Claire left this comment in the Education 101 thread:
Yes, I followed the thread, and I’m very familiar with the phenomenon of
transphobic gender essentialists on the internet calling themselves radical
feminists. (Presumably, they learned what “radical” means from the Ninja
Turtles. I was just being a little snarky and pointing out that little light’s
Taking Steps seems, judging from published comments, to not be a very safe place
for trans people, either.
Little Light’s greatest hits–the posts in which she affirms the validity of her identity and experience and argues that the violence she deals with is not less important than other kinds–have been trolled all over the place.
This post was one of them (it also deserves mention in any resource list; somebody probably already threw it up in the last thread).
The question of deleting trollish comments is a thorny one. I tend to leave them up for a few reasons. First, of course, I often moderate threads in which the trolls aren’t saying nasty things about me or mine. Second, I just wasn’t brought up to de-escalate or walk away from anything. My family never stops fighting, so removing something infuriating doesn’t make any sense to me on a gut level. A comments thread is a sort of horizontal shit-list, and I need it to keep the rage fresh. Third, and seriously, I’ve noticed a couple instances–including one very recent one–in which the deletion helped the author. Nobody can read the upsetting comment, so nobody understands why people were so upset. And then, too, it seems important that these little eruptions of bigotry remain visible so that people know they’re there, can refer back to them when someone else argues that the problem isn’t serious or widespread or real.
On the other hand, they’re nasty to encounter, useless to the actual discussion, provocative in the worst way, and written in bad faith. They most often crop up–cf. Little Light–in posts that deal with the deepest, most lasting and intimate effects of violence, precisely because those threads present the strongest threat to the legitimacy of bigotry and the bullies who enforce it. Rape is one common example. These threads aren’t for informational purposes; they’re often not even for audiences not affected by a particular prejudice. Commenters very frequently respond with their own personal stories about violence. And, of course, the “education” argument is a cis-centered one: the people who directly encounter bigotry usually don’t need to be told about its existence or shown its form.
So what are your thoughts? Those of you who are bloggers, how do you manage your own spaces?
I have one thread with over 350 comments filled with trasphobic spew in which I addressed and I lthe transphobia in certain radfem groups. I left it there purposefully as evidence of how hateful transhpobic commentary can be. I usually give people one warning that their commentary is harmful and then I delete without warning from there on in. I don’t find that leaving these comments up leads to a good conversation and people end up feeding the troll rather than dealing with the issue that I was trying to raise in the post. In this way I feel it turns the conversation once again away from marginalized bodies and makes the oppressor the center of conversation again. Since there are very few safe spaces for oppressed bodies, I feel that it is important to protect them as much as possible and to hell with what anyone else thinks. Our issues deserve to be discussed without being derailed by some ignorant ass who wants to display their inner idiot to the world.
Fessing up: I’m the one poking little light with a stick (and intending no disrespect to her, of course. Merely calling attention to what I see as a double-standard between cis-managed blogs and trans-managed ones…) Incidentally, I also intended a closing-parenthesis to appear after “Ninja Turtles.”, but alas…
I’m not sure how I would handle it… How easily-baited by trolls I am depends 100% on how desperately I feel the need to procrastinate about something more important. I can see the appeal of completely squelching the transphobic, the off-topic, and the derails… but on the other hand, I can also see the appeal of (at least in some cases) allowing the bullshit to show through. If we weren’t seeing people say “omg my search bar is broken what does cis mean?” in every thread, only blog moderators would realize how many privileged fucks feel that it’s their right to have every little question personally answered by a real, live trans person. If we didn’t have the radfem cabal on most every visible blog insisting that we are dressing awfully funny in light of our obstetrician’s infallible judgment of our sex/gender, then that “brand” of transphobia would be largely invisible… to those privileged enough to avoid it in meatspace, that is.
Really, I think the best policy would be a wider application of something Feministe does already… the Next Top Troll posts. Derailing (really privileged, self-righteous derailing: i.e. “patriarchy also hurts teh menz”, “what is cis”), and hateful shit (“omgz all wimmins need the long hard one, that’d shut u up”, “u’d have 2 be pretty desperate to fuck a dude in a skirt!”) would be denied, but the “best (worst) of” would be posted on the main page, with attention called to their trollishness or hatefullness, and disapproval piled on accordingly. That way, awareness of trolls, and thereby awareness of the trollish shit that members of certain classes have to deal with all the time, is still promoted, but the aim of trolling (derails, harassment) is not served.
If Jill wants to set up one of those contests, I’m all in–maybe we could even allow other people to share awful comments on their blogs.
