The Unit of Caring

Anonymous asked: I don't feel like you actually understand terf positions or have read their arguments? Each time the topic has come up your responses have involved strawmen, which I find very disappointing. (I'll continue this in several asks so if some of them you don't want to publish you can just respond more generally)

Hey! I’m going to answer here rather than on your subsequent asks because they don’t actually address any of the issues where I disagree with TERFs, and I expect this’ll be more helpful if I start by explaining where I do.

If you ever visit a racist internet forum or user group or whatever, you’ll notice that they do the same thing. They talk about every single gruesome crime committed by a black person or an immigrant or a Muslim, anywhere in the world. They seek these out, and they find them, because there are millions of people in these groups and in any group of millions of people you can find something gruesome and horrible. They make a sensationalist post about it, and they pass it around. If you spend any time on the forum, you will be bombarded with hundreds, maybe thousands, of posts about horrible crimes committed by black people and Muslims and immigrants. 

This is, of course, really clever. Even if you know that a group of millions of people will have some bad ones, hearing in detail about the bad ones all the time will slowly rewire your intuitions. You’ll start to expect, when you see a member of the group, bad things, because your brain has thousands of examples of bad things. You can try to consciously correct for this, but in my experience it’s actually nearly impossible to consciously correct enough; when you’re getting tons of “data” your intuitions will be shaped by it, even when it’s a lie and you know it.

I categorically reject any group of people which does this. If a group does this, I block them all and leave and never come back. It is a fundamentally wrong thing to do. It can be done against any target; it does not teach truth; all it does is rewire your brain towards suspicion and hatred, and it works just as well whether the targeted group has a higher rate of violence of various types or not. I strongly encourage anyone who recognizes this pattern in groups they’re part of to leave those groups, because this is a horrid tactic.

TERF communities do this constantly. When I’ve tried reading TERF blogs, a large share of the content is - yep - circulating gruesome, horrifying, and detailed accounts of random crimes or acts of bullying committed by specific trans people. You recommended a specific radical feminist blogger in your followup ask. I read through the most recent two pages of posts on her blog, and six of them were either screenshots of a random trans person saying something objectionable or, the classic, breathlessly reported and incredibly detailed account of a single violent crime committed by a trans person.

Doing this warps your intuitions. It is possible to target any group of more than a few thousand people with this tactic, it tells you nothing, and it’s bad. When I condemn TERFs, this is about half of why. 

I have some other major points of disagreement with radical feminism, including with your specific points, and I’m going to make a followup post discussing them. But I wanted to say this first because this is really important to my attitude towards TERF communities. I think that this kind of conduct by any community is incredibly harmful, and I think that the best response for most people to have is to, the first time they run across an extremely detailed description of a specific violent crime committed by a specific person in the hated category, by people who are circulating it to prove Those People are Bad, to go “hmmm, a red flag”. And when they run across the second one on the same page of the blog, to go “this is a community trying to hijack my intuitions in the direction of hating and fearing these people, by bombarding me with gruesome, memorable stories, in a way that works equally well on any hated group of people and has nothing to do with specific features of this one. I am leaving.”

Exception for if the story is about institutional wrongdoing (one person did something, but others covered it up or enabled it), or if the hated group being described is so tiny it’s actually remarkable for it to contain several violent criminals. 

• 14 March 2018
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