Hermeneutical Injustice, Not Gaslighting

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language Policing: Gaslighting

Tags

abuse tw, american politics is the best reality show, language

I recently saw someone characterize Mike Pence lying about what Trump said as an attempt at a “mass public gaslighting,” which I think is the final lump of dirt thrown into the grave of the good and useful word ‘gaslighting’, which used to describe a specific form of abuse and is now apparently a synonym for “lying” or “disagreeing”.

First of all, gaslighting is about observable, physical facts. Here is an example of things that could be gaslighting: “no, I never hit you”; “we didn’t go to that restaurant yesterday”; “you think that painting is blue? no, it is definitely purple”; “don’t be ridiculous, you never went to Yale, you went to Harvard”; “that table has always been there”; “two plus two is five”. Here is an example of things that are not gaslighting: “white privilege doesn’t exist”; “as a man, you can’t experience sexism”; “the minimum wage increases unemployment”; “I think that argument was your fault”; “you are lazy and entitled.” You can’t take a video of laziness and entitlement or of white privilege; these are abstractions used to explain a particular situation. You can, however, take a video of someone hitting someone else; those are observable facts.

To pick another example: if someone says “you’re a man, therefore your experience of being forced into sex while you said ‘no’ isn’t rape”, they’re not gaslighting, they’re just being an awful rape apologist fuckwit. If someone who was not present says “you didn’t say ‘no'”, they may be mistaken (perhaps they believe the rapist). If someone says “I was there while you were being raped and you didn’t say ‘no'”, they are gaslighting.

Second, gaslighting is a pattern. If you think that the painting is blue and I think it is purple, there are lots of possible explanations. Maybe it’s a weird color that’s kind of blue and kind of purple depending on the light. Maybe one of us is colorblind. If I think that we went to the restaurant on Tuesday and you think that we went to the restaurant on Wednesday, probably one of us has a shitty memory. Now, if every time I think that something is blue you think it is purple and every time we go to a restaurant we disagree about when it is, we might have an issue.

Not only is gaslighting repeated, but it also doesn’t involve an alternate explanation. If I’m colorblind, you and I may disagree a lot about what color the painting is, but this also isn’t gaslighting, because I know perfectly well why we disagree. It’s because I’m colorblind. If we both have terrible memories, we will probably go “eh, who knows when we went to the restaurant.” It is only when the conversation repeatedly descends to “you are insane and incapable of determining when you went to the place” that it is gaslighting.

I don’t want to go hardcore “all gaslighting is intentional,” because that sounds like I’m saying “all gaslighting is a deliberate attempt to make someone think they’re crazy.” While that does happen, sometimes gaslighting is “I don’t want to take responsibility for my actions so I will deny them in face of all evidence” or “I am in total denial of my shit memory and therefore assume that it must all be your fault.” But it is nonetheless true that gaslighting is not really a thing reasonable people do.

Third, gaslighting is taking advantage of a position of trust. For instance, you might trust your parents, your friends, and your partners. If some random stranger comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then says “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “crazy fucker, I should call the cops.” If your parent comes up to you and whacks you in the face and then two days later when you confront them about it they say “I didn’t hit you, you imagined that”, your thought process is probably going to be something like “wait, did I imagine that? Was that a dream or something? I couldn’t have been making it up… I remember it! Maybe it was a hallucination? What’s going on?” Repeated over a long enough period of time, it can cause you to doubt your perceptions of reality.

(This, incidentally, is why gaslighting is much more dangerous for crazy people than for sane people. Many crazy people rely on their friends, family, partners, and caregivers for reality checking on everything from “does everyone secretly hate me?” to “is there an enormous monster in the corner of the room?” If someone is in a position of that much trust, they can abuse their power, and since the crazy person’s perceptions are much more unreliable, it’s that much harder to catch.)

This is why Mike Pence is not gaslighting anyone. He is a politician. Most people above the age of six do not rely on politicians to be accurate reporters of empirical facts. Indeed, many people expect them to lie as much as they can get away with. If a politician telling a lie causes you to distrust your perceptions of reality, that is probably more about you than about the politician.

