Guest post: When two oppressed groups are in conflict
Originally a comment by Freemage on On being instructed to center everyone else.
The admonition to shut up and listen to the members of the oppressed group is a valid one, but it only works when dealing with a non-oppressed group (to-wit, straight white men, preferably but not exclusively middle-class and up). When two oppressed groups are in conflict, however, there must be an exchange of ideas and debate (and preferably, dialogue), or else you end up with one group being further oppressed.
I do think that actual trans folks suffer oppression (as opposed to the special snowflakes who like to don their trans identity like a fashionable cape they can ditch when it becomes inconvenient, but then re-wrap themselves in the moment it might be useful), because they are part of the larger oppressed group of neurologically atypical individuals–and our society sucks hard for folks with such conditions. But that oppression is practiced almost exclusively by men, usually motivated by homophobia and gay panic.
Ideally, yes, there would be an alliance between oppressed peoples in order to break the system down and end oppression for all. If you tell me that trans folks need protection for jobs and housing, I’ll agree. If anti-trans violence is to be made a hate crime, sign me up. If you tell me that trans people need accommodations–in prisons, sports, bathrooms/locker rooms and emergency housing–I’m inclined to listen (especially when it comes to situations of potential violence). But those accommodations must NOT be stolen from women, who have fought too long and hard to gain them in the first place. Instead, they should be, whenever possible, created by carving out space from the dominant group (again, SWMs). Build additional shelters that can accommodate trans folk; create trans-safe prisons; give trans athletes an opportunity compete against one another. Really, my fellow pallid phallus poltroons and I can spare it. No need to take from women (or for that matter, people of color, homosexuals, etc.).
Do trans people face oppression qua trans people, though? I think obviously they often face discrimination or bigotry, but that is different than oppression. (Also, I would wager that race and class play a larger role in discrimination that trans individuals face than the ‘fact” that they are trans.)
On the other hand, nobody suffers more at the hands of the trans cult than neurologically atypical individuals. The rate of rapid onset gender dysphoria among autistic children is shocking: it’s about twenty times the rate of neurotypical kids.
Autistic kids frequently grow up with a deep feeling of not belonging, and experience a persistent failure in finding a group to belong to. The grooming of children by trans rights activists that occurs online, combined with the enthusiastic vogue of transgenderism in schools, make it seem to autistic kids like they’ve finally found both a reason that they are fundamentally different from the other kids and a group that will forever accept them.
The absolute inability of child therapists to respond to reported gender dysphoria (it’s one of the things therapists fear the most, for legal and political reasons) causes them to punt gender-confused autistic kids over to the Gender Identity Centers, where they are shoved down a greased slide to drugs and mutilation.
All of this amounts to both a complete failure of society to help autistic children understand their dysphoria in the context of their autism, and an additional burden borne by autistic adults, as they contemplate the broken bodies and permanent inability to reproduce or enjoy sex the trans cult has conned them into.
I’m saying this to try to take back the term “neurologically atypical” for people who need it more than trans folks. Trans folks are heterogenous too. The trans folks we hear from the most aren’t neurologically atypical, they’re just suffering from an overwhelming sexual fantasy they insist the world participate in with them. They’re not underprivileged, they’re not underfunded (they’ve got billionaires like Jennifer Pritzker in their corner), and they’ve found away to exert extreme male, white, heterosexual privilege without having to allow anyone to call them out on it.
Thank you, Papito. My history with trans ideology is easy to find; I have laid it out on this blog in comments on several posts (some of which Ophelia has kindly, and unexpectedly, made into guest posts). And if it weren’t for Ophelia and the kindness of commenters like you, I would likely still be blaming my dysphoria on being trans instead of autistic. We need to protect autistic children, and let them know that society is wrong for expecting kids to fit into either the pink or blue box, and no other, regardless of their sex; and that their bodies can be mutilated if it’s deemed to be the wrong one for the box they have ‘chosen’. Kids can’t make such choices; it is always the case that they have been persuaded into following the choice of one or more parent, or other significant adult, or peer pressure from kids who have been similarly persuaded.
Did anyone ever think or say that trans people were generally considered neuro-atypical? AFAIK, gender dysphoria is a psychological condition, not a neurological one.
(I completely agree that the trans lobby is flush with funds, and that AGP is behind most of the most vocal/visible read activism.)
Well said, especially the last paragraph.
And that is one of the most frustrating parts of all this; the refusal by TAs (and the general public) to acknowledge that’s what’s happening. It comes in a variety of delicious flavours, including:
* “Our getting more rights doesn’t take rights away from you.” We’re hoisted with our own petard, here. It’s what we said about things like equal rights for women in the first place. Here it is hijacked because taking rights away from women is absolutely the point. The argument is superficially attractive but it rests on the false assumption that we’re not playing a zero sum game.
