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brazenautomaton:

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nostalgebraist:

Another post on Galileo’s Middle Finger, having finally finished the book.  (Previous posts: Maria New and prenatal dex, also various posts in the tag #michael bailey cw?)

Galileo’s Middle Finger (hereafter GMF) is a strange book.  On one level, the book’s content is pretty easy to make sense of: Alice Dreger has been involved in a number of dramatic academic controversies over the course of her career, and she figured (sensibly enough) that people might enjoy reading a book that retells these stories.  To some extent, she just presents the book as “a memoir of the controversies I’ve been involved in.”

However, she also claims that these stories are connected by an overarching theme, which is something like this:

“Scientists and activists often find themselves at odds, on opposite sides of angry battles.  But everyone should recognize that truth and justice are intimately connected: you can’t help the victims of injustice if you don’t care about the facts of the situation, and if you’re in a unique position to explore facts (such as an academic job), you ought to steer your investigations toward the social good – not by sacrificing the truth, but by looking for the truths that can help.  Activists need to be more concerned with truth, and scientists need to be more concerned with justice.  And if both sides followed this advice, they would be at odds far less often.”

All of this sounds very agreeable to me; I think I already more-or-less agreed with it before I read Dreger’s book.  But do Dreger’s accounts of various controversies actually serve as useful examples of this stuff?  Not always.  And Dreger’s attempts to link everything back to her theme produce some awkward results.

Besides a few minor subplots, there are three controversies narrated in GMF.  First, she narrates the controversy over Michael Bailey’s book The Man Who Would Be Queen.  Second, the controversy over Patrick Tierney’s book Darkness in El Dorado, which accused anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon of genocide as well as various other wrongdoings.  Third, Dreger’s investigations into Maria New and her struggles to get her criticisms recognized by government bodies and the public.

Of these three, it’s the Tierney/Chagnon case that most directly fits Dreger’s theme.  Tierney’s book was a work of shoddy hack journalism which made spectacular allegations that have been uniformly refuted by later investigators.  (N.B. Tierney made many allegations, and some of the more minor ones have been less clearly refuted, but those weren’t the ones that made headlines.)  Nonetheless, shortly after the book came out, the American Anthropological Association quickly endorsed Tierney’s book – the academic equivalent of reflexively believing a callout post without checking the sources.

Reading this in terms of Dreger’s theme seems straightforward: in its concern for justice, the AAA neglected the value of truth, and thus failed to even serve justice.

Even here, though, the theme strains a bit.  The Tierney debacle was not exactly a conflict between “activists” and “academics”; the people under-valuing truth in the service of justice were the academics of the AAA.  (Tierney could arguably be called an “activist,” but Dreger treats him – rightly, it seems to me – as a hack journalist from whom more concern for the truth cannot be expected.)

The Maria New story also lacks a clear instance of an activist failing to sufficiently value truth.  In that story, Dreger is the activist, raising ethical concerns from the outside about an established academic, and her activism is directly grounded in science that she believes that academic is ignoring.  She may intend this as an example of “activism done right” (about which more later), and/or as a case of an academic caring too little about justice.  But it’s not as though New is ignoring justice because truth is her only value; as Dreger notes, her prenatal dex work has produced little in the way of academic knowledge.  So again, it’s hard to see this as an illustration of the theme.

So far, it looks like Dreger has failed to exhibit an example of activists behaving badly, although this is crucial to her theme.  The third story (well, first as presented in the book), about Michael Bailey, is her main (and only) example of this.  But of the three stories, it’s that one that fits the theme least well.

Dreger’s account of the Bailey controversy shares a quality with her account of the Chagnon controversy: both are told as stories of lovable and humane, if out-of-touch, researchers being persecuted by ignorant people who don’t understand them.  Dreger spends a great deal of text talking about how much she personally likes Bailey and Chagnon – Bailey is a personal friend, Chagnon she met while investigating that controversy.  As “characters” in the book, they downright glow.  They’re funny, they’re good company, they both have cute and harmonious marriages.

It makes sense to write stuff like this in order to humanize people who have been demonized by others.  But one has to note here that none of this bears on the “truth” side of the things.  It’s certainly possible for someone to have committed genocide and still be a warm and sparkling conversationalist at the dinner table; it’s possible for Michael Bailey to be a great guy if you know him personally, and nonetheless to have been wrong about trans women.

With Chagnon, this tension never becomes relevant, because as a matter of simple fact, Chagnon was exonerated by multiple serious investigators.  With Bailey, the tension is glaringly relevant, because the issue of whether Bailey is actually right never gets fully addressed in Dreger’s treatment.  Indeed, she treats it almost as an irrelevant side issue.  Where is the value of truth here?

To be fair, Dreger does put her beliefs on the table about the issue.  But these beliefs seem to reveal little serious interest in the questions involved.  She seems to have uncritically bought the Blanchard-Bailey line – possibly because she only cares about these issues insofar as they affect her good friend Michael Bailey? – and to have done little investigation into academic work on transgender beyond this.

