aprilwitching asked: like 4.5 - 5 or something, at a glance. more bc i happen to fall into some "broadly true of this demographic" categories than bc i read the internet stuff you guys like or am a transhumanist or libertarian or agree with you on most ideological points or anything like that (i do softcore refuse to identify with political labels, frex, but it's out of resounding i-don't-give-a-damn-itis rather than contrarianism or believing i have some hot new boundary-busting take on it all)
Yeah I went back and did the math, and it’s possible to be labeled as “Very Rationalist Adjacent” merely by being a sufficiently queer person in their early twenties. Does this mean that Rationalists and SJWs are on the same team after all????
Some background assumptions apply. Offer void outside the diaspora tumblrs. I could’ve added a bunch of tests to check the assumptions, but this is tumblr, not rspec, so I didn’t.
But now that we’re on the topic…
So there’s this idea that a lot of the things we take for granted are actually pretty terrible and should not be that way…
and that what we think is simple and obvious, isn’t…
and that we could have a dramatically better society if we fixed certain systematic issues…
that are extremely deep-ingrained in people’s brains and hard to eradicate…
and thus most people who loudly cheer for their eradication still fail to actually achieve substantial progress…
and doing it carelessly makes one just fall into an uncanny valley of “even worse off than before trying”…
and if progress is made, some of it is easily internalized and becomes absolutely obvious, while other forms require constant pumping against entropy…
and that successfully doing such things, in an environment which doesn’t have social structures and institutions rewarding actually getting it right and offering clear actionable strategies for achieving it, is really difficult and probably tragically out of reach for huge amounts of people…
but when people and communities actually succeed in it they create significant value for people and enable new forms of human flourishing…
and that the people flocking into those communities tend to disproportionately be those who are the most hurt by such things and able to recognize them…
and it reliably ends up generating certain insights that are similar with the insights another idea that shares such characteristics ends up generating…
…then the idea that perhaps they might actually have something in common and might benefit from examining each other’s claims and ideas and insights for whatever might be useful because they share the universe they operate in and some of the goals they work towards…
I think effective social justice would focus much more than conventional social justice on
1) cause prioritization: there are lots of oppressive power structures and lots of people impacted by them. It seems like the kinds of oppression that get the most attention are going to be those that impact relatively privileged people (because they’re best at discussing in social justice terms the ways that they’ve been harmed, they have access to SJ discourse and SJ spaces, etcetera). See in particular the underdiscussion of class and education privilege in SJ communities. But it’s not as simple as ‘which oppressive system does the most harm’ because of:
2) tractability: A big effective altruist principle is that you don’t tackle the problem that kills the most people, you tackle the problem where you can take strides most rapidly. That often means looking at underserved groups and understudied problems. Heart disease kills tons of people, but it’s not a good EA cause because it mostly affects older Western adults and as a result already has lots of money being thrown at it. Schistosomiasis mostly affects poor children in Asia, Africa and South America, so there’s not much money being spent on it.
Similarly, in social justice, some problems seem much more tractable than others. Abortion is an incredibly important problem, but a very intractable one - we’ve been fighting for fifty years and the landscape has barely changed. Gay rights affects fewer people but turned out to be way more tractable - we’ve achieved a mass shift in public opinion. Which causes are tractable and which aren’t, and how does this affect where we ought to spend our energy? I don’t know, but I’d be really excited for some people to start researching/thinking/writing about this.
3) healthy community norms: when you’re trying to change the world, it’s worth explicitly building a community you expect to be strong enough to handle the blowback, support and protect its own members, and learn from and correct its own mistakes. Effective altruism tries to do this by talking about what has worked for us in building successful communities, practicing good discourse habits and by rewarding and circulating good criticisms of effective altruism. Some ways in which we fail to do this, I think, are by expecting very high standards of argumentation from critics, by getting tied up in nonproductive discussions, and by politicizing some disagreements.
