Thoughts on Doxxing

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

[content warning: quoted racist comments, brief mention of sexual harassment]

There was recently a kerfluffle about a member of the Internet right-wing named HanAssholeSolo, who made a gif that was retweeted by the president. CNN discovered his identity and did not out him, but made some statements that could be reasonably interpreted as threatening to out him if he didn’t stop being a horrible racist. I think The Intercept is probably correct that some executives decided to put in some lawyerese that happens to sound like CNN is threatening a critic with outing, and then didn’t explain themselves, because fucking executives. So I am going to blatantly ignore the kind of stupid and boring actual issue and instead discuss the much more interesting issue of whether CNN would be right to out horrible racists if this were actually a thing they were going to do.

–and let’s not mince our words here. I’ve seen a lot of people calling HanAssholeSolo a “CNN critic” or a “Trump supporter,” which seems unfairly insulting of both CNN critics and Trump supporters. To quote a Salon article on the subject:

At the same time he appears to have gone on a bit of an editing spree, knowing his posts would be under the microscope he started sanitizing some of his most offensive screeds, deleting the N-word and a comment about killing Muslims, for example. Quartz took screenshots of some of his posts before they were edited.

Despite the edits, there is still plenty of offensive material that HanAssholeSolo has posted that is still on the site (at least for now). The user, for example, posted a link to a meme that advocates running over Muslims with a tank. He or she also posted a meme that identified CNN contributors as Jews using a Star of David. The user also frequently posts racists comments that target African-Americans in particular, in one instance writing that Americans spend less on Father’s Day than Mother’s Day gifts because “most blacks don’t know who their fathers are.”

One might argue, as well, that eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth morality implies outing HanAssholeSolo is at least acceptable. After all, the r/The_Donald/Gamergate/alt-right cluster of the Internet shows no particular compunctions about sharing people’s private infomation, given that some of them are calling the journalist’s wife and parents at home with threatening messages. This is merely the latest in a long string of such incidents, which include getting a Nintendo employee fired for her history as a sex worker.

Nevertheless, I think it would be wrong to dox HanAssholeSolo, and this is why.

First, the eye-for-an-eye argument strikes me as pretty weak. When I have to give an account for my life, I hope I will have something better to say for myself than “I did not behave significantly worse than r/The_Donald.” Like, I am a better person than the average participant in r/The_Donald, that’s why I’m here defending their right not to be doxxed while they’re making unfunny memes about transgender people. (I’m too offended as a fan of comedy to be able to be offended as a trans person.) I promise there are plenty of ways we can punish the expression of horrible racism without using this particular one.

Second, when I think about doxxing, I always think about violentacrez.

Violentacrez was a vile person: among other sites, he moderated r/creepshots (which posted pictures of women’s breasts and asses taken in public without their consent) and r/jailbait (which posted sexualized pictures of women under the age of 18, many taken from their Facebook pages, again without their consent). But he also had a wife with fibromyalgia; when he was outed, he lost his job and his health insurance, putting her health in danger. While the Internet doesn’t seem to know what he’s up to now, Googling his legal name still brings up violentacrez; it seems quite likely that he has found it difficult or impossible to get a job since.

So that’s the question, isn’t it? Are you willing to sit down and endorse the statement “yes, I think a reasonable and appropriate punishment for this man’s actions is that his wife is deprived of the health care that helps keep her alive”?

And it’s not just people’s disabled partners (or, for that matter, disabled selves). It’s their elderly mother they’re taking care of and who has nowhere to go if they lose their home. Or their five-year-old who doesn’t understand anything about Reddit or CNN but does understand that Mommy and Daddy are fighting and there aren’t going to be any presents for Christmas this year. Or the better person they might be, someday, who will always be burdened by the corpse of the asshole they used to be.

It is much easier to judge people when the only thing you know about them is the worst thing they ever did.

In the case of violentacrez, yes, I am willing to bite that bullet. I am not sure that there was any other way to keep him from continuing to violate the privacy of literally thousands of girls, many of them underage. HanAssholeSolo, however, to his credit, has never been accused of harassing or threatening anyone. His comments about wanting to kill Muslims are obviously the same sort of thing as people saying “die cis scum” or “white genocide now” or “people who ship Reylo should be run over with a tank”: like, you obviously shouldn’t go around saying you want to kill people, but for every hundred thousand people who say that there’s maybe one person who actually, you know, means it. HanAssholeSolo’s racist comments were generally confined to r/The_Donald and other such places. It is not exactly a surprise to anyone that if you read r/The_Donald you will encounter racism there.

