Some Representation Is Better Than None

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans, writing

There’s a bit of a perverse-incentives problem in writing about marginalized groups.

If you write a marginalized character, people are going to criticize you for writing it offensively. This is true whether or not the way you wrote the character is actually offensive, because there is at least one person who thinks any possible depiction of a marginalized character is offensive. You write a nonbinary trans character, someone is going to write a passionate Tumblr post about how you’re catering to the genderspecials. You write the most transmedicalist-approved depressed and dysphoric trans character you can imagine, someone is going to complain about how you’re depicting transness as endless misery. You write a trans character who’s happy and okay with their body, and someone will complain that the character isn’t really even trans if they aren’t dysphoric. If you’re popular enough, it’s going to happen.

What’s worse, some of those criticisms will be right! It is difficult to accurately depict the way dysphoria affects trans people without showing our lives as unremitting sadness and self-hatred, and many writers will err too far on one end or another. Even the most well-meaning person can reproduce transphobic tropes, and even if you get a trans person to be a sensitivity reader sometimes they won’t catch it.

On the other hand, if you don’t write a marginalized character, no one is going to complain. There should be more trans characters in general, but (except in certain unusual circumstances, such as a book that takes place at Stonewall) there’s no reason to believe any specific book should have a trans character. No one is going to write “actually, the Dresden Files should totally have had a trans character in it,” and they’re definitely not going to repeat this for every single book series that happens to not have a trans character in it.

So I see a lot of young writers who are concerned about giving offense just not writing marginalized characters at all. And that’s really bad, because most of the time, an imperfectly written marginalized character is much better than no marginalized character at all.

I don’t mean to say that it’s impossible to write a marginalized character that is worse than no marginalized character at all. For example, you could write Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. (Transmisogyny at the link, and in the rest of this paragraph.) The world would be a better place if the authors of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective had not written a story with a transgender character in it. If you are writing a comedy in which one of the punchlines is a trans woman being sexually assaulted until the protagonist reveals that she has a penis, at which point there is an extended vomiting sequence because of how disgusting it is to have kissed a trans woman, and this is all played for laughs at the trans woman’s expense, I ask you on behalf of trans people everywhere not to write any more trans characters.

If, however, you would not do any of that, because that’s horrible, then you should write trans characters. Even though you’re going to mess up!

By contrast, consider Wanda from Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. Wanda is, in some ways, a problematically written character. About half her characteristics boil down to “Wanda is trans and faces transphobia.” Her birth surname is literally Mann. She cannot participate in a moon ritual because the universe itself limits certain rituals to people who menstruate. She dies tragically.

But would it be better if she didn’t exist?

Wanda is, after all, a sympathetically written character. She gets to call out the forces of magic itself for not thinking she’s a woman, and the narrative is pretty much on her side. Misgendering trans people is unambiguously depicted as wrong, and the fact that the wrong name is on her tombstone is shown to be a tragedy. She has interests and traits unrelated to being trans. Her body is not shown to be repulsive.

And… as far as I’m aware, Wanda was the first trans female character in a comic published by DC or Marvel. If Neil Gaiman had been like “hm, I guess I don’t know how to write trans people, I should make Wanda cis,” it would not have summoned an unproblematically written character out of the ether. Trans people would continue to not exist in mainstream comics, and once they did exist, they might be written by one of those people who thinks vomiting after you touch a trans person is the height of humor.

I am confident that Wanda made some cis people empathize with trans people who would never have empathized with them otherwise. And I’m sure I’m not the only trans person for whom Sandman was one of the first places we learned trans people even existed.

Of course, you should always try to improve your writing, and working on not perpetuating oppressive ideas is part of that. But the hurdle to clear before writing a marginalized character is better than not writing one is very low. You have to avoid making any particularly glaring factual inaccuracies. You have to not do the vomit thing. Most of all, you have to depict the character as a person, with thoughts and feelings and dreams and fears, someone whom the audience can empathize with (even if they’re a villain). If you do that, it’s okay to screw up on something more complicated. You’re still making life better for marginalized people.

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On Sokal Squared

Tags

my issues with anti sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, rage against the academy

Three scholars– Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose– have recently gotten several papers published in various top journals, despite not believing in the claims of their papers and despite the fact that their empirical data was faked. I congratulate Mr. Boghossian, Mr. Lindsay, and Ms. Pluckrose on their successful passes of the Intellectual Turing Test, although I wish they’d chosen a method of testing it that didn’t involve publishing false data in multiple peer-reviewed journals. Being able to write something you disagree with that is indistinguishable from what supporters of the claim believe is a rare skill.

I do, however, disagree strongly with the claim that this is an indictment of gender studies as a field.

Let us consider six of the seven papers which Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose wrote. (The seventh was accepted into the Journal of Poetry Therapy, which is not a serious publication.) You may find all of Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose’s papers here.

Fat Bodybuilding

Fat Studies published a paper called Who Are They to Judge?: Overcoming Anthropometry and a Framework for Fat Bodybuilding. The thesis of this paper is that it would be a good idea to have a non-competitive, body-positive bodybuilding event where fat people showed off their bodies, because that would lead people to question why they think some bodies count as “built” and others don’t. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose say this paper counts as a hoax paper because “it celebrates morbid obesity as a healthy life-choice.”

Let’s set aside the issue of whether competitive bodybuilding celebrates unhealthy life choices, such as anabolic steroid use and unhealthily low body fat percentages, and why it is okay to celebrate one unhealthy life-choice and not another. Obviously, fat studies celebrates obesity as a healthy life choice. That’s, like, the thing that fat studies is.

Imagine I published a paper in a theology journal arguing that it was a good idea to adopt a certain liturgy because it would help people praise God. Later, I announced that this was a hoax paper which proves that theology as a discipline celebrates delusional thinking. Certainly, many people believe that theism is delusional. But the ‘hoax’ paper doesn’t address the subject at all. All it proves is that you can publish papers in theology journals which work from the premise that God exists, which is also provable by (for example) picking up any theology journal and looking at the table of contents.

I have literally no idea why Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose would bother, unless they were confused and thought that Fat Studies was a medical journal about obesity prevention.

Dildos

Sexuality and Culture published Going In Through The Back Door: Challenging Straight Male Homohysteria, Transhysteria, and Transphobia through Receptive Penetrative Sex Toy Use. Through (faked) semi-structured interviews with thirteen men, the paper found that man who enjoyed anal masturbation using dildos were less transphobic, less homophobic, more feminist, and more sensitive to their partners’ needs, but not more concerned about rape culture. It noted that, since the sample size was small, the results are suggestive but may be unreliable. The paper proposed that receptive anal penetration may be used as a form of “exposure therapy” about homophobic and transphobic anxieties, but cautioned that many men might simply decide that anal penetration was okay while continuing to be homophobic/transphobic in general.

I literally have no idea what is objectionable about this paper. Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose claim the thesis is unfalsifiable, but it’s obviously not; they themselves say in their own discussion section that the data don’t support a correlation between anal penetration and concern about rape culture. If feminist men who oppose homophobia and transphobia never took it up the ass, while homophobic, transphobic, anti-feminist men proudly showed off their extensive collection of Bad Dragon dildoes, the thesis would be disproved.

Lindsay, Boghossian, and Pluckrose point out that not wanting to be anally penetrated is a common and harmless sexual choice, which it certainly is. But nevertheless it is puzzling that many men feel disgust and shame at the prospect of exploring receptive anal penetration, given that receptive anal penetration is very pleasurable for many (perhaps most) men. Surely we can agree that a sexual choice is common and harmless, and also agree that societal stigma plays a role in whether people choose to do it? Is your claim that it’s a complete coincidence that women who grow up in socially conservative communities are also less likely to have casual sex? If a man says “I don’t want to have a dildo put in my ass because that’s gay,” are we supposed to pat him on the head and say “I’m sorry you’re a victim of false consciousness, but in reality all your sexual preferences are completely causeless and the fact that you don’t want a plastic dick up your ass is entirely unrelated to the fact that you think enjoying anal penetration makes you homosexual and being homosexual is the worst thing in the world”?

A choice can be common and harmless and still have reasons. Some of those reasons– particularly for something as culturally important as sexuality– are worthy of scientific study.

Hoax on Hoaxes 2

Published in Hypatia, When The Joke Is On You: A Feminist Perspective on How Positionality Influences Satire argues that irony and satire by marginalized groups acts as a force for social justice, while irony and satire from privileged groups supports oppressive power structures. Since hoax papers are in the latter group, it argues, publishing hoax papers is morally wrong.

Clearly, it is horrible that a philosophy journal published an argument that a thing that lots of people don’t think is morally wrong is actually morally wrong. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose have done us a great service by revealing that feminist philosophy journals somtimes do this. However, I’d like to draw their attention to the many non-feminist philosophy journals that sometimes argue that things that lots of people don’t think are morally wrong are actually morally wrong. Why, I have read arguments that it is wrong to eat meat, go on vacation instead of giving your money to help poor Africans, accept death as a natural part of life, lie to Nazis about the Jews hidden in your basement, fail to euthanize your severely disabled children, have an abortion, not have an abortion, masturbate, have gay sex, and fail to push fat men in front of runaway trolleys.

One hopes that Boghossian, Pluckrose, and Lindsay will soon turn their attention to the rest of ethical philosophy, and because of their hard work from now on all ethical philosophy papers will solely consist of arguments that it is wrong to murder people.

Philosophy is a field where there is not universal consensus that the external world exists, that time is real, or that science is an effective way of seeking truth. It seems a bit absurd to me to believe that “it is morally fine to publish hoax papers” is more obvious than any of those claims, and in fact so much more obvious that it is inherently ridiculous and a stain on the entire profession that they published a paper arguing for it.

(Personally, I agree with When The Joke Is On You that publishing hoax papers is unethical, because you’re literally faking data and publishing it in peer-reviewed journals. I don’t care what kind of high-minded reason you have for faking your data, it’s wrong.)

