Okay, this is turning into a thing.
So in the thread created to talk about the phenomenon where people announce on the internet that they’re too afraid to discuss issues central to (or sometimes merely implicating) trans persons’ human rights before immediately launching a conversation about their concerns about granting trans persons equal human rights, one new commenter, GG, decided to change the subject. Although I feel vexed that what I wrote seemed to be ignored in favor of the commenter’s preferred conversation, the comment and request for response were both respectful and, as it turns out, the issues that GG unknowingly raised are actually significant. So I decided to respond, but I’m not going to allow that thread to be derailed so I have created this new post to discuss what GG brought up. Let’s start with GG’s comment, which itself begins with a quote from a BBC news article:
“One of the lesbian women I spoke to, 24-year-old Amy*, told me she experienced verbal abuse from her own girlfriend, a bisexual woman who wanted them to have a threesome with a trans woman.
When Amy explained her reasons for not wanting to, her girlfriend became angry.
“The first thing she called me was transphobic,” Amy said. “She immediately jumped to make me feel guilty about not wanting to sleep with someone.”
Assuming, for the sake of this discussion, that Amy’s description of her experiences are accurate, the use of the word “transphobic” here is … complicated, to say the least. It would be good to hear your thoughts on “transphobia”/”transphobe”, as they probably speak directly to the example above.
Now, I’ve heard about this news article, but I haven’t read it and am not particularly interested in doing so because of things I’ve heard about it. Fortunately, I am only asked to respond to the quote, and I am trusting GG that everything relevant to GG’s curiosity is contained here. Please, no one consider any of this a commentary on that larger article. Haven’t read that. Can’t comment on anything not included here save as speculation.
That out of the way, and assuming, as GG requests, that Amy accurately described what happened, GG asks for my thoughts on the words “transphobia” and “transphobe”, presumably as they relate to this specific incident. I find that request problematic, however. There are much larger and more important issues here than the definition of transphobia and how it appears to have been used. As a result, this is going to be a long-ass analysis that only reaches definitions after quite a lot else is said first.
If we believe Amy, as we must here because of GG’s request, Amy’s girlfriend was verbally abusive. This is a serious, common issue, and I am disappointed to see it glossed over. While I think it is still impossible to know exactly how often abuse happens in relationships between two cis women intimate partners for a couple reasons, including because of problems in representative sampling leading to limitations on the ability to generalize beyond an individual study’s cohort, the state of the demographic research the last time I made a comprehensive review showed consistently high rates compared to relationships between one cis man and one cis woman. Experts can debate exactly why this is the case, but for me and for other experts with whom I worked the strong suspicion was that queer women are, as a demographic group, more versed in feminism and as a result are more likely to recognize abuse when it occurs and to identify it in surveys. I do not believe queer women are more abusive in terms of frequency than heterosexual men (or women), but proving that they are less abusive in terms of frequency wouldn’t have been possible, even generously correcting for sampling errors and assigning a large effect size to feminist recognition of abuse when it occurs. Experts might reasonably conclude that these are appropriate interpretive steps to take, and therefore reasonably conclude that queer women, including but not limited to lesbians, are less frequently abusive than het men, but we certainly couldn’t prove it.
All this is to say that the abuse of women by women within the context of domestic, romantic, and/or sexual relationships is real. We must not ignore or minimize it. When someone sees an account such as Amy’s the first thing to do is to explicitly recognize the abuse that occurred. We cannot care for lesbians and other queer women if we ignore abuse or diminish its importance.
For that reason, we can say (again, assuming accuracy of Amy’s reporting which we are doing throughout this analysis) that the real problem here is abuse, domestic violence to use the term of art common in the United States and Canada. This abuse is unacceptable.
Amy does not explicitly recognize another dynamic as abuse, but does identify as problematic her girlfriend’s seeming refusal to accept Amy’s right to refuse consent:
“She immediately jumped to make me feel guilty about not wanting to sleep with someone.”
This is rapey bullshit. Let’s be clear, even the worst person in the world (WHO IS NOT AMY) with the worst reasons in the world (WHICH ARE NOT AMY’S) still gets to decide whether or not they will consent to sex. That’s it. There’s no grey area here. If Amy doesn’t want to have sex, badgering her into sex cannot result in consensual sex.*1
Just from the considerations addressed so far it’s clear that on this report, Amy’s girlfriend has wronged her. This is bad stuff and we cannot take it less seriously because the perp in this case is a cis woman.
But now we arrive at this point and one has to wonder, if both Amy and the author of the BBC piece care about responding positively and appropriately to abuse, the words “transphobia” and “transphobe” are almost entirely irrelevant. They’re certainly irrelevant from a public policy perspective. We know from long decades of research that abusive partners abuse for the purpose of gaining and maintaining power and control. While each abusive person might have individualized deeper motives, power and control defines abuse. As a result, we know that abusive persons abuse on pretext. Even if an accusation of transphobia was made knowing it was false as a tactic to abuse, stigmatizing accusations of transphobia won’t stop intimate partner violence. Indeed if using the word transphobia is stigmatized more than being transphobic is, then abusers will accuse their victims of using the word. The point, for the abusers, is to use anything that might make their partner feel bad. They will punish and inflict pain using any rhetorical tool that seems to them to be advantageous and they will do so in response to the least, the most trivial, even to entirely imaginary slights.
The paradigmatic example, almost a joke, is the straight, cis husband who comes home expecting dinner to be ready only to find his straight, cis wife made an effort to prepare dinner but burned the pot roast. This example has been used so many times that some people who work in anti-violence efforts use “burnt pot roast” as a stand in for an abuser’s excuse for an incident of abuse.*2 The point of using this is that everyone knows that overcooking dinner is an outrageously unjust excuse for abusing someone, but many people who survive abuse have trouble with blaming themselves and need to learn to see that other excuses are just as outrageous. There is, by definition, no justification for abuse. In this particular case the burnt pot roast is Amy’s refusal to have sex with a third person. This is still a burnt pot roast, still a completely bullshit, unjustified excuse for abuse, whether that third person is trans or not.
