Thinking as a value
In thinking about the frenzied monstering of me on Freethought Blogs over the past few weeks, I realized I must have been laboring under a misapprehension all the time I was there. I thought it was a network that was partly about thinking – thinking as such, thinking as a value, thinking as a goal and a pursuit and a method. I knew it was about other things too, of course, especially secularism and atheism and also progressive causes, but I did think it put the “thought” part front and center.
Either I was wrong all along, or it’s changed. I don’t really know which. I don’t know much about Freethought Blogs at all, it turns out, despite having been part of it from almost the beginning.
Why do I say that? A lot of reason, but one in particular is this:
101 anteprepro
squarecircle: Yup. It happened. I suck at facebook so it was difficult to get the link, but here it is: https://www.facebook.com/groups/genderdiscusssion/permalink/598460220257770/
——————————
In addition: Ophelia’s earliest post on the group was from late April. (Here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/genderdiscusssion/permalink/576637755773350/)
Many more posts happened around July 1st.The current argument (involving the “yes or no” question, oolon’s email, and the joke about Dolezal) started around July 20th.
She has not posted on that group since July 24th (as far as I can tell).Before this kerfuffle, there was an issue about her post about Caitlyn Jenner, which was in early June.
So just for clarity’s sake, it does NOT appear to be the case that Ophelia has been running into the arms of TERFs to get support, running away from FTB. It still isn’t clear WHY she was a member of that group, or why she said the things she said, agreed with the things she agreed with, and what not, but it wasn’t because we were being mean and she needed a shoulder to cry on. At least not as far as I can see, based on the actual timeline of events. Okay?
What about it? The prurience, the staring, the dedication (grubbing through Facebook looking for my earliest post in a group??), the pettiness, the outrage, the meddling, the slicing and dicing of my possible motivations for doing something perfectly ordinary – etc etc etc.
But also, the nature of the Facebook post that is supposed to be so shocking. The post is a link to the Frontline episode about trans children and teenagers, that I posted about on the blog as well. The horror is at what I said in the post sharing the link:
“Being a woman has nothing to do with anatomy or appearance — it has everything to do with how you identify.”
So I can identify as an African-American born in Brazil and educated at Oxford?
That was a real question. I don’t know what it means to say being a woman has everything to do with how you identify. I don’t “identify” as a woman, yet as far as I know I am one, like it or not.
I’m interested in subjects like this. I’m interested in what different people mean by concepts like identifying as something, and in what people understand others to mean by them, and in what implications all those things have.
In short, I’m interested in thinking about it.
Yet that one question was treated as the final conclusive evidence that I’m a pulsating horror from the swamp of doom and simply had to be shunned off the network.
I wasn’t forcibly expelled, as three people have been. I wasn’t officially told to leave. (I saw a blog comment somewhere saying the executive committee should do its job and tell me to leave. Ok but I was on the executive committee, so that might have been tricky.) PZ asked me not to leave. But in every other way, I was told to leave (and worse). MA Melby (who is nothing to do with FTB) was so outraged she did tell me to leave, very emphatically.
M. A. Melby @MAMelby Aug 5
Just saw this. I apologize for any tone policing I’ve done recently. Just GTFO Benson – now – not later. Christ.
Because I asked what it means to say you “identify as” a woman.
There are very high and spiky fences around trans issues right now. The justification given is that asking questions like the one I asked equals transantagonism if not transphobia, and that transantagonism and transphobia get trans people killed, and so asking questions like the one I asked gets trans people killed.
I say my question was not transantagonistic, and has no chance of getting trans people killed.
My question was skeptical of the whole idea of “identifying as” something, and the jargon that goes with it – but the idea and the jargon are widespread and far from exclusive to trans people.
More to the point – I’ve always talked about that kind of thing on my blog, and when I joined FTB in September 2011 I thought that kind of thing would be right at home there. For four years, it was…and then something changed. Or else for four years it wasn’t, but nobody ever told me that. (But then why did they let me join in the first place?)
The short answer is I think Freethought Blogs the network has taken a hard turn to anti-intellectualism for the sake of absolutist political commitment. I think political commitments need to be accompanied by thinking.
There it is, perfectly summarized.
FTB always felt like a den of freethinker-reinforcing social grooming, but lately it seems to be pivoting towards orthodoxy. “We will hand you the worthy topics to explore. We will tell you the acceptable questions to ask about those topics. You will agree with our conclusions about these topics and then, when you talk about it, you will follow our script. You will not question it when we tell you that people will die if you dare discuss this topic in a way that does not suit us. In addition to all that, if you do not accept these terms we will ostracize you.”
Screw that. I’m really glad you got the hell out of there.
PZ appears to be trying to buck against this nonsense, but even he is going to have problems once you fall off their radar.
Anyway, what was it that Orwell said about orthodoxy?
I followed both you and PZ prior to FtB, and found Ed once the thing was launched. And was glad that there was a “network” where I could get my fix of the three of you in one tidy little place. I tried some of the other bloggers there — none really stuck. Aron Ra is great, but doesn’t blog much. Greta Christina is awesome…but also more absent than not.
Others…well…not my cuppa in general. Miri is insufferably sure of herself for someone with such limited life experience…Richard Carrier never met an argument he couldn’t pummel to death in 10,000 words when 10 would suffice…and on and on.
I think one of the reasons I stopped commenting there was because of how echoey the chamber got — particularly post-Elevatorgate. You were allowed to say one thing in one particular way and nothing else. And if you dared challenge the OP’s premises (or — gasp — conclusions), then it was a bloody pile-on. I still read PZ…don’t comment at all, because it’s not worth the attaboys if I agree or the tsouris if I don’t.
Your blog being independent or part of a network really doesn’t mean anything, ultimately, because it’s you I read. Not the “network”.
As to the open question of identity…I have to say that I don’t particularly “identify” as a “man”…I’m a professional writer (non-fiction division), an avocational musician, a dog lover, a hiker. Those things provide some “identity”. The penis just kind of follows me around. It has its uses.
Best line of the day.
I think there’s a fundamental conflict going on at Pharyngula (I don’t read enough of the other FTB blogs to say if it’s a network-wide phenomenon) between two different views:
1. This is a place for blunt, hard-nosed, intellectual discourse. It’s not an “anything goes” site like Reddit — crude sexsim, racism, homophobia, and just generally blatant trolling or tediousness will be banned — but honest, non-hateful discussion is the point.
2. This is a safe space for pro-social justice folks. Anything that disturbs that community is to be chased out by the commentariat if the blogger doesn’t just ban it.
My impression is that PZ and many of his commenters wants #1, but a substantial mass of commenters — hard to say if they’re a majority or not — wants #2.
There’s nothing wrong with #2. People have the right to form communities on the internet and set up their own rules. And I don’t think that’s inherently contradictory to “freethought.” But it is a very different kettle of fish from #1, and a community can’t exist indefinitely with half its members thinking it’s #1 and the other half thinking it’s #2.
Lady Mondegreen put it this way earlier today:
Yes it is.
Mind you that sounds very flattering to me, and like one of the irregular verbs…but unfortunately it really is the problem. I’ve seen a lot of people say very explicitly things like “asking questions is just a way to hide her transphobia.”
But…you can go back through this blog for the past 13 years and you’ll find me asking questions of this kind throughout. I didn’t do that as a scheme to attack trans people far in the future, I did it because it’s what I want to do. My questions aren’t fake or a dodge or a disguise or a trick.
People who can’t even manage to see that much, but instead rant and rave about how my questions are why trans people are killed…
…well I don’t know how I ever managed to be friends with people like that in the first place.
The question above is a rhetorical question, to which the answer is clearly “no, of course you can’t, don’t be silly”. So while for you the unspoken conclusion is “so wtf does it mean to identify as a woman”, I can see that people who are routinely told they are “a man in a dress” may read it as a dismissal of their identity, that it is silly of them to say they identify as a women, simply because this is an attitude they encounter many times every day. Not to mention others who see themselves as “allies”.
So it boils down to trust, really. I draw on my experience of other things you’re written to interpret it the first way. Others either don’t have that experience, or have come to doubt it through the various hate campaigns (weren’t there at least 3 this year alone?), or else don’t really care, but want to enforce that every single utterance is “watermarked” with a prescribed credo. Thinking about it, the Pharyngula horde does have a habit of interpreting everything the worst possible way. Not the best way to enable a constructive dialogue…
As for “identifying as a woman”, my working hypothesis is that it’s a group identity, rather than an absolute one. If you divide people roughly into these two groups, do you see yourself as belonging in one of them? If so, which one? Or as outside of both? Then with whom would you want to set up a new group?