Feminist Mein Kampf

Published in Affilia, Our Struggle is My Struggle: Solidarity Feminism as an Intersectional Reply to Neoliberal and Choice Feminism is adapted from Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

It is a little-known fact that when you put different nouns in a sentence, the sentence says something different. For example, if you say “apple pie is delicious,” you’re making a banal statement about desserts, but if you say “cyanide is delicious,” you are maliciously trying to poison people.

A corollary is that many unexceptional statements become horrifingly evil if you put Nazis in them. For example, “we should all work and sacrifice to help freedom take over the globe” is a statement that can come from a particularly boring State of the Union address. “We should all work and sacrifice to help Nazis take over the globe” is a Nazi belief. You would not conclude from this that every US president is a Nazi.

Therefore, Our Struggle is My Struggle is full of paragraphs like this:

Fourth, for feminism to achieve solidarity, it must change culture. To accomplish this, it must change
the discourses defining culture. Feminist education must therefore take place indirectly through social uplift— “feminist politics are made, not born” (hooks, 2000, p. 7) –which is best achieved by a philosophical com-
mitment to inclusive values-based allyship and solidarity (cf. Edwards, 2006; Patel, 2011; Russell & Bohan, 2016), particularly in a way that listens (Dotson, 2011; Greenberg, 2014) and acts upon the awareness it has raised (Gibson, 2014). By exclusively pursuing this approach a feeling of liberation can be generated that per-
mits all oppressed people to fully participate in a state of justice.

See, if you listen to Nazis in order to figure out how to educate people into being Nazis, that’s bad. But that does not mean that it is somehow wrong for a social work journal to ever talk about the concepts of culture change, education, and listening. There is nothing wrong with culture change, education, and listening as long as you don’t use them as tools to help you kill seventeen million people.

Hooters

Sex Roles published An Ethnography of Breastaurant Masculinity: Themes of Objectification, Sexual Conquest, Male Control, and Masculine Toughness in a Sexually Objectifying Restaurant, which is an ethnography about the behavior of men at Hooters. The data is fairly weak, as one of the reviewers noted, and perhaps more caution should have been provided about how much you can generalize from one group of friends.

That said, I’m not sure why Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose think it is ludicrous to observe men saying things like “it’s just part of being a man to like hot young girls showing off their bodies” and then conclude that maybe part of the reason men like breastaurants is that it allows them to behave in ways they consider manly.

I myself was dubious of the article’s claim that part of the appeal of breastaurants is bossing around hot young women; I went into reading this article expecting to say “yes, I agree that’s stupid”. However, the paper claims that the subjects said some of the appeal of the restaurant is that you can “tell hot young girls what to do and have them do it for you with a smile”. The subjects literally said that. What would Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose have ethnographers do, ignore what their subjects say when it’s politically incorrect?

Dog Park

This one is legitimately extremely stupid and it won an award. Boghossian, Lindsay, and Pluckrose should be proud of themselves.

 

10 Questions We Need Radical Feminists to Answer Pronto, Answered

Tags

not feminism go away, ozy blog post

[Content warning: child-on-child sexual abuse, rape]

If there is one thing that the history of this blog has shown, it’s that I absolutely love answering strawmanny questions people ask about people with my ideology. (Seriously. Send me lists. It makes my day.)

Future Female Leaders, which identifies itself as “America’s leading social network for young, conservative women,” has some questions for radical feminists. I’m not actually in any way a radical feminist– boring liberalism to the core over here– but I think “radical” is a term which here means “literally in any way at all.” So I consider it to be perfectly valid for me to answer these questions.

1) How is being pro-choice, or pro-abortion, supporting equality for all: mother, father, and baby?

The difference between pro-choice people and pro-life people, in general, is that pro-choice people don’t think a fetus has the same right to life that we give to a human being outside the womb, and pro-life people do.

Certainly there are exceptions– pro-choice people who believe so strongly in bodily autonomy that they think you should be able to kill an innocent person to protect it, pro-life people who are primarily interested in limiting sexual promiscuity– but in general I find that this is the case.

I’m not going to go into the entire issue of how much right to life a fetus should have. (I say “how much” because many pro-choice people think that a fetus has a little bit of a right to life, and that means that it is wrong to, for example, carelessly fail to use birth control so that you have to have an abortion.) But you can understand how, thinking of a fetus as a potential person, a robust right to abortion protects everyone.

The vast majority of men have PIV sometimes when it would be a really bad idea for them to have a baby. They might have PIV with a woman with whom they don’t want to coparent; they might not want children; they might not have the emotional or financial resources to be a parent right now; they might have an infant or young child already. Of course, in those situations, the couple should use highly reliable birth control. But sometimes people don’t have access to highly reliable birth control or make a mistake and don’t use it, and even the most reliable birth control fails. (For example, if every man and every woman in the US paired up into a couple, and every one of those couples used an IUD, we would expect a little less than 150,000 unplanned pregnancies a year.) Therefore, it protects men if they have the option to have their partner end a pregnancy they do not want.

From a pro-choice point of view, a fetus is not a real person like an infant; a fetus is a potential person, like the eggs or sperm currently in your gonads. Our intuitive system of population ethics says that no particular potential person has a right to come into being: if you refrain from PIV on Saturday, you are not harming the child who would have been conceived if you had PIV on Saturday. However, our intuitive system of population ethics also says that it is possible to harm potential people. If before your child was born you had a deficiency in an essential nutrient that caused damage to the egg, and your child lived three weeks in horrible pain that was not treatable with painkillers and then died, you would have harmed your child. It would be a good thing to delay the pregnancy for three months while you get that nutrient deficiency sorted out.

The vast majority of situations where a fetus is aborted cause harm to the potential person. No one wants to be raised by a parent who doesn’t have the money to raise a child, or who doesn’t have the emotional resources to be a loving and supportive parent, or who feels unhappy and resentful about having a kid. Therefore, abortion leads to the best outcomes for the fetus, a potential person, as well.

What if there’s a conflict of interests? What if the father desperately wants the child and the mother does not, or the fetus would be very happy if it became a person but the mother would be very unhappy in that situation? Well, it is impossible to ask for a fetus’s opinion on things, so the fetus cannot make the final choice, regardless of one’s position on population ethics. The mother and father have more-or-less identical interests in the child (they both might have to pay child support, they both might enjoy parenting, and so on), except that the mother has the additional interest that if she continues the pregnancy she has to have a chronic illness for nine months and then perhaps be tortured. Therefore, she gets the final say.

2) Do you really believe that American women are horribly oppressed when there are women in other countries that cannot vote, drive, file for divorce, etc?

Let me try another example which is no doubt close to conservatives’ hearts.

Many conservatives complain about certain aspects of American society, such as high taxes and burdensome regulations. But lots of countries are way worse than America on this front! In North Korea, private sector business is virtually impossible, all property belongs to the state, and the government commands virtually every aspect of the economy. Many countries that are less batshit than North Korea are still awful: they don’t adequately protect property rights, it’s very difficult to start a new business, and the tax burden is extreme. Any businessperson would rather start a business in the United States than in Haiti, Malawi, or Mongolia, to pick three of the Heritage Foundation’s “mostly unfree” countries. Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to complain about taxes, regulation, and property rights in America.

I think a conservative would have any number of reasonable responses to this, such as:

• I live in America and thus have a particular concern about conditions in America specifically.
• I can’t do anything about North Korea, but I can improve conditions in America, such as by voting or writing my congressperson.
• We’re supposed to be the beacon of the free world that inspires other countries and we’re clearly falling down on the job.
• I just happen to care more about economics in America, and you shouldn’t yell at people who are doing a good thing if they aren’t doing the best thing when you don’t yell at people who spend all day sitting on their butts playing stupid iPhone games.
• The fact that things are worse someplace else doesn’t make what’s going on here okay.

That is exactly why many American feminists care about sexism in America.

3) How do you hold yourself on such a pedestal for promoting “equality for all women” but then bash women who do not agree with you?

Feminism is the idea that women should be equal to men, and more generally the idea that we should not have sexist gender roles limiting people’s behavior. It is not the idea that no women are ever wrong, stupid, evil, or ignorant. If you look outside at the world, you will observe the existence of many wrong, stupid, evil, and ignorant women, and that does not disprove feminism.

In fact, the idea that women are all thoughtful, good, and right about everything is the opposite of feminism. Everyone agrees that wrong, stupid, evil, and ignorant men exist. Therefore, if we pretend (in defiance of all evidence) that wrong, stupid, evil and ignorant women don’t exist, we’re treating men and women differently based on their gender, which is sexist.

Therefore, there is nothing contradictory about feminists bashing women whom they disagree with.

4) Why do you consider government restrictions on abortion “politicians being all up in your business” but are happy with politicians and the government dictating which healthcare you must have, what you must learn in school, and taxing you left and right?

I can only answer as one feminist; I imagine many feminists have different opinions on this fundamental question.

I believe all people should have certain basic freedoms, and that the duty of society is to provide people with these freedoms. One of our most basic freedoms is the ability to have control over our own sexual and reproductive lives. Sexuality and reproduction are, for many people, very important, to the point of striking at the heart of who we are as people. It is inappropriate for the government to make this sort of private, important decision for a person.

However, some freedoms cannot be meaningfully exercised if they are just negative freedoms (“freedom from”); they must also be positive freedoms (“freedom to”). (To e clear, the fact that you should have the positive freedom to do something does not mean the positive freedom should necessarily be provided by the government, as opposed to private charities, the market, social norms, etc.) Abortion is, actually, one of those freedoms. You are not free to have an abortion if there is no abortion provider in your state or if you can’t afford to have an abortion, which is why feminists are concerned about abortion access as well as abortion legality.

