And the Bailey affair continues…
Fucking huge extra disclaimer for those incredibly dense people who haven’t picked up on it yet:
I don’t harass people. Not even Bailey. In fact, I think the correct choice for people in such situations is to not harass people; even if some political tit-for-tatting were warranted (most of the time it even isn’t), other people are already doing enough of it (most likely way too much).
But I sometimes don’t condemn people who do, because actively condemning is a choice as well. Rationalists are the discourse equivalent of peacekeepers, and knowing when to intervene, how, and which side benefits from it, is relevant. I won’t waste time and effort rushing to the principled defense of Bailey (although I’d possibly rush to a principled defense of people whose actions are less over the line), as people are doing enough of it already.
@slatestarscratchpad reblogged a previous post of mine with the following commentary:
“Digusting pervert” is your term, not Bailey’s. Bailey said that a phenomenon *has a basis in sexuality*. If you think anybody who does something for sexual reasons is a disgusting pervert, that’s your problem and not his.
And when the public hears “has a basis in sexuality” they will think “disgusting perverts”. Partially because they already think trans women are disgusting perverts to begin with. I find this absurd coming from the person who literally wrote “The Virtue of Silence”. And from the person who wanted people to shut up about NrxaB for PR concerns.
Your idea that he is calling anybody a liar is equally unfounded. One of the most basic ideas of psychology and psychiatry is that people don’t necessarily know their own minds. Sometimes this can become very complicated. For example, some people have pseudoseizures - seizures which are not caused by epilepsy, which occur at moments when they need to get out of a situation quickly, and which are what most people would consider “fake” - but most neurologists believe this is not conscious dissembling but the subconscious mind responding to stress in the best way it knows how.
A lot of science involves attributing behavior to people who might not approve of those attributions. For example, many people claim that homophobes are secretly gay. The evidence for this is currently mixed. I assume some homophobes are angry about this - should they be able to harass, doxx, and try to fire the scientists who think this? Some people use Implicit Association Tests to show that lots of people who don’t think they’re racist are actually racist; these tests have recently been found to be sketchy. Should all the scientists who supported them be killed? Or should we just turn their lives into a living hell? Why even have psychology at this point?
Bailey’s book is not virtuous science. It’s politics. It’s a deliberate attempt to push an idea to the mainstream, not via the usual procedures which have institutional restraints on them, but by specifically routing around those restraints.
I’ll just quote the book a bit:
Heterosexual men who want to be women are not naturally feminine; there is no sense in which they have women’s souls. What they do have is fascinating, but even they have rarely discussed it openly. One cannot understand transsexualism without studying transsexuals’ sexuality. Transsexuals lead remarkable sex lives. Those who love men become women to attract them. Those who love women become the women they love. Although transsexuals are cultural hot commodities right now, writers have been either too shallow or too squeamish to give transsexual sexuality the attention it deserves. No longer.
Most people—even those who have never met a transsexual— know the standard story of men who want to be women: “Since I can remember, I have always felt as if I were a member of the other sex. I have felt like a freak with this body and detest my penis. I must get sex reassignment surgery (a “sex change operation”) in order to match my external body with my internal mind.” But the truth is much more interesting than the standard story
Two different types of men change their sex. To anyone who examines them closely, they are quite dissimilar, in their histories, their motivations, their degree of femininity, their demographics, and even the way they look.
To anyone who has seen members of both types and who has learned to ask the right kinds of questions, it is easy to tell them apart.
The most interesting reason why most people do not realize that there are two types of transsexuals is that members of one type sometimes misrepresent themselves as members of the other. I will get more specific later, but for now, it is enough to say that they are often silent about their true motivation and instead tell stories about themselves that are misleading and, in important respects, false.
The two types of transsexuals who begin life as males are called homosexual and autogynephilic. Once understood, these names are appropriate. Succinctly put, homosexual male-to-female transsexuals are extremely feminine gay men, and autogynephilic transsexuals are men erotically obsessed with the image of themselves as women.
