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.

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.

On Friendships With People You Disagree With

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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

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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.

Living in A Gender Bubble

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Solidarity

Tags

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Defense of Nonpologies

Tags

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

The nonpology (also called a fauxpology) gets a lot of hate; however, I believe this hate is often undeserved.

To define my terms here: a full apology is one in which the person expresses regret that another person was harmed, admits wrongdoing, and takes steps to correct it in the future. A nonpology is one where one or both of the latter components are missing: either the person doesn’t think it’s their fault, or the person isn’t going to fix it, or both.

For instance, consider the classic example, “I’m sorry that I offended you”. The person is not admitting wrongdoing– they think they had a perfect right to say whatever it was they said. And the person is not saying they’re going to fix it– they are probably going to say the offensive thing again. But all things considered they would much rather you not suffer pain and they regret that what they did had that effect.

The problem is that apologies serve two purposes. First, you could want whatever happened to not happen again in the future: for instance, if your partner totally flaked on doing the dishes and you had to eat off paper plates, you could want them to remember it in the future. Second, you could want to be reassured that the person didn’t do the thing out of malice or disrespect for your feelings. In this case, what they actually did doesn’t matter so much: what matters is the cause. A nonpology is a way of saying “even though I don’t agree that I did something wrong and/or I’m not going to change, I do feel bad about the pain I caused you”.

I do nonpologies a lot because I’m mentally ill. I am working as hard as I can on being able to consistently show up to social events but, to be honest, it is not realistically going to happen in the near future. I can’t say “in the future I’m not going to cancel on our date” because that’s not true. But I can say “I’m sorry that I couldn’t make it” because I am. I wish with all my heart that I were capable of showing up to dates consistently, and I recognize that people may be disappointed, may have said ‘no’ to other plans, etc.

The actual problem with nonpologies is twofold. First, if you want the thing to get fixed, a nonpology is totally unhelpful. You’d think “look, I’m glad you still care about me, but I really don’t want to eat off paper plates, and as long as we’re not fixing the paper plates problem I’m still unhappy.” I think the solution to that one is for nonpologizers to realize that nonpologies are not a complete get out of jail free card. It is possible for someone to still be angry at us after we nonpologize, because it is possible they’re concerned about the actual issue, not just our behavior.

Second, in most cases, it’s relatively easy to give a lying nonpology. You can say “I am sorry that I offended you” when you’re actually thinking “ugh, if I say this, will you shut up and stop yelling at me?” I don’t have a great solution to this one, other than paying attention to the overall relationship. If a person seems like a basically caring person who treats you well, especially if they have a good reason why they did the hurtful thing, then accept the nonpology; if they’re just doing it to get you to stop yelling at them on Twitter, maybe don’t.

However, I think these two problems don’t make the nonpology useless. I think it’s valuable to be able to say “I care about you and your issues, and if I had seen a way to do this without hurting you I would have”– it smooths a lot of human interaction. Personally, the nonpology continues to be a tool in my relationship toolbox, and I am not ashamed.

Mandatory X Studies Classes Is An Astonishingly Counterproductive Strategy

Tags

my issues with sj let me show you them, ozy blog post, this is a prussian education system hateblog

When I was reading up on the University of Missouri protests, I noticed that their list of demands included mandatory ethnic studies classes for everyone. This is a mind-bogglingly bad idea and I can’t imagine why anyone would support it on the grounds of making the campus more welcoming for people of color.

I mean, there is the obvious fact that many people of color already know that racism exists, and don’t want to sit through an entire class in Did You Know That Everyone Hates You? It’s True! Perhaps they would rather study physics so that they don’t have to think about the structural racism that shapes every aspect of their daily lives.

But it gets worse.

When I was a gender studies student, I had several classes that debated whether nonbinary trans people existed, or whether we only thought we were trans because of internalized misogyny.

And this isn’t an isolated thing that only affects trans people. My classes also debated whether men being forced into PIV intercourse or being hit by their partners counted as rape or abuse. My classes debated whether mental illness is a real thing or just society pathologizing deviants. And we had a Maoist, which I can’t imagine would have been a great experience for people whose families had fled China during the Chinese Civil War.