And– he would get fired. He would have a hard time finding another job. It would hurt anyone who depends on him financially. He would lose friendships and relationships. He would be harassed and sent death threats, because every time you unleash a mob on the Internet they’re going to harass you and send death threats. Maybe he would be a victim of swatting. Maybe he would be threatened or assaulted. And even if he changes, it won’t stop.

Even if you want to look at it from a practical standpoint, without any considerations of justice or mercy, presumably you (like me) want to reduce the number of horrible racists in the world. It seems to me that, to achieve this goal, it is very important that horrible racists continue to have connections with people who disapprove of horrible racism. If the people who aren’t horrible racists get you fired from your job and send you death threats, and the only place you find solace and comfort is with other horrible racists, and becoming less of a racist would not stop the non-horrible-racists from attacking you but would separate you from your source of support– would you stop being a horrible racist? Would anyone?

Those of us who have had the pleasure of having a small mob directed after them, as happens so often on the social justice Internet these days– did this get you to change your mind? Personally, I have sometimes experienced a mob where they were right and I was wrong and let me tell you at the time I would have sacrificed some of my less essential toes rather than admit that maybe the assholes had a point. I don’t know that making the mob be ten thousand people rather than a hundred would have any effect on increasing its persuasive power.

Mobbing doesn’t even consistently shut people up: I mean, sometimes it does, but there are plenty of people who get mobbed online and then respond by saying the same thing again but louder this time, and now they have sympathy including from people who weren’t on their side to start with. I mean, exactly how well has Gamergate done at shutting up Anita Sarkeesian?

Yes, yes, you should stop believing horrible things no matter how much it would personally harm you or how contrary to human nature it would be. I think it is a bit much to base your anti-racism plan on horrible racists universally being saints.

I’m not saying that anyone has a duty to spend time with horrible racists (although it’s a good thing to do if it’s something you’re personally capable of). But I am saying that at the very least one should not cause horrible racists harm in such a way that it increases their chance of continuing to be horrible racists. And that means no doxxing.

It’s Your Fault I Hit You Because Your Face Is So Hittable

Tags

fatphobia, neurodivergence, ozy blog post

I think there is a very common argument about oppression that seems to assume that the only way to stop people from being mean to you because of your axis of marginalization is to stop being visibly marginalized.

Groups I have seen this about: Trans people (“you shouldn’t transition, because then people will harass you on the street and discriminate against you”). Gay people (“if you didn’t flaunt being gay, no one would care”). Gender-non-conforming people (“stop being a flamer and people wouldn’t be mean to you”). Visibly neurodivergent people (“if you don’t get normalizing therapy, you’re going to be bullied”). Fat people (“you should lose weight and then no one will call you a fat pig”).

The important question here is whether privileged people are evil.

For instance, it might be true that, while there are some exceptional non-autistic people who are capable of being tolerant, non-autistic people as a group are simply incapable of responding to normal autistic body language and affect with anything other than ostracism, harassment, and assault. Since non-autistic people are 99% of the population, we must deal with them. In that situation, it is only practical to learn how to conceal the signs of being visibly autistic.

However, in this situation, it would be perfectly reasonable for autistic people to hate non-autistic people. It is wrong to mistreat people because of harmless behavior that doesn’t affect others in any way. It may be that non-autistic people as a group are severely impaired in their ability to behave in an ethical way; people can be impaired in ethical behavior just as they can be impaired in anything else. However, if it is an unchangeable part of your personality that you hurt someone for a harmless trait of theirs, it is entirely unreasonable to expect that person to have fond feelings for you.

In the event that privileged people are evil, it is also important to put resources into separatism and programs of mutual aid. Of course, many autistic people have high support needs, and it would probably be impossible to live apart from non-autistic people entirely. But a space where we can be ourselves is a necessity.

Most of all, in this situation, we must not lie to marginalized people and claim that the flaw is in them. If non-autistic people cannot help but hurt autistic people, then we must be honest with autistic children about this. We must not teach them that their hands should be quiet because loud hands are weird and disgusting and wrong. We must teach them that their hands should be quiet because most people are cruel and mean and will hurt them if they are not.

Alternately, it may be the case that privileged people are not evil. For instance, it may be that non-autistic people, as a group, possess the ability to not bully people for moving their hands in a funny way; it is just that many non-autistic people have never bothered to develop this capacity.

In that case, quieting your hands is a short-term solution. Whether or not non-autistic people have the capability to be nice to visibly autistic people, many of them are, in fact, cruel to visibly autistic people right now. It can make sense to avoid being visibly autistic! I would never tell anyone that they have to go around being mistreated for the sake of the movement. You have to make the decision that makes sense for you within your own personal context.

That said, it must be combined with the long-term solution, which is activism. Non-autistic people must be encouraged– through some combination of social stigma and moral persuasion– to develop the capacity to not bully people, even if those people are knowingly going about being weird in public. This process will probably involve people being visibly autistic, since familiarity tends to make people more accepting.

