promethea.incorporated

ozymandias271:

anyway here is my point. the whole “not being a dickbag to trans people requires A TON OF WORK AND CHECKING OF PRIVILEGE” narrative:

(a) lets transphobes off the hook
(b) is insulting to non-transphobic cis people
© leads some non-transphobic cis people to hate themselves
(d) leads other non-transphobic cis people to talk about how NOBLE they are because they have learned NOT TO ASK ABOUT ACQUAINTANCES’ GENITALS! SO HARD!
(e) lends credence to “trans* is transphobic!” nonsense because keeping track of a constantly shifting set of shibboleths actually is hard

and it is super-weird because while SJ legitimately might not care about (b)-(e) you would think they would at least manage to avoid (a)

Also, it’s incompatible with “not being a dickbag is such elementary stuff that it’s literally the basic minimum prerequisite for being a decent human being, not something you deserve extra credit ally cookies over”. Consistency, how does one do it.

I personally possibly endorse having a distinction between the layperson-accessible low-hanging fruit that should be an obligation to people, and the expert-level follow-the-theory-to-weird-places-to-see-if-there’s-something-there stuff that (e) kind of is about but with more self-awareness.

Physics would be an apt comparison; the layperson needs to know enough to not cause harm via bad policy or shitty decisions, and then there’s the experts who do things like “let’s check out if the universe is actually an 11-dimensional hologram and see what the implications would be for stuff we could engineer out of it, and also if you don’t know what you’re doing just don’t do it because we don’t want people doing really embarrassing amateur quantum physics”.

All in all SJ needs to acknowledge that this distinction is possible and allowable and not everyone should try to be an expert in hardcore intersectionalist gender theory any more than people need to be experts in quantum physics. I suspect a lot of the frustration around (e) comes from people thinking they need to keep track of constantly shifting shibboleths but can’t do it that well, but can’t admit it because of signaling pressures to keep up with the cutting edge and as a result end up sounding like Deepak Chopra when they espouse what’s basically a cargo-cult version of last year’s cutting edge instead of being like “I’m not an expert in this stuff but I trust the physicists when they say nuclear power isn’t actually that horrible” as they should.

It’s probably useful to have some small subset of people chasing theory to weird places just to see if there are some useful insights to be found, but they should recognize that that’s what it is and that it’s a completely different thing from the minimum criteria for a decent human being. Also, this feels like an interesting hack for replacing the stick with a carrot; instead of being just barely decent human beings while everyone else is horribly failing at it the experts could feel like high-status people who are successfully doing something cool and rare while others are okay too, and only the ones who do the Deepak Chopra quantum physics woo equivalent of gender theory, like TERFs, need to be scorned.

[epistemic status: literally inconclusive but feeling like putting some strong intuitions into words and generating important insights]

4 months ago · tagged #specialization of labour: it exists for a reason #steel feminism · 46 notes · source: ozymandias271 · .permalink

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   Trans people are not a subset. Before the wife was out of the closet, she was at a legal conference where trans issues...

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    Also, it’s incompatible with “not being a dickbag is such elementary stuff that it’s literally the basic minimum...

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    Yeah the hard part is getting over yourself. It’s easy to not ask about an acquaintance’s genitals just cuz they’re...

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    Not being a dick bag to any particular group of people takes nearly constant introspection and self-awareness. It is...

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