Monthly Archives: January 2013

On Gendered Oppression

Memo To The Social Justice Community At Large: the privilege/intersectionality model of how oppression works? Is a model. It’s an oversimplification that people use because the actual reality of how oppression works is way too complicated to talk about. It is not the Ultimate Truth Of How Oppression Works Forever and Ever. 

Therefore, there are dynamics of how oppression works that the privilege/oppression model doesn’t talk about at all.

Let’s talk about prison. Men of color are overwhelmingly more likely to go to prison than any other group, far disproportionate to their numbers. The white men who go to prison are usually poor. While women of color are also more likely to go to prison than white women, and poor women than rich women, the problem so vastly disproportionately affects men that it’s not even funny.

Or anti-queer hate crimes. Of the sexual-orientation-related hate crimes recorded by the FBI in 2011, nearly 60% were a result of the perpetrator’s hatred of specifically gay men. (I checked a couple previous years to make sure this wasn’t a fluke and, yeah, it hovers pretty consistently around ‘slightly more than half.’) You can argue that the FBI’s data-collection strategy is fucked (I’d be happy to edit this to include a correction if it is), but assuming that it isn’t, gay men are disproportionately likely to be victims of a hate crime.

This just doesn’t work in the privilege/intersectionality model, which predicts that women of color will face more racism, poor women more sexism, and LGB women more homophobia, than their male counterparts. But– at least in certain aspects of these oppressions– men clearly and objectively have it worse. 

Some people have decided to patch this by creating an alternative “female privilege,” where women have not-going-to-prison privilege and not-being-beaten-up-for-being-gay privilege. The problem here is that if you are a white middle-class-or-above man… you generally don’t have to worry about going to prison! You may smoke your weed in peace! If you are not gay (and not the kind of feminine that assholes think means ‘gay’), your chance of being beaten up for being gay is nigh infinitesimal. The prison-industrial complex and anti-gay hate crimes do not affect straight white middle-class-and-above men any more than average.

The solution here is just to throw out the privilege/intersectionality model in this particular case. It just doesn’t work here. And when you throw out the model that’s making everything more confusing, the only statement left is “gay men, men of color, and poor men face forms of homophobia, racism, and classism that are affected by the fact that they’re men.” Which is perfectly logical, sensible, empirically validated, and supported by both statistics and lived experience. 

(And that’s the NSWATM post I never got around to writing while I was there.) 

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Brain Chemicals Are Not Fucking Magic

Some people lose all sense of rationality as soon as a brain chemical is mentioned. For instance, in the middle of an otherwise good Cracked article:

It makes perfect sense — the emotion we call “anger” or “hate” is a part of our evolutionary fighting instinct, so to prepare us for the battle, it pumps us full of anesthetic to block the pain and releases the pleasure chemical dopamine to ease our fears about fighting the tiger/tribesman/drunken Red Sox fan who is threatening us. Incidentally, these are the same two chemicals that are released when you smoke crack.
Quite simply, hate gets you high.

…No, that really doesn’t follow.

Dopamine exists for a reason. It is not the Give People Highs system. It is thought to be related to pleasure and a sense of well-being and to be a sort of “reward system” for doing things that helped your ancestors survive and make more babies. It’s like giving yourself a Skittle every time you answer an email. In this model, taking cocaine is like eating all the Skittles without answering any emails at all; it circumvents what the dopamine system is supposed to do. Saying that everything that involves the dopamine system is addictive is literally saying that every time you feel happy about or want something you’re addicted to it.

Of course, it’s possible hating people gets you high! But you have to answer all kinds of questions like “how much dopamine is released?” and “is ‘high’ a useful model to deal with hatred?” and “do people seem to get high when they hate people?” You can’t just declare it so because dopamine is involved.

Or consider oxytocin:

Why would it matter to us young men that oxytocin, which is released in women’s bodies on occasions of physical intimacy, is known to cause emotional attachment and increased trust?… The release of oxytocin that our intimate behavior with a woman could stimulate may have effects well beyond what she imagined when consenting to such physical intimacy.  The imbalance in emotional connection between us men and women in these circumstances in which there is no committed relationship can easily cause emotional issues that are hard to foresee.