I think effective social justice would need drastically different community norms from standard social justice. It would need to find the balance between welcoming people who disagree with it on some points while also being a space whose members don’t feel like their right to exist is questioned. It would need to figure out how to exclude the toxic and abusive people who thrive in tumblr social justice while not ostracizing anyone who makes a mistake. It would need to manage lots and lots of competing access needs. The best way to do this would be to start small, with communities aspiring to being kinder, intellectually careful, effective spaces, and to report back frequently on what challenges we’ve encountered and how we’ve reasoned about them and how we expect to learn and improve.
4) checking whether what you’re doing works: A while ago, when the protests were happening in Baltimore, several of my friends posted that they felt helpless and were wondering ‘what works?’ I didn’t have anything to tell them. Because the thing is, we don’t really know. Do TV ads change minds? Does door-to-door canvassing? Does confronting your bigoted friends and relatives? Sharing information on Facebook? Donating directly to people in need? We don’t know. All of these things are good, but if you’re poor or have limited free time and want to do the thing that matters most, we have no idea where you can make your voice heard the loudest.
Effective altruists are currently conducting a mass double-blind randomized trial on the effect of Facebook ads on changing peoples’ behavior and beliefs. I want to see effective social justice doing the same thing. I want to be able to say, “the best thing you can do if you live in the U.S. is show up in your Senator’s office” or “we expect that if you share this on your Facebook feed, ten more people will read this article and people who read this article express, a month later, 5% more support for anti-discrimination laws”.
"Frankly, I don’t see why we should subsidize sexless men that women don’t like. If you’re that much of a loser and you’re going to try to hold the world hostage with threats of violence if you can’t get a date, we should probably execute you or at least do everything possible to make sure you can’t reproduce."
To be fair, I very much doubt that billions of men would ever wind up involuntarily celibate.
On the other hand, this seems… incredibly unsympathetic to involuntarily celibate people? I do not think it is kind to refer to involuntarily celibate people as “losers” or “men that women don’t like” (IME, most involuntarily celibate people’s problem has nothing to do with attractiveness and is mostly the product of shyness). Threats of violence do not lead to the death penalty in any civilized country. While some involuntarily celibate people are obnoxious, it’s important to note that long-term loneliness fucks people up. Humans are social animals; a fulfilling social life– which the obnoxious involuntarily celibate people do not have– is a basic need as much as food. They deserve our sympathy, not our condemnation. The whole thing smacks of hurting people because they’re weak and I don’t like it.
Endorsed. Also, OP? Literally every expression of Objectivism like this makes people like it less. Whether it’s poor people as in your usual schtick, lonely people as perhaps less expected, etc. Notice the parallels. Maybe, just maybe there are better responses then smugly going, “None of my business la la la”.
Of course, there is a perfectly consistent position that just because we shouldn’t oppress poly people doesn’t mean that it’s not a tragedy that a lot of people end up incel.
For example, homelessness. I don’t think there is anything wrong in using the lowest necessary amount of force to evict a homeless person who tries to nonconsensually place themselves as one’s roommate, or that a homeless person shouting “someone who doesn’t want to be my roommate become my roommate anyway or I will do violence to innocent people aka. anyone except me” deserves a roommate (if anything, I’d bump them down on the waiting list really hard), or that we should scorn people who have five roommates but don’t take a single homeless person to live with them; but I do think that we should try to minimize homelessness in ways that don’t coerce people to be roommates with people they don’t want to be roommates with, such as by replacing bullshit welfare with UBI, reducing artificial limits on the housing supply that render housing inaffordable, etc.
An autonomy-respecting response would be “no, you don’t get to institute monogamy; if you want people to have partners, figure out a way to make them attractive to partners so you don’t need to coerce anyone to be their partners as people would partner with them voluntarily”.
