Given how the late-addition “Q&A” session at Skepticon came into being, how it was sold to the convention, how it was advertised, and how it was “envisioned” by Danielle Muscato and Mark Schierbecker, it is no surprise the entire thing went off disastrously. Let us itemize the ways this all went wrong.

To catch you up, first.

Jonathan Butler went on hunger strike on November 2nd at University of Missouri (aka Mizzou), to protest systematic racism, the destruction of planned parenthood services and health insurance, the pepper-spraying of peaceful protestors, and edgelord bullshit such as nooses and feces swastikas on campus, along with Chan-culture making death threats via YikYak. After press of the less-than-sympathetic sort (e.g. Breitbart and Fox News) kept wheedling their way into the protest and into protesters’ faces, students created a press-free cordon around Butler and his closest protest supporters, many of whom are black students who have felt unsafe on campus thanks to the overt racism and ratcheting back of necessary services that they experienced.

A student boycott ensued, along with support from the football team and faculty members, including a Mass Media prof named Melissa Click. Mark Schierbecker — a “citizen journalist” non-journalist student of Mizzou — entered the area to take videos of people reacting to the news of the President and Chancellor both resigning. Click demanded he leave several times, and at one point put her hand on the camera he was using to film. Police are presently considering criminal assault charges for this.

Shortly thereafter, Click apologised thusly:

Yesterday was an historic day at MU — full of emotion and confusion. I have reviewed and reflected upon the video of me that is circulating, and have written this statement to offer both apology and context for my actions. I have reached out to the journalists involved to offer my sincere apologies and to express regret over my actions. I regret the language and strategies I used, and sincerely apologize to the MU campus community, and journalists at large, for my behavior, and also for the way my actions have shifted attention away from the students’ campaign for justice.

My actions were shaped by exasperation with a few spirited reporters. From this experience I have learned about humanity and humility. When I apologized to Tim Tai in a phone call this afternoon, he accepted my apology. I believe he is doing a difficult job, and I am grateful to have had the opportunity to speak with him. His dignity also speaks well to the Journalism program at MU. Again, I wish to express my sincere apology for
my actions on Carnahan Quad yesterday.

Note, Tim Tai is another reporter, who was crowded out of the press-free zone by the students and who had his arms pulled down when he tried to take a jumping photo of the inside of the cordon.

Schierbecker characterized this apology as “insincere” and “curt”, and to this day believes Click should step down. In fact, during the Skepticon event, he stated that he won’t rest until she does step down, even knowing that putting the focus on his pain and his belief that his “first amendment rights” were violated by not being allowed to access people who wished for privacy distracts from the issues of racism on campus.

The video by Mark Schierbecker went viral. The short version of the video is being used to make arguments against black folks generally by overtly racist orgs like Stormfront, and also by those attempting to damn the Black Lives Matter and ConcernedStudent1950 movements like Breitbart and Fox News. The video as edited in the “short version” shows Click demanding Schierbecker leave the area, touching the camera, and ends with Click calling for “muscle”. The fuller version shows more attempts to get Schierbecker to leave before Click becomes frustrated, and has two students serving as “muscle” approaching Schierbecker and repeating the requests to have him leave the area, and effectively physically blocking Schierbecker from persisting in attempting to film the students against their wishes. The “muscle” did not actually strongarm or physically contact Schierbecker in any way, but served to assert the requests for privacy of the people Schierbecker was attempting to gain access to.

Now, for the specific event and everything that went wrong, in no particular order.

This programming addition to Skepticon was advertised online shortly before the official opening of the con, so it was not printed in the schedules. It was only available on the online schedule, and it was announced in a blog post dated Friday, November 13th, the first day of the con programming.

On the schedule, the lunch break between speakers was registered for between 12pm and 2pm. The speakers were also expected to gather for a Speakers Photo from 12 to 12:30, however this process easily dragged on til at least 12:45. It seems while I was running to the bathroom and to get some coffee, the talk started, and I missed the opening timeline.

There were only a small handful of people in attendance — no more than 25 or 30. Peak attendance within the main hall was probably 400-ish, which is good considering there were always contemporaneous events in other rooms and attendance (though lower than last year) is likely around 600 (remind me to ask for actual registration numbers!), and there was at least 200 in the room at the 11-12pm talk for Fallon Fox. The low attendance is undeniably because it was both late within the schedule, held during the lunch break, and poorly advertised — nobody knew there was a reason to stick around through lunch, as nobody even mentioned it (by my recollection) after Fallon Fox’s talk when lunch break was announced.

The talk was evidently sold to Skepticon as a “Question and Answer”, though Danielle Muscato and Mark Schierbecker did not envision it as such. The questions for the probably-scripted event all came from Danielle Muscato, who, during the course of the event, disclosed that she was acting as pro-bono Public Relations for Schierbecker, whom she considers a friend. Only because a number of black activists effectively started shouting out questions when Muscato declared the interview to be over did the event actually become a Q&A.

Evidently, Muscato was using this event to essentially coach Schierbecker on how to repair the image damage he’d done himself by putting the focus on his “first amendment rights” issues over the racism and death threats happening on campus. That Skepticon doesn’t appear to have been aware of this relationship, and that the “press release” in the blog post appears to omit this fact, indicates to me that Skepticon, knowing Danielle Muscato from previous events, trusted her to use the forum judiciously. This use was, as I posted on Twitter shortly thereafter, a gross abuse of the venue. There is nothing “skeptical” about posting the views of the person with all the power who was aggrieved on a small scale with having their camera touched, while omitting the views of those aggrieved in the grander scheme, in a public-relations spin job fashion, when the person in question is already being published in major (right-leaning) news organizations uncritically.

Repeatedly, both Muscato and Schierbecker conflated right to access to people with freedom of speech. You have every right to say what you want, but you have no right to demand access to others. And indeed, being a student on campus and having access to the football field generally would not grant you access to the field in the middle of a game if you’re not a player — you’d get tackled, even though you have the same level of “right” to be there that Schierbecker had to the area where students requested privacy from press. No amendment grants you as a fundamental right the freedom to harangue people who’ve asked you to back off, given that you can be charged with criminal harassment even if you are on public property, nor does it grant you a right to an audience, specific or general. It’s this sort of conflation of free speech with entitlement to other unrelated aspects of communication that progressives like us call “Freeze Peach”.

From my tiny contingent, when Muscato declared she was Schierbecker’s PR, Niki Massey (whose notes on Skepticon you really should read) left the room saying to us, “I can’t do this.”. Shortly thereafter, Stephanie Zvan left to make sure Niki was all right (EDIT: she left to get migraine meds and food, and supporting Niki was a side-effect). Me, Greta Christina and her partner Ingrid stayed, out of an inclination to witness this event. Between us, we each kept remarking to each other that this was unbelievable and surreal, that we didn’t understand what was actually happening, but that it was certainly not a Q&A as advertised, and we speculated that Skepticon didn’t know what exactly was unfolding.

When the black students from Mizzou started asking questions about why the narrative was focused on Schierbecker and why there were no representatives from ConcernedStudents1950, the cameraman, Rob Lehr of Hambone Productions, was absolutely guerrilla in his coverage of this. He turned the camera toward the protesters and brought a boom mic to get their questions, and encouraged Muscato to keep going because he would keep filming. I think without his quick thinking and his self-sacrificing (this was his lunch hour too, after all!), we would not have had as much actual Q&A for the event.

When during the audience questions portion Schierbecker suggested that he would only stop distracting from the important fight against racism on campus when Click stepped down, when his own injustice was redressed to his satisfaction, I finally broke and yelled something like “You get justice before anyone else!?” This was, for the record, the only time anyone from my contingent said anything. A few seconds after that, Greta, Ingrid and I left. This was probably for the best because I was angry enough to heckle, and that doesn’t really happen with me.

A very important point to note is that Skepticon, and especially Lauren Lane, Skepticon’s lead organizer and primo boss lady, do not appear to have had prior knowledge that Danielle Muscato was acting as Mark Scheirbecker’s Public Relations. I have yet to confirm this single fact directly with anyone on staff, but staff seemed genuinely distressed by the events. When we were leaving the room, I saw Lauren Lane entering with a power-walk stride, looking to my eye pretty horrified by the events unfolding, so clearly someone had informed her what was going on and she was returning from her lunch with a mission. That said, things kept happening for a few minutes more thereafter.

I think someone — possibly Lauren, but I didn’t see, as we were just exiting the huge room at that point — asked about a question from the audience more than once, and it might have been directed at Greta who was leaving the room with me. Greta had, after all, had her hand up for many minutes without being called on before the three of us walked. I’m completely unsure as to who asked whom about questions, and the video doesn’t help fix things in my mind.

Muscato posted on Facebook that she’d severed her relationship with Schierbecker as PR manager for “multiple indefensibly racist comments”. I did not sense there were actual directly racist comments in what Schierbecker said — only that his (and now, unfortunately, my) efforts continue to center attention on him and his “freedom” to access people to catch a story, rather than the black folks being made to feel unsafe by threats and overt racism. While he did say “everyone’s a little bit racist”, and repeatedly said “fuck racists” and “I have white privilege”, he also asserted that privilege to demand that justice for transgressions against him should take priority.

And the fallout after the fact is ridiculous in the hamfisted attempts at reshaping the narrative being made by trolls and racists and reactionary right-wingers and Chan culture who want to tear down progressives in general, and Skepticon in particular — Schierbecker put out a video (titled “Journalists’ Lives Matter”, subtitled “Fuck Skepticon”) shortly after Muscato threw him under the bus.

(ETA, this may have been edited later to “Journalists’ Livelihoods Matter” given the current title and the number of people who remember it as “lives”, which while it’s good that Schierbecker realized there are some lines you probably shouldn’t cross, is actually pretty damning that people being killed is somehow comparable to journalists having the right to play paparazzi.)

During the video he admitted to being on the autism spectrum, and was clearly shaken by the whole experience of being called to account for his prioritizing himself. Trolls have seized upon this, pretending like they can now catch progressives out on what they perceive to be our attempt to play “identity politics” by claiming that Skepticon and progressives criticizing Schierbecker are actually attacking him for being autistic. (This from people who regularly use “retard” as a slur, so take it for what it’s worth — which is to say nothing, because I know plenty of people on the spectrum, none of whom are assholes or racists.)

The trolls also repeatedly demand that Skepticon apologize for calling Schierbecker racist, though clearly the only person who’d done so was Danielle Muscato, the person serving as his PR agent. Granted, Muscato was given a great deal of autonomy in putting together the event, so one might conceivably make an argument that Skepticon is on the hook for Muscato being an agent for the con. But the distress among Skepticon staff was visible to me, placed as I am such that I can actually see the feet paddling below the surface in most cons that I attend, and despite that distress, none of the agents actually called Schierbecker racist.

