Sniffing and denunciation
There’s an aspect of the recent clusterfuck that I think needs more attention, and that is the way the rhetoric and some of the thinking around it – and around trans activism in general – often has a religious flavor, or an Oprah-therapeutic flavor, or both.
For instance it’s a very popular trope to claim that the enemy of the moment, or the remark or joke or blog post or magazine article or book of the moment, is “hurting trans people.” Just today I saw a claim that trans people have “been hurt by Ophelia’s actions,” and that’s not the first claim of its kind that I’ve seen. You know what that sounds like? The all-too-familiar claim that an atheist or feminist or humanist has “hurt the religious sentiments” of people in Bangladesh or India or Pakistan.
Why is that such a popular trope? It’s not so in other branches of social justice or identity politics or whatever you want to call it. I don’t recall anyone ever saying of the slime pit or A Voice for Men that they were “hurting feminists” – do you? Damaging, harming, silencing, yes, but hurting? It sounds babyish. It sounds like children whining in the back seat – “Mommm, he’s hurting me!!” It doesn’t sound like something an adult wants to say.
Why is it different with trans issues? I would really like to know.
There’s also the attitude to belief, and to credulity. I talked about this in early June, as the clusterfuck was getting under way, in If someone says it, then you know it. There is this insistence that you have to accept what you’re told by the Approved People, and that not doing so is itself transphobic. What kind of epistemology is that? It’s not a kind I ever signed up for, I can tell you that.
And there’s also the attitude to heresy, which is what you would expect from believers.
The story they’re telling is that I simply can’t tolerate disagreement. That’s bullshit. The clusterfuck was never a matter of disagreement – it was a matter of heresy-finding. Alex Gabriel’s ridiculous “Smoke, fire and recognising transphobia” post was not a matter of disagreeing with me, it was a matter of sniffing out my heresy and denouncing it.
That’s what I have no intention of tolerating. And, after all, the people sniffing it out don’t want to tolerate what I do either – because they think it’s not so much wrong as evil.
There are of course plenty of views I consider evil and would never want to be associated with. I would agree that my attitude to such views is comparable to the attitude of religious people to heresy. It’s not that there’s never reason to consider a particular view morally unacceptable. It’s the particulars I differ on; I don’t agree that I’ve said anything morally unacceptable.
I think the bar for what’s morally unacceptable on this subject has been set in a very odd place, or maybe a whole bunch of very odd places (it keeps shifting). I think the subject has been loaded up with pointless arbitrary thought-free shibboleths, and I don’t think that’s healthy – especially for trans people.
I’m not the only one who thinks this. I’m hearing from a lot of people who are afraid to say a word on the subject, because it’s so very easy to be branded a heretic and expelled from the community of good people.
It’s not good. It’s like trying to walk a tightrope over a pool full of sharks. That’s not how to have a working politics or a reasonable worldview or a moral compass. If we can’t think or talk clearly because of the sharks, we’re screwed.
I am actually aghast at the intellectual dishonesty of anyone pretending this is about *you* refusing to tolerate disagreement.
You were basically asked “Do you agree with [statement] 100%?” with the statement you were not allowed to add any conditions, modifications, clarifications, exceptions, or nuance. You couldn.t agree with the statement 99.44%, because that would be adding a “but…”, which you were not allowed to do by terms of the question.
You refused to answer. They stated this meant you disagreed. (In most circumstances, we do not consider general, but less that 100%, agreement to be substantially disagreement.) Because they could not tolerate the thought of disagreement, they policed your participation in other forums and mined your archives for evidence for their claims of disagreement.
Now, apparently, the new step to to project their attitudes toward disagreement onto you?
There’s also an odd argument I’ve seen, which I can only describe as a Reverse Dear Muslima. It goes something like this:
1. Trans people are being hurt in a variety of ways, up to and including murder.
2. Benson’s writings (or likes. Or failures to disown. Etc.) have hurt trans people.
3. We must take action against Benson, because TRANS PEOPLE ARE BEING MURDERED!
Please note that I am not making a Dear Muslima argument myself: I am not suggesting that hurtful writings must be ignored because more serious harms are occurring. By all means, argue and take action against aggressions both small and large. But it’s grotesque to wave the bloody shirt of murdered trans people to inflame the argument against someone who does not, by any stretch of the imagination, bear responsibility for them.
About the ‘heresy’ part.
Yeah, it’s the same with me. The question is only where you draw the line.
I was trying to think about where I draw it myself. I’m ashamed to confess that it was a futile endeavor. There are indeed some clear-cut evil cases (alright, I will spare you examples); there are also some borderline ones. But where is the border?
