What is this “harm” of which you speak?
A piece by José Luis Bermúdez in Inside Higher Ed a week ago asked a necessary question about the open letter attacking Rebecca Tuvel and the apology by the Associate Editors: what are they talking about when they talk about “harm”?
This is not the place to discuss the merits or otherwise of Tuvel’s article, which I would encourage you to read (it is clearly written, and pleasantly free of jargon) before reading the open letter and the statement. There is a persuasive analysis of the weakness of the complaints made in the open letter in this article by Jesse Singal in New York magazine. At a minimum, Tuvel appears to have been significantly misrepresented.
I want to explore a much more general issue raised by this whole affair. This has to do with concept of harm, which keeps being raised. The main charge against Tuvel is that the very existence and availability of her paper causes harm to various groups, most specifically to members of the transgender community. This is a puzzling and contentious claim that deserves serious reflection.
The editorial board statement specifically refers to “the harm caused by the fact of the article’s publication.” As the concept of harm is standardly used in legal contexts, this would be a tough claim to defend. It is certainly possible for someone to suffer material or tangible loss, injury, or damage as a consequence of a 15-page article being published in an academic journal. The article might be libelous, for example. But there is no such charge here. The only individual mentioned by name besides Rachel Dolezal is Caitlyn Jenner, and it seems implausible to say that Tuvel has harmed Jenner by “deadnaming” her (i.e., using her birth name), given how public Jenner has been about her personal history.
I think we have a rough idea what they mean by it, from long unpleasant experience of the kind of thing they say. The idea is that uttering anything other than the Currently Mandated Doctrine [which shifts constantly and among doctrinizers, but never mind] causes harm to trans people because it inspires or motivates violence against them. Getting the Doctrine wrong causes people to beat up and murder trans “folk.”
I don’t think that’s true. I think the kind of people likely to attack or murder anyone for being trans are not likely to read philosophical articles about what it means to be trans anything or to identify as anything.
The authors of the editorial board statement have nothing to say about how they understand harm. This already should give pause for thought. Philosophers, whatever their methodological orientation or training, usually pride themselves on sensitivity to how words and concepts are used. This makes it odd to see no attention being paid to how they are understanding this key concept of harm, which is central to many areas in legal and moral philosophy.
Well you see it’s a term of art, like “trigger” and “violent.” It doesn’t mean what it means in either ordinary discourse or philosophy and law; it has a special, political meaning, that has to do with the need to shun and punish a perceived Bad Person aka a Harmdoer.
Surely something else has to happen for harm to occur. Most obviously, the comparison might cause someone to behave in a way that brings about some sort of injury to a specific individual or group, for example. But then, in order to substantiate an accusation of harm, Tuvel’s accusers need to explain how her juxtaposition, in a single article, of transgender people and Rachel Dolezal might reasonably be expected to have this effect.
We’re just supposed to know. We’re supposed to be woke enough to understand instantly the kind of harm that’s at issue and the mechanism by which it takes place. Failure to be that woke could mean it’s your turn to be shunned and punished.
As I said about “indigenous” in another thread, “harm” is a word Humpty Dumpty would love.
Ah, but we know what the feared “harm” is. It’s harmful to Gender Theory, specifically Trans Theory, to expose the precarious rationalizations underpinning it. It’s the harm done by the little child who said that the Emperor was naked.
If more people take Tuvel’s lead and start critically examining trans theory, a number of people who have found cozy little niches riding the trend may wind up having to think for a living instead. No wonder they’re scared.
Yes, true. But this misuse of language goes both ways. I notice on the blog of a well-known biological ejaculator that calling the Tuvel attack a “witch hunt” is an insult to those who actually have been tortured and killed as witches. Seems to be the strongest argument he could muster to support his team in this dispute. Presumably, calling a journal “Hypatia” when no one has actually been torn apart / torn anyone apart (not sure if the name honours the mob or the mathematician) is likewise an egregious insult to actual murderers/murderees.
Is it my imagination or has the fashion for trigger warnings died off to a great extent? It seems that not so long ago anything and everything was a ‘trigger’ for somebody and neglecting to supply one before mentioning something trivial, maybe cutting oneself shaving, was guaranteed to get one hauled over the coals by the usual marsupial justice system because somebody’s PTSD (and boy, do a lot of people have PTSD – apparently) might have been triggered by the allusion to blood.
On the other side of the coin ( a trigger for the impoverished?) were those who attached warnings to virtually everything they did (virtue signalling?), though I did wonder; if the mention of something in a post or comment might trigger somebody, wouldn’t mentioning that same something in a warning have the same effect on the potential trigeree? Also, how come nobody thought that the word ‘trigger’ might itself cause problems to victims of gun crimes (or to those who hated Roy Rogers’ horse)? It really did get to the point where I would have been somewhat less than surprised to see ‘TW, the following post contains words and discusses things’ written un-ironically (irony and humour being a couple of things apparently lacking amongst the most vociferous of TW exponents.).
It does appear, though, that trigger warnings are becoming scarcer nowadays, the reason for which is easy to understand. Today’s fashionable cause is all things trans, and these people have shown time and again that they simply cannot ‘do’ more than one cause at a time, hence one cause is superseded by the next rather than being supported alongside each other.