The core issue raised by Amy’s anecdote, then, is not anything relating to trans rights. It’s an issue of domestic violence. Amy deserves to be assessed for appropriate support services, and deserves to receive those services. To make the issue of an abusive partner into an issue about a rise in discussion of (and ultimately accusations of) transphobia is to fundamentally misunderstand issues and dynamics of abuse as well as the motivations and determinations of abusers. To focus on the word transphobia rather than the fact of abuse is to suggest that one of three things is true. Either
- There wasn’t really any abuse at all, save the fact that transphobia was mentioned because the existence and use of the word in any context, well founded or not, is inherently abusive, or
- Amy’s girlfriend’s attraction to a trans person caused her to abuse Amy, or
- Advocacy for trans human rights causes cis persons to become abusive of their intimate partners
We discount the possibility of number one in this post, but not because it’s implausible that someone would treat discussion of transphobia as inherently abusive. In fact we all have seen many bigots scream that they are being victimized when their bigoted actions and statements are identified as bigotry. Racists often think that someone telling them that they are racist is morally wrong, even abusive. The idea that anti-trans bigots might think the same should not come as a shock.
Nonetheless we discount that possibility in this analysis since we have explicitly agreed, at the request of GG, to explore the implications of this story if it is true, if Amy’s recollection and recounting are accurate. And Amy told her interviewer she was verbally abused. So for our purposes here we are left with two possibilities. In either of these cases the focus on the word transphobia becomes an excuse for abusive behavior. It’s as if the people who identify the word transphobia as part of the problem here are either completely ignorant of the body of knowledge regarding intimate partner violence that feminist researchers, experts and activists have worked so hard to accumulate, or that they are consciously excusing abusive behavior by cis people in order to make non-abusers responsible and accountable for the injuries inflicted by abusers’ actions.
The first of those is sad and shows someone is unprepared for a serious conversation about how to respond to the victimization of people like Amy, as community members, as people requesting new or changed public policies, or even just as caring friends. The second is more ominous. One has to wonder why a person would want abusers to escape accountability for their actions. A possible reason, of course, is not that the person is devoted to maintaining abuse within intimate relationships per se, but that however much the person might wish to limit or end intimate partner violence, that person wants trans persons to shoulder blame for crimes that they did not commit even more than the person wants honest and appropriate accountability for abusers and the downward pressure on frequency of abuse that honest and appropriate accountability would create.
Focus on a specific word used by an abuser during abuse thus badly, badly misses the point. But though I’ve written a virtual book on where community and pubic policy should focus in responding to experiences like Amy’s, GG has specifically asked for my thoughts on “transphobia” and “transphobe” as terms. So let’s do that, but let’s also be clear about one thing right up front, anyone who uses abuse perpetrated by Amy’s girlfriend as a reason to push back against the human rights of trans people **is** being transphobic according to the popular definition of the term (though not mine, and my specific thoughts are still to come). This is scenario #3 above, blaming innocent advocacy for trans human rights for the human choices of a specific abusive person (in this case one who is not even trans). Like the policy proposal of kathleenzielinski in comment #38 of that Pharyngula thread, anyone who uses Amy’s story to push back against trans rights is engaging in apologia for domestic violence. Trans people aren’t responsible for Amy’s girlfriend’s abusive behavior most people will hasten to remind us, but just as importantly and far less often recognized is that blaming trans advocacy or trans liberation or just trans people for that abuse means that Amy’s girlfriend doesn’t actually have to shoulder 100% of the blame for being abusive. Anyone who uses Amy’s story to push back against trans communities, persons, or rights is allowing Amy’s girlfriend to dodge necessary responsibility and accountability.
Anyone with a decent grounding in feminism knows that the problem of abusers escaping accountability is long standing. We even rue the behavior of teetotaling feminism which blamed interpersonal violence (including intimate partner violence) on alcohol and assumed that if only alcohol was banned from the United States heterosexual men would not abuse their women partners. We know how that worked out. Refocussing Amy’s story on “transphobia” detracts from the necessary focus on domestic violence and continues the trend of letting abusers off easily while shifting the blame to someone or something else. The policy proposal of kathleenzieinski is a proposal to protect abusers and thus to perpetuate abuse.
Now, perhaps that BBC article from which GG pulled Amy’s story makes it clear that woman to woman domestic violence is real, is unacceptable, and occurred here. Perhaps the text made clear that the pretext doesn’t matter, and that your girlfriend doesn’t have to call you transphobic for you to gain access to services, and nor will you be denied help because your girlfriend thinks that you’re transphobic. Perhaps the author who interviewed Amy made sure that Amy had access to appropriate services. But I have little expectation that this is the case. The fact that GG excerpted this and only this makes me strongly suspect that either the author or GG or both are focussing on a specific word as more problematic than the long standing problem of domestic violence that has plagued our lesbian and queer women’s communities for as long as we have had communities, a problem that needs our serious efforts to eradicate and to respond caringly and appropriately to the people abused within their intimate relationships.
I cannot tell you how sad that thought is to me. I hope like hell that the article did pay proper attention to intimate partner violence and GG simply missed the importance of those passages because of curiosity about those two words, transphobia and transphobe. I don’t think it likely, but I hope for it.
But now, at long last, I can give my thoughts on how “transphobic” was used in Amy’s story, what it tells us, and then, ultimately, my more general thoughts on the word and its variants.
I think it’s important to start out with common understandings of “transphobia”, “transphobic”, and “transphobe”. Unfortunately for our work here, these comprise a range of meanings, from unnecessarily and overly sensitive to consciously bigoted and full of overt hatred to definitions that are about behavior, and not feelings, similar to “engages in the oppression of trans people” (which can be true regardless of one’s unspoken feelings or true motivations).
