It's Pronounced Metrosexual https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/ Learn about gender, sexuality, & social justice with Sam Killermann. Your free online resource for everything from genderbread people to LGBTQ vocabulary. Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Fri, 14 Aug 2020 14:26:03 -0500 How to Engage With People Who Are Stubbornly Stuck on “All Lives Matter” https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/responding-to-all-lives-matter-black-lives-matter/ Fri, 07 Aug 2020 10:16:41 -0500 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/responding-to-all-lives-matter-black-lives-matter/ Sam Killermann <p>The &ldquo;Black Lives Matter&rdquo; vs. &ldquo;All Lives Matter&rdquo; rhetorical fight has been going on for years, and doesn&rsquo;t seem like it&rsquo;s going anywhere. How do we, in the name of racial justice, move people from &ldquo;All&rdquo; to &ldquo;Black,&rdquo; and convince them to change their stance?</p> <p>Is there a winning move here? Is this more of a <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kr24G8jQpM">sweep the leg situation</a>, or does it call for a crane kick? How do we end this fight once and for all?</p> <p>I got a message today from a reader named Jamie asking just this:</p> <blockquote> <p>Any advice on how to engage with people who are so stubbornly stuck on &ldquo;all lives matter&rdquo; or who are busy condemning protestors instead of trying to understand what the protest is really about? I struggle b/c I can&rsquo;t think fast on my feet and tend to sound like an idiot when directly challenged.</p> </blockquote> <p>For my part, I&rsquo;ve spent a lot of time in the ring. I&rsquo;ve fought this battle from a stage with crowds, in workshops with thousands of participants, and more times than I would ever want to recount on The [godforsaken, why are we still here doing this?] Internet. I&rsquo;ve waxed on (and on, and on), and I&rsquo;ve waxed off.</p> <p>But in those seven years I haven&rsquo;t written about any of it here, because I know that people aren&rsquo;t going to like the answer.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s like what I learned with <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/why-we-wont-defund-police/">Why We Won&rsquo;t Defund the Police</a> study, but worse. Harder. Pricklier. And I decided I&rsquo;d rather not lose friends over this.</p> <p>But hey &ndash; I can&rsquo;t leave Jamie hanging, can I? This is the first time I&rsquo;ve gotten this question via my <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/reply">reply form</a> as a direct Q, so who would I be to not offer an A?</p> <p>For this fight, you&rsquo;re going to need less Karate Kid and more Mr. Miagi. Less Sun Tzu, more Lao Tzu.</p> <blockquote> <p>“The best fighter is never angry.”</p> <p>— Lao Tzu</p> </blockquote> <h2 id="1-start-by-vehemently-unequivocally-agreeing-with-them-i-know-hear-me-out">1. Start by vehemently, unequivocally agreeing with them. (I know. Hear me out.)</h2> <p>&ldquo;Yes!&quot;, you might say in response to your friend saying, &ldquo;All lives matter.&rdquo;</p> <p>And you might say it so surely, so confidently, it shakes their confidence in their own stance, and not just because they were expecting you to disagree.</p> <p>At this point, most of us in this fight know what side we&rsquo;re on. We walk into the ring wearing the uniforms of our respective gyms. We&rsquo;ve seen the other things we&rsquo;ve shared on social media, the other stances we hold, the politicians we support. All of this must fit neatly together, nice and tidy. One of the first things you learn in Karate classes, after all, is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LgIkks3ngDs">how to fold your Gi</a>.</p> <p>&ldquo;All lives <em>do</em> matter,&rdquo; you can continue, fully destabilizing them.</p> <p>They&rsquo;re off-kilter now, wobbling. Vulnerable to the final blow. So, what&rsquo;s our <em>coup de grâce</em>?</p> <p>Is it time to strike with a clever verbal retort? A figurative bait-and-switch? A rhetorical dismantling?</p> <p><em>Maybe that one <a href="https://www.buzzfeed.com/kristatorres/burning-house-black-lives-matter">about the burning houses!</a></em>, you might be thinking. <em>That one&rsquo;s good. It really convinced me to more deeply believe the thing I already believed.</em></p> <p><em>Or that one about <a href="https://twitter.com/arthur_affect/status/538015166634680320">the cancer ward and all diseases mattering</a></em>. It&rsquo;s less popular, so it&rsquo;ll be more of a surprise attack.</p> <p>Or you could deploy any of the hundred other analogies people have come up with in the past seven years, each one more clever and dead-on than the one before it. I&rsquo;m sure there&rsquo;s a listicle somewhere ranking them, because The Internet.</p> <p>But if you want to win this fight, none of these moves will help.</p> <p>It turns out our opponent also has access to The Internet. They&rsquo;ve learned our secret moves, because we&rsquo;ve been talking about them in the open. They were in the room the whole time, watching as we patted ourselves on the back for how devastating that attack was on the practice dummy. But they aren&rsquo;t the dummies. They might not even be the oblivious idiots we made them out to be. And sometimes &ndash; trust me on this one, I know it&rsquo;s hard to believe &ndash; they&rsquo;re just as clever.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s only one combo move that will work. Only one rhetorical strike you can follow &ldquo;Yes, all lives do matter,&rdquo; with that&rsquo;s not going to be met with a patterned counter-attack, a choreographed back and forth until you&rsquo;re both tired or furious or someone declares themselves the winner or one of you finishes pooping and therefore is no longer on your phone.</p> <p>What&rsquo;s the next move? Study this closely, Grasshopper. Many have tried and many have failed.</p> <blockquote> <p>“Act without expectation.”</p> <p>— Lao Tzu</p> </blockquote> <h2 id="2-then-ask-them-why-they-believe-what-they-believe">2. Then ask them why they believe what they believe.</h2> <p>If they were disagreeing with someone else&rsquo;s &ldquo;Black Lives Matter,&rdquo; and that&rsquo;s what got you into the ring, ask them why. &ldquo;Why don&rsquo;t you think Black lives matter? Or why do you believe all lives matter?&rdquo;</p> <p>If this fight started as a preemptive strike, with you hearing them say &ldquo;All Lives Matter&rdquo; but nobody has mentioned &ldquo;Black Lives Matter&rdquo; yet, just ask them, &ldquo;Why do you believe that?&rdquo; or &ldquo;Why is that important to you to say?&rdquo;</p> <p>Then you listen.</p> <p>Let me say that again, and I&rsquo;ll do it with the clap emojis to really hammer it home, because this part is really important: Then 👏 You 👏 Listen.</p> <p><em>Okay</em>, you might be thinking. <em>I see where this is going&hellip; We&rsquo;re luring them into a trap. The more they talk, the more likely it is they make a mistake, or say something I can latch onto. They might even say something that&rsquo;s easy for me to connect to that burning house thing, then I really get &lsquo;em. This is brilliant. When do we pounce?</em></p> <p>Whoa there &ndash; easy, tiger! No.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not suggesting you engage in predatory listening.</p> <p>(Do 👏 not 👏 predatorily 👏 listen. 🚫🐯👂)</p> <p>I said we&rsquo;re not doing Sun Tzu here. This isn&rsquo;t the <em>Art of War.</em> I&rsquo;m not setting you up to fully eradicate the enemy army, demoralizing them in the process. We&rsquo;re not trying to emulate the &ldquo;well-timed swoop of a falcon which enables it to strike and destroy its victim.&rdquo;</p> <p>I&rsquo;m also not setting you up to put on a performance of <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/01/hypocrisy-theatre/">Hypocrisy Theatre</a>. There are no showings tonight. We&rsquo;re in the middle of a global pandemic, the theatre is closed.</p> <p>Just listen. Actively listen. Curiously listen. Empathetically listen. Hear what they&rsquo;re saying. Ask them for clarifications when you&rsquo;re unsure. Repeat their points back to them and check if you&rsquo;re understanding correctly.</p> <p>Hear them out. But most importantly make them feel heard.</p> <p><em>So when do we strike&hellip;?</em>, I can feel you getting impatient. You think I&rsquo;ve got you painting the fence over here while secretly honing your fighting form, and you&rsquo;re ready to kick some fence ass.</p> <p>Alas, I&rsquo;m sorry to disappoint, but we&rsquo;re just painting the fence.</p> <p>If it makes you feel better, you can be a really kick-ass listener (and that&rsquo;ll help! The better you are at listening, the better this whole thing goes).</p> <p>But the listening is just listening. That&rsquo;s it. That&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;re doing here.</p> <blockquote> <p>“By letting go it all gets done.”</p> <p>— Lao Tzu</p> </blockquote> <h2 id="3-and-then-you-strike-jk-were-done-thats-it">3. And THEN you strike! (JK. We&rsquo;re done. That&rsquo;s it.)</h2> <p>There&rsquo;s no third move here. I told you this was Lao Tzu, not Sun Tzu. I was not trying to trick you.</p> <p>Number 2 is where it ends, with you listening. Anything you add, any retort, or counterpoint, or complicating narrative, or challenge, or &ldquo;devil&rsquo;s advocate&rdquo; &ndash; anything! &ndash; is more likely to undo the good the listening did than it is to do any good itself.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m speaking from [a mountain of painful] personal experience here, but there&rsquo;s also a whole cadre of researchers who have spent energy and time and effort to tell you this: <a href="https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/why_is_it_so_hard_to_change_peoples_minds">Facts don&rsquo;t change people&rsquo;s minds.</a></p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;But asking questions – and showing a genuine desire to hear and acknowledge the answers – sets a different tone that boosts the odds of a productive resolution, or at least a friendlier stalemate that inspires further thought and discussion.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>You ask, they answer, you listen. End of list.</p> <p>The important part of that quote, you might be noticing, is this implies a relationship. The &ldquo;further&rdquo; part means this person needs to be in your life after this moment.</p> <p>A lot of these fights happen among strangers, or with &ldquo;friends&rdquo; on Facebook that aren&rsquo;t really our friends, and we&rsquo;re drawn to hovering over that &ldquo;Unfollow&rdquo; option when someone disagrees with us, knowing we can disappear them forever, drunk with power.</p> <p>That doesn&rsquo;t get us closer to the goal of racial justice &ndash; that is our goal, right? That&rsquo;s why we&rsquo;re doing all of this? &ndash; it just <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/lessons-from-a-decade-of-social-justice-activism/">reinforces the walls of our silos</a>, increasing the volume in our echo chamber.</p> <p>We can&rsquo;t be canceling people in our lives who aren&rsquo;t with us on this. If we care about effecting change on this front, the hard and necessary work is going to be listening. Listening to a lot of things we have a hard time hearing. Listening to things we disagree with. Listening and not cutting them off, or out of our lives.</p> <p>How do we get closer to racial justice? How do we create a society where Black lives <em>do</em> matter?</p> <blockquote> <p>“The snow goose need not bathe to make itself white. Neither need you do anything but be yourself.”</p> <p>— Lao Tzu</p> </blockquote> <h2 id="moving-beyond-the-fight">Moving beyond the fight.</h2> <p>I was <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2017/01/a-few-small-tips-for-attending-your-first-protest-march/">at a protest</a> and my group was chanting, &ldquo;Black Lives Matter.&rdquo; On the sidewalk, there was, as has become the norm, a group of counter-protestors chanting, “All Lives Matter.”</p> <p>In that moment, we saw them as disagreeing with us. And they saw us as disagreeing with them. This is happening daily now. Everywhere.</p> <p>But were we really disagreeing with them?</p> <p>As has been said a million times by now, &ldquo;For all lives to matter, Black lives have to matter.&rdquo; That&rsquo;s true. The only issue is that it&rsquo;s not actually disagreeing with &ldquo;all lives matter.&rdquo; It&rsquo;s <em>making that point.</em></p> <p>Black lives matter. Brown lives matter. Indigenous lives matter. Trans lives matter. Poor lives matter. All lives matter. Yes. That&rsquo;s <em>our</em> point.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s why we&rsquo;re marching. We&rsquo;re marching because we believe Black lives matter, <em>because</em> we believe all lives matter (not just the select few society is currently structured to care about). That&rsquo;s the goal what we&rsquo;re <em>fighting for</em>, so why are we constantly fighting against the phrase?</p> <p>And are they really disagreeing with us?</p> <p>If someone truly believes all lives matter, that &ldquo;all&rdquo; must include Black lives, right? It has to. It&rsquo;s a pretty weak all if it doesn&rsquo;t.</p> <p>And my gut reaction could have been a pitch-perfect <a href="https://media0.giphy.com/media/l2YWqLVkNBNjiBaXS/giphy.gif">Regina George</a>, &ldquo;So you agree? You think Black lives matter?&rdquo; But it wasn&rsquo;t. It never is.</p> <p>The reaction is anger, despair, guilt, frustration, pain, and hopelessness. <em>&ldquo;How do they not get this?&quot;</em></p> <p>It&rsquo;s something that&rsquo;s been happening for years now. Jamie&rsquo;s question above, from this morning, is just the most recent time it&rsquo;s come up for me, in a long lineage of thousands of times this has occupied my headspace. And it always takes me to the same place.</p> <p><em>Why are we stuck in this fight?</em></p> <p>It&rsquo;s like a racial injustice parody of <em>Groundhog Day</em> (btw, that idea is free and yours to run with, Jordan Peele).</p> <p>And, more urgently, <em>How do we move past this and take meaningful steps toward racial justice?</em></p> <p>To that I&rsquo;ll say four things:</p> <ol> <li>Everything I said above I believe to be true. Before you come back at me in the <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/reply">replies</a>, please be ready to point out the lie.</li> <li>The reason I&rsquo;m saying it is guided by a <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/01/introducing-the-social-justice-compass/">social justice compass pointing toward equity</a>.</li> <li>I&rsquo;m entirely certain that publishing this article, despite #1 and #2, is going to be a miserable experience. I&rsquo;ve been told by two <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/03/taxonomy-social-justice-people/">social justice people</a> that it&rsquo;s probably not worth the pain to release this, despite them also agreeing with what I wrote, and that this is a problem we need to confront.</li> <li>And while I think it&rsquo;s necessary for us to be able to <a href="https://www.samk.blog/reacting-to-social-justice-pushback/">pushback against bad arguments in social justice</a> to achieve our goals, in no corner of my imagination do I think that&rsquo;s sufficient. Nor do I think everything I shined light on above is THE problem.</li> </ol> <p>Here&rsquo;s what I think is THE problem here:</p> <p>We all agree that Black lives matter (yes, even many of the &ldquo;All Lives Matter&rdquo; crowd &ndash; maybe even most!), but we don&rsquo;t agree what to do to make that belief a reality.</p> <p>And instead of moving from the shared belief to shared action (and starting to reckon with the prickly truth that we&rsquo;re all likely on <em>very</em> different sides when it comes to the policies and changes we support), it&rsquo;s comfier to just keep going round and round the ring shouting what we believe.</p> <p>If my <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/why-we-wont-defund-police/">defunding the police poll</a> taught me anything, it&rsquo;s that assuming having the same social-justice-oriented beliefs will necessarily lead us to supporting the same actions is fool&rsquo;s errand.</p> <p>It’s comfier, easier, and less risky for us to grapple with the “All Lives Matter” people than it is to reckon with our own disagreements. With the massive chasms of disagreement within “our” side. With the lack of unified vision we share.</p> <p>It doesn’t matter if we “change their mind.” It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t move us closer to racial justice. We can get a lot of Internet Points for dunking on “them.”</p> <p>But that’s not the goal. And we’re not here for comfy, right? We’re here for justice. We came together today to create a more equitable tomorrow.</p> <p><strong>Whether someone shouts &ldquo;All Lives Matter!&rdquo; or &ldquo;Black Lives Matter!&quot;, my response is going to start being, &ldquo;True! I totally agree. And what specific steps do you support for us to take toward creating a society where that truth is a reality?&quot;</strong></p> <p>The amount of change and vision and global revolution it&rsquo;s going to take to make Black lives matter, ironically, is a helluva lot less than it&rsquo;s going to take to make all lives matter.</p> <p>In that way, &ldquo;all lives matter&rdquo; is the truly radical position. We have a <em>long</em> way to go before that&rsquo;s true.</p> <p>One bit of encouraging news: both of those destinations are, by necessity, different stops along the same road.</p> <p>But we can&rsquo;t start heading there until we know which direction we&rsquo;re heading.</p> <p>Lao Tzu has one last bit of wisdom to offer us here, &ldquo;The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.&rdquo;</p> <p>Step one for me is going to be publishing this article. Step two is going to be hiding from the internet for a few days.</p> <p>For steps three through infinity, I&rsquo;m all ears. Let&rsquo;s go.</p> Remember How You Got Here https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/remember-how-you-got-here/ Wed, 29 Jul 2020 10:16:41 -0500 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/remember-how-you-got-here/ Sam Killermann <p>Back before Google Maps, if we were dropping a friend off at their house for the first time, we&rsquo;d have to pay attention to how we got there. Remember the turns, street names, landmarks. &ldquo;I turned left at that gigantic weeping willow. Okay, on the home I&rsquo;ll turn right when I see it.&rdquo;</p> <p>Nowadays we can be completely lost in thought, listening to a podcast, oblivious to where we are, wherever we&rsquo;re going. Arriving there as if by magic, with not account for the twists and turns it took to get us there, we just type our home address into Google Maps &ndash; <em>beep boop</em> &ndash; and have the path home read aloud to us.</p> <p>The same is true for how we get people to where we are. We no longer have to explain it, using the little tricks we&rsquo;ve learned from our friends who got lost in the past (&ldquo;You&rsquo;ll think you missed the turn, but keep going. I&rsquo;m in the middle of nowhere.&quot;)</p> <p>Now we just give people the final destination, they tap it into their phone, and they get here without issue. Every time.</p> <p>Magic.</p> <p>But the same can&rsquo;t be said for the directions we followed on the way to where we are ideologically. The twists and turns of belief that led to us believing what we believe now. All the things we once tried to do ourselves &ndash; or demand others do &ndash; to be good people, that led us into dead end after dead end, until we got to what we&rsquo;re doing now.</p> <h2 id="how-did-you-get-here">How did you get here?</h2> <p>Over time, there are likely dozens (if not hundreds, thousands) of crossroads in your journey that led you to the actions, attitudes, and beliefs guiding you now (your <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/01/introducing-the-social-justice-compass/">social justice compass</a>, pointing you toward equity).</p> <p>When it comes to concepts like <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/categories/social-justice/">social justice</a>, <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/categories/gender/">gender</a>, <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/categories/sexuality/">sexuality</a>, race, identity, and more &ndash; how did you end up knowing what you know now? (Instead of what you thought you knew before.)</p> <p>What were the things you were <em>sure</em> were healthy, that you now see as unhealthy? The things you saw as fair, that you now see as oppressive? The things you didn&rsquo;t see at all, that you now see everywhere?</p> <p>What were the behaviors you used to celebrate, that you now avoid? The actions you now see resulted in harm, but you thought were for the good of others?</p> <p>Every one of those Thens that became a Now represent a change in direction on the path that got you here. A road sign you noticed. A wrong turn you corrected. A gigantic weeping willow you made a mental note of.</p> <h2 id="bad-directions">Bad Directions</h2> <p>A lot of people seem to think all we need to do to get closer to the destination of social justice is tell everyone where they are now. No explanation of how they got there. &ldquo;Just get here. Now.&rdquo;</p> <p>I see this all the time.