This is a really large project and not one which I’m remotely qualified to figure out by myself, but here are a few disconnected thoughts:
For a lot of people especially in the early stages of coming out, it can be easier to say, e.g. “I want to be a man,” than “I am a man.” The prevailing narrative right now is that a trans man was always a man and doesn’t leave much room for desire or becoming. This narrative is convenient for people who can confidently assert a transgender identity, but it makes it hard for people to recognize the qualitative experience of dysphoria, which very frequently manifests as wanting to be rather than feeling like you already are. I don’t think it would be a good idea to replace one totalizing narrative with another one, but if there had been a little more pluralism in how we talk about these things I wouldn’t have had to worry if it was offensive to trans people for me to think about wanting to be a woman without being one.
Due to both community dynamics and the narratives we’ve settled on, it can be really difficult for someone to recognize commonalities between their experiences and trans people’s while thinking of themself as cis. Cis people (and “cis” people) are told that they can’t understand what it’s like to be trans, that transitioning would make them incredibly dysphoric and if they don’t realize that it’s because of a failure of introspection, that it’s offensive to even make the comparison. This results in closeted trans people assuming that their experiences can’t possibly be the same as trans people’s and therefore don’t constitute any evidence that they might be trans.
People keep throwing around the phrase “gender identity” like it refers to a specific qualitative experience, of course without describing what that experience feels like. (Giving such a description would be impossible because that’s not what gender identity is.) How the fuck is anyone supposed to know what their gender identity is when you put it that way?
There were some things that the trans student organization at my undergraduate university did that seemed really helpful in ways that I don’t see very often. It was explicitly for trans people “and allies”. I don’t think anyone showed up there because they were a cis person who just really wanted to support trans people, but it meant people could show up without being sure they were trans, or without being comfortable asserting a trans identity. People could make friends and work through questions, and if they eventually decided they were cis they could keep showing up and maintain their relationships and place in the community. A significant fraction of the organization body didn’t identify during the time of my involvement as anything other than the gender they’d been assigned at birth, and they weren’t considered lesser members of the community for it. This made it a place where people could figure things out in a low-stakes environment without worrying that their place in the community was predicated on eventually coming to the right answer. I don’t think that every trans community should be like this –it is understandable and legitimate for trans people to want a community where they don’t have to deal with cis people– but if there were more communities like that one I think it would be really helpful.
In the sphere of Yelling About Things On The Internet, I think it would be beneficial for trans people to engage more seriously with things cis people write about their experiences with gender. Existing engagement tends to involve grouping experiences into either “you’re cis so your experience has nothing to do with mine as a trans person” or “you’re actually trans, you just don’t know it yet”. Actually listening and examining points of similarity and difference without trying to fit everything into a particular narrative doesn’t happen very much. This would make those conversations more accessible to questioning people, and would also aid in the development of language to help clarify the qualitative differences in question. Obviously no one’s obligated to do this kind of outreach, but I think it could do a lot more good than some of the other things people devote their energy to, like arguing with TERFs.
A position I’ve been turning over in my head lately is that a lot of the problems this approach is designed to fix come from the intersection of trans advocacy and SJ culture generally. The basic framework of modern SJ is that there are a handful of binary “axes of privilege” that define the social dynamic and one’s position within it – usually three to six, but never enough – and someone on the “privileged” side of an axis isn’t permitted to contradict or criticize someone on the “unprivileged” side on anything pertaining to that axis. On the whole, people on the “privileged” side are expected to function as silent Pythagorean initiates sitting outside the curtain in any serious discussion of those issues.
I think this approach causes problems across the board, but I can recognize that in many situations it’s trying to solve an actual problem by giving the control of small, personalized spaces (those where this philosophy holds sway) to people who are disenfranchised in the broader social sphere. The problem with applying this logic to the trans/cis binary is that in terms of social perception and usually self-perception, everybody is presorted as cis. That’s what “cisgender” means. When you apply this sort of logic to a category like trans/cis, the effect is that it pushes most people toward the “privileged” category that isn’t allowed to talk about the subject and locks them there, except the ones who are so eager to be allowed to have an opinion on the subject that they’re prepared to adopt whatever affiliation gives them the right – who can be very nice people in their own way but aren’t really the group you want to select for.