I have the feeling that GG would like me to say that use of the word “transphobic” was wrong or inappropriate of Amy’s girlfriend because Amy is not being transphobic. But we cannot honestly say that. Although I’ve agreed to accept Amy’s recounting as factually accurate, in this excerpt Amy never once denies being transphobic. We’re also never told of anything that Amy did that is clear evidence of transphobia as commonly understood. Simply declining to have sex with a trans person is not enough to prove transphobic thoughts, feelings, or motivations, much less behaviors. But nowhere in the story is there enough information to say that Amy has never engaged in transphobic behavior and never feels hypersensitivity to unevidenced threats from trans people that she would not feel from non-trans people. In fact, there’s not even enough information in this small passage to conclude that Amy never feels overt, seething hatred for all trans people as a class.
Although Amy says that she explained her feelings and reasoning to her girlfriend, she does not explain them to us. Having no evidence of transphobia or transphobic behavior, I would certainly not judge Amy transphobic. But her girlfriend knows her far better than I do, and might very well have such evidence.
An important nuance often missing from conversations about someone supposedly being called transphobic after merely declining sex with a trans person (usually a trans woman) is that while declining sex is the right of every person and while declining sex itself is not bigoted, it’s still possible for one’s motivations for declining sex to be bigoted. If I were to decline to have sex with a trans man because I believe that all trans men support the mass murder of women and girls, I would still have the right to decline sex with that trans man, but yes, my motivations for declining sex with him would be bigoted, would be transphobic.
This is important. Even white supremacists have the right to decline sex, but if they decline to have sex with someone because of their racist assumptions about that other person, then they are declining sex for a bigoted reason. If they are sufficiently transparent in what they say while declining sex, it could be that the same sentence that declines sex **also** contains rock solid evidence of their nauseating white supremacy. In that case, criticizing the white supremacist for the abhorrent racism they displayed **while** declining sex, is not the same as saying that declining sex with a person of color is an act of white supremacy. I, personally, have declined sex from white people, from cis men, from a deaf person, from a person taller than me, from a person shorter than me, from a person with sickle cell anemia, from someone whose native language wasn’t English, from someone born in Nigeria, and many more besides. None of those were inherently acts of bigotry, but just because declining sex with those people is not, in and of itself, an example of bigotry does not tell you that I’m free of bigotry. It should not surprise us that even bigots decline sex sometimes.
Because of the fundamental importance of consent, the response to a bigot declining sex with a person whom they target with their bigotry must not be to force the bigot to have such sex. That would be rape. But if a bigot displays their bigotry in the same conversation (or even the same sentence) as they decline sex with a target of their bigotry, the fact that the bigotry was adjacent to a refusal to have sex does not render immune to criticism whatever bigoted statements were made or bigoted actions taken.
So taking Amy’s reports as accurate, Amy’s girlfriend’s actions were wrong because she was abusive, not because Amy’s girlfriend believed that Amy was demonstrating transphobia. If we had enough evidence to conclude that Amy is not transphobic, and, further, that she engaged in no transphobic statements or behaviors, we could say that Amy’s girlfriend was **incorrect** when accusing Amy of transphobia. But we don’t have evidence (or even Amy’s declaration) either way. So the only reasonable thing to say based off that short story is that the accusation doesn’t have anything to do with what made Amy’s girlfriend *wrong*. That was Amy’s girlfriend’s abusive actions and denial of respect for Amy’s right to choose freely whether or not to consent to sex.
The story done, there is one more element of GG’s request to address: how do I define transphobia, and why, and do the particulars of my understanding of transphobia’s meaning have any implications for the story above.
Well, I stick with a definition of transphobia that focuses on the phobia. If you are hypersensitive to potential threats (physical, social, intellectual, career, whatever) in the presence of trans people, then your feelings are transphobic and would rightly be called transphobia. Similar to how phobia is used in professional literature (although seemingly at odds with the simplest definitions of phobia) if a person experiences an excess of disgust in the presence of trans people or towards behaviors of trans people that, when performed by cis persons, do not exhibit the same level of disgust, those feelings of disgust would by definition be transphobic and would rightly be called transphobia.
But when addressing public behaviors that target trans persons in ways that injure or oppress, I would not label that transphobia. I would instead label that cissexism (or, synonymously, “anti-trans oppression,” or, “the oppression of trans people”).
This distinction has multiple uses. With one term to describe the prejudice and another to describe violence or oppression, the classic equation used in various disciplines concerning human liberation and flourishing, “oppression = prejudice + power,” becomes intelligible in the antitrans context. If there was only one word for both phenomena, the specific form of the equation would appear so:
“transphobia = transphobia + power”.
This, of course, is entirely contradictory, confusing, opaque, and even worthless without additional clarification. Compare to the classic formulation in the context of white supremacy:
“racism = racial prejudice + power”
Note that this allows for anyone to be racially prejudiced, and does not say that some forms of racial prejudice are acceptable (much less positive or good), but still allows for the important distinction between, say, an antebellum white supremacist slave owner and the Black slave that has grown to hate all white people in response to her oppression. With no distinction between transphobia as prejudice and transphobia as oppression, we cannot speak meaningfully about the asymmetrical harm done to trans persons and communities by cis persons and communities compared to harm done to cis persons and communities by trans persons and communities. Prejudice against cis people is wrong, but oppression of cis people by trans people does not exist.
With the word cissexism (or, when speaking to the uninitiated, the phrase “antitrans oppression”), we can easily form the much clearer statement:
“cissexism = transphobia + power”.
Should we ever reach a point where political, social, and economic dominance by a trans minority were to exist, then cissexism would no longer be possible even if transphobia still existed. Similarly we can say of the real world in this current time that while prejudice against cis people is wrong and harmful, cis oppression does not exist, because the equation,
“cis oppression = anti-cis prejudice + power”
is not satisfied.
