SJ? Anti-SJ? Both? Neither?

There’s a lot of arguments on tumblr lately that tend to be about whether you’re a ‘social justice blogger’ often abbreviated SJ or SJW (Social Justice Warrior), or whether you’re ‘anti-SJ’ (people who are against SJ bloggers).  And depending on your opinions on various things, people will put you in either category, pretty much against your will.  So I want to say where I stand on this.

I believe in the ideas that get called social justice.  I face oppression in too many areas of life to ignore things like this.  People are always listing the various ways they have oppression and privilege, and even though I find such lists simplistic at best, I will list them here, just so you understand:

• Disabled.  Cognitively disabled.  Physically disabled.  Chronically ill.  Developmentally disabled.  Psychiatrically disabled.  All of these things.
• Genderless.  Not by choice, not a political statement, just who I am.  I might as well tell you my pronouns, although I am not as strict about them as some people are.  While I prefer sie/hir (by far my favorite) and ze/zer/zem (my second favorite) as pronouns, I don’t expect everyone to remember those and don’t hold it against anyone if they can’t or won’t use them.  Please do not flame or dogpile people for ‘misgendering’ me.  Many of my friends have language disabilities.  I understand how hard it is to use, remember, and pronounce neologisms.  I would never hold it against someone who either can’t do it or wanted to use those cognitive resources for something else.  If you have to use regular pronouns, then in order of preference from best to worst, singular ‘they’ is fine, so is 'she’, and so is 'he’.  Never, ever use 'it’.  If there are nonbinary pronouns that you find easier than sie/hir and ze/zer/zem, I’m fine with that too.  Those other ones just don’t happen to be ones that fit with me.  Sie/hir fits like a glove, and ze/zer/zem and xe/xyr/xem fit almost as well but not quite.  I encountered sie/hir in my formative years, and frequently used it on MUDs for androgynous characters, which probably accounts for my affection for it and connection with it above all others.
• Biologically female.  (I grew up facing, and still often face, sexism and misogyny regardless of my actual gender or lack thereof, and sometimes place myself in the category of ‘woman’ when it’s a sociological category rather than a gender identity category.  This does not mean I think that the sex you were raised as is who you are gender-wise, I think it’s a personal choice how much a person identifies with that and in what way, and that there are many ways to be completely female without ever having been raised female.  But in my case, I can’t simply throw aside my raising and act like it didn’t happen and doesn’t still affect me.  I’m genderless and I was raised female and those things both affect me strongly.)
• Lesbian.  (Attracted to women and nonbinary and genderless people, specifically.  This is the closest category where I can find any community.)
• White.  (Part Okie/Arkie migrants to California in and around the dust bowl era, and a quarter Minnesota-Swedish, and that’s about the fastest way to describe it.  And more culturally accurate than trying to describe every possible country my family is from originally, as if any of those were recent enough, besides Sweden, to make any cultural difference at all.)
• Poor, with a mixed-class background.  My parents are poorer than I am, so I can’t use their money to get out of situations.  I’m on disability permanently, so upward mobility is not in my list of likely futures.
• Fat.  Yep, even though I have a frigging paralyzed stomach and rely on a feeding tube.  If this confuses you, click here and read this post, but don’t bug me about it.  It only shows your ignorance of medicine.
• Neither young nor old.  I’m in my thirties.  I’ve got some grey hairs and wrinkles, but I’m far from old yet.  Unlike most people, I strongly hope to get old.  Until recently, I thought I would die in my thirties, so every grey hair and every wrinkle is a sign that I may make it to old age after all.  The alternative, dying young, is something I’ve come to terms with as a possibility, but it doesn’t appeal to me at all.  If it did, I wouldn’t have fought so hard for that feeding tube.

Anyway, with that combination of circumstances, I can hardly be oblivious to oppression and its effects on my life and the lives of people around me.  And I can hardly be oblivious to the ways that areas of oppression tangle around each other and make things more complicated than a single oppression alone.  Or the way that context shapes everything.  Or the way everyone has areas of oppression and areas of privilege, usually both at once, often even in areas where they seem to be one or the other.  I believe in these situations and I believe in ending these situations and making a world for all of us.