Re FTB
It troubles me to see FTB referred to as a collective, a club rather than an apartment building. That’s what “those” people did, treat FTB as monolithic. However, the current concerns about FTB seen valid, and that makes me sad. I’ve stopped reading some of the blogs over there, I can’t deal with it.
Re identity
In a Facebook discussion about Dolezal, a friend asked me if he could identify as black. I think his question reveals a few things:
– He was viewing identity as something you simply decide to do;
– He also seemed to think it required permission from others.
I think this is part of the problem with a number of attempted analogies with being transgender. Some people either use or construe such analogies as flippant, like deciding that one if going to pretend to be a firefighter today, won’t you go along with that, but tomorrow I’ll pretend to be a princess. Some people genuinely intend these analogies as real, fundamental statements about how a one might see oneself. The views don’t mesh well.
My friend has potential justification (read: evidence that might be acceptable to others) for considering identifying as black: he may have black relatives, possibly black ancestors. He asked me because I do call myself black, out of solidarity with my father’s side of the family, although I am rethinking the whole concept at the moment.
So I don’t find the question, on the face of it, silly, at least until I understand that it’s more about pretending than about how you actually view yourself. I am quite used to people telling me or my kids “No, of course you’re neither black nor Native American, don’t be silly,” and I’ve had to write complaints.
@Sackbut
There may be borderline case to being black, or even to being born in Brazil (e.g. born in disputed territory), or being educated at Oxford. But it’s hard to read the composite as being anything short of absurd.
Hi, Ophelia.
@Delft: So what does an absurd (rhetorical) question tell us?
Is it open for anyone to identify as Black, Brazilian, Oxbridge? Or, “female”, “woman”, etc?
Or which augur gets to arbitrate?
Is that what you are trying to say?
Re #2/#3:
It may be the heat wave, and the fact I just walked through several blocks of it to pick up my car from the carwash, but I got a distinctly King Missile-ish image off that exchange.
… my version came off more whimsical than disturbing, for the record. In roughly the same mood as the song. And maybe that’s the stanza that thing’s missing: the times he’d taken it off–just thinking this would be for the best–and it followed him anyway.
“I don’t know what it means to say being a woman has everything to do with how you identify.”
That’s it in a nutshell. At my request, a couple of years ago, my non-fiction, feminist book club* added a number of biographies, autobiographies and academic works about trans gender people to our reading list. I just could not (and, to be truthful, have not) gotten my head around what it means to identify as a woman. A woman is something I am because people tell me I am a woman.
Eventually, I decided that trans people’s experiences were not going to be anything that I would be able to understand, the way I think I have come to understand issues of race and homophobia. Because I have read a number of autobiographies and I cannot understand the experience of “identifying” as a gender that no one identifies you as. Which is not to say that I don’t understand a lot of the experiences that I read about in biographical works by and about trans people. I’ve hesitated writing all of this before because it’s going to take a long time and… Well, here we go. Don’t read if you don’t want to.
When I was young (about 2 -3 yrs old or so) I often said that I wanted to be a boy when I grew up. I don’t know what my motivation or intentions were in saying that. I have no memory of it except that my elder siblings and parents told me that I said it. When I was older, I joked I must have said it because I was wise to fact, even at 2 yrs, that men had it easier and I wanted a piece of that privilege. But who knows? I hear some parents talking about hormone therapy for children before the enter puberty after they identify as being the other gender in their pre-school years. My parents laughed at their silly little girl and went back to work.
In any case, I grew up a tomboy. With an older brother and poor parents, I wore a lot of boy’s hand-me-downs growing up. I played sports and played them well. I wasn’t just the first girl picked for teams; I was picked for teams over a lot of the boys. I was picked for a competitive baseball team by trying out for it and was one of 3 girls who made the team. I wore my hair short, hated skirts and dresses, spent recess running like a hyperactive nutjob, hung out with boys, got in trouble for disrupting the class just like a boy. When I saw Star Wars at 8 yrs old, I wanted to be Han Solo. Be him. Not date him or crush on him. Be. Him. I spent that whole summer ignoring people who wouldn’t call me Han and fashioned a costume out of odds and ends and scraps. Frankly, until I hit puberty, you wouldn’t know by looking at me that I was a girl. Plenty of people mistook me for a boy and, with a nickname like Sam, you could hardly blame them.
And, when puberty hit, I was uncomfortable in the body that I suddenly found myself in. I still am, in a lot of ways. I’m always shocked when I pictures or reflections of my body. Is that what I look like? Weird.
In a lot of ways, my brain works like what I’m told a man’s brain is supposed to work like. I speak over people in arguments. I’m not afraid to interrupt. People most often describe me a “smart” and “funny”. It rarely occurs to me that I might be wrong. I don’t apologize for speaking (except facetiously) or phrase my statements as a question. I’m regularly told that I’m aggressive because when I write a letter or speak in a meeting, I am direct. One of my profs in grad school confessed that he’d thought he would have to create a safe space for me to speak in a seminar. He was shocked when I not only claimed my space, I sort of trampled on some of my weaker, male colleagues (I was the only woman in my department).
So what’s all that in aid of? When I read the experiences of trans men, they read like my life right up until the point when they discovered that they were men, not women. So why didn’t I? I have no identity as a woman or a man. I am a mother and that is sometimes used by the right as a synonym of woman, but we all know that it isn’t.
But I check “woman” on the census box because all my life people have told me that I’m a woman. When people look at me I know that they see a woman, no matter how little feminine behavior/dress I engage in. So I don’t see gender as something inherent in a person but rather something that is external to the person. Gender is something imposed on you, not something you have. And, even though it is a construction, external to the self and imposed upon you, it is still real. I get that. I’m not a moron. I know exactly how real gender constructions are. I’ve lived with them my whole life. Studied them. I know how they work.
My inability to see it any other way has always, I thought, been a shortcoming of my own. I have solidarity with trans people because their struggle, for justice, fairness, an acknowledgement of their full humanity, is my struggle. But I don’t have a visceral understanding of their experiences or their self-awareness of gender.
Ultimately, I think the difference is between people who are aware of their gender (cis or trans) and people who aren’t.
*God. That sounds boring and pretentious. It isn’t. We’re a shitload of fun and cursing.
@Delft:
I agree the combination is unlikely, particularly in light of the current conversation. Like when my friend asked about identifying as black, he was being more flippant than serious. But part of the point is that identity is about how we feel, not about how the world sees us, and it is certainly not out of the question that a light skinned person from America might see herself as a black person born in Brazil and educated at Oxford. It certainly doesn’t strike me as impossible. We may find the justifications insufficient, or possibly delusional. Or maybe we agree on some but not all.
And we can discuss those justifications. Isn’t that what we want to be doing, discussing those justifications? Maybe dismiss them after we find out what they are, rather than a priori?
Me too! That’s why I pursued it as my field of academic study! And I think your question was an excellent one that cuts right to the core problem of the “self-identity is everything” model of identity. I’ve used similar absurdities myself to demonstrate why this model simply fails to represent well what it purports to represent.
The part I highlighted in the quote demonstrates why there is necessarily some social component to identity (I argue that identity is almost entirely socially constituted, that our own understandings of ourselves are molded and mediated by our social contexts, the norms and epistemological frameworks we are taught), and I further think that “identity” primarily functions not as a means of self-understanding, but as a means to mediate social relationships – as a tribal marker, as a means of status differentiation, as a means of distinguishing the self from the group, etc. Alone in the dark, we don’t need an identity – identity markers become meaningless becasue there is nothing to which to compare them or from which to differentiate them. When your set size is 1, everything is a universal attribute, and there is thus no need to mark it with an identifier. In a social vacuum, one simply exists as one does, and the way in which one exists is the way all people exist becasue there is only oneself, with no need to ever label traits or characteristics, with the possible exception of self-comparison at different points in time, since we change over time.