Personally, I am an optimist. I believe that people who are currently behaving in an oppressive way have, in the vast majority of cases, the capacity to shape up. That’s because of my personal experience. I was taught by my parents to be mean to fat people (for instance, by pointing to fat women in bikinis and saying that no one wants to see that); when I grew older and read writing by fat people, I learned that this was an awful way to behave, and I cut it the fuck out. I think other people who are currently being assholes can learn to behave better too.

This means I strive not to hate members of privileged groups or judge them based on their group membership instead of considering the individual person, and it also means that I tend to have fairly high standards for their behavior. And it means I am very unsympathetic to arguments that treat the behavior of privileged people as a variable it is impossible to change. No one is forcing thin people to be mean to fat people, or cis people to be mean to trans people, or straight people to be mean to gay people. It is a decision by individual people who could have damn well chosen to make a better one. And therefore the blame for the mistreatment of marginalized people is always on the person who’s doing the mistreating.

Intellectual Turing Test: Social Justice And Anti Social Justice

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blog meta

The Ideological Turing Test, invented by Bryan Caplan, is a test of how well people understand other people’s viewpoints. The regular Turing test is a test for programmers: can you write a computer program which a human being cannot tell apart from another human being? The Intellectual Turing Test is a test for people who believe things: can you explain your opponent’s viewpoints in such a way that your opponent cannot tell it apart from someone who legitimately believes the opinion? If you can, it shows you understand your opponent’s positions on a deep level.

I have a good balance of social-justice and anti-social-justice readers, so I am going to do it about social-justice and anti-social-justice topics. How it’s going to work: I’m going to leave the ITT open for a week. Contrary to the normal policy of this blog, submissions are open to neoreactionaries. If I get a good number of participants from both sides, I will give everyone (social justice and anti-social-justice) two weeks to write answers to the questions from both the social justice side and the anti-social-justice side. I will run first the social justice submissions and then the anti-social-justice submissions, and the audience will vote on whether they think it’s real or a fake. At the end, I’ll reveal who wrote what and give special recognition to the social justice person and the anti-social-justice person who did the best job of impersonating the other side.

The questions are as follows:

1. What discourse norms do you tend to follow? Why? Do you think everyone else should follow them, and why?
2. What is the true reason, deep down, that you believe what you believe? What piece of evidence, test, or line of reasoning would convince you that you’re wrong about your ideology?
3. Explain Gamergate.

If you would like to participate, please email me at ozyfrantz@gmail.com. (I am not guaranteed to see offers to participate made elsewhere.) Please identify whether you’re a social justice person or an anti-social-justice person.

On Friendships With People You Disagree With

Tags

my issues with anti sj let me show you them, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

[content warning: Nazis]

This is my position on who gets a say in whom people are friends with:

1. That person.
2. Not other people.

Many people seem to disagree with me on this point. I will take it first from a social-justice side and then next from the anti-social-justice side.

From the social justice side: I see people claiming that it is morally wrong to be friends with people who have sufficiently abhorrent beliefs, such as Nazis, trans-exclusive radical feminists, neoreactionaries, and so on.

 

I am not entirely sure what the goal of this ethical injunction is. If everyone followed it, then no one would hang out with Nazis except other Nazis, and they would form this little group of Nazis together, stewing in how persecuted they are by Jewish people, and gradually shifting their own Overton windows until “I don’t think murdering every person who likes a Jewish person is a good idea” becomes an extremist viewpoint. If they ever decide they might want to stop being Nazis, they’d have to give up everyone they’re friends with; some people might be brave enough to face complete social isolation for their beliefs, but most people aren’t. Conversely, being friends with Nazis exposes them to non-Nazi beliefs, creates a sense of cognitive dissonance, and gives them someone to turn to in case they want to stop being Nazis.

As it happens, at my college there was a kid who was the son of one of the founders of Stormfront. When it was found out who his father was, some people tried to get him expelled from school. (They did not succeed, because you can’t actually expel someone from school just for being a white nationalist if they never say anything racist to anyone.) Once he graduated, he said that he had become anti-racist. The people who tried to get him expelled from school did not cause this shift. Instead, what caused it was the slow accretion of cognitive dissonance: becoming friends with people of color or people in interracial relationships and realizing that his beliefs were hurting people he knew and cared about. If everyone had decided it was morally wrong to befriend white nationalists, he would probably still be a white nationalist today.

To be clear, I’m not saying you should go around befriending Nazis in the hopes of stopping them from being Nazis. That’s condescending as fuck. I am saying that if you happen to want to be friends with a Nazi anyway, there is not actually a plausible argument that this will cause more Nazis to be in the world.