Shortly after the talk, I said on Twitter:

If goal is to stop the distraction from racism at Mizzou, and you can't get representation of protestors, don't have the event. #skepticon

— Jason Thibeault (@lousycanuck) November 14, 2015

Among the people who favorited that was Danielle Muscato. Some time after she favorited that tweet, she posted this on Facebook with some clarifications, including agreement that the event should not have gone on without representation from ConcernedStudent1950, while reiterating that she’d attempted to get them to show up.

I fully understand why they didn’t, knowing now what Schierbecker’s and Muscato’s goal was for the event. I stand by my assertion that it was an abuse of the venue. A number of Skepticon’s organizers seem to feel the same, and this statement by Lauren Lane seems to agree, even if it takes more responsibility for “failure” than I think the con deserves — if it failed, it was only in trusting Muscato would not use the con improprietally. I have a great distaste for everything that has happened, and I’m more than upset with Muscato, and am suspicious of her intentions and her apparent cavalier use of the venue. She redoubled the damage to the narrative that has happened with the event in trying to do damage control, when she declared that Schierbecker made “indisputably racist statements”, because that overstatement doesn’t bear out. Now trolls can say “he didn’t say anything wrong and Muscato says so herself”, when a) she was doing damage control; b) she overstated the case after she felt she had to retract her support; c) the case is actually still about the covert racism of white privilege rather than hoods and pitchforks.

And now, Muscato has posted again, appropriately walking it back, retracting the “indefensibly racist” part, hoping to still be friends with Schierbecker. But the damage’s already done.

Much like how Dan Rather took damage from an overstatement of the case against George W Bush’s missing military service records despite the fact that there’s still a gap that’s unaccounted for, this particular story’s sails were sabotaged by the overstatement. I fear the damage is done now and the story will forevermore be about how wronged Schierbecker was in having his camera touched and in being denied access to people who asked that he step the hell off, rather than the story being about the black folks who are effectively under emotional and potentially physical siege by the systemic racism they’re facing at University of Missouri.

Once again, a white person’s metaphorically stubbing their toe takes precedence over a black person being assaulted.

And once again, a white person is swinging into action to defend and fix the PR problem that first white person caused. Then, that same white person is screwing things up by overstating the case, then walking it back.

And once again a white ally — because we’re, basically, the only people the white folks squabbling over what’s racist and what isn’t will ever listen to — has to lay everything out for easy consumption by white eyes.

I am so, so sorry that all of this is happening. I honestly feel every bit as betrayed by the parties involved in putting together this sham of an event as the folks at Skepticon, and the black folks who expected an actual Q&A from this session without having to take it by force.

I really need to put together a post about all the good that came out of Skepticon, and all the huge wins. I think Stephanie is putting something together now, but I have my own high points, so maybe I’ll make mine more personal and less event-specific.

EDIT: some grammar edits and clarifications added Wed, Nov 18, 11:45am CST. Likely more to come as I notice them.

The post On the PR Disaster at #Skepticon and the lack of #ConcernedStudent1950 representation appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Quick linking post — was quoted over on Skepchick in re Richard Dawkins’ latest nonsense, wherein he rails against warning rape victims about rape discussion on college campuses. I need to write a fuller post about how exactly people are getting this wrong, but this is a great one-two punch.

Dawkins is right about one thing: Secular Safezones have an important place, especially in areas where being non-religious (or not belonging to the majority religion) can lead to marginalization. But if he acknowledges that, how can he argue that same care isn’t warranted for those coping with PTSD from rape, assault, or other trauma? Does Richard Dawkins think there isn’t enough oppression to go around? That if he shows compassion for victims of assault or rape, his pet cause won’t get enough recognition? Or is the reality more damning?

Spoiler warning: the contents of this post includes discussion about trigger warnings. Douchebag discretion is advised.

The post Spoiler warning: douchebags think trigger warnings are bad appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Jemima at Sometimes It’s Just A Cigar wrote a very thought provoking post about sex-worker-exclusionary feminism. In my estimation, it’s exactly right, and needs a signal boost.

The problem with “porn made them do it” is that as an argument it is no different from the drink, the short skirt or the high heels made me do it. It is a transference of blame from where it belongs, on the rapist, to an external object. This transference is called rape apologism and should surely apply to the excuse of porn as much as the excuse of drink or clothing? The idea that young men ignore consent and sexual boundaries because of something they have seen in porn seems to have become embedded in our culture, with no one challenging it.

Picture this; someone asks a young man why he thinks a consent violation was acceptable. He replies with the excuse that allows him to duck moral culpability, “I saw it in porn.”

Feminists like Dent are actually providing people who chose to abuse (and ignoring consent is always a choice) with a ready-made excuse. “It;s not my fault, the porn made me” and we all nod and say its very terrible and the abuser needs not change in any way.

[…]

Patriarchy, as we all know dislikes women who are in control of their sexual agency. It really dislikes women who demand payment for something historically men have demanded (often by force) for free. Sex workers are othered, excluded shamed and stigmatised because if women were allowed to be in control of their own bodies, they might all start denying access to those who abuse, who use, and who wont pay. Without women to produce the next generation of workers capitalist patriarchy would fail. Blaming sex workers, be they workers in porn, clubs or brothels for the behaviors of abusive men is firstly a warning. It is a warning to the “good women” that if they step outside the sheltering arms of patriarchy they too will be fair game. It’s a dialectical moment of such tension, those women who have sought full control of their own bodies under capitalist patriarchy (and under CP control and autonomy are only recognised if one can commodify something) are the women who must have that control and autonomy removed, often by the state or its instruments.*

It’s this sort of exercising your own insecurities on others, acting as enforcers of the patriarchy by blaming its victims for the patriarchy’s perpetuation, that runs directly contra the sort of humanist feminism I would like to see spread. Sex-worker-exclusive and trans-exclusive feminism both have elements of transferrence, blaming patriarchy on a smaller subset of the group being victimized by patriarchy. It is damaging and it is inhumane and it is disturbing that anyone with any pretensions at having a more perfect, more egalitarian way of looking at society would attack a small subset marginalized group in service of improving the lot of the larger (but still marginalized in other ways) group.

As a sidebar, it’s also sad that Jemima was so let down by Grace Dent in the post — which you should really read in its entirety. Don’t rely on these (representatively insightful) excerpts to give you the whole of the argument. It is for this reason, this repeated disappointment in people, that I make any support of a person’s philosophy contingent on not later discovering they have shitty views on some other part of reality. You’ve seen this recently, very publicly, from me, and I know some of you recognize how awful it was from my perspective (even while others incorrectly think I was a sniggering malevolent, or a preening and arrogant ass). Coming to blows with people who are otherwise right on a lot of things, whom you’ve come to trust to be able to take criticism for what it is, about the thing they get wrong is an often devastating thing to have happen.

We often say around these parts, though, “no more heroes”. Make your support for any person’s ideas — me included, obviously — contingent on not discovering that person has other distasteful ideas. Do not let yourself become subject to the halo effect where a person being right about one thing means you’ll defend them to the death when they’re wrong about something else. If they’re wrong, speak up. If they’re being harassed, fight the harassers, but don’t stop speaking up about the ways the target caused splash damage regardless. If you keep your criticism focused on behaviours, rather than the person, you may never even get through to the person doing the damage, but people will recognize you as being on the side of angels.

The post The Handmaiden's Handbook appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Jemima at Sometimes It’s Just A Cigar wrote a very thought provoking post about sex-worker-exclusionary feminism. In my estimation, it’s exactly right, and needs a signal boost.

The problem with “porn made them do it” is that as an argument it is no different from the drink, the short skirt or the high heels made me do it. It is a transference of blame from where it belongs, on the rapist, to an external object. This transference is called rape apologism and should surely apply to the excuse of porn as much as the excuse of drink or clothing? The idea that young men ignore consent and sexual boundaries because of something they have seen in porn seems to have become embedded in our culture, with no one challenging it.

Picture this; someone asks a young man why he thinks a consent violation was acceptable. He replies with the excuse that allows him to duck moral culpability, “I saw it in porn.”

Feminists like Dent are actually providing people who chose to abuse (and ignoring consent is always a choice) with a ready-made excuse. “It;s not my fault, the porn made me” and we all nod and say its very terrible and the abuser needs not change in any way.

[…]

Patriarchy, as we all know dislikes women who are in control of their sexual agency. It really dislikes women who demand payment for something historically men have demanded (often by force) for free. Sex workers are othered, excluded shamed and stigmatised because if women were allowed to be in control of their own bodies, they might all start denying access to those who abuse, who use, and who wont pay. Without women to produce the next generation of workers capitalist patriarchy would fail. Blaming sex workers, be they workers in porn, clubs or brothels for the behaviors of abusive men is firstly a warning. It is a warning to the “good women” that if they step outside the sheltering arms of patriarchy they too will be fair game. It’s a dialectical moment of such tension, those women who have sought full control of their own bodies under capitalist patriarchy (and under CP control and autonomy are only recognised if one can commodify something) are the women who must have that control and autonomy removed, often by the state or its instruments.*

It’s this sort of exercising your own insecurities on others, acting as enforcers of the patriarchy by blaming its victims for the patriarchy’s perpetuation, that runs directly contra the sort of humanist feminism I would like to see spread. Sex-worker-exclusive and trans-exclusive feminism both have elements of transferrence, blaming patriarchy on a smaller subset of the group being victimized by patriarchy. It is damaging and it is inhumane and it is disturbing that anyone with any pretensions at having a more perfect, more egalitarian way of looking at society would attack a small subset marginalized group in service of improving the lot of the larger (but still marginalized in other ways) group.

As a sidebar, it’s also sad that Jemima was so let down by Grace Dent in the post — which you should really read in its entirety. Don’t rely on these (representatively insightful) excerpts to give you the whole of the argument. It is for this reason, this repeated disappointment in people, that I make any support of a person’s philosophy contingent on not later discovering they have shitty views on some other part of reality. You’ve seen this recently, very publicly, from me, and I know some of you recognize how awful it was from my perspective (even while others incorrectly think I was a sniggering malevolent, or a preening and arrogant ass). Coming to blows with people who are otherwise right on a lot of things, whom you’ve come to trust to be able to take criticism for what it is, about the thing they get wrong is an often devastating thing to have happen.

