Video Post: Assumptions

Crazy

I am an atheist.  As a fairly open and active atheist, I am exposed to a lot of arguments for, against, and about religion.  There is one particular idea that crops up in these arguments rather frequently that disturbs me, and unfortunately it comes from my own group.

My fellow atheists, I would like to talk to you about “crazy”.

The word crazy is a fairly common descriptor for just about anything a particular individual disagrees with or finds incomprehensible.  In the case of atheism, that would be religion, and there are two main ways I have seen religion and religious people described as crazy.  The first is a plain comparison between religious beliefs and mental illness, for example readers may be familiar with “The God Delusion”, and the other is more mindless: the speaker is simply accustomed to declaring things they don’t agree with to be “crazy” (which, again, is fairly common).  There are a number of things that are seriously wrong with this, and I am going to try to go through them in the order in which I think readers will care.

 

1) You sound like an idiot.

This is especially the case when you use “crazy” as an ad hominem attack, calling a religious person crazy rather than a religious idea.  When you describe anything as “crazy” what you are really saying is that you don’t have any legitimate arguments against it (this is always the case with ad hominem, so I’m just going to assume we’re calling ideas crazy from here on).  In a debate, you are signaling to your opponent that they have won, because you have nothing left to say.  “Crazy” is a cop-out here: it gives no information about what is wrong with the idea or doctrine in question.  Which is sad because many of the things I’ve seen described as “crazy” are actually serious problems—religiously motivated bigotry and terrorism, pro-life ideology, views of women and sexuality, etc.—that should be criticized for the things that are actually wrong with them.  I realize that there is no short hand way to talk about the problems with many of these issues, but in my mind that merely underlines the importance of those issues (and in any case, I am vehemently against arguments that can fit on a bumper sticker).  If you are going to criticize an idea, doctrine, or even a person, do so, but you have to actually criticize it.  “Crazy” is lazy.*

*that rhyme was entirely unintentional, I’m sorry.

 

2) You are misinterpreting both your opponent and “crazy”.

If a person decides that god has commanded them to blow themselves up and take a building full of people with them, that person is probably not crazy.  If a person believes that homosexuality is evil and that women are subservient to men because a religious text says so, that person is probably not crazy.  The vast majority of religious people, whether or not they subscribe to any of the fucked up ideas I have mentioned so far, are perfectly sane.  And if you are going to argue against religious doctrines or ideas, you need to acknowledge that.  When you call a religious person or idea “crazy”, you are dismissing them without really considering the full impact of the ideology.  These ideas have been thought through, reinforced within communities, and endlessly justified; they are not the result of mental imbalance or impairment and they need to be taken 100% seriously if they are to be combated, something you are not doing if you believe them to be “crazy”.

Let’s look at a real, medical definition of mental illness.  Mental illness is “Any of various conditions characterized by impairment of an individual’s normal cognitive, emotional, or behavioral functioning, and caused by social, psychological, biochemical, genetic, or other factors…” (American Heritage Dictionary)  The “impairment of functioning” part is the most important.  Unfortunately, the perception of mental illness in the general population is that crazy people are violent or malicious, when in reality someone with a mental illness is more of a danger to themselves than anyone else.  Someone with a mental illness may have difficulty with relationships, coping with stress, holding down a job, or basic self-care practices.  While most of the screwed-up ideas that are given religious justification are problematic in society, “crazy” is personal impairment that needs to be dealt with individually.  It is true that people can experience significant amounts of distress in relation to some religious doctrines, which could then qualify as mental illness of some sort, that does not make the doctrine itself “crazy”, only that specific experience of it.  The way that we deal with societal issues is very different from the way that someone would deal with a mental illness.

Calling a religious person or idea “crazy” shows a misunderstanding of the vast gulfs of difference between these two things, and that limits your ability to affectively deal with the doctrines that are actually problematic.

 

2.5) Religion is not schizophrenia.

