Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

yes

kate, it seems like you're the one imputing loads of assumptions to me, as you have been doing intermittently throughout the past few days, without my contesting them all. i don't reject your experiences as invalid, i just don't think anyone can or maybe even should escape the conversation over shared understandings through which society changes (which involves trying to hammer out a lot of things that bridge over differences in experiences). i don't see it as a certain kind of institutionalized structure and i don't think it has clear-cut criteria for success or failure; however it fares will just depend on how well we can conduct it for the benefit of everyone. this possibility that you mentioned seems like something that not happened (for analogous cases) and never will happen:

i think a far better way of handling it is coming to a collective understanding among ourselves, and then presenting our conclusions as best we can to cis people - who we are, what we want, how to treat us with respect and dignity.

maybe i'm wrong about that and certain events in the history of progressive efforts around race and sex and sexuality count as such collective but separately-arrived-at understandings, seems like there's a case to be made both ways. but it seems to me more probable that we have what we have always had, piecemeal consensuses among many people of different persuasions and with different material interests, changing over time. those consensuses are more or less resilient but as we have seen in the past decade, they are vulnerable. you think i'm making this about me, but i don't think this is about me or about you (in particular). we're in the freeze peach and creepy liberalism thread. i take it that one of the broader issues on the table is the resiliencies and vulnerabilities of an imperfectly shared, inconsistently maintained framework for shared understanding that encompasses a lot more than the people in this room, and i think it's not necessarily wrong to worry that certain ways of trying to further the progress of movements for social reform can have adverse effects on that shared framework.

Sounds…conservative

i think it's not necessarily wrong to worry that certain ways of trying to further the progress of movements for social reform can have adverse effects on that shared framework.

Of course it's not wrong to worry and think about strategy and praxis, but you seem to have a knack for acting like a big cis moderate who doesn't actually give a shit about what trans people are saying or their dignity otherwise, instead going on about abstract concepts that pervade western liberal democracy and have left a trail of blood in their wake, which you also seem to want to ignore.

So your attempts at good faith argument or discussion don't make much sense to a lot of us.

what are some of the abstract concepts you think you have utterly abandoned, or made perfectly concrete, or whatever it is you actually think when you're not just doing this tough-activist act?

thanks again everybody for all your encouragement and positive feedback :)

j., thank you for your contributions to this thread. just fyi, right now i'm not planning on responding to your latest post. hope you have a great rest of your day!

Me? What?

cool your jets, j. you are getting pushback of various levels of thoughtfulness, but that did slip into ad hominem (disregarding some ad hominems flung your way by hit-and-run posters who should be disregarded).

Xpost

Mostly I get high, read Deleuze, and write weird poetry.

I don't think categorizing your position as one of a cis moderate is inaccurate. Much of what you've written seems to hand-wring over methods of achieving equality and dignity for trans people instead of dealing with the demonstrable fact that trans people are consistently denied equality and dignity.

why does expanding equal rights and equal dignity to trans people -- legally and socially -- demand we also denounce "western liberal democracy"?

sincerely,
an idiot

i hate this 'controversy' so much. why wasn't it over in a day. why has it been in my twitter feed for a fucking WEEK. it's so boring watching these pompous people twitch endlessly about it online.

otoh did anyone link the tom scocca piece yet? it's good.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2020/07/harpers-letter-reality-debate.html

xp lol i'm outta here

are we saying that each self-identified group should have a right to "self-determination" regarding how they should be spoken of? and the notion of "universal" definitions of terms like sex and gender, in principle, are offensive?

All definitions offend me

Whatever the poverty of our knowledge in this respect, it is certain that the question of the sign is itself more or less, or in any event something other, than a sign of the times.

Lol.

this thread wasn't initially addressing it, but it's hard now not to see it from a trans point of view

Even by the standards of Twitter the speed with which the phrase "cancel culture" became utterly meaningless is impressive

The Lincoln Project becomes part of cancel culture -- idea isn't to get rid of Trump but punish anyone who agrees with Trump (and disagrees with Weaver!) on the issues--Hawley, Cotton, etc.? https://t.co/Em2mjOgYRz

— Mickey Kaus (@kausmickey) July 12, 2020

that was a derrida quote.

as an undergraduate i wrote a thesis about whether his deconstruction of "western metaphysics" was a liberationist project or a nihilistic one. i concluded it was neither of these. it was actually naively optimistic, because he seemed to think something "better" exists on the "other side" of our language/the economy of concepts that we use to imperfectly understand the world, and express our yearning for intangible but urgent ideals such as justice. he was trying to give an account of how ideals, more than anything, were "always already" contradicted from within and that our whole system of moral reasoning was a house of cards. like, for derrida the logical positivist project of "clarifying our terms," more than anything else, was a ruse.