I do see the double standard, but I don’t think it’s inappropriate. I think that each person who posts about themselves and draws fire in the process has the right to determine their own individual response. If they decide that they would rather reply to comments or delete them out of hand, that’s entirely their prerogative. I would never second-guess Little Light’s decisions: that’s her business as a survivor.
On the other hand, when cis people write about trans stuff, they have to be mindful that they’re effectively drawing fire towards targets that aren’t them, and courting hateful comments they may not really understand in full context. “You fake-ass patriarchy-fellating feminists need to stop giving space to those delusional pervert shemales” is insulting to two groups of people–but look which one gets it worse.
A thread about some instance of transphobia or other also presents an opportunity for trans people to come and share their experiences with, say, the Ohio state legislature’s name-change policy. These comments are much more useful than somebody’s brief take on the stated lasw. That valuable information-sharing happens a lot less often when the cis-authored comments threads become a haven for bigoted assholes.
In trying to educate myself on these issues, I have to say trollish comments were themselves an education. I had no concept of the horrible, hateful things people, even people whose opinions I had respected in other contexts, were saying about others. It was a quick and dirty lesson in transphobia, particularly transphobia in feminism. But I do wonder if my lesson came at the expense of a safe place for the very people who were the target of that hate. As you said, it’s a very cis-centered approach in a world that is cis-centered. I wonder if it would be more useful to delete the trollish comments in the posts themselves and then publish them separately in a discussion about transphobia.
It’d also be a really good indexing tool. It’s no fun to have to search through three hundred comments to find the first Silence of the Lambs comparison.
Well, I have an entirely different take on it, and it was interesting that you mentioned your family background in this context. While we debate in my family, we do not .ever. get nasty, ever. I literally did not know how to handle the first emotionally abusive bf I had (not that long ago either, and I’m not a young woman!) and literally could not function around his rage.
I have run many lists, participated on usenet newsgroups, and experimented with all kinds of forums, and I find that for me, heading off the nasty, if at all possible, even before it starts, is the way I prefer to go. It lets my forum (of whatever nature) get past the 101 basics and continue thoughtful discussion. It lets us build up a FAQ to refer back to, and in my experience, the trollers and that ilk won’t be educated unless they want to be, so they are only there to stir up the shit. Why should I enable any of that?
Now, that said, moderation and thread cleaning is a big huge time sink. It takes a lot of time and effort to develop that. So it’s not necessarily an answer to the overall issue here. (But it also explains why I often read blogs without ever bothering with the comments, there’s probably only about two blogs I do that on right now & RSS is my friend b/c I don’t pull in the comments in the feeds.)
I have to admit one thought that comes to mind, if you are going to leave trollish stuff up in a thread is to package it up differently. Close it up, and make it available at the push of a HERE BE TROLLS button on the thread. So without opening it up, you get a decent thoughtful thread, then you click the button and the trollish stuff (maybe highlighted in a sickly green background :) ) appears and totally illustrates how they hijack the thread.
But again, a lot of work to set that up. No good, obvious answers.
Blast it…Claire already suggested…nevermind me then.
The only time my blog was trolled it was because Anonymous had come after anyone who commented here and had a blog. I remember deleting a few comments but then I thought it would do more to disarm the trolls if I left the comments up. I didn’t want to let them think the comments were so upsetting that I couldn’t bear to look at them.
Now I only blog at DeviantArt, because it was too much trouble to separate my blogging and my art. I mention this because I only deal with other members of that community, and I’ve lost fans of my artwork because of things that I said in my blog. I’m ruthless in arguments.
I’m not trying to create a safe space per se, but I’m also not interested in keeping fans if I have to be silent on these issues to get them. My policy is that I won’t turn from an honest debate, but I refuse to tolerate any argument made in bad faith. I see no problem with deleting comments that intend to elicit negative feelings for their damaging effect alone.
As for safe spaces, I think they are very important, especially for groups of people who deal with different kinds of violence in their very real lives. It’s not unreasonable to expect visitors to those spaces to remember and respect that, but that expectation needs to made explicit in some way, especially if it’s not on a single issue blog.
I run very, Very low-traffic blogs, so trolls at my place haven’t been a big issue. The one time I got one (of the “I don’t hate teh gays–why can’t you be more tolerant of my firm belief that you shouldn’t ever get married?” variety) I decided to ask for help on Twitter, and immediately several of my followers hopped on over and added supportive (and logical) comments.
That’s one thing I wish could be true here (and at other blogs, though I probably comment most here)–that I knew other commenters offline or on Twitter, and we could solicit help from each other in fighting comment wars (against trolls and otherwise).
