Guest post: From descriptions to memberships
Originally a comment by Nullius in Verba on Happy pride day punch a terf.
(Warning: not new information for many here.) I really do think that these people have somehow reconceptualized words like lesbian from descriptions to memberships. For example, atheist as a description is a word that applies to someone who does not believe in any gods. Believe in no gods? Atheist. Believe in at least one god? Not an atheist. As a membership term, it applies to someone who is part of the group “atheists”. Thus, if one is permitted entry into the group, one is an atheist. No other criteria apply, and this is how we get to normative notions of inclusion and exclusion, of “policing” who “can be” a woman. After all, group membership is political. Admittance or rejection is an exercise of power.
This view explains why someone would feel (violently) confident in proclaiming, “If someone walked up to me and said, ‘Lesbians can’t be attracted to men,’ they’d deserve a brick to the teeth, because that’s a TERF.” Lesbian isn’t acting as a description of reality based on conformation to a definition. Rather, it is acting as a name for a group—or community, if we use the trendy language—which one can join or be included in.
Does this sound like Critical Theory plus Foucault? Why, yes. Yes, it does.
This guest post makes sense ontologically. It could explain what came out of academia in general.
I’m adding an example, that the power of membership made me look up The Jets Own the Streets and the Jet Song from West Side Story. The energy looks familiar.
When you’re a TERF, you’re a TERF all the way,
From your first microaggression to your last dying day.
Maria. I just met a t-girl named Maria …
Not as earwormy somehow. Aaaargh. I’ve hated West Side Story since I was a kid.
Anyway, I was thinking that viewing everything as membership also explains a prior observation. It has often seemed that those who support the trans movement without knowing anything about it are echoing tribal morality. That is, they hear TWAW, interpret it as a moral claim, and echo it as such. Eventually it becomes a factual claim through the power of repetition, the same effect on which religion capitalizes. This has explanatory power, but why do they interpret TWAW as a moral claim in the first place? Well, because the membership claim TWAW is a moral judgement. It says, “we will not exclude people from membership in this group, because boo exclusion”.
Nullius@3:
That’s part of what I meant by my comment on the other thread:
This post came to mind when reading a post of Facebook this morning. The meme involved one person (call this one Speaker) questioning the teaching of systemic racism, and another person (call this person Responder) claiming that Speaker must be racist, because only a racist would say something like that. It seemed ever so important to Responder that Speaker be declared racist, without any actual addressing of the question raised by Speaker.
Speaker was being involuntarily assigned membership in the “racist” club. The only thing that matters is that Speaker is in the club; the characteristics that Speaker exhibited that might warrant membership are irrelevant. The label is what matters.
Cf the TERF club, the Karen club, probably also the cis club, and so on.
So the example from the OP, “If someone walked up to me and said, ‘Lesbians can’t be attracted to men,’ they’d deserve a brick to the teeth, because that’s a TERF”, is not just arguing about the label Lesbian, but also assigning the label TERF, and stating that a TERF deserves a kick in the teeth. Not “people who say ‘lesbians can’t be attracted to men’ deserve a kick in the teeth”, but “a TERF deserves a kick in the teeth”, and this hypothetical person meets the criteria for club membership. (I know this is a made-up example, but it’s perfect for illustrating the point.)
That’s a pretty good synthesis of the description/membership shift and latsot’s observation about how group membership has become the primary motivator of moral judgement. It’s no longer that unjust discrimination based on race is morally repugnant; it’s that being a racist is. It’s not that saying that lesbians are women who are exclusively attracted to women is worthy of teeth-kicking; it’s that being a TERF is.
Making moral judgement about labels rather than actions seems a dangerous trend, especially if labels can be applied without needing to match criteria to facts about the world. The label per se becomes accusation and judgement in one. He’s a racist. She’s a TERF. They’re homophobes. Shun them, cancel them, bash their teeth in with bricks.
I very much agree with this. I also think there’s a similar distinction to be made between causes and movements. I think many people get involved in some kind of activism because they agree with (a certain description of) the “cause”, but once they have identified their “movement” (a membership category), the “cause” quickly mutates into “whatever my movement happens to stand for at any given time”, even if it’s the antithesis of the cause that got them into activism in the first place (People who got into “feminism” to fight the discrimination of biological females, and ended up arguing that biological females neither deserve nor need any movement at all to stand up for their interests, people who got into “LGBT” activism to promote tolerance of same-sex attraction and ended up arguing that same-sex attraction (as opposed to attraction to people who think or feel in certain unspecified ways, refer to themselves by certain words etc.) is the pinnacle of bigotry and evil etc.)
Re causes and movements
Perhaps not what you were getting at exactly, but I see so much nonsense about “antifa just means opposition to fascism” and “you can’t be pro-life if you support the death penalty” and similar. I mean, there are things that can be said about word definitions and implications, but let’s not pretend that people who use these terms to describe their views or actions are working from exactly the definitions. Poor choice of title, got it, let’s talk about what they’re doing and what they believe.
I have not yet read the book I Know Best by Roger Simon (2016), but this description of it applies here: