Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

otm

jesse singal's summary of the situation, very supportive of tuval:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/05/transracialism-article-controversy.html

highly critical thread from zoe samudzi:

A whole gender studies professor wrote this article, y'all. pic.twitter.com/wpXTzPG0Lw

— Zoé Samudzi (@ztsamudzi) April 28, 2017

should note that in second pic-quote, tuval does explicitly say that if we are to be pro-trans we should also be pro-dolezal, which is, uh, hoo boy

whoa when did ilx start doing that with tweets??

do feel like sometimes political correctness gone mad is a thing. like if you were someone who saw the negative reaction to dolezal and thought "this is transphobic" you should probably go and bile yer heid

easy there or youll be put in the corner with me n mordy

I haven't read the article, so for all I know it may just as bad as its critics say. The title doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But that series of tweets by Zoe Samudzi represents what must be one of the worst ways of reading something: live-tweeting your first glance at it, with screenshots of text that you interpret about as uncharitably as you can manage. Seeing people circulate that as a credible take on a philosophy article, even a really bad philosophy article, is disheartening.

so is the error in seeing it from the perspective of society (they changed their sex) rather than the person's perspective (they found the true sex they always were) it is like a collision of realities. but one reality is one we have been living with for thousands of years that your identity is at least partially shaped by your role in society and hence not entirely up to you to decide. isn't that part of the social contract?

that there is the taste of distilled ad bru my friends

adam how dare you even ask such a thing

i signed nawhin

But that series of tweets by Zoe Samudzi represents what must be one of the worst ways of reading something: live-tweeting your first glance at it, with screenshots of text that you interpret about as uncharitably as you can manage.

It mostly made me think of a "what is up with THAT?" sort of standup routine.

to circle back on my comments from yesterday, i think there could be a nuanced discussion of transracialism, of what that is and what it could mean and how it might relate to transgenderism. here's an article from the new inquiry from last year that i think does just that.

the problem in Tuvel's case is that she uncritically centers her understanding on Rachel Dolezal while largely ignoring the contributions of black and trans academics on the topic. here's an article from 2015 that sums up some of the problems of such an approach.

i think it's a worth examining too why a white woman (Tuvel) should be able to use another white woman (Dolezal) and an array of white sources (see Zoe Samudzi's analysis goole linked too) to make a claim on blackness.

how could these things be examined if the article's “continued availability causes further harm"?

as far as i can tell, no one here is saying that the article was great or that it is wrong for people to raise objections to it. the problem is that it was characterized not as misguided, not as naive, not as inconsiderate, not as poorly researched, but as "violent."

these issues live beyond this particular paper. i linked two other perspectives above. try google for others. and, yes, white people policing the borders of black identity is violent.

stphone: did you read the article? If so, did you find a way to get it for free? I'm curious enough to read it, but I've never paid Wiley to download a PDF and I don't intend to start now.

here's a link JRN. i read a few pages but no not the whole thing.

Thanks!

when did it become so commonplace and acceptable to use "violence" to describe bad art and half-assed academic journal articles? the police are violent.

death threats are violent
swatting is violent
doxxing, serving as an invitation to the above, can be violent
harassment is violence

dumb ideas are not violent

well...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structural_violence

Even if one were to accept that definition of "structural violence", a journal article is not a social structure or social institution. You could maybe argue that it is "cultural violence" by the definition below there but you'd probably end up calling a lot of things cultural violence in that case.

I know where it comes from. I guess I'm asking why anybody thinks that using that kind of terminology so broadly helps their argument or makes them sound serious and thoughtful or whatever the goal is.

What sund4r said.

like, at work, where I'm one of the plain language emo kids, it's not a good thing when people take a term with jargon and regular meanings, even when they're related, and use the jargon definition in the wrong context. It's sloppy.

It's not sloppy it's disingenuous

It's the left wing equivalent of right wingers calling liberal policies "social engineering." It gives a conspiratorial, sinister edge to things they disagree with.

i don't think terms like structural or symbolic violence are foreign to people who study philosophy, women's studies, or any other humanities field, which is where this conversation is taking place. they certainly were common in the english department at my school.