We often say around these parts, though, “no more heroes”. Make your support for any person’s ideas — me included, obviously — contingent on not discovering that person has other distasteful ideas. Do not let yourself become subject to the halo effect where a person being right about one thing means you’ll defend them to the death when they’re wrong about something else. If they’re wrong, speak up. If they’re being harassed, fight the harassers, but don’t stop speaking up about the ways the target caused splash damage regardless. If you keep your criticism focused on behaviours, rather than the person, you may never even get through to the person doing the damage, but people will recognize you as being on the side of angels.

The post The Handmaiden’s Handbook appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

I’ve been doing a lot of mental calculations lately, trying to triangulate on my courses of action that result in maximal good for all the people who deserve it the most. I have a lot of competing and mutually exclusive variables in my head, though. I figure if I lay these variables all out, publicly, putting all my cards on the table, someone can help me figure out which ones I can discard and redraw, and maybe point out where I might have a better hand than I think.

I’m going to pay a number of costs for writing this post, but I’m writing it because some people I love and trust have privately told me they think I’ve fucked up. I’m going to do my damnedest to repair that perception, and the only way to do it is publicly, because other avenues have been cut off to me.

Much of this is old business, and I’ve been bottling this up for a bit. Bear with me. Once that’s through, you’ll get to new info.

Over the past two months, a shitstorm has been swirling throughout this network, wherein Ophelia Benson is — to put it as charitably as humanly possible — perceived to have acted trans-antagonistically by some trans folk, who called her on those points, and Ophelia is — again, charitably — perceived to have repeatedly doubled-down, and tried to defend herself from what she saw as ravening hordes who want nothing better than to throw her out of the network on her ear.

During those two months, because I frankly had not had any resources for this fight, I stayed out of it. I could barely bring myself to blog regularly about good things — every time I tried to set digital pen to digital paper, the only fight worth having was the one I had to stay mum on lest I get sucked in.

Eventually, I succumbed. I saw two people I liked once, on Twitter, going at each other’s throats about whether or not Ophelia is a straight-up, no bones about it, Trans-Exclusive Radical Feminist. I tried to turn the conversation toward behaviour — at that point, I had seen Ophelia participating in a TERF-heavy gender-critical Facebook forum, asking for help countering a specific demand that she answer “do you believe trans women are women, yes or no”. Some of the replies were awful, explicitly anti-trans. Some of these awful replies were liked by Ophelia. I pointed out on Twitter that that meant it was reasonable for someone to assume that she agreed with the post in question. Even if it was a like intended as “thank you for answering”, it is not actually irrational for outsiders to assume that someone doing a thing that 99% of the time means you agree, means they agree. So, it meant that trans folk who felt she was holding a position that was directly anti-trans were not actually irrational. But I said all of that in service of the argument of damning her for specific behaviours and not for a perceived position that she’s expressly denied in the past, e.g. that she’s an unrepentant TERF hiding among us.

This, of course, was only part of all of the interactions she had on that forum. And only part of all the future interactions she’s had on the topic. And only part of all the ways she and her defenders have reinterpreted things she’s done, said, and all the ways she’s treated trans folk through this entire escapade.

One of the costs I’ve paid for stepping in and trying to keep an argument to one about behaviours instead of perceived positions was that she pointed to me and painted me as an unmitigated slimepitter-like stalker and attacker.

This post containing a passage outlining what I’d like to happen:

There are honest interlocutors genuinely hurt by things she’s said and done, that they can point to, that are still extant on the internet and not grossly misinterpreted; and these honest interlocutors are demanding a genuine and contrite apology and improvement in behaviour in the future. That is to say, nothing that would cost her a damn thing except a moment’s introspection.

Shortly thereafter, PZ Myers publicly threw me under a bus.

On a Facebook post on Ophelia’s wall, where she first expressed her desire to leave the blog network because of all these snakes in the grass who were out to get her, PZ said that given the choice between supporting her or supporting a person who wants to see her kicked off the network who has only blogged once in the past month (or words to that effect), he supported her.

I did not, ever, once, ask for her to be kicked off this blog network. I had stayed out of it entirely, because, in the past, Ophelia — prickly though she is — usually comes around to understanding the positions of people she’s unfairly hurt, and integrates those positions in her effort to continue learning how to navigate this world. I trusted that it was, at that point, still possible that she — and her “defenders” — could rightly recognize that to the trans folk she had hurt, she was actually in the wrong, and she could fix things by apologizing, learning, and moving on. These trans folk, their allies, and everyone else gravely disappointed with how both Ophelia and now PZ were acting about the whole fight, were by then actively attempting to collate their experiences to determine if this was actually a pattern of behaviour with Ophelia.

And they found a few really hurtful, really questionable “jokes” she’s made, like one comparing trans folk being uncomfortable with drag to Rachel Dolezal being uncomfortable with blackface. Like one in answer to a question as to why trans women couldn’t just call themselves very feminine men: “too last week?” Like one in answer to a trans woman identifying as a woman, that she could then identify as an African American (something else, memory fails) who went to Oxford. These were not just trans-antagonistic, they were outright transphobic jokes. And people’s outrage redoubled; and the demands for an accounting of this pattern of behaviour increased. They wanted her to recognize this was shitty behaviour, apologize, and do better. But neither her nor her defenders heard any of their cries that way.

By this point, I recognized that siege mentality had kicked in so hard that it was literally impossible to get through to her; and that PZ himself, in defending his friend from overreach, felt that this dredging up old (as in within the last few months) stuff was prosecutorial and like a witch hunt.

Given I have done some of this “witch-hunting” of this level before — that is to say, an aggregation of instances that make a person think perhaps a given situation is an actual trend and not just an isolated incident which is a mistake — I found that argument fell flat. It fell as flat as it does in terms of whether or not we were “witch-hunting” Michael Shermer when outraged over “kind of a guy thing”, and held as much weight as the arguments that we were witch-hunting Tim Hunt when chastising him for saying that girls shouldn’t be in labs because they fall in love and cry (no matter how flippantly it was said). And even when it came time to try to show Michael Shermer has a history of harassment and possibly even rape, that still wasn’t a witch-hunt, no matter how far back we were going to dredge up instances to show a pattern of behaviour.

Those were not witch-hunts. This is neither a witch-hunt, by the exact same token.

But I attempted to let it lie again. I had said my piece, once, twice, thrice; and I even clarified that I don’t think Ophelia’s an outright TERF on my blog, even though she’s damn well been repeating a lot of their bullshit from that gender-critical group, and even making up some new bullshit of her own. I further said that I saw her as lashing out at people trying to be fair to her, that I saw her attack those who were obviously trying to offer her a spoon feeding of the actual arguments without any of the vitriol and even those who wanted to discuss the questions that got us into this mess WITHOUT talking about Ophelia’s situation. I also said that she was acting “paranoid” (by which I mean seeing attacks where there are none — I hasten to say that I will not use that word again in case it affects people with clinical paranoia).

I thought that was enough for the moment — and that I would live and let live, because the people doing the aggregating were doing a yeoman’s job at it. Sure, they were being classified as “poisoner”, “the worst”, “fixated”, etc. But without me, they were empirically right, and didn’t need what little support I could actually offer — and I didn’t have the resources to offer any anyway. And, Ophelia, despite her pretensions at leaving, has not left yet. Mostly, I’ll note, because PZ begged her to stay. I thought, maybe, if I left well enough alone, if we ALL left well enough alone for a short time at least, things would calm down, Ophelia would feel less under siege, and she might even have learned something in the endeavour.

Then, after a few days of silence, Ophelia pointed to my comment saying I didn’t think she was a TERF and she called it an indictment of her for thoughtcrimes, meaning she absolutely had to leave because of all the vicious and cruel attacks she was taking from those who were once her colleagues on the blog network. She pointed to me, to my comment about how I saw her as lashing out viciously and repeatedly at the people who were trying to help most, as the only example of someone talking shit about her. This despite my comment — aside from implying she’s attacking those who aren’t attacking her by using a word that might be mistaken for a mental illness diagnosis — was not exactly predicated on any lack of evidence.

I tried my damnedest to plead my case and explain why I’m arguing what I’m arguing. Why I thought that my sticking my nose in, in her own defense even, might actually not cause her to whip around and bite me viciously — like she did. Repeatedly.

I offered, straight off, to leave Freethought Blogs instead. I did so because my blog gets significantly less traffic than hers, and I didn’t think she was irredeemable, and that her presence — numerically, and in terms of the people who might leave in her wake — was more valuable to the network than mine.

(Remind me to post an extended form of my argument that doing wrong does not leave an indelible mark, which I mention now and then on Twitter.)

I tried several times to explain myself to no avail.

I don’t think you’re a bad harmful evil person. I don’t think you’re engaging in thought crime. I think you’re hurt, and feel cornered, and want to blame everyone for all the evil befalling you; as though every person criticizing specific behaviours has it out for you. I understand that; I empathize. But I’m telling you — I’m not attacking. This isn’t an attack. I don’t want us to have bad blood. I wish you could see what I’m saying for what it is.

Trans identity is a separate and distinct axis from gender. “Trans” does not modify “woman”, because we could as easily be talking about trans neutrois, trans agender, trans man, etc. You can talk about trans folk without discussing gender and still have a set of problems and disadvantages unique to them. The fact that your argument says “how could it be unequivocal or not in need of nuance with the word trans there” is part of the problem. The fact that the rest of your argument goes that not all trans folk would consider themselves women is beside the point. If someone asks “do you believe trans women are actually women” they are asking if you think “trans” modifies “woman” in some way that “white” might not modify “woman”.

This is the whole argument, soup to nuts. That’s what you just won’t back down on, despite once-friends and once-colleagues trying to tell you is harmful, and that’s what trans folk (from what I’ve seen) are upset about, notwithstanding everything else they might have gone back to dredge up in order to overreach and call you a TERF.
Saying I’m lying about any of this is a gross misrepresentation — if I missed the nuance of “do you believe”, that’s not a lie, it doesn’t actually modify my argument, and it’s not actually salient to the argument that people are trying to have with you in this comment’s paragraph one which you somehow keep evading by painting the people trying to express it as liars and poisoners and attackers.

And the interactions on that thread, after the original post proper, are part of the substance of why trans folk feel you were looking to TERFs to buttress your counterarguments. Because some of the arguments — from TERFs — were quite gross.

If a single trans person tells me to back down on this, I will, Chris. But to have another cis man tell me I’m doing it wrong when I am underscoring the arguments I’ve seen from trans folk, doing so because I’m placed closely enough that they might get through to Ophelia, that strikes me as blinkered. If you think I’m attacking, obnoxious, harmful to trans folk, that’s certainly not my intent and if anyone better placed within the group that’s upset is willing to tell me to stop, I’ll stop advocating for them. I never want to talk over anyone who otherwise has a marginalized voice.