Further, I think this essentialized model of identity does great harm – it forms the necessary (but not sufficient) underlying basis for things like racism and sexism, and the coercive nature of the norms around essentialized identity harms everyone who doesn’t quite mesh with the norm by causing a great deal of distress around the failure to conform: are my interests or behaviors right for my sex/gender/sexuality/race/class/etc.? As with criticizing institutionalized religious belief, I very much disagree that the way forward is to pretend that the very serious problems don’t exist for the sake of making some set of people feel better in the moment (and I’m not referring to trans people generally here, I’m referring to gender essentialists who experience a questioning of the theoretical basis for their essentialization of gender as harmful, be they trans, cis, or something else entirely). I think the way forward is to expose the problems and advocate for a different means of self-understanding and social organization, just like when we tell people they don’t really have souls that will survive death (which some people also find upsetting, alienating, harmful, etc. when that’s how they’ve come to understand themselves and their relation to the world). In short, just becasue someone is trans and Christian and is upset by me calling Christianity bullshit doesn’t make it transphobic (or otherwise not okay) for me to call Christianity bullshit. I’ve been flashing to the ‘liberal’ condemnation of Charlie Hebdo over and over – just becasue Muslims might constitute an oppressed minority in some areas doesn’t mean that pointing out the absurdities of Islam constitutes a hate campaign against them or otherwise isn’t okay. To your credit, Ophelia, you’ve been perfectly consistent on this issue across the contexts that I’ve seen.
This is from Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces. I posted it on my blog several years ago. It’s so beautiful, and captures in so few words how I often feel about identity:
@Sackbut
It’s not about whether the combination is possible. If someone says out of the blue in a conversation about gender identity “So I can identify as [combination of three unlikely things] ?” it doesn’t read as a serious question. And where you were born is an actual fact, not something you can choose (unlike national identity), which is an unfortunate comparison to make in the context of gender where people are always spouting biological “facts” to deny trans people the right to determine their own identity.
@Rrr
As I explained at some length in my first comment: it’s ambiguous. And has been interpreted by two different sets of people in two very different ways.
“Either I was wrong all along, or it’s changed.”
It’s a bit of both, imho. At least where Pharyngula is concerned. It’s gradually gotten worse there over the years, but it was always bad – it’s just that in the ScienceBlogs days, the harsh treatment and invective (from both PZ and his commenters) were directed elsewhere, towards creationists and peddlers of woo. It was all great fun when the target was someone else. The targets just changed at Freethoughtblogs, though. About two years back I was absolutely savaged by PZ’s commenters for accidentally not using the correct “preferred personal pronoun” with regard to a trans* acquaintance of mine. I left Pharyngula after that, eyes opened. It’s gotten much worse since. Pharyngula, and many of the other core blogs, have imo devolved into political correctness minefields, where one perceived misstep and an explosion occurs. As you yourself found out.
Despite PZ’s defense of you, he is the one that sets the overall tone at FreethoughtBlogs, as he is by far the biggest draw there in terms of readers and commenters. Other blogs there have taken on a similar style, as commenters inhabit multiple blogs and the respective bloggers do their best pz imitations.. Maybe it took you being the target to realize what the hell has been going on over there. Really, to an increasing extent this has been going on for a long time.
At much of that network, there is little thinking and even less freethought. It’s turned into a social justice purity test.
@Delft: Thanks. I need to mull over that for a bit.
“Ambiguous” seems to be a key word. Not one that everybody can put an exact value to; obviously.
And I bet most of the FTB regulars who criticised you , if pressed wont be able to say what does it mean to identify as “male or female” – other than a Popeye version of “I yam what I yam”. I believe they over-emphasized context. That since you were asked this “obviously” in the context of Trans v/s Cis and a refusal to stick to the party lines ==> malice.
Exactly. It looks like you have to spoon feed some of the folks though – Ophelia didnt explicitly say she is questioning Gender Identity or Didnt have a blog post saying What is it to identify as female.
I dont find FTB to be a hive mind. I guess a month ago you were part of the anti-intellectual SJWs. This month you aren’t.
“The penis just kind of follows me around. It has its uses.”
Mine leads me around. In a purely geometric sense, of course.
PS: How do I do a block quote in the comments?
Mark – angle brackets + blockquote /blockquote.
SamBarge @ 11 –
So much of that describes me exactly (as I’ve been saying a good deal lately – that is, I’ve been describing my sense of my gender the same way lately). Some of it doesn’t; I was never keen on or good at sports, for instance. But wanting to be Han Solo – I was like that about a long string of male movie & tv characters.
John H @ 13 –
That’s a terrific and enlightening comment. I too have been flashing on Charlie Hebdo – the weird eagerness to find and excoriate impurity in fellow lefties.
A guy from “the Pit” (as he calls it) wants me to know that “Freethought Blogs the network has taken a hard turn to anti-intellectualism for the sake of absolutist political commitment” is what “the Pit” has been saying all along.
Well, it’s a version of it, but anyway, yes, I know. I always knew that there was plenty of truth in what they said. But you know what? I don’t give a fuck. They say it with harassment and insults and photoshops, so I don’t give a fuck that they get some of it right. They’re nasty people making a full-time hobby of being nasty. That’s all I’ve ever needed to know about them.
Oh, I take it back. There were two guys from “the Pit” telling me that.
In Defense of the Pit:
When I decided to really get to know the atheoskeptic community a couple years ago, I thought the best thing to do was comment on sites like Pharyngula and whatnot. Having robust arguments with people online seemed like what the whole thing was all about. However, I quickly found I was in some ideological battle where I was either Pro-commenters or Anti-woman (or whatever else). I was banned from Pharyngula because I was apparently racist (which was offensive to me because my wife is black, my daughters are black, and I professionally represent a large number of black people).
In any event, my own personal adventures aren’t interesting. However, it is widespread that people get caught up in arguments where they are labeled “damaging” or whatnot when they are really just trying to talk and understand other complicated people and complicated issues.
Where do people go when they are banned from someplace? Somewhere else. When the somewhere else has a common element of being mistreated by a particular group of other people, it’s not surprising to find they have fun with the things that bind them all together.
Not very effectively. Judging by their responses, most of the time they really didn’t understand the arguments being made at FtB. For every legitimate point made by a Pitter you’d always get at least twenty strawpersons. And it was impossible to argue with them; when it came to proof by assertion the Pit had the most reactionary Horde members beat hands down.
Add to the mix unrelenting harassment and sexist trolling, and, well, yeah, whatever, pitizens.
Ophelia,
Notice how, when “they” want to take credit for something, suddenly “the Pit” does have a particular point of view that can be attributed to it? When they want to avoid criticism, ah, well, then they’re a diverse collection of individuals and some of us don’t agree with the photoshops and insults and sometimes we even argue with each other and you should totally try it there you might like it it’s not what you’ve heard blah blah blah….
And yeah, I don’t think any of us needed the Pitters to tell us that some folks at Pharyngula/FTB take things a little too far, and are too quick to turn on their supposed allies. Is that supposed to change my view of the behavior of Shermer, Grothe, Dawkins, et al? Am I supposed to think that you, Watson, Zvan, McCreight et al deserved those misogynist comments? Are you supposed to welcome all those idiots you banned — some of them multiple times — on some “enemy of my enemy” reasoning?
Just for a moment….I thought you were all the way back, Ophelia.
But, you’re still caught up.
Bullshit, Edward Gemmer. “The pit” is not defensible. Much of that “fun with the things that bind them all together” is disgusting sadistic shaming. There is no defense of it. We’re not limited to two choices – the Purity Police at Freethought Blogs or the sadistic shamers of “the Pit.” I choose neither.
“Caught up” in what? My unreasonable dislike of bullying and harassment and shaming?
Ugh. The slime pit comments are pouring in. Save your energy, people of the slime pit – I’m not buying what you’re selling.
It’s the Russel conjucation: I am just asking a question. You have some problematic premises to your question. He is just JAQing off.
To be clear: I do believe you that your question came from a good place. And JAQing off is a real thing that is deserving of criticism.
However, your question of “So I can identify as an African-American born in Brazil and educated at Oxford?” is exactly the kind of question that someone who is transantagonistic or transphobic would use to dismiss trans issues and concerns without engagement. I’m no expert on these matters, but even I know that. So the anger you’ve received over it, however misplaced, is not surprising to me. It shouldn’t be surprizing to you either.
It is loosely analogous to the man who comes into a feminist blog and asks: “So as a woman, you can just stay home and be provided for while your husband works, but you still think that women have it worse than men?”
That question reads as typically disingenuous MRA trolling. And with good reason.
However, it is possible that someone could ask such a question with genuine curiosity, only to be blown away and disparaged for having views and motives that the man in question does not, in fact, have.
This tendency to be over-hasty on the trigger finger is a recurring problem with the culture at FtB.
————————————-
For the record Ophelia, I feel I owe you an apology.
My initial introduction to the whole ‘Ophelia is a TERF’ fiasco was through other blogs at FtB. Initially, I trusted those accounts, and my surface-level examination of some of your blogging on the subject fell in line with that interpretation. So I formed the opinion that you were in the wrong on this.