Things that are true: oxytocin is released from women’s bodies (and men’s bodies) after sex. It’s also released during childbirth, breastfeeding, snuggles, and hot showers. (The general rule of oxytocin-related discussion is to replace everything they say with “hot showers” and see if it still makes sense.) Oxytocin is also possibly related to increased trust, reduced fear, increased empathy, and improved memory, particularly for social information.

But here’s the thing: oxytocin has been released in women’s brains when they have sex since long before we knew oxytocin was a thing. Assuming that she’s not a virgin or very inexperienced, if a woman tends to get attached to men after sex, she would have already recognized that and incorporated it into her “should I have casual sex?” decision-making process. The fact that getting attached after sex happens because of a brain chemical rather than because of crazy random happenstance doesn’t actually change anything.

Further exciting example, this time related to music:

As chills grow in intensity, bloodflow increases between areas of the brain associated with euphoria-inducing vices like food, sex, and drugs.

Or to put it another way: “like drugs, food, and sex, music makes people happy.” Music causes physical changes in the brain, like literally everything else on the planet, because all of thought and emotions happen through physical changes in the brain. This is not remotely exciting, important, or news.

“This emotion happens in this circumstance because of this brain chemical!” actually doesn’t give you any new information about the emotion itself. It tells you interesting things about how the brain works and what assorted chemicals in the brain do. But knowing the physical process behind something doesn’t mean that the thing is any more valid, important, or real than it was before we knew the physical process.

I’m not saying that knowing the physical process isn’t important. It is, of course it is, and neuroscience is an incredibly exciting field with some groundbreaking discoveries. I am a fan of science reporting about “scientists find neurotransmitter that plays a key role in getting people to want things.” I am just not a fan of “brain chemicals secretly mind control women into falling in love.”

So I suggest an exercise. Every time you read something that mentions brain chemicals or brain scans, rewrite the sentence without the sciencey portions. “Hate makes people happy.” “Women feel closer to people after sex.” “Music makes people happy.” If the argument suddenly seems way less persuasive, or the news story way less ground-breaking… well. Someone’s doing something shady.

Notes Towards A Theory of Cultural Appropriation

I’m white and while I have been educating myself about racism I still have a lot of things to learn. So please don’t consider this post a “this is the be-all and end-all of what cultural appropriation means”; this is just my current understanding of cultural appropriation, which I am presenting in the hopes that someone will tell me where I’ve wandered off into the wrong direction. (Also, I’m going to be using the abbreviation “POC,” which stands for “people of color.”) 

The definitions of cultural appropriation I’ve found are usually something like this: “Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else’s culture without permission.” This is a bit difficult to understand to me, because I find it hard to grasp how you could get permission from a culture. You can only get permission from people in that culture, some of whom will be all “dude, whatever, don’t give a fuck” and some of whom will be all “the fuck? Why are you doing that? Give that back!” (Even the Seminoles, who have an actual tribal government the Florida State University Seminoles talked to to clear their mascot with, have dissenting Seminoles who are pissed as fuck about the whole matter.)

I think that part of the problem might be that when people use the term “cultural appropriation” they mean one of about four different things:

1) Dressing up as or incorporating in your art or naming your sports team after an offensive stereotype of POC. This is the definition that comes up every Halloween when people insist on dressing up as Pocahotties and Injun Braves, and when Victoria’s Secret decides to put Native American headdresses on their models. I am not sure why people think this is okay. Do not dress up as an oversexualized stereotype of the people your culture fucking committed genocide against. Similarly, this point covers Native American sports team mascots, Urban Outfitters “Navajo” bracelets, etc.

I’m… also not really sure why people call this cultural appropriation, because to me it seems like a pretty cut-and-dried case of “offensive stereotypes are bad.”

2) Do not use sacred shit from religions you don’t belong to. This is basic respect. People take their sacred shit very seriously, and it greatly upsets them when you use their sacred shit in ways other than the approved-of one. Do not upset people for no reason. (This guideline also applies to non-POC religions, of course, but very few people put on Mormon temple garments because they look cool.)