Mmm-hmm. So your saying “THEY are like slimers” and using four tweets of MINE to illustrate how bad THEY (ostensibly including me) are, doesn’t actually mean you think I am too.

Never mind that up until that moment, I stayed the hell out of it because I hoped that the trans folk who were upset with you would be able to get the actual arguments through to you themselves.

Never mind that I only stepped in because I hoped that my being once considered a colleague might mean you’d recognize my actions as honest — as explaining why people were evidently upset.

Never mind that I didn’t even do it to you directly, I did it to someone who was going overboard saying that the arguments were that you were a TERF because thoughtcrime because associations. I was, in effect, defending you against overreach, and explaining exactly what I thought people had problems with.

Never mind that I did not point the conversation to you out of respect for the fact that you were getting a lot of hell from a lot of dishonest interlocutors stirring the pot, and didn’t want to add to that, and that you sought that conversation out and used it to illustrate how EVIL “THEY” ARE, and now you’re claiming it wasn’t about me, and that my post defending myself (and simultaneously restating the arguments I saw that trans folk were making) was actually an attack on you.

I honestly thought you might see my name and not immediately think “dishonest interlocutor”, “troll” or “slimer”. I honestly thought that, placed as I was as a colleague, that you could take what I was saying at face value. But you whipped around on me and bit, as though you were cornered. And all your commenters think I’m evil too, including a number I once counted as friends. I fucking hate every aspect of this but I don’t see how we can ever reconcile it. That’s why I’m leaving, so everyone can go back to peace and harmony without me, the dishonest attacking slimepitter.

@87: My point… as though I could make it any clearer… is that yes, there has been some dishonest interlocutors, and some people who are perhaps too quick to burn you out of their lives because they need to defend themselves from anti-trans sentiment generally, just like in any conversation about feminism in the skeptical community and all the sides-taking and too-quick-burning-out that happens around them. My point is that some people in amongst all this actually have real grist for their mills in discussing how your actions have hurt them directly. That there are legitimate grievances in amongst all the vitriol. I appreciate your apology to HappiestSadist too, because they’ve been one of the people I’ve been thinking of as people that have been hurt by this fight.

Yes, some people are out for blood. Yes, some chunk of those people are slimepitters stirring the pot, who actually have it out for you because they see you as vulnerable right now. Yes, the people who are out for blood might seem like attackers, even aggressive, even though they’re doing as much distancing as they can and not actually pointing that disagreement at you (like Alex, who did not direct it at you, and you had to either seek it out or have one of their friends send it to you).
But I’m seeing a large number of people — myself included — trying to pick up the points of genuine disagreement and talk about those, and getting treated as trolls, attackers, wrong-headed evildoers.

And I’m further seeing you lumping everyone together as “ugly group demonization”, where my talking about specific behaviours leads you to believe I think you’re a TERF or that I’m stalking you or that I’m part of some groupthink hatemob. And all of this reminds me of your fight with Shermer about “kind of a guy thing” and his immediate response was “feminazis!!!” So, at this point, I’m disappointed in how you’re reacting to the legitimate grievances (though I empathize with why — the under siege part of this does not escape me, I know you’re under attack by hateful and disingenuous assholes). I’m further disappointed that you can repeatedly characterize my actions in criticizing your behaviour as assaults on you as a person, or that I’m no better than the disingenuous assholes who just want you out.

I never once said I wanted you out. I don’t. I don’t want you to leave any more than I want to leave myself. I don’t want to be conflated with the attackers and haters, because I’m not.

And that’s why I’m here, in the comments of your post painting me as the reason you need to leave, defending myself against your attacks on me, because that disagreement — your disagreement with me — needs some dissent. If I can’t disagree with the implication that I’m some evil attacker, then I guess some thoughts are freer than others.

And then, a hundred posts later, Ophelia released Tigger The Wing from moderation WAY early in the thread, where they said:

Jason, here’s a trans person telling you that your characterisation of what Ophelia said is so wrong that it amounts to a lie.

If other trans people are reacting based on the lies about Ophelia then I can’t say I’m surprised, but I am disappointed if they did so without making any attempt to find out what she actually did and said.

So I made good on my promise, though a person reading the thread now would have to get to comment 120-ish to see that that moderation magic happened and thus I looked like I talked over a trans person through the whole thread. Which, I’ll note, is a great rhetorical post-hoc well poisoning, but nothing with any intentionality behind it. Just a fortuitous coincidence for those predisposed to think I’m an asshole.

Which, maybe, I’ll cop to. I like to think I’m an asshole for good causes, though. Maybe I’m wrong about that. I dunno. I’m too close to tell.

Then PZ put up a post about kittens. Here’s the “new stuff” I promised. Well, almost new. I haven’t expressed them in full anywhere yet.

Well, it wasn’t about kittens. On first read, I agreed unequivocally with everything in it — that everyone’s got their hackles up, that people need to try to read one another charitably (and boy howdy, not much of what I’ve said lately has been read charitably!), that it is gross to try to push people from one gender “box” into another, and that Ophelia’s particular box is a spiky one. I also agreed with the sentiment that nobody could tell trans folk that they were wrong to be upset about such things, especially not an old white cis guy like PZ. (Especially also not another middle-aged white cis guy like me, which is why I have been deferring heavily to trans voices about what exactly was wrong with the whole situation.)

I agreed even that some boxes, when people are pushed into them, explode, per the topic of the post. One thing that I didn’t mention in my “agreement”, but certainly should have, is that it’s the people within them that do the exploding, not the boxes. If you try to push a trans woman into the “man” box because she has a penis, it’s not the box “man” that explodes, it’s the trans woman. My not saying that on the post, undercutting the analogy, was me holding my tongue. Because, I was honestly hoping that Ophelia might stay and that she might apologize to the people she’s hurt and learn to do better — to not make the sort of shitty diminishing trans-bashing witticisms she’s made in the past ever again.

I especially agreed that trying to push Ophelia into a box labeled TERF was only going to exacerbate the situation. For instance, it might incline her to wholly adopt the “trans cabal witch hunt” narrative, which would certainly endear her to Brennan and Hungerford, who are already hovering around her and lovebombing her.

There’s another card I didn’t play then, for a few reasons, which I’ll get to. That card is that we presently have no compunction with regard to people who hang out on A Voice for Men in order to laugh at funny jokes about feminists, make funny jokes about feminists, and get help arguing against certain feminist ideals, calling those people MRAs. We likewise have no problem calling people slimepitters those who hang out daily in the slime pit, posting funny memes about Freethought Bloggers, giving us funny names like Oafie and Thimbledick, and generally considering it a fun and free and free-wheeling forum dedicated to TRUE freethought. Nor do we even hesitate to call people slimepitters who revel in these same activities acting as anti-feminist atheists, borrowing memes from the slimepit proper, borrowing tactics from their posters, taking cues from their intended targets and their intended attack methods, sockpuppeting in order to commit false flag operations to exacerbate situations like the one with Ophelia today. We have zero problem calling these people MRAs and slimepitters.

We likewise should be less unwilling to call someone a TERF who has Elizabeth Hungerford as a commenter in good standing on their blog; who accepts thanks and support against those evil skeletons from Cathy Brennan; who was until recently hanging out in that selfsame gender-critical Facebook group started by Hungerford and which was found to be replete with anti-trans sentiment, some of which posted by Ophelia herself.

But pushing her into that category WOULD exacerbate things. So I agreed with the post.

Some people, as I said in the original framing, feel hurt by that thought, that I would 100% unequivocally agree with everything PZ has to say about the fight since the beginning — why would I pivot so hard to Ophelia’s position and to Ophelia’s unequivocal defense, so suddenly?

Well, I didn’t. I didn’t agree with everything PZ has ever said about this. I agreed with the post, as I read it, though I have to clarify something.

In the comments, I quickly came to understand I misunderstood two parts of PZ’s post, and had to clarify my own position a handful of posts later. First, I thought that PZ was pinning the campaign to push Ophelia into the TERF box (as a label) was based on “lies and uncharitable assumptions”, and not that the people outraged at what she’s actually done being based on that. Absolutely, with all the false flag comments I’ve seen trying to exacerbate things, saying extremely TERFy things in Ophelia’s name, or trying to say that she’s intentionally misgendered HappiestSadist (who she has apologized to, and who accepted her apology), there were lies around. Though, I still don’t 100% know if I misunderstood. I was giving PZ the most charitable reading of that passage, which is empirically correct, that there are lies and uncharitable assumptions in the mix. If I DID misunderstand the thrust of this argument — and PZ never clarified — then I disagree strongly. The people who are upset with Ophelia presently are still upset because she has actually said and done things that are trans-antagonistic, and for the most part, the people demanding an accounting of all of that have kept their grievances to the specific and evidenced things that they can prove happened.

Second, I believed PZ was suggesting that Ophelia’s feeling, that she was alone in a den of poisoners on this network, began when Alex wrote his “smoke and fire” post. I would amend that to the first instance that I know about, which was Stephanie demanding better intellectual rigour in Ophelia’s defense. Stephanie’s post was completely understandable and correct, in my mind, given that there were many arguments flying around that were rightly mocked when served in defense of Dawkins or Shermer or any other recalcitrant big-name fighting the scourge of feminism within our communities. It became muddied, though, whether PZ actually meant the WHOLE ARGUMENT around Ophelia started with Alex’s post, as though he singlehandedly wrote a hatchet job ex nihilo and without any priors. At least, I now BELIEVE that to be what PZ means. I could still be wrong.

In response to the charge that the whole fight started when Alex wrote his post, a large number of people started posting a full accounting of all the various grievances they had with Ophelia pertaining to trans-antagonism, and none of them started with Alex’s post, but predated them by up to a year. I didn’t participate in the thread any more because, as I’ve been lamenting elsewhere, a trans person told me I was talking over them, so as promised, I shut up when trans folk were talking. They were airing their case, and my participating then would have made things worse, both for me — in terms of looking like I was out for her head — and in terms of their arguments. I stayed mum because I thought it was the best course of action.

And now people who think of me as an ally, think I abandoned them then. And, yeah. I did. I’m sorry for that.

Meanwhile though, PZ then closed the comments on the post, with this:

You know, I’ve been on the receiving end of this kind of campaign before. You’re all sounding like Michael Nugent, the Mouth of the Slymepit: according to him, I’m a homicidal monster who connived to railroad an innocent young woman who threatened to accuse me of rape, which apparently, according to a mob on twitter, I’m guilty of. If all you do is look over any voluble person’s record on the internet, you can find words and phrases you can twist or take out of context to support any nefarious claim you want. You just have to ignore 99% of what they say!