Language Policing: Intersectionality

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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.

Language Policing: “Both Partners”

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language, ozy blog post, polyamory

I have an utter, irrational, nails-on-a-chalkboard pet peeve, and it’s using “both partners” or “the couple” in a polyamorous context.

Partially, this is because triads, quads, and larger group marriages exist. I expect monogamous people to be constantly going on about The Couple, but if you’re giving advice in a poly context it’s a bit much to assume that only two people are going to have an opinion about the lease agreement.

But partially it’s because these words tend to show up in sentences like “as long as both partners are okay with it” or “well, whatever makes the couple happy.” And that makes me want to scream.

At best, it’s a bit of thoughtless mononormative language. You’re used to saying “both partners”, and it comes out of your mouth even though you perfectly well know that relationships ought to make everyone involved happy, even if there is more than one person.

At worst… well, I don’t like using the term ‘couple privilege.’ It’s not a terribly clear word, because ‘privilege’ is often used to mean things along the lines of ‘white people are privileged over black people’ and people who are primaries are not structurally privileged over people who are secondaries. For one thing, the latter group quite often has primaries of their own, which they may equally unfairly elevate.

But nevertheless, some people treat their secondaries’ relationship needs and desires as less important than their primary’s. The primary is allowed to make rules like “you can’t have sex in my bed!” or “you can’t watch that TV show with her!”, while the secondary is not. The primary is allowed to veto secondary relationships; the secondary is not allowed to veto primary relationships. The primary is allowed to cancel their partner’s dates with the secondary because an emergency came up; the secondary is not allowed to cancel their partner’s dates with the primary. The primary is allowed to put secondary relationships on the backburner to focus on the primary relationship; the secondary is not allowed to put primary relationships on the backburner to focus on the secondary relationship.

Obviously, the amount you prioritize someone else’s needs depends on your particular relationship. It can help to imagine a monogamous relationship of approximately the same level of commitment. If you’re someone’s fuckbuddy, you can hardly expect them to cancel plans with friends because you’re in the hospital, and you can’t expect them to put other projects on the backburner to deal with your relationship conflicts. On the other hand, if you’ve been dating for several years and see each other three times a week, you’d be pretty fucking pissed if they didn’t visit you or give you some space to work on your relationship problems. The problem is only when a secondary is treated with less respect for their needs than they would have a right to expect given the intimacy and commitment level of the relationship.

Quite often, “both partners” or “the couple” are signs of couple-privileged thinking: if the couple is okay with dating a unicorn/a One Penis Policy/insert your favorite Bad Poly idea here, then there isn’t a problem! What does it matter if the secondary feels mistreated and like their needs don’t matter? Why would the opinions of secondaries enter into it? They’re, you know, secondary!

You might say “hey, if person is dating Alice, Bob, and Eve, then there are three couples! I meant everyone in all the couples when I said ‘couple’.” But there’s no principled reason to say ‘couple’ then. There are, after all, three triads as well (Alice/Person/Bob, Alice/Person/Eve, and Bob/Person/Eve), as well as one quad. You might say that Person/Alice has a different dynamic than Person by themself, but by the same token Alice/Person/Bob has a different dynamic than Person/Alice.

How do you fix the problem? Well, you can talk in terms of individuals: “if you’re happy with your relationship, I don’t see any ethical problem with it.” There is a principled reason to talk in terms of individuals, because while both a couple and a triad are relationships, an individual is not. Or you can say “all partners” or “everyone involved”, which take about as much time to say and don’t risk excluding people.

In Which Ozy Engages In Language Policing

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language, ozy blog post, rationality

The misuse of certain words in the rationalist community drives me up the fucking wall, and so in this post I shall explain the correct usages.

Precommitment. Precommitment is the use of a commitment device to ensure that you will face severe negative consequences from making certain choices you wish to commit to not making. Beeminder is a precommitment device, because if you don’t reach your goals, you will have to pay money.
Does Not Mean The Same Thing As: “Commitment”. If you stood up in front of your friends and family and solemnly promised not to divorce, you’re committed; if you’re going to pay two-fifths of your income in alimony, you’re precommitted.

