Know your pronouns
Chartreuse Flamethrower (who sometimes comments here as Z2) has a really excellent post up about choosing your pronouns correctly. Here’s the crux of the issue:
Pronouns are a big deal for transgendered people. Calling a trans man (female to Male) ‘she’ is at best misinformed and at worst purposefully hurtful and can be a very painful thing. Calling a non-binary ‘he’ or ‘she’ is just as inaccurate, which brings up another problem- the English language isn’t equipped for gender neutrality.
They go on to discuss several options for more appropriate pronouns, and the pros and cons of each. It’s a very insightful and thorough post, while still being concise and understandable. The post title sums it up well in that it is both “an explanation and a request” (for respectful behavior), which is why I think it’s so important to pass this on to my readers — especially those of you who don’t usually encounter, and so probably don’t spend much time thinking about, gender identity issues. It’s definitely worth your time. What are you waiting for — read it!
Not in their control
I’ve been doing some thinking since I read this post over on Friendly Atheist. Hemant Mehta reported on a vote in Goshen, IN to add sexual orientation and gender identity to its list of qualities protected in its anti-discrimination laws. They didn’t—the proposal failed 4-3.
In response to a man who asked in a local news interview, “Where do we draw the line?” Hemant said:
You draw the line in favor of helping people who are being discriminated against for things that are not in their control. That’s what the moral thing to do would be.
It really got me thinking about how some people make the crazy argument that by allowing same-sex marriage, the government is endorsing pedophilia and all sorts of other actually objectionable things. That argument is still crazy, but Hemant’s statement gave me a little bit of insight into where that argument might be coming from. (I say “might” because I doubt that many people are actually thinking it through to this degree. There is some chance that what I’m about to explain is happening on a subconscious level, and in any case, I think having logically sound reasons for our beliefs is important, even if no one has noticed a hole in your logic yet. But I’m getting ahead of myself.)
The point it sounds like Hemant is making is that if a quality is innate to you, you shouldn’t be treated poorly because of it. This is almost true, but it raises some big questions about free will. What about people who were “just born with” violent tendencies or compulsive urges to steal? Is it discrimination to charge them with assault or robbery? In the limited context of this story, it’s being used to say that LGBT orientations are something that people are born with, and nobody chooses what they are attracted to or what gender they identify with. But what about people who are attracted to young children? It’s easy to imagine that they didn’t choose that attraction, any more than people choose what body type or hair color appeals to them most. I have no idea what goes on in the mind of a pedophile, but it seems reasonable to contend that they “didn’t choose it.”
Of course, even if you are sexually attracted to children, we believe you have an obligation not to act on those desires, and it’s okay for society to punish you if you do. And if you were born a violent person (whatever that means), it’s okay for society to punish you if you allow yourself to act on your violent inclinations. But! But! protests the Religious Right. Can’t we make the same argument about homosexuals?
And there we have our problem. Because you can make the same argument. But that was never the real argument in the first place. The difference between homosexuality and pedophilia isn’t that one is innate and the other isn’t, it’s that one is fine and one is bad. There’s nothing actually wrong with homosexuality; it doesn’t hurt anyone in any way. Two individuals of the same gender freely consenting to be in a romantic relationship with each other? That’s great for both of them, and as good for the rest of society as every other stable relationship. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that even if someone has certain brain chemicals that make them want to molest children, acting on those desires still constitutes coercion and assault, and it’s completely acceptable to punish them.
When we make laws about how people should be treated, we have to think about what is good for society (or at least, what society is indifferent to) and what is bad for society. The innateness of a particular quality only comes into play insofar as it means we have to be more careful to be right when we come to a conclusion about its goodness or badness. (See: strict scrutiny.) I don’t know if it’s possible to have a public discussion about discrimination against homosexuals on these terms, but it feels more intellectually honest than simply repeating, “That’s just who they are!”
Think before you speak
An interesting story was brought to my attention by this Penny Arcade comic. Typically, Penny Arcade is about video games and the gaming community (of which I consider myself to be on the periphery), though they do occasionally cover topics of more general interest. This is one of these occasions, and the topic is the Think B4 You Speak campaign which aims to stop people from using the word “gay” as a derogatory term. There’s a news post that goes with the comic that explains what the cartoonists were thinking when they drew this.