Take Herman Mehta who infuriated many people when he gave his space to a “pro-life atheist”. Do such views cross the line?
Take Greta, who considers “fiscally conservative but socially liberal” people as supporting “economic policies that perpetuate human rights abuses and make marginalized people’s lives suck”. Would you want to invite to your party someone who perpetuates human rights abuses?
Take Ophelia, who didn’t want to answer a “yes or no” question.
Here is the best answer I’ve found so far: in my own case, on the wrong side of the border are exactly those views which sufficiently piss me off.
Any better answers are welcome. I would be delighted to know them.
I’m probably way out of my depth here, but it seems to me like an amplification problem (to make up a weird engineering analogy):
If I make fun of my wife’s driving by saying she “drives like a woman,” or some such, then I’m implying that women can’t drive. Which reinforces a stereotype, which is part of our patriarchal culture, which oppresses women, causing harm (including death) to women on a regular basis.
You could shorten that paragraph by saying that “joking about your wife’s driving kills women,” and in the sense described above, OK, I guess. It makes me part of the problem not part of the solution. The solution involves dismantling the patriarchy, eliminating stereotypes, and changing attitudes such that people don’t go around making that kind of joke.
On the other hand, the statement is absurd. Perhaps nobody heard my joke but my wife, and she actually laughed (having internalized that much of the patriarchal culture in which she was raised, of course). She didn’t die, and nobody else heard me. I most certainly didn’t kill anyone. Not only is it a drop in an ocean, but it’s a drop nobody will ever know about if my wife and I don’t tell.
In a hypothetical world in which sexism is eliminated, along with the patriarchy, people will still make fun of other people’s driving. If the driver is a woman, a time-traveling feminist from the 20th Century would interpret this not just as a joke, but as a particular case of a (no longer existent) stereotype about women drivers, and might then announce that the joker is, by telling this joke, raping and killing women everywhere.
Today sexism and patriarchy exist. We’re far from this mythical egalitarian future. We’re also far from the sexism and patriarchy of the 18th Century. We’re somewhere in between. Lots of words and deeds can elicit criticism that is deserved to a greater or lesser extent. But it’s also easy to mismatch the severity of the response to the severity of the offense. Even good feminist women sometimes joke about women loving chocolate.
All that to say, hyper-vigilance is understandable, but not always called for. There is background noise in our social interactions, and pouncing on everything that might be interpreted as sexist (or offensive for whatever other reason) has the effect of amplifying the background noise, generating false positives, and then doing actual harm with one’s response. Which I think describes part of what’s going on with the “recent clusterfuck” you allude to.
Of course if I summed it up by saying, “Sometimes you women are just over-sensitive,” I’d be asking for a pretty severe response. So I suggest you don’t sum up by saying, “Sometimes you trans women are just over-sensitive.”
Hope there’s something resembling sense in there somewhere. I’m not so sure.
From the OP,
It’s a fallacy of the excluded middle (“you’re either with us, or against us“).
Yesterday, it was pissing off the herd. Today, I see we’re back to pissing off the horde. Good deal.
It is when the hearsay accusations started that I began to lose all respect for those people. Not being familiar pre-Caitlyn with the scholarship, the current understandings, or dividing lines related to trans issues, I was genuinely interested in the potential for real discussion and to learn more. I shared some of your questions, but had no platform to pose them. Then all hell broke loose. Somehow, between the lines — and in spite of the horror show belted out by the Righteously Smug Chorus — I have learned a boatload, largely because you posed the questions and people who were not working from the anti-hearsay agenda actually stepped up to answer a lot of them.
That’s how I began to understand feminism. It wasn’t because I initially studied deep and wide on the subject. It was because I read blogs like. I watched comments sections. I watched folks answer the questions posed. And then I began to study on my own. My understanding about feminism began because I observed the blog dynamic where smart people asked smart questions and lots of smart people answered those questions. No once during that whole process did someone say, “You hurt me. You must stop posing questions about feminism.”
And once again, as always, you pose a good question about why trans issues should be considered different. Thank you for that. On this, your new (old) blog, smart people are already stepping up to answer the question; I appreciate the responses already. (Screech Monkey @2, if that is you being out of your depth, it will be fun to read what you have to say about it when you’re on the beach.)
And now that I re-read this, I can anticipate what the Righteously Smug Chorus will say in response to your OP. These asswipes are just disingenuous enough to ignore the question posed and respond with something along the lines of “We never used the word ‘heretic’, so this entire post is a load of straw.” Then they will point to this post as just the latest in a long list of evidences about how you have done harm because you dared to ask a question. Because, er, freethought.
Damaging, harming yes, but hurting no? That doesn’t make any sense.