Cooperate/Defect: These terms are used in a wide variety of different game theory situations, but the one most popular among people who aren’t game theoreticians is the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma, two prisoners are separated. If one snitches on the other, he will get a reward and the other will be imprisoned; if both stay silent, they will both go free; if both snitch, they are both imprisoned. Many situations can be modeled as Prisoner’s Dilemmas.
Does Not Mean The Same Thing As: “Prosocial”/”antisocial”. If you wear an “I cooperate on prisoner’s dilemmas” shirt, I’m going to get worried that you’re planning on starting a wage-fixing cartel.

Schelling Point: The point on which people will naturally converge in the absence of communication. For instance, if you have to meet a stranger in NYC without communicating with them, you will probably meet them at noon at the information booth at Grand Central Station.
Does Not Mean The Same Thing As: “The place at which we agreed to meet each other through explicit communication.” If you communicate with each other, it is not a Schelling point.
Also Does Not Mean The Same Thing As: “Schelling fence“, which refers to the place where people draw the line on a slippery slope. For instance, in the US, the Schelling fence about government intervention in free speech is “no fighting words, obscenity, libel/slander, true threats, or child porn”.

Moens

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follow ozymandias271 for more sad gays, language, ozy blog post

After my success with the word “cis by default“, I would like to coin a new gender/sexuality word: moen.

A moen– named after Erika Moen, perhaps the world’s most famous dyke with a boyfriend— is a person who is in a long-term relationship with someone who doesn’t match their sexual orientation.

There are two ways you can wind up a moen. First, you might have only passing attraction to people of one gender and round yourself to a particular sexual orientation. After all, if you’re a straight man with a crush on Hugh Jackman, there’s not much point to identifying as bi, because Hugh Jackman is not going to show up on your doorstep with flowers. But if Hugh Jackman does, in fact, show up on your doorstep with flowers, the straight man might find himself having something awkward to explain to his friends and family. In some cases, a moen may find that the only member of a particular gender they’ve ever been attracted to is the one they’re dating.

Second, you may date a trans person. From the woman who doesn’t stop loving her spouse when she comes out as a trans woman, to the lesbian who likes people with estrogen-dominant hormone systems and doesn’t much care what gender is attached to it, to the person who dates a nonbinary who doesn’t want to be rounded to “boy” or “girl”, many people find themselves attracted to trans people who don’t match their orientations.

Some people might ask why moens don’t identify as bisexual. While the term “bisexual” is usually defined to be inclusive of people with any degree of attraction to multiple genders, “bisexual” typically implies a substantial amount of attraction to both men and women, and moens, by definition, do not experience a substantial amount of attraction to both men and women. Polyamorous moens may find it inconvenient to identify as bisexual, because it leads on people of their non-preferred sex. Monogamous moens may find that “bisexual” feels dishonest, like they’re implying a level of attraction they simply do not experience. It’s not like their sexual orientation has changed since they identified as heterosexual, lesbian, or gay: they just found their one exception. And they might have signalling problems too– what happens when the other women expect you to be able to join in on a conversation about whom the sexiest Avenger is? (Of course, if you wish to identify as both bisexual and a moen, that’s fine! Like I said, “bisexual” is usually defined to be moen-inclusive.)

Other people might ask why moens don’t identify as “heteroflexible” or “homoflexible”. While “moen” is certainly under the heteroflexible/homoflexible umbrella, it is a reference to a particular subtype of homoflexible/heteroflexible, as opposed to (say) people who have sex with people of their non-preferred gender while drunk.

Still other people might ask why moens don’t identify as queer. This is an excellent strategy for lesbian and gay moens, which has been widely adopted. However, many heterosexual moens feel uncomfortable identifying as queer, which is– after all– a reclaimed slur. They may feel like they’re claiming they’ve experienced oppression that they’ve never experienced (particularly if their relationship is read as a heterosexual relationship). In addition, “queer” is often an explicitly politicized term: many people feel like identifying as queer implies political positions– such as a desire to overthrow the gender binary, anger at heterosexual people, sex positivity, or anti-assimilationism– that they do not share.