This creates clarity of thought, which makes productive community and public policy responses more likely to be appropriate and successful. If our goal is to change prejudice, then we must respond with interpersonal persuasion and compassion. On the other hand, if our goal is to end oppression, we must respond with changes to laws and policies and practices that have the potential to prevent abuse of power.
But especially relevant to GG’s comment, it also allows better communication between individuals. For instance in Amy’s case, because of the extremely broad definition of “transphobia” currently in popular use, it is possible that Amy’s girlfriend was attempting to say,
“I see that you are having irrational fears. This makes me sad for you and compassionate towards you and I want to help you get to a place where your decisions are not constrained by your fears, but free instead to follow whatever are your underlying desires.”
but that Amy heard something like,
“I see you oppressing trans people. This makes me sad for them and hostile towards you, and I want to fight you to stop you from hurting others.”
We currently do not well distinguish between, “I see you are afraid,” and “I see you working harm on others.” I would prefer that we as a society become better at communicating these very different ideas. That would not stop abusers from abusing, but it would stop a great deal of unnecessary and/or accidental pain.
*1: Some experts and researchers, for good reasons, label coerced sex as a category of rape, and others, again for good reasons, create coerced sex as a category of morally condemnable (and sometimes illegal) sexual violation, but still one that they would not describe using the word rape. This post is already going to be long as hell, so I won’t go into that definitional argument and instead will only say that such sex, if it resulted, would be nonconsenual and coerced regardless of whether a prosecutor (or any other person) would consider it to be rape or punish it as rape. Outside of use in law, specific policy discussions, formulation of questionnaires, counseling sessions where the counselor is allowing a client to label her own experiences, and articles published in academic and professional journals, coerced sex is sex without meaningful consent and is thus what nearly all good people would all call rape.
*2: It might go something like this: “So, you’re subjected to verbal abuse two or three times a week and physically struck once every couple weeks. Let’s talk about the last time you were struck. What was the burnt pot roast on that day?”
Thank you very much for the thoughtful post, and please accept my apologies for derailing the previous thread, that was not my intent. I greatly appreciate the distinction that you have drawn between a person’s right to refuse sex and the nature of their reasons for doing so; it’s gratifying to see a detailed explanation of how defending the former does not necessitate endorsement of the latter.
Having read through your definitions (thanks for those as well) I’m still uncertain as to how to evaluate one of the threads running through the article, the idea that finding certain physical traits to be (un)attractive in a sexual partner is intrinsically bigoted/prejudiced. Is that an obviously true/false assertion? Or is it something that an individual can only determine for themselves after sufficient soul-searching and rumination?
I think it’s technically possible for someone to find physical traits to be unattractive for bigoted reasons, but attraction doesn’t take place at the level of rational thought. For bigotry to really change someone’s attractions, it would have to be pretty deeply internalized. At that point maybe you could say that the attraction is itself bigoted. This would seem to suggest that this is something that an individual can only determine for themselves, after soul searching. So, technically I agree with that last suggestion of yours, but honestly…? I don’t care.
One of the reasons I draw the distinction between transphobia and cissexism is that it’s not my business how you think. I can’t read your mind. You don’t think thoughts or have feelings for the purpose of hurting people. Nor can your thoughts or feelings **on their own** hurt anyone, since no one knows what they are. Until you translate your thoughts & feelings into behaviors or statements it’s none of my business. In fact, it would be Orwellian if I considered it my business.
Instead, the problem is oppression & violence. If you’re a white supremacist in your thoughts & feelings, but you never discriminate or act to harm anyone, we won’t know you’re a white supremacist. Maybe it’s only the law that keeps you from doing bad things. Maybe it’s fear your mom will wither you with a disappointed gaze. But for whatever reason, if your racism stays entirely inside your head, well, it’s your problem. It’s not a community problem and it’s not a public policy problem.
Imagine my family& I go out to dinner at my favorite restaurant and Pat Robertson is there as well. I smooch my lover, hug the kids, have a good time. If Robertson feels a squeamish disgust over at the corner table **I don’t care**. That’s Robertson’s problem. It’s only when Robertson uses his disgust as the basis for a public policy proposal (like denying equal marriage rights) that I have a stake in what’s happening.
Likewise, theoretically I think it’s possible to have sufficiently bigoted thoughts and feelings that eventually you internalize them and it affects how you feel or don’t feel towards certain body parts. But since declining sex **by itself** is a right and therefore never a problem, as long as the person isn’t wandering around telling everyone, “Hey, did you know that I find red, curly hair completely disgusting?” then neither the fact of their attraction (or revulsion) nor any time they choose to decline sex (or not offer it) is my business.
So technically I think it’s possible to have bigoted revulsion (or attraction, I mean the racist shit that creepy white men in the US and Canada show towards Asian women because of their desire to own & control a woman rather than relate to her shows that attractions can be bigoted, in the same way that revulsion can), but for me, personally, I would never care about someone else’s attractions enough to suggest that they do such soul searching.
Did you decline sex? Fine.
Did you do so politely, without any accompanying statement of bigotry or bigoted action? Great. You do you.
At that point, me taking an interest in **why** someone said no feels like it could only go to two places, both bad. One is a place where I communicate that I don’t respect their denial of consent. The other is where I communicate that I’m here to reform someone’s attractions, and that one is a hard no from me.
I don’t want anyone doing that bullshit, abusive, heteroconversion therapy on me, and I, fortunately, have enough integrity to be consistent and not try to convert someone else’s attractions into ones I consider more desirable/preferable/whatever.
It also has the benefit of putting the work where it belongs. If the person’s attractions aren’t affected by bigotry, there’s literally no reason to change them. Why not like straight haired folks? Or hazel eyes? Or skinny wrists?
Ah, but if their attractions are affected by bigotry, well then. Let the bigots do the work of undoing bigotry. Not my job.