</p> <p><strong>Someone will say, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s harmful to believe X,&quot;</strong> while not mentioning that they used to believe X themselves (often until literally today, the day they&rsquo;re admonishing it), and all the ground they covered moving from X to Y.</p> <p>Sometimes it&rsquo;s even less helpful.</p> <p>People will tell others that they should <em>not</em> follow their path. That the directions they took are somehow problematic, or oppressive, or harmful (despite getting them to where they are now).</p> <p><strong>People will say A led me to B. And B led me to C. But A and B are harmful, so skip those and go to C.</strong> This is the social justice version of, &ldquo;Do as I say, not as I did.&rdquo;</p> <p>For example, I&rsquo;ve seen this a lot with the <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/genderbread-person">Genderbread Person</a>. Someone will say, &ldquo;This really opened my mind when I first saw it, but now I see that gender is way more complex than this, and this graphic is problematic, so stop sharing it.&rdquo; If it got you to where you are, might it help others get there, too? Might that initial understanding have helped you unlock the deeper understanding later? Maybe I&rsquo;m taking this one too personally?</p> <p>For a non-personal example, I&rsquo;ve seen lots of people saying, &ldquo;Anything short of arguing for abolishing the police is oppressive.&rdquo; To me, I see this as a clear A to B to C, where the person is skipping their own A and B. They went from A (police are good, necessary, and protect us) to B (police are a force of oppression, and likely cause as much harm as the good they do) to C (abolish the police, anything short of this racial violence). It&rsquo;s going to be a bumpy ride trying to get someone to go from A to C without at least a pit stop at B. And, if the data I collected here are any indicator, people are <em>very</em> A: <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/why-we-wont-defund-police/">most aren&rsquo;t ready to defund, let alone abolish, the police</a>.</p> <p>Even worse yet, I&rsquo;ve increasingly been seeing people <strong>outright reject the idea that they ever were anywhere but where they are now, and anyone who isn&rsquo;t here already is lost forever</strong>.</p> <p>That is, viewing whatever someone&rsquo;s current stance on an issue, or understanding of a concept, as somehow detached from time or evolution or change. Someone acting as though they&rsquo;ve <em>always</em> believed X (when X is &ldquo;good&rdquo;, or socially-just) &ndash; there was no road to get them there. They were born there. On the flipside, if someone doesn&rsquo;t believe X, there is no road that will possibly get them to X.</p> <p>This is a particularly <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/social-justice-dogma/">dogmatic manifestation of social justice activism</a>. It&rsquo;s also what led to me writing this article exploring <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/01/ignored-reason-people-dont-affirm-lgbtq-people-make-harder/">one prickly reason why some anti-LGBTQ people don&rsquo;t change their views</a>. It says that the people who aren&rsquo;t already here don&rsquo;t deserve our guidance to get here, and instead deserve punishment for not being here already.</p> <p>But what would good directions look like? How can we be helpful, if we want to be helpful?</p> <h2 id="we-need-to-remember-the-directions-we-followed">We need to remember the directions we followed.</h2> <p>If we&rsquo;re in a place that we want to guide others to, we need to remember how we got here.</p> <p><strong>We need to remember the roads we took to get where we are.</strong> What were the bumps we hit? Where did we get lost? What street names, landmarks, or compass directions helped us find our way?</p> <p>For social justice activism, this will look like all the things we had to learn and unlearn. All the hackles we had, the fears, the misconceptions. The discomfort we experienced. The perspectives we added to our own.</p> <p><strong>We didn&rsquo;t get here by magic.</strong> Who guided us? What were the maps we used? What were the wrong turns we made that ended up being shortcuts? What were the correct directions we refused to follow, because we were <em>sure</em> it was a left there (but we were wrong, and that stubbornness lost us precious time)?</p> <p>Here, think of all the books and articles and essays you read. The workshops you attended. The voices you listened to. The times you stepped outside your comfort zone. The people who challenged you, guided you, reassured you, questioned you, pushed you.</p> <p><strong>We need to be mindful of how long it took us to get here.</strong> It might be quicker for other people if we spent a lot of time going the wrong way. We can point out the shortcuts we&rsquo;ve learned. But it&rsquo;s still going to take time.</p> <p>It can be dangerous to hurry, particularly if you&rsquo;re driving in the dark or down unfamiliar roads. My mom always said, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t make up for lost time on the road.&rdquo; We don&rsquo;t want to get a ticket, or, worse, to crash.</p> <h2 id="there-is-no-google-maps-for-social-justice">There is no Google Maps for Social Justice</h2> <p>There is no Google Maps for activism that allows us to simply give others the destination, knowing they&rsquo;ll get all the turn by turn guidance they need, perfectly tailored to them &ndash; and get ourselves out of all the work that goes into helping them get here.</p> <p>If we want to get people to where we are, we need to be willing to guide them. Or connect them with other guides if we&rsquo;re not up for it.</p> <p>In guiding, we must be cognizant of where someone is coming from. <strong>Directions to a destination are only helpful when they consider the origin.</strong> I can&rsquo;t tell you how to get to Austin unless you tell me where you&rsquo;re coming from. You can&rsquo;t get someone to a new belief unless you start with what they believe now.</p> <p>All of this takes effort. It doesn&rsquo;t happen on its own. It&rsquo;s not magic. If our goal is to get everyone else (or even anyone else) to where we are now, guiding them is the only way it&rsquo;s going to happen.</p> <p>Nobody is getting here without directions. Give them, or get out of the way.</p> <hr> <p>P.S. But maybe our directions are wrong.</p> <p>After all, not only do we not have a Google Maps for social justice that allows us to magically get everyone to where we are, we also don&rsquo;t have an app that tells us where <em>we</em> need to go. We haven&rsquo;t gotten there yet, after all, to the destination of &ldquo;Social Justice.&rdquo;</p> <p>What if we&rsquo;re heading toward a dead end right now, and we just haven&rsquo;t hit it yet?</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not sure we need everyone to get to where we are &ndash; or really anyone. What I mean is that I&rsquo;m no longer sure that changing hearts and minds is the road to living social justice. I write about this in my book <a href="https://www.problematicactivism.com">Problematic Activism</a> (and you can read <a href="https://www.samk.blog/hearts-minds-chutes-ladders/">this essay about hearts and minds activism</a> for a glimpse of what I&rsquo;m talking about here).</p> <p>I could totally be wrong about this. And if I am, then everything I wrote about above is doubly bad. It&rsquo;s us creating roadblocks and detours on the road to social justice &ndash; actively getting in our own way &ndash; instead of giving people directions that will help us get there.</p> <p>Here are two things I know for sure right now:</p> <p>One, it was a long, winding, exhausting, and dangerous road that got me to where I am now. I wouldn&rsquo;t be here if not for countless books and articles I&rsquo;ve read, literally tens of thousands of conversations I&rsquo;ve had in almost every state in the US and dozens of other countries, and over a million emails I&rsquo;ve read from all of you.</p> <p>Two, if you want to get here, I&rsquo;m not sure I&rsquo;d recommend it, but I&rsquo;d be happy to give you directions. Just ask.</p> Of Course Biological Sex is Real https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/of-course-biological-sex-is-real/ Wed, 22 Jul 2020 12:16:41 -0500 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/of-course-biological-sex-is-real/ Sam Killermann <p>&ldquo;&hellip;They just have really strong opinions about biological sex, which &ndash; as you know better than anyone, of course &ndash; isn&rsquo;t real,&rdquo; my friend said to me recently. We were talking about <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/why-we-wont-defund-police/">the difficulty of defunding the police</a>, in the context of that MLK quote about the arc of the moral universe.</p> <p>&ldquo;Oh, I do?&rdquo; I replied.</p> <p>&ldquo;Of course! You wrote <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/guide-to-gender/">an entire book about it</a>. You&rsquo;re not a biological essentialist,&rdquo; they reassured me.</p> <p>Our conversation, until that point, was us fully on the same side: frustrated about the state of the world, the backslides we&rsquo;re seeing into injustice everywhere, and the looming sense right-wing fascism on the rise. Ya know, <em>Tuesday stuff</em>.</p> <p>The MLK quote that came up was of course the one you think it was: &ldquo;The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.&rdquo;</p> <p>(Turns out it wasn&rsquo;t MLK&rsquo;s quote. And <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/obama-loves-martin-luther-kings-great-quotebut-he-uses-it-incorrectly">he didn&rsquo;t mean it how a lot people interpret it</a>. That&rsquo;s fitting.)</p> <p>We were specifically talking about <em>why</em> it&rsquo;s true, if it is, that the &ldquo;moral arc bends toward justice.&rdquo;</p> <p>I had said something I&rsquo;ve said before, which was, &ldquo;It&rsquo;s helpful that we&rsquo;ve always had the facts on our side. We don&rsquo;t need to convince people of things that aren&rsquo;t true, which is the hard work of a lot of conservative activism.&rdquo;</p> <p>This is a short version of something I&rsquo;ve written elsewhere, about <a href="https://www.samk.blog/progressivism-problem/">the problem of progressivism</a>.</p> <p>Then my friend replied, &ldquo;True. They don&rsquo;t have the facts on their side, they just have really strong opinions about biological sex, which &ndash;&rdquo; well, now you&rsquo;re caught up.</p> <p>And now you know the corner I was backed into. By myself?</p> <h2 id="weve-painted-ourselves-into-a-corner">We&rsquo;ve Painted Ourselves into a Corner</h2> <p>I had heard that phrase a lot, but I never actually thought about what it meant until this week. Or visualized it. And now I see it as the perfect way to sum up what we&rsquo;ve done, as <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/03/taxonomy-social-justice-people/">social justice people</a> and trans rights advocates, with the whole &ldquo;biological sex isn&rsquo;t real&rdquo; thing.</p> <p>We started with a few huge sweeping brushstrokes, and lots of room to work with.</p> <p>&ldquo;Gender and sex aren&rsquo;t the same thing,&rdquo; a big brushstroke that covered a lot of ground by the door where we entered.</p> <p>&ldquo;And neither one is binary! Just look at intersex people if you don&rsquo;t believe me,&rdquo; we would use to get into the corners, cover the edges.</p> <p>&ldquo;People focus too much on biological sex assigned at birth, and that focus erases trans people&rsquo;s lived reality,&rdquo; we kept painting. And at this point started passing the brush, with lots of people now happy to pick it up.</p> <p>&ldquo;And not only that, but biological sex itself is socially constructed!&quot;, some rolled on. We&rsquo;re picking up speed now. This room is halfway painted.</p> <p>&ldquo;Yeah, and it&rsquo;s colonialist too. It&rsquo;s something that was imposed by the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,&rdquo; we continued, borrowing a brush from bell hooks.</p> <p>&ldquo;Exactly! Biological sex isn&rsquo;t even real,&rdquo; someone smeared a paint roller from the wall to the floor, backing us up. We&rsquo;re on the opposite side of the room now, with a sea of wet paint between us and the door.</p> <p>&ldquo;Yeah, actually, it doesn&rsquo;t exist,&rdquo; someone else grabbed the roller. Paint is spattering everywhere now.</p> <p>&ldquo;And anyone who says it does, is arguing for literal violence against transgender and non-binary people.&rdquo;</p> <p>And that was it: the final brushstroke, outlining our feet where we stand in the far corner of the room. Nowhere to step but on our fresh paint. Nothing left unpainted but ourselves, and the tiny bit of wiggle room underfoot.</p> <h2 id="of-course-biological-sex-is-real">&ldquo;Of course biological sex is real.&rdquo;</h2> <p>I didn&rsquo;t expect myself to be saying, &ldquo;Of course biological sex is real,&rdquo; and to have it feel like a contentious statement. Especially not to seen as arguing against <em>myself.</em></p> <p>But here I am.</p> <p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;m not a biological essentialist,&rdquo; I said, &ldquo;And <em>of course</em> biological sex is real.&rdquo; I went on to explain what I&rsquo;ll sum up better, in writing, here.</p> <h3 id="saying-biological-sex-exists-is-not-saying-transgender-people-dont">Saying &ldquo;biological sex exists&rdquo; is NOT saying &ldquo;transgender people don&rsquo;t.&rdquo;</h3> <p>First, there are a LOT more boxes available for us to fit ourselves into than being either &ldquo;biological essentialist&rdquo; or &ldquo;biological sex doesn&rsquo;t exist.&rdquo;</p> <p>That is a hilariously oversimplified binary, and the irony that we&rsquo;re <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/03/binary-thinking/">reinforcing that binary in the name of dismantling another</a> isn&rsquo;t lost on me.</p> <p>You can argue against biological essentialism (i.e., believe entirely in &ldquo;nature&rdquo;, not &ldquo;nurture&rdquo;) as the foundation for arguing for the rights, recognition, wellbeing, equity, and justice for trans people. Absolutely. A lot of people do.</p> <p>You can also argue for a little bit of nature, and mostly nurture. Neither biological essentialism nor indeterminism. Saying something like, &ldquo;Yes, our biology plays a role, but socialization plays a larger one,&rdquo; as the basis for arguing for the rights, recognition, wellbeing, equity, and justice for trans people.</p> <p>And you can be a biological determinist <em>and</em> use that as your basis for supporting transgender rights, recognition, wellbeing, equity, and justice. This is a common position, actually. It&rsquo;s summed up in the &ldquo;born this way&rdquo; ethos.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s not <em>my</em> position, but it is <em>a</em> position. All this goes to say that we&rsquo;re pushing a false dichotomy here by saying either &ldquo;believe biological sex doesn&rsquo;t exist&rdquo; or you&rsquo;re against trans people. Speaking of which&hellip;</p> <h3 id="saying-biological-sex-is-socially-constructed-or-colonialist-imperialist-etc-ist-is-not-saying-it-doesnt-exist">Saying &ldquo;biological sex is socially constructed&rdquo; (or colonialist, imperialist, etc-ist), is NOT saying &ldquo;it doesn&rsquo;t exist.&rdquo;</h3> <p>Arguing that sex (or gender, or anything) <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/09/yes-gender-is-a-social-construction-no-that-doesnt-mean-its-not-real/">is socially constructed isn&rsquo;t the same as saying it doesn&rsquo;t exist</a>. Social constructions are very real &ndash; life or death real.</p> <p>People seem to think &ldquo;socially constructed&rdquo; is the same thing as &ldquo;purely imaginary.&rdquo; This is yet another cumbersome (and indefensible) binary that isn&rsquo;t helping us, or an honest take on the situation.</p> <p>Social constructions exist in the real world. It&rsquo;s not a matter of closing our eyes and imagining something. It&rsquo;s a collective story of something we&rsquo;re all noticing. Out there.</p> <p>When someone says, &ldquo;Well, what about that vulva over there? You&rsquo;re telling me that doesn&rsquo;t exist?&quot;, we don&rsquo;t reply, &ldquo;Yes, it is merely an artifact of your imagination. And penises are a collective hallucination.&rdquo;</p> <p>We say, &ldquo;Of course it exists. It&rsquo;s just that someone having a vulva, or someone having a penis, or a uterus or testes or a deep voice or facial hair or wide hips or any of these very real biological characteristics doesn&rsquo;t mean what you think it means. And the ways we make sense of those biological traits is shaped by our society.&rdquo;</p> <p>Or we could say that, but for a lot of reasons we don&rsquo;t.</p> <h2 id="we-all-know-this-right">We all know this, right?</h2> <p>Writing this article is a bit deranging, if I&rsquo;m going to be honest. None of the above feels like it is &ndash; or at least should be &ndash; controversial amongst my people, colleagues, and comrades. The people arguing <em>for</em> social justice, for equity, against injustice, against erasure.</p> <p>But it is? It&rsquo;s got to be, or why else does it feel so risky to write this? And why am I sure opening my inbox is require climbing a mountain of pain after publishing this?</p> <p>I suspect three things.</p> <h3 id="1-we-know-the-world-is-unjust-and-we-want-to-correct-that">1. We know the world is unjust. And we want to correct that.</h3> <p>We&rsquo;re not okay with the status quo. We want things to be better, for everyone, especially those who are currently pushed to the margins, ignored, victimized, oppressed.</p> <p>We don&rsquo;t know exactly what it&rsquo;ll take to get there, what will work, or what won&rsquo;t. We just know that we can&rsquo;t keep doing things how we&rsquo;re doing them now.</p> <p>So when we&rsquo;re told, &ldquo;If we change this, it&rsquo;ll make things better&rdquo;, we jump on it.</p> <p>At least it&rsquo;s change. At least it&rsquo;s not what we&rsquo;re currently doing, even if we don&rsquo;t know for sure it&rsquo;ll help.</p> <h3 id="2-we-are-all-correctly-recognizing-how-little-we-really-truly-absolutely-know----about-this-and-everything">2. We are all correctly recognizing how little we really, truly, absolutely &ldquo;know&rdquo; &ndash; about this, and everything.</h3> <p>A big learning outcome in any social justice workshop is being confronted with an uppercase &ldquo;t&rdquo; Truth, something you&rsquo;ve taken for granted your entire life, and recognizing it might not be so simple.</p> <p>This is unequivocally a good thing. It&rsquo;s growth. It&rsquo;s necessary <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/01/introducing-the-social-justice-compass/">to orient our compass toward equity</a>, when we&rsquo;d otherwise drift toward injustice.</p> <p>We need to be careful, however, that we&rsquo;re not &ldquo;unlearning&rdquo; something that is true. Or a matter of fact. Especially if that&rsquo;s because&hellip;</p> <h3 id="3-were-terrified-to-do-or-say-or-think-or-believe-the-wrong-thing">3. We&rsquo;re terrified to do or say or think or believe the wrong thing.</h3> <p>We care about other people. Don&rsquo;t need to be convinced of that. And we don&rsquo;t want to hurt them. Indeed, we are terrified of doing so, especially publicly.</p> <p>This is where a lot of <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2017/12/introduction-social-justice-dogma/">social justice dogma</a> gains footing. We&rsquo;re looking for the &ldquo;correct&rdquo; belief, action, stance, perspective, position. We are doing everything we can to root out the &ldquo;bad&rdquo; ones.</p> <p>Instead of being encouraged to look at outcomes &ndash; Or for evidence that something does what we say or hope or believe it will. That it effects the change we want, doesn&rsquo;t hurt, leads to healing &ndash; we look for the encouraged path. We tread lightly. We stay in our lane. We follow the signs.</p> <p>When someone we trust, or view as an authority within the social justice movement, says, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re bad if you&hellip;&rdquo; you don&rsquo;t.</p> <p>When they say, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re good if you&hellip;&quot;, we do.</p> <h3 id="4-its-become-clear-that-were-bad-if-we-say-biological-sex-exists">4. It&rsquo;s become clear that we&rsquo;re bad if we say biological sex exists.</h3> <p>&ldquo;Even if we understand all the nuance, <em>other people won&rsquo;t.</em> They&rsquo;ll interpret any wiggle room as permission for transphobia. For erasure. We need to make this clear and simple. For them.&rdquo;</p> <p>This might not be verbatim what&rsquo;s going through your mind, but it&rsquo;s a version of the above heading. Of why it feels like crossing a picket line to say something that would otherwise feel so obvious.</p> <p>Or, more severely, &ldquo;Any support of the reality of biological sex is a dog whistle declaring my own personal rejection of trans people, invalidation of non-binary gender identities, or hatred and wish for violence against anyone who isn&rsquo;t cisgender.&rdquo;</p> <p>Why else would we need to say the obvious? If not to signal something less obvious, something between the lines?</p> <h2 id="the-truth-is-on-our-side">The Truth is On Our Side</h2> <p>We don&rsquo;t need to distort anything to make the case for social justice. The arc of the moral universe doesn&rsquo;t bend toward justice because we trick people, or make them afraid to speak the truth &ndash; it&rsquo;s because truth and justice are inexorably linked.