Some Representation Is Better Than None

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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 Culture War Bubbles

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in which ozy writes long blog posts railing against flaws they have, my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post

Sometimes I say something like “look, you need to have a sense of proportion about culture war stuff. There are a bunch of people who are trying to make you scared and outraged and defensive about things that aren’t that important in the grand scheme of things. But your fear and outrage and defensiveness makes them seem really important. If you take a step away from it and look at the rest of the world, you’ll discover that millions of people honestly don’t care about your pet issue, or haven’t heard of it at all. And if you do that you’ll be happier, you’ll be better able to prioritize your time to deal with the more important issues, and even when you decide to engage with culture war stuff you’ll be a lot more relaxed.”

Of course, it is rather hard to take this on faith if you are currently trapped in a culture war bubble.

So. I want to point my readers to Reddit’s gender critical subreddits [cw: transphobia, read with caution if you are transgender], a central hub for trans-exclusionary feminists. This is particularly useful for my readers, because most of you guys (both social justice and anti-social-justice) tend to be fairly trans-accepting. So their particular culture war bubble is different from yours. (My apologies to my three trans-exclusionary feminist readers.)

There are a bunch of normal reactions to perusing the gender critical subreddits. For example, “I don’t think it’s very good allyship to detransitioned women to talk about how their bodies are irreversibly mutilated by testosterone.” Or “regardless of the accuracy of your statement that real lesbians don’t want to ‘have sex with penis’, I feel like you could say this in a way that doesn’t make me visualize women having sex with enormous disembodied penises.” Or “wow you people really really hate trans women. Like, a lot.”

However, a reaction I have to it very strongly is “wow, you people are really obsessed with trans people.”

At the time of writing, 12 of the 20 top posts on the subreddits are about trans people. The most popular thread on r/gendercritical, the Peak Trans thread, consists of people telling their stories about how they realized that trans activism was wrong. (Notably, there is no Peak Patriarchy thread in which they talk about how they realized that sexism still shapes women’s lives.) Even posts which aren’t originally about trans people often become about trans people, including the mind-boggling tendency to respond to articles about obstetric fistulas and sex-selective abortion with “but trans people claim these women have cis privilege!”

And, like, they’re not wrong. Trans advocacy has made tremendous progress in the past decade or so: we’ve passed local nondiscrimination acts, made it easier for people to legally change genders, improved access to transition care, raised awareness among cisgender people about the discrimination we face, and so on and so forth. Caitlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning are in the news a lot. And inn many subcultures (the queer community, the rationalist community), it can feel like trans people are everywhere and it’s impossible to get away from us.

And yet– trans people are less than one percent of the population. Even from a trans-exclusionary perspective, it’s really implausible that trans people cause 60% of the world’s sexism. If we all worked overtime, individually causing ten times as much sexism as the average cisgender person, we’d still only be responsible for three percent.

But it can feel that way. Maybe you start out in a community with a lot of trans people, maybe you have a formative negative experience with a trans person, or maybe you just get into a lot of arguments about it on Facebook. Eventually you find yourself reading r/gendercritical, Feminist Current, and other trans-exclusive feminist websites. Naturally, these websites don’t provide you with a randomized selection of things that happened, or even of sexism-related things that happened. Every time a trans woman punches someone, or commits a crime, or says something obnoxious (or even just poorly phrased) on Twitter, you will learn about it. These websites are notably free of articles with headlines like “Crime Committed By Cisgender Woman,” “Man Punches Other Man Because He Is Drunk, It is Completely Unrelated To Trans People In Any Way,” and “Person Makes Obnoxious, Or Possibly Just Poorly Phrased, Tweet About Dog Breeding.”

Trans people might not be sixty percent of the sexism in the world, but they are sixty percent of the sexism you read about.

Every website full of culture war bullshit is like this. You read Breitbart, you find out about immigrant crime. You read Feministing, you find out about sexual assault and harassment on university campuses. You read pro-life blogs, you learn about Alfie Evans. You read anti-racist blogs, you learn about cops shooting black people.

And then because of how people work, when you ask yourself “what are the most important problems in the world?”, your brain goes through all the examples it can think of and spits out “sexual assault on college campuses” or “immigrant crime” or “censorship on college campuses” or “cops shooting black people” or “trans people” or “trans-exclusionary radical feminists.”

(I know, I know, you are so outraged to see your personal issue on that list. Don’t I know that your pet cause is actually important?)

Your brain does not spit out (for example) “macroeconomic policy in developing countries,” because unless you are a somewhat unusual person you do not read articles about developing-world macroeconomics for fun. I work for an effective altruism organization and I don’t read those articles. I open them up, make a firm resolution to read them at some point, and feeling an aura of virtue go back to reading about Catholic Twitter drama.

