Jargon
There are a lot of ways to enforce orthodoxy. A very popular one right now is to accuse heretics of “denying my/our lived experience,” at which point the heretic had damn well better apologize and swear to do better, or else prepare to be shunned.
But lived experience isn’t a conversation-ender. People can claim to have experienced anything, including absurdities, so why should it be treated as ungainsayable? People have claimed to be victims of Satanic rituals, alien abductions, the Freemasons, reverse racism, hauntings, The Jews, misandry – you name it. They’re not always right, and they’re not always telling the truth. We’re not required to believe everyone’s stories about “lived experience,” so the accusation of failing to do so shouldn’t be a conversation-ender, much less grounds for shunning.
Furthermore, experience is one thing, and what we call it is another. There’s an enormous gap between experience and language, and it’s a necessary part of critical thinking to poke and prod the way we name things. People can claim their lived experience tells them they are and always have been women despite having male bodies, but that doesn’t mean they’re right, even though it’s their experience they’re talking about. We can be wrong even about ourselves – but who doesn’t know that? What’s that “even” even doing there, as if it’s surprising that we can be wrong about ourselves? We lie to ourselves, but much more we just plain get things wrong. The subjective isn’t infallible – to put it mildly.
The politics of trying to ignore this is not a healthy robust politics. It’s the opposite of that. It’s a politics of temper tantrums and lying, and that won’t work out.
Is that like the lived experience of
“[insert woo here] cured my [insert medical problem here] & I don’t care what the controlled trials say”
I tend to believe that people are trustworthy when they appear to speak sincerely about how they feel or felt, but when they try to interpret why they felt that way they’re just as prone to error as anyone else.
“I felt wonderful when I looked at that waterfall.” This person is talking about what they felt. I probably believe this person.
“I felt the wonderful presence of God when I looked at that waterfall.” I probably believe that this person felt wonderful when they looked at the waterfall. I don’t believe it was because they felt the presence of God.
Wonderful was a feeling they felt. Its cause is their interpretation of why they felt wonderful. That’s just as prone to error as any other claim about the world.
A lot of the time people will describe their feelings in such a way that the feeling and the feelings cause are merged in their description. “I felt the presence of God.” Well, I’ll disentangle that for them, thank you very much.
Good post. And of course people can be wrong about themselves – so weird we even have to point this out. Cognitive biases are legion and well-studied, and neuroscience has provided some interesting data about confabulation. But people can also be mistaken about being God’s chosen people, or being a member of the master race, or being a Pisces, or being an ENFP. When the classifications we use to describe ourselves are themselves incoherent, inaccurate or arbitrarily gerrymandered we can also be said to be wrong about ourselves. There is also Ian Hacking’s problem of the “looping effect” of human kinds: sometimes our classificatory practices construct kinds rather than merely describe kinds (which is what radical feminists say about gender). To try and wall off particular human classifications from critique, while classifying everybody according to them, is both anti-intellectual and unjust.
Many such people are also inclined to deny the lived experience of others not in their tribe, like:
“The only way in which I feel like a woman is my awareness of my physical sex. I don’t actually have a clue as to what you mean by a feeling of gender.”
or
“Ageism hurts people over 45 more than it does people in their 20s; I’ve been both ages and I know.”
or
“When you made fun of that person’s clothes, I felt some ‘splash damage’, because I know I am unfashionable and I didn’t want to think my friends judge people that way, yet now I have to wonder what you think of me.”
I have seen such expressions of lived experience be met with very hostile responses.
Dennett has coined the term “heterophenomenology” exactly to point out this problem that what we believe to experience may be erroneous:
“heterophenomenology considers the subjects authoritative only about how things seem to them”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterophenomenology
*sigh*
Skeptic: I don’t believe there’s any such thing as being right-handed. We’re all born ambidextrous. Using the right hand is a socially imposed convention.
Lefty: Actually, I’m left-handed.
Skeptic: That’s socially imposed. Obviously your parents taught you to use your left hand, and it’s become a habit.
Lefty: Um, no. That wasn’t my experience. My dad actually didn’t believe I was left-handed and tried to teach me to throw ball with my right hand. I had to insist over and over that it was just easier with my left hand. Also, the teacher in school insisted I should write with my right hand. It was really difficult and awkward. It was much easier with my left hand. At first they didn’t believe me, and I had to be really persistent about it, but eventually they gave up and let me use my left hand.