3) Do not use things associated with POC in ways that reinforce stereotypes of POC. For instance, do not do Tantra because it is spiritual and exotic and ancient and totally sexy. It is a common Orientalizing stereotype that Asian people are exotic, spiritual, and the heirs to ancient wisdom; thinking that Tantra is awesome because it is exotic ancient spiritual wisdom from the East is playing into that exact stereotype.

Similarly, white-people dreadlocks are problematic. Black people still face all kinds of racist shit– from white people trying to touch their hair to losing out on jobs– if they style their hair the way it naturally grows instead of making it look like white hair; it is incredibly fucked that black people having their hair the way it naturally grows is considered “rebellious.” Many black people are, understandably, somewhat irritated when white people decide that it is cool and countercultural to have dreadlocks. For black people, dreadlocks are a rebellion against a racist society and a statement of pride in their race; for white people they’re… um, cool because, like, black people, man.

4) Don’t steal POC’s ideas and cultural artifacts without credit. See also: the entire history of rock music. Rock music was deeply influenced by black musicians– blues, gospel, vocal groups. So of course white men like Elvis and Bill Haley ran off with their ideas and got all the credit for being musical fucking geniuses. Because, y’know, white. Similar things happen with everything from nail art to feminist theory.

It’s difficult to figure out a way to deal with this toxic dynamic. “White people, you don’t get to wear nail art or listen to rock music” is a suboptimal solution. I think ultimately the solution is to be very intentional about pointing out your influences and promoting the careers of talented POC within your field and seeking out POC’s work instead of assuming that what white people are doing is the only interesting culture that’s going on. (For instance, it would be incredibly dishonest and fucked of me to pretend that my thoughts on class and race within feminism and polyamory aren’t influenced by Audre Lorde, or that my thoughts on masculinity or love don’t come straight from bell hooks. I am not original.) But I’m not sure if that’s enough to end that dynamic.

So. That’s what I have. Your thoughts?

A Plea To The Trans Community

Can we please invent a non-cissexist word for “the sex that has ovaries, ova, breasts, a uterus, a vagina, female-typical hormones, and two X chromosomes” and its converse?

The ones most cis people use, I think, are either “female-sexed” or “female-bodied.” (That is, the cis people who are aware and cool enough not to use “woman.”) The really obvious problem here is that while female can be used to refer to someone’s sex (it’s in the dictionary and everything!), it is also the adjective form of “woman.” “Woman-bodied” is not remotely the term we’re looking for. Women have all sorts of bodies, sometimes including penises and Y chromosomes.

Also we’d have to use the term “females” a lot, which would make the “if someone refers to women as females they’re a douchebag” heuristic way less effective.

When I complained about this on Twitter, someone suggested “female assigned at birth.” Unfortunately, that term (while useful) doesn’t help in this situation. Lots of intersex people were assigned female at birth. Many people who were female assigned at birth transitioned and now have male-typical hormones and/or no uterus.

The other really obvious workaround is “cis female,” which is one I’ve used in my own writing. The problem is that there are many trans people– including myself– who have uteruses, vaginas, breasts, et al. It doesn’t make sense to exclude us.

The final workaround that most people end up using is “people with vaginas” or “people with uteruses.” This phrasing sucks. It is so fucking clunky. Literally the only reason anyone uses it is because no one has managed to think of something else. Imagine changing a phrase like War on Women– dramatic, alliterative, punchy– to War on People With Uteruses. The ear cringes.

There are, of course, many more sexes than the standard two we are taught to believe in. What I don’t understand is why no one in the trans community has managed to come up with a name for the standard two. Please, guys. You’ve done it before. “Cis” is an awesome word! Make the magic happen again. Please stop making me say “people with X,” it is gross and ugly and makes me want to cry inside.

On The Word Queer

No argument I have encountered is quite as pointless and virulent as the argument about who gets to count as queer. The most virulent subform of this argument is, of course, whether asexuals count as queer. Seriously, fun game: go on a relatively popular feminist/queer forum, ask whether asexuals are queer, watch everyone scream at each other, eat popcorn.

I really do not have a stake in this argument at all, since as far as I can tell the question of whether asexuals are queer makes absolutely no difference to anything in the actual world. Besides, a lot of people seem to have this idea that there is an Objective Real Definition of Queer and if we argue about it enough we will, through rational argument, discover the Platonic Form of Queer. That’s not how words work though. Words just mean what everyone agrees they mean.

