cognitive capacities of a chicken, and therefore one should not torture a chicken. He has repeatedly spoken out against speciesism, the belief that one should treat beings of equivalent capacities differently based on their species. Therefore, given that he believes that many non-language-using disabled people have similar capacities to animals, and that it is unethical to treat beings of similar capacities differently based on species, we can use his beliefs about bestiality to enlighten us about what this passage means.

Singer has written in the past about bestiality. He has explicitly outlined forms of bestiality he considers unacceptable:

Soyka’s suggestion indicates one good reason why some of the acts described in Dekkers book are clearly wrong, and should remain crimes. Some men use hens as a sexual object, inserting their penis into the cloaca, an all-purpose channel for wastes and for the passage of the egg. This is usually fatal to the hen, and in some cases she will be deliberately decapitated just before ejaculation in order to intensify the convulsions of its sphincter. This is cruelty, clear and simple. (But is it worse for the hen than living for a year or more crowded with four or five other hens in barren wire cage so small that they can never stretch their wings, and then being stuffed into crates to be taken to the slaughterhouse, strung upside down on a conveyor belt and killed? If not, then it is no worse than what egg producers do to their hens all the time.)

But sex with animals does not always involve cruelty. Who has not been at a social occasion disrupted by the household dog gripping the legs of a visitor and vigorously rubbing its penis against them? The host usually discourages such activities, but in private not everyone objects to being used by her or his dog in this way, and occasionally mutually satisfying activities may develop. Soyka would presumably have thought this within the range of human sexual variety.

This suggests that Singer may believe that bestiality is morally okay as long as it is mutually satisfying, and that all cases in which the animal initiates are certainly mutually satisfying. However, there is an intermediate case: the case in which the animal is not particularly interested in sex, but is having sex for some other reason. Singer writes:

[Rural men] may also take advantage of the sucking reflex of calves to get them to do a blowjob…

For three-quarters of the women who told Kinsey that they had had sexual contact with an animal, the animal involved was a dog, and actual sexual intercourse was rare. More commonly the woman limited themselves to touching and masturbating the animal, or having their genitals licked by it.

In this case, the animal does not desire sex. The calves are sucking as a reflex action; the dogs are presumably not licking human genitals out of a passionate desire to perform cunnilingus. (My understanding is that people who practice bestiality often put a food, such as peanut butter, on their genitals to induce the dog to lick them.) Singer does not appear to have clarified whether he considers this form of sex to be acceptable. However, given the fact that he mentions it as evidence that bestiality is quite common and does not condemn it, it seems to me that the correct way of interpreting Singer’s belief is that this too is acceptable. In short, it appears that Singer’s view is that it is always okay to have sex with an animal as long as the sex does not involve injury or pain to the animal, particularly if the animal experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as sucking is to calves and food is to dogs).

Extending this to DJ’s case, I believe that Singer’s passage above means that as long as no injury or pain was done to DJ, and DJ experiences something that is prima facie rewarding (as oral sex is to humans), then sex with him is ethical.

Further evidence is that this explains an otherwise puzzling omission on Singer’s part. Singer says that “[DJ] was capable of struggling to resist, and, for reasons we will note shortly, it is implausible to suppose that Stubblefield forcibly subdued him.” But DJ did, in fact, resist: he attempted to leave. It’s possible that Singer is ignorant of this basic fact of the case. However, Singer himself says he has “stud[ied] the evidence advanced by Stubblefield’s attorney in support of her appeal.” When I searched Google for “anna stubblefield” on incognito mode, the above article was the second result. (The first was Singer’s own.) This is readily available information for anyone who wishes to read about the Stubblefield case. Unless we’re assuming that Singer is both a liar and grossly negligent, we should assume that he is aware of these publicly available facts of the case.

Therefore, the most logical conclusion is that Peter Singer does not consider DJ’s attempt to leave to be a sign of resistance. The idea that, in general, trying to leave isn’t a revocation of consent to sex is absurd rape apologism and I would not slander Singer by claiming he believed it. However, if Singer believes that violence or pain is what makes sex with DJ unethical, then it makes sense for him to point out that there wasn’t any violence or pain. In this context, Singer’s statement makes perfect sense.

The bestiality case illustrates this clearly. One can imagine a situation where you intend to have a calf give you a blowjob, the calf wanders off, you wait a bit for it to stay still, and then you have it give you a blowjob. It seems to me that if bestiality is unethical, this situation is unethical, and if bestiality is ethical, this situation is ethical.

The difference is that calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of sex, because calves do not have an abstract, conceptual understanding of much of anything. A calf is not thinking “I have a consistent preference over time to not have that guy’s penis in my mouth and I’m going to try to communicate this preference through walking out the barn door. Oh, okay, it looks like he’s not going to give in, so I’m going to lie back and think of England.” A calf is thinking “I want to go investigate that sunbeam. Ooh! A thing to suck on!”

However, while I’m sympathetic to this model when we’re talking about sex with calves, I am very unsympathetic when we’re talking about sex with non-language-using humans. Calves have known capacities; severely disabled humans do not. To pick a very clear example: it is vanishingly unlikely that calves are capable of receptive and expressive language, with vocabularies of hundreds of thousands of words, and the only reason they’re not writing poetry to rival William Shakespeare’s is that their vocal cords aren’t shaped right. Receptive and expressive language are complex capacities and there would be absolutely no reason for them to evolve in a species without vocal cords that can produce speech.