Skeptic: My theory is everyone is ambidextrous. People use their right hand because it’s imposed by society. I’ve put a lot of work into my theory. Obviously, when you were young you saw someone in a mirror writing with their right hand and thought they were using their left hand and you thought that looked really cool. You’re just favouring your left hand to be cool. It’s a fad.
Lefty: No, that’s not my experience at all. I didn’t see anyone in a mirror. I don’t think being left handed is “cool”. I don’t thing it’s uncool either. It’s just the way I am, whether I like it or not.
Skeptic: Why are you pushing this left-handed dogma? My theory is everyone is born ambidextrous. People use their right hand because it’s imposed by society. Why are you trying to malign my theory? Why do you hate me for being “handedness-critical”? You’re reinforcing socially imposed handedness.
Lefty: What? I’m just saying your theory is wrong because it doesn’t account for people like me. I didn’t decide to be left handed. Nobody taught me to me left handed, in fact they tried to teach me the opposite. Look, studies have been done. People have been subjected to testing and the results are that some people really are better able to use their left hand than their right.
Skeptic: That’s bullshit. Brains have been scanned and there’s no difference between people who claim to left-handed and people who claim to be right-handed. See! That’s proof. “Brainhandedness” is oppressive dogma. Perhaps you don’t understand my theory? Humans are bilateral. We have two hands. There’s no difference between these two hands except they’re mirror images of each other. Handedness is a social construction imposed on us by society. Everyone is therefore ambidextrous, the only reason people use their right hand is that it’s a time honoured social convention. That’s my theory. I’ve put a lot of work into my theory.
Lefty: FFS, why won’t you believe me? I was born left-handed. It wasn’t imposed on me. I’m not pretending. You’re being obtuse. You keep denying my experience.
Skeptic: You’re denying my experience. I’ve never personally experienced being left-handed, so why should I believe there is such a thing? Sure, I use my right hand, but that’s only because society imposed it on me. Really, we’re all ambidextrous. That’s my theory. I put a lot of work into my theory. I’ll tell you what — since you insist on using your left hand, we’ll call you an ambidextrous person who chooses to use their left hand. That way I can accept your existence. We’ll call you an “Ambileft”.
Lefty: But it’s not true! I’m not ambidextrous. I didn’t “choose” to be left-handed. I was born this way. Call me left-handed, dammit!
Skeptic: People lie to themselves all the time, and delude themselves. Some people claim to have been abducted by aliens. Some people claim they have visitations from Jesus. You may tell yourself the story that you were born left-handed, but my theory is that everyone’s ambidextrous. Hands are biology — which is science — and handedness is socially imposed. There is no such thing as being innately left-handed. That’s my theory. I’ve put a lot of work into my theory. Are you familiar with my theory?
Lefty: Fuck your theory. If you won’t accept the consensus of actual researchers into handedness, and you won’t accept what I tell you about my own experience of being left-handed, and the experience of other left-handed people like myself — what would convince you?
Skeptic: My theory is that everyone is ambidextrous. Hands are biology. “Handedness” is a social construct imposed on us by society. We use our right hand because of social convention. I’ve put a lot of work into my theory. Why are you attacking my theory? Have you bought into the Left Handed Doctrine?
Lefty: *headdesk*
There are people who believe that homosexuals are all “just faking it” (for the attention, to piss off their parents, because they hate God[sic], or whatever). If such an individual entered this comment section, and pointedly informed a self-professed gay commenter, “you’re just saying you’re attracted to men so you get special treatment”, I would fully expect to see a sharp reprimand; probably even a direct threat of being banned for such behavior. I dare say, unless such a person was willing to apologize and promise to avoid making such instigations in the future; they’d best prepare to be shunned.
Would such a shunning constitute “accusing someone of heresy in order to enforce orthodoxy”, or just kicking someone out of a discussion for being a jerk?
Kevin – the post is not about accusing people of faking it.
‘To be x handed’ means ‘to accomplish certain tasks, specifically writing, more competently with x hand than with the other hand.’ That’s an objective statement that can be fairly easily demonstrated.