In the end, then, I believe it’s possible that bigotry can affect our sexual attractions, but I live my life as if there’s no such thing as an attraction that is in and of itself bigoted. Because even if there is such a thing, either their bigoted actions are the public issue, or the private issue is private, and they can deal with that themselves, the way that they deserve.
I have zero problem with the idea finding traits unattractive is bigoted. Sometimes it could just be a preference, right? I don’t find blondes as attractive as dark-haired people. Some people aren’t pansexual and I have to accept that lol. But almost every other thing we say “ick” about *IS* a kind of bigotry. Ageism, fatphobia, looksism, ableism, racism, etc.
And I have zero problem with that. We all have biases we’re hard pressed to overcome, and with the primacy of consent here, nobody is obligated to power through their prejudices to have unpleasant sex. And nobody reasonable wants to have sex with somebody who finds them repellent, so we all win there, right?
But it doesn’t stop those things we find ugly from being definable as a kind of bigotry.
–
^U know, this is real easy for me to say as somebody with kind of an “everyday people” fetish, but there’s limits for me too, I’m sure, and they are informed by unconscious biases and bigotries. Like, a person with a drastic facial disfigurement does not deserve to be unloved 4ever, but I’d have to take some time to work thru that bias before I got with them. They don’t deserve a suitor coming at them that isn’t ready for who they are, as is.
@Crip Dyke #2: I’d like to offer a thought on your prior post in light of your response above.
Regarding concerns over being called “transphobic”, you wrote that you “tend to belittle this fear because I can’t figure out what people are actually losing”. I think that most people are generally decent (many caveats apply, obviously) and genuinely want to do right by others. The behavior which you have noted may not be driven by concerns over loss, but rather by moral anxiety over being unable to confidently identify right action when it comes to trans persons.
Take the example we were discussing above. There is at least one trans activist (y’all know who I’m talking about) who, while not necessarily representative, _is_ highly visible, and has explicitly stated that “sexual genital preferences [are] immoral”. More generally, there is disagreement within the trans community about what constitutes an act of prejudice against trans people. And not all trans persons use your carefully-considered definition of “transphobia”.
Privileged persons of all stripes are frequently advised to center and listen to those less privileged for advice on right action. What do you do when the less-privileged give conflicting advice? This is like Jenée Desmond-Harris’ article in the NYT from not so long ago (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/28/opinion/race-america-defund-police.html) about which Black voices white people should listen to. I admire her for grappling with the issue, but ultimately found her answer unsatisfying: “In your comment you label some ideas ‘bad.’ That suggests that you do actually have a framework for deciding what’s right and what’s wrong. Use it!”. Which is fine if the person on the receiving of that advice trusts their moral framework, but it was lack of trust in their moral framework which brought them to Jenée in the first place.
Again, lots of people _want_ to do right, but the lack of consensus, or rapid shifts in consensus, can make it very difficult for people to understand what right action actually entails. This can lead to what looks like an arbitrary set of rules which vary depending on who you ask, especially if you’re not following the inside baseball. It’s not hard to imagine that this is a contributing factor (though certainly not the only one) to concerns regarding accusations of transphobia.
OP:
Shouldn’t “Amy was abusive” be “Amy’s girlfriend was abusive”? Or am I missing something?
(Possibly even more off-topic….)
There’s also the question of whether a “preference” is labeled “bigotry.”
Example: I don’t think I’ll ever be willing to have sex with a cis man. Because of my horrible experiences with male socialization as a child, someone who is in any sense “masculine” makes me feel unsafe (which might be part of the reason I found having to live as a man so painful), and I can’t even think of sex unless I feel safe. Is this bigotry?
As the OP argues, the question of whether a “preference” for cis and not trans women as sexual partners is “transphobia” is kind of beside the point. The question for me, at least, is whether one uses the “preference” as an excuse to abuse people, and especially as an excuse to add to an already existing system of oppression. For example, I’m told that JK Rowling’s aversion to trans women is due to her experience of being abused by a (cis) man. If she were simply saying that she is anxious around trans women because the knowledge that they were assigned at birth the same gender as her abuser, I could sympathize. I wouldn’t run around accusing her of transphobia, even if it might meet some definition of transphobia. It’s when she decides to join forces with the already pretty virulent system of oppression of trans women that I start accusing her of transphobia.
This. So much this.
And yet, when I made precisely this point in response to another blogger on this network’s comment along the lines of “you don’t get to think of me in those terms”, I was roundly criticised. There was a comment along the lines of “he mentioned the fact this is called freethought blogs! Everyone take a drink!”, absolutely ridiculing me for insisting that actually, I get to think whatever the fuck I like, and you have no business judging me by anything other than my actions.
@allison, #6:
Thank you. I have fixed that by replacing “Amy” with “she” which, given the phrase right before, should be clear that I’m speaking of Amy’s girlfriend.
Regarding the comment @#8:
It refers to this https://proxy.freethought.online/pervertjustice/2019/07/29/gender-critical-moral-bankruptcy/ blog post’s comment section, in which I was involved.
I am endlessly fascinated with this example of self-proclaimed “activism” fighting for people’s right to think whatever they want and opposing some imaginary attempt to establish a telepathic dictatorship. Since telepathy does not exist outside of science fiction and fantasy books, our dear “activist” has literally nothing to fight for.
Let’s imagine I started to fight for my right to fantasize about raping children. In online discussion threads about parenting I routinely used every opportunity to argue about how people’s thoughts and fantasies are sacred and how everybody has a right to think about how they want to rape some kids. In such circumstances, my readers would not perceive me as some noble social justice activist fighting to safeguard people’s sacred right to not have their minds read by totalitarian telepaths. Instead, everybody would reasonably assume that there must be something really wrong with my fantasies.
And here we have a person who hijacks discussions about trans rights in order to argue in favor of his noble cause that his right to think whatever he wants must be respected.
Let’s just say I have some suspicions about our dear “activist’s” less than noble intentions.