but still, derrida wasn't quite nietzschean, he didn't really delight in exposing these conceptual gaps and inconsistencies, or at least not in a triumphalist way. he seemed to feel that they pointed to something that might be important, even though they were in themselves bankrupt. like kafka, he felt "there is hope but not for us," maybe. something like benjamin's notion of "weak messianic power" sustained his project, but he didn't really define this as clearly or memorably as kafka or benjamin. when derrida says, for instance, "“I speak only one language, and it is not my own," he is marking out this ideal of a language that would be his own, a kind of authentic experience, but if he were to actually describe this sort of longing in definite terms it would immediately, from his perspective, evaporate, probably.

anyway, this was all really frustrating and i ended college wishing i had instead studied engineering or something.

the moral of the story is that it is impossible to escape inherited concepts. you can't think about politics, for instance, without concepts like freedom or equality, or in any case i can't. and these very ideas were used to sustain a violent social order, that's true. but they aren't *just that* they are also signposts to a better world than the one we have. for instance, you can critique society by showing how it does not, in practice, secure freedom and equality even though it promises these things. and the discourse of trans rights, at least in the united states, very much exists within this tradition, it's about people asserting their right to self-determination, equality under the law and the freedom to live the life they want. and these ideals, which are as noble as they come (i don't shy away from normative claims), exist alongside the ideal of free speech not in opposition to it.

like, unless you have a different "language" to replace this stuff with you can't really just throw it overboard. so i just think this opposition between the free speechers and the wokesters is false, honestly. both are drawing from the same repository of concepts when they defend their positions.

why does expanding equal rights and equal dignity to trans people -- legally and socially -- demand we also denounce "western liberal democracy"?

― treeship.

because the process by which trans rights have been denied - by transmedicalism, by TERFs - is a product of "western liberal democracy", of the process of Enlightened rational debate, working _as intended_. our exclusion is not due to a failure of the implementation of the norms of such an ideology, but has been a predictable and replicable and result of those norms. a system that consistently produces injustice, whatever ideals it professes, is not a just system, and my insistence on this places me necessarily in opposition to rationalist Enlightenment norms.

my feeling is that so many of us stan the hammer and pickle not because of any particular commitment to theory but because of what we experience when we start to live as trans. i have encountered tremendous difficulty reconciling the liberal framework, the framework in which i was educated, raised, taught, with my process of becoming. i do not know how it would be possible for me to transition without actively working to free myself from the constraints of that particular framework.

also, please don't call yourself an idiot. appropriating the symbols of abuse and degradation to apply to yourself does not serve to exculpate you, particularly in light of my understanding of abuse as a cycle, of something which we are taught, which we internalize, and which we then pass on to others. you may be ignorant in some ways of the realities of trans life, but that is not a cause for shame, it is a natural state of being, and i celebrate you to the extent to which you sincerely and honestly seek to learn from the experiences of others.

i was sort of joking i guess. i am not an idiot, but also not a philosophy professor. i have nothing but love for trans people and respect for the struggles they face. i am not trying to invalidate anyone's experiences.

however, i do think that communism, "the hammer and sickle," is also part of the enlightenment project. it's Hegel, it's the dialectic of freedom overcoming the contradictions of the liberal order (in theory).

you can't think about politics, for instance, without concepts like freedom or equality

― treeship.

i feel like you're perhaps overabstracting here?

"i was sort of joking i guess."

ok! part of how i talk to other people is to take everything someone says as if they mean it, and i feel like that's worked out pretty well for me, even if it does make me look like a pedant sometimes. thank you for clarifying.

"however, i do think that communism, "the hammer and sickle," is also part of the enlightenment project. it's Hegel, it's the dialectic of freedom overcoming the contradictions of the liberal order (in theory).

― treeship."

which means i should explain my reference - "hammer and pickle" wasn't a typo, it's sort of inside pool and i could see how that might have been unclear. i don't consider myself a marxist - i identify more as an intersectional leftist. it's more referring to the reputation a lot of us trans folk have towards being fairly radical left, which is a stereotype but like many stereotypes is, i think rooted in an underlying reality.

because the process by which trans rights have been denied - by transmedicalism, by TERFs - is a product of "western liberal democracy"

what is the status of trans people in cultural groups which specifically denounce "western liberal democracy", such as traditionalist Islamic cultures like Iran? what about in current Chinese culture, where "western liberal democracy" is anathema, as evidenced by the turmoil in Hong Kong and recently by Tiananmen Square? I can't say, but I have the impression that trans rights are not prized in these cultures.