Come Out Come Out Wherever You Are

Tags

language, ozy blog post, speshul snowflake trans

[Content note: brief mention of suicide.]

Being nonbinary has one hell of a negative externality.

Which is to say: for most people I encounter, I’m the first person they’ve met who uses gender-neutral pronouns. Normally, pronouns are a part of speech we don’t think much about, similar to “the” or “and.” Having to consciously think about the scaffolding of language is awkward, makes speech less fluent, and makes people feel guilty when they mess it up.

Is this a huge cost for most native speakers of English who don’t have a language disability? No. But when you’re me, and looking at sixty years of causing other peoplt to go “she, uh, I mean, they”… well, it adds up.

It occurs to me, though, that no one has a similar problem with “he” and “she”. No one has any difficulties calling Alice “she” and Bob “he”; the problem only arises when they must call Eve “they”. And this isn’t a product of any Inherent Gender Sense in the human brain which excludes nonbinaries– native Chinese speakers, who don’t have gendered pronouns in speech, have equal difficulty with “he” and “she”. The important variable here is whether people have used the pronouns multiple times a day since they were small.

The best estimates suggest about 0.3% of the population is trans. Only a fraction of those people are nonbinary. The average person may go years between talking to nonbinary people. The problem seems insoluble.

However, gender dysphoria isn’t a binary Yes or No variable. Some people say “either I transition or I kill myself; there’s no third option.” Other people are like “I am miserable as my assigned gender, but I can survive.” Still others are like “I’m less happy than I would be if I transitioned, but I can be okay in my assigned gender.” And many people– perhaps a group larger than the rest combined– are like “I am happy now but I would be even happier if people viewed me as a different gender.”

Right now, it seems like the plurality of people who transition are in the second group, with a large minority of the first group and a smattering of the third. But if we want nonbinary genders to be normal— if we want people to be used to calling people “they”, to have it roll off the tongue as easily as “she” and “he”– we are going to have to welcome a whole bunch of people in the third and fourth groups.

We’re never going to get there to be as many nonbinary people as there are men and women. We’re probably never going to break ten percent. But if we get one in a hundred people to identify as nonbinary, then the average person is going to interact with a nonbinary person at least once a week.

And then– we develop a way to signal that we use gender-neutral pronouns. We have an “Other” option on forms. We get gender-neutral restrooms. And no one stumbles on our pronouns again.

While I’ve been using “nonbinary” and “uses gender-neutral pronouns” interchangeably in this post, they aren’t the same thing. Many nonbinary people use “he” pronouns or “she” pronouns. And some cisgender people use gender-neutral pronouns. A lot of nonbinary people tend to frown on cisgender people who use gender-neutral pronouns; however, I don’t think we should. They’re doing us a favor, getting more people to use and become comfortable with our pronouns, helping us hit that one percent.

In conclusion: if you want to use gender-neutral pronouns, please do– whether you’re cis, trans, questioning, or breaking down the cis/trans binary. All it can do is help. Thank you.

Against Linguistic Diversity

Tags

language, ozy blog post

[epistemic status: not sure if endorsed, but I’m just going to throw it out there]

Linguistic rights are pretty uncontroversial. Even the UN endorses it:

Considering that universalist must be based on a conception of linguistic and cultural diversity which prevails over trends towards homogenization and towards exclusionary isolation;

Considering that, in order to ensure peaceful coexistence between language communities, overall principles must be found so as to guarantee the promotion and respect of all languages and their social use in public and in private;

Considering that various factors of an extralinguistic nature (historical, political, territorial, demographic, economic sociocultural and sociolinguistic factors and those related to collective attitudes) give rise to problems which lead to the extinction, marginalization and degeneration of numerous languages, and that linguistic rights must therefore be examined in an overall perspective, so as to apply appropriate solutions in each case;

In the belief that a Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights is required in order to correct linguistic imbalances with a view to ensuring the respect and full development of all languages and establishing the principles for a just and equitable linguistic peace throughout the world as a key factor in the maintenance of harmonious social relations;

So what are the advantages of linguistic diversity? Well, for one thing, every language that goes extinct is one less language for linguists to study, and that makes it harder to figure out how exactly language works. For another, many languages have literature which has not been translated and, without speakers, may never be translated. Some things like poetry are entirely untranslatable.