If the PUA and redpill movements were fixed into “a social skills, self-respect, and better ability to satisfy one’s preferences for shy men movement” without the “women are shitty people, scorn dem” part, it would be a very good development. If mainstream feminists stopped ignoring the fact that there are a lot of “incels” who aren’t the shitty people they think of when they hear “incel”, it would be a very good development. If we managed to break down the expectations of hegemonic masculinity that render men who fail at them insecure, low-self-esteemed, and unattractive, it would be a very good development. Breaking down ableism, classism, heterosexism, and other unjust social biases and normativities; and decriminalizing sex work so that people who only want sex don’t need to hoard the relationship opportunities so much, etc. would be very good developments.
Of course, such ways of addressing the issue require thinking while coercive ways (such as “let’s just scorn non-monogamous people” or “let’s just scorn involuntarily celibate people because it’s not like "policy debates shouldn’t appear one-sided” is a Thing in the diaspora or anything" because most coercion is not state coercion) are easy; just take away other peoples’ choice until you get the result you want. And that’s why I have way more respect for someone trying to figure out a clever way to fix social problems with voluntary action, than for the person advocating a coercive solution.
Remember, if a man gets a woman pregnant and he doesn’t want that kid it’s his responsibility anyway. If she wants to keep it, he’s fucked. He needs to pay even if he was tricked into fatherhood. If he doesn’t pay he goes to jail. He shoulda kept it in his pants, amiright?
If a woman gets pregnant, gives birth, and doesn’t want the kid there’s a box she can drop the baby into and she’s immediately relieved of all responsibility. She never even has to tell the father because fuck that dude. He doesn’t have a right to his spawn unless she wants that sweet sweet child support check.
*Equality*
Hey, this is an option that might discourage some abortion. I say good.
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a bad idea, it’s certainly better than a dumpster. It just shows you only have options if you are the mother.
But that’s already taking it for granted (accurately, mind) that the mother is the one stuck with the baby if neither party wants it. A man can throw a baby in a baby box as easily as a woman. Go ahead, try it! (Do not actually try this.)
No he can’t, because the state will send men with guns to ransom or kidnap him if the baby’s mother is known and is on board with the “kidnapping and/or ransom” plan instead of the “put baby in box” plan.
If we as a society want babies to be taken care of, we give money to them (for use by their parents/guardians for their benefit) instead of ransoming people based on the copenhagen interpretation of ethics (your gametes were involved, it’s your responsibility now kthxbye). Or if we want to enforce contracts of “yeah, I totally will support you with the baby” then we should actually require such contracts to be consensually established instead of assuming that sex is inevitably implied consent to such with no way out even if participants explicitly agree.
We wouldn’t force people to take the risk of having to marry just for having sex, and consider those who try to enforce such things to be utter barbarians, so why would we expose people to the risk of losing substantial amounts of money for 18 years as the price of having sex?
I don’t have any strong opinions on policy here, though my intuitions aren’t too far from your own. My comments are limited to whether baby dumpsters amnesty (specifically) is unfair to men (specifically,) not anything else.
“No he can’t, because the state will send men with guns to ransom or kidnap him if the baby’s mother is known and is on board with the “kidnapping and/or ransom” plan instead of the “put baby in box” plan.”
But the same applies in reverse. If a legally recognized father found out that his child had been thrown into a dumpster by the child’s mother, you don’t think he could arrange to have her kidnapped?
I don’t know the specifics; probably yes, although I don’t know if she would be kidnapped and/or ransomed if she just renounced her custody and gave it solely to the father; it might be that the law is equally unfair in theory and simply lopsided in practice and she would have to pay, or it could be that the law actually works differently because I wouldn’t put such ass-backwardness beyond the capability of any american jurisdiction.
Remember, if a man gets a woman pregnant and he doesn’t want that kid it’s his responsibility anyway. If she wants to keep it, he’s fucked. He needs to pay even if he was tricked into fatherhood. If he doesn’t pay he goes to jail. He shoulda kept it in his pants, amiright?
If a woman gets pregnant, gives birth, and doesn’t want the kid there’s a box she can drop the baby into and she’s immediately relieved of all responsibility. She never even has to tell the father because fuck that dude. He doesn’t have a right to his spawn unless she wants that sweet sweet child support check.
*Equality*
Hey, this is an option that might discourage some abortion. I say good.