Examining whether cultures which are highly divergent from western liberal democracy have equally denied trans rights, then what they share in common is not "western liberal democracy", but some other fundamental trait as yet unidentified in this discussion, apart from than by identifying its outcome.

iow, metaphorically: "beware! one train may hide another".

commonality = reliance on "traditional" gender roles / family structures to reify their respective projects?

because the process by which trans rights have been denied - by transmedicalism, by TERFs - is a product of "western liberal democracy"

what is the status of trans people in cultural groups which specifically denounce "western liberal democracy", such as traditionalist Islamic cultures like Iran? what about in current Chinese culture, where "western liberal democracy" is anathema, as evidenced by the turmoil in Hong Kong and recently by Tiananmen Square? I can't say, but I have the impression that trans rights are not prized in these cultures.

Examining whether cultures which are highly divergent from western liberal democracy have equally denied trans rights, then what they share in common is not "western liberal democracy", but some other fundamental trait as yet unidentified in this discussion, apart from than by identifying its outcome.

iow, metaphorically: "beware! one train may hide another".

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless), Sunday, July 12, 2020 10:55 PM (forty-three minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Thanks Aimless, this is more or less the jist of what I came here to post but this thread keeps crashing my browser. OTM

Idk seems kinda racist

Ok that was mostly trolling just skip over that

It probably is kinda racist tho

I can't say, but I have the impression that trans rights are not prized in these cultures.

are you interested or are you just bringing it up to score sophistic points

Did you know there’s a Wikipedia article entitled “Transgender rights in Iran” that kind of undermines your whole racist point

Did you know it takes, like, a second to look that up

For crying out loud

Or by “traditionalist Islamic cultures like Iran” (Iran is a nation-state btw not “a culture”) did you mean “but not necessarily Iran, maybe one of those other ones, which is probably about the same as Iran”

Hi! Have I mentioned that I'm from Iran? :)

Tbh I was mostly heckling Aimless

Who I know for certain isn’t from Iran

But if he hasn’t killfiled me by now I would be surprised so it’s a wash

So did you read that Wiki or

I’m not looking to embarrass myself further if that’s what you mean I am dumb but not that dumb

I mean I'm not "Persian" as such, I just happen to have been born there after my parents fled from "one of those other ones" to Iran some 20 years earlier

And I've lived in NYC most of my life, we came here when I was a little kid

shortly after we got my grandfather out of jail

Anyhow what I'd really like to do is go back to Kate's initial post from a couple of days ago and reply to that, but I can't fucking load it so I might have to just improvise

I've tried to imagine who you envision participating in this 'debate', what is to be concluded, who is to be persuaded to the eventual conclusions, and why it would matter to anyone outside of the small group allowed to take part. otoh, if it is a discussion, not a debate, then it might do some good to discuss these issues with people who don't already agree. at least they'll be exposed to new thinking.

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless)

putting aside the irrelevant debate/discussion thing, I'm sorry, I just can't treat a person who takes the bell curve as a serious person. I don't know how else to put it. Like if I encounter them IRL, I'll engage w them how the situation demands, but I assume we're talking about, like, ppl who can be reasoned with. I don't think anyone who is anything less than a skeptic of the bell curve is worthy of serious engagement. they're a fundamentally dangerous person, which doesn't mean you dont engage w them, but it means you don't engage with them about the *content of their argument*, which is based on harmful bullshit.

what is the status of trans people in cultural groups which specifically denounce "western liberal democracy"

― the unappreciated charisma of cows (Aimless)

yeah i could see how that statement could be read that way. to clarify, i don't believe for a second that "western liberal democracy" invented transphobia, which has existed pretty much back to the dawn of history. what i'm saying is that "western liberal democracy" found new and innovative ways to codify and perpetuate transphobia that, by and large, failed to produce materially better outcomes for trans people than other historical cultures, while all the time patting themselves on the back for how much more advanced and tolerant and compassionate they were than those historical cultures. also, since "western liberal democracy" was the specific culture in which i was raised, i have a particular stake in how it implemented its specific mores in a way that i don't with "traditionalist Islamic culture". (As it happens, I do know trans and GNC people in a number of different countries around the world, including Iran, and the diversity of their experiences is powerful, often surprising, sometimes deeply painful. Their stories are not mine to tell, but they exist, and they are important.)

