as small as a world and as large as alone

3:35am May 2, 2014

poisondartwolf:

andromedalogic:

ok, i’m going to go there:

i think i was far more open-minded, unprejudiced, and willing/able to understand people’s experiences that didn’t mesh with my own, before i Spoke SJ.

i think it has clouded my judgment and made me a worse person.

a few things about feminism have been useful to me. a lot of things about disability rights and self-advocacy have been useful to me. but the language, the matrix, and the way that people’s lives are presented has completely fucked up my ability to see people as people.

i know part of this is due to my scrupulosity (morality-based ocd); that kind of brain problem is extremely vulnerable to systems of prescriptive moral judgment. buuuut. anything that claims to be good and respectful should not trigger that part of my brain. ‘social justice’ cannot resemble mental illness. that’s a giant red flag.

as soon as i learned to use the word ‘privilege’, without precisely understanding it, i felt some of my empathy spiral away, to be replaced with an empty sardonic ghost. to be replaced with the idea that i technically understood, i knew what was going on here sociologically, i could fit it into the puzzle, so i was not required to go through the legwork of understanding. i was one of the enlightened ones. i was in.

and i know the great thinkers who articulated these ideas are not to blame. but the watered-down version is presented this way. as a social tool. it’s about how in-the-know you can be, how Good you can be, and it is deeply toxic and disturbing.

i don’t want to be there. i want to preserve the truly important things i’ve learned, particularly wrt disability advocacy, but i want the system to be alien to me again.

Spending time around the social justice has taught me some absolutely important concepts, and I have learned a lot of things. Learning about disability advocacy and the various forms ableism can take was absolutely vital. And tumblr being what it is has allowed  me to read a lot of different viewpoints of my own, and that too has helped me grow.

But how social justice is talked about in dialogues I’ve encountered is a very specific language and set words. Most of them rooted in actual research and sound theory, yes. But the more I look, the more there is not much of a place for people like myself. I don’t see reflections of me in those theories. Either my life is such an aberration I don’t matter, or my delusions are worse than I thought, or the truth of it is people are intensely complex and varied, and america is intensely varied. (Focusing on america in this case because of a lot of discussions are american-centric.) And I think that theories are important, but they can’t allow for every possibility. There has to be some flexibility.

And I also feel like some of the hard rules in tumblr sj culture make it very easy for people to be declared irredeemable bad or toxic. When the proof for such things is very low it becomes very easy for people to manipulate that kind of thing for their own end. Worse because people tend to trust those aiming for justice. (I mean I don’t but I am literally paranoid. It’s just sometimes a useful paranoia.) A practical example of this is this discussion on “if you are called out you must apologize immediately”.

Also about empathy in privilege-I think it some ways it can cause people to think their pain isn’t real. Pain is not the same, and yes privilege does exist. But mental illness, chronic illness, a whole host of those sorts of things can affect anyone. And people are allowed to hurt and feel pain, and a part of my time on tumblr has resulted in me thinking my paint doesn’t matter, my problems don’t matter because I have it easy-even though I am disabled, and have mental health problems I would probably consider severe. And it almost becomes a form of self-gaslighting (I can’t quite think of a better concept, if someone knows one I am open to suggestions): “someone has told me I am wrong, I should not critique that because I am inherently wrong”, “I have been called toxic therefore it means I am irredeemable”, “these words are bad [even though there may be debate about them] so I must police my language and the words of those around me”, “this goes against my personal ethics but it is the right thing to do so I will ignore my feelings and do it”. I eventually stopped trusting myself, and my feelings of reality started going with that too.

Tumblr has the ability to spread information and concepts very quickly, but at the same time that also spread a certain kind of ideological purity, and it becomes a game of casting out those with the “wrong” ideals.

And I did learn a lot. And that is good. And I don’t know exactly how discourse should change. But I do want distance. I’m starting to feel like I can trust myself again, and it’s okay to have my own morals and ideas on ethics. And I can decide things for myself. Though I think how well I speak tumblr’s sj codewords will stay with me, and that type of thinking will stay with me. I don’t know how I feel about that, but I think I’m starting to see the subtleties of interactions again, and the complexity of situations, and shades of grey. I feel like it doesn’t amount to much in the culture around me, but if I can be okay, and others can be okay, I’ll take it.

I can’t agree more with andromedalogic.  Some of the concepts are what’s bad, some of it is just the way they get used the most often, but they do things to the mind that are very dangerous.

And I also think that a lot of these ideas serve the egos of people in oppressed groups in an extremely destructive way.  I don’t mean ego in terms of the way people say “inflated ego”, although that does happen here.  I mean ego in terms of the part of a person that… isn’t the part that moral judgements should be coming from, because it’s completely self-centered, selfish, and self-serving.  And these concepts teach oppressed people to be self-centered, selfish, and self-serving, and to call their selfishness a high moral calling.