Therefore, I have decided to list out every definition of queer that I have heard, with rationale, in the hopes that everyone will agree that they are all equally valid definitions that mark categories which actually exist and we can just pick the one that’s most suitable for whatever conversation we’re in.

Reclaimed Slur: This definition suggests that, since “queer” is a reclaimed slur, it should only be used in a badass “your insults cannot hurt me, I accept who I am” way. The problem with this is that people who use this argument very rarely carry it to its logical conclusion. “Queer,” as a slur, is primarily used against men who have sex with men and trans people who were male assigned at birth. Male crossdressers have more right to reclaim “queer” than I do.

LGBT: This definition says that “queer” refers to lesbians, gay people, bi people, and trans people. Like, maybe you want another word because you’ve been using the word LGBT too much? That can be a thing. “Queer”, in this definition, reflects the shared history of LGBT people and the fact that the oppressions they face (homophobia, transphobia, biphobia) are intimately linked. (Ace hate, on the other hand, is to the best of my knowledge more more closely related to rape culture and compulsory sexuality than to homophobia or transphobia.) This is the definition that most of the people who are on the “no, asexuals cannot say they’re queer” side use.

LGBT and also asexuals and aromantics: This definition says that since asexuals are also a minority sexual orientation, it makes sense to classify them in the same group as LGB people (the other three minority sexual orientations). Therefore, queer means people with a minority gender history or sexual orientation. (Some people include aromantics, who don’t experience romantic attraction to people, under the queer umbrella as well.) 

A broader version of LGBT (plus possibly asexuals): This is the definition I like! There are lots of fuzzy edges around LGBT. Straight men who sometimes sleep with guys when they’re drunk. Women who fall in romantic love with people of all genders but only want to have sex with men. People who thought they were trans but ended up detransitioning. The fuzzy edges are in a very different position from those of us who are actually LGBT; however, it’s also important to acknowledge the ways in which we have similar lived experiences. Of course, this definition comes in asexual/aromantic and asexual/aromantic-free versions. (The fuzzy edges of asexuality are demisexuals and gray-asexuals.)

Gender and sexual minority: Everyone who has a minority gender or sexuality! This is really broad, because it includes not just asexuals, aromantics, and the fuzzy edges around LGBT, but kinky people, poly people, butch women, femme men, and basically anyone who takes at least a sentence to explain their gender or sexual orientation. This category can be justified because of the massive overlap between those groups, and because all these groups face people who think that their sexuality or gender is, for some reason, something other people are allowed to have opinions about.

People who are gender-revolutionary and question the gender binary: The queer writer Kate Bornstein has been known to define sex-positive trans-supportive straight people as “queer heterosexuals” and talk about how everyone who admits that their gender is in some way transgressive or ambiguous (as is everyone’s) is queer. I suppose it is indeed nice to have a word for that.

The subgroup of any of the above definitions that views their sexuality as political. Basically, the Kate Bornstein definition of queer, except limited to LGBT people, or LGBT people plus asexuals and aromantics, or gender and sexual minorities, or whatever. Queers are people who view their genders and sexualities as weapons against the cisheteropatriarchy and who probably write a lot of really terrible poetry about the matter. (By this definition, I’m not queer!)

Against Asshole Atheists

Religious people: This post mentions the nonexistence of certain things the majority of religious people believe exist, such as God, an afterlife, the supernatural, and any nonhuman force that rewards good and punishes evil in the world. If your form of religion doesn’t believe in those things, that’s very nice for you and I’m not talking about you. If you are upset at the suggestion that these things don’t exist or that the majority of religious people do believe they exist, I suggest you look at Cute Roulette instead, because this post will not make you happy.