I find comments threads, even the ones infested by trolls, to be much friendlier places when I have the feeling that I’m part of a larger community that I feel at least some personal connection to.
(And, you know, if anyone wants to, you can find me on Twitter.)
piny @ 3,
Point taken, the double-standard seems right (though, perhaps not to the extreme that it has been applied.)
i come from a similar family history. but i still believe in deleting comments. 1) because i want other people to feel comfortable at my blog and 2) because i know how hard it is for me to walk away from a fight even after i realize its just trolling.
that being said i have a similar situation to MK @9 in that my blog is low traffic so i don’t often have to worry. i hang around pretty large livejournal and journalfen communities that have pretty lax mod policies and its the commenters who often respond to trolls (by posting nonsense and macros in response to flood the trolls inbox.) that is pretty fun, but i don’t know if its effective in having a productive dialog especially giving the comment structure here (i.e you have to scroll through all of the comments.)
My blog is a smaller personal blog, so I don’t get trollish comments very often. I tend to leave potentially trollish comments be if there’s some thought behind them because once I thought someone was trolling and it turned out I knew them and they were being sincere. So my policy at the moment is to respond politely whenever possible. If a comment is totally out of left field, like stick a hanger where the sun don’t shine (yes, got that one), then sure, I delete it. Sheer rudeness and hate I would delete. But when possible, I prefer to err on the side of not deleting.
Clearly, though, a feminist blog that gets tons and tons of comments is a very different space.
Since this post is asking a comment maintenance type question, I hope that it’s OK to also say that the concept of derailing a thread is something I learned about on feminist blogs and something I’m not really sure how I feel about. I get (now) that it’s a rule/issue in these spaces, so honestly, I usually just don’t comment unless I’m *really* comfortable with a given topic, because I have a fear that I will be called out for commenting incorrectly, or even accused of trolling or hate or whatever if my opinion is “wrong.”
My initial gut reaction to derailing is that people should be free to talk about whatever they choose in a post unless the post specifically asks that the conversation be about something specific and only that. And I certainly prefer to participate in spaces where the conversation is only directed like that on occasion. I am open to the possibility that there are important issues, like those discussed here recently, that I just don’t quite grok, but since I don’t really, I don’t know, personally care or understand about thread derailing, I tend to just comment less.
For example, I wanted to ask what “cis” was earlier, but I choose not to and googled it instead. But I was glad when someone else did ask, and the link that someone gave in reply was actually better than what I found on my own.
Wanted to second MK’s comment above @9. My blog is really low-traffic and the only time I had a problem with someone attacking me personally (versus just disagreeing, even in an agressive way) I ended up posting links at both Feministe and Feministing in self-promotion threads which brought in more readers and more nuanced discussion.
It was my first experience with comment moderation and, in retrospect, I probably wouldn’t be so quick to delete the hateful comments because they were examples of the behavior I was describing in the original post and — as piny points out — deleting led to people complaining they were being censored.
I still think there’s a time and place to say “this is my blog and that sort of verbal abuse of authors/commentors is not acceptable here.” But I feel like drawing that line is (for me) still very much a work in progress.
I don’t have a blog, however I’ve seen it when people delete or disemvowel comments. It, really, just makes the trolls strong. There is nothing quite as powerful as seeing a comment tht gs lk ths t mk wnt t rd t. (that goes like this to make you want to read it.)
And then if you’re seeing responses to a comment when there IS nothing there… it just gets really confusing. Kind of like seeing someone argue with themselves.
The thing about having a LiveJournal-type platform (in my case LJ itself, but I’m also thinking of Dreamwidth and other clones, is that derailing is not so much of a problem. Instead of a linear one-comment-after-another thread which can be derailed by two people going on a tangent, LJ’s nested comments mean that when someone makes a slightly off-topic statement, the tangent can be explored in a comment thread separate from other discussions.
As for comment management; I tend to think of my journal as a self-regulating space. I very rarely get trolls, but when I do my commenters are quick to jump on them and fight back. I was introduced to the internet where someone is expected to back up what they say or have their crap pointed out, so I’m OK with that.
But then, I really don’t have that many trolls, and they’re never hurtful to me and my friends, just ignorant and usually just arguing for the sake of it.
…and it’s sort of hilarious that annajcook would second my comment, because while we’ve yet to meet in real life (which is sort of ridiculous, given that we’ve been at the same grad program, and our real lives also intersect via my Sig Fig’s work) we’ve become Blog Friends largely through both commenting at places like Feministe.