</p> <p>I suspect that a lot of us are suffering from a crisis of faith &ndash; we&rsquo;re not sure that we&rsquo;re arguing the right things, or that the facts are on our side, or we&rsquo;ll accomplish the goals of social justice. And from a place of <a href="https://www.samk.blog/bad-faith/">bad faith</a>, we lash out recklessly, argue unfairly, ignore obvious truths when they feel inconvenient, punish anyone who doesn&rsquo;t toe the line.</p> <p>But none of that is necessary. Or helpful. And it&rsquo;s got us arguing for things, and against things, that are creating as much work for us to repair as the injustices we&rsquo;re uniting against.</p> <p>To use a term that I fear has been diluted to the point of irrelevance, but I can&rsquo;t think of a better one to use: <strong>we don&rsquo;t need to gaslight people to believe things, or reject things they know to be true, for the sake of social justice.</strong></p> <p>I&rsquo;m not saying we <em>shouldn&rsquo;t</em> (we shouldn&rsquo;t). Or that we can&rsquo;t do that because we&rsquo;d be <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/05/justifying-injustice-for-social-justice/">justifying something unjustifiable on the path to social justice</a> (we are).</p> <p>But because it won&rsquo;t work. It can&rsquo;t work. Not in the long run.</p> <p>How am I so sure? That&rsquo;s been the playbook of every anti-justice movement that we&rsquo;ve dismantled in the name of social progress. Check the scoreboard. History sides with justice.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s this <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayard_Rustin">Bayard Rustin</a> quote I&rsquo;ve been thinking about a lot lately. I&rsquo;ll leave you with it now:</p> <p>&ldquo;If a bigot says to me, &lsquo;The sun is shining.&rsquo; If the sun is shining, I say, &lsquo;Yes the sun is shining,&rsquo; because I want to tell the truth.&rdquo;</p> Why We Won't Defund the Police (in two graphs) https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/why-we-wont-defund-police/ Wed, 08 Jul 2020 17:16:41 -0500 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/why-we-wont-defund-police/ Sam Killermann <p>A month ago, when we were in the midst of a resurgence of international Black Lives Matter marches and activism, hearing calls for justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims of lethal police brutality, I dedicated the header of this site to a movement proposing solutions.</p> <p>By now, you&rsquo;ve probably heard of it. It&rsquo;s called <a href="https://8cantwait.org/">#8CantWait</a>.</p> <p>In a matter of days, many people (myself included) went from never having heard of #8CantWait, to spreading the word and making phone calls in support, to having (or being encourage to have) an intensely oppositional stance against it.</p> <p>A month later, it likely feels like a distant memory, with half a dozen <a href="https://www.samk.blog/rage-du-jour/">Rage du Jours</a> punctuating the weeks since this was <em>the</em> issue. (Or at least felt that way for many of us.)</p> <p>So to emphasize the part I want to emphasize, it&rsquo;s the bouncing from one jarringly different position to the next <em>in a matter of days</em> &ndash; or, for some people, hours: people went from not knowing something exists, to loudly supporting it, to loudly discrediting it.</p> <p>After showing an #8CantWait banner to hundreds of thousand of people on this site, I got a message via <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/contact">my contact page</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;You should know that [#8CantWait has] been proven false and the people who created it are actually funded by the police to discredit real abolition work that will make a real difference. At this point anything that isn&rsquo;t focusing on abolishing the police is violence. You might as well put your knee on Geroge Floyds neck yourself. Support real abolitionists or get out of the way.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>I got another message the next day that said something similar:</p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;The Overton window has shifted so far that the majority of us are in favor of abolition. Stop peddling this reformist &lsquo;#8CantWait&rsquo; bullshit we all know won&rsquo;t work.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>My <a href="https://twitter.com/killermann">twitter feed</a> was filled with similar sentiments and ideas. People retweeting threads attacking the policies advanced by the #8CantWait platform, or explaining why anything short of abolition isn&rsquo;t enough. Sharing studies and articles about how <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/implicit-bias-training-salt-lake/548996/">reforms like implicit bias education and training don&rsquo;t work</a>.</p> <p>It would have been easy for me to agree with the people who messaged me. In my tiny world, every voice felt like it was saying the same thing. I found myself thinking, &ldquo;Maybe the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window">Overton window</a> <em>has</em> shifted.&rdquo;</p> <p><em>Maybe the time is ripe for abolition, and anything short of that is conservative, unhelpful, representing a step backwards, away from what everyone is demanding, not a small step in the right direction.</em></p> <h2 id="phoning-a-few-hundred-thousand-friends">Phoning a (few hundred thousand) Friend(s)</h2> <p>I started to call and text friends to get their take on the current moment of focus.</p> <p>I have friends who range from having been involved in the abolitionist movement for decades, to one who just recently marched for the first time for Black Lives Matter, so I thought I could get a representative-ish sample of what was on progressive people&rsquo;s minds.</p> <p>&ldquo;What do you think of #8CantWait?&rdquo; I asked a bunch of people.</p> <p>And what I heard was several variations of &ldquo;I support those policies, but they&rsquo;re not enough,&rdquo; with a sprinkling of, &ldquo;Everyone is calling for defunding the police right now, so I think we should focus on that.&rdquo;</p> <p>The thing about the policies proposed in #8CantWait is that they&rsquo;re compatible police abolition; they&rsquo;re just baby steps, not a huge leap, but they would move us in that direction. This is something that even some of the most scathing, pro-abolitionist critiques of the campaign acknowledged.</p> <p>It wasn&rsquo;t that what was being asked for was harmful, it&rsquo;s that it wasn&rsquo;t alleviating enough harm. That&rsquo;s a huge difference!</p> <p>The response to the website banner pushing people to take action for #8CantWait was <em>potentially</em> confirming this attitude.</p> <p>Only about 7% of the people who responded to the message with a click (instead of ignoring it, which roughly 99% of people did), clicked on the &ldquo;Take Action&rdquo; button. Everyone else hid the message.</p> <p>Of the hundreds of thousands of people who saw that message about #8CantWait, seeing only a few hundred take action was confusing to me. After all, the vast majority of these people were on here that week to <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2017-01-17-a-few-small-tips-for-attending-your-first-protest-march">read tips for attending their first protest march</a>, so I assumed they&rsquo;d welcome that invitation to take action.</p> <p>Because of the seemingly unanimous message I was receiving on Twitter, and the corroboration of that message from my close circle, I had the seemingly-reasonable thought: &ldquo;<strong>Only 7% of people are wanting to take action for the #8CantWait platform because it&rsquo;s not radical enough</strong>. I&rsquo;m annoying hundreds of thousands of people with a conservative message, when they want something bolder. They want more.&rdquo;</p> <p>I took down the #8CantWait banner. I started looking for other ways I could help.</p> <p><em>I don&rsquo;t want to be part of the problem. The last thing I want to do right now is slow down progress from happening. The worst thing we could possibly do right now is squander this moment, and turn it into nothing.</em></p> <h2 id="the-poll-and-the-unexpected-graph">The Poll and The Unexpected Graph</h2> <p>I decided that before I did anything else, I should do what I can to figure out what people actually believe, where they&rsquo;re <em>actually at</em>. Before you can move someone anywhere, you need to know where they stand.</p> <p>I worked up a simple poll for readers here, that would appear above every article for a couple of days, until I got enough responses to feel like the data I had were at least representative of IPM-goers, and hopefully most progressive, social-justice-activism-inclined people.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s what it looked like:</p> <figure class="aligncenter"> <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/screenshot-of-ipm-blm-poll.png" title="open image" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/screenshot-of-ipm-blm-poll.png" alt="poll showing different policies to end poluce brutality, from education and anti-racism training up to abolishing the police entirely" /></a> <figcaption>Screenshot of the poll</figcaption> </figure> <p>After a few hundred people responded, I checked the results to see which solution had received the most votes. Here&rsquo;s what that looked like, as a pie chart:</p> <figure class="aligncenter"> <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/screenshot-of-early-poll-results.png" title="open image" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/screenshot-of-early-poll-results.png" alt="unlabeled piechart showing one wedge that is taking up about half, with five other wedges making up the other half" /></a> <figcaption>Piechart of the initial responses</figcaption> </figure> <p>Without the labels, and after hearing for the past days about nothing other than defunding the police, or abolishing them entirely, I assumed that the big blue wedge represented abolition, the big green one defunding, or vice versa.</p> <p>I was gobsmacked twice when I looked at the legend:</p> <figure class="aligncenter"> <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/screenshot-of-piechart-legend.png" title="open image" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/screenshot-of-piechart-legend.png" alt="labels explaining the piechart" /></a> <figcaption>Legend of the initial piechart</figcaption> </figure> <p>First, I was shocked that education was the clear frontrunner. Second, I was shocked that I was shocked by that.</p> <p>I shared the poll and pie chart screenshots with a few of the friends I had already been talking about all this with, who were familiar with IPM and what I generally write about here, the types of people this site is for. But I didn&rsquo;t include the legend.</p> <p>I asked, &ldquo;Without the labels, which result do you think won?&rdquo;</p> <p>Every single person answered either &ldquo;abolishing&rdquo; or &ldquo;defunding.&rdquo; Every. Single. Person.</p> <p>When I shared the legend they shared in my gobsmacking. The dozen or so responses can all be summed up by one of my friend&rsquo;s reply of &ldquo;WUTTTTT.&rdquo;</p> <h2 id="supported-solutions-for-ending-police-brutality">Supported Solutions for Ending Police Brutality</h2> <p>I ended the poll when I collected more than enough results to draw conclusions, and to have a representative sample.</p> <p>The main conclusion: we&rsquo;re not going to be defunding the police any time soon. But I&rsquo;ll get to that in a second. First, here&rsquo;s the distribution of the votes for solutions to police brutality:</p> <figure class="alignwide"> <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/popularity-of-responses-to-police-brutality-piechart-its-pronounced-metrosexual-sam-killermann.png" title="open image" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/popularity-of-responses-to-police-brutality-piechart-its-pronounced-metrosexual-sam-killermann.png" alt="A pie chart showing popularity of police brutality solutions" class="shadow" /></a> </figure> <p>To fully grasp this, remember that people could vote for as many options as they wanted. So they weren&rsquo;t limited by what&rsquo;s &ldquo;practical&rdquo;, or having to choose a &ldquo;realistic&rdquo; solution over a pipe dream. They could choose both. But they did not.</p> <p>The clear winning solution for police brutality was &ldquo;education and anti-racism training for officers&rdquo; with 26.8% of the total votes, while &ldquo;abolishing the police entirely&rdquo; got 8.9%.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s the breakdown of each solution, and the percentage of respondents who supported it:</p> <figure class="alignwide"> <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/support-for-each-solution-to-police-brutality-its-pronounced-metrosexual-sam-killermann.png" title="open image" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/support-for-each-solution-to-police-brutality-its-pronounced-metrosexual-sam-killermann.png" alt="A bar chard showing the support for each policy" class="shadow" /></a> </figure> <p>An overwhelming majority supported education (79.6%), comprehensive reporting (71.5%), and banning chokeholds and strangleholds (67.1%). A minority supported reducing police budgets (42.1%), and an even smaller minority supported abolishing police (26.5%), while 10% supported none of these policies.</p> <p>These data are from June 8 - 11, 2020. If there was a shifting of the Overton window that had happened because of the international protests, it would have been reflected in those numbers. But, instead, they line up fairly well with what we would have expected of progressive people prior to last week.</p> <p>Considering these two graphs together, here are three things that are at the front of my mind:</p> <ol> <li>Anonymously, in a non-zero-sum game where every solution could have been supported, most people refrained from supporting the most radical (and loudest on progressive social media) policy.</li> <li>Meaning we don&rsquo;t even have majority support of partial defunding or abolition within &ldquo;our own people,&rdquo; so we are up against a huge amount of pushback within left-of-center, center, and conservative-leaning people.</li> <li>Who the fuck are these 10% of IPM readers who don&rsquo;t support any of these policies? <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/contact">Introduce yourself</a> to me, please. I must know.</li> </ol> <p>But above all else, my reaction to these data was &ldquo;we have a massive problem on our hands.&rdquo;</p> <p>Two, actually. <em>At least.</em></p> <h2 id="two-huge-reasons-we-wont-defund-the-police">Two Huge Reasons We Won&rsquo;t Defund the Police</h2> <p>To succeed in defunding the police, even locally, it will require buy-in from countless powerful institutions and figures. We&rsquo;ll need a movement powerful enough to successfully topple an increasingly-powerful, increasingly-funded police force, which is supported by unions, lobbyists, military manufacturers, and huge swathes of citizens, politicians, industries, and small businesses alike.</p> <p>But before we can do that, it appears we a lot of work to do in our own backyard, so to speak. Because this &ldquo;we&rdquo; I keep referring to isn&rsquo;t much of a &ldquo;we&rdquo; at all. It&rsquo;s a whole lot of &ldquo;them,&rdquo; we&rsquo;ve just effectively shut a lot of them up.</p> <p>I mean &ldquo;us&rdquo; up. We&rsquo;ve shut us up.</p> <h3 id="1-we-dont-actually-want-to">1. We Don&rsquo;t Actually Want To</h3> <p>&ldquo;We&rdquo; is a flexible word we use a lot (look at us go!). We might use it to mean &ldquo;all of humanity,&rdquo; or &ldquo;Americans,&rdquo; or &ldquo;American voters,&rdquo; or just &ldquo;Democratic voters,&rdquo; or even &ldquo;very liberal Democratic voters.&rdquo;</p> <p>Each time we add a qualifier, we make a smaller &ldquo;we.&rdquo; Just in that list, we went from about 8 billion people, to about 300 million, to 130 million, to 65 million, to 10 million &ndash; a decrease of, if my math is right, about 99.9%. That&rsquo;s a helluva smaller &ldquo;we.&rdquo;</p> <p>The &ldquo;we&rdquo; I focus on here, generally, means &ldquo;people who read this site and use these resources,&rdquo; whom I hope are proponents of social justice, endeavoring to make our worlds more beautiful. If that&rsquo;s you, you&rsquo;re who I think about most, and try to tailor everything I do for. The &ldquo;we&rdquo; that makes up that &ldquo;you&rdquo; is smaller still, it&rsquo;s a few million people &ndash; or .01% of the the biggest &ldquo;we&rdquo; above &ndash; a huge chunk of whom aren&rsquo;t American, aren&rsquo;t voters, and aren&rsquo;t Democrats.</p> <p>But who is the &ldquo;we&rdquo; we&rsquo;re talking about when we&rsquo;re discussing defunding police? One could assume we&rsquo;re only talking about &ldquo;we who support defunding the police,&rdquo; in which case my heading above would be nonsense.</p> <p>But it&rsquo;s actually a trickier answer than it should be, because our ability to get an accurate sense of &ldquo;we&rdquo;, these days, is being hijacked.</p> <h4 id="social-media-silos">Social Media Silos</h4> <p>When it comes to hot button issues like defunding the police, we don&rsquo;t really know who we are.</p> <p>Thanks to algorithmic siloing of social media (e.g., Facebook automatically showing you things it thinks you&rsquo;ll like, or respond to, or click on) plus our own self-filtering (e.g., unfriending people who hold certain views, say certain &ldquo;problematic&rdquo; things, or don&rsquo;t support the things we deem important), we&rsquo;ve created social bubbles to occupy that are entirely unrepresentative of the world at large.</p> <p>In times of global crisis, this filtering gets particularly pernicious.</p> <p>When a global event is happening, it feels like everyone is reacting to it, and that&rsquo;s more correct than not. But we only get to see our bubble&rsquo;s reaction. This makes it easy for us to think, &ldquo;Everyone is [insert emotion] about this right now,&rdquo; when in reality what we should be thinking is, &ldquo;Everyone in my tiny algorithmically and self-selectively filtered silo is [insert emotion] about this right now.&rdquo;</p> <p><em>Everyone in my tiny algorithmically and self-selectively filtered silo is furious about that cop killing that Black person.</em></p> <p>With the current moment &ndash; where everyone is witnessing a resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement and an international uprising against police brutality &ndash; we went one step further: beyond just getting a read of what &ldquo;everyone&rdquo; is feeling, to what &ldquo;everyone&rdquo; thinks we should do about it.</p> <p>A few days ago, one of my friends posted, &ldquo;Unfriending anyone who says we should do anything other than defund the police.&rdquo; Another friend posted, &ldquo;If you are against abolishing the police you can&rsquo;t say #BlackLivesMatter.&rdquo;</p> <p>Neither of these friends were people I had ever seen support anything abolition related in the past. As far as I knew, this was an opinion they recently formed, or they had been keeping their police abolition activism a secret previously.</p> <p>Both got nothing but positive comments, likes, and shares. What wasn&rsquo;t seen &ndash; and couldn&rsquo;t be seen &ndash; was the people who didn&rsquo;t react, who disagreed but didn&rsquo;t want to say so, or who were tailoring their next post to live up to this new norm.</p> <h4 id="plus-pluralistic-ignorance">Plus Pluralistic Ignorance</h4> <p>Enter <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pluralistic_ignorance">pluralistic ignorance</a>, which is a cognitive bias where &ldquo;a majority of group members privately reject a norm, but go along with it because they assume, incorrectly, that most others accept it.&rdquo;</p> <p>The silencing of dissenting opinions, often under the threat of social punishment or being ostracized, is all you need for pluralistic ignorance to thrive. We have that and more!</p> <p>Adding to the active silencing of dissent, we have <a href="http://www.cedma-europe.org/newsletter%20articles/misc/The%2090-9-1%20Principle%20-%20How%20Users%20Participate%20in%20Social%20Communities%20(Mar%2010).pdf">a passive lurker problem</a>. In any social media space, the vast majority of people consume, while a tiny minority create and curate.</p> <p>So most people aren&rsquo;t posting, they&rsquo;re just reading or signal boosting an already heavily-filtered feed. We can&rsquo;t notice the passive lurking, and only notice the posts, likes, shares, and comments. If those all seem to be endorsing a view, and we&rsquo;re not seeing many people dissent, it makes sense for us to think &ldquo;that&rsquo;s what everyone believes,&rdquo; even if we are part of that everyone, and we don&rsquo;t.</p> <p>In response to me sharing the pie chart from my survey here, someone messaged me, &ldquo;Wow. I genuinely thought it would be abolishing that was the most popular. I thought I was the only one who wasn&rsquo;t onboard with that.&rdquo;</p> <p>I replied, &ldquo;Have you commented that publicly?&rdquo;</p> <p>They replied, &ldquo;lol of course not.&rdquo;</p> <h3 id="2-were-asking-the-wrong-people-for-permission">2. We&rsquo;re Asking the Wrong People for Permission</h3> <p>That subheading is going to piss a lot of you off. I know that, and I&rsquo;m sorry. I didn&rsquo;t write it because of that, but in spite of it: I just don&rsquo;t know how else to sum up this idea.