Since then, I’ve dug a bit more, and I’m now questioning that conclusion. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and I simply don’t have the time to pursue all of the material I would need to get a confident answer on every question. So I’m back to simply not knowing on grounds of not having the time to look hard enough to craft an informed opinion.
I feel that I know you well enough to know that you don’t want anyone to be discriminated against or dehumanized for any reason. But at the same time, some of the things you’ve been saying and doing are, even if well intentioned, still really deaf to trans concerns and issues. So it’s not a matter of saying ‘FtB wrong, Ophelia right’ or the other way around. Truth resists simplicity. Which is part of why I’m finding it hard to outline an opinion on the whole scenario.
With all of that in mind: I’m sorry for the initial step at the beginning, for not checking in on your own accounting better before forming an opinion on what I was reading at FtB. That was sloppy on my part. If I don’t have the time to dig into the subject thoroughly, I should suspend judgement on that subject. Mea culpa.
I would agree except for one thing – the level and intensity of the anger is orders of magnitude more than anyone should be unsurprised to see in response to my asking one question that (arguably) resembled something that someone who is transantagonistic or transphobic would say. The level and intensity of the anger has been grotesque.
There are people who consider themselves “pitters” who actually find the photoshopping and harassment over the line. I don’t fully understand that sort of compartmentalism, but I have come to view it as less of a monolith and more of a random group of people, many or most of whom can be quite nasty.
Good point. In this case, I think that the greater context of the narrative about what a huge and terrible TERF you are has contributed. The anger was building, and the question just gave it a place to ground itself.
Alona @ 33 – Meh. People who find it over the line but hang out there anyway don’t really find it over the line.
“a pulsating horror from the swamp of doom” — I’m an OB fan for lots of reasons and phrasing like this is one of them.
This. People can say whatever they want on open forums, obviously. Continuing to contribute to those forums makes you complicit, though.
On reflection, I think a lot of people asking such a question are honestly confused about the idea that you can “identify” as something they’ve always seen as a reality rather than an identity. And it doesn’t help that it’s never explained except in terms like “identify with the gender role as a set of attitudes, behaviours and expectations”, when probably most people don’t particularly identify with their assigned roles in society, and many openly reject them without particularly wanting to change gender. So while I can see the question can be hurtful to trans people that doesn’t actually mean it’s transphobic in itself.
The degree of anger shown here is partly probably habit, the long-term FTB (or Pharyngula?) rule that aggression is better than argument, or at least argument should be liberally laced with insults and accusations of bad faith. As someone said upstream, PZ sets the tone, and he prides himself on rudeness.
And partly it’s the hatred of what is called “doubling down”, i.e. refusal to confess, beg pardon and be forgiven – the accepted procedure for “transgressions”. In the “Chilly Climate” talk you linked to there was an interesting bit where Sandler presents her findings to the mods, is told she’s wrong, but the next day they’ve changed their behaviour. My guess is that screaming at them wouldn’t have yielded better results, and maybe worse. But if you mention something like this on FTB you’re a tone-troll, another enemy…
What it leads to is self-selection of readers not only by narrower and narrower catalogue of “things that must not be questioned or contradicted”, but also of those OK with a high degree of hostility. And I am starting to see that as “over the line”.
Two short remarks about FtB and the pit for a start.
Firstly, I’ve always been opposed to treating FtB as a monolith. Differences between individual blogs (and the commenters they gather) are considerable; some of my favorite places on the net are still there, on FtB. As I see it, the “monstering of you on Freethought Blogs” (real enough!) was done by a very small fraction of FtB bloggers, plus a bunch of particularly vocal commenters. Please, understand: what happened to you was very bad and I admit it; I just refuse to use such a broad brush.
Secondly, as to your #28
There is no defense of sadistic shaming – no quarrel here. But there is still something that bothers me. I’ve had some conversations with the pitters in the past but up to this day I cannot fathom how a complete disregard of this sadistic aspect is possible. What’s the mechanism and how should one approach it? Situations like: I talk to someone, we discuss, in this conversation my interlocutor sounds – on the face of it – reasonable and even basically decent, and then he says something like: “The pit? It’s just a lively place with a lot of banter and good criticism”. And the thing is that he is *not lying*: that’s really how he thinks and feels. How is it possible? (Evidently, it is!) Moreover, how should it influence judgments and actions in individual cases – does it mean that he (personally) is a bad person, a sadistic shamer? I find such questions very troublesome.
Now to the point.
Apologies in advance for pedantry in what follows. Professional deviation – sorry!
Consider the implication:
If I identify as an X, then I am an X.
To put some irrelevancies (like plain lying) aside, let’s assume that “I identify as an X” means: “I sincerely believe that I’m an X and this belief is important to me” (not a perfect definition, but workable enough for what I want to say).
Is this implication universally true? Obviously not. I met people who identified (in this sense) as very good chess players but who were in fact quite mediocre. Apply a simple reality check and you have the answer. Easy!
Obviously again, this is not always so easy. Here are the key questions:
(*) For a property X, (i) what sort of reality checks do we have for ascertaining that someone has this property? Moreover, (ii) can “identifying as an X” serve as the only indicator in a given case?
I don’t have any simple answer. It’s mind boggling.
Consider the property of being French (or Ophelia’s “African American” – no matter!). Now, some cases:
(a) Assume that I identify as French but I live in Russia, being born there, from Russian parents, no French lineage at all. However, I devour French literature, I speak French fluently, French dishes are on my table every day, I have a long distance French girlfriend; hell, I even called my dog “Aimee”!
(b) Assume that (a) holds but in addition the Russian government for some deep and mysterious reasons persecutes the French and I’m threatened with imprisonment.
(c) Assume that (a) holds almost to the letter, with the only exceptions being that (1) I live in France (2) the French government persecutes the Russians.
(d) Assume that I live in Russia and I don’t speak French, but I identify as French since my parents emigrated to Russia from France and they were of French origin.
(e) Assume that I do not identify myself as French at all, but I live in France, I’m a citizen of France and my lineage is French.
…
In which cases would you apply “French” to the person in question? I’m really curious. Political ramifications (cases (b) and (c)) aside, I would say: typically, for a given property we use a cluster of reality checks – with self-identification being only one of them – and we give a positive verdict if sufficiently many of the checks return a proper information. In many cases no single criterion is treated by us as necessary and it’s really a numbers game! Typically, there is also an area of vagueness: it’s not clear what exactly is meant by “sufficiently many”. And – also typically – in practice we do not care about this vagueness at all. (Frankly, I don’t give a shit about (a). On the other hand, if you happen to work in the French immigration office, it might be different: would you be ready to give such a person a French passport on the basis of (a)?)
It is the political ramifications (cases (b) and (c)) that bring real worries. Observe that in case (b) your insistence that I’m French could get me into real trouble, while in (c) it could take me off the hook. Which one you choose? Is it a purely political choice, with no requirements apart from political expediency (so that even consistency can be sacrificed?) Well?
Apologies for having more questions than answers.
Daniel Schealler #41 wrote:
Yes; same here.
As a longtime reader and fan of Ophelia Benson (from way before FtB) I’m having a hard time understanding how anyone even remotely familiar with her or her work would or could put the very worst interpretation on her question. She deals in philosophy — “thinking as a value,” as she so succinctly put it in the heading. The context is therefore going to be very broad indeed.
I was sorry to see her leave the network, though I’m pleased (and not terribly surprised) to find out that PZ at least asked her to stay on. Since I usually don’t give the social justice threads more than a brief scroll-through (not because it’s not an important topic, but because I tend to focus more on other topics) I’ve been startled and confused over the recent exodus of two of my usual blogs. I’m wary of picking ‘sides’ because I just don’t know enough of the background, and there’s a wicked part of me which doesn’t really care enough to take a few days or weeks or months and sort it all out. “It is what it is,” as they say (not us, of course, god no — but other people.)
On a more or less daily basis I read PZ; I read Ed; I read Ophelia .I also read Jerry and Orac and then maybe a few others if I have the time or inclination. And for my part I don’t care who hates whom. To echo Ben Goldacre “It’s More Complicated Than That” is a useful slogan to live by. It’s so seldom wrong.
Many years ago in the chatrooms the Christians could always be sent into a massive state of confusion if asked to explain why and how “God” was or even could be a male. As complicated as the concept of gender is, I think we can all be thankful that at least we don’t have to deal with that one.