I think it’s good to include allies in general for the reasons mentioned in the OP, but I think the word “allies” should never be used under any circumstances as it’s unsalvageable by this point. It’s functionally an idpol category of its own just for people who want to help out with other idpol categories. Setting aside the fact that “allies” have a justifiably bad reputation as making other people’s problems about themselves and being in it mainly for their own woke self-image, the term imports the entire narrative where you’re a pair of hands with no right to an opinion. I can’t imagine any context where I would ever be willing to identify as an “ally” of anything in the SJ sense on account of all the freight yoked to it, so a group that’s for “trans people and allies” is still a group where I’d feel unwelcome. If you want to know what would work to be genuinely inclusive: make it a community of shared interest or goals, rather than centering it around an identity group and assuming that the shared interest and goals will follow naturally.
I am unwilling to give up “allies” just yet, since many of the queer adults I know used to think they were “allies”; I just reject the “no right to an opinion” narrative. Everyone’s entitled to an opinion, they may not be entitled to a ton of deference to it.
But also, yes, I have known so many trans people who were severely harmed by the “cis people can’t have these thoughts or opinions” notion. Understanding that gender dysphoria is a thing most cis people can also experience is incredibly useful.
Most cis women, if they thought about “being a man”, would experience revulsion and horror. It would feel awful. Same for most cis men thinking about “being a woman”. That’s gender dysphoria. If you think you’re a cis woman, and you think about being a man, and it sounds awesome and comfortable? You’re probably not actually what we normally mean by “a cis woman”.
none of yall know how to just enjoy shit normally thats how we get ppl writing essays about how rick and morty is only for intellectuals and titty animes are actually feminist
check please is not itself a problematic entity beyond that fact that all art on some level is problematic. however i think some of the culture that its fans have bred or misconstrued can be kind of unhealthy. Ngozi has been very open when talking abotu the comic that she didn’t want it to be another gay tragedy. and thats great and we need more of that in the world we need lgbt stories of all types. that being said what a lot of i think maybe a lot of people have taken away from that is that places like samwell exist. and maybe they do, but its an unrealistic expectation of how those spaces have identity. hockey is a very expensive sport played by mostly white men. it’s stupid to think that there isn’t a population of lgbt people even in professional circles. but life isn’t a buddy comedy. it’s crazy to me that this is the website that takes every opportunity to take down frat culture and college party culture as evil but as soon as you put both of those things on ice skates it’s some how soft and accepting. any hockey player you like, you can find receipts of them that you’re not gonna like. i’m so thrilled that check please exists and i think we need more media like it but its readers need to be more critical about what they’re praising.
There’s also a lot of irony here about the fact this is written as a happy story Bc she did that Bc the original story she did all the hockey research for WASNT a happy story, so she decided to take the time to write a happier one taking place in a mildly similar setting. Like you’d think that’d be clue enough that the culture isn’t a bed of roses
who would win in a fight: an army of lush employees vs an army of bath and body works employees??? discuss
lush employees, who are more adept at guerrilla warfare and fabian tactics. bath and body works employees rely too much on pitched battle and are not equipped well enough for prolonged conflict
I disagree with some of that, I feel as though the Bath and Body Works employees are pretty well trained in the art of handling an all out attack. Their defenses are high and well coordinated. Remember, they deal with white moms on the daily, whereas I feel that Lush employees are more used to dealing with a younger generation of customers.I feel as though they’d be equally matched but in the end I feel with the advancement in technology that Lush possesses over Bath and Body Works in terms of sheer amount that they sell, ultimately Lush wins, but not without heavy casualties.
All true, but everyone is forgetting Bath and Body Works employees have extreme training dealing with the hell on Earth that is Semi Annual Sale. Have you ever seen someone come between a white woman in her 40s and Vanilla Bean Noel at 75% off? Bath and Body Works employees have and still live to tell their stories
I think terrain is an important consideration? Lush employees are better at straight melee since they’re used to fighting in close quarters, whereas B&BW employees have more experience in moving through wider terrain and using ranged attacks.
when you’ve curated your feed so you don’t get the Discourse anymore you just get 2nd and 3rd hand vagues and salt ab the Discourse and you’re trying to figure out what the fuck is going on
Has anyone noticed how much Tumblr discourse is starting to be peppered with ‘embarrassing’ and ‘yikes’ as one-word responses when you disagree with someone? It’s really interesting how this choice of languages hammers home the ‘in-group’ opinion/correct opinion as something that doesn’t even need to be stated, and presents opposing opinions as embarrassing and something to be mocked.
These two words are, at their heart, conformist. They promote conformity and ridicule diversity. I find this deeply concerning – it’s like something the popular kids at high school would say to embarrass the less popular kids. They want their superiority to be acknowledged without explanation or justification, and they get off on mocking people who are different.