Astonishingly, for instance, the phrase “gender dysphoria” never appears in GMF at all.  (A word-search for “dysphoria” turns up only one result, in the title of a Blanchard paper cited in the endnotes.)  When Dreger presents her account of trans women, she talks about (for instance) transitioning as a choice made by feminine gay men in order to better fit into homophobic social environments, stressing that these people might not have transitioned if feminine gay identities were more accepted in their local environments.  I’m willing to believe this happens sometimes – but Dreger seems to actually not know that gender dysphoria is a thing.  This is in a book published in 2015.  One wonders if she’s ever even looked up the condition in the DSM (which changed the name from “Gender Identity Disorder” to “Gender Dysphoria” in the 2013 DSM-V, but even before that had included dysphoria as one of the two major diagnostic criteria).

Dreger has a page on her website, written after GMF was published, in which she responds to questions about “autogynephilia” and states her current positions.  Again, she never mentions gender dysphoria.  Of Blanchard’s androphilic/autogynephilic typology, she says that “I think what I’ve seen from the scientific clinical literature and socioculturally suggests this division makes sense.”  She does not provide any citations, and does not address critiques (see here) that the data show a continuum which does not separate well into two clusters.

I belabor all of this because Dreger’s indifference to the truth here simply makes GMF fundamentally incoherent.  I agree with Dreger’s theme; I have no clue how she thinks the Bailey story illustrates it.

But wait – Dreger’s claim is that activists value truth too little in their quests for justice.  Does this hold true for the activists who attacked Michael Bailey?

Again, Dreger seems to not much care.  She devotes a lot of space to the claims made by these activists, but mostly to express confusion over them.  Noting that some of them display what look to her like signs of autogynephilia, she scratches her head: why are they angry at a book for talking about autogynephilia?  One would think that someone in Dreger’s position – someone interested in getting to the bottom of situations where truth and justice appear to conflict – ought to answer a question like this.  Dreger doesn’t.  Her attitude is basically: “who are these weird people attacking my friend Michael?  What do they want?  They’re so confusing!  Michael is a scientist, so maybe they don’t like science?  Jeez, who knows!!!”

What she substitutes for consideration of these issues – and let me be clear, this is not nothing – is a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the nasty, dishonest ways in which the activists tried to ruin Michael Bailey’s reputation.  They were, in fact, really nasty.  But people don’t just do things like that for no reason.  What about the larger questions of truth and justice here?  Why do these activists believe Michael Bailey is so harmful?  Could it be the case that Bailey is harmful, to the point that defaming him is a net good?

Dreger never mentions this sort of idea, but it hangs uncomfortably over her whole book.  She bemoans the fact that her work on Maria New – which is generally polite and non-nasty, if very harsh on New – has failed to make appreciable waves in the world, beyond loading the first page of Google results with dex-critical pages.  On the other hand, Bailey’s book is now solely known as the subject of a stormy controversy, which received huge amounts of media discussion.  What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done?  What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?  And, putting it the other way around, how can Dreger assume that the anti-Bailey crowd didn’t have truth and justice on its side, just because they were nasty and vicious to her friend?

In Dreger’s telling, Andrea James is a scary asshole who sends her possibly-physical threats via email, and Michael Bailey and Napoleon Chagnon are precious cinnamon rolls.  But fighting for truth-and-justice is not the same as identifying the Nice People and the Mean People.  These may in fact be (I hate to say it) largely unrelated endeavors.

A serious book about activism, science, truth and justice would begin with these disquieting possibilities, and then explore from there.  (One example that book might look at: Dreger’s earlier non-nasty activism for intersex people has gotten stuff done.)  Dreger’s book instead stays in an overly cozy universe, where “fighting for good” and “defending her lovable buddies against the bad meanies” can never be conflicting goals.

“What if nasty activism is sometimes necessary to get the job done?  What if simply having both truth and justice on your side isn’t enough?”

I really want more serious treatment of this question from someone sensible. Obviously I really hope the answer is no, and I am tired of discourse from people who seem like they would actively prefer the answer to be yes (although maybe it’s only my bias making them seem that way.) But yeah, doe anyone know of any decent book-length discussions of the issue which look at real-life situations?

The answer is no because the moment you decide that nasty activism is necessary to get the job done you completely lose the capacity to distinguish “cases when nasty activism is a distasteful necessity” from “cases where nasty activism can be used to punish people for saying things that make me upset, or just for the crime of being unpopular and perceptible to me.”

This is proving too much. If one contrasts nasty activism to violence, one could say the exact same thing, and to some degree it’s quite true (PoliceMob being a very good example of insufficiently restrained violence, contrast with BadSJMob), but the actually correct answer would probably be “it’s possible to use it usefully, but most of the time it’s a bad idea and completely abstaining from it is way less likely to be harmful than using it indiscriminately”.

TL;DR and a fucking massive disclaimer to not get this misunderstood and misrepresented by everyone: I think most nastiness is excessive and unwarranted, but consider it at least possibly excusable in some situations where people are reacting to sufficiently shitty things, and Bailey is up there in the list of “those few cases where nastiness and extremism might be okay”, along with the likes of Judge Rotenberg Centre etc.; and it’s really shitty that if I say “Bailey is terrible, scorn him”, some asshole somewhere will take it as endorsement of heaping abuse on some kid whose only crime was not being up to date with their shibboleths.