I don’t think anyone is saying it’s a bad idea, it’s certainly better than a dumpster. It just shows you only have options if you are the mother.
But that’s already taking it for granted (accurately, mind) that the mother is the one stuck with the baby if neither party wants it. A man can throw a baby in a baby box as easily as a woman. Go ahead, try it! (Do not actually try this.)
No he can’t, because the state will send men with guns to ransom or kidnap him if the baby’s mother is known and is on board with the “kidnapping and/or ransom” plan instead of the “put baby in box” plan.
If we as a society want babies to be taken care of, we give money to them (for use by their parents/guardians for their benefit) instead of ransoming people based on the copenhagen interpretation of ethics (your gametes were involved, it’s your responsibility now kthxbye). Or if we want to enforce contracts of “yeah, I totally will support you with the baby” then we should actually require such contracts to be consensually established instead of assuming that sex is inevitably implied consent to such with no way out even if participants explicitly agree.
We wouldn’t force people to take the risk of having to marry just for having sex, and consider those who try to enforce such things to be utter barbarians, so why would we expose people to the risk of losing substantial amounts of money for 18 years as the price of having sex?
this asker has ALL the hallmarks of a trans girl who hasn’t realised she’s a girl and you decide to tell her she has no worth. cis women are fucking unbelievable.
this is so obviously a trans girl who doesn’t know she’s a girl. it reads like a girl who’s lost and doesn’t have the words to describe what she’s feeling. and she’s reaching out (do you know how hard that is?) to a woman for guidance coz she’s obviously struggling with it, as in, it’s not within her realm of understanding, and it’s OBVIOUS. what the fuck is wrong with cis women
Honestly, I’m not sure that this is a struggling trans woman. Like it could be, but it also comes off to me like a guy complaining about how he feels guilty for being a man and expecting a woman to coddle to him. From that stand point I get why OP, who I consider a friend btw, would respond that way. Though it is very true that this person could be trans.
what is with the idea that there are secret hypothetical trans girls everywhere every time some cis dude whines about misogyny existing (heck we don’t even know if the guy there is cis)
sorry but it’s just not reasonable or possible to interact with every cis dude in a way that keeps in mind that they might-secretly-be-a-trans-girl even though they’ve never made any indication of that and are actively being harmful and demanding coddling from women
Well said my friend. Well said. <3
Trans women are women, we are not men. Why the flying fuck would we give a shit about a bunch of dudes who think they deserve a pat on the back for basic decency? We’re desperately trying to NOT be perceived as men. Are you people for real?
“Why the flying fuck would we give a shit about a bunch of dudes who think they deserve a pat on the back for basic decency? We’re desperately trying to NOT be perceived as men
“
(Figure 1: the tumblr trans community)
I support and want to protect all fellow AMAB people, cis or trans or whatever, whenever they struggle and are hurt due to their gender and the way it’s treated. No exceptions. I even stand for the trans people who horrify me, like those above, because this is the awful selfish and short-sighted mentality that can be beaten into anyone by oppression and alienation. I am no angel myself, I know. But this hurts me, this hurts my friends, it might very well push some vulnerable people over the edge.
Y’all are saying vile and oppressive things, but I think you can be better. You ought to reevaluate your positions.
“I support and want to protect all fellow AMAB people, cis or trans or whatever, whenever they struggle and are hurt due to their gender and the way it’s treated.”
like do you realize how hideous that statement is what the fuck is wrong w/ this
I rest my case.
did you seriously tag this “misandry cw” and “not trans enough.” the asker isnt “trans enough” because theyre not fucking trans. your argument is fucking incoherent. this is incoherent nonsense. yes, a cis man feelin bad about misogyny isnt fuckin “trans enough” because he Isnt Fucking Trans. what the hell is wrong with you.
Yeah honestly this post is a mess. Like, he specifically identifies as a man throughout the entire post.
Let alone like people acting like “amab” is a good way of aggregating people. like that seems basically counter to the last forever of trans women’s activism.