Today I would like to complain about the phenomenon of Asshole Atheists. Let me be clear here: when I talk about Asshole Atheists, I’m not talking about people who are loudly atheist. While some people have a tendency to consider you an asshole if you say, loudly and without caveats, that God doesn’t exist, I don’t think that’s true. Of course there are times in which it’s inappropriate to bring up the topic of God’s nonexistence, ranging from small talk to funerals. But

Signs that you are an asshole atheist: If your description of the deity involves the words “invisible,” “sky,” “daddy,” or “fairy.” If you make pedophile jokes about Catholic priests. If you appropriate the struggles of Christian queer people and Muslim women to prove that religion is always and everywhere terrible, without acknowledging the queer people and women who use their religion to defend their liberation. If you believe there is absolutely nothing good that religion has ever done ever, no good moral teachings in the Bible or Koran or Torah or Bhagavad Gita, no Dorothy Day or Oscar Romero or liberation theology (can you tell I’m an ex-Catholic?). If you describe religious people as stupid, blind, deluded, or sheep. You get the idea.

Some people seem terribly smug about being right about one thing. It makes me wonder if this is, in fact, the only thing they’ve ever gotten right in their whole lives.

Atheists are not necessarily any more right than other people. There are atheists who believe vaccines cause autism, homeopathy has any benefits other than the placebo effect, alien abductions happened, the stars control our destinies, alternative medicine is superior to regular medicine because it’s natural*, sexism is over, “I’m colorblind, I don’t see race,” mentally ill people are monsters, and if poor people just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps they would stop being poor. All of those things are factually wrong statements that huge numbers of atheists believe!

Religion is a result of the same cognitive biases that affect every human everywhere. Do you think you’re free from confirmation bias, you who get all your news from fifty people on Twitter who agree with you in every particular? Do you think you have never assigned a mind to something that doesn’t have a mind, you who constantly plead with your computer or your car when it isn’t working right? I’m sure you don’t believe in the Just World Fallacy, which means you’ve never said that with hard work and sacrifice anyone can get ahead, or that cheaters never prosper, or that if that horrible thing happened to someone they must have done something wrong to deserve it.

For, lo, all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of rationality.

And let’s be clear here: I’m not exempting myself from this. I’m wrong. I’m wrong a lot! I’m incredibly cognitively biased! I’m a regular victim of the planning fallacy, and reactance, and the unit bias, just to pick a few random examples. I have been wrong about things in the past (look through the NSWATM archives if you’re curious) and I am wrong about some things now. (Hell, I might even be wrong about some of the things I said were wrong up there.) I am on a lifelong quest to try to be less wrong about things.

The world is a million-question test. The problem with Asshole Atheists is that they look at the first question, bubble in “No” on “is there a God?”, lie back in their chairs, and are like “I got an A!” That’s very nice for you, getting the first question right. Now it’s time to deal with the rest of them.

*Some alternative medicine treatments have been shown to work for some illnesses; mindfulness meditation is actually part of the standard, evidence-based treatment for borderline personality disorder. In addition, it makes sense to take advantage of the placebo effect for certain illnesses, such as colds or mild depression or pain, and altmed may offer the best placebo effect with fewest side effects. Therefore it is not correct to state that alternative medicine is less effective than regular medicine in all circumstances.

Why I Hate The Word “Sex-Positive”

Okay. I’m sex-positive, I guess. I absolutely adore the work of Heather Corinna, Jaclyn Friedman, and Cliff Pervocracy. I think slut-shaming is bad, rape culture is worse, people doing what they want with their own bodies is awesome, and everyone’s sexuality is a beautiful and unique snowflake.

But dear God I hate the word.

There are lots of things I’m positive about! I’m consent-positive! I’m autonomy-positive! I’m people-being-happy-positive! But I’m not really sex-positive. I’m more sex-neutral, really. If people want to have sex, then they should have sex; if people don’t want to have sex, then they shouldn’t have sex. As long as everyone involved is happy, I don’t really feel entitled to have an opinion about whether other people have kinky lesbian orgies or hold each other’s sleeves because they’re not yet emotionally ready to hold hands.