I just wanted to follow up on my earlier comment by saying that while I’d love to feel like I “know” commenters (and authors) here better, creating the kind of blog community that could simultaneously be both inclusive and better able to handle derails and trolls in solidarity, the one thing I Don’t want to see is a members-only club.
One of the reasons I stopped reading Pandagon was what I felt to be a very cliquish group of commenters who often treated new commenters with hostility, either overtly or just by engaging time and time again in snarks and inside jokes. I love that Feministe isn’t like that.
second that last bit mk. I do see some blogs trend toward insularism at times, and it always kind of bothers me, even as someone who is involved with the community — but who can’t always be involved, who falls out of things for months at a time, etc. and I know I’ve skipped over some blogs where I just felt too much an “outsider” to bother trying to break in.
I know that it’s different for everyone, but I’d argue that scary/threatening/triggering trolls need to go. Pseudo-intellectuals, nutwings, and idiots can stay.
I’d also moderate more carefully on “personal experience” posts. People generally talking about the wage gap or whatever aren’t likely to feel be triggered by an idiot bumbling along. Women talking about their rape experiences, however, might be deeply triggered by someone coming in and telling them that sluts deserve it (even if the person is speaking in general terms and not to a commentor/OP).
I would, however, suggesting deletion of a troll if its completely derailing the thread to other commentors bickering with a nutter about whatever random fact.
I don’t get a huge amount of traffic; I’m on the Fatosphere feed so I get a lot more than I’d get otherwise, but on those few occasions when I’ve had higher traffic than usual because of the subject matter, I’ve jumped in when derails and trolling were starting to happen. But I also work full-time and I also work nights, which means that I’m sleeping for a big part of the day, and I’m in the Pacific time zone besides. So obviously, I can’t be on a thread every second it’s active, and if I had a lot more traffic I’d probably have to ask someone else to co-moderate with me.
I picked the “all first time posts get moderated, everything with more than 2 links gets moderated” option with WordPress, and it seems to work pretty well. If something smells funny about an initial post, I don’t approve it. I’m pretty vigilant about preventing fatphobic or any other kind of trollery; I won’t have “yay weight loss” commentary of any kind on my blog, because really, that’s the kind of argument I don’t feel like having over and over and over again, and my readers don’t want that kind of verbal littering either.
I really haven’t had a problem with any other sort of trolling so far (going on two years). My posts tend to run, ahem, long, so that may well serve as a troll deterrent of sorts. Would I delete a trolling or hatespeechy post that snuck through? Depends. If someone had already picked up on the offending post before I got to it and had some cogent things to say about it, maybe not. But if anyone was being threatened or called vile names, yeah, I’d probably take some serious action.
I might be a little unusual in that as things stand right now answering non-trolling 101-type questions (about fat or autism/Asperger’s) doesn’t really bother me. It might be different if people were asking me all day, every day. But they don’t.
[...] Feministe » Yet More on Comments Threads [...]
This is the moderation policy I wrote for my blog today (inspired partly by the discussions going on here, and partly by things that have been happening for months):
I’m hoping it’ll be flexible enough to take care of belligerent, insensitive people in addition to the outright trolls. I do agree, though, that offensive comments can be used as tools – one thing I often do is paraphrase them in a new post and then unpack them. I’m sure I’ll eventually quote one directly, too, if the particular wording is important.
Also, I’m moving this comment from the original boycott thread because it was a derail:
I think [it's a great idea to have the comment policy above the comment box]. I think we could go even further, too. What if, the first time you commented under a particular name or from a particular IP, you were required to read through and agree with the comment policy (which would, of course, include things like recognizing your privilege, doing your own research, etc.)? Sure, a lot of people would probably just skip to the “I agree” button, but it might help a little.
And even if potential derailers didn’t take it to heart, just outlining a more comprehensive policy could lead to heavier moderation of the “damaging, silencing, and erasing” comments that Cara referred to. Questions of open debate versus censorship could fall away if, for example, we were able to say, “Oh – this person denied that person’s experience. See rule #2.”
I really don’t know where some of these people are running into radical feminists that are transphobes. I consider myself both a radical feminist and a support of trans rights, and I haven’t explicitly come across transphobia that seems to be accepted by the radical feminist sphere by definition. Transphobia, in fact, is not limited to radical feminism. I’ve seen liberal feminists do it plenty too. Perhaps this is bias, and call me out on it if I’m wrong, but the most explicit and disgusting manifestations of trans-hate that I have seen on blogs have been posted on big-name liberal feminist blogs, not radical feminist blogs.