“How many articles have I read about this topic?” is not particularly well-correlated with “does this topic, like, matter at all?” But if you’re not careful your brain might think it is.

If you enjoy your current level of interaction with culture war bullshit and it’s not interfering with your ability to achieve your other goals, then by all means continue. I’m not the sort of hypocrite that writes articles about transness and then turns around and tells people to stop caring. But if it makes you stressed and depressed and you can’t tear yourself away because this is important, this matters, what if the misogynists or the SJWs ruin video gaming forever—

Try a detox. A week, maybe two, away from culture war bullshit. Read books: I’d suggest both something that’s trashy and fun and lets you turn your brain off, and an academic work on something you find interesting. Go for walks. Bake banana bread. Call somebody you haven’t talked to in a while. Play with your kids. Play with someone else’s kids. Culture war bullshit has been going on for at least sixty years, it’s still going to be there when you get back.

Who knows? Maybe it’ll still be important after you’ve had a chance to rest and fill your brain up with examples of other things. Maybe it won’t. But I think it’s worth a test.

Conservatives As Moral Mutants

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american politics is the best reality show, I'm a conflict theorist ama, ozy blog post

[Related to: Three Worlds Collide; the True Prisoner’s Dilemma]

[This post has been linked by Slate Star Codex and as such will be more tightly moderated. Accusing anyone of wanting to commit genocide, kidnap children, commit murder, put people in concentration camps, etc., unless the person has specifically stated that they want to do so, will get your comment deleted. In general, I expect people to maintain a high standard of charity, intellectual honesty, and integrity. Please try to understand your opponents rather than humiliating them. Comments that fail to do so will be deleted. I am considering closing comments and will do so if the conversation gets too heated.]

According to moral foundations theory, liberals tend to primarily think about morality in terms of harm/care and fairness/reciprocity– that is, liberals tend to be primarily concerned with whether people are happy and treated equally and justly. In addition to being concerned about harm/care and fairness/reciprocity, conservatives tend to be concerned with three other moral foundations: ingroup/loyalty (sticking with people who stick with you, patriotism, self-sacrifice for the group, avoiding treachery and betrayal); authority/respect (obedience, deference to those in charge); and purity/sanctity (avoiding disgusting and contaminated things, elevating sacred things).

Of course, as with any psychological research, this may not replicate. But all the liberals I know are like “see, I told you conservatives believe in nonsensical bullshit” and all the conservatives I know are like “see, I told you liberals are literally incapable of moral reasoning,” so I suspect it’s getting at something real.

(Note that this post applies to conservatives and liberals only in the Anglosphere: people in other countries have different arrangements of moral foundations. While these are two common ways moral foundations are arranged, many people have their own unusual arrangements. Some liberals still use loyalty, purity, and authority foundations but care about them less than the primary liberal foundations. In addition, some conservatives only have the “liberal” moral foundations, and some liberals use the “conservative” moral foundations: for example, liberal opposition to GMOs is likely rooted in a purity foundation. However, I am happy to declare that the relevant conservatives are on My Side, and that the people who hate GMOs are not.)

Many of the centrists I know seem to take this as a reason that liberals ought to change our values. This is most prominent in Jonathan Haidt’s the Righteous Mind, which argues that we harm/care and fairness/reciprocity people need to expand our moral foundations in order to include all five. (This is a pretty good summary of his argument, for people who haven’t read the book.) I strongly disagree.

As an analogy, consider aesthetics. One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures. The Wikipedia page provides an example of a generally preferred image:

However, art of this sort leaves me cold. The art I find most heartbreakingly, exquisitely beautiful looks like this:

The first time I saw it, Joan Miro’s The Birth of the World moved me to tears from its sheer beauty. I make a special effort to visit it every time I am in New York City, including taking my husband to see it on our honeymoon so he could understand my aesthetics better. (Unfortunately, the picture doesn’t capture it; the painting is much more beautiful in person.)

Needless to say, my aesthetics don’t line up with normal human aesthetics very well at all. Does this mean I should try to shift my aesthetics to correspond to what normal humans value? Is there, perhaps, some deep evolutionary wisdom I am missing in why trees are prettier than abstract shades of grey? Of course not. I like what I like; the things that give me pleasure are the things that give me pleasure. It is irrelevant that this is an unpopular human preference. And while evolution did give me my aesthetic sense in the first place, its purpose in doing so was maximizing my number of grandchildren, which is not a metric I particularly care about.

Similarly, I value the things that I value. I don’t want to change myself so I value different things, because then I would waste resources on things I do not currently value. I am not going to sacrifice my own moral sense because other people do morality differently, any more than I’m going to decorate my house with a painting of a nice landscape because other people do aesthetics differently. (This is the Gryffindor Primary in me.)