Yes it does, for the reasons I gave.
So I write this post, and a friend writes a long Facebook post agreeing with it and expanding on it, and many people make excellent comments on that post, and then someone comes along and says “There are ways to have convos about these things that are sensitive to the feelings of trans people and do not feed into damaging narratives. I have no problem with those types of conversations. But they have to be done carefully, with caveats and assurances.”
But that just restates the problem all over again. “You can talk about this, if you really must, but make sure you do it CAREFULLY, with CAVEATS AND ASSURANCES. Make sure nothing you say feeds into damaging narratives. Make sure to be sensitive to the feelings of trans people – all of them, with all their varying views and feelings. If you do all that I guess you can go ahead, if you insist.”
Fuck that. Fuck sanctimonious stipulations of that kind. Fuck the idea that trans people are made of crystal. Fuck boatloads of extra rules and restrictions for this one subject. Fuck treating gender as something that only trans people can talk about.
StlSin @7 has a point; in the vernacular, those terms (damaging, harming, hurting) are generally synonymous, so I find the response @8 dismissive without being explanatory.
I feel I should note that, for me, Ophelia’s contention works if she refers to hurt feelings, which people can feel even without without actual (or potential) harm or damage.
(Spooioioioiing….)
AJ Milne, I see you need a new irony meter. I’d send you my spare, but it seems to have developed an unexplained fault.
Rob, thanks for the thought, but I expect I won’t be receiving any deliveries for a while, anyway. Apparently, I’m under radiologic quarantine for a bit…
… I’m still a bit in shock, here. I’d never seen one of these suckers go up with an actual mushroom cloud before.
If I ever start a blog, I’m calling it “Caveats and Assurances.”
@Ariel
You know, I’ve been thinking about that and there is actually a difference – and it is a pretty important one at that.
Pro-life atheists were criticized for their arguments being wrong. Mehta was criticized for not exercising skepticism before promoting those arguments.
The issue included the fact that such arguments hurt women sure, but the primary basis was that they were bad arguments because they failed as arguments.
Similarly with regards to fiscal conservatism – the issue there is again that social liberalism has to have fiscal consequences in order to be meaningful, it is essentially simply stating that you can’t have a free lunch and all the issues you’re conservative about have social consequences.
the central point in both were presenting arguments and those arguments were being dealt with. Similarly one could in fact point to the way Richard Dawkins is criticized for things like Dear Muslima.
With Ophelia Benson – her argument isn’t really being touched. What she is saying, isn’t really the same as what is being argued against.
Benson arrives at pretty much the same conclusion as her opponents in all practicality with regards to the treatment of trans individuals, but by a different route and thus is seen as suspect.
It isn’t Benson’s conclusions that are being argued with, but rather her lack of orthodoxy.
Further a major part of this isn’t what Benson is saying, it is who Benson is associated with. This is similar in a lot of ways to the Slyme Pit tarring FTB as a monolith when it first started.
Further there is an element of kangaroo courts in all of this. Anything Benson may say to try and clarify her position or in her own defense is to be parsed for further evidence of her wrongdoing rather than as an argument to be considered.
One of the biggest dangers in modern communication I suspect is that we tend to read between the lines, while ignoring what is written in the actual lines, and thus end up with minor discomforts becoming massive deep rifts with otherwise good people.
The other problem is that recently social justice activism has become lazy in the way it thinks. It is unfortunate but it has to be said – jargon is often the enemy of thought. When we talk about punching down – that is because a joke pisses us off, and it is easier to say that than to go into detail about why that joke is wrong.
We talk about intent not being magic, because it is easier to do that than to actually consider the other person as a human being and make allowances for miscommunication and error.
In fact that is the major problem with social justice activism right now – there is no room for error, and it is actually worse to be an ally than to be an outright enemy. An outright enemy is not constantly being vetted and subjected to minute inspections for imperfections, but an ally is.
Think about the “faitheist” position – the idea that atheists should be willing to be “allies” to the religious on things where we have common cause. The issue is that atheists say things which the religious find objectionable – but where is the call for the religious to be allies to atheists?
I mean if you are going to argue that without God there is no morality, and without God people cannot have love, and that God is the basis for government and legal rights, and that non-believers deserve an eternity of hell whether you define that as eternal burning or permanent sensory deprivation, I am sorry that is a lot more offensive to me than simply saying “you’re wrong”.
But we atheists of course have to be the ones who are the allies, constantly being vetted for everything that might be considered offensive to someone and we have to be super tolerant of people whose major schpiel is “atheists are jerks.”
Frankly why would I want to be an ally?