Anyhow what I'd really like to do is go back to Kate's initial post from a couple of days ago and reply to that, but I can't fucking load it so I might have to just improvise

― Deflatormouse

apologies if i'm making it difficult, i really don't want to suck all the space out of the room and keep others from contributing here, i just have a shitload to say

speaking of which:

I've been thinking a little more about those weird things some people just can't bring themselves to say. I mentioned before about those people who can't bring themselves to say "black lives matter" and the people who can't bring themselves to say "trans women are women" and immediately what I got back was a "no true scotsman" argument about how anybody who couldn't say those things wasn't a real liberal. That just struck me kinda funny.

I mean, it's not really that I never said people who couldn't say "black lives matter" or "trans women are women" were liberals, although it does confuse me generally when people argue with a statement I didn't make. Maybe I didn't express myself very well, maybe the person was so upset at the very idea that a liberal might deny that trans women are women that they had to correct my error right that very second, maybe, you know, who knows? Could be lots of things.

And it's not really that the "no true scotsman" argument is a well-known logical fallacy. Seriously even in - especially in - objective, rational arguments, people make logical fallacies all the time, and that's kind of a nuisance sometimes, but my experience is that it seldom does any good to point these things out. I can't think of a better response than to just shrug and ignore it when someone says something like that.

And yet I'm coming back around to it, and it's not because I want to pick on the poster, but because it genuinely confuses the hell out of me that it's considered normal and acceptable in many circles to make judgements on the authenticity of other people.

When I first started hanging out on trans discord, one of the first things I learned was to never tell anybody whether or not they were trans. That's just a matter of practical experience. One learns very quickly that if someone comes onto a trans discord and asks a room full of trans people "Am I trans?" they probably have an answer to that question in mind. Someone in that position - and a lot of us have, at some point, been in that position - usually isn't looking for someone else to tell them the answer - they're asking for permission.

I mean, yeah, that's kind of fucked up. You shouldn't have to need a permission slip from a trans person in order to say "Hey I'm trans." That's how it is for us. The reason there's literally a book called "Yes, You Are Trans Enough" is because pretty much all of us have had the experience of being told, over and over again, "No, You Are Not Trans Enough", even though it was a lie, even though it fucked us up and hurt us, to the point where we internalized that bullshit, believed that bullshit. One of the weird things that actually happens to us is that even after years of being out, years of transition, we will still sometimes ask ourselves "Yeah, but am I _really_ trans?"

Having had that experience, it's pretty fucking important to me to not tell other people who they are. But liberals, I mean, not only is that not important to them, it's something they have this weird need to do. It seems like it's never enough for liberals to just speak for themselves, they gotta speak for other people too. Not only that, they assume everyone else is doing it as well. Often when I talk to cis people they get this weird assumption, that I actively have to fight against, that I speak for all trans people. I sometimes get the feeling that the idea of actual, like, diversity is disturbing to them, and I _particularly_ get the idea that the idea of self-determination is a direct challenge to the core of their worldview.

Thinking about it more, I think the things that that other poster was quick to say "no true liberal" believes, I feel like those are honestly really extremely liberal things to believe. "All lives matter" - I mean, that is absolutely a textbook liberal statement, isn't it? The idea that everybody is equal, everybody is equally important, it's certainly at the core of what I was taught. I get why someone who believes that might have a problem with saying "Black lives matter". While of course logically there's no contradiction, there's some inkling of what's _implied_ by that statement. It perhaps suggests the idea of "special treatment". To white liberals, when Martin Luther King talked about, in their favorite fucking speech of his, dreaming of people being judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, they somehow decided that the way to make that happen was to instantly start pretending everybody they talked to was just as white as they were. "Black Lives Matter" is a threatening statement because it requires them, on some level, to acknowledge the _existence_ of black people.

Not only was the whole "pretend everybody's white" idea not really a good idea in the first place, the people who adopted that ideology did a fucking awful job it it. So they've spent all this time living a lie, a very bad and obvious lie to anybody who's suffered the consequences of it, and they live in terror of anything that might possibly expose the lie, because this lie is at the core of their self-concept, of their value system, of their actual identity. We Are All Equal, and the only way to make it so is to keep saying it, over and over and over again. Justice, after all, has to be blind, which means, logically and sensibly, that justice must necessarily be blind to injustice.

I was talking to my brother today about my experiences as a trans woman. I was talking about seeing all the ways in which I am treated differently, the different sorts of scrutiny I am put under, since transitioning. And he promptly and immediately told me that he didn't believe I was being treated differently as a woman than I was as a man, that I certainly didn't get treated any differently than I did, that I was just more sensitive to such things since my transition.