Healthcare is also private. The government has no right to force you to receive healthcare against your will or without your informed consent; in fact, in many cases, forcing someone to receive healthcare against their will is considered a form of battery. There is considerable debate about the best way to give people the positive freedom to access healthcare, which is mostly irrelevant to this blog post. Unfortunately, we cannot give people the unlimited freedom to access as much healthcare as they want, because there are too few doctors and hospitals; all forms of allocating healthcare involve some form of rationing.

In the United States, the government does not regulate what you have to learn; it simply offers a public option for schooling. More than half of states have no enforced requirements about what children should learn when they are homeschooled, and most of the remaining states merely require that children learn reading, writing and math. Further, education is a proper concern for the state. Children are not yet capable of exercising freedom the way that adults do, and so the state takes a paternalistic attitude towards them. Many adult freedoms can only be fully exercised by people who were properly educated as children (for example, one cannot take advantage of freedom of the press if one can neither read nor write), so a small amount of coercion can result in more freedom of choice overall.

Finally, while taxes do limit people’s control over their own money, they allow the state to provide many essential services, such as police, the military, food stamps, etc. I think that is a tradeoff worth making.

5) Why are you more concerned about fictional characters on fictional television shows getting fictionally raped than real men having their real lives ruined by very false rape accusations? I’m looking at you, Rolling Stone.

False rape accusations are bad. It is wrong to falsely accuse people of rape. Those who knowingly make false accusations to the police should be charged with wasting police time. The Innocence Project is doing excellent work. We should demand reforms to the criminal justice system, including a complete ban on pseudoscientific forensics, so that the only people who go to prison are those who have committed a crime. If someone you know has made a false accusation and has not apologized and made amends, you should, in general, avoid interacting with them in order to provide support to their victim.

Some feminists have claimed that false accusations never happen or are “as rare as a lightning strike.” I point the reader to Scott Alexander’s excellent blog post debunking these statistics. We need to do better, particularly given that false accusations are a common tool of abusers (it’s the RVO part of DARVO). As feminists and anti-abuse advocates, we cannot find ourselves providing comfort to abusers.

That said, I don’t believe anyone’s life was ruined about the A Rape On Campus story, except perhaps the author’s, and she deserves it. A fraternity was vandalized, and all fraternities on UVA campus were briefly suspended; neither is life-ruining. The accuser accused a person who didn’t actually exist, and who therefore does not have a life to be ruined. It seems like the author of this series of questions should also be concerned about the possibility that they’re prioritizing the feelings of fictional characters over those of real people.

Fiction matters because fiction influences our beliefs about the world. It doesn’t do so directly or deterministically or didactically; but it does so profoundly, for all that. Movies glamorized smoking. The CSI TV series made more people interested in crime scene investigation. Advertisers pay for product placement because they think that if fiction depicts a car as cool then people will be more likely to drive it. The murders and rapes and kidnappings in our fiction make us believe the world is more dangerous, even as it becomes safer. Feminists are concerned about the depiction of rape in media not because we think that fictional characters have feelings but because we are concerned that the way rape is depicted on TV can have effects on actual rape victims, perpetrators, and bystanders in real life.

6) Why have you let Lena Dunham become a spokesperson for your cause, a woman who has admitted to taking advantage of her younger sister sexually and doing “anything a sexual predator might do”?

First, Lena Dunham is famous because she wrote that TV show Kylo Ren was in before he hit people with lightsabers. Famous people have a big platform, which means that when they talk about feminism more people listen than when I do. It is not like there was an election and Lena Dunham was voted President of Feminism. We have no power to give Lena Dunham a smaller platform except by not watching her TV show. I already don’t do that, because I have a strict lightsabers-only media policy.

Second, let’s be clear about the actual allegations here: Lena Dunham, age seven, curiously looked at her then-one-year-old sister’s vagina. As a teenager, she occasionally masturbated while her sister was sleeping in her bed. She also at various unspecified (but young) ages gave her sister candy to kiss her. Obviously, you shouldn’t bribe your sister with candy to kiss you, and it’s an enormous boundary violation to masturbate while someone is sleeping in your bed. (The vagina thing is just a seven-year-old being curious.) But there’s a reason that if a child steals a candy bar we don’t send them to prison for shoplifting. Children and teenagers are not fully mentally developed and are not responsible for their actions the same way that adults are. Treating children as if they are identical to adult sex criminals causes people to criminalize ordinary curiosity about sex and to unreasonably punish behavior which, while wrong, does not indicate the child will grow up to be a rapist. It leads to policies that destroy people’s lives.

7) Do you really think being able to walk around topless is a freedom that women need to live a good life?

Is walking around topless a freedom that men need to live a good life?

Men take off their shirts in public because it’s hot out and they’d like to exercise or (sometimes) because they would like to show off how attractive their chests are. These are not particularly important reasons in the grand scheme of things. However, if you’re allowing men to do something and forbidding women to do the same thing, purely because of gender, that is in fact sexist: it’s treating men and women differently for no reason other than their gender.

Some people might object that men experience visual sexual attraction and therefore women shouldn’t take their shirts off. This argument implies that gay and bi men don’t exist, which is a bit strange: at the very least shouldn’t taking your shirt off be taboo if you’re a man in San Francisco? It also implies the nonexistence of straight and bi women who experience visual sexual attraction, which is a bit hard to square with, for example, that girl who bit through her retainer when she saw Erik Killmonger shirtless.

Straight women appreciate this scene in a completely nonsexual fashion.

It is not clear to me why straight and bi men experiencing visual sexual attraction means that women should not take their shirts off. Judging by both my personal experience and straight men’s porn habits, they seem to enjoy looking at women without their shirts on, so if anything it is a favor to them. (I just asked a straight man of my acquaintance and he said “that sounds GREAT! Who is even against that, religious conservatives who are afraid they will go to hell for having boners?”) Certainly some women would prefer that men not look at their chests sexually, but those women are free to leave their shirts on, just as men who don’t want their chests to be looked at sexually can leave their shirts on. No one is proposing a tyranny of mandatory shirtlessness.

I suspect in many cases the problem is not “men experience visual sexual attraction” but “certain men would not appreciate women’s chests in a quiet and polite way, but would instead make rude, upsetting, and perhaps frightening comments.” I think the problem here is clearly with the men who make rude and upsetting comments, and if anyone’s freedom should be curtailed it’s theirs. Perhaps all of us– women who want to go shirtless on a hot day and men who would like to look at shirtless women– should keep spray bottles in our bags and squirt those men when they make rude comments, much like one squirts a cat who is trying to climb on the couch.

But there is another, more important reason for women to have top freedom.

Over the course of their lives, many women feed babies with their breasts. Reliable studies show that breastfeeding is linked to small but real benefits for both mothers and babies. In particular, PROBIT, a large randomized controlled trial of a successful breastfeeding intervention, suggests that breastfeeding may cause a gain of five points of IQ. Breastfeeding is inexpensive and, for many parents, convenient. And I’m sure everyone who’s ever listened to a crying baby in public is happy about the fact that putting a hungry baby to a breast takes far less time than preparing a bottle.

As a culture, we should make breastfeeding as easy for women as possible, if for no other reason than to save the eardrums of those who happen to share an airplane or a restaurant with a baby. It would be unreasonable to demand every building contain a lactation room. Going into the bathroom to feed your baby is humiliating and can result in a long wait time if someone is already in there. Fumbling with nursing covers is difficult for the already sleep-deprived (and, remember, the whole idea here is that we want to put as little time as possible in between the baby being hungry and the baby being fed). And I’m sure we all agree that women with babies should be able to participate in public life.

There’s a simple solution here. It’s that we, as a society, get over ourselves and accept that sometimes, in the process of feeding a baby, you will see a bit of boob or a brief flash of nipple.

Men have two pretty unimportant reasons to show strangers their chests. Women have two pretty unimportant reason and one very important reason. Why, then, is only the latter taboo? Sexism.

8) How do you make supporting the right to abortion a tenant of feminism when the majority of abortions performed worldwide are due to the child being female, or also known as gender-selective abortions?

Sex-selective abortion. The phrase you’re looking for is “sex-selective abortion.” Gender-selective abortions would involve inventing a prenatal test for transness.

It is difficult to estimate how many sex-selective abortions there are in the world, since sex-selective abortions mostly occur in developing countries and often in countries in which sex-selective abortion is illegal. Experts do believe the “missing women” problem is not solely caused by sex-selective abortion. Other causes include female infanticide and inadequate healthcare and nutrition for girls. Therefore, I don’t think it’s possible to reliably state what percentage of world abortions are sex-selective.

It is unclear to me to what extent sex-selective abortion trades off against the other causes of missing women. If it does, then sex-selective abortion might actually be a good thing, because it is better that a potential person not be brought into existence than that a real girl be starved to death.

Clearly, we should fight patriarchy in developing countries as well as developed countries. But it is not clear to me that banning abortion would have this effect. If parents are not allowed to abort female fetuses, they will still value women less than men, and that will have effects throughout their daughter’s life– on the amount she is fed, on her education, on her health, on whether she is abused. Conversely, if we try to create a society in which men and women are valued equally, it will prevent sex-selective abortion and sexist mistreatment of girls and women. The latter seems like a better deal all around.

9) When you say “Teach men not to rape” are you meaning to imply that men have been, in the past, taught TO rape, or that men are the only people capable of rape. Mary-Kay Letourneau, anyone?

You are absolutely right that all people, regardless of gender, should be taught not to commit rape. The erasure of female rapists is a serious issue in modern-day feminism.

The idea that we should teach people not to rape does not necessarily imply that people were, at some point, taught to rape. We have to teach toddlers to pee in the potty, preschoolers not to hit, and teenagers not to drive drunk. This is not because some malicious person is going around teaching people to pee on the floor, hit each other, and drive after six shots of tequila. It is because civilized behavior is often very different from natural behavior.