You might argue that being friends with a Nazi makes you more likely to be a Nazi. I suggest that the correct solution to this problem is not becoming a Nazi in the first place. Do you cherish some deeply-held desire to become a Nazi?

You might argue that whom I’m friends with doesn’t just affect me; if I invite Nazis and you to my Christmas dinner party, then you will have to interact with Nazis. However, this is a problem faced in a lot of circumstances, such as anyone who is friends with multiple parties involved in an extremely nasty breakup. The solutions those people come up with– such as organizing multiple dinner parties or only inviting one side to the party– also generalize to Nazis and people who don’t want to talk to Nazis.

From the anti-social-justice side: I see a lot of people claiming that ideological diversity is very important, and people who don’t want to be friends with people who share certain disagreements with them are just making excuses for living in a bubble. I think this is absolutely absurd.

First, people’s factual beliefs about the world affect their behavior. For instance, I don’t want to be friends with someone who believes that gender pronouns should be used in accordance with the sex one was assigned at birth, because they are going to use pronouns for me that hurt me. I don’t want to be friends with someone who believes it would be morally right to coerce me into having an abortion or deceive me into eating meat, because that increases the chance that they’ll violate my bodily autonomy. I don’t want to be friends with someone who thinks that borderlines are inherently abusive and evil, because that thought process seems like it would lead to mistreating me.

Do these preferences apply to everyone? Of course not! Some trans people are willing to accept being referred to with the wrong pronouns; some people who don’t want to get abortions don’t mind people who might be pressurey about them getting one; some vegetarians are okay with people who might deceive them into eating meat; some borderlines are okay with being friends with people who think they’re evil. I think they’re quite strange, but other people might think it’s strange that I count a trans-exclusive radical feminist and a neoreactionary among my friends. What matters is what makes you feel safe and comfortable in your friendship. Personally, I object to people who mispronoun me, but I don’t mind the belief that I’m an autoandrophile transitioning out of a sexual fetish. Others might have different preferences, because they’re different people.

Second, preference drift exists. For many people, their friends have an effect on their values. The thing that made me an effective altruist was not reading books or blogs about effective altruism; it was joining a community in which it was routine and accepted that everyone was donating ten percent of their income to the charities they believed were most effective, and a lot of people had specifically chosen their career to help do good. And, frankly, it’s a lot easier to be vegetarian when I don’t have to constantly defend my vegetarianism to others.

I don’t think that’s just for altruistic endeavors, either. A musician who’s devoting her life to the pursuit of her art will probably do better with friends who are musicians than with friends who are constantly talking about their great vacation to Tahiti and their shiny new Ferrari; the latter may cause her to care more about money and less about the art. A devotedly child-free person may wish to have child-free friends, for fear that being left out of conversations about diapers and college funds will lead them to want children, in spite of their self-knowledge that they’re a shitty parent.

Again, this doesn’t apply to everyone! Some child-free people find that being around parents only increases their gratitude that they can sleep in until 1pm on Saturdays. Some people remain firm in their altruistic values even when they’re surrounded by the most selfish people imaginable. And a lot of people are more likely to drift with one value than with another: maybe your love of your music will never change, but you worry that being around people who mock vegetarians will make you start craving bacon.

A lot of people I know accept those two arguments, but they accept them in a sorrowful fashion. Of course, it would be best if everyone were able to be friends with everyone, but as a concession to human weakness and frailty we are grudgingly admitting that Ozy is allowed not to be friends with people who hate borderlines. I don’t actually think that is a useful attitude to take! The purpose of my friendships is to increase the joy, fulfillment, happiness, and virtue of myself and my friends. To the extent that diverse friends serves those goals, it is good; to the extent that non-diverse friends serves those goals, it is good. Ideological diversity is one way that my friendships can enrich my life by giving me access to new perspectives and changing my mind on issues. But it’s not inherently more important than helping me keep to my values even in stressful situations or not causing me pain. It’s just one way that enrichment can happen.

On Personal Experience In Social Justice Activism

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

I recently read this excellent personal essay about transness and how alienated one closeted trans woman feels from feminist discourse, and it has me thinking about discourse norms.

Social justice tends to emphasize people’s beliefs coming from their position in society. The previous belief tended to be that people of color, women, disabled people, LGBA people, etc. were biased, because they were involved in the issue, while white people, men, abled people, straight people etc. could have an objective view on things. Of course, no one has an objective view on anything, all our viewpoints are inextricably linked to our positionalities, and we just have to muddle along as best we can to get at objective truth. (The anti-social-justice reader who is about to object to this paragraph should reflect on how many of their beliefs are a product of having the positionality ‘human.’)