Of course, from a conservative perspective, I am an incomprehensible moral mutant. I can put myself in their shoes. When I read writing by a person who only has the fairness/reciprocity intuition, I seethe with anger; I imagine a conservative feels the same when I say “from a moral perspective, an American is worth no more than an African.” From their perspective, I don’t simply have different values, I actively rejoice in evil. I tell cute childhood stories about replacing “Respect Authority” with “Question Authority” in the Girl Scout Law. I urge people with all the eloquence I can muster not to prioritize their ingroups over other groups of people. I talk about the beauty of Serrano’s Piss Christ; my strongest criticism is that I feel it’s bad form to court controversy when your art cannot stand on its own. I imagine someone actively rejoicing in denying a person a fair trial because they deserve to be in prison– not just accepting this as a grim reality, but thinking it is good and right and virtuous– and I shudder. They must feel similarly about me.

However, from my perspective, conservatives are perfectly willing to sacrifice things that actually matter in the world– justice, equality, happiness, an end to suffering– in order to suck up to unjust authority or help the wealthy and undeserving or keep people from having sex lives they think are gross.

There’s some conflict here.

Conservatives and liberals fundamentally cannot both get what they want. A society that is pleasing to conservatives will, from a liberal perspective, hurt vulnerable people for no reason other than the country they were born in or their interest in things other people find disgusting. A society that is pleasing to liberals will, from a conservative perspective, have three-fifths of ethics only present by sheer coincidence.

There is, I feel, opportunity for compromise. An outright war would be unpleasant for everyone. Conservatives do care about what liberals care about, even if they care about other things. From a harm/care perspective, you don’t want to do things that hurt other people, as long as they’re not excessively burdensome: from the liberal-values perspective, you should avoid drawing Mohammad or desecrating the Eucharist, although you are under no obligation to ensure your sex life is appealing to others.

And yet, fundamentally… it’s not true that conservatives as a group are working for the same goals as I am but simply have different ideas of how to pursue it. It’s not true that conservatives simply think that lowering taxes will stimulate the economy or that economic growth works better than foreign aid to help the global poor or that, as regrettable as it is for gay couples who long for children, children will be severely traumatized unless they are raised by heterosexuals. I would certainly prefer it to be that way. I want to have respect for all belief systems; I want to believe we’re all working for the same goals but simply disagree on certain facts.

But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

So it goes.

Civility Is Never Neutral

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free speech sequence, it does not say rsvp on the statue of liberty, ozy blog post

There are a lot of people I know who say something like “the free market of ideas is really important and we need to seek truth. It’s important to let everyone have their fair say and share the evidence that they possess. So what we’re going to do is not shame anyone for expressing any belief, as long as they follow a few common-sense guidelines about niceness and civility.” I am very sympathetic to this point of view but I don’t think it will ever work.

I do not mean to say that it won’t work to personally decide to be as nice and civil as you can. I think that’s a good idea and more people should, and certainly I have met many extraordinarily nice people over the course of my life. The problem is when you make niceness and civility a social requirement, the sort of thing you will be punished for not adhering to.

First, it has been a commonplace observation since the day of John Stuart Mill that civility rules are almost always enforced unfairly. If someone is making an ineffectual and stupid argument, you’re unlikely to take much offense at it; in fact, those arguments are usually just funny. But if someone is hitting you at your actual weak points, pushing you hard on exactly the points you find most difficult to answer, then you’re going to get really upset and triggered and you’re probably not going to respond rationally. Incisive questioning of a locally unpopular view is called “being insightful”; the proponent of a locally unpopular view being triggered by it is called “letting your emotions run away with you in a rational discussion” and “blowing up at someone for no reason.” Incisive questioning of a locally popular view is called “uncharitable” and “incredibly rude”; the proponent of a locally popular view being triggered by it is called “a reasonable response to someone else’s assholery.” It all depends on whether the people doing the enforcement find it easier to put themselves in the shoes of the upset person or the person doing the questioning.

There are lots of tactics that are sometimes civil and sometimes not. Sometimes a cutting satire sums up an entire point more eloquently than anything else; sometimes it misrepresents other people’s viewpoints or is just mean. Sometimes anger is an appropriate way to convey exactly how you feel about an injustice; sometimes anger is cruel. In general, people tend to cut more slack to viewpoints they agree with and viewpoints that don’t threaten them or make them feel defensive. If you like someone, it’s righteous indignation; if you dislike someone, it’s being an oversensitive jerk. If you agree with it, it’s witty and biting; if you disagree with it, it’s strawmanning and misrepresenting others.