Am I alone in sometimes wondering if the real passion for some people isn’t social justice, it’s the love of shouting at others from the safety of a keyboard?
#3
Hyperbole is Bad, except when the hyperbole bolsters my outrage! /s
#4
Remember when a ‘trigger’ was a term of art from psychology, and meant that a certain stimulus might induce a panic attack (or other psychological effect)? Thanks to gross overuse, I’m pretty sure it now most often means ‘your difference of opinion displeases me.’
I learnt in the early 90s, Helene, to refer to indigenous, mainland Australians as “Aborigines”. “Aboriginals” was dreadfully offensive. Our woke Prime Minister at the time, Paul Keating, referred to mainland and Torres Strait ingenious peoples collectively as “Indigenies”.
Flash forward to 2017 and I find out “Aboriginal” is in and “Aborigines” is dreadfully offensive. I found this out when a uttered the offensive word at a barbeque. I thought I was woke but I’d been asleep for a couple of decades.
My Indigenous Studies sub-majoring daughter crucified… err sorry… decimated… no… re-educated… um… flayed me alive… um… subject me to Inquisition… no… pilloried… assailed… Hmm…
Aren’t they’re talking about the same kind of harm that misogyny, objectification and the marginalisation of women does to women?
I don’t think misogyny has to physically harm a specific woman in order to “harm women”. A misogynistic screed in a newspaper which rails against the idea of women in the workplace, or against the ability of women to control automobiles, does not “harm a woman”, but the oppressive memes it both feeds off of, and in turn feeds, harms women’s attempts to get themselves taken seriously as human beings and to be treated with their due respect. The same goes for casual objectification of women, such as that documented at great length by Fem Freq’s “tropes vs women” series.
The harm may be abstract and indirect, but surely that does not make the harm less real, does it? The systems of oppression that exist in the world, which cause harm to people due to their very existence, can be bolstered casually, or by venemous rants, or by well-researched, eloquently argued, scholarly articles.
Such an article may be wrong, and still cause harm. It may even be right, and cause harm. Or it may not.
Tuvel’s article may or may not have valid points to make. But may it, independently of that, cause harm or not cause harm? It seems to me that both those aspects are deserving of debate, with due concern for the wellbeing of those who claim that they are harmed.
You may very well be right that there is no harm there. But how is it that, as a scholar of feminism, you don’t understand the category of harm being discussed, or how someone not affected by it might have a hard time grasping how that harm might manifest itself?
I mean, how are women harmed by men paying them complements in the street, again? That’s absurd! (/s)
No, they’re not talking about that kind of harm – although you’re right that they probably think they are, or want us to think they are, or both.
How do I know? I know from reading Tuvel’s paper. She did nothing resembling misogyny, objectification, or marginalisation.
See this is the problem here. Trans activists and “allies” want trans activism to be like the other social justice movements, but it isn’t, because its core demand is belief. It’s all about identity and a magic internal essence, and that’s not political – it’s personal and psychological. So the result is people get mobbed and bullied and torn to shreds for making some sort of “mistake” about the belief system. That’s not remotely comparable to misogyny or racism or gay-bashing.
I think I did make that reasonably clear in the post, by the way. That’s what I meant by this part:
It’s not a matter of agreeing that trans people should be free to live their lives as they want to and that they shouldn’t be persecuted or bullied or shunned. That’s not enough. We’re required to endorse the Currently Mandated Doctrine, whatever it may be, and we’d damn well better keep up with the constant changes, because saying something that was the Currently Mandated Doctrine last week is HARM when it’s been superseded by the Currently Mandated Doctrine issued today. We have to sign up to a whole complicated ever-shifting ontology, no questions asked, on pain of harsh punishment if we make a mistake, let alone actually disagree.
No other social justice movement does anything like that. They do pretty much the opposite: the point is to treat people decently regardless of their Identity Category.
I understand the category being discussed, but I think it’s misapplied when used to describe Tuvel’s article. That can happen, after all. It can happen in feminism and anti-racism, and it can happen in trans activism. The category can be useful, or it can be a bullying tool. Here I think it’s being used as a bullying tool. Of course it’s true that someone not affected by it might have a hard time grasping how that harm might manifest itself, but that still isn’t a reason to take every claim of harm at face value no matter what.
I found PZ’s post on this issue maddening and his comments on his own post condescending and thoughtless at best. But as other people have mentioned, the whole comment thread was a series of piles-on. Against Tuvel, mostly, but also against the few people who turned up to defend her arguments and against Ophelia personally, of course.
That comment was particularly horrible and it speaks volumes that PZ – who was obviously monitoring the thread – didn’t take the time to point out that at the very least the comment was completely inaccurate, nevermind personally and severely insulting to Ophelia for no good – or even bad, as far as I can tell – reason.
Perhaps even more importantly, it was also threatening to anyone who dared to quote, paraphrase or even mention Ophelia.
When PZ is wrong he is wrong and his failure to address that comment in particular is beyond disappointing.