Conversely, nearly all humans have receptive and expressive language capacities. We know that some humans retain receptive and expressive language, even if they have lost the ability to speak. For instance, many humans with cerebral palsy have difficulty controlling their mouth muscles, so they can’t speak, but they can communicate with augmentative and auxiliary communication technology. Some autistic humans are intermittently incapable of speech under stress. Therefore, a non-language-using human may lack the capacity to use language altogether, or they may understand language but have such large difficulties using it that (unlike in the case of many humans with cerebral palsy or autism) we can’t tell that they have that capacity.

Of course, language use is not a morally relevant capacity. But the same thing does apply to morally relevant capacities. How are you supposed to tell whether a person who can’t use language understands the normal significance of sexual relations between persons or the meaning and significance of sexual violation? I mean, it’s not like you can ask him.

We don’t even have a good sense of the probabilities here. It could be that every non-language-using disabled person has the cognitive abilities of a calf. It could be that every single one of them understands sexual violation. We have no way of distinguishing these two worlds.

I note that Peter Singer agrees with this argument. Inexplicably, he seems to believe that DJ can have the ability to understand sexual violation if and only if facilitated communication works as a way of communicating with him. Since presumably DJ had those capacities (if he does) before he ever met a facilitator, he could also presumably have those capacities even if he cannot communicate them.

Furthermore, it does not seem like the ability to be sexually traumatized is as complicated as all that. One-year-olds in general have a very poor understanding of consent, as one can see by their tendency to hit other toddlers to hear the interesting noises the other toddler makes, but I would expect that fucking a one-year-old would cause them no small amount of emotional harm both in the short and the long run. It certainly seems like a bad idea to decriminalize sex with toddlers on the grounds that they are incapable of giving or withholding consent.

The safest course, I believe, is to assume that DJ is a person (albeit a person with certain diminished capacities). As a person, he is capable of being sexually traumatized. This does not necessarily mean he should be consigned to celibacy. I personally agree with Scott’s proposal:

I wish there were a system in place to protect disabled people from sexual abuse while not banning all sexuality entirely. If you want to do surgery on a disabled person who can’t consent, lots of doctors and lawyers and friends and family get together and do some legal stuff and try to elicit information from the patient as best they can and eventually come to a conclusion. The result isn’t perfect, but it’s a heck of a lot better than either “no one can ever operate on a disabled person” or “any surgeon who wants can grab a disabled person off the street and do whatever operation they feel like”. If there were some process like this for sex, and they decided that DJ wanted to have sex with Anna, then (again ignoring the power dynamics issue) I think this would be better than either banning him from all sex forever, or letting her have sex with whoever she wants as long as she can make up convincing enough pseudoscience.

Notably, this does seem to not have happened here even in an unofficial way, as one can tell by the fact that the family’s response to Anna revealing that she had sex with DJ was not “woohoo, finally” but “what the FUCK?” and trying to get her to go to jail for twelve years. Which is the second reason that I’ve claimed she’s a rapist.

(The fact that Peter Singer did not say something like “while good consent practices were not used in this case and Stubblefield is a rapist, I want to be clear that it is possible for a neurotypical person to have enjoyable and enriching sex with a non-language-using person if proper care is taken to ensure that they consent” seems to me to be further evidence that my claim about what Singer means is right and he in fact thinks that Stubblefield’s actual behavior is morally acceptable.)

Finally, I’d like to address the issue of abstracting away specific details of the case to talk about underlying philosophical issues. Clearly, it should be acceptable to talk about under what circumstances it is okay for non-language-using people to have sex; clearly, the routine desexualization of intellectually and developmentally disabled people is a grave harm to them.

However, let’s imagine that Peter Singer had instead written an article entitled Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? In this article, in addition to using pseudoscience to claim that Brock Turner’s victim actually consented, Singer writes that it’s a mistake to assume that sex with unconscious people is unethical just because they can’t verbally revoke consent.

Of course, it is possible to ethically have sex with unconscious people. Many couples enjoy waking each other up with sex. It is very silly for some sex-positive feminists to criticize it for lack of affirmative consent. But it seems to me that making this argument in the context of, you know, an actual rape victim is absurdly offensive and insensitive. Doing so in an article called Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? in which you argue for clemency for Brock Turner leads one to the conclusion that you’re not just abstractly considering important issues but, in fact, arguing that the particular rape which actually happened is morally unobjectionable and should not be punished.

And it seems to me to be equally objectionable to argue against protests of Who Is The Victim In The Brock Turner Case? by pointing out that it’s harmful to say that waking people up with a blowjob is rape and then saying it’s a shame that Singer didn’t do his homework about the details of the case, whereupon he would realize that Brock Turner did not in fact finger his girlfriend with her previous consent with the intent of allowing her to wake up pleasantly. Brock Turner’s case is clearly and obviously not the same thing as waking up your partner by fingering them, and it is offensive, morally wrong, and worst of all extremely unenlightening to discuss them in the same place.