People’s thoughts and fantasies are indeed their own business. For example, somebody could spend all their free time fantasizing about how they would like to murder me and my dogs in a public park, and I would never know or care about their fantasies. Whatever. As long as they don’t go the extra mile and type a text informing me about their fantasies, that is.
The moment people start typing online about their thoughts, they make an action. And they will be judged for their action (in this case: the words they wrote).
When a person starts to passionately argue online about how they have a right to think bigoted thoughts or how they have a right to mentally assign incorrect genders to trans people, well, they will be judged for this action, and they won’t be perceived as some noble activist fighting for people’s freedom.
Note: Since sonofrojblake decided to bring up an old discussion they had with me, I am posting this comment to give appropriate context and explain the situation. This explanation is intended for Crip Dyke or others who might be unaware about the reference. I have no intention to start a discussion with sonofrojblake (who is banned from my own blog’s comment section), and I do not intend to respond to their comments or insults.
Yes, but people can still make abstract statements about ideas and thoughts in general without being able to read minds and confirm whether person X has these thoughts/opinions. For example, I can make a general statement that “love is good” or “thinking about trans women as ‘delusional men in dresses’ is bad” without being able to know for sure whether John Doe feels love or mentally misgenders trans women. I do not even need to care about John Doe’s or any other specific person’s thoughts in particular in order to pass judgments about ideas. For example “trans women are actually men” or “I want to think about trans women as men” are examples of ideas/thoughts that can be opposed separately from any specific person X who has these thoughts. And I can certainly make an argument why thinking about trans women as men is harmful without needing telepathic powers so as to confirm whether John Doe in particular has these thoughts.
Andreas @10:
QFT
As much as it makes some sense to *not* label genital preferences as a type of bigotry, the discussion of it feels harmful to me in some way, and I think I’ve figured out why. Or maybe remembered why, because I’ve done this hokey-pokey before.
Let’s say you don’t want to have sex with fat people. Fine, just a physical preference – one share by many, and I’m sure fat people don’t want to have sex with somebody who finds them repulsive either. But why do we need to discuss this over and over again in so much detail and depth?
It surely causes measurable harm to trans people to have repeated discussions about this subject, the same way a fat person being reminded that the mainstream regards them as repulsive is measurably harmful.
People with strong genital preferences – please shut up about it, outside of short exchanges of private information with prospective partners, outside of erotic personal ads. The only people who benefit from this endless rehash are transphobes.
What you want out of this conversation is some kind of absolution from a transgender person. Do you really need that more than they need to have a peaceful day without relentless focus on their anatomy and sexuality?
–
Great American Satan @12: “What you want out of this conversation is some kind of absolution from a transgender person.”
Respectfully, I don’t think that’s what people want; people want clarity as to what justice requires.
To say that someone is “transphobic” (or “cissexist”) is not an aesthetic judgement; like “racist”, it is a term of moral censure, and implies that the person so labeled needs to change their behavior to align with the demands of justice. The privileged are told that they should look to the members of marginalized groups to identify what justice requires regarding behavior that affects those groups. Here we have a situation where there is a wide and dramatic dissensus among members of the affected community regarding what justice requires, which leaves non-community-members without a guide to right action.
To speak plainly, and I apologize in advance if I inadvertently provoke offense:
+ Some members of the trans community say that genital preference is intrinsically prejudiced. They claim that, because genital preference is a form of prejudice, justice requires that people act against genital preference. The corollaries and sequelae of this view have already been outlined above.
+ Some members of the trans community say that genital preference is _not_ intrinsically prejudiced, which leads to a different, irreconcilable set of conclusions regarding what justice requires.
Again, respectfully, what is the resolution to this dilemma? Or, more generally, how are people to identify right action with respect to a particular community when community members themselves are in disagreement?
GG:
It’s only a dilemma for people such as you.
Some of us can make our own determinations, not being moral ditherers or cowards.
In short, you shouldn’t need to be told what to think, you should rather inform yourself as to what others claim, the issues at hand, the consilience of evidence… and then decide.
(Yes, I know it’s funny, me telling you to think for yourself)
PS re
That’s Trump’s technique — to say ‘people say’ when he means ‘I say’.
The comment was specifically addressed to you, not to “people”.
GG – If a transgender person brings this subject up directly to you, or in a blog with open comments, go wild. If that’s tangential to the subject at hand or a cis person started the conversation, maybe just don’t talk about genital preference at all ever?
–
With all due respect, I don’t think anyone has ever claimed this. Instead, people have claimed that genital preferences are not fully independent of the legal, social, religious, and interpersonal contexts in which they arise. **Some part** of genital preferences for purposes of sexy times appears to be genetic (based on twin studies). **Some part** of genital preferences cannot be explained by genetics. It is also very probable that how large each part is varies from person to person. For instance, a person genetically predisposed to enjoy partners with vaginas equally to how they enjoy partners with penises has more flexibility than someone who is genetically predisposed more towards one genital configuration.
From the outside, then, we know that these sexual preferences are partially determined by environment, and we know that trans persons have been oppressed and marginalized by cis persons.
There is a strong argument, then, that persons equipped to question their own sexual assumptions should include how they think of trans people as attractive or not in order to determine to what extent they have internalized cis supremacist notions of the idealized body. Both before and after self examination, there is also a strong argument that whatever your personal sexual orientation(s) and preference(s) that individuals have a responsibility to express their orientation, opinions, and preferences in ways that are not harmful to others.
If, say, Tindr banned the use of “No Fatties” language on profiles, this wouldn’t have anything to do with requiring people to “act against [size] preference”. There’s nothing rapey about it. We’re asking that people express themselves decently and respectfully.
Likewise, advocating that people do not use “No Trannies” on their profiles is an argument for setting a standard of decent and respectful conversation. It’s not a request, much less a demand, to “act against genital preference”.