I’m not talking here about abstract debates like “does male privilege exist?” or “are black women structurally oppressed?” I’m talking about things that would genuinely be hurtful for everyone: “am I really the gender I say I am?” “is the person who beat me actually the real victim?” “am I faking my problems?” “was the man who killed my relatives actually a great guy if you think about it?”

I don’t know what those debates specifically are in ethnic studies, because due to budget cuts my school didn’t have an ethnic studies professor until the year I graduated. But I promise you that there are debates like that. Any time you talk about oppression there are debates like that.

There are civility requirements in a classroom. In most environments, my response to the idea that nonbinary trans people have just internalized misogyny is “fuck off”. But in a classroom, you must be calm, you must be civil, you must carefully lay out evidence for the viewpoint that you are worthy of basic respect and human dignity, you must treat the opposing idea respectfully as a valid alternate opinion.

And the thing is… if you’re a student who’s generally privileged, you are in general not going to have this experience. Classrooms do not discuss whether cis men only feel that they’re men because of their internalized misogyny. If your family never had to flee a mass murdering dictator, the mass murdering dictator’s supporters are mostly funny.

To be clear, I’m not saying that this is something that should be changed. There is debate in the field of gender studies about whether nonbinary trans people actually exist, and one of the purposes of my classes was to familiarize me with active debates in the field. This is something I signed up for when I decided to major in gender studies.

And even if you tried to change it, how would it work? The whole reason those topics are up for debate is because people don’t agree which positions cause harm; if there was already an academic consensus on it, they would just teach that instead of hosting a debate about the subject. You certainly agree with me that forcing men into PIV is rape; but many of the professors are people who will say “well, obviously forcing men into PIV isn’t rape, and we shan’t debate it because of the tremendous harm it would cause to real rape survivors.”

Furthermore, debating issues is a lot of x studies education’s pedagogical method. None of my teachers were Maoists, but Maoist Student would still have made the classroom tremendously hurtful for many people, and it is unclear how to prevent this without simply stopping Maoist Student from talking (which is probably bad precedent, as much as I would have appreciated it at the time). Even worse, transphobic people voicing their transphobia is a necessary step to them having their transphobia challenged; if they aren’t allowed to speak it up, you’re not even accomplishing your goal of making people less bigoted.

So for multiple reasons gender studies classrooms have to be this way, and it is probably good that they are this way. What I am saying is that participating in this should be optional. It is inhumane to require trans people to civilly debate whether they should be misgendered as a condition of graduating college. And therefore no one should require gender studies courses.

X Studies classrooms are, of course, far from the only classrooms that have this problem. The personality disordered student taking abnormal psych may very well find herself debating whether she is inherently abusive; the developmentally disabled student in a philosophy class may have to write a paper about whether he should have been murdered at birth. However, as far as I am aware, no one is trying to make those classes required– and they’re definitely not trying to make them required in order to make schools more welcoming to disabled people. So I wish to express my fervent disapproval of this strategy.

Identities Are Not Arguments

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: brief, vivid description of footbinding and female circumcision.]

If I could wave a magic wand and change one thing about the social justice movement, it would be to get everyone to stop fucking using group membership as an argument.

“This can’t be sexist, I’m a woman.” “This is transphobic; I know, I’m trans.” “Listen to LGB people about what homophobia is.” “Actual people of color don’t think that’s racist.” This is a terrible argument and all of you should stop.

(“All of you” includes anti-social-justice people, by the way. Don’t like this post and turn around and reblog a “twenty people of color say cultural appropriation is stupid!” picset.)

Debi Pearl is a woman who argues that women should never say ‘no’ to sex with their husbands, leave an abusive husband, work outside the home, or use birth control. Anne Lawrence is a trans woman who is one of the major researchers involved in the division of trans women into homosexual transsexuals (men who are, like, really super gay) and autogynephiliac transsexuals (straight men with a sexual fetish for being women). Courage is a Catholic organization whose members are mostly LGB people, which argues that if LGB people ever have an unrepented orgasm they will be tortured for eternity. Does “listen to trans women about transmisogyny” have an implicit “except for Anne Lawrence”? If we say “I’m a woman; I know what’s sexist and what isn’t”, how can we respond to a woman who says that what’s really sexist is denying women’s essential feminine nature which limits her to marriage and babies?