I see this specific comparison often enough to give it its own section.  This seriously underlines the lack of understanding and general knowledge about mental illness.  The main reason for this is the miscasting of a religious idea or experience as a “delusion” or “hallucination”.  First of all, ecstatic experiences can be fairly easily induced in people who have no mental illness at all, so we do not need to posit a “crazy” explanation for religious experiences.  Secondly, belief in god is non-falsifiable (look it up if that term is unfamiliar to you), most delusions are blatantly and obviously false.  In fact, from the little reading I have done * people with schizophrenia can often distinguish between their delusions and there bona-fide religious or spiritual beliefs.  Also, delusions and hallucinations do not necessarily have to be distressing; I have heard of people with fairly benign delusions (believing that your record player affects the weather is not going to have a huge impairment on your day-to-day functioning—this example comes from a friend who spent some time in a psych ward and keeps in contact with some of the people he met there), and I have even heard of people with schizophrenia missing their hallucinations after they begin treatment (many mental illnesses are, after all, just coping mechanisms that have gone horribly wrong).

People are not brought up with a delusional belief, one is not raised to experience hallucinations. Once again we see that religion is a social phenomenon, while the mental illness it is compared to is personal.  I encourage readers to do a little basic research on schizophrenia and other mental illnesses to better understand the vast gulfs of difference between them and ideas that are simply incorrect or screwed up.

*I would like to stress very strongly at this point that I am not an expert in mental illness, I just read a lot of literature and blogs on the subject matter.  Take that as you will.

 

3) You are reinforcing the stigmatization of mental illness.

When you say that a particular thing is crazy, what you are really trying to express is that you don’t like it.  You are expressing your distaste by making a comparison to something else already considered negative.  It is a shorthand, and a fairly lazy one at that.  So saying “religion is crazy” is actually saying is “I take issue with religion and so I am going to equate it with this other thing that is stigmatized”.  It is exploiting the existing negative connotations given to mental illness in order to attack something totally unrelated.

The purpose behind fighting screwed up religiously motivated ideas and doctrines is to make people change their minds, religious beliefs are something that is chosen.  But mental illness is not chosen and can only be changed with a lot of work on the part of the individual (and an amount of outside support and possibly the aid of medication).  To equate mental illness with the chosen doctrines that you take issue with is to reinforce the idea that people with mental illnesses are dangerous and/or malicious.  In order to call anything you don’t like or agree with “crazy” you have to endorse the idea that crazy people are bad, and so does the person whose ideas you are calling crazy, resulting in  a double reinforcement of the stigma when that person reacts negatively.

Mental illness should be responded to with empathy and support, not censure, an effort you are unknowingly undermining whenever you refer to something you don’t like as “crazy”.

 

Even if you don’t care about any of that, and I realize that unfortunately many people will not, the use of “crazy” is not useful in a criticism of anything.  Just stop using it this way; it’s doing the opposite of helping in so many different directions it’s not even funny.

Video Post: Listen to the Story

Trying something new. This was also posted on redsociology101.wordpress.com

None of the Above

I’ve been having difficulty with labels recently (well, always but specifically over the past month). I have had a lot of trouble with labels over the years, and thought that I had finally found something that worked for me, but now I am no longer sure…

I’m good with pronouns, I love the pronouns I have chosen for myself and they really work when people bother to actually use them. There is a blip when it comes to the general usage of them, as a generic “any person” pronoun rather than “specific person who is non-binary”, but I’ve written about this before so I’ll let it lie for now.

No, the issue is the overall gender label. There are many ways to announce non-binary-ness: androgyne, neutrois, gender fluid, bigender, and the one I’ve taken to using, genderqueer (among many, many others). It works best for me out of the available vocabulary for a number of reasons, but I don’t think any gender-word neologism will be truly adequate to express my identity.

The whole thing with gendered labels is, I’m not really sure what they’re for. We call someone a man or a woman and that’s supposed to be representative of their identity somehow but I don’t really know what that label is supposed to be actually communicating. But the point is that it is communicating something, people are getting information from this and presumably those who identify as male or female find this communication adequate. I suppose it denotes a general group that an individual feels they belong to, like any label, and defines spaces that they can move through (bathrooms, etc.).