This is not to say Ophelia hasn’t screwed up or been intemperate (just as I wouldn’t say I’ve never done that, either), but that there’s an obsessive pursuit of every detail of her internet presence explicitly calculated with an intent to reach a predetermined conclusion. I’m also disappointed that, while she’s been reluctant to own her own errors, you all have been rather dishonest in admitting to your own agenda: you’re pissed off, you’re looking to score points, and hoping to drive Ophelia off this network altogether. Every time you claim you aren’t, I just have to roll my eyes.

There is no interest in honestly improving her awareness of trans issues at all — as if she were somehow completely opposed to any kind of social justice concerns at all — and clearly this thread has just become another opportunity to rage away. So it’s closed. It’ll stay that way, since the angry finger-pointing is completely unproductive.

This is absolutely patently an unfair characterization of what was happening on that thread.

Every single person who posted about repercussions wanted an apology, or at most, for her to shut up about trans issues while she went and learned about them herself. I know PZ sees a prosecution, rather than an attempt at convincing him that the history was actually far deeper and far more troubling than that Alex started a shitstorm single-handedly. I know PZ thinks that walking through one’s history for every single problematic thing that a person has ever said about any topic is Nugent-like — but that’s because that’s what Nugent’s done. That’s not remotely like what anyone else has done here, though. The absolute worst that you can say about anyone involved in this fight who’s actually doing any of the comment-dredging, is that they went looking through Ophelia’s history of transphobic comments, and finally, after building a dossier of them, demanding an apology and some self-reflection, and demanding an acknowledgement from him and others that, yes, this was actually problematic behaviour in the first place.

And the icing on the cake is that PZ recognizes that she’s been reluctant to own her errors, suggesting that he thinks these ARE errors. Even while he tries to play judo and call anyone asking for an apology and self-reflection as “having an agenda” of “hoping to drive Ophelia off this network altogether”.

I’ve screwed up bigtime in the past. I’ve talked out of my ass about things that I didn’t really know much about, and hurt people I didn’t mean to hurt, and they’ve brought those cases to me and, though it took me a while (measured in days, mind you), I’ve eventually come around on those issues. It is possible to do bad things, unintentionally, to realize you’ve done bad things, to own them, to apologize contritely, and to work to do better next time. What I didn’t do is dig in for months, then leave the network when more and more people said “no, seriously, you’re fucking up here”.

This is, of course, what I’m doing now with this ever-expanding post, trying to do right by those who think I’ve abandoned them and pivoted on them.

One of the big reasons I held my tongue more than I wanted to, is that first, PZ was actively trying to keep the network together, a goal I agreed with — I’d have preferred, best case scenario, that Ophelia stayed here, figured out that she was being an ass about some stuff (even while she felt under attack), and fixed those problems herself. Then we all stay together, one big, happy, resilient family.

Another is that I had a few extra days’ lead time on knowing that Ed was leaving. Traffic-wise, Ed and Ophelia both are about a third of this network. Without them, it’s now PZ and The Also-Blogs, at about a 90/10 split. We’re taking a big hit traffic-wise, which results in a big hit money-wise. That big hit money-wise means the server we’re paying for is slightly overprovisioned (which means more stable, yay!) but also means a larger slice of the ad revenue and more likely to result in shortfalls (boo). Shortfalls that will probably be paid out of PZ’s pocket. Shortfalls that probably mean if anything goes sour, we’ll have lean months, maybe even where bloggers get $0 revenue, where even now we’re lucky to get double digits.

When I offered to leave the network to keep Ophelia here, I was doing so from the pragmatic standpoint that if the cashflow stops, the network becomes destabilized further, and I am not personally dependent on my blog revenue to stay afloat. Some others of our bloggers are actually, believe it or not, dependent on that meagre revenue flow. The last thing I want to have happen is that the network collapses because of Ed and this coincidental simultaneous shitstorm with Ophelia, resulting in a lot of people without a digital home.

I was prepping for the eventuality that some people might end up homeless, and I was seriously planning a “solo career”, so to speak. This is why I offered to leave — I could probably do it safely. If I had, I planned on offering free berth to anyone who’d come with me. I don’t know how viable I’d be on a tiny Amazon AWS instance alone, but maybe with a few others, we could stay afloat.

But with Ed’s departure coming so soon (I thought I might have a few weeks, maybe a month!), I cannot possibly leave the network responsibly — without my free-tier tech support, the revenue stream becomes significantly tighter.

The fact that Ophelia’s apparently moved out with some finality now, though, means it’s all moot. I don’t have to go anywhere, at least for the moment. I can take a breath.

But, in order to reassert my right to speak freely, I do actually have to speak up, about the things that need to be said about how this all went down, and with some specificity about how the Guy Who Now Holds All The Chips has handled this scenario.

I think PZ is categorically wrong about what people’s intentions were. I think he is categorically wrong about what caused this shitstorm. And I think he’s categorically wrong, now, about prioritizing blog network unity over actually treating people’s concerns about Ophelia’s actions properly — that is to say, not mischaracterizing them as a witch-hunt when they are about accounting for actually shitty things she’s done. Now that she’s gone, I’m not saying “piss on her grave” — I’m saying, be a little more honest about who was demanding what. And I’m saying definitely don’t mischaracterize people, where the people who are blowing up in his kitten scenario are having the temerity to do it all over the thread that looked like it was there for that reason.

I suspect I will pay a lot of costs for this post. I’ll probably pay the cost in any intended mediation between myself and PZ, insofar as I’ve laid it all out publicly, though these grievances are not insurmountable regardless (at least, not on my end). I’ll probably pay costs with regard to my place in this network, and amongst peers who at least once respected me. I’ve already paid the cost of writing it for the past three hours, and will probably pay more cost for posting it with only minimal reread. But, I won’t, at least, leave people I love and trust with the impression that I’ve hung them out to dry through inaction. And at least one of the costs I’m recouping, finally, is that I’m no longer shutting the fuck up “for the good of the network”. The network can stand it, and though I suspect I might not be able to stand the costs personally, maybe I actually can. We’ll see. If not, I still have my backup plan.

I will post my thoughts on Ed separately. Something he said privately to me makes me think that my posting this first, clearing my conscience, is the right thing to do.

(No, I won’t tell you what that was. I said it was private.)

—

Jesus fucking hell. Sorry about the length.

The post Accounting. appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Throughout the discussions on gender that have been sweeping through our circles of late, there’s been one particularly maddening dichotomy in thought that’s been thrown into sharp relief for me — that people having this conversation evidently have competing ideas of what a “social construct” actually is. Will has a great post on the gender discussions proper over at Skepchick, which has a passage that I think highlights exactly why people are getting it wrong in our communities:

It is no coincidence that many people within the atheoskeptosphere tend toward essentialism. After all, most people in these communities tend to highly value the natural sciences and think of science as a culture-free objective enterprise. Thus, the “soft” social sciences (and the non-scientific humanities) are often viewed as being wishy-washy and far less objective than the natural sciences, and so any theories developed in these disciplines are subject to increased, if not hyper, skepticism.

I cannot think of a more accurate statement to summarize why people in these communities are having such a hard time with these conversations.

Content note for topics that involve violence against certain genders or identities, assault on personal autonomy, and might trigger dysphoria amongst people prone to such. I’m trying to be sensitive herein, but we’re talking about gender-prescriptivists and the nexus of sex and gender.

Full disclosure, I’m a heteronormative heterosexual cis white middle-class male — pretty well the privilege royal flush in our society. But I have a particular interest in society and the so-called “soft sciences” of sociology; of human interactions, gender, and social justice. So, I’m bending my thoughts to the fights I’ve witnessed over many many years of blogging and other internet conversations. Correct me if I get anything wrong herein, please. I’d strongly prefer you voice your concerns and I alter part of this argument, than that I cause anyone (especially those already under scrutiny or oppression) any undue pain.

Though recently we’ve all seen this argument play out in relation to trans identity (my most proximate example is in the comments on my only post on the most recent fight), I’ve personally witnessed this particular vector of discussion play out far more often in context of race — mostly when one explains that race is a social construct, by virtue of the actual genetic differences involved between races being swamped out by something as commonplace as, say, the difference between the average child and either of their parents. The arguments generally play out identically though — “Reals, not feels”, shout the hyperskeptics. “Therefore we should be colourblind and thus ignore any injustice happening to one race — All Lives Matter.” However, even those arguments, galling though they are, become confused when someone, in service of anti-trans sentiment or simply out of ignorance of the topic at hand and making false analogies, tries to make the argument that Rachel Dolezal was “trans-racial”, and that if we were “colourblind” we might recognize that Rachel Dolezal is just the same as Caitlyn Jenner and her transition from man to woman.

And they’re confused because they mistake “social construct” for something that is entirely made up and thus could be thrown out without impact, rather than being an agreed-upon framework by which we understand differences between human beings and as label shortcuts to simplify language, and to better understand a rough approximation of a person’s identity and upbringing in shorthand.

Race is a social construct. Gender is also a social construct. That does not make them “not real things”, in the same way that money is a social construct — as an abstraction and standardization of value and a symbol of resources available to a person. Nobody is rushing to say money doesn’t actually exist or have any importance in our capitalist society. They might want to abolish money, in the same way as a person might want to abolish gender. But that’s not to say they’re going to succeed without serious changes in society, changes that evidently can’t be envisioned happening by increments by the people proposing that abolishing the construct is a worthy goal. In the case of money, you’d have to have absolute abundance of all resources — free limitless energy and a replicator machine that could make whatever you want with that energy, for instance. In the case of gender, you’d have to have a society that accepted any performative aspect of self-identity without our innate desire to pigeonhole or label them in short-form for communications purposes.

Perhaps another example would help. Another thing that’s a social construct is sex. Not sexual congress, but the binary male / female dichotomy. Genetics are not so binary, and there’s a fuzzy area in between the assignments where things get dicey. Assigning a child a sex at birth when maybe 95% (a number off the top of my head) might fit readily into one of the two boxes without issues, and the remainder do not fit quite so neatly, is very problematic. It’s doubly problematic when people — doctors, parents, cigar makers — use the mental shortcut of what sex that child is assigned to determine what gender they’re likewise assigned at birth. The cigars don’t after all say “it’s a male!” And “it’s a boy!” could rightly be viewed with skepticism as to its certainty, knowing that it’s only VERY LIKELY a boy, and might actually turn out to be, say, a trans neutrois person once they’re fully able to make the gender identity determination for themselves.