(descriptions of dirty tricks, nasty sj, and other dark underbelly-of-the-world things below the cut)

There are ways to use nasty activism to Get Shit Done, but it causes casualties, and needs to be well-coordinated. If one is able to pull off a “good cop, bad cop” scheme it can be frighteningly effective. One could eg. throw a mob at a problem, position themself as The Person Who Can Make The Mob Go Away, and extract concessions.

This could, when used in the right situation, on the right target, theoretically do more good than harm IF the mob can be pulled off effectively; the “protection racket” technique loses all its impact if paying doesn’t protect. And failing at that seems to be the standard mistake of people using nasty activism; there’s no point in giving concessions if the mob will keep heaping on the abuse anyway. And it probably works best in policing those who basically agree with the ideas to begin with, but fail at applying them, because then it’s coming from one’s “own side” and has something to stand on, instead of being outsiders trying to make people conform to arbitrary rules.

Then there’s the alternative technique of simply seeking to destroy those who do harmful enough things, the one that has been pulled on Bailey. One needs to be even more careful with this one because its point is to not pull off the mob (and thus it’s way easier to (=over)use) since no sufficient concessions could realistically be extracted anyway.

Now, there’s a pretty clear and easy bright line that one should never initiate violence, or nasty activism, and it works really well in practice. Thus, pulling the mob on Bailey can be seen as victimizing an innocent truth-seeker. However, this disregards the way Bailey’s work is effectively doing the same thing as nasty activism, in the sense of being thoroughly wrong in a way which severely blurs the line between incompetence and malice. Thus, the trans community is (rightfully, imo) perceiving itself as under attack by people like Bailey, and retaliating to nastiness with nastiness, the rightfulness of the extent and precise methods of which is the thing I consider open for debate.

It would be lovely to be able to say that direct nastiness should never be used, but this completely ignores the way Bailey is in a position to cause a lot of indirect nastiness with his (incompetence || malice). Our lives are subject to countless forms of control by outsiders, and their perceptions of us are determined to a large degree by the writings of popular hacks like Bailey, who play (knowingly or not) to the biases of the cis audience, instead of providing accurate information.

If we lived in a libertarian utopia where people actually could trust that they won’t get killed for someone thinking they’re an “autogynephile”, or that their right to bodily autonomy wouldn’t be subjected to popular approval in GICs and bathroom bills, I would be more sympathetic to the idea that even the most horrible argument in the world only ever gets calm and polite counter-argument, not nastiness. Unfortunately we don’t live in a libertarian utopia, and the things Bailey et al say are very harmful to actually existing people, and thus the culpability for the Initiation of Nastiness lies at least partially on Bailey’s side.

I suppose it would be politically correct for me to say that I feel bad for Bailey, but frankly, I don’t shed a single tear for him. I’m a convicted criminal and have spent years battling depression caused by democratic application of the principles Bailey et al serve to uphold, and thus I can’t really be arsed to condemn anyone heaping abuse on him, other than the standard “oh it would be really nice if people didn’t (implied “have to”) do these things”. Leave out the death threats and the hurting third parties thing just out of pure principle, but otherwise my position on Bailey is 100% scorn him, his “science” is bad and he should feel bad.

Politicians, bureaucrats, clueless “scientists”, doctors at GICs, etc., they are Harmful and I’d love to be running a trans mafia that could threaten to destroy them if they hurt people they have nonconsensual power and authority over. I’m down here, oftentimes mopping up the broken people the GICs spit out, to prevent some of them from turning into “literally broken people the trains’ wheels spit out and who need to be literally mopped up” and I can tell you it’s fucking not pretty down here and the only thing that stops me from destroying the gatekeepers is the fact that I have neither the ability to do so without great harm to myself or innocent people, nor a better alternative to offer because the state has literally banned free-as-in-speech transgender clinics (or any kind of free-as-in-speech medicine at all, but there’s a specific piece of legislation extra banning the monopoly GICs’ competition just to be sure).

And here’s a longer takedown on how exactly the stuff is both wrong and harmful: http://genderanalysis.net/2016/04/alice-dreger-autogynephilia-and-the-misrepresentation-of-trans-sexualities-book-review-galileos-middle-finger/

2 weeks ago · tagged #nastiness cw #transmisogyny cw #cissexism cw #suicide cw #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 54 notes · source: nostalgebraist · .permalink

  1. socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from lovestwell and added:
    And I think there’s a big difference in this. Writing a blog post is one thing, writing a really popular book and being...
  2. lovestwell reblogged this from nostalgebraist and added:
    You’re drawing a distinction between science and everything else that I don’t subscribe to, and which I did not...
  3. nostalgebraist reblogged this from lovestwell
  4. laropasucia reblogged this from veronicastraszh
  5. veronicastraszh reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin
  6. brazenautomaton reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:
    I would agree with the same thing about violence. That is why every revolution devolves to shit so quickly. But there’s,...
  7. not-even-even said: books I don’t know, but I seriously doubt that, say, any dictatorship could be dismantled by nice and pleasant activism.