‘To be gay’ means ‘to be exclusively sexually attracted to people of one’s own sex.’ This is also an objective statement that can be demonstrated, but the definition is a bit trickier; I know people who identify as gay, and whose gay identity is important to them, although they are married to, and presumably have satisfying sex with, straight opposite-sex partners. These people don’t meet my definition of ‘to be gay’, but I’m not the king of the English language and it’s none of my business if they want to identify as gay or not, so I keep that thought to myself.
‘To be a woman’ means ? What’s the objective statement, and how can it be demonstrated?
Also, the plural of anecdote is not data.
I am willing to concede that you are telling the truth about your experience, and that you may well know others like you, with similar experiences, who interpret those experiences the same way. But that does not necessarily mean that everyone, or even the majority of people, who found themselves in similar situations, ended up with a similar experience.
I’m not denying that Richard Dawkins or some of his contemporaries experienced sexual assaults as children which they were able to brush off, or that some women and their colleagues have had personally empowering experiences in the sex industry. I believe them. But that doesn’t mean that everyone in those situations experiences them, or is affected by them, in the same way.
Society should probably be concerned either with how the majority of people, or how the most vulnerable and marginalised people, are affected by certain situations when it comes to deciding how harmful those situations are.
@guest
“For people raised in a culture which uses both language and expression to sharply differentiate adult females from adult males, women = those who most readily think of themselves in terms of the female varient; men = those who most readily think of themselves with the male variants.”
No worries, the science is already being done…
“An exploration of transgender identity through the implicit association test (IAT)”
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/274833232_An_exploration_of_transgender_identity_through_the_implicit_association_test_IAT
Conclusion: The performance on the IAT-GI appears to reflect the strength and intensity of gender identification and is independent of biological sex and sexual orientation. Implications for clinical practice will be discussed.
The biological basis for gender identity has been gaining broader scientific acceptance…
Review Article Provides Evidence on the Biological Nature of Gender Identity
http://www.bu.edu/news/2015/02/13/review-article-provides-evidence-on-the-biological-nature-of-gender-identity/
“The researchers conducted a literature search and reviewed articles that showed positive biologic bases for gender identity. These included disorders of sexual development, such as penile agenesis, neuroanatomical differences, such as grey and white matter studies, and steroid hormone genetics, such as genes associated with sex hormone receptors. They conclude that current data suggests a biological etiology for transgender identity.”
@Ophelia – forget “faking it”, that’s not the point. What if the person contested that the proliferation of sexist imagery within society led people to be confused about their sexuality; that lesbians were, like all other women, attracted to men but had gotten mixed up by all the sexist imagery into thinking they were attracted to women. And that this explains gay men to because, um, sexuality is complicated and other special pleading. Regardless of their grounds, I presume there would not be much of a welcome mat put out for those who insist that any particular gay/lesbian commenter wasn’t “truly” attracted to the same sex.
@ Silentbob #6
The problem is that metaphor doesn’t work – and it misrepresents the position of both the skeptic and the lefty.
We have a real world situation where most people are right handed, about 10% are lefties and a few are fairly evenly handed.
Handedness skeptic: most people are either right or left handed.
Objector: that’s an oppressive viewpoint! Handedness is a continuum. Anyone should be able to use whatever hand they want!
Skeptic: OK, technically, yes. But the human race splits about 99.8% into clear right handers and left handers. And of course anyone can start to use their “off” hand if they want. Human beings are adapatable. But, at base, you’ll still be a biological left hander who has taught themselves to use their right. In fact you’ll just be ambidextrous.
Objector: I’m left handed!
Skeptic: No, you’ve spent the last (10 – 40) years writing and working with your right hand. That makes you a right hander. I’m a left hander. I’ve only ever had my left hand as a dominant hand.
Objector: That doesn’t make you left handed! I have a deep seated and long standing feeling that I am a left handed person.
Skeptic: I don’t understand that at all. I’m a left hander because I’ve spent my life learning to cope with using my left hand in a world that is set up for right handers. I call myself a left hander because that is what I do, that is how the world sees me. I have to get special cheque books and scissors and other things because I can’t effectively use my right hand.
Objector: That’s not what being a left hander is. Being left handed is the experience of feeling left handed.