At the same time, marginalized people have access to a certain kind of knowledge that privileged people do not. There are quite a lot of cis academics who have a better understanding than I do of the etiology of transness, trans people cross-culturally and in history, the causes of transphobia, etc., but not one of them has felt the icicle-in-the-heart of being thoughtlessly misgendered. Of course, it is quite possible to have experienced that and also be wrong about things– just as it is possible to be an expert in the neuroscience of gender variance and be wrong about things– but just like it would be a mistake to leave neuroscientists out of the discussion of transness, it is also a mistake to leave trans people out. For these reasons, social justice tends to prioritize the opinions of marginalized people.

On the other hand, the sensible viewpoint that marginalized people’s opinions should be prioritized can create a culture of obligate self-disclosure. Marginalized identities are often a source of great pain. For many marginalized identities, such as abuse survivor or intersex person, disclosing your marginalization can mean disclosing private information that people feel uncomfortable sharing with strangers. In many cases, such as mental illness and queerness, a person may be a member of a marginalized group and not know it themselves. And of course being publicly a member of a marginalized group sets you up for all sorts of bad experiences, ranging from familial rejection to harassment to well-meaning people attempting to keep you from going to hell.

So what does this mean?

• Any person you talk to about homophobia could be a closeted gay or bisexual person.
• Any person you talk to about poverty could be poor or have grown up poor.
• Any person you talk to about transphobia could be trans, whether stealth or closeted, or a non-transitioning gender dysphoric person.
• Any person you talk to about sexism could be female. (And for the MRAs in the audience, they could be male too.)
• Any person you talk to about disability could be disabled– whether neurodivergent or a person with an invisible physical disability.
• Any person you talk to about race could be a mixed-race or white-passing person.
• And online, any person you talk to about any subject could be anything. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

Now, you might be thinking, “Ozy, does that mean I am not allowed to criticize anyone for being oppressive?” Of course you can, because marginalized people are routinely oppressive to other marginalized people. You can even criticize them in a snarky or vicious way, if you think that tactic is warranted: it is perfectly reasonable to be snarky about Debi Pearl’s misogyny, in spite of her being a woman. However, it seems wise to me to direct snark at people with stupid ideas, and not people with privileged identities. The ideas, after all, are the bad part.

There are certain tactics I would advise avoiding in one-on-one discussions. For instance, do not tell people what they did or did not suffer; it’s rude and always an asshole move. People can suffer things they don’t tell you about, and being told you didn’t suffer something you did feels like shit. Similarly, don’t tell someone they couldn’t possibly understand X experience because they are privileged; even if they’re not closeted, a lot of experiences are shared across marginalizations anyway. It’s probably wise to avoid speculating about the group membership of people you don’t know very well; there have been far too many awkward cases in which the privileged neurotypical turned out to be a mentally ill person. In general, whenever possible, stick to arguing about facts and evidence, instead of exploring why the person you’re arguing with believes the thing they believe; the latter often winds up condescending.

On the other hand, it doesn’t make sense to give everyone the same treatment you would to a person you know is a member of a marginalized group. Think about neuroscience. In general, people will give more weight to the same neuroscience claim coming from a neuroscientist than they would coming from a layperson. Of course, neuroscientists can still be wrong, and non-neuroscientists can still lay out citations to peer-reviewed papers that show their claim is correct. But if you wanted to not disclose that you’re a neuroscientist for some reason– perhaps this identity is the one you mostly use for writing very embarrassing fetish porn– then you’re not going to get the respect people give to neuroscientists. Similarly, people give more weight to the same claim about what being trans feels like when it comes from a trans person, as opposed to a cis person. But if you are not out as trans, you cannot expect to be given that benefit of the doubt.

Language Policing: Intersectionality

Tags

language, ozy blog post

Someday I will die, and on my grave will be inscribed the sentence THAT’S NOT WHAT ‘INTERSECTIONAL’ MEANS.

Intersectionality, as developed by black feminist thinkers like Kimberle Crenshaw and Patricia Hill Collins, does not refer to the idea that some people are oppressed in multiple ways. The knowledge of this fact is what is scientifically referred to as “having eyes.”

Instead, intersectionality is about the idea that each positionality is unique. The natural way for people to think about oppression is to think “well, white women experience sexism, and black men experience racism. Therefore black women experience the racism that black men experience plus the sexism that white women experience!” However, that’s not how it works. Black woman is not black man plus white woman. Black woman is its own, unique experience.

(This is traditionally referred to as “oppression is multiplicative not additive,” the idea being that you don’t just add the numbers together, you produce a totally new number! Yes, gender studies people are bad at math.)