So, with that, what does a word like “genderqueer” communicate? I don’t mean within the trans-whatever community and in lgbTQ spaces, I mean to people that I interact with on a regular basis that might not have encountered the word before. What do I do if I have to define it? I say, “it means I don’t identify as male or female”. Great, that’s accurate, but how useful is it to me or the other person? First of all, if someone is unfamiliar with the concept, this doesn’t mark me as part of any community or define my spaces, it marks me immediately as an outsider with no community or spaces at all. I’ve even encountered extreme absurdities like “well then how do you pee” (because gender = your junk and if you’re not a man or a woman you have nowhere to put your urethra apparently).

What does it say about my ability to operate within society if the only way I can talk about myself is “I’m not that, or the other thing, but something else that I can’t specify”? The answer can’t be “make a social space for people of your gender” because I can’t communicate what my gender IS, I can only say what it is not. And it’s like that for all the non-binary terminology I’ve encountered. I’m very dissatisfied with the whole thing. “Man” and “woman” might be vague approximations but at least they’re accurate, the terms I use don’t even point people in the right direction. I’m not even sure where the right direction is, because I can’t talk about this with MYSELF, I only have vague pre-verbal sensations that I can’t articulate.

What I’m saying is I need a new word, something that joins me to a community but doesn’t just mean “that grab-bag of other things”. I don’t think one exists yet.

This confusing mish-mash brought to you by the confusion pudding in my brainpan.

My thougts on gender

The more I operate within the trans/queer/activist/stuff region of the interblags, the less I like the word “gender”. It really seems to mean everything and nothing at the same time. What definition you use is based on your political/theoretical leanings, and not so much on communicating a particular idea. I’ve seen, and participated in, conversations in which everyone had different (and occasionally mutually exclusive) definitions of gender and assuming everyone else was using the same definition as them. This is when yelling begins, generally.

The problem for me is that I have certain experiences that cannot be described unless I identify them as “gendered” experiences. I have a part of my mind, nestled somewhere behind where my identity is kept*, that reacts to certain stimuli, almost like a basic instinct. The stimuli it deals with specifically are things like pronouns, socially gender-specific words, etc. and it really doesn’t seem to have many or any other functions. It is the part that gets happy when someone uses my preferred pronoun and the part that gets angry when someone calls me “he” or “sir”. It’s only job, apparently, is to help me parse these simple and omnipresent social cues, specific to me. I have no name for this impulse, even though it seems pretty important and is difficult to ignore, so I have been calling it my “gender”. This meshes a little with what I’ve heard other people say about their genders, though this is usually vague stuff like “an internal feeling about one’s identity as male or female (or neither/both/kitty)”.

*I’m sorry if my internal mind references get/are confusing, I’m neither a psychologist nor a neurologist so I have no vocabulary for this stuff. It will all be extra subjective and metaphorical.

The main important factor of the “gender” feeling is that things that are socially coded male or female are rejected: male :( >, female :( >, ??? :D > But this doesn’t hold true for all things our society assigns to masculinity and femininity, just the formalized interactions based around that dichotomy. I wonder what this means.

Unfortunately, to make things extra-special complicated, I have another experience that matches up with other people’s definitions of “gender”. I sometimes describe myself as “gender fluid”, but the internal impulse that I described above is most definitely not fluid. What I’m talking about is more a sensation that is halfway between internal identity and external gender expression. It sometimes has the standard binary markers of “male” or “female”, but there are other less obviously “gender” modes such as “punk”, “goth”, and “drag queen” that alternate in this region of my mind-face*. This sensation seems less based on internal sources of identity and more on temporary or situational identification with some external gender exemplar or prototype. Sometimes the source of these prototypes is pretty clear (read: “punk” and “goth”) and others do not seem to align with societal definitions of the terms I feel like using at all (I am at my most “female” when lounging shirtless in torn up jeans). This is less a “parse the world around me” thing and more a “how I want to present myself to the world” thing.

*I’m sorry again. This term totally makes sense in my head but I’m not sure I explain it. It’s like, where the “gender” feeling from up top is, but way forward, in my face.

The fun part? I’m not totally sure these two things are wholly separate, even though they operate completely differently. For example, when I am feeling “female” (the domain of the expressive feeling) I am more open than normal to female-coded social interactions (the domain of the internal impulse), though still not as comfortable as I am with non-gendered codes. Maybe they interact, maybe they’re two sides of one particularly confusing coin, I don’t know. I wonder how much my upbringing and general experiences influences the content/form of these two feelings, and even if it influences their apparent separation.