</p> <p>And, I&rsquo;m realizing now, this internal struggle I&rsquo;m facing in writing this essay perfectly synopsizes the mess we&rsquo;re in. As I wrote and rewrote that heading, and bounced between &ldquo;permission&rdquo; and other words (e.g., buy-in, support), I experienced the prickly problem in real time.</p> <p>By &ldquo;asking permission,&rdquo; here, I simply mean the answer to, &ldquo;Who has power to shape our activism?&rdquo;</p> <p>Imagine for a moment you&rsquo;re a kid and you&rsquo;re asking your parent for permission to play a video game. Do they need to <em>love</em> that idea, or <em>support</em> you spending several hours that way? No. Do you need their <em>buy-in</em>, or to convince them of the merits of gaming? Nope. You just need their permission. That&rsquo;s the bar.</p> <p>As social justice advocates, who are we asking for permission from, when we&rsquo;re deciding what policies we support? What movements we back? What tactics or strategies to use? What shape our activism will take?</p> <p>The second big reason we&rsquo;re not going to defund the police is because we&rsquo;re getting permission from the wrong people, and we&rsquo;re altogether ignoring (at best) the people who make the rules.</p> <h4 id="we-seek-permission-from-the-community">We Seek Permission from &ldquo;The Community&rdquo;</h4> <p>Before we post something, or take a stance on an idea or proposal, or formulate an argument, we need a thumbs up from &ldquo;The Community.&rdquo;</p> <p>In this case, a lot of things can stand in for what I mean by &ldquo;The Community&rdquo;: the social justice community broadly, the marginalized community experiencing oppression, or just our personal circle of social justice people.</p> <p><strong>What I mean in general by &ldquo;The Community&rdquo; is basically the subsection of people we see as already agreeing with us, the people &ldquo;on our side.&quot;</strong></p> <p>Based on everything I said above regarding social media silos and pluralistic ignorance, some alarm bells might be ringing for you.</p> <p>&ldquo;How can we know if The Community gives us permission? Or supports a particular policy? Or doesn&rsquo;t?&rdquo; are all reasonable questions to be asking. It would be helpful if every statement of &ldquo;THIS GROUP WANTS YOU TO DO THIS&rdquo; was paired with blaring sirens.</p> <p>But that&rsquo;s not even the element of this disaster I want to draw you attention to here.</p> <p>An equally siren-sounding issue is that The Community doesn&rsquo;t actually make the rules.</p> <h4 id="we-also-need-permission-from-people-with-power">We Also Need Permission from People with Power</h4> <p>We often oversimplify what we mean by &ldquo;people with power&rdquo; in social justice spaces.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t mean &ldquo;white people.&rdquo; I do mean, at least, some white people. In particular, whatever percentage of white people &ndash; and all people &ndash; collectively have their hand on the lever of change.</p> <p>I also don&rsquo;t just mean people situated in roles of structural power (e.g., politicians, judges, principles, business owners). A lot of power is distributed to the many people who elect or hire or support those few. The voters who pick their District Attorney. The customers who choose to shop at that grocery store.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s an inconvenient, but patently obvious truth: &ldquo;our side&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t currently have the power to make the change we want to make.</p> <p>We&rsquo;re not going to abolish the police because we are a tiny group (people supporting abolition) within an already small group (social justice people). If that weren&rsquo;t true, and we had the power and numbers to enact the change we wanted, there&rsquo;d be no police. Poof.</p> <p>The people with power, in this case, are politicians, city council members, police chiefs, police unions, and &ndash; most importantly &ndash; all of the people who currently support policing (and the composition of this group will surprise a lot of social justice people: most <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/2/13/18193661/hire-police-officers-crime-criminal-justice-reform-booker-harris">Black americans, for example, support hiring <em>more</em> officers</a>, in every poll or dataset I can find).</p> <p>In order to defund the police &ndash; or enact any progressive, equitable, social-justice-oriented change &ndash; we need permission from people who aren&rsquo;t &ldquo;us.&rdquo; We need &ldquo;them.&rdquo; Or we need a <em>much</em> bigger us. And ideally we get both.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s another inconvenient truth: other than through violence, the only way to accomplish either of those goals, and in turn accomplish our goals, is going to be expanding the constituency we see ourselves as serving.</p> <h4 id="without-both-were-doomed">Without Both, We&rsquo;re Doomed</h4> <p>&ldquo;Who am I trying to make happy?&rdquo; is a question we might find ourselves asking a lot in our lives, in different shapes:</p> <ul> <li>Who am I trying to impress?</li> <li>Who am I trying to convince?</li> <li>Whose feelings do I care about?</li> <li>Who do I want to support or help?</li> </ul> <p>In social justice activism, particularly when it&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/social-justice-dogma/">tinted with dogma</a>, we are provided clear answers for all of these questions.</p> <p>And often it&rsquo;s via the exceptions that prove the rule:</p> <p>We should <strong>not</strong> be trying to impress, convince, care about the feelings of, or support or help people who hold dominant group identities, who support oppressive policies, or who are in some way not onboard with social justice activism.</p> <p>&ldquo;If they say All Lives Matter, fuck &lsquo;em,&rdquo; to sum it up more gently than I see it characterized daily (blasé threats of violence are becoming all too common).</p> <p>The &ldquo;#AllLivesMatter crowd&rdquo; is a way we&rsquo;ve come to sum up everyone who isn&rsquo;t supporting #BlackLivesMatter, which we&rsquo;ve used (incorrectly, if the data are to be trusted) as shorthand for people supporting defunding.</p> <p>But if we don&rsquo;t let the people who aren&rsquo;t already on our side shape our activism, if we don&rsquo;t see them as part of our constituency &ndash; trying to impress or at least convince them, considering their feelings, finding ways to support and help them &ndash; we&rsquo;re the ones who are fucked.</p> <h2 id="a-post-mortem-in-progress">A Post Mortem In Progress</h2> <p>I almost published a version of this article on June 12th when the data were freshly collected. Then again a week after that. And now I&rsquo;m writing it again, a month later. Why the delay?</p> <p>Initially, I didn&rsquo;t want to share those graphs, or any version of these observations in response to those data, if it would in any way take the wind out of the sails of the movement. I&rsquo;d love to see us reach this destination. I&rsquo;m firmly and happily aboard the ship.</p> <p>Honestly, I wanted to be wrong. I was cautious not to share this, because I hoped in hindsight that I would have realized I had slowed us down in the name of caution.</p> <p>Now it&rsquo;s been a month, and all signs are pointing to the moment being squandered. To a movement derailed.</p> <p>A lot of people have moved on to other activism, or new internet squabbles &ndash; the broader media surely seems to have called it a day on this. City budgets are coming out showing more funding for police, not departments being defunded (with a few exciting exceptions!). Even Biden, as presumptive Democratic nominee for president, announced he plans to <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/06/10/biden-root-out-systemic-racism-not-just-divisive-trump-talk-column/5327631002/"><em>increase</em> police funding</a>, and &ldquo;definitively&rdquo; does not support defunding the police.</p> <p>With activists threatening to vote politicians out of office who don&rsquo;t support abolition &ndash; or at least massive funding cuts, not more &ldquo;reform&rdquo; &ndash; I can&rsquo;t help but wonder how comfy those politicians in question feel in the face of that threat.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m worried, with everything I just shared at the front of my mind, that politicians would be smitten with the idea of a popular vote on this issue, while we&rsquo;re somehow thinking we could wield it do our smiting.</p> <p>And this isn&rsquo;t just about defunding the police. It&rsquo;s about everything happening on a big stage in the social justice movement.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m hoping that by writing this now, and sharing it here, it can serve as the alarm bell you hear when you notice activism following the potentially doomed recipe above. Whether it&rsquo;s activism focused on defunding the police (or reforming, which I know most of you support), or some other cause that catches the zeitgeist.</p> <p>That said, this is not a post mortem yet. This is still a story in progress and we can change the ending. We just have to change <em>just about</em> everything.</p> <p>But hey &ndash; what&rsquo;s new? That&rsquo;s what we signed up for, right?</p> The Enemy of Your Enemy https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/enemy-of-your-enemy/ Sat, 11 Jan 2020 21:16:41 -0600 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/enemy-of-your-enemy/ Sam Killermann <address>The following essay was written for my forthcoming <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/dogmatic-activism" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">book about dogmatic activism</a>, which I'm currently <em>publicly</em> (!) writing, as a new blog post every day on my personal blog. If you want to follow along, you can <a href="https://bitly.com/sjmdbook" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><strong>get new chapters emailed to you as I publish them</strong></a>. Here's the <a title="Enemy of Your Enemy, original essay by Sam Killermann" href="https://www.samkillermann.com/enemy-of-your-enemy/" rel="canonical">link to the original post</a>.</address> <p>In an increasingly-complicated world, we&rsquo;re constantly using shortcuts to make sense of things. We don’t have time to process everything coming our way, so we often grab one or two salient data points — either the things we notice first, or the ones that feel more important to us — and do math.</p> <p>This makes sense. It would be impossible for us to sift through all of it, in every situation.</p> <p>Just ordering coffee, if you really wanted to consider all the variables, would take a month — what roasts do they have, what’s the source of the beans, how they were dried, the ownership of the farm, the ownership of the shop, which of the 20 types of milk you want, where each of those is sourced, and so on.</p> <p>Instead, we choose from a few variables we prioritize. Maybe price and size. Or if ethics are important to us, we might decide by looking for a “Fair Trade” stamp on something locally roasted.</p> <p>In that case, we&rsquo;re trusting that the sticker means we&rsquo;re making the right choice, instead of doing all the investigation ourselves. It’s a shortcut. If it adds up, we say “I’ll have that.”</p> <p>No problem if we&rsquo;re ordering coffee. The heuristics of “price + size = decision” or “Fair Trade sticker + locally roasted = Yes” aren’t likely to cause too much pain in your life.</p> <p>But when we’re making other decisions, basing them solely off of one or two bits of information — particularly if they just happen to be the first bits we learn — might get us into hot water.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s one such heuristic: &ldquo;the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and its inverse, “the friend of my enemy is my enemy.”</p> <p>And following is a common way we&rsquo;re applying it, and three ways we&rsquo;re getting burned.</p> <h2 id="if-they-hate-you-youre-doing-something-right">&ldquo;If they hate you, you&rsquo;re doing something right.&rdquo;</h2> <p>This sentiment is a variation of &ldquo;the enemy of my enemy is my friend” that I’ve heard so many times I’ve lost count. Whenever someone finds out my work is getting protested, or I’m receiving hate mail, or even death threats (all of which have become like water for me), it’s likely that this sentence isn’t far behind.</p> <p>What they&rsquo;re saying is that as long as the people protesting my work are the right people (i.e., the “wrong” people, or people the speaker things are wrong), the very act of them protesting my work means that it’s good work. It’s helpful. It’s to be celebrated.</p> <p>Most of the time, the people saying this don&rsquo;t even <em>know</em> my work. They haven’t read the essay or book in question, or seen the show or documentary themselves. And they won’t. They don’t need that data point.</p> <p>All they need to know is that a group that&rsquo;s their &ldquo;enemy&rdquo; has labeled my work as “enemy.” Therefore, my work is “right.” Or it’s good. Or it’s worthwhile, helpful, just, positive in the world. I’m “fighting the good fight.”</p> <p>I believe all those things are true about it, but I don’t believe it because a certain Fox New correspondent attacked my work, or some conservative Christian Right organization boycotted me. Those aren’t data points I consider (at least I didn’t consider them <em>at first</em> — I’ll get to this in a bit).</p> <p>This phenomenon carries further than the sentiment being expressed. It&rsquo;s not limited to people saying, “If they hate you you’re doing something right.” People have effectively leveraged this into crowdfunding campaigns, fundraising in general, fame and platform-building, and have created entire careers, seemingly, just by being hated by the right people.</p> <p>And I see &ldquo;enemy of your enemy&rdquo; everywhere I go in Social Justice Land.</p> <p>On social media, people wear attacks from the other side as badges of pride. As proof that they deserve a seat at the table. That you should listen to them, and that they&rsquo;re &ldquo;one of us.&rdquo;</p> <p>I just opened Facebook, and the first post I saw, from a social-justice-supporting friend of mine, was a meme from the page &ldquo;Hate Liberals? Bite me.&rdquo; After that, I opened Twitter and clicked through to the bios of three of the most recent tweets that people retweeted into <a href="https://twitter.com/killermann">my Twitter feed</a>. One person&rsquo;s included the phrase &ldquo;most hated writer at&hellip;&quot;, one included a slur in quotes they (I assume) get called by their homophobic detractors, and one simply said, &ldquo;Hated by Fox News and the right wing.&rdquo;</p> <p>Further, it&rsquo;s important to note that this heuristic is deployed across parties and movements and ideologies. It’s not just a thing <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/03/taxonomy-social-justice-people/">social justice people</a> (or <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/social-justice-dogma/">the dogma within the movement</a>), or progressives, or liberals do.</p> <p>It’s actually something many conservatives, particularly the more modern, young, or tech-savvy ones, have perfected. There’s a booming industry of “owning the libs” — in apparel and products and entertainment and “news” — and business is good. And this isn’t even a secret.</p> <p>Of his ability to effectively exploit his followers&rsquo; hatred of “social justice warriors,” Jordan Peterson said:</p> <blockquote> <p>“I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors. I’m driving the social justice activists in Canada mad because, if they let me speak, then I get to speak. And then more people support me on Patreon. It’s like, “god damn capitalist, he’s making more money off of this ideological warfare. Let’s go protest him.” So they protest me. And that goes up on YouTube. And my Patreon account goes <em>way</em> up.”</p> </blockquote> <p>Publicly. He said this <em>publicly</em>. In an interview his followers (i.e., Patreon funders) were meant to be watching, not caught on a hot mic.</p> <p>You’d think this would irk his fanbase, to know he’s knowingly reduced them to an algorithm of “enemy of enemy is friend I give money to,” but instead this was cause for celebration.</p> <h3 id="the-first-problem-non-starter">The First Problem: Non-starter</h3> <p>One of the problems that comes with this line of thinking feels so obvious to me that it&rsquo;s unnecessary to explain, but it’s not obvious enough to prevent people saying it (hundreds of times to me over the years, and I’m sure billions of times in general).</p> <p>So here’s the obvious: a lot of stuff our &ldquo;enemies&rdquo; hate isn’t that great. That is, &ldquo;just because they hate you,&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t mean you&rsquo;re doing something right. It just means they hate you.</p> <p>If one of our &ldquo;enemies&rdquo; identifies a social justice person, idea, strategy, theory, etc. as “an enemy,” that doesn’t mean they’ve found something we should support, or that what they’ve identified “is right.”</p> <p>It’s possible they picked an idea we otherwise wouldn’t have supported, or gotten behind, or rallied around — or even an idea that we, ourselves, thought was wrong. I’ll go even further.</p> <p>It’s not only possible, but <em>likely</em>.</p> <p>Because there are plenty of bad ideas, unhelpful actions, inneffective strategies, and problematic theories that get shared in the name of social justice. Maybe even <em>most</em> of the ideas we share won’t work — this isn’t a slam on social justice people; it’s just the nature of the work we’re doing itself. We’re trying to create something that hasn’t happened yet. It’s the <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/progressivism-problem/">problem of progressivism</a>. We’re likely to have more ideas fail than succeed. We’ll experiment, and prevail through trial, error, tweaking, then trying again.</p> <p>The worst ideas, the ones that not even most of <em>us</em> would agree are good, are the easiest targets. So it makes sense that an “enemy” would take a shot at them. Which brings me to the second roadblock. Actually, roadblock isn’t right.</p> <h3 id="the-second-problem-tainted-fuel">The Second Problem: Tainted Fuel</h3> <p>The second problem with this line of thinking makes a roadblock seem ideal by comparison: It’s more like we’re giving our “enemies” control of the GPS. We’re handing them our phone, saying, “Where to?”, letting them type in a destination, then driving there at breakneck speed.</p> <p>If we all pile in to support something that our enemies hate, we’re giving them power over what we choose to support. This heuristic doesn’t just say, “If my enemy hates it, I’ll support it,” it says, “If I hate this, my enemies will be inclined to support it,” and “If I like this, my enemies will be inclined to hate it.”</p> <p>This can be easily manipulated by the people we call our enemies, to say the least. And that might be worth us diving into, but even if <em>they</em> don’t manipulate it, it’s hard for us not to be motivated by this ourselves.</p> <p>I mentioned earlier that at first, whenever I was creating a new thing, I never considered whether or not my “enemies” would hate it. And that’s true. The idea had never crossed my mind.</p> <p>Instead, and this feels so naïve, I merely focused 100% of my attention on trying to create things for people to use, appreciate, or love. <em>Imagine that!</em> I was making things for “my people.” For the people who shared my goals to advance them. <em>Oh, what a time to be alive.</em></p> <p>But now, after hearing hundreds of people say &ldquo;If they hate you, you’re doing something right,” and feeling the recognition that is accompanied that when it happens, it’s become impossible <em>not</em> to consider than when I’m creating something. I’m still not saying I factor it in, but it’s absolutely on my mind every time I’m working on a new project (more on <em>that</em> down below).</p> <p>Because here&rsquo;s the sad truth: creating things your enemies hate is way easier than creating things your allies love.</p> <p>And intense negative emotion spreads faster via social networks than positive emotion (not just Facebook, but also the good ol’ fashioned grapevine). How often do you hear positive gossip? When was the last time someone was just absolutely chomping at the bit to tell you about that <em>really nice thing</em> that happened at work?</p> <p>You might be noticing that we&rsquo;ve stumbled upon a sort of formula, much like Jordan Peterson’s above: if we want to create something that spreads like wild fire, the easiest thing to create will be something my enemies hate.</p> <p>Here’s where I want to pump the breaks: I&rsquo;ve never created something based on this formula. And I’m not even accusing Peterson, or anyone, of doing so. I’ll let them speak for themselves.</p> <p>What I&rsquo;m saying is it&rsquo;s tempting.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve created hundreds of websites for social justice over the years. And some of them have taken off, and lots haven’t. It’s been arduous, required patience, and is sometimes mystifying why something you’re <em>sure</em> your people will love, that some of them tell you they do love, never seems to make it around the horn.</p> <p>Meanwhile, I’ve seen tons of people follow the formula above and create overnight successes that are built on nothing but reactionary hatred and superficial tribalism, nothing more than being the enemy of your &ldquo;enemy.