Civility norms will always be enforced disproportionately against viewpoints that the people in power don’t like. This is why a lot of free speech advocates are cautious about campus speech codes and other attempts to enforce civility on campus, but I think it’s worth considering even in a social setting.

Second, people’s differing opinions often lead them to have different conclusions about what is and is not civil.

Consider the concept of radical honesty. Radical honesty means that you should not say or withhold information to manipulate someone’s opinion of you. For example, proponents of radical honesty hold that if you think someone is being an obnoxious asshole, you should say that without even trying to be tactful. The proponents of radical honesty would argue that radical honesty is (to quote the website) “the kind of authentic sharing that creates the possibility of love and intimacy”, and for that reason calling people obnoxious assholes when you think they’re obnoxious assholes is, in fact, the nicest and most civil thing to do. Conversely, the mainstream opinion is that if you are trying to be nice to people you probably shouldn’t insult them at all even a little bit.

Or imagine that your Great-Aunt Gertrude and your Great-Aunt Bertha are trying to work together on Thanksgiving dinner. Great-Aunt Gertrude is a proper Southern lady. She thinks no one should curse in mixed company (in fact, she’s rather suspicious of the word ‘goshdarnit’). She believes it is unconscionably rude for children not to say “sir” and “ma’am” to their elders. And certainly sex should never be discussed, much less joked about, where women and children are able to hear it.

Conversely, Great-Aunt Bertha skipped school in the fifties to go get drunk with sailors and was the first woman in the Hell’s Angels. Great-Aunt Bertha thinks it is very rude that Great-Aunt Gertrude keeps saying “a-HEM” five times a sentence just because she’s talking the way she normally talks. All her best jokes are sex jokes, and really Great-Aunt Gertrude should have a sense of humor. It’s not polite to interrupt what people are saying by getting offended and storming out. And that whole “sir” and “ma’am” business– unlike Great-Aunt Bertha’s story about the two clowns and the goat– is actually offensive. Children are people and it is wrong to treat them as if they are subservient to adults.

Great-Aunt Bertha and Great-Aunt Gertrude will have some difficulty agreeing about what is polite behavior at the Thanksgiving table.

The same thing happens in more directly political contexts. Trans people think it is polite to use the pronouns people prefer; anti-trans activists think it is rude to demand that other people lie if they think “she” refers only to people assigned female at birth. Muslims think it is cruel to them to draw pictures of the Prophet; many non-Muslims think it is rude to yell at people over stick-figure drawings labeled “Mohammad.” A certain word referring to the female genitalia is so taboo in America that I can’t actually make myself type it out, whereas in many other countries in the Anglosphere it is used without even being intended as an insult.

One could resolve these problems by taking some authority on etiquette, perhaps Miss Manners, and then saying that civility is officially now defined as doing what Miss Manners says to do. On the other hand, many aspects of etiquette have nothing to do with being nice to people but instead are ways of signalling that one is upper-class, or at least a middle-class person with pretensions of same. (Most obviously, anything about what forks one uses; more controversially, rules about greetings, introductions, when to bring gifts, etc.) You wind up excluding poor and less educated people, which people in many spaces don’t want.

So what’s the solution? There isn’t one that works literally 100% of the time. If you just give up on socially enforcing civility at all, then you get 4Chan. Not to bash 4Chan, but I for one am pretty happy about the existence of social spaces that are not 4Chan.

I think it’s important to think carefully about what your space is and is not for. Maybe this is actually just Great-Aunt Bertha’s Thanksgiving, and Great-Aunt Gertrude will have to suck up the curse words and sex jokes or organize her own Thanksgiving. Maybe you want your support group to be welcoming of trans people, and people who are strongly opposed to using people’s preferred pronouns have to go to a different support group. This is totally fine: no space is ever for everyone.

Sometimes you do want civil dialogue to occur between two groups who disagree a lot about what civility is. If everyone involved has good faith and is willing to compromise, that can happen okay. For example, maybe Great-Aunt Gertrude really cares about not hearing sex jokes, and Great-Aunt Bertha really cares about being allowed to swear, and they can have Thanksgiving together both feeling only a little bit uncomfortable. Maybe the anti-trans people will use trans people’s preferred pronouns and not describe their bodies as mutilated, while the trans people will avoid using the word “TERF” and call themselves “natal females/males” instead of “assigned female/male at birth”.

If the rules are explicit (for example, in an online group with moderators), it’s a good idea to make sure all sides are equally represented in the group of people who enforce the rules, so everyone has their concerns respected. If the rules are implicit (for example, in a group of friends), it’s a good idea to focus mostly on correcting the behavior of people you agree with and not the behavior of people you disagree with. If you ever feel scared or defensive, take a break from the conversation: online, this might mean stepping away from your computer, while offline you might ask for a change of subject.

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.

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

Tags

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.