@Bruce:
The more I look at it the more I feel that it’s better just to work towards the same goals, but not as part of the same team. It sucks, but making friends with members of these groups should be secondary to getting work done… and when said groups start having a pissing contest over who’s most screwed over, well… kick it to the curb.
Is it “the community of good people” or is it a group of humans who have the same cognitive biases, the same slide-down-the-pyramid self-justifying behavior, and the same tendency towards groupthink as every other group of humans?
It’s not necessarily an “or” — it can be an “and” — but also: no exceptions.
picklefactory, obviously it’s a group of people who consider themselves good on the basis of their adherence to a particular ideology which incorporates non-tolerance towards non-adherents.
Such groups tend to be exclusive; Peter Gabriel summed it long ago: “Not One Of Us”.
Hi Ophelia – this is just to say that I’ve finally got around to pledging you some coffee money* via Patreon. The recent blowup at FTB must have been thoroughly horrible for you, even if there is a certain dark humour in being hounded off a “freethought” site for refusal to recite creeds on demand. Please keep thinking & writing.
*or you can have tea if you would prefer.
John Morales @ 10 –
No, StlSin @7 does not have a point. No, even in the vernacular, those terms (damaging, harming, hurting) are not generally synonymous. The child in the back seat does not say “Mom, he’s harming me!” Mill didn’t talk about a hurt principle. The theocrats in the subcontinent don’t complain about atheists damaging religious sentiments. And I said that in the post. I think I was reasonably clear about the differences, without going into huge detail about it because it’s not the core subject of the post and I dislike longwindedness. This is about rhetoric and loaded words and emotive manipulation. I suspect you know that perfectly well.
SAWells @ 20 –
Many thanks. I choose neither coffee nor tea but gelato. Coffee is for the body but gelato is for the spirit!
Ophelia Benson
Licorice ice cream with strawberry crumble.
Heresy sniffing cannot be appeased. The ground is constantly shifting, issues around trans-sexuality are in constant flux as the actual experience of the people involved accumulates.
This seems to mean that Some People are endowed with ‘special’ skills to establish the Party Line du Jour and mete out punishment to anyone who fails to toe the (invisible, constantly moving) line.
‘Dear Muslima’ was a near-perfect example of the arbitrary dismissal of comment on the basis of ‘privilege.’ ‘You can’t complain about X because you haven’t been shot in the head,’ is about equivalent to ‘You’re cis-privileged, you should sit quietly and let the “right people” hector you until they run out of breath.’
I’ve seen all this a long, long time ago, when I was a sectarian Marxist. A student from a wealthy family could criticize without mercy another militant, accusing him of disrespect towards the working class, without ever stopping or being stopped and feeling no shame.The sacred people the accused is said to have hurt as proof of sacrilege change, but the social structure is the same.
Working people, evidently, deserve a lot of respect, as trans people do, but that is not the point of the argument. The point of the argument is to persecute the accused.
“Accusing him”. Forgive me, I think in a different language, one in which everything is gendered and the neutral promoun revolution has not happened yet.
If I recall correctly, the issue (or at least my issue) with Hemant inviting a “Secular Pro-LIfe” guest post on Friendly Atheist was not so much the idea of giving voice to the anti-choice position but of presenting that position on its own without explicitly engaging in the debate/discussion (other than in the comments). Kristine Kruszelnicki is a local here, and CFI Ottawa recently devoted one of our monthly “Counter-Apologetics” meetings to the topic of abortion. There are questions about contraception, pregnancy, abortion, and birth that not everyone knows the answer to, and I think it is valuable to give people an opportunity to become educated in a setting that is both civil and challenging. Kruszelnicki presented her secular case against abortion, and I presented the rationalist case for freedom of choice. Both Kristine and I raised questions that many people had not previously considered. Thinking through the answers to those questions is important to equip people for future discussions they might have with religious people (which is the purpose of our Counter-Apologetics group)
Surprise!: One can be unequivocally pro-choice while still acknowledging the value of discussing some aspects of the topic of abortion. And I think this is similar to the idea of supporting full rights for transgender people while still acknowledging the value of discussing gender.
Carlos @ 26 –
Oh you’re forgiven, we don’t have a (real, workable) neuter pronoun either.
Yet the second one is forbidden, on pain of savage punishment.
It’s not healthy.
I’ve been following this kerfuffle with some degree of mystification. What I’m wondering is did any actual Trans person take umbrage to Ophelia’s statements? Because it seems to me those are the only feelings that actually count. How all we cis people feel is not really germane since we cannot possibly know how a Trans person feels since we have no experience with it.
I could be wrong but this whole thing smells like more of the industry of outrage (thank you Rushdie).