And are we so sure that no one is teaching men to rape? I suspect that, if they are not taught ethics, many people will use violence, threats, or coercion to get what they want, including sexual things they want. But I– along with most other feminists– believe there is also a cultural role. When we teach women that men always want sex, we’re teaching them to rape men. When we equate masculinity with sexual success, or encourage women to play hard to get and men to play along, or create media depicting men ignoring women’s nonsexual nos as sexy and romantic, we’re teaching men to rape women. When we teach children that they’re not allowed to say “no” to hugs and kisses, food they don’t like and clothing that is uncomfortable, we’re teaching people of all genders that they don’t get to say “no” unless they have a ‘good reason’ and they don’t have to respect a “no” unless the other person has a ‘good reason.’

Finally, while obviously no one of any gender should have sex with their thirteen-year-old student, Mary Kay and Vili Fualaau have been married for thirteen years and have two children, and Fualaau does not consider himself to be a victim. I feel like this is an odd poster child for women raping men.

10) Do you really think the original feminists, the women who fought for the right to vote, would be proud of you fighting for the right to bare your lady parts, abort your children and shame men into submission like you claim they would?

Yes.

Critique of Just Love, Part One

Tags

god bothering, ozy blog post, rape tw, sex positivity

[Content note: this post discusses, without explicit detail, many forms of unethical sex, including rape, sexual harassment, and child molestation.]

A reader commissioned me to write a blog post about the book Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret Farley, a Catholic nun and former professor at Yale University Divinity School. (It’s “Just Love” as in “love that follows principles of justice,” not as in “only love.”) Just Love was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church for endorsing masturbation, gay marriage, gay sex, divorce in some situations, and remarriage after divorce.

I will begin by discussing why we should have sexual ethics other than “don’t rape people” at all, then explain Farley’s view of sexual ethics, then I will critique each of her proposed norms in turn. I have a lot to say about this book, so I’m splitting the post up over several days in order to save everyone from having to read a ten-thousand-word monstrosity.

A Justification of Sexual Ethics Beyond Rape

Many people adopt what I consider to be an extraordinarily deontologist view of sex. They consider sexual ethics to consist solely of not having sex with people without their consent. Everything else is strictly supererogatory. You might decide to care about your partner’s sexual pleasure, or indulge your partners’ fetishes, or avoid sex that makes you feel sick and empty and degraded inside, but these are all personal choices with no moral valence. The actual ethics is in the consent.

I admit this is a model I am continuously tempted to use. It is so simple and so elegant. A free agent in the sphere of sexuality and romance can set their boundaries and express their needs to other people. They search until they find a partner who has a compatible set of needs and boundaries. Throughout the relationship, they renegotiate as their boundaries and needs change; when their boundaries and needs no longer mesh, the relationship ends. No set of needs and boundaries is “wrong”, although with certain sets of needs and boundaries it may be hard to find a compatible partner. The only unethical action is violating someone else’s boundaries.

But it is unsatisfying in many ways. It is all very well for deontologists to have a model where as long as you follow the rules you’re okay. But utilitarians ought to object that there are many instances of consensual sex which do not produce the greatest good for the greatest number. Egoists should remark that there is no reason to assume that all consensual sex is pursuing the individual’s enlightened self-interest. Virtue ethicists might point out that it would be very odd if sex were the only sphere of human interaction in which we cannot cultivate wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude. Even many formulations of deontology object: sex can be consensual and still involve treating a person as a thing or following a rule that you would not will everyone else abide by.

The “only nonconsensual sex is unethical” is equally odd from the perspective of intuitive morality. Sometimes consensual sex is disloyal, harmful, or unfair. Certainly it would be very strange if sex were the only area of human life in which the sum and total of ethical human behavior is “don’t commit literal felonies.”

I think how unsatisfying the only-nonconsensual-sex-is-bad ethic is can be shown through how many other aspects of sexual morality people insist on attempting to smuggle into it. For instance, some people argue that cheating is wrong because it violates your spouse’s consent. It seems extraordinarily puzzling to me that people get to consent to sex that they are not involved in and may not even be aware of, and very unprincipled that only spouses have this capacity. (Why can’t parents revoke consent for their teenagers to have sex? Why can’t governments revoke consent for sodomy to happen between its borders?) You might argue that the difference is that you have sex with your spouse and you do not generally have sex with your government. But in that case a spouse would have no room to object if their partner had sex with someone else and then conscientiously never had sex with them again. Most people, I believe, would consider the latter decision to compound the harm, not to erase it.

I think the only logical conclusion is that the harm from cheating has nothing to do with consent; instead, the harm from cheating comes from breaking a promise. It is possible for sex to be completely and 100% consensual and also be wrong.

A lot of people have a flinch reaction to that conclusion, which makes sense. As completely reasonable sentences that are usually followed by horrible bullshit go, “it is possible for sex to be completely consensual and also be wrong” is right up there with “I’m not racist” and “think of the children.” Traditionally, of course, “it is possible for sex to be completely consensual and also be wrong” is followed with some thoughts on the evils of premarital sex, pornography, homosexuality, polyamory, birth control, feminism, sex toys, oral sex, sex outside of the missionary position, and literally everything else that’s fun. In our more modern era, it is also used by various Tumblr users who want you to know that BDSM is violence and violence is still wrong when everyone is consenting, which is presumably why they make a habit of protesting boxing matches and karate dojos.

That is what you might call act-based sexual morality. In addition to sex without consent being wrong, people put certain sexual acts on the “no” list, because those acts are considered to be inherently violent or misogynistic, objectifying or going against God’s will, disrespectful or a violation of the proper end of the human body, regardless of context or how the participants feel about it.

I think that consent-only sexual morality is right but doesn’t go far enough. However, act-based sexual morality is totally and completely wrong. After a great deal of thought, I have not been able to identify a single sex act qua act that I would consider conclusively wrong in all circumstances. (As opposed to, say, choice of sexual partner, where there are a number of choices that are wrong in all circumstances– children, your students, people who are in a monogamous relationship with someone else, etc.) Unprotected PIV is wrong if you picked up a stranger at a bar, but beautiful if you’re conceiving a loved and desperately wanted child. Calling your partner a disgusting whore is cruel if you mean it, but extremely hot for some people in a negotiated D/s dynamic. Certain forms of dangerous edgeplay are far too risky for most people, but can be valuable for certain people who are aware of and have accepted the risks.

(Sex in public where people might see is the closest I can get to an “always wrong in all circumstances” thing, but even then if there were enough sex-in-public enthusiasts that they convinced the city to allow them to cordon off a few streets every so often for the purpose, and there were bouncers checking IDs and making sure everyone knew what they were in for, I think that sex in public would be absolutely wonderful.)

The fallacy of act-based sexual morality makes sense once you try to apply it to any other subject. Is it inherently wrong to punch someone? Depends on whether they’re assaulting someone else at the time. Is it inherently wrong to play at a rock concert? Depends on whether you’re doing it in my backyard without my consent. Is it inherently wrong to give away a million dollars? Depends on whether you’re giving it away to the Nazi party. You can’t judge any action outside of its context, so why do people think this is a reasonable way to judge sexual ethics?

Three final notes: First, while I do think sexual ethics should consider issues other than consent, I do not think any form of consensual sex should be illegal. It is wrong to cheat on your partner, but that does not mean that you should go to prison for cheating on your partner.

Second, no person is perfectly ethical. This is true for every area of ethics. It is wrong to yell at your children, but nearly all parents yell sometimes. It is wrong to go on expensive vacations instead of giving that money to the poor, but most people who can afford to go on expensive vacations have gone on at least one. It is wrong to eat products that come from chickens, but I still eat the occasional cookie without inquiring too closely about whether there are eggs in it. Similarly, we would expect all people to have unethical sex sometimes. The question is whether you are doing the best you can, not whether you have reached some unattainable standard of goodness.

In particular, it is very very common for people to do wrong things because they have no other choice: for example, people eat eggs because they’re depressed and if they didn’t eat eggs they wouldn’t eat at all. It is not ever wrong to take care of yourself first. Ethical actions should be healthy, happy, and sustainable.

Third, when I say that sexual ethics must go beyond consent, I don’t mean to imply that consent is not important. In fact, consent is the bedrock of all sexual morality. Unfortunately, our society has caused many people to internalize the idea that you shouldn’t say no to sex if you have a certain relationship with someone, or if they really really want it, or if you don’t have a good reason. All sexual ethics has to come from the fundamental, baseline position that you can always refuse sex with someone for any reason or no reason at all. Even if your reason is really really stupid, you have a right to say no to sex for stupid reasons. Even if they paid for dinner, or you’re married, or it’s the third date, or you’re a man and you think men always want it you have a right to say no to sex. You should absolutely say no to any sex that makes you feel sick or gross or sad or violated.

Farley’s Framework

Farley argues that justice involves treating other humans with respect for who they are as humans: a unique person with a body and a soul, needs for food and clothing and shelter, the capacity for free choice and thoughts and feelings, a history, a social and political and cultural and economic context, a relationship to various systems and institutions, a potential for growth and flourishing, a vulnerability to diminishment and despair, interpersonal needs and capacities, and emotions. Of particular relevance to sexual ethics are a person’s ability to make free choices (autonomy) and their ability to have relationships with other people (relationality).

Farley presents a seven-item framework for sexual ethics. The first two are grounded in human autonomy, while the second five are grounded in relationality.

1. Do no unjust harm

While this is a general principle of ethics, avoidance of harm is particularly important for sexual ethics. Violations of this principle include rape, domestic violence, enslavement, sexual exploitation, unsafe sex, deceit, betrayal, sexual unfulfillment, emotional manipulation, and so on and so forth.

2. Free consent

Free consent is the right of each individual person to determine their own sexual actions and relationships. Violations of this principle include rape, violence, coercion, sex with people who do not have the capacity to give informed consent, sexual harassment, and child molestation. Norms derivative from this norm of free consent include privacy (the right of an individual to keep information about their sex life confidential), telling the truth, and keeping promises.