* Plain old failure to recognise that it’s specifically and only women’s rights that are being unilaterally trumped. “We should all be more accommodating” as a principle does not work out equally in practice. For instance, same sex public toilets superficially sound like an equitable solution but disadvantage women more than they do men. Trans men won’t typically have an advantage over men in sports, but trans women typically have an advantage over women. It seems a lot of people can’t see or won’t accept that asymmetry.
* Good old fashioned failure to care because it’s women’s rights that are being trumped. Choke on my barbed-wire-wrapped lady-dick, TERF.
* Tacit assumption that it’s women who will accommodate without even having thought about it. We’ve all seen lots of examples of this here. Women are the ones who have to be “kind”, which in this case means lying blissfully in front of the steam roller. This includes the “women’s toilets have stalls anyway, what difference does it make if some have men in them?” argument and the “trans women need rape crisis services too” argument.
* The presto-changeo where-did-that-bait-go redefinition of words mid-sentence that boils down to the Central Dogma that TWAW. An example is saying that in order to qualify to enter women’s spaces, a man must “be living as” a woman, which sidesteps the real concern (that any man can just go ahead and claim womanhood at any time) and on closer inspection defines “living as” as including “suddenly deciding they are”.
And many more. The asymmetry between the effects of accommodating trans people in certain women’s and men’s spaces is used deliberately and cynically to give the impression that it’s women who are doing all the complaining and to erase the facts of violence, unfairness and oppression by men to women.
Getting over this imperative to carve trans-inclusive spaces from the shattered husks of women’s spaces seems like such a small step. But we’re up against the fact that for all their pleading about safety and fairness, trans spaces are fundamentally not what TRAs want.
Exactly, as I keep repeating the TRA agenda is not really one of inclusion but rather of replacement. If they have their way, every right, every concession, every piece of progress that biological females have managed to wrestle from the hands of the patriarchy throughout the ages will henceforth apply to people like them instead of the people for whom they were originally intended. In essence their message to biological females everywhere boils down to:
“We own the word “woman” now. And by the way, all of “women’s” rights will go with the name rather than the actual people. You can keep all the sexist treatment while we keep all the rights.”
And not just autistic kids. I have direct experience with someone who is physically not within the mode for societal acceptance (large, overweight). Also a loner, shy, and with inadequate social skills. This person was actually evaluated for autism, but not all shy loners who lack social skills are autistic. He grew up in a setting that made social skills difficult to obtain.
He has fallen in with the trans cult because he didn’t feel like he belonged anywhere, and they welcomed him with open arms. They fawn over him and treat him special, and it is something he rarely got anywhere, though his parents did dote on him (not in the bad clingy way, but in the loving way that provided guidance and not abuse), but that isn’t the same as having friends his own age. Now he has a chance to be accepted, and he doesn’t even have to change anything except his declaration of self. Does he have AGP? Possibly. But I think a lot of it is a depression and anxiety disorder that made him vulnerable.
I understand that, because I have never felt like I belonged anywhere, or fit in with any group of people. There are now two exceptions to that in my life – my marriage and right here on B&W. That helps me hold on and avoid those who prey on vulnerable people. If the Trans Cult had been around when I was younger, and if we had been on the internet to have the saturation bombing they do, would I have decided I am really male, and that was all my problem? Possibly not, but there is no guarantee. I do think being a GCF (and being around others) helped a lot with my perceptions of self, but even that is no guarantee.
I do research in autism, so that is the viewpoint I am speaking from.
I am increasingly frustrated with some of the language around autism. I feel like we’re over-pathologizing people at the “high-functioning” end of the spectrum that leads to patronizing behaviours from people who should know better.
I’m a geneticist, and sometimes I worry about where my work could be distorted and perverted by people (including researchers and clinicians in the field) with an agenda. I have no desire to erase neurologically atypical people – what I want is to figure out how to make their lives easier: earlier interventions, understanding of modifiable factors that may be exacerbating symptoms and more focus on some of the subphenotypes such as sleep disturbance and GI issues that are not well understood.
I hate the way any kind of difficulties with social skills is casually labeled as autism by people who have no idea what they’re talking about. The utter callousness towards lower-functioning people and their parents “choices” is particularly vile.
Papito is right – neurologically atypical is being appropriated by people who are neurologically typical enough to think the world revolves around them.
Couldn’t we just agree that, with the exception of Harrison Bergeron, we are all members of oppressed groups and elevate dialogue and exchange of ideas on their own merit, or would the bereavement at a losing a Schmittian tribal enemy be too painful to bear?