My brother is not a liberal, just as I am not a liberal, but this is how we were both raised, this is the legacy we have to deal with, and again, it wasn't something where I was going to press him on. I pointed he was offering his opinion on my lived experience, he agreed, and I said "OK" and moved on. If I'm going to argue with someone I first think about whether it's going to help or not, and arguing with him just wasn't going to help. I have never been a patient person. It's not been one of my strong suits. I've had lots of opportunity to practice, these past few months.

Of course what my brother said to me was incredibly rude and offensive, of course, but mostly I wasn't hurt. Again, I was just really confused. I just really don't get why my brother, who is a Good Person(TM) and is really supportive and cares a lot about me, who has done a lot of good work and continues to work hard on a lot of things, didn't see any problem with saying that to me.

Denying that I get treated any different as a trans woman than I did as a cis man isn't at all equivalent to denying that trans women are women, but I perceive it as being sort of along the same continuum. It consists of a certain sort of license, arrogating to oneself the right to project one's own beliefs onto other people's reality, to, well, reject my reality and substitute their own.

I feel like this has, perhaps, some relation to the extremely fraught and complicated notion of "passing". "Passing" is a really important goal to a lot of trans people. It's a guarantee of safety, of protection from prejudice, even in places that would otherwise be dangerous to trans lives. For me, it's a really psychologically weird sort of performance. Trans women learn, particularly early on in transition, to exaggerate our femininity, to behave in really stereotypically "feminine" ways. We put on an act in order, ultimately, to convince people that we are authentic.

But the standards by which we are judged are precarious, are arbitrary. Attempting to "pass" can be dangerous and scary. Whether we "pass" or not isn't really dependent on us - it's dependent on each and every person we come into contact with. It's about how closely our presentation reflects their internal Platonic ideal of the gender we're presenting as. This means that we can't really _know_ how well we pass, so we set really exacting standards, put ourselves under a tremendous amount of pressure. In reality most cis people are pretty clueless about what trans people are really like. Most cis people don't really care, don't scrutinize us too closely, don't really _question_, and as long as nobody asks the question, I'm OK. Just like it is for us when we come out to ourselves, though, as soon as someone asks the question, they already know the answer.

And this, I think, has some bearing on the difficulty the statement "Trans women are women" has to some people. "Womanhood", to some people, is a basically homogeneous group, defined by its similarities, threatened by its differences. To say "Trans women are women" is not just to welcome us in the larger category of "women", but implicitly to acknowledge _difference_ within that category. When I look at women, I see not a homogeneous group, but a tremendous, amazing amount of diversity. There are black women and white women, gay women and straight women, women with kids and women without, tall skinny women and short curvy women, and all of those differences are there to be celebrated, to be uplifted, not to be glossed over or ignored. Honestly, that's not what I was taught, and those just aren't the values by which a lot of liberals seem to live their lives.

Liberals failing again.

#PolandVotes, official results (99.97% votes counted):

Andrzej Duda 51.21%
Rafał Trzaskowski 48.79%

Turnout 68.12%

It's mathematically impossible for Trzaskowski to win.

ANDRZEJ DUDA RE-ELECTED AS PRESIDENT OF POLAND

— Jakub Krupa (@JakubKrupa) July 13, 2020

apologies if i'm making it difficult, i really don't want to suck all the space out of the room and keep others from contributing here, i just have a shitload to say

Well, I think you've done an excellent job of turning this debate into a conversation. And that is no small feat.

A liberal might and probably should think that all lives matter, but it's coded by now as revanchist anti-BLM language, so no liberal aware of this would be wise to say it, especially as a slogan.

I just think it's possible to be, to some degree, liberal, but also be smart about it, and see the necessity of embracing and promoting the whole variety of human experience to the degree it requires. Just as it's also theoretically possible to be communist and not "stan the hammer and pickle", cmon

"All lives Matter" has always been used as to counter BLM and if you used it you are definitely not smart, and I am not waiting to find you out whether you are a bigot.

I don't think liberalism has failed entirely, i do think that Americans tend to be, for lack of a better word, very idealistic, very fixated on how things ought to be. There's also a lot that's very wrong with the way Liberalism has borne out, a deep rot that has taken hold. And because of those two things, a lot of what ime have been the successes of Liberalism are taken for granted. I understand how easily that can happen when you're suffering, you're going to be inclined to ask "what's wrong?", you wouldn't think to ask "what's right?"