Yeah when I first saw this, I thought, that seems likely to be an AMAB trans person who hasn’t figured it out yet. It would not surprise me in the least.
But it is unreasonable (and frankly disturbing) to expect women (cis or trans) to put up with every man’s entitled bullshit just on the off-chance that one of them might not *really* be a man. That’s… basically male entitlement to women all over again. And it’s not like this person being secretly trans would make this message in any way acceptable behavior.
If this person is trans, I really hope they figure it out and become less of an entitled ass. I know it helped me. In the meantime, lesbiancraft handled it perfectly and everyone else needs to leave her the fuck alone.
“Men have no inherent worth, that’s reserved for women.”
Consider: “Women have no inherent worth, that’s reserved for men.”
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
People have worth. Period. Full stop.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett:
“… Sin is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”
“But they start with thinking about people as things…”
The fact that the entire post sequence up to(and not including, to some extent) @multiheaded1793 actually happened is one of the things that fucking terrifies me about SJ. someone comes to you claiming to have depression symptoms and a lack of self-worth and asks if they do indeed have human worth and you say no, and the response is ‘maybe you do, but only if you’re a trans woman’ not ‘what the fuck we were fighting against people having their self worth revoked for facts about their gender’?! Seriously, is every damn movement doomed to metamorphose into their own version of ‘our enemies aren’t human’?
I suppose yes, unless the paladins of Everything Else keep a constant watchful vigil over everything.
I reject feminism as an ideology. It’s not just because I want no part of a movement that rejects the humanity of a self-identified male on the grounds that they are male, its because I think it’s important for me to tell feminist women that, to tell them that I think they’re wrong. (I’m assuming lesbiancraft is female). If there’s a type of feminism that is 100% onboard with males telling women they’re wrong, maybe I could get behind that, but it’d be a very odd type of feminism.
Hi, welcome to my steel feminism, we’re currently “only” properly controlling the meaning of “extreme” feminism in just one country (yes, that’s right, sometimes we “extremists” are better than the “moderates” because we apply our feminism _consistently_, even to men, instead of shying away from the conclusions our theory inevitably leads to), but we’re growing and actually quite influential under the surface.
It’s admittedly a common misconception that feminism is “female supremacy” but in actuality the community has, among other things, consistently expelled people who have tried to apply double standards in things like rape apologia, advocated for the abolition of double standards in military service (while it would be exaggerating to say nobody supports them, nobody is willing to say it out loud if they are because the consensus is overwhelmingly in favor or Actual Equality), literally cheered when services were established in Sweden to address the needs of men and other non-women who have been raped, acknowledged that according to the feminist definition of rape (based on consent, not penetration) the CDC’s latest statistics suggest around 45% of people who are raped nowadays are men and that this is a significant non-addressed humanitarian tragedy, utterly rejected moralistic approaches to sex work, etc.
The feminism you are talking of already exists, it’s not that odd, we just think “male” is more useful as an adjective, instead of a noun, that’s all, and if what you said is your true objection to [feminism as you currently understand it], then we would very gladly have you aboard because human worth knows no gender and neither does one’s gender act as the sole determinant of the correctness of one’s arguments.
this asker has ALL the hallmarks of a trans girl who hasn’t realised she’s a girl and you decide to tell her she has no worth. cis women are fucking unbelievable.
this is so obviously a trans girl who doesn’t know she’s a girl. it reads like a girl who’s lost and doesn’t have the words to describe what she’s feeling. and she’s reaching out (do you know how hard that is?) to a woman for guidance coz she’s obviously struggling with it, as in, it’s not within her realm of understanding, and it’s OBVIOUS. what the fuck is wrong with cis women
Honestly, I’m not sure that this is a struggling trans woman. Like it could be, but it also comes off to me like a guy complaining about how he feels guilty for being a man and expecting a woman to coddle to him. From that stand point I get why OP, who I consider a friend btw, would respond that way. Though it is very true that this person could be trans.
what is with the idea that there are secret hypothetical trans girls everywhere every time some cis dude whines about misogyny existing (heck we don’t even know if the guy there is cis)
sorry but it’s just not reasonable or possible to interact with every cis dude in a way that keeps in mind that they might-secretly-be-a-trans-girl even though they’ve never made any indication of that and are actively being harmful and demanding coddling from women
Well said my friend. Well said. <3
Trans women are women, we are not men. Why the flying fuck would we give a shit about a bunch of dudes who think they deserve a pat on the back for basic decency? We’re desperately trying to NOT be perceived as men. Are you people for real?