Like. I feel like I should make a list. Things That Are Totally Ethically Neutral As Long As They Are Performed In An Emotionally And Physically Healthy, Consensual, and Honest Way, And That You Should Not Feel Like An Inferior Person For Doing:

  • Celibacy
  • Monogamy
  • Polyamory
  • Kinky sex
  • Vanilla sex
  • Casual sex
  • Relationship sex
  • Sexless relationships
  • Refusing a sex act you don’t like
  • Having orgasms
  • Not having orgasms
  • Having sex for pure physical pleasure
  • Having sex as an expression of love
  • Having sex to make someone else happy
  • Having sex for money
  • Having sex for literally any other conceivable reason
  • For that matter, not having sex for literally any conceivable reason
  • Having anal/oral/PIV sex
  • Not having anal/oral/PIV sex
  • Watching porn
  • Not watching porn
  • Being so uncomfortable with porn that you choose a partner who doesn’t watch porn
  • Masturbating
  • Not masturbating

The problem here is that sex-positivity… well, it kind of sounds like it means “sex is awesome and you should have sex.” It’s bad enough when people assume that “sex-positive” means “sex is awesome” and then start talking about how they’re not sex-positive because they think women should have the right to refuse anal sex, pegging, or learning to squirt. But it’s really awful when people look at the word “sex-positive” and are like “of course I’m sex-positive! I love sex! Sex is awesome! All those prudes and virgins just need to loosen up and have more of the kind of sex I like!”

And here’s where I start complaining about The Ethical Slut (which is a great book, and one I highly recommend). The Ethical Slut defines a slut as ”a person of any gender who celebrates sexuality according to the radical proposition that sex is nice and pleasure is good for you”; thus, it implies, anyone can be a slut. Except… for a lot of people, sex isn’t nice. There are rape and sexual assault survivors who don’t think of sex as nice (as well are survivors who do, of course). There are people who have internalized slut-shaming to the degree that they can’t see sex as “nice” for themselves and while, yes, that’s bad, they are hardly the enemy. And, most of all, there are people who think sex is boring, or who liked it for one part of their lives and not anymore, or who would really just rather have a cup of tea and a book.

Dear God sex-positivity has such potential as a movement. I want a movement that talks about accepting what you don’t want as much as it does about accepting what you do. About “some people like sex just fine without orgasms, some people even prefer sex without orgasms, and that’s fine” as much as “learn how to have an orgasm! Now how to have a more intense orgasm!” About prude-shaming (internalized and externalized) as much as slut-shaming (internalized and externalized).

Why Discussion-Based Classes Can Suck My Silicone Dick

(Ooooh, yay, I can swear in titles again!)

I absolutely love discussion. There’s nothing better than hanging out till 4 am exploring different facets of an idea, critiquing each other’s ideas, learning from another person’s lived experience, synthesizing different worldviews into a more full and nuanced whole, finding out what Judith Butler was saying from someone who could actually put up with that asshole’s terrible writing.

So, of course, I picked a school that advertised its seminar-style discussion-based classes.

As it turns out, discussion has roughly the same relationship to discussion-based classes as brie does to Extruded Cheese-Based Snack Product.

When you talk about interesting ideas with people, they’re generally people you choose to talk to. Of course, you don’t want to just talk to people who agree with you, that’s boring. (In fact, one of my favorite people to argue with is a libertarian moral realist Kantian.) But you get to filter for things like “has insight and interesting ideas” and “is willing to change their mind when presented with new evidence” and “listens and attempts to understand your point of view.”

In a discussion-based class, you are talking to an arbitrary collection of random students. (Occasionally, in upper-level classes, they may even be an arbitrary collection of random students from your major.) This means you have to put up with That Guy who thinks of themself as a great philosopher, as shown by their tendency to interrupt social psych class with questions like “what is love really? Like, on a spiritual level?”

Furthermore, there’s a certain level of trust and mutual respect you need for a really good conversation about ideas. The kind where you’ll wait and see where someone’s going with that absolutely ludicrous notion, or ask for clarification instead of just assuming that someone meant something utterly idiotic. The kind where you can point out flaws in your own position or defend the other person’s, because both of you know that this is not a game where you win by proving the other guy wrong (whether they are or not). The kind where either you have similar worldviews or you understand why and how your worldviews are different, so you don’t run into the rocks trying to explain things to each other. 

It’s really hard to get that kind of trust in a discussion-based class unless everyone knows each other really well already (which is uncommon, especially if you have classes with asocial cockends like me).