This pawning of the trans-hate unto radical feminists is actually starting to really piss me off. I’m not denying that radical feminists could and have, and probably have, engaged in trans-hate and marginalization. I’ve seen heterosexual radical feminists engage in marginalizing behavior and the equivocation of gay issues with trans issues frequently. But this happens because the majority of blogging feminists, of any ideology, happen to be cisgendered heterosexual white American women. Which means that liberal feminists have engaged in exactly the same behavior.
Look, I consider myself a radical feminist, and I’m not ashamed of the label. I intensely despise, however, how that ideology has been dragged through the dirt by some people on liberal feminist blogs, as if all the marginalization and hatred came from those hairy ball-busting Feminazis. That’s bullshit, and the mainstream feminists ought to know it.
The most recent and blatant examples of trans-hate have come mostly from liberal feminist blogs. This has nothing to do with liberal or radical feminist ideology. It has to do with the fact that the bigger the blog, the wider the audience and the more marginalizing the posts can be. I’m a lesbian, and I’m very well aware that the bigger the blog, the less and less people talk about lesbianism without equivocating it with all other non-heterosexual or non-cisgendered oppressions. This marginalization is a process of trying to put a blog to a wider audience and having contributors that are mainly of the same background.
But enough with the “radical feminists are responsible for marginalization” meme. It’s simply bullshit and a very transparent attempt of some to pawn off their own marginalizing and discriminating behavior on an ideology that is easy to vilify.
I’m not sure how well this would work on a blog, but maybe there could be a system that allowed commenters to somehow moderate each other. I’ve seen message boards where if a person recieved X-amount of negative feedback on their comment it would be deleted. Again, I don’t know if this would on in a blog setting as well but maybe if it did it make commenters more accountable and maybe make moderation easier for the bloggers.
Well, Jenn, you can be pissed off all you want, but that doesn’t make it any less true. I agree that liberal feminism is often unfriendly, especially the larger blogs, but the outright hatred, the “you’re a serial killer/organ stealer/rapist/potential rapist” stuff? Almost uniformly radical feminists. Not to mention all the wishful “in a post revolution world, trans people won’t exist” scarcely hidden genocidal wi
And we mostly run into trans hating “radical feminists” on our own blogs, getting trolled. The Little Light threads mentioned – “Fair” and “Seam of Scales” – were mostly trolled, and trolled viciously, by rad fems.
I am well aware that is this is mainly an online phenomenon (the presence of Sheila Jeffreys’ published hate speech aside), and that it is far from uniform, but there is enough BLATANT HATE that it is best for me as a queer trans woman to stay the fuck away. This is not simply liberal cis feminists discrediting radical feminists – it is the knowledge of trans people from being hated and yes, oppressed by fellow women and feminists. It’s not institutionalised or policed with violence in the same way as wider patriarchal, heteronormative and transphobic systems, but it is nevertheless a form of marginalisation directly propagated by women onto other women.
So I’m sorry it hurts your feelings as a radical feminist, but you don’t have the right to tell us which of our experiences and knowledges are valid and who we experience discrimination from.
Sorry, incomplete sentence there. “scarcely hidden genocidal wishes. Cos everything will be solved after the Revolution and just coincidentally everyone will be cissexual. No need for yucky trannies after all. Phew.”
Oleander: That sounds nice in theory, but in practice it’s the last thing a feminist space needs. At best, it runs the risk of silencing already marginalized voices. At worst, it allows a few loudmouths to assume de-facto control over conversations.
Emily: Radfems are more virulently anti-trans because, well, they’re more virulent in general. Jenn does have a point, however; saying that the bad behavior is because of them is a convenient way to wipe my hands of responsibility. Calling radfems the problem can be a way for libfems to avoid examining their own behavior, which neatly avoids getting anything actually done.
I sometimes think it’s too bad there isn’t a “hide” option for individual responses. (which I have seen on other systems) looks something like:
39 troll: [hidden] (47 lines)
40 moderator: I’ve hidden 39 because people who’ve already had their fill may not want to be triggered by more transphobic spew. But if you want a perfect example of exactly the kind of thing we were just talking about, 39 is a perfect example.
Direct responses to (troll) will also be hidden so that the conversation won’t be taken off track.
***
admittedly often ended up not working so well; people -do- end up peeking, and even if the mod is consistent with the hiding, a really persistent troll can end up having the thread look like:
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[hidden]
[deleted] (something was over the line with personal info revealed or FBI-signaling threats or something)
[hidden]
puffball: Say, that’s a good point back there (500 comments ago)
[hidden]
**
Still, sometimes helps ime. need the tech for it tho.
or alternately, even,
43 mod: I’ve hidden 42 because it’s off-topic.
and hide responses to 42 as well. in general if these aren’t authored by assholes/mortal enemies, people quickly take the hint and either move the convo elsewhere or refrain and get back on topic.