But “It’s very likely a boy!” won’t play well on cigars except amongst a particularly enlightened crowd. And even then, with a truly enlightened society, who’s to say the parents would then have any particular investment or excitement of hitting the Red-or-Black on the roulette wheel, that they might ask doctors to bump the child from 0 or 00 into their preferred category? There’s comfort in certainty that you’ve pigeonholed a person appropriately. There’s likewise an abrogation of personal integrity in altering the child to fit one or the other sets of criteria.

Some examples of this that happen fairly regularly (given how rare the conditions involved actually are) include removal of one or the other set of sexual organs from intersex children, or giving courses of testosterone to a micropenised boy or removing it altogether and raising the child as a girl. The existence of the Phall-O-meter, developed by Anne Fausto-Sterling, speaks to our desire to enforce a sex binary. And we all know that this sex binary impacts on gender, because parents generally socialize infants in the gender that matches their sex — people with vaginas are treated as little girls, etc.

It is no surprise that there is so much pushback against abolition of the gender binary — even by those who claim to want to eliminate gender altogether, who rail against trans folk as being alternately “invaders” into female spaces, or “traitors” by switching side to Team Patriarchy. When the binary suggests that men are always oppressors and women always victims, that presupposes that everyone must fit into one of those two categories and that gender — which is performative — isn’t actually impacted societally by those two camps. That you can take on any gender you want without having had that gender impacted by society socializing a person in a particular way. And yet, you will see the same people presupposing a sex dichotomy, railing against performative gender, demanding that only assigned-females-at-birth get any dominion over the gender category of “woman”, and that any trans woman must needs define themselves as “males with unusual gender performance”. TERFs‘ ideology is confused in this way — it argues both sides of each issue to arrive at a muddled and hairy conclusion that necessarily marginalizes identities whose very existence undercut their own. It is no wonder people like Cathy Brennan and Elizabeth Hungerford petitioned to have trans identity stripped from UN protections — the existence of trans folk undercuts their own sense of self-identity. They believe that a trans woman in a “female-bodied” space would pose some sort of danger to their efforts to… eliminate gender. Because some of these trans women might ACTUALLY be male rapists in disguise! Or some other fear-mongering nonsense. You know.

No, I’m not sure how to square that either. I just don’t know why anyone would want to try, why anyone who pretends at rationality who legitimately wants to interrogate gender and their relationship with it wouldn’t write off Brennan and Hungerford as cranks and get their gender-critical ideas elsewhere.

It is probably possible to be “transracial” in a limited sense. It is certainly possible for a white person to live in a predominantly black culture and to integrate into local customs and, as the racist phrase goes, “go native”. To naturalize to a culture that is not the one of their heritage. America was after all founded on being a melting pot of culture. Certainly people do it all the time here, coming to America to start a small business and find their fortune, despite hailing from a country where the closed-minded and provincial sorts who live in this country might look at you and say “yer a terrist!” because you’re not the same colour as them, or speak with an accent, or have a funny name (not like good American names like Stroker or Dorkoff). And these people integrate into some amount of the local culture, even though America as a culture is not itself a race. It is a good example of how someone might come to adhere to cultural standards of a “race” which might have firebreaks built between intermingling — laws like anti-miscegenation, microaggressions against people of certain skin color, systemic problems like broken-window policing that keep society stratified and finding that those stratifications, strangely enough, occur along racial divides. All of this might lead to someone being socialized into another “race” despite not technically being a member, and functioning primarily within the framework of that race.

But a person like Dolezal who might still benefit at any time from white privilege by stopping kinking their hair and pretending to be a light-skinned black person, who chose to present as black out of cynical self-interest and an evident desire to be the blacks’ Great White Hope and lead their organizations and be their Respectable Spokesperson, is more like the grossly improbable bugaboo scenario of a person pretending to be trans in order to invade your spaces. It’s a violation in that it’s not true. It’s not, like with Caitlyn Jenner’s gender identity, about finding an identity that is more comfortable to you at the expense of some amount of privilege, about being able to perform an identity that fits better your internal map of self. With Dolezal, it was about a person literally deceiving an underclass in order to gain some measure of direct power over them. Try to tell me that Jenner has more power as a woman, binning all but vestiges of her macho Olympian past, without sounding like an MRA.

And beyond all that, even black folks who integrate thoroughly with white culture in America to the point of participating in all the societally prescribed methods of maintaining the capitalist stratification that keeps their race oppressed, will themselves become targets by racists. A black CEO of a Fortune 500 company would, I posit, have a higher chance of being pulled over and maybe murdered in a traffic stop for resisting arrest than a white carjacker driving the same Porsche. Race is a social construct based mostly around skin colour and prejudice, and any cultural upbringing associated with that race becomes conflated and confused with that race. Thus a racist might make fun of black people for eating collard greens while New Zealanders can get away with eating Dalmatian cabbage without a second look.

That social construct has real impact. Saying “race is a social construct” is not the same thing as saying “race isn’t real and we should all be colourblind”. And saying “gender is a social construct” is not the same as saying gender has no impact, or that if we did away with gender that people would no longer need to perform anything.

In fact, I think the opposite. Even if you’re critical of gender in its current form, there will always be a performative aspect of gender. Even those who don’t perform typically, who are disinterested in any overt displays of gender, are performing the gender identity that they are most comfortable with — they have added to their self-identity those routines that allow them to avoid what they know society expects of them, and that abstaining is itself performative. It is possible to be agender entirely, to simply be the intellectual whose only pursuits are science, or the artist whose only pursuits are art, who cannot function in society because they cannot relate to other people, or who can function in society by understanding the social mores and rules and performing them only to the point where they don’t involve anything related to sexuality or romantic coupling. It’s even possible for people who are entirely agender to perform romantic gestures with one another. (Though steeped as we are in heteronormative romantic narratives, it would look to most of us like a couple that fits into other boxes, like a regular heterosexual couple who happens to perform gender very differently, who wears or dresses however they want regardless of gender associations with particular modes of dress.)

But gender also serves a purpose in society, though it need not necessarily if only we were more willing as a species to ask questions of our potential partners. When I say I want all people of all sexes to be able to perform whatever gender they prefer without being judged for it, I also understand that heterosexual cis people might have an interest in finding a reproductive mate and that these people might be inclined to look for, or rule out, certain mates based on those intentions, and looking for people of particular genders is a quick mental shortcut.

This might also be why there’s such a moral panic amongst bigots about the possibility of these shortcuts being “wrong” in the sense that what they perceive to be a woman might actually have a penis, meaning they found themselves attracted to someone with whom they can’t mate in the traditional sense. Their heterosexuality is thrown into question because of someone else’s performance and they become confused, because their identity is so tied up in their preferring vulvas that they find any chance of them judging presence of preferred sexual organ incorrectly to be repulsive. Their identity then hinges on preventing someone else from performing theirs, and they become (often violently) reactive.

So there will always be some judgment involved in interpersonal interactions. I’d just rather it be pluralistic and pragmatic judgment rather than xenophobic or bigoted judgment resulting in unnecessary pain out of reactions to perceived assault on the bigot’s self-identity. And I’m especially disinterested in judgments that result in abridging people’s rights as full human beings; or judgments that result in violations of bodily autonomy or bodily integrity. I think my positions about pluralism, about gender, and about trans-inclusivity specifically are entirely consistent with my core belief that each human being has a right to self-direction and self-identity, and that only where that self-identity trods upon another’s is the identity itself in question.

It’s for that reason that I side with women against a society that would force women to be birthing factories, that I would side with black folks against a systemic injustice that results in their disproportionate murder and incarceration and enforced poverty at the hands of those with power, and that I would side with trans folks against those trans-exclusive “gender critical” folks who find the existence of trans identity to be undercutting to their own sense of identity and who would petition to strip them of fundamental human rights.

It seems only fair and just in this world rife with injustice.

And one cannot come to these positions without understanding what a social construct actually is, and isn’t. You can’t change the world in a positive way without first understanding how it functions now, or by throwing out large swathes of it in service of a jingoistic “colourblindness” or “genderblindness” just because it feels like the more skeptical course of action. If you try to navigate society by gut feel, you’ll get results no better than random — you might arrive at the most just world, but only by sheer chance.

The post Constructing an understanding of social constructs appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Oh, how like a slimer I am in aspect and in character! How viscous my thoughts, how stalker-like my attempts at forming them in context of evidence! I have committed a grievous sin, which I will admit here and hope for papal dispensation from the gatekeepers of intersectionality: I have looked at the Likes on a post on Facebook, on a post that I felt aggrieved people with whom I feel the need to side with in a particular fight.

Ophelia Benson, with whom I have stood shoulder and shoulder in a great many fights against awful human beings bent on destroying feminists for being feminists on the internet, has decreed that I am anathema, that I am like a slimepitter; I am a terrible person and very much creepy and stalkerish for my actions in deciding to disagree with her that the question of whether trans women are women is not an easy one and in my methodology in catching up in the matter. By my picking now, while she feels under assault, to disagree with her specific tack and her specific argumentation about trans women making awful terrible demands of her like asking yes/no questions for clarification, I am of course disingenuous, not legitimately asking but rather just trying to tear her down. I am “joining the mob”. And I am even indistinguishable — despite our history — from that mob.

Let’s get the housekeeping out of the way first — the backstory that moves me to post so floridly once more, despite my prolonged absence.

Ophelia has recently, ostensibly inadvertently, angered the online trans community, with whom FtB is generally friendly, after some rather tone-deaf commentary on the performance of beauty by Caitlyn Jenner. This brought to the minds of a number of trans folk hereabouts a post from a year ago about Hobby Lobby, when she both dismissed a request to acknowledge that Planned Parenthood actually also benefits trans men who still require OB/GYN services, and subsequently misgendered a trans person who claims to have given their preferred pronouns — they were understandably wary of her and evidently viewed Jenner post as trans-antagonistic. This sparked a large fight, during which time Ophelia acted as though — if you’ll pardon my interpreting her feelings here — that she was under siege by a number of dishonest interlocutors.

After this fight simmered for a month plus (while I’ve been preoccupied with my own life nonsense and could not be moved to post even silly videos about turtles or about the latest video game that I’m obsessed with), things came to a renewed head recently, when a trans person asked her point blank whether trans women are actually women, and demanded a yes or no answer.

Sensing this as a trap, she has posted about how awful this tactic is, how holding her hostage to a yes or no answer is abridging freethought and demanding dogmatic adherence to a specific ideology. The trans community was, in my estimation rightly, incensed by this refusal to acknowledge their requested validation of trans women’s womanhood.

Ophelia’s reaction seems odd to me because the question has a very obvious answer that, as long as you recognize gender for the social construct that it is and are not trying to police what “counts” as womanhood while also demanding that we be critical of the gender binary, works entirely logically and equally with every other adjective you might add to “woman”. The phrase “are trans women actually women”, when you replace the adjective with another like “white”, or when you remove it altogether, has an obvious answer.