3. Mutuality

Mutuality is mutual participation in the sexual act. Sex is not a thing that one person does to another person; instead, it is a relationship in which everyone involved is both active and receptive and both gives and receives pleasure. This does not necessarily imply that it is morally wrong to be, for example, a pillow princess or an exclusive top: as just one example, a pillow princess may actively participate through their obvious enjoyment of the sex.

4. Equality

While no two individuals are perfectly equal in power, Farley argues that individuals participating in ethical sex must be sufficiently equal. Severe inequalities, such as when one person is very emotionally immature or those produced by certain patriarchal cultures, may result in one person being vulnerable and dependent and having limited options. Violations of the norm of equality include sexual harassment, emotional and physical abuse, some forms of sex work for some people, and giving up your entire sense of self for the person you love.

5. Commitment

In general, Farley argues, ethical sex requires some form of commitment to your partner, although not necessarily a lifelong marriage.

6. Fruitfulness

The most obvious kind of fruitfulness is procreation. Procreative sex must be conducted in a context that ensures the responsible care of offspring, the creation of a family, and participation in the great project of building the human community. However, for many people, sex is not procreative: they might be gay, infertile, childfree, or simply not ready to have children. However, they can still have fruitful sex. Ethical sex opens you to the wider community. It is not self-involved. Good sex can strengthen you, which lets you move beyond yourself in many ways: you can nourish your other relationships, make art, help people, provide goods and services to others through work, or raise your own or help raise other people’s children.

7. Social justice

Please note that this is “social justice” in the Catholic sense of the term, not in the modern-day sense of the term.

Social justice is an umbrella term covering many different kinds of sexual ethics. It is not sexual ethics construed narrowly, as in whether or not you should have particular kinds of sex; it is sexual ethics construed broadly, as in all the ethical problems which are affected by our sexualities. All people have a right to “freedom from unjust harm, equal protection under the law, an equitable share in the goods and services available to others, and freedom of choice in their sexual lives– within the limits of not harming or infringing on the just claims of… others” (Farley pg. 228); unfortunately, some people are denied these rights due to their sexualities or in the sphere of sexuality.

In a narrow sense, social justice requires that we take responsibility for the effects our actions may have on others, such as public health concerns, procreation, broken promises, and so on. In a broader sense, social justice implies a concern for the many ways in which people are harmed based on sexuality: a brief and incomplete list would include sexism, sexual and domestic violence, racism, global poverty, oppressive religious and cultural traditions, HIV/AIDS, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, lack of contraceptive access, and the harmful use of new reproductive technologies.

Unjust Harm

In general, I endorse Farley’s reasoning. If you are the sort of person who reads a long post about sexual ethics, you probably already know that you should not rape people or sexually harass them or enslave them. It is in general wrong to have sex with people if you know it will cause them more distress than pleasure.

Many utilitarians may object that “no unjust harm” pretty much covers all of sexual ethics and we don’t need any additional sexual ethics. Be that as it may, I think it’s useful to have guidelines about how you can avoid harming people, particularly for those of us who have already mastered “slavery: probably a bad idea.” These sexual ethics I will discuss in the next post.

Man Should Allocate Some More Categories

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

My friend M. Taylor Saotame-Westlake wrote a blog post during my parental leave from this blog, in which he disagrees with Scott Alexander’s The Categories Were Made For Man Not Man For The Categories and in true dialectical fashion I am disagreeing with both of them.

No one wants to read two long blog posts about the epistemology of transness before they can read my blog post, so let’s sum up the argument so far. Scott argues that categorizations don’t come from the Big Dictionary Up In The Sky: they’re justified based on usefulness. For example, a whale is not a fish to a biologist, because whales are more closely related to other mammals like humans. But a whale is totally a fish to King Solomon, because King Solomon mostly cares about whether a whale is in the ocean or on land. Neither definition is strictly speaking “wrong”: it just depends on whether you’re talking about evolution or planning a hunting trip.

Scott then extends this argument to apply to trans people. Trans men may not be male in a certain biological sense, because they don’t produce small gametes and usually produce large gametes. However, it makes trans men happy to be called men, so we might as well classify them as men.

Taylor points out that there are totally shenanigans going on here. There are two different senses of the word “useful.” Calling a whale a fish is useful in the sense that it captures a group of creatures that share certain traits in common, such as swimming and typically having an aquatic habitat and being the sort of thing you would use a boat to hunt. Calling a trans man a man is useful in the sense that it makes him happy.

You can perfectly well agree that definitions aren’t objectively true and we should use the one that is most useful in the first sense, without agreeing that we should use the one that is most useful in the second sense. For example, if there exists a person who has read entirely too much Strunk and White and insists that “flammable” should mean “not capable of being lit on fire,” they may feel very strongly about this, but I am going to ignore their opinion and instead use it to mean “capable of being lit on fire.” I do not want to hold my language use hostage to every pedant with an opinion.

Now, there are several perfectly good definitions of the word “man” which Taylor and I agree on. First, there is the biological definition, a human who produces small gametes. (Since humans are not yet a sequentially hermaphroditic species, we also use “man” to refer to people who produced small gametes in the past or are going to produce small gametes in the future.) This definition is useful for writing scientific papers and speculating about evolutionary history.

Second, “man” can refer to a particular cluster: people who have XY chromosomes, penises, the ability to grow a beard, testosterone-dominant hormone systems, no breasts, no ability to get pregnant, the capacity to impregnate others, etc. This is a cluster: for example, some (cisgender, non-intersex) men have breasts, can’t grow beards, are infertile, or lost their penises during World War I. This definition is useful for a variety of reasons, ranging from predicting who needs prenatal care to deciding who is likely to empathize with the horrors of the female reproductive system.

By this definition, while some trans people are clearly in one cluster or another, any trans person who has biomedically transitioned is in between. For example, a trans man who has biomedically transitioned can’t get prostate cancer, but is as likely as a cisgender man to go bald.

Saotome-Westlake argues for the existence of a third definition, based on psychology. He argues that (some) trans people are psychologically different from cisgender members of their identified genders: if you graph, say, how likely cisgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, and how likely transgender women are to be members of the rationalist community, these charts will not look very much like each other at all. Therefore, it makes sense to consider trans people to be members of their assigned gender at birth for some purposes.

I’m not going to argue with the claim that trans people are unusual psychologically; it would be silly to do so. However, I note that transgender people are also not particularly similar to their assigned genders at birth. To pick an easily observable example, trans men are vastly overrepresented in gender studies departments, slash fiction writing communities, and lesbian events, while trans women are vastly overrepresented in esports, computer science, and lesbian events. Conversely, as far as I can tell, there has yet to be a single transgender NFL football player, while statistically there ought to be five currently playing.

So by Saotome-Westlake’s argument, any group of women whose interests and personality traits, on average, observably differ from that of women as a whole ought to be classified as not actually women at all.

By extension, lesbians are not women.

Source. Sorry, lesbians, you really should have thought of this before you decided to be so obsessed with the L Word.

Autistic women also are on thin ice.

Source.

And what about horny women? Sex drive is one of the best-attested differences between men and women. Of course, we wouldn’t want to mis-classify anyone, so let’s make the rules as strict as possible: if you’re a woman and you jerk off to visual porn, enjoy casual sex, have had sex with a stranger, and want sex five to six times a week, you will have to go by “he” pronouns from now on. You may pick up your testosterone shot by the door.

Of course, “is this person from a group the distribution of whose personality traits is identical to that of women as a whole?” is not actually the criterion anybody actually uses to classify whether someone is male or female. That is why there is a general consensus that lesbians, autistic women, and horny women are in fact women.

Nor are the problems that Saotame-Westlake identifies best solved through creating this category. In fact, both are solved by allocating new categories:

He quotes a female member of a rationalist community:

There have been “all women” things, like clothing swaps or groups, that then pre-transitioned trans women show up to. And it’s hard, because it’s weird and uncomfortable once three or four participants of twelve are trans women. I think the reality that’s happening is women are having those spaces less—instead doing private things “for friends,” with specific invite lists that are implicitly understood not to include men or trans women. This sucks because then we can’t include women who aren’t already in our social circle, and we all know it but no one wants to say it.

I observe that I have never been invited to any all-female rationalist events.

This is a good thing! On pretty much every conceivable axis, I would be a terrible person to invite to your all-female event. I am attracted to women, so there wouldn’t be the comfort of knowing no one here is sexually attracted to anyone else. I don’t know anything about fashion or makeup. I find many female social bonding rituals somewhere between offensive and incomprehensible. I would be very irritated at being invited.

“That’s not fair, Ozy,” you might say, “you’re transgender, they wouldn’t invite you!”

So consider my friend theunitofcaring, who has graciously agreed to be a cis female example of a person you should not invite to your female-only event.

Once again, she is attracted to women. She does not care about most stereotypically female interests. She finds many social bonding rituals somewhere between offensive and incomprehensible. She has a personality that is different from the stereotypical woman on many axes, and for this reason finds women-only spaces unwelcoming and unpleasant. And, yes, she would be very irritated at being invited.

She has also never received an invite to any of these events!

So far, the organizers are 2/2 in terms of never inviting people they shouldn’t invite. This is a pretty good track record and they should be proud of it. However, if they replaced it with a cis-woman-only system, or a people-who-produce-large-gametes-only system, or whatever, they would invite me or theunitofcaring. The best-case scenario is that we would be irritated and not go. The worst case scenario is that we would be confused what sort of event you were running, show up with the intent to swap clothes, and ruin your event.

The actual category they should be using is not “cis women.” The actual category they should be using is “people who would be contribute to the atmosphere you made this a woman-only event for.”