Something I see that happens periodically that seriously frightens me, also.  Is people heavily steeped in this culture, people who do not question it at all.  Who eventually turn on their own, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad reasons.  But whether the reasons seem good or bad, the outcome is similar:  A fight over who has the right to shout the loudest, a fight over whether specific individuals have the right combination of oppressions to speak the ideas that they are speaking, who gets to be listened to more than everyone else, all of which hangs on who has the most oppressions.  So then it becomes who is really oppressed in these ways, who is just saying they are oppressed in these ways.  And just saying you’re oppressed in these ways becomes sacrilege.  And the punishment for sacrilege is being treated in ways that if they happened in any other context would be called severe cyberbullying.  This is not the only kind of sacrilege, but I see this and other forms of SJ sacrilege result in periodic shunnings and purges within the community.  After which new people rise up to become The Most Oppressed Ones Who Get To Speak Over Others Always, and the cycle begins again, until that person does a sacrilegious act.

It scares me.

It really scares me.

This is not how to run a community.

This is not even a community.  A community takes care of its own.  A community involves compassion and helping each other.  A community is not just a bunch of people who share an ideology and use that ideology to run roughshod over everyone who doesn’t share their ideology.

I remember there was a time when I was very surprised that someone could decide whether they liked me or not based on my spiritual beliefs.  I thought there was a rule in the world that people were not allowed to decide who they liked based on religion and spirituality.  So I kept asking the person, with total incredulousness, “You’re deciding whether or not you like me based on my religious beliefs?”  And I could not get past the fact that this is not in fact a hard and fast rule, that people are allowed to make decisions about whether they like people based on religion, whether I like it or not.

I see that same level of incredulousness in parts of the SJ community.  That same sense that the rules of the community are the rules of the world.  And I see things happening in interactions between people from that community, and people from the rest of the world who have never heard of the norms of that community.  Where the people used to SJ norms become completely incredulous that anyone would act outside the norms of their community.

Like “But… but that’s a derail, you can’t derail things!”

Yes you can, and there’s not even a rule in the world that anyone has to acknowledge that a conversation is the sort of thing that can be derailed.  The whole concept of derailing does not have to be built into the norms of human interaction.

I admit I was really happy when Derailing for Dummies came out.  It seemed to speak to so many interactions I’d had, where people found ways to dismiss important things I was saying, out of hand, in ways that were completely unfair.  And I still think it’s a good idea to be aware of those things.

But like many things involved in SJ culture, it has become almost a religion.  It has become, “These are ways that nobody should ever act in any context, these are things that, if they are ever said, are always the wrong thing to say.”  Not just factually wrong, but morally wrong, in a very absolute black-and-white fashion.

Recently someone accused me of derailing a conversation.  I got quite irritated with this, because I was not operating within the same context that this person was, and I did not, and do not, happen to believe that I have to operate within an SJ context when having ordinary conversations with people.

What happened was that someone said something.  And I answered what they said, and gave some experiences of my own that contradicted the idea that they had said.  And then other people started giving their own experiences, some of which were similar to mine, some of which weren’t, and many of which drifted far from the original topic, because thread drift is a thing and thread drift is not always a bad thing.

And then I got slammed for ‘talking over a trans woman who was saying important things about her experience of gender’.  Thing is, first off I didn’t know she was a trans woman.  Doing a cursory search of her blog, I could not find any information that would have led me to understand that she was  a trans woman, even if I even wanted to be in the habit (much less had the abilities) to go back to the original post in every reblog chain I reblog, and check out which categories the original poster belongs to.  

But the moment the words 'trans woman’ were uttered, everything changed.  The rules of conversation changed.  The rules of conversation were that I should defer to everything she says, because trans women are more oppressed than genderless people, trans women are in fact oppressed by genderless people, and that because I have certain problems with the way gender operates in my life, I also must have the same social and political agenda as a transphobic radical feminist.  I got flamed to a crisp, as did people whose only crime was to respond to things I was saying.  I eventually had to step out of the conversation because it was impossible to have any kind of reasonable discussion on the matter.

And all of the rules of the conversation changed the moment the trans status of the OP came into play.  Because there’s currently a rule in SJ that says that trans women are always the most oppressed trans people (and are frequently oppressed by bio-female trans and genderless people of all sorts), and there’s another rule in SJ that says the most oppressed person is always the person who needs to be listened to.