In any given class, there are a couple people who don’t want to be there. The class fit their schedule, or it’s a requirement for their major or a distribution requirement, or their best friend is taking it, or they got dropped from the class they wanted to take at the last minute, or they have an enormous crush on the professor, or whatever. Those people are likely to be utterly uninterested in the topic and, thus, have very little of interest to say about it. But since the class is partially graded on participation, they have to speak up anyway. People being forced to talk about things they don’t care about is a recipe for conversational disaster and lack of insight. 

In addition, in any class, at least half the people did not do the reading. (These probably include the uninterested people, but also a bunch of other people who are lazy, disorganized, depressed, taking six other classes and supporting themselves so they don’t have time for this bullshit, or more interested in parties than studying.) In normal discussion, you can simply explain the author’s point and move on; in addition, since you’re basically familiar with what people have and have not read, you can just talk about the things both of you have read. But since we’re all participating in the collective fiction that everyone has done the reading, no one is allowed to explain the reading to the people who didn’t do it or decide to talk about something everyone has read instead.

An Introduction to Neurodiversity

Neurodiversity is essentially the radical notion that not everyone has a brain that works the same way. The concept of neurodiversity originated in the autistic rights movement, possibly because autism is one of the easiest-to-see examples of “not broken, just different,” but it applies much more widely.

Some people have brains that work better than other people’s– they might be able to grasp mathematical concepts much more easily or easily visualize complex three-dimensional shapes. Some people have brains that work less well than other people’s– they might feel sad constantly for no reason or constantly hate themselves. Some people’s brains work better in some ways and worse in other ways– ADD has benefits (multitasking like whoa!) and downsides (“where did I put my keys again?”). Some people’s brains aren’t better or worse at all, just different– for instance, autistic people or trans people.

The problem for all these groups is that society is set up for the norm. People assume that neurodivergent people work the way everyone else does, and that when they object to a food or physical touch or a room they’re just being fussy and need to learn to put up with it. Schools and workplaces are often very reluctant to offer accommodations that will help people do their work because it would be “special treatment.” Friends, family, or romantic partners of neurodivergent people are often complemented about how brave and strong they are for putting up with neurodivergent people. Lots of people think of neurodivergent people as monsters, with “awwww so inspirational” condescension, or as neurotypical people who are just pretending to be neurodivergent. All of this creates a lot of unnecessary trouble for neurodivergent people.

Here’s the thing: people are different. Different people have different needs. For instance, I need people not to yell at me, I need classes that move relatively fast, I need to have directions written down instead of told to me verbally, and I need specific training about how to deal with my emotions. As long as these needs are met, I’m fully capable of talking about things I did wrong, not getting bored, following directions, and not exploding into a sobbing pile of “I AM THE WORST PERSON ALIVE.” My needs are not any less real because they are different.

People’s refusal to acknowledge neurodivergence hurts people. Neurodivergent people are very often told that they’re lazy or broken instead of being taught coping mechanisms for their neurodivergence. Even when they’re taught coping mechanisms, they’re often not about having a happy and functional life while neurodivergent, but about how to pretend to be normal so you don’t threaten or upset people.

Incidentally, that also provides a neat solution to the whole “but we are overmedicating people and medicalizing ordinary variation!” problem. Medicalizing ordinary variation is only a problem if you think the purpose of treatment is to make people normal. So you have one side going, “We’re fine with you turning those people normal, they’re really weird! But some of those people you’re diagnosing with things are practically normal already. We don’t want everyone to be totally the same, just same enough that we don’t feel threatened or have to change anything to accommodate them.” And the other side goes, “Yes, but if we try to make all the people normal, then we get more money! Braindrugs for everyone!”

Telling people their experiences are real, helping them find people who are like them, teaching them coping mechanisms for their neurodivergence (which may include medication, but doesn’t always), helping them find accommodations… all of those are good things which the mental health system could do. Sometimes it even does them.

Finally, one of the big mistakes people make with the neurodivergence model is that they assume that because a lot of the trouble that comes from being neurodivergent comes from lack of accommodation, ableism, stigma, and other badnesses, therefore all the trouble that comes from being neurodivergent comes from those things. For some people, this is true.