&rdquo;</p> <p>And you don&rsquo;t even have to do it on purpose.</p> <p>A lot of the most trendy &ldquo;enemy of my enemy&rdquo; stuff isn&rsquo;t planned — and likely couldn’t have been. Someone makes a thing. Shares it into the world. Then it just happens. Like a tsunami without warning. After that, it’s up to the creator to ride the wave. Surf or sit out. That’s the only say they have in the matter.</p> <p>And a lot of people choose to ride that wave for years — fueled and funded by the the friendship of enemy’s enemies for month after month — even if they never end up being able to create another wave. Maybe because they <em>know</em> they won’t be able to create another one.</p> <p>But it would be understandable if someone thought that was their best bet.</p> <p>If someone had seen others rocketed into the stratosphere by the hatred of their “enemies,” and the support of their enemy’s enemies, it makes sense that they might think that was their most likely path to success.</p> <p>This is the essence of this problem with the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” heuristic: suddenly, your “enemy’s” decision about who is their enemy, is dictating your friendships.</p> <p>The things you like, support, or want to create are susceptible to being dictated by what your “enemy” hates. Or, if you’re the creator yourself, you’re incentivized to create things that your “enemy” will hate, driven to identify the types of things they will identify as their enemy, and make those things — whether or not they’re things that align with your goals, or what you want to see happen in the world.</p> <p>And as soon as that happens, you’re no longer as worried about where you’re going, as you are about going <em>somewhere</em>.</p> <p>Even if that somewhere you&rsquo;re going happens to be a path charted by your “enemies.” And in that moment you realize they weren’t you enemies at all, because if you’re basing your actions off of them, your fuel is their negative energy (the more they hate you, the further you go), and your flight path is dictated by their reactions to your work, &ldquo;enemy&rdquo; is the wrong word to describe them. <em>They&rsquo;re</em> your true allies &ndash; your copilots &ndash; and the people you were calling your “allies” are just customers buying tickets to ride the plane.</p> <h3 id="the-third-problem-backfire">The Third Problem: Backfire</h3> <p>Once you go down the course of starting to factor in &ldquo;the enemy of the enemy is my friend&rdquo; as you&rsquo;re creating things, or making decisions, or forming opinions, we have the third problem: the reverse of &ldquo;If they hate you, you&rsquo;re doing something right,&rdquo; is also true.</p> <p>And it might be even more motivating than the original statement itself: If they <em>don’t</em> hate you, you might be doing something wrong.</p> <p>What does it mean if &ldquo;they&rdquo; don&rsquo;t hate you?</p> <p>It might mean they don&rsquo;t care. They haven&rsquo;t even noticed you. And that&rsquo;s not good. That means you&rsquo;re not being enough of an &ldquo;enemy.&rdquo; Or you&rsquo;re just not getting noticed enough.</p> <p>Or, even scarier, what does it mean if they <em>appreciate</em> your work?</p> <p>By the above heuristic, &ldquo;them&rdquo; (i.e., the &ldquo;enemy&rdquo;) appreciating your work should send shivers down your spine. It means you’re not <em>not</em> doing something right, but you might be actively doing something <em>wrong</em>.</p> <p>And god forbid they see you as “one of the good ones.&rdquo; One of &ldquo;the few people in your camp who are making any sense.” That might as well be a death sentence.</p> <p>Because if they see you as one of the good ones, or as someone who is making sense, and they don&rsquo;t see you as the enemy, then all of a sudden you&rsquo;ve become the enemy &ndash; or at least indistinguishable from the enemy, which is essentially the same. You&rsquo;ve become the friend of the enemy, which is our enemy.</p> <p>So not only are you motivated to create things that your enemies hate, as we covered above, but you&rsquo;re also motivated <em>not</em> to create things your enemies <em>might</em> like. And any sense that your enemy likes something is an indicator you did something wrong.</p> <p>The result of this is that &ldquo;reaching across the aisle,&rdquo; or &ldquo;compromise&rdquo; are out of the question. You&rsquo;re also discouraged from trying to convert anyone who might be deemed &ldquo;enemy.&rdquo; No cavorting with them, or understanding their pain, or building relationships there &ndash; it doesn&rsquo;t matter if your goal is to help them see your side of things, or even just to better understand your opposition. Step foot in their camp, be seen favorably by one of them, and you are one of them.</p> <p>When that happens, someone in your former camp &ndash; in a weird twist of allegiances &ndash; is able to benefit from the &ldquo;enemy of my enemy is my friend&rdquo; heuristic, only suddenly you&rsquo;re the enemy. You&rsquo;ve become the enemy of your friends.</p> <h2 id="beyond-enemies">Beyond Enemies</h2> <p>Hopefully it wasn&rsquo;t too annoying, but I repeatedly used quotes when I referred to &ldquo;enemies,&rdquo; above, and I was doing that for two reasons:</p> <ol> <li>Our framing of people who disagree with us as enemies is a construction of language. It&rsquo;s not necessarily true that they&rsquo;re our enemies, nor does it <em>have</em> to be if it currently is. It&rsquo;s up to us to make that, or unmake it, and we vote for our side every time we speak, and use that framing.</li> <li>As you likely realized, the enemy-enemy relationships established by the &ldquo;enemy of my enemy is my friend&rdquo; heuristic are actually not typical enemy relationships at all. They&rsquo;re instead quite symbiotic, relying on the other to survive, where the roles of enemy and friend are fluid, interdependent, and even transferrable.</li> </ol> <p>I would love for us, within the social justice movement, to move beyond the framework of &ldquo;enemies.&rdquo; Enemies are a quick way to create friendships and alliances (as we covered in the <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/appeal-of-dogma/#4-dogma-creates-intense-bonds">Appeal of Dogma</a>), but not without costs.</p> <p>Organizing our efforts within a framework of &ldquo;Enemies&rdquo; is likely more harmful than useful, creating as many problems as solutions. If social justice really is equity for all, then there is no room for enemies &ndash; unless we&rsquo;re here to serve our &ldquo;enemies.&rdquo;</p> <p>But I don&rsquo;t think we even need to move beyond that framework broadly, to see the unique pitfalls to this &ldquo;enemy of my enemy&rdquo; heuristic. It&rsquo;s a non-starter, it&rsquo;s commandeering our course, and if we let it motivate us it&rsquo;s likely to backfire.</p> <p>You might be thinking that I&rsquo;m arguing here, now, for removing the use of a simplified heuristic altogether. That I&rsquo;m saying you should fully investigate every position (to it&rsquo;s absolute source, crunching all the research and data long the way) or person (all of their past actions, beliefs, attitudes, etc.) before aligning yourself with them or not.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s not what I&rsquo;m saying. That idea might be appealing, or feel like a solution, but it&rsquo;s not. Even if we had the inclination and energy and interest to do so, that wouldn&rsquo;t work.</p> <p>Take <a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/thomas_thwaites_how_i_built_a_toaster_from_scratch?language=en">Thomas Thwaites hilarious attempt to build his own toaster</a>, for an example. The adventure, which ensued over the course of many months and countries visited, had Thomas sourcing raw materials, researching skills for processing them, hitting all types of barriers and overcoming them, all to end up with a misshapen lump of sadness that barely resembled a toaster. And when he plugged it in, “there was 240 volts going through these homemade copper wires, homemade plug. And for about five seconds, the toaster toasted, but then, unfortunately, the element kind of melted itself. But I considered it a partial success, to be honest.”</p> <p>The lesson here: If you want a toaster, you&rsquo;re better off taking a shortcut than trying to make your own.</p> <p>Rely on a the massive, interconnected global network of suppliers, manufacturers, and distributors that you know nothing about, and make your decision based on a couple of data points that you care about (e.g., like price and size).</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not saying we should all build our own toasters.</p> <p><strong>I&rsquo;m saying the heuristic of &ldquo;enemy of my enemy&rdquo; is broken, easily hijacked, and more likely to create a codependent spiral toward doom than it is to give us social justice.</strong></p> <p>We can&rsquo;t crunch all the data. We absolutely need simpler heuristics. We just need ones that work. Not because they generate a lot of energy (because we&rsquo;re clearly doing that, melting ourselves in the process), but because we notice that we&rsquo;re accomplishing our goals as a result of them. We&rsquo;re making toast.</p> <p>And here&rsquo;s my first suggestion for the replacement:</p> <p>When we turn it on, we pay attention to what happens. What the outcome is. And if it&rsquo;s that it melts itself, we don&rsquo;t count it even a partial success.</p> Literal Transphobia https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/literal-transphobia/ Tue, 07 Jan 2020 16:02:02 -0600 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/literal-transphobia/ Sam Killermann <address>The following essay was written for my forthcoming <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/dogmatic-activism" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">book about dogmatic activism</a>, which I'm currently <em>publicly</em> (!) writing, as a new blog post every day on my personal blog. If you want to follow along, you can <a href="https://bitly.com/sjmdbook" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><strong>get new chapters emailed to you as I publish them</strong></a>. Here's the <a title="Literal Transphobia, original essay by Sam Killermann" href="https://www.samkillermann.com/literal-transphobia" rel="canonical">link to the original post</a>.</address> <p>I&rsquo;d be willing to bet the goal of most LGBTQ+ advocates, educators, and activists has never been to make people afraid of transgender people. If that <em>has</em> been your goal, these aren&rsquo;t the words you&rsquo;re looking for. You can go about your business. <a href="https://youtu.be/ihyjXd2C-E8?t=58">Move along</a>.</p> <p>For the rest of us, you might be able to relate to an annoyingly common experience I&rsquo;ve had over the years:</p> <p>During a training, or in some other setting, someone would say something homophobic or transphobic, I&rsquo;d point it out, say it&rsquo;s an example of homophobia or transphobia, then they&rsquo;d reply, &ldquo;No, I&rsquo;m not afraid of gay people, I just&hellip;&rdquo; then they&rsquo;d usually double down on their homophobic thing (I&rsquo;ll let you fill in the blank).</p> <p>Or sometimes it would come up in a different way, with someone preemptively disclosing &ldquo;I&rsquo;m not <em>afraid</em> of transgender people, but I just&hellip;&rdquo; and ditto.</p> <p>The thing I&rsquo;m getting at here is <strong>people conflating the terms &ldquo;homophobia&rdquo; or &ldquo;transphobia&rdquo;</strong> (as well as other &ldquo;-phobia&rdquo; words, like &ldquo;biphobia&rdquo;, used in social justice contexts) <strong>with traditional phobias</strong>, such as arachnophobia (bad movie, worse reality: they could <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/03/28/spiders-could-theoretically-eat-every-human-on-earth-in-one-year/">eat us all in a year</a> if they were organized &ndash; all they need is a leader).</p> <p>People really latched onto the &ldquo;fear&rdquo; part of &ldquo;phobia&rdquo; being used to create the neologism, instead of the &ldquo;irrational&rdquo; or &ldquo;extreme&rdquo; or &ldquo;aversion&rdquo; parts. And I do mean <em>latched.</em></p> <p>This was one of those things that if you were a gender and sexuality educator &ndash; especially prior to, say, five years ago &ndash; easily wore on your patience. The first few times you heard it, you&rsquo;d say, &ldquo;Yeah, I totally get it, they&rsquo;re similar words, and it&rsquo;s confusing.&rdquo;</p> <p>But by the umpteenth time, it was hard not to cut people off, or assume malicious intentions. Because we knew the &ldquo;correct&rdquo; definition of the term, it was easy to assume they should, too. And that <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/reacting-to-social-justice-pushback/">any pushback was derailment</a>.</p> <p>Adding to this frustration, even when people weren&rsquo;t confused about the word, and they did know <em>exactly</em> what it meant, they&rsquo;d still chime in.</p> <p>&ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always thought it was funny that it&rsquo;s a &lsquo;phobia&rsquo;, like omg gays lol!&rdquo; Yeah. L.O.L.</p> <p>A lot of us regularly updated our definitions of the &ldquo;-phobia&rdquo; terms to try to remedy this. For example, here&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/defining-lgbtq/">my latest attempt</a>:</p> <blockquote> <p><strong>_______-phobia:</strong> a range of negative attitudes (e.g., fear, anger, intolerance, invisibility, resentment, erasure, or discomfort) that one may have or express toward _______ people.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>&ldquo;Fear&rdquo; is still in there (which makes sense, because it has the suffice &ldquo;-phobia&rdquo;), but it&rsquo;s followed by all the ways we usually see this concept showing up, the ways we were hoping to focus on.</p> <p>We didn&rsquo;t want the word to be 1:1 connected to fear or being afraid, and only surface that idea when it&rsquo;s used. We just needed a word to talk about a thing we were seeing everywhere, and hoping to disrupt, the byproducts of heterosexism and cissexism (and the other -isms).</p> <p><em>We know you&rsquo;re not afraid of gay people. We get that. You&rsquo;re just intolerant, and so are lots of other people, and this is the word &ndash; imperfect as it may be &ndash; that we&rsquo;re using to talk about that, so let&rsquo;s talk about that.</em></p> <p>But then a lot of us started seeing something else.</p> <h2 id="enter-literal-transphobia">Enter Literal Transphobia</h2> <p>I&rsquo;m not sure when I started hearing about this, but it was recent. Within the past several years, for sure.</p> <p>It started as a trickle, where I&rsquo;d hear about it from someone (e.g., a dean at a university I was visiting, or an assistant principal of a high school), but then not hear about it from the next several dozen someones, before it popped up again. And at first I dismissed it when it popped up. An outlier. Noise, not signal.</p> <p>Then I started to hear about it more consistently, where 1 out of every 10, then 1 out of every 5 someones I was interacting with would bring it up.</p> <p>And before long, it was most of what I was hearing about. Where before, people would center their conversations with me on things like dismantling ways their organization perpetuated oppression, or asking for advice for creating welcoming environments for LGBTQ+ people, or different ways to explain gender to people in their sphere &ndash; our conversations were now centered on <em>this</em> more often than not.</p> <p>Lots of someones started talking to me about literal transphobia.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not sure what else to call it. And in a way it feels like we&rsquo;ve kind of gone full circle, because the thing I kept hearing about was people <em>actually</em> and <em>literally</em> being afraid because of transgender people (or LGBPQ+ people, or sometimes women, people of color, and other marginalized groups). Not in general or the abstract (i.e., they weren&rsquo;t afraid of &ldquo;trans people&rdquo; as a whole), but specific people in their lives (<em>This</em> transgender person. Bob. I&rsquo;m afraid of Bob.).</p> <p>And at first I thought it was silly. <em>Why would you be afraid of Bob? I bet Bob&rsquo;s great. I bet you&rsquo;re the problem.</em></p> <p>Then I kept hearing more and more examples. Here&rsquo;s one:</p> <p>A teacher told me that one of their groups had a trans girl who was a member. She was being cruel to other group members, and the teacher was afraid to intervene.</p> <p><em>Outlier. Not a thing</em>, I thought.</p> <p>Then I was talking with a parent whose non-binary child was having a hard time connecting with one of their teachers, who prior to the kid transitioning served as a sort of mentor, but now wouldn&rsquo;t be alone with them. The parent talked to the teacher, and was then referred to the Vice Principal, who said the teacher didn&rsquo;t feel safe being in a one-on-one setting with the kid any more.</p> <p><em>Ridiculous. What are these people on about?</em></p> <p>Here are a few more examples I have heard:</p> <ul> <li>Someone emailed me that their coworker (a &ldquo;queer <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/05/what-does-the-asterisk-in-trans-stand-for/">trans*</a> female&rdquo;) didn&rsquo;t contribute to their team projects, and she was overloaded trying to pick up the slack, afraid to tell their boss about it.</li> <li>A dean of students at a university told me that they had several conduct hearings regarding the same trans student&rsquo;s behavior, but they were afraid to take action against him, so they kept finding him &ldquo;not responsible.&rdquo;</li> <li>Someone emailed me that their supervisor (&ldquo;who is a transwoman&rdquo;) constantly made inappropriate jokes, but she didn&rsquo;t know what to do, and didn&rsquo;t feel safe going to her supervisor&rsquo;s supervisor.</li> <li>A hospital administrator told me they took down their &ldquo;safe zone&rdquo; type signage because they were afraid to keep it up</li> </ul> <p>My list goes on.</p> <p>Colleagues of mine, who do similar work to me and travel around having similar conversations, even began to share with me <em>their</em> examples of things like this coming up:</p> <ul> <li>A person who works in a youth camp told a colleague their camp leaders didn&rsquo;t feel comfortable enforcing rules on their transgender campers.</li> <li>Someone who does corporate diversity and equity consulting said their conversations have moved from regularly being about &ldquo;how to make the workplace inclusive and attract more queer employees to hire&rdquo; to &ldquo;being afraid of firing queer employees they have.&rdquo;</li> <li>A supervisor was afraid to give their young trans staff member feedback about their job performance for fear that they would be labeled transphobic if they gave them a bad review</li> <li>A hiring manager didn&rsquo;t feel like they could interview a trans person and then not hire them</li> </ul> <p>And I started noticing other examples of things I&rsquo;d hear that weren&rsquo;t about &ldquo;literal transphobia,&rdquo; but I realized later might be connected:</p> <ul> <li>A teacher told me the male faculty in her school no longer felt safe coaching girls teams</li> <li>A (White) friend told me her (POC) girlfriend was abusive but she was afraid to leave her</li> </ul> <p>I&rsquo;m not going to continue sharing, but suffice it to say I have no shortage of examples of this. And I&rsquo;m guessing the replies to this will be full of more.</p> <p>I will, however, share that it took more examples than I&rsquo;m proud to admit before I started to let myself notice what was becoming a trend, instead of dismissing these cases as &ldquo;outlier&rdquo; after &ldquo;outlier.&rdquo;</p> <p>Even as I am writing this essay, today, a thousand words in &ndash; <em>right now</em> &ndash; I&rsquo;m starting to doubt that this was something worth writing about. Sincerely. I was about to delete this draft, so I started texting friends and colleagues the thesis and asking, &ldquo;Is this a real thing?&rdquo;</p> <p>One person replied, &ldquo;A person who is trans is also aggressive and no one knows how to handle it because of them being trans?&rdquo;</p> <p>&ldquo;Yeah, that would be an example,&rdquo; I replied, then asked, &ldquo;That real?&rdquo;</p> <p>They said it was, then immediately followed up with <em>two</em> detailed cases of this in their life, before they panicked and asked me not to share their examples (and I didn&rsquo;t &ndash; they&rsquo;re not included above).</p> <p>So it&rsquo;s probably a real thing.</p> <h2 id="what-are-they-afraid-of">What are they afraid of?</h2> <p>At this point, it&rsquo;s safe to assume that most people have heard of at least one example of someone getting publicly dragged for doing something problematic. I&rsquo;d even go so far as to assume literally every person reading this has.</p> <p>Sometimes the person who becomes the target for the tomatoes is conservative, trying to make a point that&rsquo;s unjust, or defending bigotry.</p> <p>And other times the person is progressive, liberal, social-justice-minded, and supportive of liberation movements.</p> <p>That part usually doesn&rsquo;t matter, at least from our perspective as outsiders looking in (or one of the people throwing the tomatoes). We don&rsquo;t care what their beliefs are, or their intentions.