This seems to me to be less an argument in favor of reviving dead languages and more an argument in favor of a sudden frantic burst of linguists and translators.

My position here is shaped by me being a skeptic about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The weak form of Sapir-Whorf has been validated: languages that use “north/south” rather than “right/left” have speakers that remember where North and South are more easily; speakers of languages that make more color distinctions have an easier time remembering colors. However, the strong form has not been validated, and I don’t think it will be.

Think about so-called “untranslatable” words from other languages. It turns out that all of those words are, in fact, translatable; it’s just that you need a paragraph to translate them, rather than a sentence. There’s nothing inherent in the English language that means we can’t express a particular concept. Of course, it’s easier to express a concept if you have a particular word, but English has never had any particular difficulties inventing words that its users need. The language which brought us “one-reply bitch”, “lackoass”, and “post-fartum depression” will not be long stymied by concepts without words.

As for the downsides:

The burden of linguistic diversity falls disproportionately on those marginalized. As a native English speaker, I am at an advantage in science, trade, and even tourism, because my language happens to be the lingua franca. A member of a group with a dying or dead language is in one of two situations.

First, they’re raised as a native speaker of a language with a few thousand other speakers, and then they have to learn English. If they’re not linguistically gifted– several of my friends are cognitively incapable of learning a second language, and I imagine this is not a malady limited to native English speakers– they might be confined to jobs that only require the ability to speak their native language.

Second, language preservationists want to make them learn the language. I notice that no one’s language preservation tactics involve making me– a white, upper-middle-class American– learn Quechua. They want to make the people who originally spoke these languages learn them. These efforts disproportionately affect poor people, people of color, and people in developing countries, for the simple reason that those people’s languages are the languages that are dying. Even the white, developed countries that have language-preservation efforts, such as Ireland, are countries that have a long history of colonization, imperialism, and oppression.

The problem is that all the effort being put into preserving a dying language is not being put into anything else. The school hours that Irish students spend learning Irish are hours that American students are spending on science or math. The money spent on state-owned television stations in a dying language is money not being spent elsewhere. Is it really worth directing that effort?

Now, I’m not saying we engage in the deplorable practices of wiping out languages. We should not punish children for speaking their native language, force people to change their names, or require workplaces by law to only use the preferred language. But I am suggesting that we leave it up to individuals whether they want to preserve a language. I suggest an end to deliberate efforts to support a language. There’s a difference between cold-blooded murder of a language and taking it off life support, and we’ve too long equated the former with the latter.

Demisexuality Meaning

Tags

asexuality, language, ozy blog post

I have had a couple conversations with people where they identified as “demisexual” and then it turned out that they had a mistaken idea of what demisexual means, so I thought I would make a public post about it, since confusion is apparently somewhat widespread in the rationalist community.

“Demisexual” means not being attracted to someone unless you have an emotional bond to them. The emotional bond may be platonic or romantic. This is not the same thing as not wanting to have sex with someone until you have an emotional bond to them. Allosexuals: you know how there are some people who are kinda weird-looking, and then you get to know them and they’re funny and smart and kind and suddenly hot as hell? That is the sexual attraction demisexuals experience all the time.

If you just mean to convey something like “kinda asexual but not really”, the word you’re looking for is “gray-asexual” (also spelled “graysexual” or “gray-A”). Gray-asexual people may experience sexual attraction on rare occasions, enjoy sex but only on very specific or limited circumstances, have some sexual attraction but be repelled by sex, fluctuate between being asexual and being allosexual, have sexual attraction but no interest in having sex, etc.

If you are like “hey, one of those words describes me! But I don’t like those special-snowflake words and I don’t want to identify as them”, you don’t have to! You should only use words if they are helpful to you in understanding your own sexual attractions and communicating them to others.

Against The Word SJW

Tags

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

[ETA: It has been pointed out to me that “social justice warrior” is sometimes used as a neutral term for what I call in this post “social justice person.” I am totally okay with this use, although I would advise people who use it that way that other people might understand them as using SJW in a pejorative sense. This post is only complaining about its use as a pejorative.]