On the other hand, there are lots of neurodivergences that lead to people hurting themselves or others, losing touch with consensus reality, or being unable to function in everyday life even with accommodations, and those pretty much suck balls. (Those are the ones I call “mental illness,” usually.) It is okay to acknowledge that some ways people are different suck; it’s not okay to treat people worse because of it.

Pro-Equal Marriage Is Not A Fucking Privileged Position

I am so fucking tired of shit like this:


[Cartoon of gay and straight couple doing normal things like cuddling and shit, with caption "Gay Marriage: Why The FUCK Is It Illegal?" Commentary on side: "Let's queer this shit up. If equality = assimilation count me OUT. I am NOT normal. And I am fucking proud. Rad queer pride. Gay marriage: Why the FUCK is it the priority?"]


[Protest sign that says "Sleeping on the streets or walking down the aisle? It's time to start prioritizing LGBT youth."]

Obviously, I’m not saying that LGBT youth homelessness isn’t a serious issue; it is. So are employment discrimination against LGBT people, violence against LGBT people, access to trans health care, and HIV/AIDS. But there is this bizarre tendency among some people to believe that marriage only matters to rich cis gay men who want to have a giant floofy wedding and be just like everybody else. That being pro-equal-marriage is a “privileged” position and people who are really aware of social justice issues don’t care about it.

Noooooope. Let us review some of the advantages (for Americans; non-Americans will have different advantages) of marriage!

  • If your same-gender spouse dies, you can’t get Social Security survivor benefits; if you are not the biological or adoptive parent of your child and the biological parent dies, you don’t get Social Security survivor benefits to take care of the kids. This disproportionately affects poor people, since rich people are less likely to need Social Security benefits to make ends meet. 
  • The government gives tax breaks to couples who are raising children. If your child isn’t your biological kid or adopted by you (and adoption by an LGBT person can be hell in a lot of states), you don’t get those tax breaks, which means you have less money to take care of your kid. Again, affects the working poor a lot more than it affects the rich.
  • Employers are not required to offer family leave to people so they can take care of a sick, injured, or disabled domestic partner or family member of a domestic partner. This disproportionately affects disabled people, since– hey– turns out we need more caretaking than abled people do!
  • Spouses of people in the US can immigrate to the US. Your same-gender lover? Doesn’t count as a spouse! Like a lot of immigration issues, this disproportionately affects the poor (who can’t afford lawyers to work through the immigration bureaucracy) and people of color.
  • Employers who offer health care for domestic partners get taxed more than those who just offer it for spouses, which makes them less likely to offer health care to domestic partners. They’re also not required to offer former employees continued coverage for domestic partners the way they are for spouses. While you’re pretty privileged if you have employer health care, this still hurts the middle class more than rich people. Not to mention how necessary health care access is for disabled people!
  • Turns out you can get a lot of the same rights as a married couple if you hire a lawyer to draw up the contracts. Guess who can’t afford a lawyer? Poor people!

I realize that social justicey people don’t like talking about disability and poverty, because poverty and disability aren’t cool and sexy issues that you get all kinds of cool points for talking about. But they matter. It matters when you run the risk of never seeing your life partner again because neither of you can immigrate and you can’t afford a plane ticket. It matters when you can’t get leave to take care of your partner who’s dying of cancer or just out of the mental hospital. It matters when your partner dies and while mourning them you have to find some way to make ends meet without the Social Security checks you’d been relying on.

It also helps that a lot of the people criticizing “assimilationism” are young. A lot of the benefits of marriage are things like Social Security and parenting and family leave, things that young people usually have no lived experience with. It’s easy to think that marriage is just about “being the same as the breeders” when you’ve never experienced any of the ways it isn’t.

Furthermore, if you talk about the end of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell as a concern of super-privileged queers, and don’t talk about how the military is one of the few options for poor, rural people to make a middle-class income, I will fart the word “intersectionality” in your face.

P. S. First dude! As a polyamorous nonbinary queer sex worker who has a lot of Words to say about the way our culture constructs relationships, very few of them kind, I am probably as “anti-assimilationist” as you. But you know what? I want to get married, I want to help raise children, and even if I didn’t I stand in solidarity with those who do because there is no fucking wrong way to be queer. I refuse to limit other people’s choices so you can feel super-special and revolutionary because of whom you want to bang.