I feel like these things need different names, other than just “gender”, but there’s not any really satisfying vocabulary out there that I’ve seen. The first impulse might be “brain sex” or something, but that makes a neurological statement that I as a layperson am not comfortable making, and the second might be “gender expression” but that really doesn’t fit particularly well. Either or both could be “gender identity”, but that phrase is so vague and has so many active definitions as to be essentially meaningless. I’m just pretty stuck between two seemingly contradictory sensations of being N-gendered (N standing for some gender that isn’t coded by society, but is coded by my mind for me personally) and of being fluid gendered where I bounce between obvious social constructions.

So, one or both of these definitions/sensations will clash with other definitions of gender out there. I’m honestly OK with that, because I have no evidence whatsoever that my experiences are remotely common, and my “gendered” feelings might just be mine and other people have different processes. Hopefully some of my hypothetical readers understood some of this free-associating stuff. If you did, leave me a comment because I’m totally confused.

The word of the day is sex

I’m fascinated by words. Words are more than just a dictionary definition; they carry minute connections and nuances coded into the lexicon. This is sometimes helpful, carrying complex cultural information, but sometimes it hinders us. Language is influenced by usage, and things we don’t talk about get the shaft lexically.

Which brings me to sex. The word sex is very loaded in our society. It is a very simple word, in many ways, but hugely complex in others. The main interest, for me, is the range of connections this word makes. Just take a look at the varied definitions of “sex”*:

1) One of the two categories male or female (both Wordnik and the OED define it in binary terms almost exclusively in all the variations on this definition, though the OED does admit the usage of the term “third sex” dating back to 1820).

2) The act of sexual intercourse.

3) The genitals.

*Just the noun. There is a verbal form that means “to assign someone to either the male or female category”, that I think sort of folds into definition one.

Does this weird anyone else out, just a little? Not even getting into the fuzzy line between the first definition listed here and the definition of “gender” (which has way too many convolutions for me to address right here), the connections being drawn here are very clear. It should be no surprise that our society links maleness and femaleness with genitals, we deal with that all over the place (even though we don’t actually use genitals to determine what sex/gender we think people around us are [hopefully, otherwise it would be creepy]). The thing that trips me up is the connection with sex as an activity.

This is how our society views the function of our sexed bodies. Men and women equal body parts equal baby making. So we use the same word for both things. But we also build up complex social constructs surrounding masculinity and femininity. What do those gendered stereotypes, often associated with (and occasionally pseudo-scientifically justified by) physical or biological sex, have to do with the act of procreation. Or sex in general, for pleasure or emotional connection or any of the myriad reasons people have sex. Are any of these things connected with sex as an activity?

What about our bodies even? The interaction between sexuality (who one is attracted to and sexual feelings about one’s own body and identity) and sexed bodies is not necessarily straightforward. I’m just free-associating here, and I’ve wandered into strange territory already.

The use of sex to mean male/female predates the intercourse definition by quite a bit of time (OED citations give it ~1400 for the former and ~1900 for the latter). So, are we to assume that the one use developed from the other? We had some other word to describe the sexual act (or maybe we just danced around the subject, talking about “knowing” or something), and then began using a word we otherwise used to describe our bodies (and social constructs created around those bodies).

This is murky to me. Are we automatically sexualizing ourselves just by referring to ourselves as men and women (or male-bodied and female-bodied)? Or are we obfuscating an act by confusing it with the equipment we use (sometimes) to perform it? Both? I’m not sure I’m comfortable with either of these explanations.

And what about the idea of the third sex? This label has been forcibly applied to homosexuals, mainly, back before even the first attestation of “sex” being used to describe the activity. So this linking between our bodies and what we do with them goes back a ways. Different sexual activities necessitates a different designation from male or female (and while “third sex” is not applied to LGB people so much anymore in Western society, there is the common idea that gay people are not “real” men or women or that they are trying to be the “opposite” sex).