I gather from that news post that Tycho is in favor of GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network, which is running the campaign along with the Ad Council) and groups like it, and in favor of their general goal of tolerance of and respect for people regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. I am, as well. I say this up front because I’m wary of being misunderstood (or encouraging readers to misunderstand someone else) on a sensitive topic like this.
The Think B4 You Speak campaign includes some print ads and some radio and TV ads. Three of the print ads they have on their site are structured in the same basic way: a teenager’s face fills most of the background, and text covers their face, saying:
- That’s so “jock who can complete a pass but not a sentence.”
- That’s so “cheerleader who like, can’t like, say smart stuff.”
- That’s so “gamer guy who has more videogames than friends.”
An inset at the bottom of the ad says, “Think that’s mean? How do you think ‘that’s so gay’ sounds? Hurtful. So, knock it off.”
Tycho’s reaction?
…Bigots and stupid kids speak this way expressly to promulgate the root concepts or to provoke a reaction. Telling them to “knock it off,” as this campaign hilariously does, is like exposing your belly to these wolves.
Lexically speaking, the word Gay is a battleground of warring meanings, uses, and baggage. The fact that the slur has retained its power – for all parties involved – is evidence that the conflict is ongoing, and that its destiny is not yet established. I have tremendous support for them in their aim: the wresting of language, which is identity, from the unworthy foe. If you want to hunt this kind of game, though, you need bigger ordnance.
This criticism is an important one. The ads come off as almost wimpy, merely pointing out that people’s feelings are hurt. That’s often the goal, “to provoke a reaction,” to make people feel insulted. The target audience may just think: “So what?”
My take on this campaign, however, would come from a slightly different angle. You might recall what I wrote about the Spread the Word campaign (against the word “retarded” as an insult), basically explaining that there is a negative quality to mental retardation that leads to its use in a derogatory context. For most people who use “gay” to mean “bad” or “stupid,” homosexuality itself is a negative quality. (Sure, there are some people who say it unthinkingly, but my sense is that they are a minority. I don’t know of any statistics on this; maybe I’m wrong. The lines given to the character of Gabe in the comic strip do illustrate basically what I imagine to be typical. He knows what he’s talking about when he says “gay.”) If you go back and read over those poster slogans, you’ll see that they all do refer to negative qualities: being unintelligent or illiterate or unliked by others. They didn’t choose to stop at, “That’s so cheerleader” or “That’s so jock” or “That’s so gamer”—they had to add extra phrases to make the statements actually sound insulting.
The point of this whole thing, as I understand it, isn’t just to stop people from insulting people. It’s to teach people that “gay” shouldn’t be an insult. To achieve that, you need to show that it’s just a descriptor, a part of some people’s identities. Maybe the posters would be better if they said things like, “Ugh, that’s so 27-year-old guy from Michigan.” Really basic, using innocuous qualities, but obviously intending to convey disgust. Then the point you’re making is a bit more clear: how would you like it if someone used your identity as an insult?
Of course, none of this erases the deeply held beliefs that many people have about homosexuals being condemned to hell. And there will probably always be some straight people who feel squeamish about homosexuality, simply because the orientation is unappealing to them. I think the best that society can hope for from this campaign and others like it is to establish that some things are off limits. You might personally be happy that you’re not a different religion or of a different ethnic background, because some of their traditions and customs don’t appeal to you, but that doesn’t make it okay to mock people who do belong to those groups. We need this rule to apply to sexuality as well.
It’s not clear that this campaign, as it is, is counterproductive, though… maybe at worst, just unproductive. Tycho wrote that “the conflict is ongoing, and that its destiny is not yet established.” This is the next phase of the conflict, the next statement in the social dialogue. It doesn’t have to end the conflict, but there’s nothing wrong with strategizing in the meantime about the most effective next step.
Am I a jerk?
I’m perplexed by the recent campaign against the “r-word” (retard, retarded, etc.). In the interest of not being a total jerk I’m going to include their promotional banner here, but then I’m going to do a bit of the critical thinking thing and ask whether their campaign actually makes sense. To cut to the chase: I agree with the conclusion, but not the means of getting there. Hopefully that doesn’t make me a bad person.
I want to make it clear that I don’t think calling anyone names is acceptable. I would never say, “You’re such a retard” to a person, or even say “He’s such a retard” behind someone’s back, whether or not that person was actually mentally retarded. I admit that I have occasionally used the adjective “retarded” to refer to plans or situations that I think result from people not understanding what’s going on or not being able to think through the complexities of an issue. When the campaign refers to “everyday” use of the word, I assume they mean this latter case. I do think I should stop doing it, but not for the reason the campaign suggests. (I’ll get to my reason later.)