Jenn: this is probably -not- the place for it, but believe me, if you want a list of Greatest Hits, a number of people could produce one all too readily, myself included. You can probably find them yourself for that matter; it doesn’t take too long really. I mean, if you -want- to see it.
“you just put your fingers together and type.”
Jenn, what Emily said. I have seen some damn cluelessness–case in point, my last post–from liberal feminists. I have seen comments like, “I feel like transgenderism is about reinforcing gender,” or, “Trans men act like frat boys and trans women all want to be Barbie!” from liberal feminists. And in the feministing thread, plenty of them came forward to defend toilet seats from the trans menace.
But the stuff about having a moral and theoretical objection to the idea of transgender? That it’s part of violence against women? How surgery is mutilation? How trans women are evil fucked-up men? The really beyond the pale statements, like about how trans women want to harvest our uteruses? That’s a radical feminist, every single time.
And when it happens on a liberal-feminist blog? Alas, Feministing, here at Feministe? The aforementioned Taking Steps? It’s a radical feminist, every single time. The only other time I’ve been trolled with that level of nastiness, dude was a right-wing homophobe. Not just that, but the reason you don’t see transphobic radfems ’round these parts? There was a massive blog blowup–like two of them–a few years ago, and now people are a lot louder about horrible comments about “mutilated men.”
Liberal feminists can be cissexist and knee-jerk–it is kind of odd, really, to encounter a rant about how we don’t focus on liberal feminist transphobia this week of all weeks. They tend to focus on personal autonomy, however, and they don’t tend to take transsexuality as a personal affront.
Radical feminists identified trans women as the enemy thirty years ago (back then, of course, liberal feminists were casually or cruelly on board), and they haven’t all updated their ideas since. There are four prominent radical feminists who made their bones attacking trans women: Janice Raymond, Mary Daly, Robin Morgan, Sheila Jeffreys. At least two of those women still say the same things; they’re sticking to their anti-trans guns and religion.
I don’t think that radical feminism is by definition transphobic–any more than liberal feminism is by definition accepting–but it is there, and I think it is more common on that wtf level.
I also don’t think I can blame trans women for refusing to put up with a certain amount of transphobia even if it isn’t ubiquitous.
Jenn wrote:
Where to start? How about the “Home of the New Radical Lesbian Feminist Front”
http://dirtywhiteboi67.blogspot.com
To get the real feel for the situation, go through the archives, skimming each article. This is distilled transphobia, not the relatively weak stuff you’re used to.
Please look at the comments on
http://dirtywhiteboi67.blogspot.com/2008/08/mich-fest-shuttle-van-tragedy.html
No, I won’t hotlink with a convenient URL. Not in the comments section of a blog I respect. It would be defacement.
Look at the blogs of those who are her fanclub, and the blogs they in turn link to.
You did ask.
Here via Questioning Transphobia (of which I’m a reader, though not trans myself). Bit late to the party, but I’ve been thinking. Hoping this can be useful to anyone who’s still pondering the topic here.
(splitting into separate comments for ease of reading, as it’s long)
This is going off at a slight tangent. I was thinking not so much about comment moderation in itself, but about how much each post can prime the direction of its comments.
I don’t mean that in the explicit-instruction way like “All comments must respect that this thread is a trans centric space” or “Take the basic questions to [this link] instead” – though that may often be useful.
I mean how much the need for moderation may be increased or decreased by the writing and framing of the main content of the original post.
I was thinking about the two posts/threads which Cara names in the thread which sprouted this one, and which were catalysts for the boycott, as examples of this.
(continues)
(continued – 2)
The Feministing/bathrooms thread is the simpler to analyse from this perspective.
The title “Men in Women’s Bathrooms, Is Your State Next?” is almost a quote from “Focus on the Family” – presumably meant to parody their tone, but wide open to misinterpretation.
Later in the comments, Rachel_in_WY explains:
(Or, as queenemily so concisely puts it in her later commentary:
But nowhere in the original post is that explained!
The original post only said
and
OK, if you already knew the territory, you’d know that this misleading text from FoF was part of what was meant by “fear tactics”. But if not, not. And that one word “protects” was the only nod towards acknowledging that for trans people this is potentially a life and death issue (as well as a “rights” one).