Skeptic: But I don’t “feel” left handed! I know I am because of the fact I use my left hand for everything and struggle to use my right. You don’t struggle to use your right hand.
Objector: I know and I hate that. It seriously conflicts with my inner sense of handedness.
Skeptic: That must feel awful. I’m sorry you feel like that – but at the end of the day you use your right hand for most things.
Objector: I’m going to have my hand surgically altered to look like a left hand. Then I really will be right handed.
Skeptic: No. You won’t. You’ll be a right hander with a weird right hand.
Objector: I’ll have to use my left. That makes me a real left hander.
Skeptic: Well, I guess that if you do use your left hand for everything then the world will see you as left handed. So, from a social point of view, yes, you’ll be a left hander. But that won’t change the fact you’re naturally wired up as a biological right hander.
Objector: There’s no such thing as biological handedness. It’s all a social construct. Here, talk to my friend.
Objector 2: I’m left handed.
Skeptic: … but you’re using your right hand.
Objector 2: No, that’s my left hand.
Skeptic: Pretty sure that’s your right.
Objector 2: A left hand is whichever hand a left handed person uses.
Skeptic: So… the hand on the right side of your body is a left hand if you identify as a left handed person? But I don’t identify as anything. I just use my left hand because that’s my dominant hand.
Objector: So maybe you’re queer-handed.
Skeptic: this seems utterly illogical to me.
Objectors 1 & 2: This is our experience of the world.
Skeptic: OK, I get you feel you should be left handed and it’s your absolute right to practice to use your left hand all the time but I am left handed and I don’t experience any of this!
Objectors 1 & 2: That makes us more left handed than you. Our experience is equal to yours.
Skeptic: Yes, all experience is equal but that doesn’t mean I have to accept the idea you “should” be left handed or that there’s any underlying truth to the idea that you can have a right handed body but a left handed brain!
Objectors: You’re privileged because you have never had to question your handedness.
Skeptic: It’s not privileged to have had to make extra arrangements and spend extra money for left handed equipment! Not to mention the suspicions about left handers.
Objectors: We’re looking forward to using that equipment. And you should enjoy the way people treat you!
Skeptic: I don’t. I hate it. And you don’t have the right to tell me I should.
Objectors: It’s not up to you to decide whether you’re privileged or not. That’s our right.
@Steamshovelmama,
I see your point; handedness is perhaps not the greatest analogy. Handedness is a label which almost tautologically describes the underlying phenomena. “Woman” is not like that. “Woman” is not used as a shorthand answer to the question, “What did your genitals look like when you were born?” (as might be done with the medical label “intersexed”); it is not used to determine “Are you chromosomally XX or XY?” (as would done with blood-type). And yet those criteria are claimed used, by many, as the sole meaningful basis for “What is a ‘woman’?”. In effect, “man” vs “woman” is one of the only labels we have where “how the label is assigned” is almost utterly irrelevant to “how is the label used”. Not even race or sexual orientation, with all their associated socially-fueled misconceptions, really have such a full departure from “how it is assigned” and “what it says about the person assigned that label” (the least racist person in the world could still meaningfully differentiate whether a particular child had Asian or African parents).
Maybe that’s part of what makes discussion of gender, particularly with respect to transgender individuals (and, dare I say, the “lived experiences” thereof) so difficult: there simply is no other labeling system which works as an analogy. All analogies will therefore grossly misrepresent the actual stance of those on either side of the debate – always giving one side a sense of “hah, it’s so simple, those who disagree are clearly ideologues” (e.g. applying transgender claims to classist labeling schemes) and the other side a sense of “Bah, they just don’t get what I’m trying to say, they are clearly ideologues!” (I’ll admit that the handedness analogy may fall into this camp).
However, I think if we shelve the analogies and look at gender straight on, whether we’re talking in terms of “lived experiences” or in more scientific terms, it seems to me that the idea of gender as a “purely cultural construct”, that biological differences start and stop at the level of genitals-at-birth (or XX vs XY chromosomes) is on increasingly shaky ground. Actually, IMO, that’s an understatement; many adherents of the idea, for their refusal to engage with scientific evidence of it’s shortcomings, are actually approaching the grounds of flat out “denialism”.
Kevin @ 11 – well if “faking it” isn’t your point it’s too bad you brought it up.