The first thing I think the Spread the Word campaign is forgetting is that no matter what word is used to describe people with severe and broad learning disabilities, that word is going to be used as an insult that means someone is stupid. “Mental retardation” was at one point the kinder, euphemistic term replacing previous terms like “idiot,” “imbecile,” and “moron.” Seriously, those were the scientific terms for different ranges of IQ scores. This commenter on a disability advocacy blog pointed out that “special needs” is already resulting in the playground insult, “You’re special.” You can’t stop this phenomenon by eliminating one word at a time.
People described as “mentally retarded” are described that way because they learn slower and comprehend less than other people. Guess what? That means they are less intelligent. That doesn’t mean they’re not good people or that they’re not a valued part of society. It also doesn’t mean that they’re not skilled at anything. But you can’t say that random things count as intelligence (like “bodily-kinesthetic intelligence” and “naturalist intelligence”) and then declare everybody to be equally intelligent.
The thing is, using the “r-word” for the most part evokes qualities that are actually related to the term “mental retardation.” Because of this, I don’t think of it as such a grave insult the way that the Spread the Word campaign is characterizing it. The “r-word” isn’t being used as a synonym for “bad” or “uncool” just arbitrarily, to be mean. It’s not like seeing a boy try out for the school musical and saying, “That’s so gay!” It’s more like seeing two men kissing and saying that. Like… yeah. It sort of is.
The problem is — and this is the problem I recognize — it isn’t really. It’s actually more like poking your slightly pudgy stomach while you look in the mirror and saying, “I’m obese.” Or, in a more real-life example, leaving that difficult exam and exclaiming, “I was raped!” Using the word “retarded” to describe someone who merely disagrees with your understanding or to describe a situation which was simply sub-optimally planned trivializes the reality of mental retardation. It’s a complicated condition, a real challenge for people who have it. It’s disrespectful to those people to describe your everyday inconveniences using this serious medical term. Imagine if your friend dropped something accidentally and you said, “Jeez, it’s like you have cerebral palsy or something.” Or if he stumbled over his words while thinking of what to say next, and you said, “What is it, do you have Parkinson’s?” People do commonly exaggerate in everyday speech (It’s like a million degrees outside today! or, It took a thousand years to download that song!) but I can certainly see the argument that exaggeration downplays the significance of these serious conditions.
The Spread the Word campaign is based around the idea that the “r-word” insults people by implying that they are less capable, while in reality they have so many abilities. (Just look at the Special Olympics!) But the fact is that mentally retarded people are less capable in this specific set of situations involving comprehension and learning. That’s why we call it a disability. It seems to me that it would be more appropriate and effective to acknowledge this, and combat everyday use of the “r-word” on the grounds that it is a trivialization of a serious challenge that many good, respectable people have to face.
Like farm subsidies, but for babies
Louisiana state representative John LaBruzzo announced on Tuesday that he is considering a proposal to pay $1000 to poor people willing to undergo tubal ligation or vasectomy so they will not have any children in the future. (I heard about this on CNN, but found a link to the Times-Picayune article via Wonkette.) LaBruzzo says he is concerned that families on welfare have more children than families who aren’t, and thus sap the state’s resources in ever-increasing amounts.
This idea sounds revolting on face to most people. John LaBruzzo is surely not a politician I would trust to formulate reasonable policy, particularly after hearing him say on CNN that he didn’t expect Democrats to support this proposal because people on welfare are the Democratic base. Cute. More importantly, the statistics don’t support LaBruzzo’s fears. While I strongly suspect that LaBruzzo’s intentions are racist and/or classist in nature, and I acknowledge that there is no urgency of an out-of-control welfare budget, I don’t think that that visceral revulsion at the basic idea is really warranted.
The first thing I want to point out is that no one is being forced into this arrangement, unless your definition of “force” is incredibly broad. If a person would rather have $1000 than be able to have children in the future, I see no reason not to allow them to make that trade. Plenty of people seek vasectomies or tubal ligations on their own, so it’s clear they’re not inherently bad operations. No one else would be harmed by the fact of an individual receiving the surgery, so if that individual would prefer the money to their fertility, the trade makes everyone better off. Surely there are people out there who face both unwanted pregnancies and financial problems, and would find themselves killing two birds with one stone in a system of this sort. (I anticipate a claim that this is merely economic coercion, since some people really need the money — but this is a ridiculous argument. Is it coercive for a grocery store to charge you money for food? You need that to survive. Is it coercive for your employer to require you to work according to your contract before you get your paycheck? Clearly not.)