“Why the flying fuck would we give a shit about a bunch of dudes who think they deserve a pat on the back for basic decency? We’re desperately trying to NOT be perceived as men
“
(Figure 1: the tumblr trans community)
I support and want to protect all fellow AMAB people, cis or trans or whatever, whenever they struggle and are hurt due to their gender and the way it’s treated. No exceptions. I even stand for the trans people who horrify me, like those above, because this is the awful selfish and short-sighted mentality that can be beaten into anyone by oppression and alienation. I am no angel myself, I know. But this hurts me, this hurts my friends, it might very well push some vulnerable people over the edge.
Y’all are saying vile and oppressive things, but I think you can be better. You ought to reevaluate your positions.
“I support and want to protect all fellow AMAB people, cis or trans or whatever, whenever they struggle and are hurt due to their gender and the way it’s treated.”
like do you realize how hideous that statement is what the fuck is wrong w/ this
I rest my case.
did you seriously tag this “misandry cw” and “not trans enough.” the asker isnt “trans enough” because theyre not fucking trans. your argument is fucking incoherent. this is incoherent nonsense. yes, a cis man feelin bad about misogyny isnt fuckin “trans enough” because he Isnt Fucking Trans. what the hell is wrong with you.
Yeah honestly this post is a mess. Like, he specifically identifies as a man throughout the entire post.
Let alone like people acting like “amab” is a good way of aggregating people. like that seems basically counter to the last forever of trans women’s activism.
Yeah when I first saw this, I thought, that seems likely to be an AMAB trans person who hasn’t figured it out yet. It would not surprise me in the least.
But it is unreasonable (and frankly disturbing) to expect women (cis or trans) to put up with every man’s entitled bullshit just on the off-chance that one of them might not *really* be a man. That’s… basically male entitlement to women all over again. And it’s not like this person being secretly trans would make this message in any way acceptable behavior.
If this person is trans, I really hope they figure it out and become less of an entitled ass. I know it helped me. In the meantime, lesbiancraft handled it perfectly and everyone else needs to leave her the fuck alone.
“Men have no inherent worth, that’s reserved for women.”
Consider: “Women have no inherent worth, that’s reserved for men.”
Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.
People have worth. Period. Full stop.
To paraphrase Terry Pratchett:
“… Sin is when you treat people as things. Including yourself. That’s what sin is.”
“It’s a lot more complicated than that–”
“No it ain’t. When people say things are a lot more complicated than that, they means they’re getting worried that they won’t like the truth. People as things, that’s where it starts.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are worse crimes-”
“But they start with thinking about people as things…”
The fact that the entire post sequence up to(and not including, to some extent) @multiheaded1793 actually happened is one of the things that fucking terrifies me about SJ. someone comes to you claiming to have depression symptoms and a lack of self-worth and asks if they do indeed have human worth and you say no, and the response is ‘maybe you do, but only if you’re a trans woman’ not ‘what the fuck we were fighting against people having their self worth revoked for facts about their gender’?! Seriously, is every damn movement doomed to metamorphose into their own version of ‘our enemies aren’t human’?
I suppose yes, unless the paladins of Everything Else keep a constant watchful vigil over everything.
Okay it’s late but…what part of this is TERF-y? Like, trans-positive feminists generally seem like they tend to agree with this, at least when talking about cis people? The TERF claim seems to take things further with “socialization can never be modified or unlearned, and is determined entirely by ASAB” or something like that.
this isn’t TERFy at all.