Delft @ 38 –
Yes, I’ve been thinking about that – the whole demand for the admission of “errors”…as if we were in a papal court. I do admit my errors once I’ve been convinced of them. But admit them when I haven’t been convinced of them? No, and in addition, fuck off.
Now of course that itself is my crime – how dare I not be convinced of them. My failure to be convinced is my wickedness.
But, having not been convinced, I don’t agree with that take.
We have an impasse.
But then one of the “errors” I haven’t been convinced of is thinking that Freethought bloggers weren’t supposed to be accusing each other of official “errors” that they had to confess to. Freethought bloggers were supposed to be wholly independent. That was always the proud boast, and it was also the reality. We didn’t go around sniffing out “errors” aka heresies in order to make shouty accusations on our blogs…
…until suddenly one day we did.
So that whole proud boast of being wholly independent bloggers went right out the window.
I’ve been putting off commenting on the more meta ‘what is wrong with the horde’ stuff for a host of reasons (if you’ll excuse the expression). Some good, I think. Some less so. The better, I think: keeping it to the specifics of the conflict with Ophelia, at least, keeping it out of the airier generalities would help keep it more honest. I’m pretty close to it (I’d been one of the horde, I think it’s more than fair to say, some years back), so how much I could, anyway, I don’t even know…
I figure it’s at least fair to comment on the following generalities, though, not all of them even specific to this situation:
1) What was attractive, I think, for a lot of atheists especially about the early net was it was a place where they could finally just say ‘bullshit’, and as loudly as they had long felt inclined to things that, in fact, really were. A lot of us lived in social situations where there was some very protected, privileged woo around, and we did feel stifled by rules that said thou shalt not guffaw. So places like Pharyngula really were a breath of fresh air. You could finally say out loud, with others who felt the same, look, this is just incredibly silly stuff we’re expected to ‘respect’.
2) I figure the above is probably pretty uncontroversial. I think, however, a somewhat less ideal byproduct of this was some of the rhetorical strategies this allowed/encouraged/dignified became overgeneralized and overused, and, ultimately, forthrightly abused. Sure, I think it really should be fair enough to say in the 21st century there are no ghosts ushering the planets around their orbits, nor watching over your sports teams’ fortunes, and to waste little time with saying oh come off it can’t we please talk about something actually interesting to anyone still trying out those lines. But people began, with varying degrees of honesty, I suspect, to extend it to other questions. And this could get quite absurd, itself. I’ve had darkly amusing encounters with MRAs cosying up to skeptics’ societies and trying to insist that if you accept the broad conclusions of sociologists on the ubiquity of patriarchal patterns in social hierarchies, this is somehow a purely religious belief. The amount of empirical evidence they themselves wave away in claiming this notwithstanding. It seems to me: they saw the technique as rhetorically useful, and thus attempted to coopt it. Likewise with claims about ‘ideology’. Yes, ideologies can paper over a lot of complexity, run away with themselves, taken too far from the empirical grounding that built the cosmology that built the principles therein. But this doesn’t mean every time someone has an organized, coherent view of anything (and one at odds with your own views) you can just snort ‘ideology’ and thereby dismiss them. But this is probably old ground, here.
3) Deeply part of what I think we’re seeing is a sort of categorization, a building of a social and ideological box as a rhetorical strategy. The MRA above attempts to classify his opponent as ‘religious’, and thus fair game for such dimissal without serious consideration. Likewise, here, Ophelia’s attackers want to get her straight to ‘transphobe’, for much the same reason, notwithstanding this is likely to paper utterly over a great deal of important nuance and kill a great deal of still quite necessary discussion of how gender is perceived and performed. So long as that term can be used as a shorthand for your opponent, you don’t really need to deal with what she might be saying.
4) Why people do this is a huge intersection, I think, too. But I don’t think it’s all deliberate or nefarious. The horde, especially, however, does have some of that ‘a group apart’ mentality (they are by no means unique in this way, so does the rough intersection of groups that assemble here, so do many self-assembled online communities; it’s hard to resist, and by no means entirely bad either). But remember these are people who self-assembled around various interests and causes probably broadly on the fringes of their meatspace lives, and, yes, I expect this does drive some of this. Strangely enough, they probably started off feeling stifled by various social taboos which had propped up colossal humbugs, and this is part of why they self-assembled. That they are creating some of their own taboos, I might broadly say is just part of the great cycle of being. (Yes, the deliberate stylistic nod to new age woo amuses me, in the context.) Perhaps the humbugs are a mite lesser, not quite as audacious as the universe was created by a sentient being who doesn’t want you to have an abortion. Some aren’t even humbugs so much as oversimplifications of complex questions made by people thinking somehow this will keep things honest (and it’s also a dangerously blunt instrument, doing that, even if there is a time to say simply cut the crap). But there are lines in epistemology (see below) this crosses for me, and while I’ve few (no) tools I trust utterly, that’s an important one for knowing when to take a step away.
5) Language on the web and in real life is a huge part of this. Catchphrases, in-phrases in the horde do ease that above ‘boxing’. But the hell of it is: they did and do have their uses. Recognizing broad phenomena, types of derails, types of previously dismissed arguments is useful, if you don’t want discussion to wallow back in old eddies people want to move on from, and into which (outside) existing social forces would be happy repeatedly to drive you. But the trouble with that is: it can be used manipulatively or none too consciously also to slip around facets of discussion you just don’t want to discuss, ideas you’re just interested in running out of town entirely without a fair hearing. I suspect staying entirely honest on which you’re doing will always be a tall order.
6) I can’t really offer very specific suggestions on that. I do think it’s important people try to be aware of the two-faced nature of all such tools. Language, I think this very important and true, is a two way street, always has been. You do start to think the way you talk, over time. Learning quick dismissal of old, bad ideas has its utility. But you need to remember: quick dismissal is always a shortcut, but not necessarily to where you want to go. And getting in the habit can lead to much mischief.
7) Much of my discomfiture with this goes back years. I always figured a key, against what I suspect are many, many tendencies that are difficult to avoid, is to watch how the epistemology works out, try to keep that sensible. But that’s a bit of a canary in the coal mine approach, really. As in: when you start to notice the rhetoric is only faintly touching at evidence, and cherry picking and confirmation bias are taking over, things probably actually left the rails a while back. And by then the social dynamics are a bulldozer. There’s a lot of mutually reinforcing things taking off, by then, hierarchies building even around the narrative people are invested in, and these have tremendous influence on how people think. I do think Ophelia’s phrase about political commitments involving thinking, as general as it (likewise) is, is also kind of minimum responsibility, though.
8) This is a bit outside the meta, but the people are dying rhetoric always sets off my radar. Yes, they absolutely are. But that’s also how they tell you we must invade Iraq. That kind of ‘don’t go there/this just isn’t the time’ thing just isn’t friendly to sober second thought, never has been. It’s not always used manipulatively, and people do genuinely get caught up in it. But you really do need to watch that stuff.
9) The above is, again, by no means unique to the horde. Oddly enough, while I think they have their specific departures from reality (from where I’m standing, anyway), I think they’re hardly the most absurd online example, generally. Mentioning them (us) here, I think, is only fair, however, as it’s here and now, and why this comments thread is a comments thread again.
… I must apologize again I can’t really stick around for this much. Hope it’s not some kind of bomb (I can never really tell, honestly). I keep meaning to, but life and work have been a bit mad lately. Sat down to put this probably slightly scattershot thing in time I probably should be working; I’ll try to pop back in, anyway.
Sastra @ 40 –
He did ask, with considerable energy. But then four days later he made it all the more impossible to do so, by saying in his post about me that I had to admit my “errors.” See above. I’m not going to admit them unless I’ve been convinced of them, and I haven’t been. It’s all way too papal for me.
I should add that Taslima and Yemisi also asked me to stay on – but Stephanie Zvan quickly shut that down.
There may be a few others who didn’t particularly want me to go, but lots of people don’t communicate on the back channel, so there’s no way of knowing.
@Ariel: Hi, I don’t know how this will be taken, but let me just answer your question about the ‘Pit. I post there occasionally and I do follow it. I don’t particularly like the shops, but at the same time, no they don’t bother me, and here’s why. I’m an Internet Old Man. Really. I’ve been around the webs since like 98 or so. So I have some history here.
Way way back when, when the progressive blogosphere was a twinkle in people’s eyes, when quite frankly blogging software did not exist, we had a couple of sites, largely Bartcop.com and Rackjite.com that were both the gathering points for online liberalism. And quite frankly, both engaged in the same sort of thing as you see at the ‘Pit (except much more acerbic IMO). Then you had the early blogs such as Atrios’ blog, which routinely posted the same sort of content. DailyKos, etc.