Think about it this way: white women’s oppression, historically, involved being put on pedestals and sheltered from work. Black women’s oppression, historically, involved working long hours in traditionally female fields such as domestic or nanny and returned home to take care of their own houses and children. What a white woman saw as liberating– working outside the home instead of caring for your own home– a black woman experienced as oppressive, because her experience of sexism was fundamentally different from the white woman’s experience of sexism.

Intersectionality applies to a lot of oppressions other than race and gender. For instance, a cis neurotypical woman may experience street harassment which she finds degrading and upsetting. A trans woman may have a complicated experience: on one hand, she finds it upsetting, but on the other hand it’s an affirmation of her gender that was so often invalidated. And a developmentally disabled woman may experience desexualization and treatment as an unperson, which means she isn’t harassed on the street. (Of course, I’m only describing experiences that some people have– many developmentally disabled women are street harassed and many trans women have no complicated feelings about street harassment.)

Intersectionality also means that people in relatively privileged groups also have unique experiences. For instance, black and Latino men are disproportionately likely to be victims of the prison-industrial complex– a fact that’s related not only to their race but to their gender, as men are considered to be more violent and dangerous than women. And poor rural whites have been subject to eugenics and discrimination based on the anxiety induced by white people who acted like black people. (For more, I highly recommend the excellent book Not Quite White.)

Intersectionality is about more than just two oppressions affecting each other, too. The experience of a upper-middle-class cis black butch abled lesbian is fundamentally different from the experience of a rich trans white masculine man with schizophrenia. When you carry through intersectional analysis far enough, each of us has a unique experience of marginalization, based not only on our identities but on our experiences, personalities, and luck. (Fortunately, it is possible to notice trends.)

The problem is that privileged identities tend to be invisible. It’s really easy to say “sexism is when you’re harassed on the street! Anti-autistic ableism is when people don’t want to date you!” An intersectional analysis says things like “while autistics of either gender do experience both, autistic men are more likely to have a hard time finding a partner, while autistic women often can find a partner but have a hard time identifying and avoiding partners who are predatory or abusive.” Or “for many women, street harassment is an unpleasant violation of their boundaries that reminds them that men care only about what they look; however, some women don’t experience street harassment because of pervasive desexualization that means no one sees them as a sexual being at all.”

If you’re not doing that sort of analysis, you’re not doing intersectionality. Please stop using that word.

Be Cautious About Saying That Things Have Changed

Tags

ozy blog post, rationality

Every so often, I see people remark on how in the last few years Tumblr has made up the concept of genderqueer people.

This is, obviously, not true. Even leaving aside the historical complexities of whether other cultures had third genders, the term ‘genderqueer’ was used in the mid-nineties. Before the popularization of genderqueer identity, many people articulated their sense of gender as being neither male nor female: for instance, many stone butches did, as did many drag queens and crossdressers. While one could argue that genderqueer identity was made up by special snowflakes, the historical evidence suggests that it was made up by special snowflakes two decades before Tumblr was even a thing.

But it’s interesting to me to think about why people believe that nonbinary identities are a Tumblr thing. Heterosexual crossdressers are usually closeted and most people, being heterosexual, are not part of queer culture; by extension, most people in the nineties were not aware of how they conceptualized their gendered selves. However, Tumblr people will not stop navel-gazing about our genders, so suddenly a lot of cisgender and heterosexual people are exposed to the existence of nonbinaries. From their perspective, it looks like nonbinary people suddenly started existing.

Similarly, I have seen many people make claims about how social justice movements have become toxic; often, they provide causal explanations, such as “the Bush Years made everyone think in a polarizing fashion”. They may also make cute graphics like this one:

However, Jo Freeman’s Trashing and The Tyranny of Structurelessness describe extremely well the dynamics of the average social justice clique, despite being published in the seventies. Furthermore, it is notable that lists of misandric feminist quotes rarely have a quote that comes from later than 1995, which is at least some evidence that the feminist movement is improving; similarly, the modern feminist movement, for all its faults, does not seem to have produced a Mary Daly or an Andrea Dworkin, and its wars are not as vicious as the Lesbian Sex Wars.

Nevertheless, this is easy to explain from a personal perspective: a person grows up knowing mostly reasonable feminists, then meets some awful feminists, and quite naturally concludes that feminists have become awful. (They may also, in this case, be primarily familiar with feminism from being taught about it in school, and schools have a tendency to concentrate on inspirational heroes and leave out the controversies.)

So I think that when you are asserting that something has changed, you should consider and rule out the hypothesis that what actually happened is that your social groups changed. When possible, the best strategy for doing this is to examine historical evidence: for instance, looking at when ‘genderqueer’ was coined and reading second-wave articles about intrafeminism dynamics. Sometimes, of course, this is impossible, in which case I think the best course is to admit one’s ignorance rather than making broad claims.