You might argue that there are not that many cisgender female outliers. Well, let’s assume for the sake of argument that all psychological differences between men and women are correlated into a general factor of Psychological Femaleness. If the Cohen’s d effect size is 1 (commonly glossed as “large”), a full 24% of women will have less psychological femaleness than the average man, which means that 98.67% of your problem is a cisgender female problem.

Or you might argue that that’s all very well if your community is 0.3% trans women, but if ten percent of the people in your community are transgender then that’s a different story. Of course, if your community is full of trans women, it is probably attractive to unusual women in general, and you should expect lots of cisgender outliers as well.

[NOTE: Upon request, the second quote has been removed. If you are interested in reading what I am replying to, please go here and control-F “another (cis) female friend of the blog.” I have also been informed that the person who provided this quote does not identify as a cis woman.]

I do not understand the relationship between this and psychological gender differences. It seems quite obvious that the relevant category here is “people who look like the vast majority of street harassers” versus “people who do not look like the vast majority of street harassers.” The former group uncontroversially includes some trans women (closeted trans women) and some trans men (Buck Angel) and has nothing to do with psychology anyway. No matter how female-typical a trans man’s psychology is, if he has muscles like Chris Hemsworth and a beard like a lumberjack, he belongs in the men’s room.

Indeed, I would argue, there are many cis men in the former category. Even today, and much more so in the past, men’s bathrooms are not equipped with changing tables for babies. When in such a poorly-designed bathroom, some fathers will go into the women’s bathroom and use the changing table there. While obviously we should put changing tables in the men’s bathroom, I think that this use does not erode the protection women’s bathrooms have against harassers. Harassers do not carry around babies in order to have plausible deniability in the event that the woman they are harassing enters a woman’s bathroom at the same time the baby happens to poop.

Similarly, early-transition trans women can be placed into the former category. In our culture, it is generally very stigmatized for men to wear dresses, skirts, makeup, and other signifiers of womanhood. In particular, catcallers and sexist harassers essentially never do: if you’re a catcaller or a sexist harasser, it is probably because you are invested in a particular style of masculinity that is completely incompatible with wearing a skirt. Therefore, allowing all dress-wearing people to use the women’s bathroom has minimal risk of allowing catcallers in. In the event that men wearing dresses and makeup is completely destigmatized to the point that even sexist assholes do so, I am happy to reexamine this statement.

In fact, because of the usefulness of female clothing as a signifier of transness, there is far more danger to norms from early-transition trans men and some butch and gender-non-conforming cis women using the women’s bathroom. If followed to its logical conclusion, this argument suggests that some cis women should be using the men’s room. If strangers regularly refer to you as “sir’, then you may resemble a street harasser or a catcaller far more closely than the average early-transition trans woman, and according to the premises of this argument should use the men’s room. It’s true that cis women in the men’s room might be harassed, no matter their gender presentation, but trans women in the men’s room might be harassed too.

This is not, of course, what I believe. While public bathrooms as refuge from harassment is an important purpose, more important is the primary purpose of public bathrooms, that is, a place to pee. Every person should have the ability to use the bathroom in public. Many trans people and some cis people (both assigned male at birth and assigned female at birth) are not read consistently as male or as female. People who harass and assault other people are far more likely to use the men’s room than the women’s room– that is the point of this entire discussion. If the choices are (a) never pee in public at all, (b) pee in a place where you run a moderate chance of being harassed or assaulted, or (c) slightly erode the norm that people who resemble sexual harassers should not use the women’s bathroom, I think (c) is the only ethical choice.

Finally, I would like to discuss the category I think we should allocate that would make all the discussion of transness much clearer.

Think about money. What do Bitcoin, gold, the little pieces of paper you get from the US government, and cigarettes in a prison have in common? What is the thing that makes all four of those things– all seemingly very different– money?

The answer is that everyone agrees that they’re money. Because everyone agrees that they’re money, you expect that you will be able to exchange them for valuable things in the future. You have an incentive to accumulate cigarettes, gold, or dollar bills even if you don’t smoke, have no interest in making jewelry, and already have perfectly good toilet paper.

I don’t mean to imply that there is no fact of the matter about whether things are money. Clearly there is. Dollar bills are money; Beanie Babies are not. It just happens that the reason that dollar bills are money is that everyone agrees they are money.

I also don’t mean to imply that the definition of money is “things we agree upon to be money.” That would be circular. The definition of money is “any item or verifiable record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a particular country or socio-economic context.”

Social gender is like money. For example, some cultures have more than two social genders, because everyone agrees that more than two social genders exist.

Social gender is distinct from sex: no cultures have more than two sexes because they decided they did. Social gender is distinct from gender presentation: if you meet a woman with a shaved head and a fondness for cars who has cried twice in her entire life, you will not experience the slightest confusion about whether she’s a woman.

Social gender is useful for prediction. Here are some things you can predict about a person based on their social gender:

• Pronouns
• Which gendered terms (“husband”, “groom”, “father”) they use
• Which gendered insults are used against them
• Which gendered holidays (Mother’s Day, Father’s Day) they celebrate
• Whether they wear dresses, skirts, or makeup
• How vicious the harassment they receive is, if they are Internet famous
• Whether people feel comfortable letting them hold their baby
• Whether they experience street harassment
• How many messages they get on a dating site
• Whether people expect them to know how to cook, clean, lift heavy things, or fix cars
• How likely they are to be considered a “slut” if they have lots of casual sex
• Whether they change their name upon getting married
• Whether they are expected to make career sacrifices to take care of their children

And so on and so forth.

Returning to the money example: if a person says that fiat currency isn’t real money, what do they mean? Obviously, they aren’t saying that you can’t exchange fiat currency for goods and services: taking them to the local WalMart will not change their opinion. Our goldbug friend isn’t suggesting that fiat currently isn’t money; they’re suggesting that it shouldn’t be money. They think that everyone should stop agreeing that fiat currency is money, and instead agree that only gold is money. It’s not a definition of what is money; it’s a criterion for what should be considered money.

Similarly, “you’re a woman if you identify as a woman!” is not a definition of womanhood. It is a criterion for who should be a woman. It states that our social genders should be fully consensual: that is, if a person says “I would like to be put in the ‘woman’ category now,” you do that. Right now, this criterion is not broadly applied: a trans person’s social gender generally depends on their presentation, their secondary sexual characteristics, and how much the cis people around them are paying attention. But perhaps it would improve things if it were.

Since it is not, properly speaking, a definition, the decision of who should be socially gendered male or female, and how many social genders we should have is not an epistemic decision. This decision can and should be made on purely utilitarian grounds.

Do Some Trans People Pass? The Results

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

The first five pictures were of cisgender women; the second five pictures were of transgender women.

(Yes, I’m lazy.)

The cisgender pictures are from r/selfie; the transgender pictures are from r/transpassing, a subreddit where people post pictures of themselves to see whether they pass. Both were from the most upvoted pictures of the last month. The trans girl who hadn’t taken HRT was #8, the second girl with a flower crown; an astonishing 37% of voters thought she was cisgender.

Of the five cisgender girls, two were conclusively identified as cisgender, while three had less than sixty percent of voters identify them as either cis or trans. In two cases, the voters leaned towards cisgender, while in one case, the voters leaned towards transgender. Of the five transgender girls, three were conclusively identified as transgender, one was conclusively identified as cisgender, and the remaining girl was not conclusively identified either way, although voters leaned towards her being transgender.

My initial predictions were wrong; I thought that people would be far more likely to misidentify transgender people as cisgender and vice versa than they actually were. In fact, with two exceptions (one cis and one trans), the lean of the vote was in the correct direction.

However, I found the lack of consensus striking. I defined “lack of consensus” as failing to get at least sixty percent of voters to agree on whether you’re cisgender or transgender; by this relatively narrow definition, four women’s pictures were unidentifiable. Using a broader definition, in which fewer than two-thirds of voters agree, six women’s pictures were unidentifiable as cisgender or transgender. As qualitative evidence, several commenters mentioned that, if they hadn’t known that five of the pictures were of trans women, they would have assumed all or nearly all the pictures were of cisgender women.

My interpretation of this data is that base rates matter. Many people– I would roughly guess about half the population– are not readily identifiable as cisgender or transgender if there’s a 50/50 chance that they’re cis or trans. However, in the real world, 99.7% of people are cisgender; for this reason, pretty much all ambiguous people are read as cisgender all the time.

What matters, of course, is not the actual base rate but the perceived base rate. Sophia Kovaleva commented on the original post:

I recently spent 20 minutes arguing with Russian border control agents that my passport is mine, and the incorrect gender marker in it is not a result of “a technical mistake on the part of the organization that issued the passport”. Never mind bone structure or height or the pitch and resonance of the voice – they couldn’t clock me despite seeing my passport and having me literally saying “I’m trans” (well, technically I was saying “I’m changing my sex” in order for this statement to be accessible to them).

Of course, Russia is a very traditional and transphobic country, so the perceived base rate of trans people is extraordinarily low, perhaps zero. No amount of evidence would cause people to update in favor.

I myself have noticed that context matters. When I lived in a Southern state, I passed as male if I cut my hair, wore a button-down shirt, and didn’t talk very much– except when I went to anime conventions. Since many people crossplay at anime conventions, people didn’t expect that someone in male clothing would be male. Now that I live in San Francisco, I rarely pass: people expect butch women to exist. (Inexplicably, having green hair caused me to be read as male, until I started carrying around a baby a lot of the time, at which point people started reading me as female again. I have attempted to persuade my husband to wear a dress in an attempt to confuse people into gendering me as male, but no dice.)

This suggests an unfortunate tradeoff for transgender people. The feminist, trans-friendly places where being perceived as trans is least dangerous are exactly the places where it is most difficult for us to go stealth.

Do Some Trans People Pass?

Tags

ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

I am occasionally informed that no trans people ever pass, because their physiology and bone structure will inevitably reveal what sex they were assigned at birth. So let’s play a game.