Honestly, I’d encourage you not to fall into using this language without understanding why it’s an effective means of shutting down opposition and how it works. It’s anti-debate language that focuses on ridiculing the person who has the opinion rather than debunking the opinion and explaining how you believe it’s incorrect/harmful.
This is really good meta and fits with my current vague hypothesis about the broader emerging foulness, and the tendency for appearances to be valued over results or factual accuracy, in the present dysfunctions of social justice discourse.
Namely, that it is a specific backlash against the people at the fringes who started speaking up for themselves in the big diversity acceptance boom of a few years ago.
I notice this most as an autistic person, because that’s where this stuff hits me most. It’s all a bunch of microaggressions against autism, even when the discussion takes place between allistics and autism is mentioned nowhere in the discussion; a bunch of “I’m socially suitable and people who disagree with me aren’t, and boy howdy those socially unsuitable people should get away from me” signalling.
And so even if you do agree with them about whatever they’re talking about, if you’re aware that you’re classed as socially unacceptable for some other reason, it sends the hostile message ‘if your social skills slip around me, you’re toast.’
“Cringy” is another of these terms I’ve seen, and I think at least part of the popularizing of these other terms in certain internet communities grows out of this co-opting of “cringe culture” by political discoursers(I avoid discourse on here mostly, but I remember seeing right-wing blogs picking this lingo up a year or two ago, at the latest).
At the same time, though, I don’t think this is what this is entirely; yes a shorthand, but not always a dismissive and condescending one. I’ve seen “Yikes”, specifically, used pretty frequently in black circles as a response to racist posts the poster doesn’t realize are racist(or clearly doesn’t care. For instance, even more racist responses to charges of racism often get a “Yikes”), and I think in these cases it’s working sort of as a “meaningful look”, a shortcut that expresses That conversation without having to actually have it because it’s exhausting having to constantly have it with people who don’t really care about listening, just about avoiding the social sanction that label carries. I can’t be sure about this, but given how culture usually flows in the US I wouldn’t be surprised if “Yikes” started in black circles and was appropriated into other online communities, where it was put to more derogatory use.
We are living in a post-discourse world. Almost everybody on Tumblr knows The Discourse, everybody on Facebook knows a slacktivist friend who changed their profile picture for one cause or another and an older relative who posts weird political stuff nobody else cares about. Twitter users and Newspaper readers know who Justine Sacco was. Github and Hacker News have seen Opalgate, Django pull request #2692, Donglegate, …
Shirtgate and Tim Hunt have even reached TV news.
People make inconsequential jokes, or take part in something unpolitical that is subsequently scrutinised and deemed not politically correct enough (by whatever side). The person at the center of this whole thing gets dragged back into it every time somebody on side A attacks somebody on side B and it all ends with both sides unfollowing/unfriending each other.
Tumblr had seen peak discourse in 2013. Tumblr has not been trendy with teenagers in five years. Even Snapchat and Instagram are no longer the cool new thing. Twitter has not been the cool new thing for seven years now.
Social media is no longer full of early adopters, or wide-eyed, curious MOPs making their first steps on the net, or concerned Soccer Moms trying to figure out what heir young (too young for this!) child has signed up for. People can deal with social media. It’s no longer a novelty. Society has even adapted to deal with the ways people deal with social media, somewhat.
We have all lost friends (not real friends, of course, but what counts for a friend on social media, like mutuals) in the flame wars. We know what to expect. We no longer cheer when somebody gets caught in the fangs of the anonymous Internet mob – we reach out in private and ask if they are okay, carefully avoiding any public support for fear of backlash.
After years of Usenet, web 1.0, pre-discourse, forum culture, LiveJournal, the Blogosphere, the Internet went mainstream, and the mainstream acknowledged that. The Internet was no longer a place for nerds and weirdos like John Carmack or Cory Doctorow, respectively. We have seen the Internet, and it is us!
We went from anonymity and caution to pseudonymous communities, to real-name oversharing, and finally to carefully constructed social media personae.
At some point during the oversharing phase, discourse and mob rule reached their peak, toxic activists unleashed shitstorms, and we gladly joined in. We thought the victim deserved it, because he had a problem with the Internet, which meant he had a problem with us. It started out as outrage against corporations, but it quickly learned to pick on random people.
Now we, as stated above, have learned to keep our heads down. We have learned that the hate mob is us. Some of us only stopped joining in because of outrage fatigue.