Members of marginalized groups have the same diversity of opinion that people who aren’t members of marginalized groups do. This is because members of marginalized groups are people, with people’s tendency to have their own opinions, rather than members of the Oppression Borg. In fact, the whole argument is oppressive, I think; it pedestalizes oppressed people by assuming they are always correct, and erases the differences and diversity among marginalized people, presenting them as a stereotyped group that all shares the same opinions.

Now, I don’t mean to say that the argument from opinion poll is never relevant. Some arguments are similar to the argument that you shouldn’t chew with your mouth open because it will disgust people at the dinner table; they are about some small matter, easily avoided, that predictably upsets people. You shouldn’t draw Mohammad, because Muslims will be upset; you shouldn’t say the n word unless you are black, because black people will be upset.  Such common courtesies make up the stuff of civilized life. In that case, if it turned out the majority of black people or Muslims were just fine with white use of the n word or drawing Mohammad, the argument would lose its force.

(Caveats: I said ‘small’; while it is easy for me to go through my whole life without drawing Mohammad, it is not easy for a lesbian to go through her whole life without holding hands with her girlfriend in public, and the offense caused to homophobes in the latter case does not outweigh her desire to hold hands with a woman. In addition, there are good reasons to deliberately cause offense, most notably protest.)

But the majority of social justice arguments do not take this form. Women should be able to leave abusive partners because abuse causes people pain, and it is bad for people to suffer unnecessary pain. The division between autogynephile and homosexual transsexuals does not reflect reality, and it is bad to have models that do not reflect reality. LGB people should be able to have orgasms because orgasms are nice. These arguments do not depend on the input of Ms. Pearl, Ms. Lawrence, or the esteemed members of Courage. At best, an opinion poll of marginalized people provides slight evidence about what may or may not be harmful to them– but this evidence can be clearly outweighed.

It is time to take up the thorny issue of internalized -isms– when women, or LGBT people, or poor people or people of color, or disabled people believe -ist things that hurt themselves. A lot of people don’t like talking about internalized -isms. This impulse comes from a kind place. There is a long history of people using “oh, you’ve just internalized sexism” as a way to ignore other people’s arguments. This is called Bulverism and it’s rude. As my friend Keller says, treat people you’re arguing with as though they came to their opinions through a disinterested process of pure reason; psychologize those not involved in the conversation.

The other reason a lot of people dislike the concept of internalized -isms is that it has so often been used to delegitimize people’s preferences. Women who wear lipstick, do sex work, stay at home to raise their children, or enjoy kinky sex have long been accused of only doing those things because they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy. Fat people who want to lose weight, autistic people who want a cure, and trans people who think being trans fucking sucks may frown on the idea that they’d be perfectly happy the way they are if not for the evil forces of society.

But without the concept of internalized -isms many things do not make sense.

For one thing, many people report feeling ashamed of their bodies because they were fat, or like they were worth less if they had promiscuous sex, or like they would be ugly if they did not wear lipstick, or like slowly limping along in pain is better than painless, fast use of a wheelchair– and then finding social justice and realizing that those things aren’t true. It would be very strange indeed if every person that applied to had already found social justice and realized those things aren’t true. 

For another, women are fifty percent of the population. Sexism could not last long unless there was considerable buy-in from women. There was a point when the majority of American women didn’t want the vote, because it would tarnish their purity and anyway they had the real power through influencing men. This isn’t something that men imposed on women; it’s something women and men agreed on. It is not that men cruelly denied the vote from women who were thirsting for it; it’s that both men and women agreed that the women shouldn’t have the vote. Was denying women the vote unsexist until it ticked over and 50.1% of women thought they ought to have the right to vote? And, of course, if you buy that logic, how would women ever get the vote at all? How could you convince half of women that it was sexist, if you don’t think it’s sexist until half of women agree?

And if you’re willing to bite the bullet on that– Chinese women, with crippled feet, who could barely walk, and who spoke about how happy they were to be so graceful, so delicate. A woman whose clitoris was burned off and her labia sewn together, glad about how it helped her preserve her chastity. Women who iron their daughters’ breasts the way their own were ironed, who jump into the funeral pyre when their husbands die, who can count on one hand the number of times they’ve seen the sun.

Because make no mistake– those institutions did not survive over the opposition of women. As Andrea Dworkin said in a different context, “Have you ever wondered why we [women] are not just in armed combat against you? It’s not because there’s a shortage of kitchen knives in this country.” Patriarchy survived because women believed, women were taught, patriarchy was right, and just, and the way things ought to be.