</p> <p>The outcomes are the same. Someone gets fired for a (bad) tweet. Or put on blast for wearing a (bad) shirt. Publicly protested for saying the wrong thing. Boycotted for asking the wrong question. Canceled for sending an email with a bad idea. And so on.</p> <p>I could link to examples for all of those, and dozens more, but I don&rsquo;t want to be another dog in the pile, and I trust you know what I&rsquo;m talking about here.</p> <p>Even people who don&rsquo;t know the examples, or aren&rsquo;t in touch with the details, seem to understand this is <em>a thing</em> happening nowadays. Like it&rsquo;s in the air.</p> <p>One of my friends calls it &ldquo;the cannibals,&rdquo; but they don&rsquo;t follow any of the stories. Another friend says, &ldquo;Oh, you mean Twitter?&quot;, because to her (a person who doesn&rsquo;t use Twitter) <em>this is what Twitter is</em>. (And if I&rsquo;m being honest, she&rsquo;s not far off, depending on who you follow)</p> <p>In any case, whether you read every issue of <em>Cancel Culture Weekly</em>, get mad about the <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/rage-du-jour">rage du jour</a> yourself, you try to avoid hearing about this stuff altogether, or are somewhere betwixt the three:</p> <p><strong>Everything I just highlighted is what people are afraid of.</strong> They&rsquo;re not afraid of the trans people in their lives (even if that&rsquo;s how they make sense of it); they&rsquo;re afraid of what happens if things go wrong in their relationship.</p> <p>The people I&rsquo;ve been talking to, anyway. The ones who are sharing their examples of literal transphobia.</p> <p>They&rsquo;re afraid to say, think, believe, or do the wrong thing; or <em>not do</em> the correct, right, allowed, enough, or un-problematic thing; or just be <em>perceived</em> as any of the above.</p> <p>&ldquo;If you don&rsquo;t want people to call you transphobic, don&rsquo;t be transphobic&rdquo; doesn&rsquo;t apply here. Or, more generally, &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t be an asshole.&rdquo; They&rsquo;re not relevant advice.</p> <p>Because the <em>public perception</em> that they did the wrong thing is enough to be afraid of. Just being <em>accused</em> of doing the wrong thing by the right person is plenty. There is no &ldquo;innocent until proven guilty&rdquo; in the court of public opinion. So, ultimately, it doesn&rsquo;t feel like it matters what they do.</p> <p>Because the people talking to me have all been social justice advocates themselves, they&rsquo;re all subscribed to different progressive, intersectional-feminist-type media outlets, and their social feeds are algorithmically stacked with social justice stuff.</p> <p>So they&rsquo;ve seen examples of this celebrated by their peers again and again. They might have joined in on the celebration. And they&rsquo;ve seen how every defense the person conjures gets thrown out, and how anyone who rises to defend them gets cast in with their lot.</p> <p>They&rsquo;re afraid of that trans person because that trans person, in their mind, has the power to ruin their life.</p> <p>And not just that they &ldquo;might,&rdquo; but, based on the examples it felt like they were seeing every day in their social feeds, it&rsquo;s <em>likely</em>. All it takes is one misstep. For them to make a mistake. Or to do nothing wrong and this person decides they have an ax to grind. Or their parent does. Or a friend. Or an unrelated third party who doesn&rsquo;t even have a horse in this particular race, but cries foul.</p> <p>And when I&rsquo;ve talked to people who are living with this particular fear, literal transphobia, it feels like anything but irrational. And I can&rsquo;t tell them otherwise.</p> <p>Now, before we move on, I want to take a step back to say something important: <strong>I&rsquo;m not blaming the transgender person</strong> (or any other person in these people&rsquo;s lives who holds a marginalized identity that&rsquo;s led to someone else being afraid of being publicly dragged).</p> <p>In some of the examples I&rsquo;ve heard, the trans person is being mean, or cruel, or an asshole, sure &ndash; but hey, sometimes people are assholes. Being an asshole knows no boundary of gender (or sexuality, race, etc.).</p> <p>But in every case, I don&rsquo;t think the transgender person is <em>at fault</em> for the fear. So who is?</p> <h2 id="are-we-the-fear-mongers">Are We the Fear-Mongers?</h2> <p>Before I answer that, a disclaimer:</p> <p>Maybe what my colleagues and most of the people I&rsquo;ve talked to in the past several years about social justice have been noticing and feeling is not representative of a larger trend.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s anecdotal evidence after all, so it&rsquo;s subject to updates and corrections by better methods (which, by the way, for all the people who write me for ideas on what to research in gender and sexuality justice: here&rsquo;s a great topic!).</p> <p>Maybe this is just a pee-colored snowball sample because I happen to be standing in the Mecca for full-bladdered dogs. But maybe it&rsquo;s yellow because of acute environmental pollution? Does it really matter which one it is? Do I want to be holding the snowball? Is this analogy too gross?</p> <p>Let&rsquo;s try again.</p> <p>What if there is something going on that&rsquo;s causing people &ndash; progressive, social-justice-minded people &ndash; to be afraid of transgender people in their lives?</p> <p>And what if that something isn&rsquo;t effective fear-mongering by bigots, anti-LGBTQ+ people, and conservatives (although we&rsquo;ll get to this in a second), but something that we are doing ourselves?</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s the thing: I can&rsquo;t know for sure. I wish I could, but I simply cannot. We don&rsquo;t have the data. (So we&rsquo;re clear here, neither can you, unless you have a crystal ball or you&rsquo;re sitting on some bombshell research you haven&rsquo;t published; to which, in both cases, I&rsquo;d say <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/contact/">get in touch, friend</a> &ndash; why&rsquo;s it been so long?)</p> <p>But it does seem reasonable that this is more our doing than anyone else&rsquo;s.</p> <p>Because of the <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/lessons-from-a-decade-of-social-justice-activism/">siloification within social justice</a>, we&rsquo;re far more susceptible to being influenced by our own people than outsiders, by &ldquo;us&rdquo; than &ldquo;them.&rdquo;</p> <p>We&rsquo;ve become quite exacting when it comes to not not being persuaded by, or even having relationships with, conservative people, or people who aren&rsquo;t in favor of social justice. That&rsquo;s a tenet of the social justice dogma that has reached most of us: don&rsquo;t trust outsiders.</p> <p>And at the same time, social justice dogma (SJD) provides a lot of reasonable answers to why people have started to be literally transphobic. I&rsquo;ll walk through three.</p> <p>For one, SJD says that it&rsquo;s oppressive to question victims, but only victimhood that works within <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/03/the-social-justice-power-inverse/">the social justice power inverse</a>. A dominant group member isn&rsquo;t a valid victim, or at least their victimhood is totally up for question.</p> <p>Secondly, SJD teaches us that intentions don&rsquo;t matter, only outcomes. End of debate. It doesn&rsquo;t matter who you are, what you wanted to do, what you actually meant, all we care about is the effect of your cause. And we specifically (and sometimes only) care about how it affected marginalized people.</p> <p>Finally, SJD pushes us to name and identify oppression, recognizing it wherever it is, but makes it hard (if not impossible) to dismiss oppression, or say that a thing named as oppression isn&rsquo;t. I call this the &ldquo;Seconded Law&rdquo; in the <a href="https://sjmd.space">Social Justice, Minus Dogma Course</a> and describe it like this:</p> <blockquote> <p>&ldquo;The way this works is one person can name something (e.g., a movie, an idea, a policy, a custom) as oppressive (often as a felt experience), and others are only allowed to second that claim. Someone else can’t rebut the claim, or name away oppression, or risk being named oppressive themselves.&rdquo;</p> </blockquote> <p>If you say something isn&rsquo;t oppressive and you&rsquo;re not affected by that oppression as a target group member, best case scenario is you&rsquo;re told to &ldquo;pass the mic.&rdquo; More likely, you&rsquo;re identified as an oppressor. You&rsquo;re complicit.</p> <p>Even if you&rsquo;re a target group member, your dismissal will get swept away as internalized oppression, or some variation of the horrendous &ldquo;Uncle Tom.&rdquo;</p> <p>So within SJD we have:</p> <ol> <li>A narrow definition of victimhood, which doesn&rsquo;t allow us to see someone accused of doing something oppressive as a victim, and doesn&rsquo;t allow us to question a marginalized person&rsquo;s victimhood; combined with</li> <li>A lack of consideration of intentions, or the ability to weigh in what someone hoped would happen, or if they didn&rsquo;t mean to cause harm; and</li> <li>A constant pressure to identify more oppression, and the inability to name <em>away</em> named oppression.</li> </ol> <p>With all that in mind, what people are afraid of is that if a transgender person says they did something bad, in the eyes of a lot of good social justice people (1) they can&rsquo;t defend themselves (they&rsquo;re not the victim), and if they do defend themselves, then they&rsquo;re not believing a survivor of trauma (a second thing they&rsquo;ll get attacked for); (2) it doesn&rsquo;t matter if they didn&rsquo;t mean to whatever it was, or try to enact any ill will; and (3) it&rsquo;s evidence of the transphobia in them and the organization they&rsquo;re part of.</p> <p>Now, not everyone reading is going to agree with those three items. My hunch is that the majority of us don&rsquo;t. Not completely, or absolutely, or even mostly. We don&rsquo;t want this.</p> <p>We don&rsquo;t want more fear.</p> <p>But we have learned those rules, not pushed back against the dogma (For good reasons! We want to end transphobia! We want social justice! We don&rsquo;t want people to suffer!), and we&rsquo;re afraid to be on the wrong end of it.</p> <p>So be it.</p> <h2 id="when-a-reasonable-outcome-is-fear-reassess">When a Reasonable Outcome is Fear, Reassess</h2> <p>Fear is regularly weaponized by opponents of social justice.</p> <p>Infamously, fear of transgender people was effectively stoked to prevent Houston, my neighbor to the east, <a href="https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/11/houstons-hero-was-defeated-by-transphobic-bathroom-panic-pioneered-in-1970s-era-battle.html">from enacting an anti-discrimination ordinance</a> that would have protected trans people. And we&rsquo;re currently in the midst of a swell of anti-transgender laws surging all over the nation, proposed by conservative lawmakers, and motivated by fear of the other.</p> <p>The people in the examples above, who shared those things with me, aren&rsquo;t motivated in these ways. They don&rsquo;t respond to the &ldquo;bathroom panic&rdquo; button. They aren&rsquo;t afraid of transgender people in the abstract, which is what those strategies require.</p> <p>But they&rsquo;re experiencing fear nonetheless. Fear that&rsquo;s being stoked, or at least reinforced, by progressive media. Fear that&rsquo;s a likely byproduct of the dogmatic bent within social justice, gender, and sexuality activism.</p> <p>It might be summed up as the fear of being seen as a bad person, with the feeling that there is an increasingly narrow tightrope to walk to be a good one.</p> <p>But it&rsquo;s more than that.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s witnessing the glee many social justice people experience when a person is dragged through the coals for the &ldquo;right&rdquo; reason &ndash; glee that is sanctioned and encouraged by SJD. And the callous lack of compassion for the person in the aftermath. &ldquo;Fuck them.&rdquo;</p> <p>And I don&rsquo;t think that was most of our goal. I don&rsquo;t think we <em>wanted</em> people to be afraid. I don&rsquo;t think we had &ldquo;terror&rdquo; on our intended outcomes.</p> <p><strong>We wanted people to care, and to be careful.</strong> To be tender with their words, actions, and viewpoints. To hold compassion for the other, and be open to the truth that they might be causing harm without knowing it.</p> <p><strong>One of the most popular ways we exercised this care was with language.</strong> Because it&rsquo;s something people can control. Because it matters. Because it&rsquo;s ubiquitous.</p> <p><strong>We wanted to make the world a better place for everyone in it.</strong> We wanted to undo oppression, dismantle unhealthy systems, and create pathways toward liberation.</p> <p>And we still can.</p> <p>But if our strategies, actions, beliefs, and norms are becoming the source of fear, we&rsquo;re venturing in a dangerous direction. And it might be time for us to correct course. To move toward not creating fear <em>for</em> social justice.</p> <p>What might a course correction look like?</p> <p>Well, Yoda said, &ldquo;Named must be your fear before banish it you can.&rdquo;</p> <h2 id="fear-leads-to-anger">Fear Leads to Anger</h2> <p>The people I&rsquo;ve talked to about this are ashamed of the fear they experienced. They came to me looking for me to assuage it.</p> <p>&ldquo;Oh I see,&rdquo; they were hoping I&rsquo;d say, &ldquo;You&rsquo;re missing this one bit. Does that help? You&rsquo;re no longer afraid, right?&rdquo;</p> <p>But I couldn&rsquo;t help. They weren&rsquo;t missing anything. They often had as complete a picture as I did. They always left afraid, or more afraid, when I accidentally pointed out some wrinkle they hadn&rsquo;t thought of.</p> <p>Being open about this fear &ndash; naming it, publicly, and reckoning with it &ndash; might be a gigantic leap in a different direction.</p> <p>And I don&rsquo;t think gigantic leap is an exaggeration: right now, even talking about <em>talking about</em> this fear is terrifying. Everyone I spoke with as I was writing this essay was afraid of being identified, or to have people know they had this fear.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s easy to imagine the fear transforming into something else. The open-hearted-ness that people came to me with when they shared the above examples evolving into bitterness over time without a solution. With no outlets. Turning into something darker.</p> <p>And it&rsquo;s easy to see opponents of social justice weaponizing this fear, using it to create animosity toward equity for transgender people (or toward tactics of social justice more broadly), to unravel progress we&rsquo;ve made, or slingshot us backward.</p> <p>If we&rsquo;re to trust Yoda (and why wouldn&rsquo;t we?), &ldquo;Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering.&rdquo;</p> <p>Suffering?! That&rsquo;s not ideal. Beyond <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/suffering-points">ending suffering caused by society being the goal of social justice</a>, this is best to be avoided because &ldquo;fear is the path to the dark side,&rdquo; and that sounds worse than what we&rsquo;ve got now.</p> <p>For me, that&rsquo;s reason enough for us to do things differently. I don&rsquo;t want to take the path to the dark side. That never works out for anyone.</p> <p>But maybe you&rsquo;re unconvinced. You&rsquo;ve read all this, and you don&rsquo;t see the harm. There&rsquo;s one more thing I have to say.</p> <h2 id="in-the-end-the-most-vulnerable-suffer">In the End, the Most Vulnerable Suffer</h2> <p>Maybe you don&rsquo;t care if people are becoming <em>literally transphobic</em>. You&rsquo;re not motivated by the idea that social justice people, progressive people, the people on &ldquo;our side,&rdquo; might be increasingly living in a state of fear as a result of our efforts.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m totally going out on a limb here, but perhaps, in a <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/10/what-kind-of-social-justice-are-you-talking-about/">retributive justice sense</a>, you dig that the tables have turned: &ldquo;Trans people been afraid of cis people for so long, it&rsquo;s about time they feel the fear.&rdquo;</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t know. I&rsquo;m just trying to cover all my bases here, because I know this is all likely to be spot-read and replied to with some mix of &ldquo;cis tears&rdquo; and &ldquo;I couldn&rsquo;t care less.&rdquo;</p> <p>Maybe you&rsquo;ve taken an appreciation to the idea of employers being afraid to fire transgender people and you say, &ldquo;What&rsquo;s the harm?&rdquo;</p> <p>Full disclosure: I&rsquo;m in favor of people <em>not</em> firing trans people &ndash; I think that&rsquo;s a good thing, and I&rsquo;d just rather &ldquo;fear&rdquo; not be the motivator. And for a reason beyond &ldquo;I think it&rsquo;s not good to be in the manufacturing of fear business&rdquo; (although I think that&rsquo;s a pretty compelling reason by itself).</p> <p>If we only want to focus on the LGBTQ+, trans, or other marginalized people, and prioritize their well-being despite anyone else&rsquo;s, there&rsquo;s still plenty of harm being done. Harm we are complicit in, and contributing to, by perpetuating social justice dogma.</p> <p><strong>This fear isn&rsquo;t just affecting the people who are feeling it; it&rsquo;s driving their behavior, and their behavior affects others.</strong></p> <p>It&rsquo;s causing people to treat transgender people differently &ndash; and not <em>good</em> differently &ndash; <em>because of</em> social justice.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s causing teachers to distance themselves from the marginalized students in their lives they were previously close to, they mentored, they helped after class.</p> <p>It&rsquo;s causing employers to second-guess the net benefit of interviewing trans people if they&rsquo;re afraid to turn them down, or hiring a transgender person if they won&rsquo;t feel safe firing them.</p> <p>Economics might not trickle down, but suffering does.</p> <p>When push comes to shove, people pass the buck. They protect themselves. And the vulnerable, as ever before, are left vulnerable.</p> WIP: New Book About Dogmatic Activism https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/dogmatic-activism/ Sat, 04 Jan 2020 12:01:05 -0600 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/dogmatic-activism/ Sam Killermann <p>I don&rsquo;t know what it&rsquo;ll be called. I don&rsquo;t know how long it will be, or exactly when it will be published (soon!). But I do know one thing: it&rsquo;s a gigantic leap.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m currently, actively, and <em>publicly</em> (!) in the process of writing a new book about social justice, minus dogma &ndash; or, more broadly, dogmatic activism. Every day I&rsquo;m publishing a new entry on <a href="https://samkillermann.com">my personal blog (samkillermann.com)</a>.</p> <div class="button-stack" style="margin: 2em auto; text-align: center;"> <a class="button" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" href="https://bit.ly/sjmdbook">Get chapters via email as they're published.</a> </div> <p>So far I&rsquo;ve published one essay about <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/talking-about-social-justice-dogma-is-anti-viral/">how talking about social justice dogma has been anti-viral</a>, and one about <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/reacting-to-social-justice-pushback/">how we (over-) react to pushback within the social justice movement</a>.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ll be publishing another there later today. And tomorrow. And so on until this book is done.</p> <p>This work-in-progress (WIP) is a continuation of a lot of the writing I&rsquo;ve been doing <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/social-justice-dogma">about social justice dogma here</a>, the podcast, the conversations I&rsquo;ve had with hundreds of you offline, and more recently <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/courses/social-justice-minus-dogma-course/">the course I launched last summer</a>.</p> <p>I said this <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/im-publicly-new-32867191">on Patreon</a> but I&rsquo;ll say it again here:</p> <blockquote> <p>The most common pushback I got to the course was that people wanted more answers, not just to be guided in open-ended questions or nudged to explore the topics themselves. Namely: they wanted a book, not a course.</p> </blockquote> <p>So I&rsquo;m writing a book!</p> <p>And I&rsquo;m doing it publicly because I need the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wisdom_of_the_crowd">wisdom of the crowd</a>, and the checks and balances that come with it, to ensure the finished project is something worth reading. I&rsquo;m also hoping to model something that I&rsquo;m believing more every day we need in social justice spaces: room to make mistakes, and work through ideas in front of others.</p> <p>With that in mind, I built out commenting on my blog, and will be reading all the email replies to new chapters I send to your inboxes.