Although some elements of Cher’s story are very common to this kind of transsexual (especially the erotic cross-dressing), others (such as the wearing of fake vaginas) are unique to her. At least I have never met other transsexuals who admitted to this. Nevertheless, I think that Cher is a wonderful example of the second kind of transsexualism, less because she is representative than because she openly and floridly exemplifies the essential feature of this type, which is autogynephilia
In my experience, most laypeople are happy to accept the “I’m a woman in a man’s body” narrative, and don’t really want to know about autogynephilia—even though the preferred narrative is misleading and it is impossible to understand nonhomosexual transsexualism without autogynephilia. When I have tried to educate journalists who have called me as an expert on transsexualism, they have reacted uncomfortably. One said: “We just can’t put that into a family newspaper.” Perhaps not, but then they can’t print the truth.
There is one more reason why many autogynephiles provide misleading information about themselves that is different than outright lying. It has to do with obsession. Something about autogynephilia creates a need not only to enact a feminine self, but also to actually believe in her
True acceptance of the transgendered requires that we truly understand who they are.
According to this narrative, transsexuals want to change their sex because their sense of self disagrees with their bodies, not because they have any unusual sexual preferences that depend on a sex change. While the first part of this explanation sometimes may be true, the latter is not. It should be clear by now that the “gender, not sex” part of the transsexual narrative is false for autogynephiles
I have devised a set of rules that should work even for the novice (though admittedly, I have not tested them). Start at zero. Ask each question, and if the answer is “Yes,” add the number (+1 or -1) next to the question. If the sum gets to +3, stop; the transsexual you’re talking to is autogynephilic. If the sum gets to -3, she is homosexual.
This isn’t science. This is politics. This is condescending bullshit from someone who thinks he’s “helping” and, thanks to his high status in society, can get away with it without regard for the consequences he’s causing. And the scientific parts are bad and certainly do not warrant such a confident presentation in the form of a confused amateur ethnography. Even when accounting for the fact that this was written 10 years ago. For example, did nobody think to check cis women for autogynephilia too, to check on whether they’re actually picking up just regular common female sexuality instead of some “paraphilia”? Or maybe consider the fact that trans women exist outside gay bars and support groups, and that the ones found in those might not be representative of the whole population?
Even if I disregard all this “women are men” stuff and focus on the object-level claims instead of shibboleths, this has “bullshit alert” scrawled all over it. When you claim people are obsessed with something, that they are lying to themselves and everyone else, that they sort really neatly into two categories, etc. you better have some really solid evidence and most importantly you need to show that you understand the alternative claims and are actually able to rule them out with sufficient confidence. And when you sort neatly, it introduces another level of irresponsibility because this stuff seldom works that way so you need to overcome an extra amount of prior skepticism. TMWWBQ did not demonstrate any of this.
Those people are getting away with terrible science because of the differential positions of trans people vs. academicians. It’s brutal, cynical status psychology. (Of course, Bailey isn’t thinking that he’s consciously doing a hack job, he just doesn’t feel the need to test his theories properly because there was no pressure to be scrupulous when dealing with trans people because people got away with all kinds of unbelievable bullshit.)
Many people claim that homophobes are secretly gay. And it’s one thing to do science and write something like “I observed a correlation with homophobic attitudes and signs of arousal from homoerotic material” and a completely different thing to write a book titled ‘The Man Who Hates His Sexuality: Why All People Who Dislike Homosexuals Are Secretly Gay’. Current evidence doesn’t warrant writing the latter, and if someone did it and it became really popular and widely accepted I’d consider it a big problem in the world and would express my disapproval in suitable contexts and be very understanding of why some people would react with nastiness. If you engage in outright memetic warfare, don’t complain if memetic warfare engages you.
I think Bailey’s theories are likely false, but science is full of false theories. The whole point of science is that we expect there to be dozens of false theories for every correct one, and the correct one will eventually win out. If everybody who proposes a false theory gets harassed, science can’t progress - and I’m sure that your harassers will be *super diligent* in making sure they only firebomb the homes of scientists whose theory is *genuinely false*.
And if you think anybody who attributes a phenomenon to something you don’t like deserves to be hurt and harassed, I think you’ve excluded yourself from the category of people who can discuss things maturely, and that any community that cares about epistemic integrity needs to exclude you for their own safety - not just the safety of their truth-orientation, but for the physical safety of their members. I think this is a super super super basic rule and I am surprised we cannot manage it.