I confess I don’t know how to deal with internalized sexism; I expect “oh, you don’t know what’s good for you, you poor thing” to be as ineffective and offensive directed at the footbound Chinese woman as it is directed at the modern sexual submissive. Indeed, that thought process seems oppressive in itself; the allegedly benevolent denial of autonomy, the assumption that others know better than the individual what is good for them, is at the core of much sexism (particularly that direct at white women) and ableism. But not knowing how to deal with internalized isms doesn’t mean we should pretend internalized isms don’t exist.  

I say: it is possible for women to be sexist against themselves, to believe sexist things, things that cause them tremendous pain; indeed, this is the normal condition for members of oppressed groups, and correctly identifying that it is unfair when people hurt you and they should stop is the exception. Therefore, when we make arguments, we must make them based on facts about the world, and on values, not based on opinion polls or the Marginalized Group Hivemind.

On Praiseworthiness

Tags

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

There is a common criticism of allies in social justice movements as “seeking cookies.” The prototypical interaction goes something like this:

Straight person: I think gay people should be allowed to get married!
Gay person: Good… for you?
Straight person: I don’t say the word ‘faggot’!
Gay person: I’m glad?
Straight person: I have never in my life beat up a gay person for being gay!
Gay person: …do you want a medal?

This is, of course, very silly behavior.

There is also a very common argument in animal rights movements that goes something like this:

Alice: Meat is murder!
Bob: That’s not fair. A lot of people don’t know how to be vegan. We should encourage people to reduce their meat consumption as much as they can and accept that a lot of times they’re still going to be eating meat.
Alice: Um. Animals are literally getting tortured.
Bob: Yes, that’s why I’m saying we should get people to have Meatless Mondays or maybe switch to free-range eggs.
Alice: Meatless Mondays? Would you support Murderless Mondays?
Bob: If the average person killed more than one person a day YOU’RE FUCKING RIGHT I WOULD.

I think both of those interactions are getting at the idea of praiseworthiness.

“Praiseworthy” is different from “good.” “Good” is about the effect your actions have; “praiseworthy” is about where you’re starting from.

If you accept the child-in-the-pond argument, not donating $3000 to malaria relief and being an assassin paid $3000 are morally equivalent actions. However, they aren’t equally blameworthy. You would have to be an unusually bad person to become an assassin, but a saint to donate all your money to charity. Becoming an assassin is doing much worse than you could be expected to do; giving all your money to charity, much better.

If you grow up in a liberal environment, it is not praiseworthy to support gay marriage. Everyone supports gay marriage. It would be unusually homophobic of you not to support gay marriage. On the other hand, a person who grows up in an evangelical Christian environment might have to go through a lot of struggle and personal growth to conclude that homosexuality should not be illegal and LGB people should be treated with compassion and love, although homosexuality is still against the law of God. Although the former is better than the latter, the latter is more praiseworthy, because the person’s default was worse.

Why does this matter? Because shaping.

Shaping is a principle of behavior modification. Imagine that you wanted to train a dog to fetch the newspaper. First, you’d reward him for going outside when you said “fetch”, or maybe even heading to the door. Once he got the idea, you’d gradually stop rewarding that and start rewarding the dog walking in the direction of the newspaper. Once he starts doing that, eventually you’d reward him when he began to mouth the newspaper. And so on and so forth.

There are two errors you can fall into in this process. First, you can say “the dog should already know how to go outside! I am not going to reward him unless he goes to the newspaper!” But it doesn’t matter what the dog should do. If he doesn’t know to go outside, he’s not going to go to the newspaper, and he is never going to find out that he would get rewarded for it. Second, you can say “the dog knows to go outside! What a good dog! I should reward him a lot!” But you aren’t actually looking for the dog to know to go outside; you’re looking for him to fetch the newspaper. If he keeps getting rewards for something he knows how to do, he’s not going to try to become better.

The same principles apply to humans. We want to shape ourselves and each other to become ideally virtuous humans, and part of that is rewarding good behavior and punishing bad behavior. Therefore, we should avoid both of the possible errors: we should reward people for doing the best they can, even if the best they can is slight; and we shouldn’t reward people for doing what they’re supposed to do, even if it’s objectively speaking better than what the previous person was doing.