Here are ten ordinary people’s publicly available selfies. Five are trans, five are cis. I am not going to include sources yet, because I don’t want people to be able to look up which is which; sources will be included in the answer key. If one of these is your selfie and you’d rather I not use it, I am happy to remove it. In a few days, I will post an answer key.

I have filtered for picture quality (i.e. nothing where you can’t see the person’s face) but did not deliberately choose pictures where the trans people passed particularly well. One trans person included is pre-HRT. All pictures are of women because men, regardless of assigned sex at birth, are much less likely to take selfies.

Ways of Thinking About Psychological Gender Differences

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not feminism go away, ozy blog post

Broadly speaking, I’ve noticed three different ways people can think about psychological gender differences: they can say there is no difference between men and women on a particular trait, they can say that there are two overlapping bell curves, or they can say that there is a fundamental, essential difference between men and women.

(To be clear, this is different from saying the difference is genetic or environmental. Whatever the cause of a psychological difference– genetic, environmental, or both– a person may think it resembles overlapping bell curves or that it is a fundamental and essential difference.)

First, some people think men and women are the same on a particular trait: for example, they might argue that men’s emotions are just as strong as women’s, that women are just as interested in sex as men are, or that men talk just as much as women do. They might think people are mistaken about the alleged difference: for example, the blog Language Log has written many posts arguing that men talk just as much as women do.

Sometimes, however, people think that men and women behave differently, but not because of an underlying psychological difference. They might believe that men and women face different incentives. For example, they might think that women are less likely than men to be interested in casual sex, not because they like casual sex less in the abstract, but because women are more likely than men to be shamed for having casual sex and less likely than men to have orgasms during casual sex. They might believe that women take more maternity leave than men do paternity leave because women have to recover from the physically difficult ordeal of pregnancy and childbirth and because pumping breastmilk is very inconvenient. Other times, people believe that different behavior is a product of discrimination. For example, women might be less likely to work in a particular field because hiring managers assume that they are incompetent.

Second, some people believe that there’s a psychological difference between men and women on the population level, but that many men have the more female-typical version of the trait and many women have the more male-typical version of the trait. This is easiest to see in a picture:

(Note that, in many cases, a person may believe the means are closer together than they are in this picture.)

An obvious example of a physical overlapping-bell-curves trait is height. Men are generally taller than women, but there are still lots of short men and tall women, and it’s not that surprising if any particular woman is taller than any particular man. Similarly, a person might believe that sex drive is an overlapping-bell-curves trait: men typically have higher libidos than women, but many men with low libidos and women with high libidos exist, and it’s not that surprising to find a heterosexual couple in which the woman has a higher libido than the man.

Third, some people believe in fundamental and essential differences between men and women. I’m going to do the worst job describing this one, because I basically don’t believe in fundamental and essential differences between men and women, but I’ll do my best.

The easiest way to observe this belief in the wild is to go to a bookstore’s relationship self-help section, where you will encounter books like Love and Respect: The Love She Most Desires, The Respect He Desperately Needs, Men Are From Mars and Women Are From Venus, and Act Like A Lady Think Like A Man. (Methodology: I looked on Amazon’s relationships bestseller list for books about gender.) As part of their fundamental premise, these books assume that no men primarily desire love, that no women want to retreat into their caves and refuse to talk to anyone when they’re upset, and that no men are willing to date women who don’t want sex that much.

But these beliefs affect more than relationship advice. I was recently reading Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, which made the following argument against gay marriage (edited for space):

The complementarity that defines marriage as the union of a man and a woman is crucial as well for the raising of children. There is no such thing as “parenting.” There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both…

[University of Virginia sociologist] Wilcox finds that “most fathers and mothers possess sex-specific talents related to parenting, and societies should organize parenting and work roles to take advantage of the way in which these talents tend to be distributed in sex-specific ways.” These differences are not the result of gender roles or sex stereotypes. They are a matter of what comes naturally to moms and dads, what moms and dads enjoy doing with their children…

[Rutgers University sociologist] Popenoe concludes:

“We should disavow the notion that “mommies can make good daddies,” just as we should disavow the popular notion . . . that “daddies can make good mommies.” . . . The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”

What are the distinctive gifts of mothers and fathers? Wilcox reports, “Among the many distinctive talents that mothers bring to the parenting enterprise, three stand out: their capacity to breastfeed, their ability to understand infants and children, and their ability to offer nurture and comfort to their children.” And fathers, Wilcox writes, “excel when it comes to discipline, play, and challenging their children to embrace life’s challenges.”

As Popenoe explains:

“The complementarity of male and female parenting styles is striking and of enormous importance to a child’s overall development. . . . [F]athers express more concern for the child’s long-term development, while mothers focus on the child’s immediate well-being (which, of course, in its own way has everything to do with a child’s long-term well-being.) . . . [T]he disciplinary approach of fathers tends to be “firm” while that of mothers tends to be “responsive.” While mothers provide an important flexibility and sympathy in their discipline, fathers provide ultimate predictability and consistency. Both dimensions are critical for an efficient, balanced, and humane childrearing regime.’

This argument makes little sense from a non-essentialist point of view. From the point of view that psychological gender differences don’t exist, of course, it is nonsensical. With the exception of the capacity to breastfeed (which people with XY chromosomes do not have absent copious medical intervention), they argue, there is no reason that a parent of any gender can’t have any of those capacities. Who says fathers can’t nurture and mothers can’t discipline?

From an overlapping-bell-curves perspective, it is also silly. There are many more heterosexuals than there are gay people, and heterosexuals are more likely than gay people to have children. If even ten percent of women are as firm as the average man, then there are many more children who have a father and an unusually disciplinarian mother than there are children who have lesbian parents. Therefore, it makes sense to prioritize the unusual people getting married issue, perhaps by raising awareness that if you are a man who cares a lot about your child’s immediate well-being you should make sure to have children with a woman who prioritizes the future. (Alternately, since they’re willing to forbid gay marriage, perhaps they should require heterosexuals to take some sort of personality test to get married.)

But if men and women are basically different, those arguments sound like nitpicking. Sure, there are probably some playful women somewhere (they might argue), just like there are some people who only have one hand and some people who have eleven toes, but no one says “human beings have two hands except for certain people who have experienced tragic accidents.” At their core, men and women are basically different, and it makes sense to make policy based on that.

(Before the feminists and men’s rights activists of my blog howl, I’d like to point out that this is how the most striking physical sex differences actually work: there are in fact no cisgender men who can get pregnant and no cisgender women who can produce sperm. From a purely theoretical perspective, it’s not that odd to postulate that some psychological sex differences are equally striking.)

Is The Type One/Type Two Division Caused By Timing Of Transition?

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ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[This should probably not be the first thing you read about Blanchard’s theories. I will consistently use “type one” to refer to so-called homosexual transsexuals and “type two” to refer to so-called autogynephile transsexuals, and it is the absence of neutral terms for these distinctions that have driven me to this problem. As always, a caveat that Blanchard’s theories are controversial and that there’s a replication crisis which limits the accuracy of any psychological research.]

So this is a super-fun request post. (Back me on Patreon and get a chance at a request post yourself!)

Monica sent me her thoughts on the type one/type two division. She argues that the division is in fact caused by age at transition, noting that age at transition is not precisely the same thing as when one became gender dysphoric. Later transition causes your brain to be exposed more to your birth sex hormones and you to experience more gender socialization for your assigned gender; we would expect more masculine behavior from this population. Sexual fantasies often don’t develop until adolescence and continue to develop in adulthood; earlier transitioners may have weaker or nonexistent sexual fantasies related to their gender. Orientation change is commonly noted as an effect of hormones; perhaps earlier transitioners are more likely to experience this effect, thus becoming exclusively androphiliac.

Children who were assigned male and who behave femininely may be more likely to transition early. Monica mentions that accepting parents may be more likely to allow their children to behave in a feminine fashion and to transition, and that early transition lends itself to selective memories on the parts of both families and trans people which exaggerate how feminine a child was. I’d add that more feminine assigned-male children may be more likely to be allowed to transition, while more masculine children take longer to transition because they have to get past more gatekeepers.

However, my own anecdotes suggest this is not the case. I personally know many type-twos who transitioned at nineteen or twenty; on r/asktransgender one may find type-twos who have come to a transgender identity as young as fourteen. By Blanchard, this really shouldn’t happen at all. In fact, given the number of trans women in Silicon Valley who come out in their twenties, the proposition that most type-twos transition in their forties or fifties would imply that (contrary to popular belief) there are in fact no cisgender male programmers at all.

Therefore I predict (with a fairly high degree of confidence) that Millennials will be far less likely to transition at midlife than previous generations.

It makes sense that this would be the case. Before relatively recently, there were two kinds of trans narratives. First, there were narratives that embodied cisgender anxieties far more than transgender realities: trans women were depicted as predatory and wanting to lure men into sex, or as pathetic mockeries of women, or surprisingly often both at the same time. (Trans men, of course, did not exist at all.) Second, and far less common, there were narratives from actual trans people sanitized for cisgender people’s consumption. You always knew you were a man deep down, you played with trucks as a child, you have definitely never been attracted to a man, your gender plays no role in your sexuality, and if you ever wore a dress it was by coercion and you threw it out and it is definitely not in the back of your closet waiting for Drag Night.

So whether people transitioned depended a lot on luck: it was hard to get any sort of idea about what trans lives were actually like unless you happened to meet a trans person. It was all too easy to have the idea that your gender dysphoria didn’t really count if you liked wearing eyeliner sometimes and had no deep-down sense of being male.

The trans and gay communities have been linked since inversion was a twinkle in Krafft-Ebing’s eye: thus, trans people who were part of the gay or lesbian community pre-transition generally encountered other trans people young and transitioned earlier. Trans people assigned male at birth who were not part of the LGBT community blundered around in a fog of shame and quiet misery unless they happened to stumble across a crossdresser group or something, and thus transitioned later. Trans people assigned female at birth who were not part of the LGBT community had… as far as I can tell completely nothing, and thus rarely transitioned.