I think there’s a significant confusion here. First of all, I’m not advocating firebombing anyone (Except the publishers of ‘The Nihilist’s Cookbook’ because when the entire human race is on the line I don’t give a shit. So people better not publish amateur-accessible guides to creating apocalyptic bioweapons.). And I’m not advocating that anyone should personally engage in this kind of activism on the margin, because what the world needs is less of it, not more. All I’m saying is that in a sufficiently shitty situation a thing that would otherwise be really shitty might be the least shitty option available, and that I cannot say with confidence that the world would’ve been a better place if Bailey hadn’t been reacted to with nastiness.
Obviously we’d all be better off in a world without nastiness.
And refraining from nastiness even when nastiness seems like a good idea is pragmatically a pretty good universal heuristic.
But in this utterly broken world there may be specific situations where some group engaging in nastiness would result in better outcomes than them abstaining from nastiness, even when accounting for the allure of the dark side. It would be highly suspicious that there would never ever be such a case, because nastiness is most closest analogous to violence and there are cases where violence is obviously the best answer.
And to continue the analogy, just because I recognize that violence is sometimes the least worst option doesn’t mean that in practice anyone would need to fear for their safety near me, because it’s effectively impossible that such a situation would actually arise in civil interaction between people who treat each other like people (self-defense being the most obvious candidate, which doesn’t have a clear equivalent on the nastiness side because nastiness is a lot more difficult to precisely define; but if you write a mean misrepresenting book about my ingroup, I’m going to write a mean misrepresenting book review about it).
But I can easily see ways by which nastiness could be used to improve the world. For example, if there was a sufficiently coordinated source of nastiness that could reliably retaliate against those who initiate nastiness without excessive bias in favor of specific sides, it might act to reduce the total nastiness. If doxxers got doxxed, if death-threaters got threatened, harassers harassed etc., we’d probably see less doxxing, threats and harassment. (In practice this is difficult because the smart ones always do it anon)
And when one looks at responses such as this one, the comparison to firebombing is even more baffling. Is James being nasty? Yes, absolutely. Is it an unwarranted level of nastiness? I can’t say so. It illuminates the way people experienced Bailey’s book, and some of the objections that didn’t get to academia because we don’t have access to academia. Such neat typologies are incredibly prone to confirmation bias. Bailey’s sample was ridiculously biased. Blanchard’s institution is notorious for abusiveness. Garbage in, garbage out, and in a better world TMWWBQ would’ve been dismissed as the trivial hack job it was, based on shitty interpretation of shitty data, but we don’t live in that better world and the book is a representative of a wider incredibly shitty trend where cis academicians talk over trans people, erasing all the inconvenient ones in pursuit of their pet theories, and systematically get away with it. And we pay the price, sometimes with our lives.
There’s a massive institutional failure here, and I can’t say that flawless politeness would necessarily be the best option. It would be nice if it was, but there’s a certain suspicious convenience to that idea. I have seen way too much of the phenomenon where polite objections get dismissed and ignored, and only anger gets people to notice that maybe there’s a problem (people are clockwork, and respond to emotional appeals differently than to abstract arguments, news at eleven), to believe that complete politeness by everyone would always be the best way to achieve things. (And once the angry ones have stretched the overton window, the polite ones suddenly appear reasonable and make compromises and everyone credits the polite ones when in reality it’s the nature of the “good cop, bad cop” game which got stuff done. Yes, I’m cynical, but my background is that of a politician, not an academician, and I find it a mistake to assume that the rules of academical ingroup civility would automatically be the most effective ones everywhere. Just like it would be a mistake to assume the rules of effective politics would be conductive for effective truthseeking. But effective truthseeking doesn’t happen in the arena and style TMWWBQ was made for and in.)
Against that backdrop, I can’t consider a nasty article to be a massive sin.
(And to make it clear, writing nasty articles and trying to get someone discredited is the type of nastiness I’m talking about, not doxxing or threats, because there’s a chance that this might’ve been missed by the illusion of transparency. (This is going to be really embarrassing if it all ends up having been about that one.))
2 weeks ago · tagged #discourse cw #nastiness cw · 12 notes · .permalink