I used to use the phrase “social justice warrior” a fair amount. Then I started to notice something.

When my friends complain about people using feminism as an excuse for ableist attacks against mentally ill and developmentally disabled men, they use the phrase “social justice warrior.”

When men’s rights activists complain about gender studies teaching women to hate men, they use the phrase “social justice warrior.”

When anti-social-justice people complain about (to look at the top three posts on wtfsocialjustice as I write this) blogs named BPD(insert character name here), nonsexual BDSM, and fat people who have the temerity to think that they shouldn’t hate themselves, they use the phrase “social justice warrior.”

And when misogynist douchebags complain that people disagree with them about whether women are good at anything besides making babies, cleaning, and finding the car keys, they use the phrase… “social justice warrior.”

This is sort of upsetting because I would really not like to say any words that might conceivably lead people to mistake me for Jim.

The reason that such a wide group of people can use the phrase “social justice warrior” is that it doesn’t actually mean anything besides “social justice person that I don’t like.” You personally might define “social justice warrior” more narrowly, as “bullying social justice person”– but such narrow definitions do not reflect how the word is actually used (indeed, even by the people who have narrow definitions).

There’s a couple of reasons why it’s bad to have words like that. First, there’s an illusion of transparency issue. I, the hypothetical MRA, the creator of wtfsocialjustice, and Jim have very different critiques about social justice. I think social justice is often full of bullies who use fighting oppression as an excuse to perpetuate oppression. The MRA shares my values about not irrationally hating large groups of people, but has a factual disagreement with me about whether gender studies involves this behavior. The creator of wtfsocialjustice has a bizarre hateon for asexuals, trigger warnings, and self-diagnosis. Jim objects to anyone who thinks that women are not pets who can talk.

But the problem is that if you say “social justice warrior”, all four of those groups are going to think you’re talking about the same group of people. (…Well, maybe not Jim.) It can take a surprisingly long time to figure out that someone else’s true rejection of social justice warriors is that social justice warriors think asexuals exist. This is particularly true if someone is just making contextless negative statements about social justice warriors– if someone says “I like real social justice, but not social justice warriors”, do they mean “I believe that social justice people can also be sexist and racist” or do they mean “I think it is hilarious and funny to viciously mock teenagers online who think they’re wolves”? This is really an important distinction!

Second, if you say “so-and-so is a social justice warrior” or “such-and-such is a thing that social justice warriors do”, it makes your argument sound a lot more credible than it really is. Imagine replacing “Jane is a SJW” with “Jane is a social justice person and I don’t like her”. The former sounds like a fact about the world, while the latter sounds like a fact about your preferences– even though they literally have the same meaning!

Third, it creates a category which really doesn’t exist. There are some times when “people I don’t like” is a relevant category– for instance, drawing up invitations for a party. Intra-social-movement politics is really not one of those times.

It’s not necessarily true that everyone I used to call social justice warriors– people who are mean to others, people who claim to be in touch with the Universal Oppressed Person Hivemind, people who are sexist or ableist, people who erase male rape survivors, people who make really silly claims about how language works– are the same group of people. It is perfectly possible that no one who erases male rape survivors makes silly claims about how language works. It might turn out that all the people who do those things are mostly the same group of people, but that’s a claim that needs to be argued for, not smuggled in one’s language.

And if they aren’t necessarily correlated, I’m going to make bad predictions. I will relax my guard around people because they aren’t ableist and are therefore not a social justice warrior, only to discover that they regularly bully others. I’m going to assume that people who believe one thing I disagree with believe other things I disagree with, which makes me more likely to misrepresent their views. I will assume problems in the social justice movement are the result of a few individual actors that we can easily eliminate, rather than widespread bad ideas and incentive structures.

The solution here is really simple: instead of saying “social justice warrior”, say the actual trait you’re critiquing. Social justice people who bully others. Ableist social justice people. Social justice people who hate men. Social justice people who think asexuals exist. Social justice people who believe that women should have autonomy. This practice will lead to much clearer thinking and communication.