Nowadays, we have Twitter and blogs and Imogen Binnie’s Nevada: narratives written by trans people, about trans people, for trans people. And these resources are accessible like never before. If some sixteen-year-old– hesitant, terrified, palms sweating– enters “am I transgender” into google, they will stumble across an article like this one (first result for me in incognito mode search). It’s not perfect, god no, but look at what’s on the list of signs the author was a trans woman: hating girly things, longing to be pregnant, crossdressing (!), repulsion at the idea of trans people, hating cameras, a bizarre fondness for the song “Lola”. And that means that that kid will not think “oh, I hated boys’ toys at a kid, I can’t possibly be trans”, will sort themselves out sooner, and will be able to transition.

In conclusion, I suspect the early transitioner/late transitioner thing is a mere artifact of transphobia and not a real division, and that trans people of the present generation will transition far earlier regardless of type.

Deontologist Envy

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my issues with anti sj let me show you them, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post, utilitarianism it works bitches

Many consequentialists of my acquaintance appear to suffer from a tragic case of deontologist envy.

In consequentialism, one makes ethical decisions by choosing the actions that have the best consequences, whether that means maximizing your own happiness and flourishing (consequentialist ethical egoism), increasing pleasure and decreasing pain (hedonic utilitarianism), satisfying the most people’s preferences (preference utilitarianism) or increasing the number of pre-defined Good Things in the world (objective list consequentialism). Of course, it’s impossible to figure out all the consequences of your actions in advance, so many people follow particular sets of rules which they believe maximize utility overall; this is sometimes called “rule consequentialism” or “rule utilitarianism.”

In deontology, one makes ethical decisions by choosing the actions that follow some particular rule. For example, one might do only the actions that you’d will that everyone do, or actions that involve treating other people as ends rather than means, or actions that don’t violate the rights of other beings, or actions that don’t involve initiating aggression, or actions that are not sins according to the teachings of the Catholic Church. While it’s allowed to care about whether things are better or worse (some deontologists I know call it their “axiology”), you can only care about that within the constraints of the rule system.

In spite of my sympathies for virtue ethics, I do think it is generally better to make decisions based on whether the outcomes are good as opposed to decisions based on whether they follow a particular set of rules or are the decisions a person with particular virtues would make. (I continue to find it weird that these are the Only Three Options For Decision-Making About Ethics, So Says Philosophy, but anyway.) So do most people I know.

I have some consequentialist beliefs about free speech. For instance, I support making fun of people who say sexist or racist things in public. I think it is fine to call someone a bigoted asshole if they are, in fact, saying bigoted asshole things. I appreciate Charles Murray refusing to speak at an event Milo Yiannopoulous is at because he is “a despicable asshole” and I wish more people would follow his example. And when I express my consequentialist beliefs about free speech a surprising number of my consequentialist friends respond with “but what if your political opponents did that?”

I did not realize we are all Kantians now.

I think there are three things that people sometimes mean by “but what if everyone did that?” The first is simple empathy: if it hurts you to be shamed, then you should consider the possibility that it hurts other people to be shamed too, no differently from how you are hurt. I agree that this is an important argument, and we could all stand to be a little bit more aware that people we disagree with are people with feelings. But even deontologists agree sometimes it’s necessary to hurt one person for the greater good: for example, even if you are very lonely and it hurts you not to get to talk to people, you don’t get to force people to interact with you against their will. So I don’t think that the mere fact that it hurts people implies that (say) public shaming should be off-limits.

The second is a rather touching faith in the ability of people’s virtuous behavior to influence their political opponents.

Now, if it happened that my actions had any influence whatsoever over the behavior of r/TumblrInAction, that would be great. I don’t screenshot random tumblr users and mock them in front of an audience of over three hundred thousand people, so the entire subreddit would close down, which would be a great benefit to humanity. While we’re at it, there are many other places people who read r/TumblrInAction could follow my illustrious example. For instance, they could be tolerant of teenagers with dumb political beliefs, remembering how stupid their own teenage political beliefs were. They could stop making fun of deitykin, otherwise known as “psychotic people with delusions of grandeur,” because jesus fucking christ it is horrible to mock a mentally ill person for showing mental illness symptoms. They could stop with the “I identify as an attack helicopter” jokes; I mean, I don’t have any ethical argument against those jokes, it’s just that there is exactly one of them that was ever funny. 

In general people rarely have their behavior influenced by their political enemies. Trans people take pains to use the correct pronouns; people who are overly concerned about trans women in bathrooms still misgender them. Anti-racists avoid the use of slurs; a distressing number of people who believe in human biodiversity appear to be incapable of constructing a sentence without one. Social justice people are conscientious about trigger warnings; we are subjected to many tedious articles about how mentally ill people should be in therapy instead of burdening the rest of the world with our existence.

Therefore, I suspect that if supporters of social justice universally became conscientious about representing their opponents’ views fairly, defaulting to kindness and using cruelty only as a last resort when it is necessary to reduce overall harm, and not getting people fired from their jobs, it would not have any effect on how often opponents of social justice represent opponents’ views fairly, behave kindly, and condemn campaigns to fire people. In fact, they might end up doing so more enthusiastically, because suddenly kindness and charity and not getting people fired are Social Justice Things, and you don’t want to support Social Justice Things, do you?

(I’m making this argument with the social justice side as the good side, but it works equally well for literally any two sides in the relevant positions.)

Third, there’s an argument I personally find very compelling. Nearly everyone who does wrong things, even evil things, thinks that they’re on the side of good. Therefore, the fact that you think you’re on the side of good doesn’t mean you actually are. (The traditional example is Nazis, but I think Stalinism is probably better, because in my experience most people agree that your average rank-and-file Stalinist supported an ideology that killed millions of people because they had a good goal but were horribly mistaken about how to bring it about.) So it’s important to take steps to reduce the harm of your actions if you’re actually doing evil.

Like I said, I find this argument compelling. But you can’t get an entire ethical system out of trying to avoid being a Stalinist. Lots of generally neutral or even good things are evil if a Stalinist happens to be doing them, such as trying to convince people of your point of view or going to political rallies or donating to causes you think will do the most good in the world. If you were a Stalinist, the maximally good action you could do, short of not becoming a Stalinist anymore, is sitting on the couch watching Star Trek reruns. This moral system has some virtues– depressed people the world over can defend their actions by saying “well, actually, I’m one of the best people in the world by Not-Having-Even-The-Slightest-Chance-Of-Being-A-Stalinist-ianism”– but I think it is unsatisfying for most people.

(I can tell someone is about to say “you can donate to the Against Malaria Foundation, there’s no possible way that could be evil!” and honestly that just seems like a failure of imagination.)

That’s not to say that trying to avoid being a Stalinist should have no effects on your ethical system at all. Perhaps most important is never, ever, ever engaging in deliberate self-deception. Of almost equal importance is not hiding inconvenient facts. If you know damn well the Holodomor is happening, do not write a bunch of articles denouncing everyone who says the Holodomor is happening as a reactionary who hates poor people. On a less dramatic level, if there’s a study that doesn’t say what you want it to say, mention it anyway; if you can massage the evidence into saying something that it doesn’t really say, don’t; take care to mention the downsides and upsides of proposed policies as best you can. These are most important, because they directly harm the ability of truth to hurt falsehood.

And there are some things that I think it’s worth putting on the list of things you shouldn’t do even if you have a really really good reason, because it is far more likely that you are mistaken than that this is actually right this time. Violence against people who aren’t being violent against others, outside of war (and no rules-lawyering about how being mean is violence, either). Being a dick to people who are really weird but not hurting anyone (and no rules-lawyering about indirect harm to the social fabric, either). Firing people for reasons unrelated to their ability to perform their jobs. I’ve added “not listening to your kid and respecting their point of view when they try to tell you something important about themselves, even if you disagree,” but that’s a personal thing related to my own crappy relationship with my parents.

But that’s not a complete ethical system. At some point you have to do things. And that means, yes, that there’s a possibility you will do something wrong. Maybe you will be a participant in an ongoing moral catastrophe; maybe you will make the situation worse in a way you wouldn’t have if you sat on your ass and watched Netflix. On the other hand, if you don’t do anything at all, you get to be the person sitting idly by while ongoing moral catastrophes happen, and those people don’t exactly get a good reputation in the history textbooks either. (“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,” quoth Edmund Burke.)

The virtue of consequentialism is that it pays attention to consequences. It is consistent for me to say “feminist activism is good, because it has good consequences, and anti-feminist activism is bad, because it has bad consequences.” (Similarly, it is consistent to say that you should lie to axe murderers and homophobic parents, but not to more prosocial individuals.) This is compatible with me believing that if I had a different set of facts I would probably be engaged in anti-gay activism, and in fact many loving, compassionate, and intelligent people of my acquaintance do or have in the past. Moral luck exists; it is possible to do evil without meaning to. There would be worse consequences if everyone adopted the policy of never doing anything that might possibly be wrong.

There is a common criticism of consequentialism where people say “well if torture had good consequences then you’d support torture! CHECKMATE CONSEQUENTIALISTS.” Of course, in the real world torture always has bad consequences, which is why consequentialists oppose it. If stabbing people in the gut didn’t cause them pain or kill them, and in fact gave them sixteen orgasms and a chocolate cake, then stabbing people would be a good thing, but it is not irrelevant to consequentialism that stabbing does not do this.

Some people seem to want to be able to do consequentialism without ever making reference to a consequence. If you just find enough levels of meta and use the categorical imperative enough, then maybe you will be able to do consequentialism without all that scary “evidence” and “facts” stuff, and without the possibility that you could be mistaken. This seems like a perverse desire, and in my opinion is best dealt with by no longer envying deontology and instead just becoming a deontologist.