So I’m kinda used to it from a progressive point of view. To me, it’s part of the toolset. It’s not what I’m there for..I think the actual discussion on actual issues is very good, and quite frankly leaps and bounds better than what you’d find in a lot of other places…
I left FTB a few years ago because quite frankly I wasn’t satisfied with the quality of conversation, or of political thought to be honest. The rise of identity politics, unfortunately, has killed a lot of the nuance and details out of that portion of the progressive left and as such, as a policy wonk I find it very unsatisfying.
This particular “schism” issue, I find especially frustrating, because to me it’s all posturing, or at least mostly posturing. Quite frankly, there’s a valuable discussion to be had towards the appropriateness of gender criticism that’s simply not being had, and that once you let the gender criticism horse out of the stable, it’s hard to pull it back. (Generally, if you’ve seen Noel Plum’s 2nd video on the subject, I’m in agreement with him, right down to the point that a lot of TERF-dom is actually about misandry, I.E. the belief that men, masculinity and male culture are toxic to our society and need to change unilaterally, something I refer to as Neo-Feminism).
Strangely enough, over at the ‘Pit, for the longest time I was a defender of the host here. I was, and still am frustrated at the attacks that she received from people for posting things that I thought were relatively fair and balanced. (Not TERF stuff, individualist/egalitarian feminist stuff). I personally try to avoid personal attacks on individuals…I don’t think individuals are the problem here. But boy..the culture sucks, and I honestly say I hate it.
So I don’t blame the individual, and while I do have issues with some of the gender criticism and links to gender critical people in this whole mess, I think the larger community is responsible for fostering those ideas and opinions without being challenged or even sufficiently explained, or enough allowances for nuance or detail.
I swear, why is it so scary about the idea that a lot of what we consider to be “gender” (personality) is biologically determined, not solely based upon sex, but based upon a multitude of other factors…And while social/cultural factors certainly have a role to play, we can’t entirely discount the innate part of the person. And pulling people too far away from their innate self can have very bad effects on the individual. But too many people want to think that they can mold/change people to their liking. IMO they’re playing with dangerous forces they can’t control.
That’s just callous. They don’t affect you – you’re just a nym, so what’s there to photoshop? – so they don’t bother you. That’s the definition of callous.
Ophelia wrote:
Oh, well, you’re confusing Catholicisms then. Modern Catholics all just ignore the pope when he says or does something that’s clearly ripe for being ignored.
That doesn’t change the papal quality of what the pope does. PZ was being papal in announcing that I should “own” my “errors.”
Ophelia wrote:
Sorry, I’m so out of the loop on this whole issue. I don’t get around much anymore, especially in summer. Is this what you mean?
“I confess: I pissed off touchy people on touchy subject.” Sounds rather neutral and like something you already must have noted in writing. Maybe he means “live with it?” Or am I (probably) missing something?
No, although that one was also bullshit.
It’s @ 154:
I’m not reluctant to “own” my “errors.” If I think they’re errors, I’m impatient to own them. I refuse to “own” any “errors” that I don’t agree are errors.
Again: it’s always been the proud boast that the bloggers on the network are independent. It was never supposed to be the job of other bloggers or the owner-bloggers to accuse other bloggers of unowned “errors.”
I’ve probably been unclear.
My point is that disagreeing is one thing, and announcing “error” is another, especially when the subject is mostly oughts as opposed to is-es.
Aha! And I’d finally just scrolled down to that one. I’d missed that thread entirely. Thanks.
To me, that doesn’t sound “papal,” more like he thinks you’re wrong about some things — “screwed up or been intemperate (just as I wouldn’t say I’ve never done that, either.)” What he thinks these things specifically are is left rather murky. And at least it’s in a comment, which is decidedly unpapal. Don’t popes usually blow horns or let off smoke or something when they’re getting ready to announce or denounce things?
I don’t know. I’m out of many loops and should probably stay out. But your comment made me curious.
@Ophelia:
But there’s a lot of things that DO bother me. The oppressor/oppressed gender dichotomy, for example, bothers me, the idea that who I am is simply in order to oppress other people, and that if I just don’t automatically decide to basically become someone else, I’m a horrible person. The idea that people could think that about me, I find very troubling. But nobody really seems to care about stuff like that. Trust me, there’s a LOT that bothers me, but why bother bringing it up when it’s just going to be dismissed/handwaved away?
I think this is a callousnessness that we all share. And I agree, it would be a good thing if we all could get past this. But, I think in the end it might be too limiting and stifling for everybody involved.
I mean, do you think that The Daily Show shouldn’t have been on the air in its current format? Because quite frankly, they’re doing much the same thing IMO. Hell, The Colbert Report is a ‘shop of Bill O’Riley in video form and it always was and has been.
The thought I keep returning to is the idea that you are suddenly not supposed to be who you have always been as a blogger. What have Stephanie, Alex, Jason, etc., been reading this whole time? Did they not know that this is what you have always done? Did they finally actually read you and react with, “Wait. What? This Ophelia person is actually writing about how she’s trying to process and understand complex issues? She actually captures via the written word her efforts to comprehend why things are the way they are, why conventions are they way they are, why we do the things we do? She even ventures into the minefield of controversial topics instead of just regurgitating/cleverly restating others’ enlightened opinions? The implications! The horror! This must stop!”
Alex and Jason, I could not care less about their reactions. They are sticking to script and don’t have much in the way of unique thoughts to share anyway. “Regurgitate psuedo-enlightened orthodoxy. Vilify those who aren’t as enlightened. Repeat.” This process works to put in their place both religious people and heretical freethinkers.
Stephanie’s reaction, though, is quite a letdown for me. She’s been through the Internet wringer, too, so I would have thought she would have had a little empathy for you. And I always believed she was thoughtful. Her reaction to this is disappointing. Same goes with the Skepchick reactions.
And PZ, just damn. By asking you to own your sins this time, he may as well have just asked you to confess to being the blogger you have always been. Was he also not doing a careful reading of your work?
Ha! I know what this [demands for orthodoxy on the issue of Trans identity] is. It’s a kind of intellectual laziness, shading into moral cowardice at the margins.
See, the world used to be simple. We had these two categories: male/female, man/woman, girl/boy. They were innate, they were immutable, they framed your world view, and you didn’t have to think about them too much.
But NOW…we have these trans people, and things have gotten all complicated. Male/female isn’t a simple, clear distinction anymore. What used to be a unitary concept of gender is now being analyzed into aspects, like physical, social, and identified (with gay/straight intersecting on an orthogonal axis). And we’re just getting started on this stuff: no one really knows where it is all going.
What’s more, these aren’t just abstract philosophical issues. The male/female binary is wired deep into our social behavior. When that binary comes apart, it throws all kinds of conventions and norms into question. And inasmuch as norms guide behavior, they have moral aspects as well. For example, Wellesley College recently decided that students who transition F to M will be asked to leave the college. Right or wrong, that is an inescapably moral decision.
Some people aren’t willing to expend the effort required to think about these issues, let alone wrestle with the moral implications. They want to make the world simple again. To do that, they need to restore the male/female binary. Physical criteria (genitals, XY chromosomes) no longer serve to ground that binary, so they have latched onto identity instead: if a person *says* they are a woman, then they *are* a woman. See? Simple again.
Ophelia’s terrible sin was wanting to actually think about these things. People who don’t want to think can’t tolerate people who do: thinking threatens to tear it all open again.
And now I’ve put the whole thing in a box and labeled it, thus demonstrating my own intellectually laziness :)
Karmakin, show me a single instance of photchopped porn on Atrios’ site. I won’t hold my breath. Sure Baby Blue can be pretty damned rude about public figures, but I’ve never seen anything remotely like the stalkerish dumbfuckery that Ophelia has put up with from the pit. So right away you’re making with the false equivalencies/”both sides do it” horseshit.
Ophelia, I’ve been reading you, and PZ, and Ed since before Sciblogs. Keep on keeping on.
That quote from PZ doesn’t say to own errors, it says to own walking on the minefield. That seems fair. Some trans people have their feelings hurt by gender critical analysis. That’s unfortunate, and may alienate friends who are trans. Doesn’t mean gender critical analysis is wrong, any more than criticizing religion is wrong because you may alienate religious friends. Just have to pick what’s important to you, and own that choice. I’m sure Rachael Dolezal’s feelings were hurt by people saying she’s not actually black. I’m sure Otherkin people’s feelings are hurt when told they’re not actually hedgehogs. Homeopath’s feelings are hurt when you criticize their woo. Hurt feelings aren’t a trump card against criticizing bad ideas.