Now, if you can find a three people, just three in the entire world, who have actually said that there’s a moral or practical requirement that people “act against genital preference” when selecting sexual partners, and that this moral or practical requirement is imposed by the requirements of gender liberation and/or justice for trans persons & communities, THEN I’ll concede that this is a point worth discussing further.
But even if you can do that, and I don’t think you can (though you can easily find religious bigots stating that lesbians must convert to heterosexuality and fuck cis men), all you have then proved is that some trans people are entirely morally warped and are insisting on submission to rape in the interest of justice.
This is why I am uneasy with our conversation at times: you say you want moral clarity as to whether any given individual is required to submit to rape in the interest of justice, but I don’t think you need that. I think you already know that is wrong. Why you might need a trans person to tell you that’s wrong is a mystery to me, and, forgive me for saying this, if this really is the question you want answered, if you really think that justice might ever require, even once in the history or future of the world, submission to rape, then your moral foundation is desperately primitive and malformed.
I don’t believe that of you, which is why I have a hard time believing you’re actually looking for clarity on that point. But if you’re not looking for clarity on that point, why are you telling us this is a question to which you don’t yet have a perfectly adequate answer?
Crip Dyke @ 17: Here’s the cite: https://twitter.com/sportisaright/status/1178788284073480192?lang=en
This is the probably-not-representative-but-highly-visible activist I was alluding to @5. Even with a charitable eye it seems like a plain assertion that genital preference is immoral.
@GG: But if you note, that’s only HALF of your claim. I’m sorry if this seems tedious, but I just want to be clear, so I’m quoting you again saying that members of the trans community assert:
All you have in the tweet you link is this:
PLEASE NOTE: this is proof that the person buys the premise (sexual genital preferences are immoral) but there is no mention (in this tweet) of saying that one therefore has to have sex with people with whom you do not wish to have sex if the reason you don’t want to have sex with them has to do with genitals.
I fully agree that some people think that having a genital preference is immoral. The question is, what do they propose you do about it?
If the answer is just, “Learn to live with the fact that you’re not a perfect moral being,” I gotta say that I’m in agreement with them in the sense that their solution is reasonable if you accept their moral premise (but remember that I do not accept their moral premise and that I have expressed myself on this complicated question already). If the answer is, “You must submit to sexual contact you don’t want,” that’s horrific, immoral, an incorrect statement, and nothing I’ve ever seen from any trans person (though, again, I’ve seen it from many straight religious bigots).
Do you have even one person who says that
??
Or do you only have the first part, people saying that genital sexual preference is immoral?
It seems you need to think carefully about what people are actually saying. You’re literally telling anyone on the internet who stops by here that trans people are advocating rape and sexual assault. I would like to think you have at least one solid example before you make that claim.
it certainly appears, from your linking to this tweet, that you don’t have such evidence. From my point of view, I have to wonder why you would link something that does not support your claim if you had access to evidence that did support your claim.
Now, perhaps you linked the wrong tweet. Perhaps you forgot where your best evidence is located but you mean to link it here as soon as you have it. Well, okay. But the fact that you don’t have access to that evidence, evidence of even one person advocating rape as the solution to this moral problem (much less the 3 I asked for to prove this isn’t just one evil person, which is statistically inevitable in any large community) gives rise to the possibility that no one you’ve read has actually advocated that, and that instead you’ve allowed something (your fears?) to cause you to drastically misinterpret what was said, misinterpret to the point of inventing an assertion that just isn’t there.
If you did think that Dr. Veronica Ivy’s tweet supported your claim, if you didn’t notice that there was nothing in there that would lead one to believe her proposed solution to this moral difficulty is rape on an industrial scale, then that strongly supports the hypothesis that you’ve done this more generally, and that no one is advocating rape, but in the face of uncomfortable moral criticism you’ve ascribed an extreme immoral position to your critics.
If it’s the case that you actually thought that tweet supported your claim, I suggest you have some serious introspection ahead of you.
You make a number of fair points; permit me to think on them for a bit.
sure
[pedantry]
Asexuals exist.
I’m a cis/het white guy, so I’m prone to missing a lot of stuff, and my very well be missing something important here…
But, I think this whole question/argument about “attractive characteristics” or “preference for …” is just a bad-faith argument for the various bigots (TERFs, right wingers, various phobes…) trying to send out feelers for a “socially acceptable” justification for their hate, bullying, and oppression.
It seems like every time I look in the comments section of some article discussing a “trans-panic” assault and/or murder, there is no shortage of people demanding that trans people state their transness first thing, even before “hello, my name is:”
I sometimes try to counter with something along the lines of how it’s well within my rights to not consent to have sex with anyone that’s lived in Florida, but it’s also my responsibility to suss that out. I can’t just assume everyone I meet outside of Florida has never lived there, and if it matters so much to me, I should bring that up at some point before the garments come off. It never goes over well, and almost immediately is derailed into “genital preference”. Which, on it’s own, I don’t know, I don’t really care, maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s not, but I don’t think it’s the important part here, and the bigots are trying to make us think it’s the important part. I mean, on at least some dating apps, people are very vocal about what kinds of pubic hair stylings they expect of their potential partners, which seems a bit… arbitrary? to me, anyways… Because almost everyone of these people will almost always object to the idea of hooking up with a “stealth” trans person with GCS/SRS/”bottom” surgery, even if they can’t personally discern the difference. That, right there, leads me to believe it isn’t about “genital preference”, but that they don’t really see trans women as women, and see them as “actually” and irrevocably men, and having sex with them would call into question their own “straightness” and masculinity (sorry, I kinda got pigeon holed here talking about trans panic for trans women, not intending to exclude trans men, but I feel that trans women tend to be more often the obvious targets of transphobia, and are kinda more common in these bad-faith arguments…).