“Are white women actually women?”

“Yes — the ‘white’ part is not a modifier per se of the word ‘woman’, thus you are asking ‘are women actually women’, and thus the answer is yes.”

“Are women actually women?”

“Of course they are. That’s a tautology.”*

It’s for that reason that I can without hesitation answer the question of ‘are trans women actually women’ with an unequivocal yes, with no qualifiers or asterisks.

Whether “womanhood” as a construct is valid is a separate question, and one I think Benson with her “gender-critical” views (as evidenced by her reaction to Caitlyn Jenner coming out as trans, and the backlash thereabouts) has been attempting to undertake herself, and she clearly sees being sideswiped by the question of whether or not a trans woman “counts” as a woman as a monkey wrench in the gears she’s trying to build to grind gender away into nothingness.

I’ll happily talk more about gender as a construct and a performance, and the nexus of the expected performance vs the actually performed one, at a later juncture if anyone’s interested, but it’s not particularly important here. The short form of my argument, though, is that since classification as “woman” has no bearing on whether you have certain physiological needs e.g. trans men also need OB/GYN services, what is left is the societal construct only, and thus denying the desired gender role of the trans person just because of physiological concerns like “has penis” is every bit as gatekeeping and gross and gender-prescriptive as denying womanhood because of somehow insufficiently womanly performance.

What’s important now, though, is that there was a conversation between some people I consider friends and allies on Twitter this morning, which I think was going in completely the wrong direction because of a certain specific recalcitrance to recognize that trans folk might actually have found Ophelia Benson’s arguing against the full womanhood of trans women to be damaging and might actually have been coming to that position through a rational examination of the evidence at hand. Even if that wasn’t her intent — even if her painting the entire exercise of asking for clarification because she’s been unclear to that point as pure McCarthyism (“Are you now or have you ever been”) was entirely out of fear of being painted into a binary yes/no question on a situation she thought was more complex, it’s clear that the correct answer was “yes” at the specific resolution in which it was being asked, and any “buts” actually come as nuance to the argument about the gender role, and not about the desire for that gender role by the trans person. Being unable to simply give the “yes” and then add whatever clarification was necessary, that act itself hurt those trans folks who posed the question.

My interjection into the Twitter conversation was explicitly about the potential of interpreting Benson’s response of the “trans women are women” question as having a qualifier that makes the womanhood of these trans women somehow questionable, that the use of the adjective somehow changed “women” in a way that “white” does not, and how her liking the responses that evinced that position might lead someone outside the argument to genuinely interpret Benson’s position as anti-trans. My argument was that judging Benson’s position as being anti-trans was actually fairly reasonable based on the evidence at hand.

I will note now that it is well possible to hold a nuanced view about gender as being a malleable and mostly-societally-prescribed construct without denying access to the desired gender role to the person who feels, thanks to nature or nurture, more comfortable in one over another. Given that we all get boxed into specific roles, and those specific roles might chafe (as I’m sure the specific roles Benson is saddled with chafe her in myriad ways, as she’s railed against them severally over the years), especially in context of society mistaking physical sex organs for appropriate classifying criteria for the otherwise malleable gender roles. It therefore seems only just and right to rally to assist those of us who would be more comfortable in another role, especially where our support of them comes at absolutely zero cost to us except to our own prior unexamined programming with regard to gender roles.

In fact, if the goal is the deconstruction of gender, it seems apposite to cause people to rethink how others might like to perform gender in their own ways regardless of the apparent discrepancies in their physiology, seeing as how the correlation between said physiology and their desired gender is entirely a shim between a fact and a societal construct. So, calling trans women women, saying yes to the dread question — if indeed “trans” alters the fact of “woman” in any way more proximately than “white” might, which I actually expressly deny — would thus aid in the deconstruction of the gender binary that so chafes at Benson and, frankly, us all.

Strangely enough, when I felt the need to catch up on this specific fight and interject in a conversation between these friends and allies on Twitter, apparently my simple act of reading a public Facebook thread where Benson asked for support against these arguments that were being made against her, and noticing that she’d liked some comments that apparently interpreted her position as something approximating “trans women shouldn’t need the adjective if they were actual full-stop women” (comments that I found particularly repulsive and moved me to see who liked them), was somehow creepy and stalkerish and Slimepitter-like. While this strikes me as a particularly vast overreach by someone who feels themselves under siege, I empathize with the thought processes that led to it, even if I disagree strenuously.

Being pointed to a thread, seeing who agreed with a repulsive comment, and noting that Benson herself did so, is not in fact equivalent to following her around social media for years and itemizing and indexing her every comment, like, edit, and all the rest of the social media equivalent of rifling through her garbage. Noting her public endorsement of a repugnant thing is not, actually, somehow thought-policing her. I have lost a number of friends — Benson included — over daring to suggest that Benson’s actions in this regard are actually relevant in determining Benson’s own views on trans folk, despite the fact that this collecting and parsing of evidence is only necessary since she’s so recalcitrant to give a simple yes or no when asked. Make no mistake that I have been burned for making this stand. But, I do not claim the victim mantle for that; anyone who’d burn me for these actions isn’t someone I’m wont to associate with anyway. I prefer people who can take a complicated and close topic like this and give it the nuanced treatment it deserves.

To be honest, I could not give you a link to the specific Facebook post now (since I’m not, you know, actually stalking her, committing URLs to my eidetic memory or copying them to my How-To-Burn-Ophelia file), nor do I care to put the full scope of how she’s behaved on trial (since I’m not trying to have her excommunicated or drummed out of anything or set on fire as a witch, despite her protestations). I am speaking only for myself, how I reacted to how I saw her behave and what I saw her endorse, and I am merely disagreeing with the whole vector this conversation and her repeated doubling-down against what should be a simple concession, much as she once disagreed with Michael Shermer for atheism being “kind of a guy thing” over his and fanboys’ howls of being witch-hunted. If you consider me a dishonest narrator, so be it. Since I can’t offer proof of what I saw or how I reacted, that’s your call.

I sincerely doubt that the mere action of looking at the Likes on a particularly gross post on Facebook and discovering the person you’re in the process of collecting data on is anything approaching the years-long, patently unfair and grossly fixated harassment campaign she amongst others hereabouts has endured at the hands of the numerous antifeminist atheists who inhabit the slime pit. And yet, a number of long-term commenters at Freethought Blogs, who should know who I am and what I’m about, evidently feel strongly enough that my noticing her liking comments that I find repugnant is somehow a literal witch-hunt that, despite the innumerable fights we’ve had over criticism vs McCarthyism, they agree that I am somehow dredging the annals of Benson’s history of associations to find some few words to hang her by like some Cardinal Richelieu.

Except, that is patently not my intent here. I disagree with the specifics of why Benson refused the yes or no question. I do not think she should be excommunicated or excoriated or burned at the stake or drummed out of the movement or drummed out of the blog network or defriended or block-botted or what-have-you, except I do not deny that people who’ve been hurt might feel otherwise. That people have reacted genuinely to being hurt and feeling betrayed by her is not particularly invalid, nor am I one to judge those cries and those blocks and those friendships thrown on the pyre. But in the meantime, I absolutely refuse to believe — despite her feeling under siege presently — that anyone should hold off on nuanced criticism.

I absolutely empathise with her reaction, though. It’s surely difficult to recognize valid criticism when you feel you’re under siege from all parties. I’ve seen so many of us go siege mentality. I’ve done it myself. I get what it feels like to be attacked, and for such a length of time. I’ve seen it in others where no valid criticism ever gets through to you, being drowned out by the rage and the howling. I’ve even seen how she’s reacted to others acting exactly as she’s doing now — when others deny there’s anything valid there, she holds them to account even despite the defense and the protests of witch-hunts.

Except honestly, much — maybe even most — of the criticism she’s receiving is, indeed, valid. What I’m seeing is a lot of valid, stretched out over time, peppered with a little overreach. Admittedly, I’m not the locus, but I’m certainly seeing a good deal of legitimate criticism of the calibre that you didn’t see with Rebecca Watson or Anita Sarkeesian.

Even if you CAN find me tons of examples of overreach, of attacking her directly, of attacking her for specious connections and tenuous arguments bolstered only by rumours and insinuation (none of which I can deny because it is in the very nature of a dogpile to contain overreach like this), a good deal of the criticism she is facing is actually valid. There are honest interlocutors genuinely hurt by things she’s said and done, that they can point to, that are still extant on the internet and not grossly misinterpreted; and these honest interlocutors are demanding a genuine and contrite apology and improvement in behaviour in the future. That is to say, nothing that would cost her a damn thing except a moment’s introspection.

When she’s ready to hear these requests, they’ll still be said. These people will still be here. The arguments will continue to exist, despite their various handwaving dismissals by Benson and supporters. And they’ll be provided by the people whose axe to grind is against their own oppression, not against Benson as a person, not against dishonest pilers-on from places slimey and antifeminist and only interested in taking down another strong feminist to the end of their holy war against feminists on the internet. Mind you, the longer she grabs at the victim mantle and paints all criticism equally, the more likely she’s doing damage to herself, and the more exasperated the honest interlocutors will get. The more likely it is, over time, that many of these people will have left, tired of waiting for Benson to catch up.

In the meantime, I side unequivocally with the trans folks who are hurt by this whole incident. Not out of spite of Benson, nor malice, nor attempting to drive traffic or steal traffic or popularity or “drama blogging” or whatever other excuse one might pull from the Grab Bag of I Don’t Wanna Deal With My Criticism. Let’s be honest — I barely blog any more. I can barely find it in me to do any sort of activism, given how high a price you pay when you dare disagree with people within your own community. I am only moved to fight the most proximate of injustices, and I harbor no pretenses that I’ll actually impact on them. Given I have two orders of magnitude lower traffic than Benson at the moment, I suspect only she will really see this (and only then thanks to the two links back to her posts in this one, thus the trackbacks). I further suspect only a select few very close to this issue or motivated to defend her against all attacks might comment. But if she does see this, and makes it to the end of this post without ragequitting half way through, good on her. She should hopefully know I have no “grudge” against her, no “beef”. Maybe the whole story laid out like this will bring her to realize this isn’t an attack, it’s a genuine request for dialogue.

I’m not kidding myself, though. Probably not.

—

*”Are blue candies actually candies?”

“OBVIOUSLY NOT. YOU WOULDN’T NEED TO QUALIFY THEM AS BLUE UNLESS THAT MEANT SOMETHING SPECIAL IN TERMS OF THE CANDY LABEL.”

