The Unit of Caring

safe spaces and competing access needs

Safe spaces are great. Safe spaces are a really important thing. But sometimes I see people talk about them like the point is to expand them outwards and make the entire world a safe space, which sounds great…

and which really won’t work. And the way it fails will hurt a lot of people. 

because say there’s a religious community. It’s fair of them to want a safe space where atheists won’t come in and say ‘these beliefs make no sense’ and 'have you looked at double-blind prayer tests?’

And say there’s a person who was raised in an extremely coercive faith community, and now they’ve decided it’s not true, and they’re in the process of angrily rejecting hateful and damaging things that they internalized as religious teachings. (I know several people like this). 

These people both need safe spaces. One needs a safe space to practice their traditions without people interrupting to say 'none of this is true’, and the other one needs a space to say 'none of this is true!’ and 'I can’t believe I agreed with this nonsense!’ and 'wow look at these double-blind prayer tests!’ What’s disruptive for one person is healing and important and necessary to another. 

If we pick one norm and stick to it (like 'people rejecting the oppressive environment they grew up in is a good thing, and that process can make them emotionally vulnerable and in need of a community, we should welcome that in our safe space!’ or 'criticizing other faith communities makes you a jerk, no doing that in our safe space!’) then we’re inevitably hurting one of them. 

And this isn’t a rare edge case. It’s not like most things are easy cases where we can safely say 'no one anywhere benefits from having a place where this can be said aloud; it ought to be banned from decent human conversation everywhere’. You know the principle that people shouldn’t make fun of weird triggers? Well, on the same principle, no one should make fun of weird needs for safe spaces. And there are lots of weird needs for safe spaces. 

I have an eating disorder and I’m triggered by body positivity stuff (my brain reads it as 'hating your body makes you a terrible person, you worthless piece of goose poop, stop hating your body right now, YOU DESERVE TO BE HATED BECAUSE YOU HATE YOURSELF’.) Does this mean body positivity spaces shouldn’t exist? No, of course not. They totally should. But spaces that avoid all pictures and all language about celebrating and embracing and stuff and instead just unfeelingly give you lots of statistics on lifespan and morbidity (which are constructive and non-triggering to me) should also exist.

I give away as much money as I can possibly afford to and I have an unhealthy reaction to donation requests, because all of these people deserving help exist and I can’t help any of them (and a good person wouldn’t have bought groceries yesterday, she’d have saved the money so she could give it to strangers). Any space that’s safe for people to make donation requests isn’t going to be safe for me.Does this mean donation requests shouldn’t exist? No. They totally should. But it’s okay for me to cultivate a community where I don’t see them. 

Or (and here’s the example I am scared to share) I’m gay. And sometimes I wonder, 'would the world be a better place if gay people didn’t exist?’ Telling me 'wtf is wrong with you’ is really not helpful for enabling me to work through that question. And if I ask it in my campus LGBT center, or on tumblr, it is likely that my need to have that conversation is going to have a big painful collision with someone else’s need not to hear questions like that entertained seriously.

I need people who will think about my question and give me honest answers, to the best of their ability. I won’t be able to get over this question until someone reaches out to me with a genuine spirit of respect and curiosity so we can talk about the answer. 

On the other hand, the needs of other people to not be around serious conversations about whether they deserve to exist is really valid and really important. There should be safe spaces where my question is prohibited. There should be lots and lots of spaces where my question is prohibited, actually. Everyone in the world should have access to spaces where my question is prohibited.

But if my question is prohibited everywhere - if it is a universal norm that no decent human being will have a conversation with me about this - then it will keep lurking in the back of my head, unanswered. Or, even worse, I’ll turn for answers to the people who are willing to ignore this universal norm, the people who don’t care about being regarded as decent human beings, and I’ll internalize the things they are saying because no one else is in that space countering them. 

And if a 'safe space for asking really weird hypothetical questions without being judged’ exists, I can go there and ask, and people will take me seriously and I’ll know that they’re trying to give honest answers. 

The problem is the internet. 

Specifically, given the way the internet works, the boundaries between these spaces inevitably fall down. Here’s one thing that I have seen happen:

[I go to the safe space for people who perseverate on weird hypothetical questions]: Hey, guys, sometimes when I hate myself I think 'maybe the world would be better off without gay people’. And I know it’s internalized homophobia and probably also my depression and self-image problems. But what I need is someone to treat the question seriously -

Bob: Yeah, I perseverate on weird hypothetical questions too. Hmm, so there are a couple ways we can look at it. Firstly, you can try arguments from the diversity of human experiences - but I don’t know, I don’t think that’s very convincing.   [etcetera]

Now, if we have this conversation in private, this ends with me feeling better and me and Bob having had an enjoyable interaction, and everything is good. But if it happens over the internet, there are two separate failure modes, both of which I have witnessed in action, both of which harm people.