Reading the comments thread, it’s obvious to me how the resulting misunderstanding shapes responses all down the page. Here for instance is Brianna G:
There are numerous comments from other people too which i.m.o. were quite clearly written from that same mistaken perspective, by people who didn’t realise at the time that they had misunderstood (or perhaps better said, been fooled by FoF).
Miriam concedes (also in comments):
- but I think that’s a misrepresentation of what happened, in that I don’t think the original post did “take an issue of trans rights”. I think it “took” a deliberately misleading and transphobic text, and preserved intact the transphobic language of that text, to the point where many of the commenters clearly had a completely wrong idea of the legislation under discussion – just as FoF originally intended!
There is a political issue with “using” trans people’s experiences to make a point about gender – but even aside from that, this was an example of plain old unclear writing in the original post. IMO a major part of why that comment thread got so noisy was that new commenters were joining in all the way through under a misapprehension about the facts.
You’d only know it was lies if either (like I said) you knew the territory already, or you had carefully read and understood the comments thread too – which, even though it’s usually a good idea, not everyone does before posting.
(On a practical note, it really would have helped if, when those misapprehensions became evident, Miriam had done an “Edited to add:” on the original post. Easy to say afterwards, I know, but a useful move to keep in mind.)
(continues)
(continued – 3)
Now for the Feministe post about Ryan’s article:
Retrospectively, Cara describes it as “a post that was mostly about trans misogyny in an article at Nerve”.
“Mostly” by word count, maybe. But I don’t think it was framed that way. Have a look at the title – By Any Other Name – and the first three paragraphs.
OK, there was a tiny clue in the “categories” list, which includes “trans”.
Other than that? Ryan’s article is described as “about the C-word“. The longish second paragraph is all about a book called “Cunt”. And the title clearly refers to that as well.
By the third paragraph, probably everyone reading it is gonna be thinking about their personal relationship with the word “cunt”.
Only in the fourth paragraph does the reader find out that a trans woman is central to Ryan’s story.
Yes, there was substantive content about Ryan’s trans-prejudices after that, as the post went on. But people don’t wait till the end of reading a post to start writing comments in their heads!
And then it finishes off “So, what do you think — both about this highly imperfect piece, and “the word” itself?”
Given that framing, it doesn’t surprise me (to say the least) that the comments thread doesn’t centre the trans stuff!
(I have to admit that it wouldn’t have occurred to me, prior to this set of arguments, that it necessarily needed to – but I’ll come back to that in a minute.)
(continues)
(continued – 4)
It may or may not be coincidence that the two posts I’m talking about have something else in common besides a controversial comments thread.
Both posts were commenting on someone else’s text. In both cases, the cited text was problematic. And in both cases, it seems to me there was a degree of unintentionally inheriting the agenda or beliefs of the original writer.
From the FoF text, obviously the inheritance included the suggestion that men would be allowed in all public toilets – which Miriam almost certainly didn’t believe, but omitted to counter explicitly.
From the Ryan text, the inheritance was more subtle: it included a degree of “This is an article about the word cunt”, versus “This is an article which reveals my problematic attitude to a trans woman who is/was my student”.
Cara acknowledged both aspects, and I don’t actually think that was wrong. I think the question is about proportions and framing.
I can’t speak for trans people, but it seems to me the essence of what landed as “off” was something like this:
a) Central to this narrative is a human being, being exploited and objectified by someone who has various kinds of privilege in relation to her. The word “cunt” might be interesting, sure, but it’s peripheral in comparison.
b) Trans women are often ignored, marginalised, not listened to, have their stories told inaccurately by other people on their behalf, etc. Anyone who’s serious about being their ally shouldn’t be either endorsing or reproducing that here.
Obviously it’s easy for me to say this now after seeing how it played out, and I’m not saying I’d have done any better than Cara. I have to admit that (in contrast to the Feministing thread) I probably wouldn’t have found either the article or the comments thread particularly problematic if the trans women hadn’t pointed it out. I would have just thought something like “Lots of good thinking here on various angles”. So, live and learn.
But in retrospect I can imagine an article with different framing. It would have centred the way Ryan speaks about Diamond, and (as people did say in comments) the point that we’re now reading his words and not hers.* And the title would have reflected that in some way.
(* actually I haven’t read the Ryan article myself, and I’m not sure I shall, but I have read all or nearly all the comments in the threads I’m mainly talking about.)
Then, after that post or simultaneously, Cara might have done another one “By the way, and not to detract from the central point, which is discussed in [link to other post], but here are the thoughts I’m having about the word cunt…”
I don’t know. I was trying to puzzle out “well, how could Cara have written about the Ryan article, that would have been better”, and that’s what I came up with. There might be lots of reasons why in practice that wouldn’t work, but I definitely think part of the answer is some element of threading. Thoughts on that welcome.