Yeah, this is not TERFy. The last sentence is pretty much a description of how trans socialization works for many, many people: that boy who was mistakenly assigned female at birth is somewhat likely to have his perception be shaped so that he feels wrestling is a part of his gender, even if he himself wasn’t encouraged to wrestle because of mistaken assignment. Or he may have discovered the joys of dresses and then have to wrestle with the fact that he likes dresses but is 100% A Guy Who Wants To Be Seen As A Guy (I know something like several such people) and because everyone else thinks dresses are not!Guy things he will have problems with those wants. Or anything in between.
So there’s this thing that happens when people are in a group, especially when that group is dedicated to feminism or SJ, where people decide that the outgroup has bad dynamics and they’re going to reject them.
A few examples: “Men are privileged in our society, therefore, we’re going to make sure that women do most of the talking and planning in this group. Male allies can listen and agree, but mustn’t talk over the women.” “Allistic people’s social norms are bullshit, we’re going to work in accordance with the social norms that feel right for autistic people like us, and allistic people who feel uncomfortable can piss off.” “We’re completely opting out of binary gender, people can identify as anything and use any pronouns they like, and if people won’t use my nounself pronouns, they’re rude.”
Now let me be clear: I think this is a value-neutral thing. It’s not bad to reject outgroup norms in favour of your ingroup, and it’s not necessarily bad to expect people interacting with your ingroup to abide by your outgroup’s norms. For example, if your ingroup has a norm of expecting rational, coherent arguments, and someone comes in spewing badly-formed Nazi apologism, no one is going to be too happy. But I think some varieties of feminism have dominated the landscape of the left long enough that they’ve changed the norms to the point where they’re Not Okay anymore.
For example:
“It is acceptable to say things like ‘men are worthless and disgusting’, or even ‘kill all men’, as long as I say after the fact that I was joking. Never mind that it hurts men of colour, trans men, depressed men, and men with scrupulosity issues.”.
“Male allies are never allowed to contribute to discussion or debate, because they have nothing of value to say.”
“Trans women are not really women and are going to be excluded from all women’s spaces (or even worse: ‘are even more disgusting than cis men and [insert grossness here]”. Or the flipside of that, “trans women are more important than cis woman, should have final say in all discussions about what it means to be a woman or what it means to be trans, and are never wrong, even when they’re saying things that are patently false”.
“People need to fuck people who they’re not attracted to, or they’re transphobic.”
“Trans men are worse than cis men because they chose to take on masculinity and should [insert grossness here]”, or, conversely, “trans men are more pure than cis men because they weren’t raised with male privilege, they’re not really men, and thus are allowed to talk because they’re not icky cis men.”
“It’s acceptable to use ableist slurs, fat-shaming, various other forms of body-shaming, and even (if the person saying these things is truly terrible) suicide baiting, as long as it’s against nerdy cis men.”
“Consent ethics is so intuitive that anyone can understand it and it’s a requirement of being a decent person… what do you mean you’re autistic?! What do you mean that social rules aren’t intuitive to you and you need explanation on how to follow them? I don’t need to explain myself to you, creep!”
And so on, and so on, and so on.
Sometimes it feels like, in trying to fight oppression and discrimination, we have gone too far in the exact opposite direction. Within our own communities, we’re perpetuating dynamics that are the exact opposite of the ones we’ve been fighting, where certain people don’t get to talk because of their genitalia or their trans status.
Let me be clear, I think the dynamics we’re trying to get rid of still exist in the outside world- I mean, the backlash to the two new Star Wars movies having female leads is enough to prove that.
But within the community? You’ve got trans guys afraid to come out because they know that they’ll be ripped to shreds by angry people- or worse, feeling guilty about being trans because they’re afraid identifying as a dude will make them a bad person. You’ve got cis guys- especially gender non-conforming cis guys- feeling guilty and disgusting about who and what they are, with no way to change it and no way to tell people what they’re doing is not okay, and unscrupulous people like monetizeyourcat trying to get them to transition for political reasons. You’ve got people playing Oppression Olympics just to be heard, people lying about their gender or trans status or race so that people will listen to them, abusers using their status as oppressed victims to make their Less Oppressed partners look bad… it’s a mess.