Steven @ #55:
Thank you for your post. An excellent encapsulation of the subject/debate.
This is the best part. Now I can be lazy too. Put in a box and labeled. Done and done.
The quote I pointed out does say to own errors. There are two different quotes.
Early in the thread several people brought up not identifying as members of a gender. Such a lack-of-identity can be the result of either of (at least) two things: One is privilege – cis privilege, and in the case of men – male cis privilege (ie privilege on both these axes, probably reinforcing each other). Recall the story of a discussion where a black woman says that when she looks in the mirror she sees a black woman, a white woman says she sees a woman, a white man says he sees a person? When one is in the privileged group, the group seen as the ‘norm’ one may be oblivious to how membership in that group is part of one’s identity.
The alternative is that one doesn’t identify as a member of one of the two more common genders because one might identify more with a less common gender if one had the opportunity to explore this option.
I’m not so sure where I fit. As a child I went through times I wanted to be included with the boys, though I never thought I might be a boy, and times I went along with being one of the girls, though I often disliked what the other girls were doing or what they were interested in. Post-puberty I was mostly comfortable with being female-bodied, but I often objected to descriptions of what was supposed to be feminine behavior, style, interests, characteristics, ‘ways of thinking’. I have no idea if had I encountered the terms and the ideas at a much earlier age I might have identified as some kind of genderqueer person or somewhat agender. But since I was raised with only binary options I made somewhat reluctant peace with an identity of a cis-het woman who is somewhat reluctant about it. I have no interest of passing as a man, but I’m not sure how important it is to me to be perceived as a woman. I think I mostly want to be perceived as a woman because I want people to question assumptions about womanhood. But there might be cis-privilege creeping in.
My child identifies as genderqueer and is not very happy with society’s insistence that only binary genders are acknowledged legally. When they pass as the major gender other than their assigned one they are elated. They are planning to change their gender legally soon. I do wonder how much of my child’s current presentation is framed by desire for passing.
About identity: I still don’t get it. I don’t know what it means to identify as something as separate and apart from just being that thing and acknowledging it. If there’s any good, solid thinking in that area I haven’t found it yet. When I go looking, all I find is people saying how dangerous it is to allow for any other standard than self-identity to determine gender, but never a clear explanation of how self-identity works, when it is and isn’t valid, what the limits are, what the border cases might be, what the drawbacks or inconsistencies are. There doesn’t seem much interest in having that conversation among people who have a pro-trans rights bent, and those who don’t generally only have an interest in the conversation insofar as it can be used against trans people, and quickly lose interest in it otherwise.
I never “identified” as a butch lesbian- I assumed that this was an objective description of a person who wore men’s clothing while being female and dating women. I was extremely uncomfortable with and resistant to the idea that I “identified” that way, rather than just accepting it as the reality. More than that, I found all the identity talk in the queer community really alienating and obnoxious. And I was very, very angry at trans people, particularly trans men, for acting as though saying you were something you weren’t was all it took to make you that thing.
I was also incredibly, painfully jealous of anyone who got to stop being a woman. Acknowledging that, and that I had the choice to transition to male just as much as anyone else did, was very freeing. But, it didn’t get rid of my discomfort about this identity stuff (although it made me somewhat less emotionally invested in it). I’m either trans or I’m not. I’m either a man or I’m not. What I say about it is important because I want people to believe me, and because I may want access to certain medical interventions, but it doesn’t create new facts on the ground.
At least, that’s my current understanding. I’d love to be convinced otherwise, but there doesn’t seem to be a lot of interest in creating the sort of robust intellectual framework for this “self-identifying” thing that I’d need there to be in order to find it a useful concept. Or, maybe it’s out there and I just haven’t been talking to the right people, but certainly the average trans person I’ve spoken to the internet doesn’t have access to even a watered down explanation of what self-identifying is, how it works, what its limits are.
Karmakin @44 in relation to the Slymepit:
Which makes me an internet Ancient, since I was around the net before the Web existed. And I was around for the genesis of the proto-pit at ERV’s, too.
I also think the place is pretty mild in relation to nastiness; nothing like alt.tasteless in its pomp, for example)
And I further think they’re mostly simpletons congratulating each other for saying rather stupid things while imagining they are rebellious deep thinkers. To the degree that echo-chamber ideological purity exists in Pharyngula* and other blogs at FTB*, it pales in comparison with the pit.
(Toddlers aping their betters in their safe space, they are)
—
* I’m always amused when those two terms are employed as metonyms for each other.
Andrew @ 42 – I forgot to thank you for that thoughtful comment. Not a bomb at all; interesting and illuminating.
VR @ 61 – that’s how it seems to me, too. It seems to be one of those words that you’re just supposed to know by instinct…But I’m never satisfied with that, to put it mildly. I want to pin down and understand.
Is it true though that one is either trans or not? Or did you mean that specifically about yourself. My understanding (which is far from complete, as we all know) is that it either is or isn’t for some, while for others it’s a spectrum – could be trans, could be gender fluid, could change mind, etc.
Well…see…that’s exactly what I take myself to be attempting to do – to start a discussion like that so that the robust intellectual framework could be crowd-sourced – not by me alone, obviously, but just as one small piece in a big fabric.
I’m also doing it for my own reasons of wanting to understand, etc, but there is always that hope of adding to or setting off a conversation.
It still surprises me how badly that went.
To VR Urquhart: The vast majority (all?) of trans folk aren’t just people who attempt to pass as members of a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth. To my understanding, the vast majority of trans people experience at least some degree of gender dysphoria – severe negative emotions with regard to at least some of their secondary sex traits. This dysphoria is often alleviated if one undergoes hormonal, surgical, or a combination of the aforementioned treatments that modify one’s secondary sex traits. I don’t know how well mere social transition to the target gender (changing one’s appearance using non-medical means such that one passes for a member of the target gender) resolves gender dysphoria, but my own child is absolutely ecstatic whenever random strangers address them as ‘sir’.
If you are questioning whether or not you are trans, try thinking how you might feel if people started sincerely addressing you as ‘sir’, speaking of you as ‘he/him’ as opposed to addressing you as ‘ma’am’ and speaking of you as ‘she/her’. Which do you feel better with? Which do you feel describes you better? Would you prefer being Mr Lastname or Ms Lastname?
Or perhaps neither feels suitable, and you would rather go with gender-neutral terms?
I am grateful to the trans community for raising awareness that the gender one is assigned at birth isn’t necessarily a final answer. It is a hypothesis based on observation, a somewhat more accurate answer than the ultrasound-based gender prediction, but still tentative. If it does not fit it can be discarded as erroneous.
Also see I’m a Butch Woman. Do I Have Cis Privilege?
(VR Urquhart is the author of the linked article, if I’m not mistaken.)
@VR Urquhart #61
Are you familiar with the concepts of family resemblance categories and fuzzy sets?
Categories can be viewed as similar to a family resemblance. If ten siblings all look different to one another, you can still work out what the ‘common set’ of features are. Even though not everyone in that family has every one of those features, each member of the family can still be captured by that ‘definition’.
The idea of fuzzy sets is that each element of a set isn’t either fully in or fully out. But that each member has a number between 0% and 100% that signifies how good of a fit they are within that set. Fully in would be 100%, and fully out would be 0%. But something could be 50%, or 80%, etc.
Fuzzy sets and family resemblance categories work well together.
A good example is the category of vegetables. Consider the question: Which is the better vegetable, carrot or garlic? Most people instinctively feel that carrot is the better vegetable. So it’s insufficient to think of whether a carrot is a vegetable or it isn’t. It’s better to think of how good a fit a carrot is for the category in which it finds itself.
I find that these ideas inform me greatly in my thinking about gender and gender identity. I don’t know for sure if these are new ideas to you or not: Apologies if I’ve been explaining to you something you already know, I know that can be infuriating at times. :)
On the chance that these ideas are new and you’d like to know more, a very accessible talk about them can be found here.
————————————–
I’m a cis male and my insights are likely shallow. I hope it’s not obnoxious for me to weigh on on this with my views.
In terms of the insistence on the primacy of self identity as a defining feature, I view that more as the rejection of the notion that anyone else gets to impose an identity on you that you don’t want or don’t fit.