Failure mode 1: Alex runs across the forum. Alex is also gay or bi, but they’ve dealt with homophobia in a different way than me.

Alex: Oh, wow. Here are a bunch of people having a casual conversation about whether the world would be better off without people like me in it. Smart, nice-seeming ordinary people who are willing to say things like that. 

Alex has different access needs than me, and now Alex is understandably badly shaken, and feels less safe. This is bad. 

Failure mode 2: Taylor runs across the forum.  

Taylor: Oh, wow. I knew Bob, and I thought ze was a decent person! Everyone who interacts with Bob deserves to know that ze goes around debating whether gay people deserve to exist. I’m going to take a screenshot of the most horrible disturbing thing Bob said, and circulate it so people know not to interact with zem. 

Now Bob, who was just trying to be supportive of me and respect the norms of the safe space for people who perseverate on weird hypotheticals, loses zir friends. 

Even worse, sometimes Taylor says to everyone in the safe space for people who perseverate on weird hypotheticals, “Wow, you guys are all homophobes for letting this conversation happen. Were you really just sitting around while they were dispassionately debating whether gay people deserve to exist? Have you guys ever looked at how to make your community a safe space for people like Alex? You have to stop shit like that, first thing." 

I want to say here that I respect Taylor and I get where they’re coming from. They’re defending people like Alex, and they don’t have a good way of distinguishing 'the safe space for people who perseverate on weird hypotheticals’ from 'the safe space for homophobic jerks’, since there’s not usually a sign on the door and if there were, the homophobic jerks wouldn’t put 'homophobic jerks’ on their sign. They might even put something like 'community for dispassionate discussion of the implications of homosexuality’. There are definitely jerks who do exactly that. Taylor doesn’t have a way to tell. 

But. Still. If the space for people who perseverate on weird hypotheticals goes away, I have a lot more demons in my brain and no realistic avenue for coming to terms with them. Being told I’m a bad person for voicing them definitely makes them worse. 

There’s an easy way to avert the first of these bad outcomes: content warnings! If Bob and I are careful to tag our conversation cw: homophobia or tw: homophobia or something, then Alex doesn’t have to see it and we don’t hurt hir. 

There’s no way at all that I can think of to avert the second bad outcome. Even if Taylor sees our cw: homophobia tag, they’re still going to react exactly the way they did. I mean, putting content warnings on your writing doesn’t make you less accountable for it. This is a shitty situation and I don’t know how to fix it, except to say that people should try not to call to shun other people no matter what you think they said, and that if you are going to accuse them of saying something awful, you had better link to it so everyone can see the context. 

And, the more controversial point: I don’t think the 'safe space for people who perseverate on weird hypotheticals’ should go away. I don’t think it should change its norms like Taylor suggested. I don’t think the 'safe space for people who have a bunch of opinions they’re terrified to air for fear they’ll be called a terrible person’ should go away. I don’t think either of those is co-opting the language of safe spaces, because that is exactly the purpose they’re serving, just providing a different sort of safety for a different sort of need. Those spaces have saved lives, and they deserve not just to exist but to be acknowledged as what they are.

 I think both those spaces will have out-there conversations and it’s quite plausible they will attract bad people; they should work on community norms that solve this, and people who don’t want to hang out around out-there conversations and bad people are totally justified in avoiding them. Warning people off them by saying 'disproportionately high share of bad people, and they’ll occasionally have conversations about whether we should kill all of the animals in the world’ is completely fair. Warning people off them by saying 'they’re monsters who have dispassionate conversations about annihilating every ecosystem on earth’  is… less fair. Tarring them as bad people, and demanding everyone shun them because they’re pro-animal murder? Definitely not fair.

And asking them to adopt a different set of safe space norms, to morph into a community that’s unsafe for their original population and safe for a different group of people?

No. 

I don’t have the answer to any of the problems I raised here, but I’m pretty sure that’s not it. 

• 20 October 2014
• #every single person uses gender neutral pronouns and I am not sorry#tw: all the trigger warnings#um#but seriously#cw: homophobia#cw: eating disorders#cw: body positivity#cw: depression#cw: religion#original sj content
• 1303