Determining a hierarchy of who gets to talk and who doesn’t, perpetuating violent ableism, judging people’s worth based on their genitals or appearance, telling people that they should die based on things they can’t help- aren’t these the things we’re trying to fight? Isn’t the goal to give everyone a fighting chance to be heard?
Previously guilty to a couple of these, nowadays working to eradicate them all.
I mean I’ve seen videos where they talk to little kids and it’s like hey Sally what do you think about the wage gap? and Billy you should really stop contributing to rape culture, don’t you think? and hey they’re eight years old, sure it helps to teach about communication and consent etc. but these kids are going to be convinced that gender is a warzone before they hit puberty, let alone college.
unsurprising that an increasing number say fuck this I’m out, nb4life y’all
just look at the incentives
you say that like “nonbinary” or “agender” is truly neutral
i would guess enbies are, on average, more supportive of intersectional feminism than either men or women
Speaking as a supporter of intersectional feminism, this makes perfect sense as a central point of intersectional feminism is to stop the war and establish a fair peace treaty. Of course there are those career guerrillas who are incentivized to see the war going on because they can’t imagine anything else, but the rest of us are actually trying to solve the problems.
There’s promethean-steel-feminism!intersectional feminism, and then there’s, uh, “intersectional” “feminism”. I feel that nonbinarity is correlated somewhat with the latter, unfortunately. Which is definitely a faction.
The other dimension that possibly divides different kinds of feminists is the relative focus on gender abolitionism. On the one hand, everyone is treated equally if gender does not exist. On the other, people with strong gender identities, and trans people who want to pass/express their strong gender identity with coded body language, clothing, etc – can’t. I imagine cis-by-default, nonbinary, and agender people would be more likely to support the first, while trans people would be more likely to support the second.
And all these being under the umbrella of intersectional feminism.
Me bridging gaps between different groups seems to be a thing, and as a non-binary trans person my gender abolitionism is basically gender pluralism taken to its logical conclusion.
I don’t expect gender to stop existing, but it can probably be transformed into unrecognizability by morphological freedom and abolishing cultural prescriptiveness.
For every single thing in hard gender some trans people benefit from, some other trans people suffer from it just as well, and people who want to be “the kind of people who wear skirts and like flowers and have a certain kind of body language” can still be that kind of people even if we destroy the idea that trans women aren’t women if they wear pants. There are numerous people with strong gender identities who can’t be perceived as members of their gender if said gender is assumed to consist of cultural things that are personally incompatible with them.
A huge number of trans people seem to be basically “gender is bullshit, I’m definitely a woman and people should respect that, but I don’t want to have to suffer all the social prescriptions to prove it, I want to be an individual person damnit not a role (still 100% woman though you don’t take that away from me)” and I can’t see how they would be incompatible with postgender hyperpluralist morphological freedom utopia which allows people to specify their gender as a modifier which is not intrinsically linked to their clothes/body language/etc. and most importantly not invalidated by not having the right kind of clothes/body language/etc.
I understand that in our current cistem dystopia some women would be misgendered as men if men wearing skirts was more normal, but that isn’t a flaw in “men wearing skirts was more normal” but rather in “would be misgendered if”. Assholes not respecting people’s genders is the problem, and trying to shift around the disrespect (”don’t invalidate us, invalidate those other women instead!”) doesn’t help, eradicating the disrespect does. That’s what must be done. Trying to survive in the cistem is a necessity I will not condemn, but trying to maintain the cistem of disrespecting people’s genders is a violation of others’ self-determination and gender freedom, and as a free and open source gender advocate I will not tolerate it.
This is what I want to abolish. The disrespect and the invalidation and the idea that people aren’t allowed to choose. Another’s right to choose is not a violation of my gender freedom; my attempt to impose my views on gender upon them would be.