Using the same word to describe two (very different) things speaks of a powerful cultural connection between them. Do we really need to link these ideas to each other so strongly? Can we disentangle our descriptions of our bodies from our sexual activities? Does it matter? What happens if we disconnect the two? I don’t feel that my body is inherently sexual, though it can be when I want.

I’m in unfamiliar waters with this post. My experience with my body has mainly been to disconnect it from the societal projections placed on it, so my instinct is to disconnect it from the lexical projections as well. I feel like the many, many ways there are to experience one’s body and one’s sexed and sexual self are stifled by this connection. But maybe the usage of the word, in the activity sense at least, is flexible enough to accommodate all of these experiences. Not the male/female definition, that’s about as rigid as it gets, “third sex” stuff not really helping and mainly being a tool for othering.

I think I tried to take on too much with this. There is so much cultural baggage placed on our bodies and our sexual activities that it’s impossible to parse them all. I think I’ve partially unearthed some of my own baggage just trying to organize this, and not very successfully either, judging from how rambly I’ve been this whole time.

I’d love to hear other people’s take on this; I find stuff like this pretty fascinating (obviously).

Woe is them, they cry little black tears.

“[They] can only win if they can get us to accept and internalize the second-class status they propose for us. To accept our own marginalization, to be quiet, to stand down and keep our heads down. To live in fear, instead of acting, with courage, out of hope. They do not know us.”

While this looks like the statement of some oppressed group speaking out about their treatment in society, it is actually National Organization for Marriage’s Brian Brown complaining about having to live in the same country as us queers. Because other people being allowed to disagree with you is discrimination doncha know? What really burns my ass here (help, I’m flaming!) is the complete co-opting of anti-oppression rhetoric basically word-for-word. Ten bucks says he saw this on a gay rights website and copy/pasted it into his statements.

Ugh, I’ve seen this bullshit before and I am sick of it. Dear Fundamentalist Christians: it is not the first century anymore. You are not being fed to lions. This is 21st century America, Christians basically run the damn country. Get over yourselves.

And, as I’ve said before, if you can’t handle interacting with people disagreeing with you, move to a remote island and leave the rest of us alone.

New People and Invisibility

When was the last time I posted here? Well…I’m back from my unintentional hiatus and I have things to say (hopefully interesting things).

So, I’ve basically been a hermit lately, but the other day I attempted to socialize and had an experience that reminded me why I find meeting new people so uncomfortable. There was this social gathering thing at my mother’s apartment building that I went to (free food was involved) and I got to talking to some of the other tenants. None of these were people I expected to see again frequently or soon, since I’m going back to school in a couple weeks, so the whole thing was pretty low pressure.

The problem event was brief, so much so that by the time I realized I was uncomfortable the speaker was already several sentences ahead and it was too late to say anything. The people in the group I was with were discussing some movie* specifically the actors involved*. Several women in the group mentioned the attractiveness of one of the male characters; then one of them motioned to me and one other member of the group who was apparently male and stated that we might have found the female lead more interesting.

*Cowboys and Aliens, not important which is why I’ve clarified down here. Also, I’m crap with names so I don’t remember who was discussed.

This is a pretty small thing, but it was kind of alienating at the same time. This is the sort of action that is insignificant to most people, but stands out wildly to me. I feel like there’s very little I can do in these sorts of situations. I think I’ve mentioned it before, it’s very hard to correct someone without interrupting or derailing the thread of the conversation (and it never got back around to a subject where I could correct her assumption easily). This is not helped by the fact that I am pretty socially awkward, and that these situations always throw me for a loop even though they’re not really surprising. These were nice, mostly liberally minded people, they were not cracking gay jokes or being homo- or transphobic, but they still managed to make me feel like I was excluded from the conversation, albeit in a small way.

Theoretically I’m “out”, at least about my sexuality. But this really drives home how much of an active process that is. What was a casual conversation suddenly, and for a brief moment, became very high stakes for me. Even if I had been prepared to say something, I had an infinitesimal amount of time to decide how these people, whom I had just met, would react to my being queer and how to present that information. And there’s really no cure for this as far as I can see, all of the steps involved in heterosexual assumption are involuntary and people don’t like to analyze these sorts of processes. I don’t even really feel justified making a big deal about it, all of the arguments people make about assumptions being “normal” start bouncing around my head.