But I am not part of the mainstream of SJ bloggers, and I will never be.  There is an unspoken, unwritten culture there that, by virtue of (among other things) my cognitive disabilities, I’m incapable of keeping up with.  And even if I were capable, I wouldn’t want to keep up with it.  Even though I like and am friends with many people who would proudly count themselves as members of SJ communities, and certainly don’t dislike them as people… I think there are a lot of destructive ideas and community norms going around.  Things that not only do a lot of harm to individual people, but also make oppression worse, not better.  So I totally agree with the goal about ending oppression.  And as for the rest… I agree with some of what they’re doing, but vehemently disagree with other parts.  I can’t get behind the culture that has grown up in these communities.

A lot of SJ bloggers say there is no SJ community.  That there’s just people talking about their lives, and that anti-SJ bloggers call that “SJ blogging”.  And I believe that happens, definitely.  But I also think that, whether they have intended to create a culture or not, they have created a particular culture around what people have been calling the “SJ community”.  And there is a community, and there is a culture, and there are norms within that community.  Making it impossible to talk about that culture, that community, and those norms, may be convenient for the people who don’t want to examine them too closely.  But it isn’t convenient for those of us who really want to change things, because without being able to talk about it, we can’t do anything about it.  So when I talk about SJ, I’m not using it the way an anti-SJ person would, I’m just using the word because it’s what most people understand, it communicates something real about the world and the people in it.

As for the anti-SJ community, I am completely not a part of that.  I find a lot of it destructive for the sake of destructiveness.  Some people in it mean well, but a lot of them are people who are simply unwilling to confront privilege in their own lives, so they take potshots at anyone who tries to show them their privilege and the oppression they participate in.  And a lot of the anti-SJ community is about tearing people down, and it gets quite nasty.  Weirdly enough, I don’t always see much difference between the worst of the SJ community, and the anti-SJ community — they’re people doing the exact same things to each other, just on different sides of a particular conflict.  They often have identical mindsets and identical ways of interacting with people they don’t like.

So I am not an SJ blogger, I am not a part of the SJ community, and I have serious problems with the mainstream of the SJ community.  However, I am also, emphatically, not anti-SJ.  Like many people, I fall outside both categories.

I can say that I care deeply about ending oppression in all its forms.  But the ways that I want to do this, are often at odds with the SJ community.  There’s just too many differences of opinion there.  Luckily, there are lots and lots of people like me.  The world is not divided up into SJ and anti-SJ.  There are lots of people, lots and lots, who are neither.  And we deserve to be considered people, and communities, in our own right.  Not as automatic members of communities we might actually be opposed to.

As with all my opinions, it’s not black and white, though.  There are people, both SJ and anti-SJ, that I strongly agree with on specific issues, and may reblog.  This does not mean I agree with all of their opinions.  It does not even mean I agree with everything about the opinion I (partially) approve of.  I tend to have complicated opinions, which weave in and out of the party line and go off in weird directions.  Not on purpose, but that’s just how my brain works.  See my article Politics, Ethics, and Mental Widgets for more on why my opinions tend to work differently than most people’s.  Usually where I get in trouble is that the SJ world is very widget-based in terms of how values and norms are created and enforced, and my brain can’t do widgets very well.  This sets up an automatic conflict between our opinions.  And given that one community norm in the SJ world is that if you disagree with certain things, then you’re being oppressive and awful… things go downhill from there.

The two biggest areas where I disagree with the SJ community:

• I don’t think that you can create an elaborate system of rules for how people should behave, without turning around and doing more damage than the system you’re already fighting.
• I don’t think that you can approach ethics in general by creating a system of ideas and ideologies, without also doing the opposite of what you’re setting out to do.

Basically, as my friend puts it, the way the SJ community do things will result in a situation where you’re for animal rights but your ideology will eventually tell you that kicking puppies is the only thing you can ethically do.  Always.  Because that’s how that kind of ideology works.  And that’s why I can’t be part of such a community.  It’s not that I dislike the people, or wish them ill.  It’s that I think what they’re doing is badly broken and will do harm.  But their main opponents, the anti-SJ people, are generally just as bad if not worse, so I can’t claim to be part of that, either. 

TL;DR:  I’m not an SJ blogger.  I’m not an anti-SJ blogger.  There’s lots of people like me out there, and many of us have found each other and know each other and talk to each other, but we don’t have a name for ourselves, so I can’t tell you what kind of blogger I am.