And the thing that got me the most was that I was not talking over her in any way.  I was not saying that my experiences should trump her experiences.  She hadn’t even talked about her experiences at that point, mind you, she’d just made a sweeping statement about how gender ought to work.  And I’d felt that her sweeping statement didn’t take my own experiences into account, so I described my experiences.  I did not say that the entire world had to be changed so that it would conform to my experiences.  I did not say that my experiences were more important than her experiences.  What I thought would happen, was that a wide variety of people – cis and trans and genderless alike – would describe their experiences with gender and how it’s dealt with in our society, and then maybe it would be possible to come up with a solution that worked for all of us.  But instead I was immediately accused of having a huge sense of entitlement (for thinking that my experiences as a genderless person were at all relevant in a conversation started by a trans woman, when again I had no idea she was a trans woman or even what gender she was), as in the sort of sense of entitlement that, say, a white person would have inserting their experience of race into a discussion taking place between people of color that should have been centered on people of color.  Except that’s not at all what happened, I didn’t believe my experience was more important, and I didn’t even think that as a genderless person my experiences would be considered so distinct and privileged compared to the experiences of trans people.  I sort of thought the discussion was going to be everyone’s experience of gender, maybe especially both trans and genderless people, because we have unique experiences of gender that cis people don’t, but not… nothing in the conversation gave the slightest clue that the conversational rules were that trans women were the only people whose experiences counted.  Not until I was already being flamed for talking over trans women.

And after that the conversation just got so impossible that I checked out of it.  Because nothing good was going to come of it.  Everyone involved agreed that we shouldn’t have been there, but that didn’t stop people from sending us lengthy explanations of exactly how wrong we were to have stepped into the conversation in the first place.  A conversation that gave absolutely no indication that there were boundaries we shouldn’t be crossing.  It was like we were supposed to be psychic – we were supposed to magically intuit that the OP was a trans woman and that only the opinions of trans women were welcome, and that as genderless people we should just butt out.  There was zero, zero indication of this, and yet we were being held to the idea that we should have somehow known and avoided the conversation.

Which makes no sense.  Even if we’d known that the OP was a trans woman, which we didn’t know.  There would’ve been no indication that our views were not welcome.  Because sometimes conversations like that are open to everyone, cis, trans, and genderless.  And sometimes conversations like that are only open to trans and genderless people.   And sometimes conversations like that are only open to specific kinds of trans people.  And unless someone gives a very specific set of cues, you’re not going to be able to know which is which.  Especially if (as all of the 'transgressors’ were) you’re autistic and have trouble reading social situations in the first place.

But the other rule was that as soon as the OP said she was a trans woman, we were all supposed to defer to her, even as she was saying really nasty things to us.  And that rule was one that people around her met with incredulousness that we didn’t automatically understand and follow the rule.  And then once she said that, it was as if we retroactively should’ve known everything about the social rules and followed all the social rules, all within the social norms of an SJ community we weren’t even part of.

I actually find the current view of privilege in the trans community – at least the view that seems most common on tumblr – really disturbing.  Because in the trans community, there is so much complicated stuff around privilege, that you can’t say that one set of people automatically and always has more privilege than another set of people.  The current social norms say that trans women are the most oppressed and least privileged trans people.  And there are ways in which I would never deny that – they (and any trans people mistaken for them, which has actually happened to me in the past, so I know it happens) are the ones most targeted for violence and murder, for instance.  But they are not always the ones with the least privilege.  With trans people, there are so many strands of privilege within each person, between each two people, that sometimes you can take two trans people and you can say “this person has this kind of privilege in this area, but lacks it in this other area”.  Sometimes binary trans people have privilege over non binary trans people.  Sometimes it’s the exact opposite.  Sometimes genderless people have privilege over gendered trans people.  Sometimes it’s the exact opposite.  Sometimes trans people have privilege or oppression related to the gender they were raised to be, which nobody is supposed to talk about at all, because it’s seen as affirming that somehow they “really are” that gender (which is not what I’m saying whatsoever).  I know for instance that the oppression involved in being raised with female expectations does not disappear just because I don’t feel like I have a gender.  And I have seen trans people (whether women or genderqueer or genderless) who were raised to be male, doing things that absolutely reflected the privilege they were raised with.  You can’t totally escape gender socialization just because you’re not the gender everyone thinks you are.  And so all of this and more, means that any time you get two trans or genderless people together, you’re dealing with maybe twelve different types of privilege and oppression all intertangling in a big mess.  You can’t, ever, just make a categorical statement that one set of trans or genderless people has it easier than another, or has absolute privilege over another.

One reason that this kind of complexity is denied all the time in the SJ community – a complexity that exists not just in the trans community but in all communities, although the trans community seems especially prone to such complexity due to how complex our gender experience and socialization is – is because there’s an almost religious belief in the SJ community, that it’s important to figure out who is the most oppressed, because that is the person who has the most right to speak and be listened to.  