So the way I think of it, given this: “I never “identified” as a butch lesbian- I assumed that this was an objective description of a person who wore men’s clothing while being female and dating women. I was extremely uncomfortable with and resistant to the idea that I “identified” that way, rather than just accepting it as the reality. ”
If we run with that definition of ‘butch lesbian’. Suppose a woman named Foobar who meets that definition. However, Foobar doesn’t like being called a ‘butch lesbian’, and has told us so, and it visibly distresses her to be called a ‘butch lesbian’. If we continued calling her that, it would be kind of a jerkish thing for us to do.
Suppose a woman named Barfoo. Barfoo meets the definition above, and is happy being described as a butch lesbian. Suppose a man named Oofrab. Oofrab happens to think that butch lesbians all like beer and sports. When Oofrab discovers that Barfoo doesn’t like beer or sports, he tells her that she’s not a real butch lesbian. Oofrab is a jerk.
These are the kind of scenarios I have in mind when people talk about how important it is to respect someone’s self-chosen identity labels (or self-rejected identity labels).
Another example is Neil deGrasse Tyson. He lacks any form of God belief, so he meets the minimum definition of an atheist. However, Neil doesn’t view his lack of God belief as being significant. He prefers to identify himself by what he is than what he isn’t. This annoys some atheists, who think that Neil should identify as an atheist to improve the standing of atheism. But I think those critics are mistaken. Even though Neil meets the minimum definition, it’s still kind of a jerk move to try and tell him what words he should use to describe himself, and to ignore his stated preferences as to how he should be identified.
However, the other half of the consideration is that, even if we allow for flexible and fuzzy sets, and even if we grant the importance of not imposing identiies on unwilling people, there is still a point where we need to consider someone as not truly belonging to a self-identified category.
I’m a cis male. I don’t meet every stereotype for men. For example, I find sports boring, and I enjoy dancing. But I meet very many of the standards that most people consider to be indicative of maleness. I was assigned male gender at birth, and I’m very much content with that.
If tomorrow I were to identify as a trans male, I’m pretty sure that everyone involved in this kind of discussion would view this as being both incorrect as well as being obnoxiously minimizing to the experiences of and problems faced by trans people.
With that in mind, I don’t think that anyone truly seriously believes that identity is completely in the realm of what people assert about themselves. For an identity to fit, it does have to have some basis in reality. I think that the insistence on respecting a person’s self-identity is largely a resistance against having their identities denied by people who think they know better but don’t.
Sackbut @ 66 – hahahaha yes. You’re not mistaken; Anat just told VR Urquhart to read a piece that VR Urquhart wrote. Anat probably saw it because I blogged about it here.
Sorry for the confusion. Can’t remember if I originally read the article from a link here or elsewhere, but what made me decide to link it was that it had the experience of a person being addressed as a man based on their appearance – and the person felt the need to correct such an address, suggesting they felt it did not suit them. This is different from what Urquhart appears to be expressing here, where she apparently considers the trans man identity as a possibility. This difference caused me to think they were different people and that the person in the article was more certain of their identity than the author of the post here.
Anyway, yes, she did identify as a butch lesbian, because she applied the label to herself and found that it described her correctly. That’s generally what identifying as something or other means.
Except that she explicitly said she did not identify as a butch lesbian.
It seems a bit rude to contradict her own account of herself.
And as for “what identifying as something or other means” – that’s what we’re discussing, because it’s complicated, so just saying it’s simple isn’t really productive. It’s not simple; that’s the point.
For what it’s worth, I’m constantly doing this every time I have a conversation with Dan Fincke: I go to reference him to an article I dimly remember reading, search for that article, and it turns out that it was written by Dan Fincke. >.<
In the interest of building bridges, and with all respect to your continued work, I would like to answer your question at the bottom there:
Identifying as something in the gender and sexuality sense of the term is in reference to an innate gender identity and an innate sexuality that is immutable with regards to external force even if the experience of them can be internally fluid (see people who have fluid sexuality or are genderfluid). We don’t need to rely on personal narrative to see this phenomenon. We can see it in the failure of social stigma, reparative therapy, and other attempts at correcting these innate states to affect any external change. We can see it in the increase in suicide risks in those who are asked to afford themselves one particular identity that fits better with popular conceptions of who people can be and who people are presumed to be. And yes, we see this confirmed in personal testimonies of those who have experienced dysphoria or who have tried to be something they are not and the struggles endemic to that.
As such, “identifying as” is often a shorthand to describe quickly this innate phenomenon in gender and sexuality as these are often invisible states of being from an outside perspective.
Sadly, much like “theory” the popular usage of identity clouds the issue and makes it seem part of a spectrum of personal identities one may have that refer to an individual’s community, work, or social behaviors (“I identify as a nerd”, “I identify as a scientist”, “I identify as a feminist”). And this is an especially easy mistake for many people who are cis-identified to make as they can largely ignore their innate gender identity in the same way someone who is straight can ignore their sexuality or someone who is white can ignore their race. And this is because society is largely built around the needs and life-experiences of people whose gender identity matches how they are treated every day for better or for worse. As such, there is little disconnect or need to focus on the innate nature of gender, and this especially becomes true as gender is also a term that popularly gets universalized to not only mean innate gender identity, but also a basket of gender norms and expectations that not all individuals who are cis may be comfortable with.
And it can be hard to separate that out and see gender identity separate from that conflation when one’s own experience of gender is being perfectly comfortable with gender identity, but having a lot of uncomfortable interactions with expected gender roles. As such, it can be easy to view innate gender as someone just deciding that they identify as X (which may be part of the binary or not) one day and that being prone to just as much abuse as anyone stating they are something and being expected to be taken at their word (see male “feminist” “allies” of the type who are found out to be serial harassers and quick to turn on fellow feminists at the first instance of critique, but who expected to be given deference to their actions based on their “identity” as “feminists”).
However, that isn’t really the same sense of identity. And it’s often hard for cis people to see the full scope of how that is unless they were to spend a period of time being treated and referred to as if they were a different gender (not fulfilling a different gender role, such as being butch, but full on being treated as if you were something you are not). Dysphoria is an invisible condition and relies on people listening to the experiences of the marginalized to really get a feel for what it means and what gender means to them.
There’s a privilege there in having that cis experience of gender identity, which like all privileges can blind one to the full picture of an experience as well as to explanation of why people react so strongly/hostilely (in ways that seem totally disproportionate) to what feel like innocuous statements.
A statement questioning identity and relating it to our popular understanding of identity and cases like Rachel Dolezal is on the surface, perfectly innocuous. However, to many trans people, such questions are usually step one of a series of dehumanizing remarks that erase innate gender and as an excuse for violence, “correction”, and as the cornerstone and justification of organized wide-spread oppression. Religious groups asking what is different between a trans person identifying as genderqueer and a person identifying as a monkey is often the first step in arguing for oppressive bathroom bills, legal discrimination, and street harassment.
As such, many trans people may have knee-jerk and angry reactions to such questions asked in genuine interest and scientific curiosity largely because of this history. It is very similar to a feminist community constantly being barraged by “what even is consensual” type openers as part of a long meandering rape apologist campaign and then having a male identified sexuality and violence researcher popping into a thread and asking the same question as part of an attempt to understand philosophically the underpining of how we build consensual actions in life. That individual may have all the best intentions, but has a good chance of being firmly and violently rejected because of the context the researcher was not being aware of of all these individuals engaging in a disingenuous form of the questions as a means of oppression.
And it becomes harder for that trust to extend if it turns out that the male researcher was to face-plant mildly on some privilege as again those patterns are the most fresh and raw experiences of those reacting negatively.
And that rawness can make it very tricky at points to engage with and explain oneself as the accumulation of that pain and dismissal can make it easy to simply dismiss (fairly or not) individuals who evoke that pain or even any who are privileged on that axis entirely.
I hope this helps.
There is so much that’s wrong in that last comment that I can’t keep reading it. It’s grotesque.
Sorry, that wasn’t polite, but I find that comment extremely frustrating. It’s all the more so because it’s well-written.
I disagree strongly with the overarching claim:
The claim is repeated and cited throughout to justify and explain other claims, but I don’t accept that claim. I disagree that there is such a thing as a universal “innate gender identity.” I accept that some people do experience it that way, but I do not accept that it’s universal, much less that it’s established demonstrated fact.
All the ensuing claims about cis experience are therefore wrong as generalizations, in my view.
Like this one:
I am not perfectly comfortable with gender identity. There was a time when I was extremely UNcomfortable with it (puberty). I got used to it and resigned to it over time, but that is not the same thing as “being perfectly comfortable” with it.
I really want people to stop telling me that.
[…] this comment on Thinking as a value has been scratching at me all day, so I’m going to argue with it even […]