You’re still not comparing like with like.
@ 13 – it would help if you distinguished between sex and gender.
@Karellen #11 – personal experience alone should be taken with a grain of salt. But I’d hardly say that testimony of Holocaust survivors should not be a part of the repertoires of arguments used to combat those who deny that the Holocaust happened.
A huge reason for dismissing religious experiences as evidence for a “supernatural” realm, or alien abduction experiences as evidence for ET visitations, is that these experiences diverge drastically from one another (and are typically reported by those who’ve at least heard of such experiences’ from others).
Such seems not to be the case for experiences reported by transgender or homosexual individuals. In those cases, multiple people are reporting phenomenon with uncanny similarity; and often, those reporting the experience are doing so without a clue that anyone else in thee history of mankind has claimed to experience anything of the sort.
In that light alone, I think it’s fallacious to lump transgender experiences into those buckets; to be as quick to dismiss them. Couple this with the fact that, the more closely and carefully scientists examine objective quallities of how most people experience gender vs how transgender individuals experience gender, the more the consensus seems to be that something biologically is going on… and I think it’s almost an act of willful ignorance to pretend that “lived experiences” of transgender people is in any way on par with hauntings and alien abductions.
Indeed. To be clear, the point was, “A person who (for whatever reason) sees the world in some way that precludes any form of love between two men or two women that is the same thing as the love between heterosexual men and women, would probably be shunned for suggesting that any particular lesbian was ‘just using the jargon’ of true love when discussing their confused feelings they have toward members of the same gender.” It would be, to say the least, “not acceptable”, for them to object to gay or lesbian forum members using the word “love” without qualifying it as “homosexual love”; a different category from “actual/normal/true romantic love”. I may be wrong, but I don’t think you’d sit idly by if someone used your comment section to engage homosexual members of your commentariate in such a manner.
No analogy is perfect, but not all are flawed. Can you elaborate?
Not really. I’d say that’s a very secondary reason. The core reason is that there’s no independent evidence of any kind that there is such a realm, and no reasonable theoretical explanation of how and where there could be.
Think “Recovered Memory.” For a time, the accounts of people who claimed to have recovered memories of abuse and even murder were believed, and alleged Satanic abusers were sent to prison. Then Elizabeth Loftus and others did new research into memory and documented how very fallible and easy to manipulate it is. The result was a lot of rejection of a lot of claims of “lived experience.”
But also, Kevin – it would be nice if you could pay attention to my main point in the post, which is that the phrase should not be a conversation stopper. That’s a limited claim, and I think a reasonable one. I’d rather discuss that than your angry certainties yet again.
“which is that the phrase should not be a conversation stopper. ”
That’s the whole point of my example of homosexual experiences. Specifically, there ARE contexts where denying someone’s lived experience is inappropriate.
“That’s a limited claim, and I think a reasonable one. I’d rather discuss that than your angry certainties yet again.”
It’s a nuanced claim. Sometimes it’s not a showstopper, and sometimes it is. Discounting lived experiences is perfectly valid when they fit this description: “The core reason is that there’s no independent evidence of any kind that there is such a realm, and no reasonable theoretical explanation of how and where there could be.” But it’s a completely inappropriate (albeit quite common among denialists) response to those who claimed to have lived through the Holocaust, to have been drugged and raped by Bill Cosby, or to feel every bit as much in love with their partner of the same sex as any heterosexual person might feel for their spouse.
Thus, the very question, “Should it be a showstopper” becomes the questions, “is there independent evidence of the phenomenon?” and “is there a reasonable theoretical explanatioin of how and where there could be?” It’s foolish to pretend that the former can be answered while avoiding engaging the latter (which I can’t fathom why anyone would ‘rather’ not do).
As an aside: What in my comments here came across as either “certainty” or “angry”.?
Not inappropriate but wrong, because there is massive independent evidence that the Holocaust happened. But that doesn’t mean every single person who claims to have been a victim of the Holocaust is telling the truth, and there have been some fakes.
And that’s a different category from feeling love for X. You’re muddling everything up here.