It’s especially sought out because, as I’ve noticed in other posts, it really feeds the egos of oppressed people.  It tells us we can do and say anything we want in response to real or perceived oppression.  It tells us that we don’t really have to be accountable for what we do and say in response to real or perceived oppression.  It tells us that any response we have is the right one.  And it tells us that as long as we can position ourselves as the most oppressed person in a conversation (which many oppressed people have down to an art form) then we are the ones people should be listening to the most.

Now as every oppressed person knows, whether they’re in the SJ community or not, it doesn’t work like that.  In the wider world, being oppressed is not going to make people listen to us.  But in the SJ world, it means that at least people are supposed to listen to us (no matter what the situation, whether we’re right or wrong, constructive or destructive), and that idea is incredibly seductive to people who may have never been listened to in our lives.  When you try to discuss this, people always say “What are you talking about?  Being oppressed gives me no actual advantages, so stop acting like it does.”  But within the SJ community being more oppressed gives you, if not actual, instant power, at least the promise that you are a person that people should listen to.  And the SJ community has community norms that make a lot of people very afraid of contradicting anyone more oppressed than they are.  So even if there are people constantly contradicting you, even if there still is a power structure that puts you near the bottom in some ways, even in the SJ community… there’s still these norms and there’s still these values and they do have an actual effect in that community.  And it feels like the community has to deny the values exist.  Because if they acknowledged the “the more oppressed person is the one everyone needs to listen to” norm, they’d have to acknowledge a lot of other things that are going wrong in their communities.

Mind you, in theory I do think it’s important that people who are extremely marginalized have their voices listened to.  Like many ideas that are common in the SJ world, it’s not that the idea itself is a bad one.  It’s the fact that they are codified into rigid laws and community norms, that makes them bad.  It’s the rigidity and the refusal to take context into account, ever.  And it’s the toxic community dynamics that have grown up around these ideas.

And one of those toxic community dynamics is the one where some people are always fighting it out, trying to be the one to claim the most oppression points, because that will mean they’re the one most worthy of being listened to.  Nobody will admit this happens.  But I see it all the time.  And I see horrible things where the SJ community will rip into its own people, seriously rip them to shreds, in order to have entire drawn-out fights over who has the most right to claim the most oppression.  And nobody can admit it, because to admit it would mean admitting that they’re wrong when they say “that’s ridiculous, oppression doesn’t get you any power in this community, it doesn’t get you any power anywhere, are you serious!?”  And again, I know that even in the SJ community, more oppression can mean more oppression.  But it in theory is also supposed to mean “to compensate for how marginalized you are, we are supposed to center your perspective, always”.  (Um, that’s me using their own language, it’s not how I normally talk.)  And so there’s a rush to “center the perspectives” of the most marginalized people out there.  And that leaves the community wide open both to infighting over whose perspective gets to be “centered” the most, and to people who come into the community and claim (accurately or sometimes lying) a huge amount of oppression, just so their voices will be “centered” in discussions.  And such people can wreak havoc on the community if they want to – but it’s those community norms that make it possible.

(And I’m again going to point out I’m not anti-SJ, I find their community just as bad and toxic, and lots of people are in that community for the wrong reasons as well.)

All this said… I really agree with andromedalogic. There are a lot of ideas that I wish were not in my head.  And some of them aren’t ideas that are, in and of themselves, bad or wrong.  But they’re ideas that have become twisted into something bad or wrong, by a community that is extremely rigid and moralistic.

Sometimes I look back on my writing and I really cringe.  Because I find words and catchphrases in my writing.  And those words and catchphrases are ones I now associate with the SJ community.  Like “that perpetuates sexism” or something like that.  And at one time, they felt innocent, but now they feel tainted by association.  I know I didn't mean the rigid SJ ideas when I said these words, but now I see them and I can’t, in my reading comprehension, divorce them from what they’ve turned into.  So now it feels like they’ve retroactively invaded my own writing style and mind.

The worst thing about having my mind infiltrated, is this thing that happens where I become afraid of just saying things.  I start doing what a friend describes as 'dodging and weaving’, always trying to say the 'right’ things, avoid saying the 'wrong’ things.  And I’m not capable of doing that.  I don’t have the cognitive powers to sustain that kind of behavior.  It’s completely exhausting on a cognitive level.  And it harms people on a deep level.  It makes them afraid to say what they really mean, even when what they really mean is exactly the right thing to say.

But yes, I agree a lot with the OP here.  And I wish things were different.  I wish certain concepts had not wormed their way into my mind.  And I wish certain concepts that aren’t bad on their own, could exist on their own in my mind, without the taint of their association with very rigid and distorted application.

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