I don’t know, I’m not great at explaining myself, and again, cis/het white guy here… I just feel like I’ve seen too many of these bad-faith “genital preference” arguments that I feel like there is a pretty strong pattern there, and it’s less about the genitals and more about trying to frame their hate in a palatable format…
Crip Dyke @ 19:
I stand by my characterization, though I should have linked to the entire thread (https://twitter.com/seriouslysushi/status/1178790110730620928). Summarizing the first few tweets:
+ @seriouslysushi relates trying “really hard for like two years” to enjoy sex that involved “doin stuff with other vaginas”, but being unable to do so, and that that’s “ok” “in every possible applicable sense”.
+ Veronica Ivy disagrees with this statement, and says that “pansexuality is the only morally defensible orientation”.
Veronica is asserting that, for @seriouslysushi to be a moral person in this regard, @seriouslysushi must be pansexual. This is despite knowing that @seriouslysushi will not enjoy some pansexual encounters. Restated slightly: morality requires sexual behavior from @seriouslysushi that @seriouslysushi will not enjoy (because @seriouslysushi is acting against genital preference). Apart from swapping “morality” and “justice” this doesn’t appear to be materially different from “justice requires that people act against genital preference”.
But I don’t want to get derailed on the topic of what Veronica Ivy thinks about genital preference; as I noted in @5 above, she’s probably not representative of the community, but rather is interesting insofar as she punches above her weight in terms of influence and media exposure. She just an exemplar of one area of disagreement within the trans community with particularly stark implications. The greater point is there are lots of areas of disagreement within the trans community.
John Morales, this is an appropriate point to respond to your critiques, as that’s exactly the phenomena to which I’m trying to draw attention. I agree with the sentiment that “you should rather inform yourself as to what others claim, the issues at hand, the consilience of evidence… and then decide”. However, depending on my relation to the oppressed group, I could conceivably be “blinded by privilege”; I might, as lochaber @ 23 put it, be a “cis/het white guy” and so “prone to missing lots of stuff”. Persons in such situations are frequently admonished to “shut up and listen” rather than trying to figure things out for themselves; see https://proxy.freethought.online/pharyngula/2021/03/05/sometimes-you-have-to-shut-up-and-listen/ for an example from our benevolent overlord.
“Shut up and listen” is a demand for epistemic deference, one which can be justified if you assume that marginalized communities are univocal. However, pretty much _any_ marginalized community is going to be poly-vocal and so you’re back to square one, a cis/het white guy trying to decide which of the voices is right. But if you could do so reliably you wouldn’t need to shut up and listen in the first place.
Which brings me back to the original point which started this thread, which is that its not necessarily easy for the average individual to understand what behavior is required of them in their treatment of any particular marginalized group. I mean, I read moral philosphy for fun, and I’ve got Crip Dyke (justifiedly) calling me out over whether I’ve over-extended myself on the implications of the word “immoral”. We’ve ventured a long way from the golden rule; this shit is _complicated_. And because its complicated people find it hard to develop a natural intuition of what behaviors are (un)acceptable. Thus I maintained that anxiety over the inability to identify the right course of action, an not just concern with personal loss, is a contributing factor to people’s worries about being called “transphobic”.
GG:
You’re sure of that? Because it seems to me the counsel is more about not debating and litigating and pontificating on everything someone else says than about not trying to figure things out for oneself.
Mmm. As you yourself put it @5, “Privileged persons of all stripes are frequently advised to center and listen to those less privileged for advice on right action.”
Interestingly, in that same comment you claim “Again, lots of people _want_ to do right, but the lack of consensus, or rapid shifts in consensus, can make it very difficult for people to understand what right action actually entails.”, which implies right action is not something one determines for oneself, but is rather what one perceives as the consensus. Which actually is “epistemic deference”.
PS I think the Silver Rule is much better than the Golden Rule, being less pervertible.
John Morales: “You’re sure of that? Because it seems to me the counsel is more about not debating and litigating and pontificating on everything someone else says than about not trying to figure things out for oneself.”
Expectation of epistemic deference to marginalized groups is absolutely “a thing”. Olúfémi O. Táíwò has a good essay on the subject (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/essay-taiwo), and notes that the expectation may be expressed in “call[s] to ‘listen to the most affected’ or ‘centre the most marginalized'”. Here are some other illustrative quotes from the essay:
+ “She was called to defer to me by the rules of the game as we understood it. Even where stakes are high – where potential researchers are discussing how to understand a social phenomenon, where activists are deciding what to target – these rules often prevail.”
+ “Broadly, the norms of putting standpoint epistemology into practice call for practices of deference: giving offerings, passing the mic, believing.”
+ “Broader cultural norms – the sort set in motion by prefacing statements with “As a Black man…” – cued up a set of standpoint-respecting practices that many of us know consciously or unconsciously by rote.”
I’m not offering an opinion on whether epistemic deference is good or bad, merely that it is a real phenomenon, and is difficult to operationalize when the marginalized community expresses multiple opinions on an issue.
Well, GG, the matter may indeed be complicated, but it seems to me you are way over-complicating it, because you seek yes/no answers when the reality is that it depends — sometimes yes, sometimes no.
I note your last response to CD was an assertion: “The greater point is there are lots of areas of disagreement within the trans community.”
From that basis, it follows that you will remain in the bind in which you find yourself, so long as you seek definitive yes/no answers that are universally applicable yet general.
You do get that, no? By virtue of your approach, you’re faced with an impasse, not a dilemma.
Perhaps you’d do better to instead work on the basis of such commonality as there is, and wing the rest.
What I love about CD posts is that they’re usually so rich with ideas that a powerful (if lopsided) discussion can come from only discussing one part. The thing that I focused on here was the broader idea that so many of the arguments that are had around topics relating to bigotry come from everyone deciding to ignore, for a variety of reasons, the *actual* underlying issues at hand because the case ends up just being a proxy for a culture war. In this case, the element of transness was irrelevant; coercion is bad. So the only way it could somehow be relevant to trans issues is if such anecdotes said something about trans people generally… which is a bigoted assumption.