Living in A Gender Bubble

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my issues with sj let me show you them, not feminism go away, ozy blog post

One of the big problems in talking about gender is that there are just too many people.

“Men” is 3.5 billion people. If one assumes that most people talking about gender in English on the Internet are only intending to talk about the Anglosphere and not men in Saudi Arabia (which seems right), men is still 225 million people. That’s a lot of different people. That’s a hell of a lot of diversity.

And yet most of the time when people talk about ‘men’ and ‘women’ they aren’t basing it on survey data about those 225 million people. They’re talking about, well, their personal experiences. Over the course of their lives, they’ve met a few hundred, perhaps a thousand men. That’s not a lot. And the sample is systematically biased in a whole lot of ways. Of course, there are the obvious ways: my sample has way more trans people and way fewer black people than would normally be expected. But there are subtler things too.

Here’s an example I happen to know from my personal anecdotes. In high school, I was friends with some frankly entitled nerdy guys. They were universally under the impression that they were Nice, as shown by their willingness to pay for dates and buy their girlfriends flowers on Valentine’s Day, and that it was sheer injustice if a girl they were interested in said ‘no’, given that they were Nice. Girls more attractive than I was would occasionally find themselves subjected to severe social pressure to go out with whomever had a crush on them, and labelled a ‘bitch’ and isolated if she continued to refuse.

Right now, I’m friends with a bunch of nerdy guys who are scared shitless of women. They have never asked a girl out because it is too frightening, and when girls flirt with them they tend to radiate terrified body language which makes the flirting girl assume that she is being crushingly rejected. Many of them feel that, simply by having a crush on a girl, they’re doing something wrong; their sexuality, being male, is burdensome and creepy, and they should avoid ever letting a girl know about it.

Now, by luck, I happened to be in both groups. Imagine if I had only known entitled nerd guys: every time one of the scared guys was like “I am afraid of doing something wrong when I ask a girl out!”, my instinctive response would be “well, maybe you are doing something wrong, you fucking creep.” Or imagine if I’d only known the scared nerd guys: every time someone complained about the entitled guys pressuring them into dating them, I’d be like “Christ! Nerd guys have it hard enough! Knock it off! You’re just unfairly stigmatizing socially awkward people.”

As it happens, I’ve been in both groups, so I have a fairly nuanced viewpoint on the subject. But there are lots of cases where I’ve only been in one group, and I don’t know which ones. I can’t make my thoughts more nuanced when I don’t even know what ways my samples are distorted.

So whenever I say something about ‘men’ or ‘women’, take it as ‘this is the pattern I have noticed among people I have happened to interact with, which may or may not be similar to people that you have interacted with.’ And when you get into arguments with people about whether men are sexist or women can’t communicate, have as a hypothesis “both of us are telling the truth about different groups of people.”

Solidarity

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my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

One of the values at the core of my intersectional feminism is solidarity, which means to me: I want my experience of marginalization to make me more compassionate to those who are different than me.

I am nonbinary. I want to use that experience to allow me to relate to binary trans people, who experience gender dysphoria as I do; to gender-non-conforming and LGB people, as well as anyone who’s had a hard time fitting in their gender role, who are harmed as I am by the gender binary and oppositional sexism; to otherkin, people with bodily identity integrity disorder, and some anorexics, who just like me experience proprioceptive hallucinations, what-is-this-body-I’m-looking-at-it’s-not-mine, and weird floating preferences about category membership that don’t connect to any disagreement about empirical facts or fact about how the categories are treated.

Of course, our experiences are not the same. I can get top surgery; an anorexic who has a similar relationship to their weight that I do to my sex characteristics may die if they get the body they prefer. This is a tremendous difference. But I think there is a lot to saying “here, this is the experience I have, let me use this as a tool and a motivation to understand you, person who is very different from me.”

And I’m not saying I’m good at this, mind you. It took me a surprisingly long time to connect “I have this strange preference that I be considered nonbinary, despite agreeing that I possess all the traits typically associated with women and knowing that my life would be far easier if I were a woman” to “I have this strange preference that I be considered nonhuman, despite agreeing that I possess all the traits typically associated with humans and knowing my life would be far easier if I were a human.”

There are costs to this perspective. Right now, the legitimacy of trans people’s genders is very fragile. Most people, even in relatively trans-positive countries, do not see trans people as the genders we identify as. Even fewer people see otherkin as the species they identify as. If the trans movement as a whole said “otherkin with social species dysphoria are just as valid as trans people with social gender dysphoria!”, I’m pretty sure the response of people in general would be “so what you’re saying is that both of you guys are fake?” It wouldn’t do much good.