I read all the Pharyngula comments, too, and I confess that I didn’t really even understand what the various arguments were. I found PZ’s thoughts on the “witch burning” metaphor a little… hard to follow.
I used to read Pharyngula every single day. It was a go-to-blog. It’s been months since I read it that way.
@Ben:
Me too. He seemed to be saying that it was inappropriate to call something a witch hunt if it didn’t involve burnings at stakes.
I disagree. I think the term can be wildly inappropriate and is ridiculously over-used. But I think it can be appropriate. When people – and especially women – are hyperbolically accused of doing ill-defined harm without evidence or argument, that kinds of sounds analogous to a witch hunt to me.
My donkey died when that woman I don’t like looked at it funny, she must be a witch. That analogy seems fairly good to me.
^ Exactly. It does get overused, it does get used when it shouldn’t be, but that doesn’t mean it never fits. I don’t think it fit when people disputed (sometimes fiercely) a crudely-reasoned post Richard Dawkins wrote about women who accuse men [who might be friends of his, though that went unstated] of rape. It didn’t fit because Dawkins was far from the powerless one in that scenario, even though people were disputing his piece; it didn’t fit because he’s not a woman; it didn’t fit because he wasn’t an innocent victim chosen arbitrarily or unfairly.
The mobbing of Tuvel is a much better fit.
latsot @ 11 – Yeah, it was annoying that he let that comment stand without a correction. Annoying but not at this point surprising.
I think so too. Not only can Tuvel not easily defend herself, nobody else can defend her either without being similarly accused.
I’m not a scholar of actual witch trials but I’d be very surprised if defending an accused witch were not grounds for being accused of witchcraft. The analogy keeps on giving. Or… taking away… Nobody really seems to be winning here.
It surprised me a little, but not that much. I tried to think of a way to reply to the comment but I couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make it worse. Minds were made up, blinkers were applied, idiocy was worn like a cheap Marks and fucking Spencers suit.
I trust you all to know what I meant. That’s a thing you can mostly count on around here.
That “I’d be surprised if” construction is very easy to lose one’s way in when writing.
The cheap Marks and Spencer fucking commentary is his reward.
Woah! M&S suits aren’t that cheap. No, his commentary comes sporting F&F from Tesco or maybe George at ASDA, and that’s probably flattering them but it’s the best comparison I can make because Aldi and Lidl don’t sell suits.
A comment in that thread by Giliel at #67 struck me as being extremely revealing. How dare people defend a white cis woman when black, trans people disagree with her! She is apparently automatically wrong because of that, and never mind the fact that there are differences in thought among black and trans people. I guess she thinks they are a hive mind and that these issues are Settled.
Oh, and she is also
[dramatic pause]
pretty! [Collective gasp]
Holmes @21 and 22, I noted that comment as well (and a few other eye poppers). Mind you Giliel, Crip and a few others, while sometimes making quite useful contributions always did display a tendency to become very shouty when challenged and to have stances that at root were belief, inconsistently applied. As soon as PZ surrendered any pretence at moderation that was the end of his Blog as a space for even the limited discussion it had been. I think it’s a shame that in creating a space safe from the assholes at the Slymepit and the Libertarian-skeptic wing any dissent from a very narrow view eventually became intolerable. Sadly I thought that lesson had been learnt.
Holms, Giliel’s comment is hardly surprising as she was one of those a couple of years and several causes ago (racism was the excuse for their virtue signalling back then) ‘educating’ white people to accept that when a PoC tells you that something you said or did is racist, you shut up, listen and learn. You don’t argue or disagree or explain your opinion, you accept it, because if a PoC says that something – anything – is racist then it is, no matter how ridiculous we white people – who, we must remember, are all racist even when we’re not because PZ said so – might think they’re being, and that’s because we non-PoC people are not PoC and only PoC get to judge what is racist because only PoC know what offends PoC.
Of course, we are to ignore the rather racist implication from Giliel et al that all PoC think alike, and not mention the irony of the fact that it was largely white people explaining this on behalf of PoC (Why? Do they think PoC incapable of speaking for themselves?)
That place is a fucking joke now; they’re virtually trolling themselves.
Yes, I should have known better than to attempt it while simultaneously enraged by nine things.
You have to make allowances for the fact that I bought mine in about 1982.
I am a scholar of conflict resolution and peacebuilding. Over the course of my research projects I have talked to many people who lived through war, rape, torture and ethnic cleansing. And yet, never have I met any group of people who use the terms “violence,” “harm,” or “trauma” as liberally as critical theorists with cushy jobs in Western academia.
It’s simply mind-blowing to me.
@latsot #11.
You’re right, this is very telling.
It is telling us how claims can become dogma independantly of whether they’re true. Earlier, people were divided as to where truth was (some accepted the vile accusation, some claimed it wasn’t even backed up with any evidence). Some repeated the claim until nobody was left to counter. It became a local truth, a community marker.
That’s somehow frightening, the fact that people are readily accepting it passively now, most of the time knowingly.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that you cannot possibly accomodate a lie, because it’s the beginning of the end. That place is dirty forever.