We can also think about the potential children that might have been conceived in the future by someone who signed up for this surgery. If $1000 is worth more to you than your own child, I’m going to hazard a guess that you either would not love and care for that child very much, or that you clearly do not have the financial resources necessary to raise a child in a healthy situation (I mean, with adequate food, clothing, shelter, etc.). In either case, the wisest choice would be to refrain from conceiving a child in the first place, which is what a program of this sort allows for.
I know any hint of eugenics makes everyone queasy, because of how easy it is to invoke a comparison to the Nazi regime. I am not contesting the badness of Hitler here. However — aside from the obvious differences in levels of violence and coercion — it is important to notice that while Nazi eugenics were based on ethnicity, religion, and other qualities having in reality nothing to do with one’s ability to raise a family, the eugenics in a program of this type are almost precisely equivalent to the sort we all employ if and when we look for someone to start our own families with. We ask, will this person be able to love and care for our children, putting their needs ahead of his or her own? Will this person take on the intense level of responsibility involved in raising a child? Will our combined salaries be enough to support a family of the size we want? It’s not exactly “eugenics” to choose to have children with someone you think would make a good parent, as opposed to someone you think would make a bad one — or, if it is, it’s not the hateful sort of eugenics that’s tantamount to genocide.
Claims of eugenics with respect to this program are based on the fact that the payments could only go to poor people. Either the goal is to end poverty by ending poor people, as the Wonkette headline read, or the goal is to diminish the numbers of ethnic minorities who are statistically more likely to be poor. These are legitimate complaints. I’d like to step back and look at the basic idea of paying someone not to have children, though, and ask: is it really necessary to restrict this program to poor people? Everyone’s children impose some burden on the state, since public schools must make room for them, they consume resources and contribute to scarcity, Social Security will (maybe…) make payments to them when they retire, and so on and so forth. Sure, wealthy people are probably less likely to take the government up an an offer like this (since $1000 has less marginal utility to someone with greater financial assets), but for the sake of fairness why not offer it to them as well? Would a plan structured in that way make you feel the same kind of revulsion? I doubt it.
My point is absolutely not that John LaBruzzo is a good guy, or that his particular proposal is a good idea. I simply believe that what I’ve been hearing and reading on this topic is missing a certain level of rational discourse. Of course, in the US we don’t suffer from such severe overpopulation as to make a policy like this worth enacting, and I definitely think we should steer away of programs with central and unavoidable discriminatory effects. If it became practically necessary, though, paying people not to have children would be a legitimate plan, not a reprehensible one.
Updates in scientific literacy
Several stories have been floating about lately, all generally on the topic of popular understanding of science. Here are the highlights.
A court has ruled that the University of California was well within its rights to deny admission to students they found unqualified as a result of their having attended Christian schools. The schools in question taught many classes that were extremely Bible-centric, to the exclusion of nearly all other content, making it impossible to meet the UC admissions requirements with their courses misleadingly called “biology” or “history.” I found this personally interesting in light of my earlier comments on how far it’s appropriate to extend religious tolerance. Even though it has upset some religious people, the courts have ruled that it’s okay to assess religious descriptions of the world and find them academically lacking.
Speaking of lack of academic background, I was happy for once to read USA Today, which reported that 76% of Americans believe that improving science education should be a priority issue for presidential candidates. In keeping with this, about 26% say that they themselves have an adequate understanding of science, but more ridiculously “44% couldn’t identify a single scientist, living or dead, whom they’d consider a role model for the nation’s young people.” My reaction is similar to Doug Natelson’s: Or dead? Really? We couldn’t name, oh I don’t know, Einstein? Perhaps he is not hip enough for the youth. (Check out Doug’s post for some more details on presidential candidates and their support for science research funding, as well.)
The USA Today article discussed science literacy in the context of voting ability. If Americans aren’t sufficiently “science-savvy,” how can we make the right choices about science issues? It’s not just about budgeting for research, it’s also about healthcare availability, education, stem cells, abortion… and it’s about every issue that invokes statistics. A bit more math than science, yes, but if we were more educated about science we’d be better at identifying large enough sample sizes and acknowledging deviations from the mean. That applies to almost every issue on which there is public debate involving presentation of evidence.