And a very common way marginalization works is that people have the mistaken belief that Widely Disliked Group A are really all Widely Disliked Group B. If a masculine gay man hears someone say “all gay men are flamers!”, he of course responds “no, we aren’t! I am gay and I’m just a regular guy: I lift weights, drink beer, and don’t know Cabaret from Carousel.” On one hand, his desire to not be mistaken for someone who knows things about musicals is quite reasonable; it’s not a great feeling when people believe inaccurate things about you because of your marginalizations. On the other hand, he is distancing himself from feminine men. In many, perhaps most, cases, the subtext is: “I’m gay, but that’s not bad. Now, being a feminine man, that’s really bad and awful and deserving of derision.” The insult gains its sting from the cultural horror of feminine men; if someone said “gay men all have blue eyes!”, he would be nonplussed, not offended.

A quite natural way of dealing with marginalization is to say “I don’t deserve it. They deserve it.” This can work on an external level– “you shouldn’t use that condescending tone when you talk to a person in a wheelchair, it’s not like they have Down syndrome or something”– but I think it is most pernicious on an internal level.

Neurodivergent people who have high IQs or good academic skills tend to wrap up a lot of our self-esteem in being smart. We go, “I don’t deserve to be treated this way, I’m smart.” We go, “actually, I am better than the people who are being cruel to me, because I’m smart and all those bastards are going to work for me one day.” We go, “I’m not worthless, because I’m smart. If I were this fucked up and I weren’t smart, then I would probably be worthless, but actually I’m an eccentric genius and did you know Albert Einstein didn’t wear socks because he thought they were a waste of time.”

On one hand, we don’t deserve to be treated that way, we aren’t worthless, and we may very well be better than the people who were cruel to us; if this mindset allows us to understand those facts, it is good. It rubs me the wrong way to take away people’s coping mechanisms from them. On the other hand, the whole idea of having to earn not being mistreated is harmful, and it inevitably happens that at some point you’re not the smartest person in the room anymore and if you’ve wrapped up your self-worth in being smart when that happens you suddenly feel like you are really worthless. And, of course, it’s kind of shitty for intellectually disabled people. Intellectually disabled people deserve to have autonomy over their lives and not be bullied or abused, because everyone deserves to have autonomy over their lives and not be bulled or abused. A politics that denies that is harmful to intellectually disabled people.

And… I don’t like doing it. I don’t feel right when I deny my similarities with others, when I refuse to have empathy for people who are like me in order to maintain the shreds of rights or worth we’ve been able to grasp. Which I guess is my true rejection.

Motte Definitions

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effective altruism, not feminism go away, not like other ideologies, ozy blog post

[Commenting note: As one may tell from the title, use of the forbidden words “motte” and “bailey” is permitted in this comment thread. Please do not abuse this privilege.]

One thing I’ve noticed is that all three of the movements closest to my heart have standardized definitions that are, well, things everyone can agree with. Feminism is the radical notion that women are people. Rationality is systematized winning. Effective altruism is the use of evidence and reason to make the world the best place it can be. Why is this such a common impulse?

One common explanation is that it’s public relations. No one disagrees with the idea that women are people; no one doesn’t want to win; no one thinks that we shouldn’t use evidence or that it’s a good idea to make the world a worse place. Therefore, we can get people to agree that rationality, or feminism, or effective altruism is a good thing under one definition, and then while they’re not looking smuggle in our more controversial claims about Bayesian reasoning, structural sexism, or culices delendi sunt.

However, I don’t think that that’s all of it. I think, when one is looking to characterize a movement, the easiest way is to characterize it by its goals. Effective altruism is evidence-based do-gooding, feminism is about fighting sexism against women, and rationality is about improving people’s thinking. While there’s a certain amount of PR in characterizing “fighting sexism against women” as “believing women are people”, it doesn’t seem like an absurd mischaracterization to me– particularly if you believe (as many feminists do) that a common form of sexism is treating women as Pure Perfect Angels Of The Home and/or Sex And Children Dispensing Objects.

The problem is that a lot of movements’ goals are pretty uncontroversial. The red pill‘s goal is to help men reach their relationship goals; Communism intends to end exploitation of workers; the anti-gay-marriage movement intends to preserve families. I don’t think most people who oppose those groups object to helping men reach their relationship goals, ending exploitation of workers, or preserving families. They object to the empirical claims associated with those groups, like the alpha/beta/omega theory of dating, the labor theory of value, and the gay cooties theory of family dissolution.

So defining a movement by its goals inherently ends up presenting a more palatable version of the movement, because you’re leaving out the empirical claims people find controversial– whether it’s the idea that the differences between men and women are caused by sexism, that volunteering is a less effective way of doing good than charitable donations, or that going to CFAR will improve your thinking.