We can still dispute their usage.

didn't know nymag.com was part of the humanities literature but it makes sense

didn't intend for my link to sound like I was supporting the journal's accusation, which is yeah problematic like Sund4r said, but I thought it was worth throwing into the conversation. I always associated struc. violence w/ ingrained prejudice/hatred that's baked into political/economic institutions, for the most part.

I read the article. My immediate reaction is that it does a reasonable job of showing that some ways of treating transgender identity as legitimate while discrediting "transracialism" don't work. I'm less certain about the attempt made near the end to block parallel moves from being made on behalf of e.g. "otherkin" people, and I suspect that anxiety about just that kind of slippery slope is part of what drives the hostility to her position.

I'm sure there are arguments against her position that she didn't consider, and I'm willing to be persuaded that she was egregiously negligent, or worse, in not considering them. I'll be curious to read some of the response articles that will probably be coming soon.

(My immediate reaction is similar.)

Thanks for the link, stphone.

i don't think terms like structural or symbolic violence are foreign to people who study philosophy, women's studies, or any other humanities field, which is where this conversation is taking place

but their familiarity isn't the same as their being accepted in those circles, in particular being accepted in the usages intended by the critics of the tuvel article.

the answer to tombot's q is that the usage (given its uptake) changes the social reality, obviously.

part of the skepticism about the journal's response comes from reluctance, within the broader intellectual communities in which the core constituency of the journal is included, to concede the validity of the usage.

i read something today that highlights tuvel's commitment to millianism abt things like liberty and experiments with life-projects, and that would certainly underline the difference of opinion between tuvel and her detractors, since a millian is unlikely to agree that much speech can be harmful in any sense injurious to liberty, particularly philosophical speech produced in the service of liberty of thought. but that just seems to show, depending on your tastes, how the disagreement was illicitly converted into a moral-political one by her detractors, or how it occupies just the kind of border territory about harmful speech for which philosophy will never be capable of settling distinctions of licit and illicit.

Your last point is a great reason why philosophers should shut the fuck up every now and then, btw.

bite me, creep

Hey, if you want, I can try and play the game as well:

The disagreement wasn't 'illicitly' converted into a moral-political one, rather what we have here is what Lyotard calls a 'differend', a conflict between two discursive systems that cannot be resolved in either one. A political discourse finds the wrongs of an article of philosophical discourse so grievous - deadnaming someone on page 1, using a term found offensive to many without discussion, failing to include viewpoints of the minorities the article proclaims to be about - that they attack it, but using their own discourse. Significantly, Leiter seems to recognize this differend, as he calls for law to be involved, rather than further philosophical discourse.

tl;dr: Philosophers should shut the fuck up from time to time, when they don't know what they're talking about.

well that's never stopped you has it

http://www.totalprosports.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/fight-of-the-century.jpg

Well, no, but then again, I am not a philosopher, and I don't do philosophical discourse :) That's, like, my point...

Yes of all the forms of discourse that should be able to threaten and bully and cuss out other forms of discourse, let's have shouty political dudgeon be at the top of the pecking order, please

also Fred I think you missed Adam's point just a tiny bit

and, yes, white people policing the borders of black identity is violent.

This makes it seem like the paper is taking the position of getting to define who is and isn't black, when surely any defense of transracialism (ignorant, ill-advised, whatever) works towards a situation where this can no longer be defined? Blackness as a social construct being a political invention to further white supremacy.

I realise the problem is that race being a social construct does not eliminate its reality in everyday life, structural oppression, etc. and that these issues need to be faced, which is why there was such a strong negative reaction towards Dolezal, but "policing the borders" seems like a weird way to characterise something that aims to make those borders irrelevant.

But at the moment, nobody expects transracialism to go both ways, so isn't it in practice just a further consolidation of white privilege?

But at the moment, nobody expects transracialism to go both ways

I literally only know of one person who identifies as transracial, and I think that goes for most people who've heard of the term (just did a search for "transracial", "assigned black at birth" and that throws up nothing but Dolezal links, too), so isn't it a bit early to make that statement?

(a bit early to write an academic paper on the issue as well, probably)

a certain key&peele sketch comes to mind..

it's weird how strategies that seek to erase race, a bit like people who don't see skin colour, always seem to work in a whitening direction

🗻

the revelation that nv thinks of fred b as the muhammad ali of ilx discourse has turned my world upside down

two titans of the challop game at the peak of their powers