Claire,
Yeah, that boils my piss too. OCD is another example. If people could stop thinking about themselves for a few moments, say long enough to try to understand how people who actually have those conditions can suffer, then…. well, I’d be a lot less inclined to parade them around in a headlock for one thing.
It seems to be OK to appropriate certain conditions and not others. This seems to be a function of the amount of imagination and/or empathy needed to understand the condition. For example, I suffer from chronic pain. Nobody ever makes little, light-hearted, off-the-cuff jokes about chronic pain because it’s all too easy to imagine. For most of my life I also suffered from insomnia (largely under control now, yay!) and people do joke about that. It can be enormously debilitating; I used to feel my faculties being stripped away one by one… and that was before the hallucinations started. It’s a horrible feeling and although I don’t expect anyone to understand how it feels, surely people who knew I frequently failed to sleep for days on end didn’t really think the result was the same as that one time they were woken up by a fox and it took them ages to get back to sleep? Well, you’d think so.
And my complaints are minor, it’s so much the worse for more serious conditions like autism and OCD. A friend’s kid is 19 and has Asperger’s. He finds it difficult to fit in and especially difficult to talk to girls, but is desperate for a girlfriend. He knows that he misreads situations often but he can’t recognise when he does it, even if we talk about it after the fact. He knows he has dramatic mood swings but likewise can’t recognise when it happens either from his own behaviour or the reactions of those around him. From time to time he can’t even bear to hope that things will get better because he can’t understand what he’s doing “wrong” and sees no way to improve. And then the lockdown happened, of course, which broke everything familiar to him, making the world a lot more scary still.
Having seen him at some of his lower points, I don’t have much sympathy for people who joke that they’re “a bit autistic” when they mean they’re a bit unpleasant and/or narcissistic.
Likewise with OCD, I once volunteered to take an acquaintance with quite severe OCD to a medical tribunal which was in part to decide whether she could continue to live by herself. So a big deal. She has acute anxiety about crossing bridges and of course it turned out that the tribunal was in Newcastle, which is basically made of bridges. The anguish in her face at having to go through this terrifying ordeal…. only to go a situation that anyone would be scared of, where a good part of the rest of her life was to be decided…. and then have to go home again over all the bridges… “Anguish” is the right word, I can’t imagine how difficult that journey was for her.
So when someone laughingly claims to be “a bit OCD” when they mean they have absolutely typical standards of cleanliness, I find my shit becoming lost.
I don’t think it takes much empathy or imagination to figure out that there actually aren’t ‘fun’ parts of such conditions that you can appropriate and leave behind the agonizing terror and hopelessness. But few people bother to try anyway.
iknklast @ 8 – I’m all verklempt that this is one of the two places where you feel you belong and fit in with people. I’m glad. (I mean, glad that this is such a place. Not glad there are so few.)
You know, I don’t think it actually is valid, or more like the validity of “shut up and listen” isn’t on the axis of oppressed versus non-oppressed, but rather on the axis of expertise vs non-expertise.
Because the thing is – being oppressed doesn’t actually make people immune to being wrong, and all too often putting the validity of “shut and and listen” on that axis, leads to a situation in which one ranks oppressions.
We saw it with “Islamophobia”, where concerns around sexism, the mistreatment of apostates, homophobia, anti-Semitism etc… were more or less silenced because Muslims were the oppressed minority of the day. A minority that was deemed more oppressed than these other groups, thus the other groups needed to “shut up and listen”.
The TRAs very specifically aimed to paint themselves as the most oppressed minority, specifically because that grants a greater ability to tell other groups to “shut up and listen”.
And I can’t help but think it is going to end up being the response to women who point out that calling people “Karens” is sexist. In fact I’d be surprised if the argument hasn’t already been floated.
I think there is something to be said for listening to people about their experiences, but it should be an active sort of listening, in which one asks questions and requires claims to be supported.
And yes, this can come off as JAQing off, but there is so much bullshit out there floated as “woke” that you can’t really get around it.
I’m South African so my example is always going to be Bell Pottinger, a PR firm that sought to undo the legacy of Nelson Mandela in order to run interference for a pack of thieving scumbags who were robbing my country blind. They did it using woke points, cynically and expertly playing up racial tensions and pushing “White Monopoly Capital” as the villain, in a way that was indistinguishable from people who may well have been genuine about it.
There is a lot of fakery mixed in with the stuff we’re supposed to be shutting up and listening to, even with causes we’d normally all get behind. “Shut up and listen” – doesn’t help us sort the bullshit from the real, and that has become a real problem that is actively undermining a lot of groups.
And a lot of the bandwagon on bullshit causes is populated by well meaning straight white guys who “shut up and listened” to the wrong people.
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I was just thinking about that in connection with another Shut up and listen-type tweet – the “You have to EARN it” one.