But the truth is it is a big deal, even tiny moments like this one. One instant of assumption moved me from cheerfully (if awkwardly) interacting with a group of people to being uncomfortable with the whole group. Do people get used to this? Because I can’t, it feels too much like being back in the closet.

I am not diseased

There are many comparisons that get made in explaining trans people and transition to the questioning masses. The concept of having it be a disorder almost makes sense, if one is going for the “not under our control” thing, and with the justification for medical intervention. That particular one gets a lot more use by people who hate trans people, but hey. Either way, I’m not to pleased with it.

The use of trans as mental disorder is one that gets used as anti-trans rhetoric all the time, probably due to both the listing of transsexualism in the DSM and the lovely ableism that allows us to dismiss anything we don’t like as “crazy”. I’ve seen transgendered identities compared to everything from body dysmorphia to schizophrenia to anorexia (no, seriously).

When trans people (and pro-trans arguments) make the “disorder” argument it’s usually physical, because that’s what people are trying to change about themselves. There’s a movement for reclassifying transsexualism as, essentially, a birth defect, where the outward sex and brain sex are mismatched. There’s some science behind this, I’d like a nice longitudinal study myself but this direction of inquiry is relatively new. A lot of it also looks at explaining transgenderism itself, rather than looking at the development of gender identity in humans in general, which reeks of pathologization. But you can’t just straight up compare it to diseases like cancer and heart disease. Whatever the cause, transgenderism and transsexualism are usually if not always self-diagnosed conditions. We have to convince other people that our self-conceptions are legitimate, even the doctors, it’s not a diagnosis where some medical professional doles it out and you get recommended or assigned treatment. (The article I link even suggests that trans people aren’t in control of their own transition, that it’s all the doctors, and it’s written by a trans woman. I have no idea.)

As I see it, etiology is a question for the scientists, for activism and social interaction it does not matter. My body is healthy, my gender is not disordered. There’s a mismatch to be sure, but how I manage that mismatch is entirely in my control. I am not diseased, and I don’t need ham-handed justifications for my existence.

Webcomickery

So, in a continuing theme of “it’s summer and I’m still unemployed and have nothing to do”, I’ve been reading a lot of webcomics lately. I’m not enjoying it as much as you’d think.

Trying to find legitimately trans-related comics on the web is a chore. We’re talking about a genre that thinks that the “trans” in transgender stands for “transformation.” Even in print comics it’s all body swapping and “huh I seem to have woken up with tits let me grope myself”. Sludging through all that to get to the ones that actually feature transgendered characters doesn’t produce many gems. This is kind of a personal preference thing, but it really seems to me that every single LGBT related comic follows the same pattern, and it’s not one that’s very good. Slice-of-life genre stuff about queer kids in high school (or more rarely, college/university) who do and talk about queer things all the time. I guess this is OK if you like that genre, and it can be done well, but as far as I can tell it is literally everything. Actually, LGB protagonists are featured in a number of science fiction, fantasy, and horror comics where the tropes of those particular genres drive the plot, but inevitably any comic in those genres claiming to be trans-related is just another transformation comic. Usually, and especially with transgendered characters, if a protagonist is queer, queerness eats the plot. What I would really like to see are comics with trans protagonists that are about something other than transition, ones that flesh out the characters and show that trans people care about more than just hormones. I could totally take the utter proliferation of slice-of-life high school transitions if I could actually find something else once in a while.

Speaking of hormones and transitions: pretty much every trans character in any LGBT comic is a transsexual who is transitioning or trying to transition. No non-ops, few post-ops, and few nonbinary identified people. When nonbinaries do show up, they aren’t recurring characters and are there to be mocked (or at the very least this was a poorly thought-out joke). Even comics that acknowledge that nonbinary-identified people exist fail to have anything that remotely resembles my experiences. Which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing if the transness of it all didn’t eat the plot of every one of these comics. When you’re only talking about trans people, it helps to develop them as actual people.

I know what the obvious response to this is; I would totally be making my own webcomics if I thought I could draw worth a damn (my writing isn’t much better then mediocre either). Check back in a few years to see if I’ve learned to draw faces, and then we’ll talk.