</p> <p>This book, like everything else I&rsquo;ve been doing regarding SJD, feels important and scary and like something I&rsquo;d really rather not write and wished someone else would do &ndash; but in lieu of that, here I am. It&rsquo;ll also be the perfect platform for me to build on <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/lessons-from-a-decade-of-social-justice-activism/">the lessons I&rsquo;ve learned over a decade of social justice activism</a>.</p> <p>I created <a href="https://bit.ly/sjmdbook">a special mailing list</a> for people to follow along, but I wanted to let everyone here know that I won&rsquo;t be posting the chapters on It&rsquo;s Pronounced Metrosexual as I write them.</p> <p>I might crosspost one or two, if they feel like good fits for IPM, but generally I try to only publish things here that self-contained and useful to you right now, not WIPs that might hopefully be useful later.</p> <p>So if you want to follow along, you&rsquo;ll have to do so <a href="https://www.samkillermann.com/topics/sjmd-book/">on my personal blog</a>.</p> <p>Please let me know what you think about this by using the <a href="http://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/reply#source=WIP%3a%20New%20Book%20About%20Dogmatic%20Activism">replies</a> here, there, or by sending me a good ol&rsquo; fashioned electronic mail.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m looking forward to co-creating this thing with you, and seeing what we put together come February.</p> <p>&lt;3 sK</p> 7 Lessons from a Decade of Social Justice Activism https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/lessons-from-a-decade-of-social-justice-activism/ Wed, 18 Dec 2019 15:53:42 +0000 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/lessons-from-a-decade-of-social-justice-activism/ Sam Killermann <p>My dad has started calling himself &ldquo;ok boomer.&rdquo; Meaning he signs off on emails to me &ldquo;Love, - OK BOOMER (aka dad)&quot;. Chalk that up to one of the million things I could have never anticipated back in 2010.</p> <p>I thought the year 2020 would be filled with flying cars, utopian world peace, food in pill form, and brain-implanted computers.</p> <p>Instead, a permanent percentage of my brain is allocated to tracking the current charge level of my various devices, and the locations of nearby chargers to keep them above 20%.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not proud to admit this, but: Doesn&rsquo;t it feel like the walls start closing in when that little battery icon turns yellow? <em>No thank you very much</em>. When it gets below 10 and turns red my heart starts to race.</p> <p>Food in pill form is a far cry from &ldquo;Does anyone have a charger? Thanks! Oh &ndash; sorry, nevermind, not <em>this</em> charger. I need the basically-identical one for my basically-identical phone, but this one <em>absolutely</em> won&rsquo;t work, because we&rsquo;re in the future.&rdquo;</p> <p>We are in the future. It&rsquo;s just not the good future.</p> <p>Every day it feels more and more like we&rsquo;re in the future that the time travel movie sends the hero back to change.</p> <p>And now we&rsquo;re on the precipice of a new decade, so I thought it was a good time to share some lessons I learned &ldquo;on the front lines&rdquo; of the social justice movement throughout the past one &ndash; in the form of a listicle, no less (One of this decade&rsquo;s most sinister inventions, but ranked well below Instagram, CRISPR, and &ldquo;President Trump&rdquo;).</p> <p><strong>This isn&rsquo;t going to be a walk down memory lane</strong>, or highlights of all the cool things my collaborators and I have made or done in the 2010s.</p> <p><strong>Instead, I want to pull out some of broader themes of doing the work</strong>, focusing on how its changed throughout the decade, and pinpointing the areas where I think we (as <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/03/taxonomy-social-justice-people/">social justice people</a>) might focus our efforts differently in the 2020s.</p> <p>Before I go further, three things:</p> <ol> <li><strong>If you&rsquo;re wondering &ldquo;Who tf are you?&quot;</strong> (I ask myself that every single day) and the credibility breadcrumbs strewn about that subtitle above didn&rsquo;t do it for you (they do nothing for me either), please read <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/about/about-sam-killermann">all about me here</a> (wouldn&rsquo;t recommend it), so I can keep the autobiographing in this piece to a minimum.</li> <li><strong>This is coming from someone who has dedicated their life to social justice,</strong> and that hasn&rsquo;t changed in the past decade (and I don&rsquo;t see that changing). It&rsquo;s going to seem critical (because it is), but it&rsquo;s critical because I care deeply about the goals of the movements, and want to see us succeed (because we have to).</li> <li><strong>It&rsquo;s not all bad.</strong> Social Justice Land, as I call it &ndash; the mental geography of all of the varying, intersectional, identity-based and feminist-positive movements for equity, liberation, and dismantling oppression &ndash; has had a helluva decade. I live in <a href="https://kinder.rice.edu/urbanedge/2019/10/22/wallethub-austin-dallas-houston-fastest-growing-cities-2019">Austin, TX</a>, and even I look at all the people moving to Social Justice Land and think &ldquo;damn.&rdquo;</li> </ol> <p>A decade ago, when I&rsquo;d tell people what I do the first thing they&rsquo;d say, invariably, was &ldquo;What do you mean by social justice?&rdquo;</p> <p>I can&rsquo;t remember the last time someone asked me what I <em>meant</em> by &ldquo;social justice.&rdquo; The word has spread. And, for a lot of us, that was a big goal. So mission accomplished.</p> <p>But it&rsquo;s feeling more like that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_Accomplished_speech">George Bush standing in front of a mission accomplished banner in 2003 talking about a winning a war we&rsquo;re still fighting</a> type of &ldquo;mission accomplished&rdquo; &ndash; and now I&rsquo;m getting ahead of myself.</p> <p><em>On to the listicle I promised!</em></p> <h2 id="the-list-social-justice-lessons-learned-from-the-2010s">The List: Social Justice Lessons Learned from the 2010s</h2> <p>Here are the broad lessons I&rsquo;ve learned doing all kinds of social justice activism &amp; education, both in-person firsthand, by creating curricula others use in-person, and through all the resources I&rsquo;ve created online.</p> <h3 id="1-a-lot-of-people-are-saying-social-justice-to-mean-different-things">1. A lot of people are saying &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; to mean different things.</h3> <p>We have a classic <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIP6EwqMEoE"><em>Inigo Montoya</em> problem</a> on our hands: we keep using that word, but we&rsquo;re not sure what it means.</p> <p>And people who <em>aren&rsquo;t</em> us &ndash; people who aren&rsquo;t advocating for social justice &ndash; <em>really</em> don&rsquo;t know what it means.</p> <p>I had a conversation with a fellow <em>social justice person</em> friend the other day, an educator, where I said something like, &ldquo;Well, obviously, the ultimate goal of social justice is to reduce the suffering created by society, and create more opportunities for everyone to experience joy.&rdquo;</p> <p>And she said, &ldquo;Obviously? I&rsquo;ve literally never heard anyone say anything like that.&rdquo;</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve noticed this when I&rsquo;ve traveled as well. So many people are on completely different pages when it comes to <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/10/what-kind-of-social-justice-are-you-talking-about/">what kind of &ldquo;justice&rdquo; we&rsquo;re talking about</a>.</p> <p>Before &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; became popular as a phrase, people would call this work &ldquo;diversity&rdquo; or &ldquo;inclusion&rdquo; or &ldquo;multicultural issues&rdquo; (oof) or other things. I thought when we transitioned to &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; we solved the branding problem. <em>Alas.</em></p> <p>Now we just have more words that we use to explain what &ldquo;social justice&rdquo; means (e.g., &ldquo;equity,&rdquo; &ldquo;intersectional feminism&rdquo;), that, themselves, give way to dozens of different explanations and defnitions.</p> <p>So, we should probably hold a meeting about this sometime in 2020. Whatcha think?</p> <h3 id="2-silos-do-us-no-justice">2. Silos do us no justice.</h3> <p>The 2010s were a decade of siloification, a word I just invented that &ndash; like the phrase &ldquo;President Trump&rdquo; &ndash; the world would probably be better without.</p> <p>The <em>siloification</em> is happening on two fronts: we&rsquo;re constantly being put into silos by every company that is utilizing big data to sell us shit; and we&rsquo;re ever-increasingly self-siloing.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ll speak to the second part.</p> <p><strong>How many times have you read an article (aka skimmed a headline) that said something to the effect of &ldquo;unfriend people who are different from you&rdquo;</strong> &ndash; and presented the idea in socially-just wrapping paper?</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve seen so many variations of those in the past few years that I&rsquo;ve lost count. The gist of all of them is roughly the same: it&rsquo;s okay to disconnect yourself from people whose political opinions are problematic, <em>for</em> social justice.</p> <p><em>Unfriend the Trump supporters on Facebook.</em> <em>Unfollow problematic people on Twitter.</em> <em>Don&rsquo;t invite conservative people to your progressive events.</em></p> <p>Sometimes they&rsquo;re delivered with an &ldquo;it&rsquo;s okay to&hellip;&rdquo; permission (for self care, etc.!). Other times they&rsquo;re shared as a moral imperative: &ldquo;You need to do this.&rdquo; (for revenge, etc.!)</p> <p>Why might this be a problem for social justice?</p> <p>In the US, we saw the results of this siloification in the 2016 election. Not only did we elect a person who pretty much everybody thought was an impossibility (including his supporters), pretty much all of my colleagues, collaborators, and comrades didn&rsquo;t know a single person who supported him &ndash; because of our silos.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m not saying the presidential election is, alone, a social justice weather vane. Nor am I trying to overly center US politics (hello <a href="https://theweek.com/articles/848096/three-years-after-brexit-global-nationalism-still-ascendant">Brexit and the world</a>).</p> <p>I&rsquo;m just pointing to something concrete to anchor the following more abstract ideas.</p> <p>Because of our siloification:</p> <ol> <li><strong>We&rsquo;re increasingly losing touch</strong> with people who have different beliefs from us.</li> <li><strong>This isn&rsquo;t <em>just</em> happening because society is becoming more atomized</strong>, but it&rsquo;s something that we&rsquo;re doing intentionally within the social justice movement (SJM).</li> <li><strong>As we share new social justice ideas or plans for the future, we&rsquo;re only talking to (and hearing from) our silos,</strong> and we&rsquo;re actively creating norms that insulate us from those outside our silo.</li> <li><strong>This results in less criticism (constructive and destructive) of our ideas.</strong> So our bad ideas don&rsquo;t get caught early, and nothing benefits from the insights of an outsider&rsquo;s perspective.</li> <li><strong>And we don&rsquo;t need to be good at sharing our ideas with a tough crowd, or defending them.</strong> We aren&rsquo;t encouraged to reach outside our silo, but when we do, we write off anyone who needs convincing.</li> </ol> <p>But here&rsquo;s the thing: social justice can&rsquo;t be accomplished in a silo.</p> <p>The project of social justice isn&rsquo;t to create a small utopian, equitable, bubble that&rsquo;s a subset of society-at-large &ndash; nor is that possible. At all. Even if we decided we didn&rsquo;t really care about &ldquo;social justice,&rdquo; but wanted this instead.</p> <p>Because the injustice that we&rsquo;re working against, and the paths toward equity and liberation we&rsquo;re trying to create, are entangled with society-at-large. And society-at-large is way (way, <em>way</em>) bigger than our silo (even if our silo has gotten <em>rill</em> big).</p> <p>We need to be aware of other people&rsquo;s views, perspectives, and beliefs. We need to create coalitions that bind together our atoms of society. We need to share ideas broadly, in order to vet and improve them, and to see them to fruition. This requires receiving criticism, and learning how to defend our ideas to tough crowds. And all of this applies <strong>especially</strong> to people who disagree with us, or are vehemently <em>anti</em>-Social Justice.</p> <h3 id="3-were-developing-a-social-justice-industrial-complex">3. We&rsquo;re developing a Social Justice Industrial Complex.</h3> <p>And it&rsquo;s creating problems as quickly it&rsquo;s creating solutions (if it&rsquo;s even creating solutions). But that&rsquo;s what &ldquo;Industrial Complexes&rdquo; do, I suppose, so we&rsquo;re not special.</p> <p>In 2010, if you&rsquo;d asked me how I&rsquo;d feel if a major financial institution had an &ldquo;justice and equity&rdquo; department to advance social justice within their organization, I&rsquo;m sure I would have been ecstatic.</p> <p>2015 me had seen that trend happening, where more and more corporations and organizations were structurally re-orientating toward social justice, and I started to visit these places, and talk with the consultants who worked with them, and I was starting to grow skeptical &ndash; but still optimistic.</p> <p>2020 me is <em>9% battery level anxious</em> about the whole thing.</p> <p>What I mean here is a parallel to the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_complex">Military Industrial Complex</a> (MIC), the short version being that there is an &ldquo;an informal alliance between a nation&rsquo;s military and the defense industry that supplies it.&rdquo;</p> <p>The Social Justice Industrial Complex (SJIC) is similar: there is a burgeoning &ldquo;social justice industry&rdquo; (says a person who is part of it 👋), and an informal alliance has formed between it and progressive organizations and corporations (or orgs that want to appeal to progressives and progressive causes).</p> <p>With the MIC, the result has been endless wars (problems) and every-growing defense spending (another problem), not peace (the purported point of it all &ndash; what it exists to &ldquo;solve&rdquo;) &ndash; and there is no sign of peace in sight.</p> <p>With the SJIC, it might go a different way, but my concern is that it won&rsquo;t.</p> <p>What I&rsquo;m worried about in the 2020s is that the byproduct of all the SJIC endeavors won&rsquo;t be equity, justice, or liberation (i.e., the goals of social justice). But instead that merely more oppression will be identified (more problems), while countless dollars are spent on audits, certifications, and consultants (says a person who has opted out 👋), and not actually improving equity, dismantling oppression, or moving us toward social justice.</p> <p>The same way that the MIC hasn&rsquo;t ended war, the SJIC isn&rsquo;t incentivized to end oppression.</p> <h3 id="4-social-justice-is-_so_-fetch">4. Social justice is <em>so</em> fetch.</h3> <p>We&rsquo;re trendy, y&rsquo;all! A lot of nitty-gritty, theoretically-deep, academic-jargon-laced concepts have become mainstream in the past 10 years. Like <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/privilege/">privilege theory</a>.</p> <p>I wouldn&rsquo;t have expected, for example, to hear &ldquo;check your privilege&rdquo; jokes in TV shows, comedy sets, or movies &ndash; ever, let alone so quickly after the idea getting infused into the zeitgeist.</p> <p>There&rsquo;s <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/04/social-justice-fandom-aka-creating-new-barriers-name-dismantling-others/">a whole fandom surrounding social justice</a> now. <em>wut.</em></p> <p>(There&rsquo;s also a whole counter-cultural &ldquo;we&rsquo;re cool because we&rsquo;re not cool&rdquo; industry of &ldquo;Anti-<a href="https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/sjw">SJW</a>&rdquo; people producing surface-level, obvious, reactionary, knee-jerk content. And you know you&rsquo;ve made it when you&rsquo;re <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkRJzErnRmY">cool to hate</a>. <em>lol.</em>)</p> <p>This isn&rsquo;t necessarily bad, or something we need to move away from, but here&rsquo;s the part I want to focus on for the 2020s:</p> <p>Like other pop culture trends, the things that stick don&rsquo;t necessarily make sense (See: slap bracelets, Pogs, and super tiny backpacks). Trends don&rsquo;t become trends because they&rsquo;re the best version of whatever idea it is. There&rsquo;s no meeting. No deliberation. It just <em>sorta happens</em>. And the other similarity: trends, by definition, don&rsquo;t stick for long.</p> <p>These are problems for social justice because the things that become trendy aren&rsquo;t necessarily (or maybe ever) the things we&rsquo;d really <em>want</em> everyone to get behind.</p> <p>They&rsquo;re often niche ideas, or have <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/05/3-dimensional-social-justice/">convoluted connections to a future socially-just world</a>. Sometimes they&rsquo;re <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/05/justifying-injustice-for-social-justice/">directly antithetical to living social justice</a>. <em>But there&rsquo;s momentum! And energy! And it&rsquo;s hard enough to get people to care about anything, let&rsquo;s not shoot ourselves in the foot by criticizing the efficacy of this popular thing!</em></p> <p>And the other problem is we need ideas that have staying power. If <em>everyone is doing this thing right now</em>, but tomorrow they&rsquo;re on to something else, it really doesn&rsquo;t matter what it is &ndash; it&rsquo;s not going to <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/01/introducing-the-social-justice-compass/">move the needle toward social justice</a>.</p> <p>If we&rsquo;re letting trends be the wind in our sails, I don&rsquo;t see us getting where we want to go. We need to be our own wind.</p> <h3 id="5-were-holier-than-thou">5. We&rsquo;re holier than thou.</h3> <p>Social justice become rife with <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/social-justice-dogma">dogmatic</a>, elitist, moralizing, and dehumanizing stances. We&rsquo;re against binaries in general (like the <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2011/11/breaking-through-the-binary-gender-explained-using-continuums/">gender binary</a>), but <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/03/binary-thinking/">okay with the binary of <em>we&rsquo;re good and you&rsquo;re bad.</em></a> We shame laypeople when they&rsquo;re not fluent in our [intensely academic] jargon. We intentionally violate [certain] people&rsquo;s feelings and sense of self, then disregard their suffering &ndash; but it&rsquo;s not cruelty when it&rsquo;s justified by a theory.</p> <p>And pushback to any of this &ndash; when it comes from within or without &ndash; gets met with even more elitism and theory: &ldquo;You clearly don&rsquo;t understand.&rdquo;</p> <h3 id="6-money-scares-us">6. Money scares us.</h3> <p>The social justice movement &ndash; and many of the movements within it &ndash; have a complicated relationship with money.</p> <p>Many of us are afraid that a focus on class (or socioeconomic status) will derail our focus on other dimensions of discrimination and oppression (e.g., via race, or gender). So we don&rsquo;t do it, or when we do (e.g., talk about <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/10/list-of-upperclass-privilege/">upper-class privilege</a>) we often couch it within an intersectional framework, focusing on race and gender through the lens of class.</p> <p>And we struggle with the money aspect of what we do, as a movement. Many of us charge exorbitant fees to access the work we create, or to access <em>us</em> as ambassadors of that work. Or put up paywalls, intellectual property fences, and restrictions on its usage. And we justify this in complicated, theoretical ways (based on either our identies, the historical nature of oppression and marginalization of anti-oppression work, or both).</p> <p>All this despite the 2010s bringing a greater level of social awareness about the pitfalls of capitalism, predatory nature of money in the education and healthcare systems, and the seeds of a working class movement germinating all around the world.</p> <p>In the 2020s, I hope we can reconcile this. And recognize that not only should the working class be included in the social justice movement, and a direct beneficiary of our efforts, but that these &ldquo;class-only&rdquo; issues and causes (like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income">Universal Basic Income</a>) are actually levers of broader social justice: we just need to pull them.</p> <p>Fortunately&hellip;</p> <h3 id="7-were-surrounded-by-incredibly-creative-thoughtful-compassionate-and-brilliant-human-beings">7. We&rsquo;re surrounded by incredibly creative, thoughtful, compassionate, and brilliant human beings.</h3> <p>This has, I&rsquo;m sure, always been the case. But because of the internet and social media, the 2010s put it on display: social justice people are astounding.</p> <p>So much of the art that we&rsquo;ve seen in the past decade for justice, activism, and protest has been breath-taking. Soul-hugging. Earth-shaking.