The post How do I know he's a witch-hunter? He is dressed as one! appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

This is an experience that I’ve been steeped in and have been actively fighting for almost a decade now. I’m exhausted. It’s why I really just want to blog about things I like right now.

Being in possession of a white penis as John Oliver says (and/or being perceived to be same when I was anonymous so many years ago; see comments for nuance with regard to trans folk), I received a tenth the harassment I saw others receive. I only drew people’s ire when I pointed this out, and only attracted haters and slime pitters to swarm me and attack me when I dared defend their targets or interrogated their questionable logic. They are entirely disinterested in me as long as I turn a blind eye to the damage they do. It’s a built-in defense mechanism, I think. And it’s a winning strategy — a decade of seeing the dregs of humanity tear down everything you try to build does, in fact, wear at you.

You wonder why I am tired? This is why. Because there’s a cadre of people who act as a katamari of awful, rolling from one community to another, genuinely believing in their campaign to push interlopers off of the internet, picking targets and slowly eroding their confidence and destroying their lives, pushing them out of the public sphere. It is censorship of a creeping and insidious sort, and a far more insidious censorship than “waah, someone said that thing I said is objectively harmful even though I’m free to say it, they shouldn’t be free to say otherwise because free speech”. Rape threats and death threats and defense of same as “criticism” is shameful, attacking legitimate criticism as “witch hunts” and “lynch mobs” is shameful, and it’s shameful that anyone with a shred of intellect (*coughdawkins*) might be suckered into that narrative just because they themselves are criticized for saying sexist, racist or otherwise societally harmful things.

The post John Oliver on online harassment appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

ETA: The fundraiser is actually over. Here’s their Patreon page instead, so you can be a recurring contributor if you’d like.

I’m sure you all know Sally Strange, who frequents these parts and is a staple of the commentariat even here. She and a number of other bloggers are building a blog network to represent some classes of voice that don’t often get heard, and asked me to throw in what meagre support I have to offer. And they have already — before launching — met with an overt attempt at scuttling their plans.

8chan, where the nastiest parts of chan culture re-settled after even 4chan started turning their noses up at their inhumane doxxing, SWATting and harassment, got wind and are already in the process of attacking the Indiegogo campaign and the bloggers for whom it would benefit.

They deserve our support and a shot at making their voices heard. They deserve the chance to speak, rather than to be silenced by this hate mob who attack them “for the lulz”.

Here’s Sally’s plea.

Sally Strange and Burning Bridges: Why You Should Support a New Blog Network

Well, this is strange.

Yeah, I know. Strange, haha. Aren’t I strange. You’d probably be surprised at how many internet trolls have thought it would be clever to try to insult me by calling me strange. I know I was. I mean, I’m basically sitting here saying, yes, I acknowledge my strangeness.

I didn’t pick the name at random. Strange is my normal (and Sally was my namesake grandmother’s nickname). Strangeness has been a constant throughout my life. From growing up isolated in the country with hippie parents in rural upstate New York, to attempting to live “off the land” in my delusional attempt to make their dream a reality during my 20s, to graduating college at age 31, to being the lone woman on many a construction work site, I’ve gotten used to being the odd one out.

Right now the strangeness is coming from the stomach-dropping commitment to believing that my stories are worth telling to the world. That my skills would be up the task. That people will want to read them, and the stories of my comrades who are planning to share their stories, art, videos, and more on this new blogging network called Burning Bridges Blogs.

This past winter was rough for me and many of my friends. I was fired from my last job essentially in retaliation for whistleblowing, though I was not in fact the whistleblower. I was commiserating with my friends, many of whom also experience poverty on a regular basis, thanks to being laid off, single parenthood, escaping abusive relationships, disabilities and chronic illness, mental health issues, and societal bigotries such as racism, trans-antagonism, and misogyny. We all write regularly and have many other talents and skills, and we were wishing that we could translate our regular output on social media and our private blogs into regular revenue which, if not sufficient to pay the rent, would at least help tide us over during the rough times. And so the idea of Burning Bridges was formed.

The name comes from the idea of lighting your way with the bridges you burn, rather than fearing the flames. And maybe next time using a better, less flammable design, if a bridge is really what we want.

We want Burning Bridges, the blog and the publishing company, to further the trend of marginalized people gaining a voice through the horizontal structure of the internet.

Burning Bridges will include Sunflower Punk, a homeless, single mom with depression from NYC by way of Puerto Rico. She’ll be writing about racism, class, gender and mental illness, and also Sailor Moon.

There’s Kassiane, who’s basically a mythical warrior elf shooting flaming arrows at ableism and other forms of bigotry. She was one of the earliest of early adopters of the neurodivergence movement.

Angie Jackson is a reproductive rights activist and lesbian single mom with arthritis who was raised in a faith healing cult, who gained notoriety when she live-tweeted her abortion in 2010.

Alyssa and Ania are a lesbian couple and blogging about, respectively, transgender liberation and minorities in STEM, and chronic illness and medical marijuana. There are writing examples and videos up from all these and more at our Indiegogo site. You can peruse my abortive attempts at blogging at my wordpress journal, which I plan on updating with this.

As for me, I plan on talking about climate change and environmental justice. That’s going to be a weekly installment. As a person with a fair amount of privilege (able-bodied, white, cis, educated), I have resources to be able to pay attention to this and talk about it to other people. Climate change is a feminist issue; the people who will be affected the most are disproportionately, as always, women and people of color. Getting beyond greenhouse gases, it’s clear that our captains of industry have made a policy of seeking out poor and disorganized communities in which to site infrastructure with the worst environmental side effects; for example, garbage incinerators (a fight against an incinerator in upstate NY was the seed for the current anti-fracking movement), dumps, untreated brownfields, mining, etc., because such communities lack the capacity to resist such projects the way middle class white communities would (and did, in the case of upstate New York).

Second, on a more personal note: when I was in my early 20s, I traveled a lot and did some cool weird stuff. I also kept journals. Lots and lots of journals.

I plan on transcribing my journals online, with commentary. This is going to be interesting because I haven’t really read these in about a decade, and I’m sure that what I can consciously recall about those years is but a sliver of what I can actively recall now, about ten years later. Now, I wouldn’t inflict the tortured musings and bad poetry (there’s not much, I promise) of an insecure young woman who’s in denial about her sexuality for no reason. The thing is, at the time, I sincerely believed in alternative woo–chakras, “energy”, auras, past lives, tarot, psychic phenomena, astrology, that sort of thing. My journey to skepticism about these things brought me to meet some fascinating characters, and to explore some beautiful places. I hope to bring some of these alive for you, while providing insight into what it’s like to leave, not religion, but a sort of vague lefty spirituality.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, and the only writing I’ve gotten paid for thus far is technical manuals and press releases. This is exciting and a little nerve-wracking. So please! Support Burning Bridges! Spread the word if you can’t donate. The fundraiser is going to pay for domain registration, graphic design, server & server set-up. There are a few fun incentives, including satirical homonormative rewrites of pop songs by Dirty Nerdy, and I have promised to personally crochet a toy cephalopod (like this one that I made for my nephew) for anyone who donates over $150. My summer is looking super busy, so I’m half hoping nobody takes me up on it.

Update: between when I started this article, and when I went to publish it, our fundraiser was found by 8chan, which, if you’re unaware, is where the pedophiles and doxxers went once they got too extreme for 4chan. Already several of our contributors have had their blogs and videos torn apart in their message boards, with horribly misogynist, homophobic, ableist, and transphobic commentary. For me, it’s a minor nightmare. For some of our contributors, who are writing under their real names, it’s terrifying. We knew something like this would probably happen, but personally I’m a bit surprised that they glommed onto us before our fundraiser is even finished. I guess we’re probably doing something right. So if nothing else, you should donate. Just to spite them.

–Sally Strange

I will disagree, albeit mildly, with that last point. I donated not to spite the Channers who would antagonize diversity off of the internet just because it’s diversity, who choose their “lolcow” targets based on who’s the most vulnerable and the least deserving of hatred but who would be most likely to display the damage for their own entertainment. Whose empathy is so atrophied and whose social behaviour so impossibly objectively evil that they honestly think hurting people is a game, just notches on their belt, as though they are agents of social Darwinism and they are doing society good by savaging the weakest members.

I donated because I honestly believe in helping give voice to the otherwise voiceless, in levelling the playing field so that those people with disadvantages have a chance to advocate for themselves on equal footing. If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in advocating for various social justice causes in meatspace and on the internet, it’s that diversity is its own reward — the benefits of a pluralistic society make themselves plain wherever it exists. People who already have a voice, like those channers trying to undercut the network because the bloggers involved are different, shouldn’t get to decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t. And their haranguing those they perceive weak and different “for the lulz” has but one logical outcome — a pax romanus and empathy vacuum of cis white heteronormative culture dominated by people exactly them-shaped.

If this network is funded and succeeds and thrives despite the roiling hate mob, perfect. If it sticks a thumb in the eyes of the hate mob, that’s icing, not the cake.

The post Sally Strange and Burning Bridges: Why You Should Support a New Blog Network appeared first on Lousy Canuck.

Let’s all say it: Ayden Pearce is morally repugnant. Errant Signal does an excellent and thorough job itemizing exactly why.

I had been interested in this game, and in the concept of hacking-as-superpower, but when it turned into yet another white-guy-does-whatever-he-wants story, where every moral decision boils down to “shoot the guy or blow up the guy”, where you’re given tidbits of information about the lives and dreams and desires of each person you’re systematically murdering, where you’re essentially obligated to spy on and not intervene in situations where you could actually legitimately make a difference because they’re just cut-scenes inserted for flavour, I couldn’t bring myself to play.

It’s like all the power they give you is misdirected, where you can’t fix the system but you can take advantage of it for your own gain. Where you become judge, jury and executioner for crimes that haven’t yet been committed, and you let other grievous crimes go entirely unpunished because you, omniscient privileged douchebag, cannot be moved to actually do anything. And when you DO do something about an injustice, it’s the wrong thing entirely, against the wishes of everyone around you. Where you’re both the cause and the violent solution to the problems in your life. Where your actions are supposed to be good but your opponents’ actions are bad, despite the fact that you’re doing a thousand times objectively eviller things as a matter of course.

If we’re going to talk about ethics in video games, this is ultimately a Douchebag Hacker Empowerment Fantasy simulator, and it doesn’t remotely touch on any of the things that need to be discussed with regard to the disturbing surveillance culture we’re in. I can get empowerment fantasies in far less problematic worlds than this, without feeling like I’m railroaded into the Evil playthrough of a game like Infamous where the moral choices are approximately “save the box of kittens, or stuff them with grenades and throw them off a building indiscriminately”.

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