So you are saying it would not be inappropriate, but actually wrong to deny the lived experiences of transgender individuals [excepting the background noise of “fakes” that seem to accompany all culturally noteworthy phenomena, from military service to Holocaust survival], if there was sufficient independent evidence of a biological phenomena behind it? How, then, can it be derailing the discussion to bring up such points such as:
Review Article Provides Evidence on the Biological Nature of Gender Identity
http://www.bu.edu/news/2015/02/13/review-article-provides-evidence-on-the-biological-nature-of-gender-identity/
“The researchers conducted a literature search and reviewed articles that showed positive biologic bases for gender identity. These included disorders of sexual development, such as penile agenesis, neuroanatomical differences, such as grey and white matter studies, and steroid hormone genetics, such as genes associated with sex hormone receptors. They conclude that current data suggests a biological etiology for transgender identity.”
No, I am not saying that. I was responding to your pointless analogy.
Fine, then, let’s disperse of the analogy (see sidebar conversation with Steamshovelmama; I concede that it’s very, very difficult to find good analogies for this topic).
If a person reports experiencing a phenomenon X, then can we agree that it is only appropriate to dismiss the person’s account as evidence for the existence of X in the case where there is no scientific credibility [external evidence and plausible mechanism] for it? And that, conversely, it’s not okay to dismiss that person’s experience as evidence of X, merely because one does not believe X is true?
On a related note, do you feel there is scientific credibility to the idea of a biological basis for gender identity (one’s sense of being, and preference to be referred to as, male or female; that’s independent of and may run contrary to that person’s at-birth reproductive genitalia)?
You’re still not understanding my point. I’m not talking about “dismissing” anything.
Look. You’ve got a personal stake in this subject, and it seems to make you unable to talk about it in an impersonal way. The result is not really all that productive.
“For people raised in a culture which uses both language and expression to sharply differentiate adult females from adult males, women = those who most readily think of themselves in terms of the female varient; men = those who most readily think of themselves with the male variants.”
Really? Because “male” is treated as the default in our society.
So I guess a surprisingly large percentage of females are men. I’d definitely be a man by this definition.
It’s not? That’s how I use it, pretty much. The word indicates sex and age.
I don’t know any other way to define the word that wouldn’t exclude female friends who don’t behave or dress in “feminine” ways.
That’s been my lived linguistic experience for decades.
Yeah, I agree with Lady Mondegreen. To me, “woman” is the state of being an adult biological female. Which necessarily includes the genitalia. For me “woman” implies nothing else – not femininity, not style of dress, not interests, not attitudes. Like LM I can’t see a valid definition of the word that is based on anything else.
It certainly does not mean “possessed of a deep and important sense of oneself as female regardless of biology”. Perhaps one day it will come to mean that but it doesn’t yet.
Silentbob #6, your dialogue was entertaining. You might want to leave out the “sigh” next time: it comes off as patronising.
But while your dialogue was entertaining, it doesn’t really show whether handedness is innate or not. It’s hard for individuals to tell the difference between what is innate and what is socially inculcated – “lived experience” certainly can’t tell us that. And researchers who assume handedness is innate at the outset are unlikely to throw any light on whether handedness is actually innate or not. A field of research can be either contested, or operating under faulty assumptions, so uncritical deference to researchers is epistemologically naive.
It’s hard for individuals to tell the difference between what is innate and what is socially inculcated – “lived experience” certainly can’t tell us that.
THAT. That’s what I’m talking about in the post, in a nutshell. It’s hard to tell. Our “lived experience” doesn’t come with handy labels, so it’s a mistake to just assume it’s transparent to us in every way. It’s a mistake to assume that we can always and reliably and automatically tell what’s part of our Self or Identity or Nature versus what’s acquired somewhere between birth and now. It’s a mistake to take it for granted that we can do that and then proceed accordingly. It’s a mistake, it’s naïve, it’s crude, it’s a failure in basic critical thinking. That means that a politics fundamentally based on doing exactly that is bound to be coercive instead of persuasive or reasoned – and a coercive politics is not a healthy politics.
@ 23 Ophelia Benson
Heh.
Good point. From now on, we should only let men talk about sexism. Only white people should talk about racism. Only straights should talk about homophobia. We don’t want silly personal “feelings” getting in the way of our enlightened discussion. Brilliant strategy.
Silentbob, would you mind responding to the point I directed at you? I’d really like to hear your response.