At some point you just run out of the neurotransmitters you need to feel
angry about things. We have learned to only tweet our lunch, not our opinion. We have learned to use a pseudonym. Remember your PR training, stay on message, don’t make jokes outside of the member-approved internal chatgroup!
People had to lock down their posts and profile. The Internet is not a nice place any more. When you mess up, we will privately support you, but come on, what were you thinking saying that in public?
The Post-Discourse Situation:
Most twitterati have stopped dogpiling.
There is a mall, dedicated core of people coordinating the shaming campaigns.
We know you are not a bad person just because you got into an Internet Shitstorm.
We might privately commiserate or publicly vagueblog in your support.
We will say we told you so when you get edgy and it blows up.
The epistemic level of The Discourse is still bad.
Big Internet Shitstorms have gotten rarer. They are no longer perpetrated by viral, spontaneously forming crowds, but by strongly connected groups of bloggers. Outrage has been eaten up by the division of labour.
From the inside, however, once a shitstorm does happen, it looks just the same. It looks like there is a broad, popular opposition to your viral Facebook post. Your friends will privately scold you for getting into a preventable situation.
As the chilling effect increases and the censorship becomes internalised as self-censorship, the few remaining culture warriors can concentrate on the few remaining non-self-censoring netizens.
IN A WORLD WHERE BIG INTERNET SHITSTORMS RUN WILD
ONE MAN THINKS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS HAS GONE TOO FAR
I had the lightning rod realization why The Discourse about fiction feels so alien to me
It’s because 99% of the arguments boil down to denying an individual’s agency
Fiction is one of the safest ways to exercise your right to choose – especially fanfic, which comes with an entire culture of tagging and content warning etiquette
If you go seeking fanfic on AO3, you can try new things with a fairly good understanding of what you’re getting yourself into
And if you get in over your head – you can close the window and walk away with no regrets
No real people were hurt in the production of words on a page – you aren’t sitting there thinking “gosh, I hope those people in this YouTube video survived that fall”
Fiction gives you the right to try on all kinds of ideas
Which is why I get so indignant when I see stuff like “XYZ content could be bad for some people, therefore it shouldn’t exist”
Or “what if minors clicked on porn for ABC fandom uwu”
The truth is, you have agency
My god, but you have agency
If you are old enough to be poking around these sites without parental supervision, you are old enough to start reading the warning labels on what you consume
And if that isn’t true for you? Then ask someone in your real life for help
(I have some pals who do ask me to screen fics for things that might trigger them)
But seriously, with fiction, you can choose what to access, and learn (in private) what you can handle
Don’t let anyone take your power
antis straight up don’t believe that people have agency. or at least, not agency enough to cancel out the other things that they believe have power over us.
they’re rooted in the same politics that gave us terfs/swerfs, aka radical feminism, which believes among other things that women can’t make free choices under patriarchy – like the choice to do sex work or engage in kink or any number of other things. the reasons women give for doing these things aren’t real reasons, the only reason they do them is because patriarchy has manipulated and brainwashed them into thinking these are acceptable things to do. it’s a “feminism” founded on the idea that most women (except the radfems themselves, of course) are not real agents.
hence the transphobia – because being a woman isn’t about how you feel, only about whether you were assigned in childhood to a particular sex-based second class
hence the biphobia – because bi is a “lesser” kind of gay, because it taints the true equality of gay relationships with imbalanced man/woman ones, which are always inherently coercive towards the woman because the man has all the power
hence the hate of kink, of stories with cruel or abusive themes, because if you like that sort of thing you can’t be trusted to know your own mind. at best you’re participating in your own oppression, mindlessly acting out the desires of a bunch of old white men circlejerking it to your humiliation. at worst, you’re a traitor who’s enabling and encouraging our pedophilic anti-woman overlords, the creators of all cruelty, without which we’d live in a lesbian separatist paradise with no war or suffering.
it can never be just because you find something valuable in reading about weird shit – the only people who could do that without gagging are oppresor menz or brainwashed women. (nb people don’t really fit in here, so they’re ignored.) try on ideas? but some of those ideas are Dangerous, Corrupting, Objectively Sick, and it’s our job to keep you away from them. there are some thoughts that are too awful to ever be admitted into your head, even for a moment, because they’ll change you.
i mean, this sounds like a stretch, but the more i read the more i see it all fit together. it might not be what people consciously believe, but it’s what created this radical exclusionary politics.
ironically, women believing that their only power is to control other women both arises from and perpetuates a toxic patriarchy.
just moving along like everyone else 