I certainly agree that science education should be a bigger priority than it currently is, and my opinions were only reinforced by this report on end of life care, which stated that 57% of the American public believes that “God’s intervention could save a family member if physicians declared treatment would be futile.” Almost 20% of medical professionals share this belief. While I don’t believe in miracles myself, I of course can’t offer positive falsification of their existence. What we should all be able to agree on, though, is that if all medical signs point to imminent or already-real death, a miracle recovery is not coming this time. There are many other interesting outcomes in the study, such as differing opinions about persistent vegetative state and how long it is acceptable to demand continuing treatment of a dying loved one. Orac of Respectful Insolence wrote a very thoughtful and thorough treatment of all this, cautioning against becoming too preoccupied with the religion aspect. I agree wholeheartedly with his bottom line:
Indeed, the focus on religion takes away the focus from the real issue: improving public understanding of scientific medicine and what it can and cannot accomplish. Lots of patients have unrealistic beliefs about health care based on all sorts of things, be they religion, faith in pseudoscientific quackery, or just fears based on misinformation that is rife in the media (i.e., the claim by antivaccinationists that vaccines cause autism). … Persuading families and patients that what evidence-based medicine recommends is the best for their injured or ill loved ones requires a far gentler touch.
Discussing race and racial slurs
I saw the below video today, thanks to the awesome and always fascinating blog Sociological Images. It’s a clip from the ABC’s The View, a coffee klatsch sort of show aimed generally towards women of whatever age range it is that doesn’t mind listening to Barbara Walters talk. You can read all the hosts’ bios here, but the two primarily involved in this conversation are Whoopi Goldberg and Elisabeth Hasselbeck.
There are a couple things in this clip that stuck out to me. The first is the general topic of the power of language. I understand why it’s considered more acceptable for black people to use “the n-word” than for white people to do so. I have no problem making self-deprecating jokes about any number of my personal qualities, but if a friend of mine laughed and chimed in with agreement, I’d be a bit offended. When I say it, it’s a funny joke; when you say it, it’s rude. The question is, is that rational? Does the meaning of what’s said really depend that much on who says it? I find that hard to believe. It’s not offensive for me to use a slur referring to a group I’m a part of, because of course I didn’t mean it “that way” — but surely you are capable of not meaning it that way either. It seems more than a little unfair that, simply by virtue of your existing and your being born with certain qualities, a layer of meaning has been added to all your statements which you can never really escape. Your words will always be white-person-words or black-person-words or [fill in an adjective]-person-words, never really just words.
The position that’s argued in the video by Goldberg, and to a lesser degree by Sherri Shepherd, is that the word “nigger” has history which ought to be remembered and which is an important part of black culture. It’s “taking back” a slur, making it your own. It’s similar — though obviously different in magnitude — to a woman calling herself and other women “chicks” with a sense of female empowerment, or to LGBT folks saying “fag” or “dyke” with pride in their sexual orientation. The idea is that by embracing the term, you can make a once-derogatory word into a simple descriptive adjective, or even a positive quality.
That brings me to the second issue: to what extent do we create the society we live in simply by acting and imagining? Hasselbeck says, “We don’t live in different worlds. We live in the same world,” and the other hosts disagree. They’re right, of course — issues of “race” (whatever that means) and ethnic differences are not yet non-issues. There’s still discrimination and prejudice. Hasselbeck’s response to this is to acknowledge that there’s nothing fundamentally different about people with different skin pigmentation, and to try to live her life as though no differences exist. On the other hand, Goldberg’s response is to try to use a racial slur as though it were a friendly, endearing word. Both seem to have the ultimate goal of creating a society without prejudice. Who’s using more pretending and wishful thinking to try to get there? Whose approach is more likely to be successful?
It seems to me that both of them could be right, but at different times. Reclaiming a slur can encourage pride in one’s identity, and it can turn something deeply offensive into something hardly worth remarking upon. That’s worthwhile progress — it means moving past the worst parts of prejudice. However, I don’t think it’s a permanent solution. I said hardly worth remarking upon, not totally unremarkable, because keeping special terms that only “our people” are allowed to say, that continually remind everyone of past persecution of “our people” by everyone else, isn’t really going to eliminate boundaries. To create a society where we really all “live in the same world,” we need to give up language that serves only to exaggerate differences.
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