</p> <p>The theoretical underpinnings of our movement are deeply thoughtful, moving, provocative ideas. And the thinkers behind them genius, and generous with their gifts of mind.</p> <p>Social justice people don&rsquo;t wear their heart on their sleeve: we give our heart freely, completely, to strangers. Entrusting its care to people of different walks of life, identities, experiences, from the &ldquo;other side of the tracks&rdquo; to the other side of the globe.</p> <p>We&rsquo;re surrounded by so many brilliant people, who shine brightly through the fog of oppression.</p> <h2 id="we-have-a-big-decade-ahead-of-us">We have a big decade ahead of us</h2> <p>Climate change, geopolitical trends toward nationalism, a resurgence of white identitarianism, the same ol&rsquo; patriarchy, the widening wealth gap, the fact that I&rsquo;m literally writing this while the votes are being tallied for our president&rsquo;s impeachment for ethics violations (giving us another new phrase: &ldquo;Impeached President Trump&rdquo;)&hellip; the list goes on.</p> <p>The 2020s will be made of mountains for us to climb. I think we can climb them.</p> <p>We have momentum, the glimpses of cultural consciousness, and tons of tools at our disposal and crafty people to wield them.</p> <p>We just need to do it together. That&rsquo;s one thing that&rsquo;s never changed.</p> <hr> <p><em>Have you learned a lesson I didn&rsquo;t include? Or do you want to hear more from me about a particular lesson above? Hit the reply button and let me know. I&rsquo;d love to update this list and expand upon it based on your insights.</em></p> Does the Genderbread Person exclude genderfluid people? https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/genderbread-person-and-genderfluidity/ Wed, 11 Dec 2019 15:53:42 +0000 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/genderbread-person-and-genderfluidity/ Sam Killermann <p>I got an email pointing out to me that <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/genderbread-person/">my versions of the Genderbread Person</a> exclude genderfluid people. And not just people who use <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2013/01/a-comprehensive-list-of-lgbtq-term-definitions/#term-genderfluid">the term &ldquo;genderfluid&rdquo;</a> to identify themselves, but anyone who expresses gender differently at different times. So, do they? Let&rsquo;s figure it out.</p> <p>First, I want to say what I pretty much always say when I get asked a question <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/tags/genderbread/">about Genderbread</a>: it&rsquo;s not perfect, and it&rsquo;s a forever work in progress. That&rsquo;s why I&rsquo;ve released so many different versions, all based on wonderful insight and pointed constructive criticism like this question. I addressed this in my <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/videos/gender-from-checkboxes-to-continuums">Nerd Nite Talk &ldquo;Gender: From Boxes to -Ness.&quot;</a></p> <p>So nothing that follows is my trying to say this model can&rsquo;t be improved, or doesn&rsquo;t have issues. It can and it does. That&rsquo;s what we&rsquo;re doing here!</p> <p>Okay, so wrapped cozily in that weighted blanket caveat, <strong>does the Genderbread Person exclude genderfluid people? Or not make room for gender fluidity in general?</strong></p> <p>I don&rsquo;t think so.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s why:</p> <p>The Genderbread Person is a tool for helping ourselves and others understand gender &ndash; both our own, others&rsquo;, and gender in general. Like any tool, it&rsquo;s efficacy is really dependent upon how well you use it.</p> <p><em>Just because you&rsquo;ve only used a hammer for building, doesn&rsquo;t mean it&rsquo;s not great at dismantling. That&rsquo;s what those little claws on the back are for.</em></p> <p>Now, of course, the Genderbread Person, like any other tool, has its limitations.</p> <p>For example, the Genderbread Person <strong>is not</strong> a great tool for depicting comprehensive sexuality (that&rsquo;s why we have <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2016/05/sexualitree-model-of-comprehensive-sexuality/">the Sexualitree</a>).</p> <p><em>Try as you might, a hammer is never good for screwing. That&rsquo;s why we have screwdrivers.</em></p> <p>However, <strong>it is</strong> well-suited to include and depict genderfuid people and gender fluidity, if you use it right.</p> <p><strong>The problem, in this case, isn&rsquo;t the tool itself, but the ways a lot of people might be using it.</strong> And what is the &ldquo;right&rdquo; way to use the tool in this case?</p> <p>Well, you just have to have two things in mind if you&rsquo;re using Genderbread to describe yourself, or include bits of instructions when you&rsquo;re using it with others:</p> <h2 id="1-youre-not-limited-to-a-single-dot">1. You&rsquo;re not limited to a single dot.</h2> <p><strong>You are invited to see yourself as existing anywhere along any of the continua (or scales). Including (and especially!) in multiple places!</strong></p> <p>For example, on the gender identity scales, you might see yourself as existing <em>between</em> the roughly 20% point and 60% point of &ldquo;woman-ness&rdquo; <strong>and</strong> 40% point and 80% point on the &ldquo;man-ness.&rdquo;</p> <figure class="aligncenter"> <img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/genderbread-person-fluid-identity-scales.jpg" alt="A 0-100 scale for woman-ness with a circle drawn from the 20% point to the 60% point and a scale for man-ness with a circle from 40% to 80%" class="shadow" /> <figcaption>How you might plot that example.<figcaption> </figure> <p>Those ranges being the wiggle room for the fluidity you notice in your experience of gender. (Sidebar: if that&rsquo;s actually how you see yourself, we should be friends, because ditto: that&rsquo;s how I&rsquo;d plot my Genderbread 😘)</p> <p>Or maybe you&rsquo;re a firm 0% on man-ness, but identify with different amounts of woman-ness depending on your situation.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s how a friend of mine plots their gender identity scales, to describe themself as above &ndash; a &ldquo;genderfluid femme&rdquo; way of doodling gender:</p> <figure class="aligncenter"> <img src="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/img/posts/genderbread-person-fluid-femme-identity.jpg" alt="An X at 0 for man-ness, with a big circle covering most of woman-ness, and an asterisk anchored at about the 30% mark" class="shadow" /> <figcaption>The asterisk represents how they most often feel, but the circle is range of fluidity.<figcaption> </figure> <p>Drawing ranges (e.g., with circles, brackets, or lines) are one of the ways you can represent fluidity on the Genderbread scales (btw: not just on Identity, but also on the Expression, Sex, and Attraction scales). But it&rsquo;s not the only way.</p> <p>For example, I&rsquo;ve seen other people in workshops use different letters (instead of a dot or a star or asterisk) to represent the different ways they experience things based on different situations. Like an &ldquo;F&rdquo; for &ldquo;around family,&rdquo; an &ldquo;M&rdquo; for &ldquo;me, by myself,&rdquo; and an &ldquo;S&rdquo; for &ldquo;in society.&rdquo; This method highlights the fluidity of how being around other people, or in certain situations, can affect how we experience gender.</p> <p>And the list goes on. These examples aren&rsquo;t meant to be exhaustive, or even clear &ldquo;Do it this way&rdquo; instructions, but meant to highlight the broader point I made above:</p> <p>If you&rsquo;re not just limiting yourself to one dot on each continuum, the Genderbread Person is a great starting place for understanding and depicting gender fluidity.</p> <p>Now, on to the other point.</p> <h2 id="2-your-place-on-the-scales-can-change">2. Your place on the scales can change.</h2> <p><strong>However you see yourself in regards to the Genderbread scales of Identity, Expression, Sex, and Attraction right now &ndash; today, in this exact moment &ndash; isn&rsquo;t set in stone. If you doodled yourself into that diagram again in the future, it&rsquo;s totally okay if your answers change. And they most likely will!</strong></p> <p>This hits at the more long-term time frame aspect of gender fluidity, and also at the societal evolution of gender itself.</p> <p>A lot of people think that filling out the Genderbread Person is like filling in a birth certificate: it&rsquo;s a one-time thing. Well, it&rsquo;s not a one-time thing.</p> <p>You&rsquo;re welcome to update how you see yourself based on how you&rsquo;ve changed, or how society has changed, or how you haven&rsquo;t really changed but you just finally see yourself for who you are &ndash; however often as you like!</p> <p>Revisit the Genderbread, and <em>your</em> Genderbread, as often as you&rsquo;d like. I always smile when I hear from people &ndash; in workshops or <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/reply/">via replies</a> on this site &ndash; that how they&rsquo;ve seen themselves in the scales of the Genderbread Person has changed since last time they considered it.</p> <p>You&rsquo;re not doing it wrong if it changes, or if you&rsquo;re not sure if how you see yourself now will represent how you see yourself in the future.</p> <p>Like Bryce Maryott <a href="https://www.facebook.com/metrosam">commented on Facebook</a>, &ldquo;I&rsquo;ve always thought that the markings should be done in pencil because (in my experience) they change over your lifetime anyway.&rdquo;</p> <p>The Genderbread Person is best filled in with pencil &ndash; literally or metaphorically.</p> <p>So maybe it is <em>just like</em> a birth certificate*: you can update it later if you realize the scribbles that were scribbled don&rsquo;t do a good job of representing who you really are.</p> <p>(*This parallel is true in many countries and states, and generally true as a &ldquo;should&rdquo; &ndash; it <em>should</em> be this way with birth certificates)</p> <h2 id="creativity-is-encouraged">Creativity is encouraged.</h2> <p>Take your marker out and have fun. Blot out things that don&rsquo;t apply for you, and draw in the things you need to better show up. Color outside the lines.</p> <p>This is as much a statement about gender in general, as a suggestion for how to use the Genderbread Person as a tool.</p> <p>And, of course, this applies directly to using Genderbread to represent and understand genderfluid experiences, identities, expressions, and more.</p> <p>I don&rsquo;t think that, if you&rsquo;re following the above rules (or, more importantly, not adding restrictive rules that need not be added), the Genderbread Person is inherently exclusive of gender fluidity. It&rsquo;s not a hammer trying to be a screwdriver in this regard.</p> <p>But maybe I&rsquo;m wrong.</p> <p>If, after reading this, you still think the Genderbread Person isn&rsquo;t inclusive of genderfluid people, please let me know! And share your ideas for how it can be improved. That&rsquo;s what the reply button is for.</p> Brand New Site for a Brand New Decade https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/news/brand-new-site-for-a-brand-new-decade/ Wed, 04 Dec 2019 11:49:05 +0000 https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/news/brand-new-site-for-a-brand-new-decade/ Sam Killermann <p>I created <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/about/">the IPM site</a> in 2011 not knowing what I was doing, or what to expect. Hundreds of millions of downloads, shares, and resources distributed later, as we&rsquo;re about to embark on a new decade, I figured it was time to recreate this site. Bonus: now I <em>kinda</em> know what I&rsquo;m doing.</p> <p>Let&rsquo;s start with some context.</p> <p>The short version of the history of this site goes like this:</p> <p>It started purely as a way to tell people about the comedy show I was performing on college campuses (named &ldquo;It&rsquo;s Pronounced Metrosexual&rdquo;). Then I started writing articles here, which quickly took off, and it turned into a comedy show + free online resource (and I had millions of people coming to the site not even knowing it was a comedy show). That chimera existed until last year, when I stopped performing the comedy show, and this site became solely a free online resource.</p> <p>Throughout that decade, I redesigned this site four times (all four versions powered by Wordpress), to respond to the changing nature of what it was, and to keep improving based on the best practices I was learning about. The site was hacked countless times (and brought down a few).</p> <p>Because of the traffic the site gets, combined with the threat of hacking, I was booted from hosting companies, donated servers, and migrated hosting companies about 10 times. Each time more expensive than the last, with the most recent bill running between $400 and $800 per month. That&rsquo;s a lot of money for me, someone whose personal income fluctuates around the poverty line.</p> <p>For a long time, performing the show (and being paid honoraria for doing so) was able to cover the costs of providing this free online resource to millions of people every year, in every country on Earth. But when I stopped performing the show last year, I <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2018/09/the-state-of-this-site-or-funding-online-work-in-2018-an-infographic/">turned to my readers</a> for direct support.</p> <p>And now we&rsquo;re here, at the end of 2019, and the end of this weird-to-describe decade (the 2010s?), wrapping up a year that itself has lasted <em>at least</em> four decades (#ThanksTrump), and you&rsquo;re reading these words on a brand new version of the site.</p> <h2 id="whats-new-pussycat">What&rsquo;s new, pussycat?</h2> <p>If you&rsquo;ve ever visited IPM before, the difference will be obvious (<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20191028041633/https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/">here&rsquo;s what the site looked like yesterday</a> for the unanointed). But the change goes WAY beyond what you&rsquo;re seeing on the surface.</p> <p>This is the first version of the site that I&rsquo;ve built to actually do what you all seem insistent upon using this site for: sharing <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/">articles</a> and <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/downloads/">downloading .PDFs</a> bajillions of times.</p> <p>I&rsquo;m no longer using <a href="https://wordpress.org">Wordpress</a> &ndash; or even servers, in the traditional sense &ndash; to power this site in a traditional sense. I created it using what&rsquo;s called <a href="https://jamstack.org/">JAMStack methodology</a>, which I&rsquo;ll suffice it to say &ndash; at the risk of losing you in the weeds &ndash; is <em>very different</em> from Wordpress (<a href="https://github.com/killermann/ipm">here&rsquo;s the code</a>, for the curious). And good different.</p> <p><strong>IPM can now, finally, handle huge spikes in traffic</strong>, and those traffic spikes won&rsquo;t bring down the site or cost me a ton of money in server overages. For the past few years, I&rsquo;ve had this really weird problem where I actually don&rsquo;t want new articles to go &ldquo;viral,&rdquo; because I literally couldn&rsquo;t afford it. Now that IPM is serverless, this is longer a problem.</p> <p><strong>IPM finally works well in the parts of the world where internet bandwidth is sparse.</strong> I have always been amazed at the traffic the resources I post here get from remote, isolated parts of the world.</p> <p>For example, a few years ago I realized that I had a big constituency of readers in Egypt, many of whom lived in the middle of the Sahara, and <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2014/04/sam-killermann-in-cairo/">I went to visit them</a> and learn about how they were using this site, articles, and edugraphics. It was an eye-opening trip in a million ways, one of which was I realized how much of a pain in the ass it was to load my site on a phone in the desert. Or to download a .PDF that was 5MB for local organizing and protesting.</p> <p>That&rsquo;s no longer a problem, now that I&rsquo;ve left the bloated and slow architecture of Wordpress, and reduced my overall data delivery by about 90%.</p> <p>The benefits of this change are two-fold: people can access the site faster regardless of where you are in the world, and the carbon footprint of the site is significantly reduced (Yes, websites create greenhouse gases &ndash; and most of them are an unrecognized nightmare on this front).</p> <p><strong>And speaking of access, most importantly to me, IPM finally works for all users, especially those of you who are blind or visually impaired.</strong> <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/web-accessibility-blind-users-dominos/">Accessibility is a huge problem on the internet at large</a>, and maybe you&rsquo;d think websites about <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/categories/social-justice">social justice</a> wouldn&rsquo;t contribute to that problem. But we do.</p> <p>Literally <em>every</em> social justice / feminism / activist website I visit regularly is inaccessible. I&rsquo;m not going to name names here and put people on blast, or do a little <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2019/01/hypocrisy-theatre/">hypocrisy theatre performance</a>, but you probably go to a lot of the same sites. And some of them <em>perform</em> accessibility, but none of them actually do it. Because they&rsquo;re not prioritizing accessibility &ndash; they&rsquo;re prioritizing search engines or clicks or donations or something else. IPM was no different yesterday.</p> <p>I&rsquo;ve always <em>said</em> IPM was accessible. Because it&rsquo;s free, <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/uncopyright/">uncopyrighted</a>, and I don&rsquo;t have paywalls or other barriers preventing people from accessing the content here (operating outside of capitalism an within the <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/gift-economy/">&ldquo;gift economy&rdquo;</a>). But it never truly was.</p> <p>For the past 5 months, as I was building this new site from the foundation up, I had a cabal of accessibility activists and IPM fans who are blind in my corner. I&rsquo;d send them a new version of the site, they&rsquo;d point out all the things I messed up, then I&rsquo;d google a ton, learn how to fix it, fix it, and send it back.</p> <p>And now, today, IPM is finally accessible in every sense of the word &ndash; or at least as close as it&rsquo;s ever been. This was the primary guiding light for the redesign of this site. There&rsquo;s still room for improvement, and improving is the goal. With that in mind, please <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/contact/">let me know</a> how I can make this site more accessible to you, and I&rsquo;ll get on it.</p> <p>TL;DR: <strong>All of these new things can represented in this one image</strong>, which is the new <a href="https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse">Google Lighthouse</a> score for IPM:</p> <p><img src="https://i.imgur.com/eKcVSJF.png" alt="100 for performance, 100 for accessibility, 100 for best practices, 100 for SEO, and progressive web app enabled"></p> <h2 id="whats-not-new-pussycats">What&rsquo;s not new, pussycats:</h2> <p>Beyond the site&rsquo;s digital architecture itself, not much is changing.</p> <aside class="heyHeyLook wednesdayEmail"><p><span class="icon">💌</span><strong>Most Wednesdays</strong></p><p>I publish new Social Justice, Gender, & Sexuality Resources.</p> <a class="button" title="Join my mailing list" href="http://bit.ly/2MmE28c" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Get the Email.</a></aside> <p>This is still a ship with a single crew member, and I&rsquo;ll be the one writing <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/articles/">all the words</a>, doodling all <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/edugraphics/">the doodles</a>, creating <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/courses/">the courses</a>, publishing <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/books/">the books</a>, replying to your <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/reply#source=Brand%20New%20Site%20for%20a%20Brand%20New%20Decade">replies</a>, and coding the code (and <em>learning how to code the code</em>, because <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/about/about-sam-killermann/">my background</a> and degrees are all decidedly <em>humanities</em>, so this computer science world is my exploration of an alien planet).</p> <p>Everything here is <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2013/11/uncopyright/">still uncopyrighted</a>, and yours to print, use, improve, and share however you&rsquo;d like.</p> <p>I still think <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mw7Gryt-rcc">John Mulaney&rsquo;s &ldquo;What&rsquo;s New Pussycat?&rdquo; bit</a> is one of the funniest stories ever told on stage.</p> <p>And <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/2012/05/5-reasons-im-a-social-justice-all/">I still love you.</a></p> <p>Let me know what you think about the new site by hitting that reply button below, or <a href="https://www.itspronouncedmetrosexual.com/contact/">sending me an email</a>.</p> <p>Here&rsquo;s to another 10 years of learning, teaching, activism, advocacy, and trying to make the world a more socially-just place,</p> <p>&lt;3 sK</p>