(continues)
Of course it’s not surprising. That doesn’t make it excusable. The entire point of being aware of privilege is so that you step back and think before you pull that kind of shit.
(continued – 5)
And then to extrapolate from that to slightly more general terms, what I’m thinking now in terms of “Things to remember in the future” is something like:
If there’s a trans person (or indeed anyone else in relation to whom I’m in a privileged position) in a story, make very sure that they aren’t just an accessory to the “main” story. Insofar as I’m capable of it, think about how the story looks “with them in the middle”, and how the story’s events might affect them in their life. Insofar as I’m not capable of that, acknowledge it, and (depending on the context) perhaps show a draft to someone who can give me that perspective, and ask for feedback.
(I say “depending on the context” because of the also-problematic “who educates whom” dynamic, and because e.g. me getting it wrong on my blog with like 10 readers is, in practical terms, not as big a deal as, say, if you were writing for a major newspaper or something.)
Those are my thoughts. No apologies for it being long, ’cause I don’t think I could have squashed that down into a few lines. But if anyone – especially trans women – wants to tell me where I’ve gone wrong, you’re very welcome :-)
p.s. I’m seeing that my “continued – 2″ comment has gone initially to moderation, so if you’re reading this before that’s come back, be aware there’s a bit missing :-)
Yeah, I agree Jennifer. This is one of the many things I have figured out as a result of all of this, and the reason why I apologized in the other post for not making the subject of the original post more specific and clear. But I didn’t at all go ahead in spelling all of this out, so thanks for doing it.
@ amandaw
No disagreement there. Sorry I wasn’t clear.
My purpose isn’t to excuse the commenters from responsibility – more, wanting to investigate AS WELL the responsibilities/power/influence of the original writer… if that makes sense.
This last week or two, I’ve seen a LOT of discussion of the above two threads, and little or no discussion of how their main content was framed by the original post. That seemed to me like a missing link in identifying ways that comment threads can be made to work better.
There’s something else which I realise now I should have acknowledged already as context, which is that to the best of my knowledge neither Miriam nor Cara identifies as trans. So this is a different type of analysis from the “We don’t like how you told your own story so we’re not listening till you tell it our way” type of sulk.
I.e. if there’s a post along the lines of “Here’s something most people don’t wanna hear, told true from someone who’s lived it”, and it attracts some unsatisfactory comments, then I wouldn’t be saying to the original poster “Well you see you brought it upon yourself by telling people something they didn’t want to hear”. NO WAY! But M and C weren’t in that position when it came to the trans stuff.
I’ve learned something from their experiences (see my bit number 5 which hadn’t gone up when you commented) and I thought it was worth reporting on.
hope that’s clearer – thanks for your comment and the opportunity to clarify.
jennifer, i think that your analysis is spot-on, with one exception, which i will get to in a minute. (fyi, i don’t know if you know me from previous comments, i am a trans woman. and a fairly mouthy one at that ;o)
other than that, yes i agree that it is *absolutely* how those articles were framed such that they wound up centering a cis viewpoint. i think miriam’s article was worse in this regard – she bought the fof bs hook line and sinker, even if she was not conscious of having done so, to such an extent that i was confused as to whether she even supported the legislation that fof is foaming about.
i think cara’s article did get to the point of how the author dehumanized Diamond, but took an unnecessary and confusing detour to get there, one that was big enough to encourage other cis women to participate in the detour.
the one point that i want to make is about your use of the word “unintentional” @35. i am not making this point out of anger, i’ve been able to take care of that; but i still think this needs to be said: the inheritance of the beliefs that happened *was* intentional. the intentionality was unconscious, such that miriam and cara were unaware of it, but believe me, the intention was there. privilege seeks to defend and center itself, and since it is so pervasive, it influences everything we do, say, write. i don’t exclude myself from this – how often have i done *the exact same thing* when i write about racism (i am white)? probably nearly every time, despite my best conscious efforts to make it not so.
that intention is there, it’s part of our fabric and being, and one has to consciously fight against it. and we slip up. miriam and cara slipped up. miriam has gotten very defensive about it. cara is making a significant effort to understand what happened and change it. speaking only for myself and not for any other trans / gq folk, this is all i am asking for (well once i get past the anger, anyway), is for cis people to keep working at it, chipping away at it bit by bit.
@ Cara – thanks! I did have a concern in posting this that maybe someone at some point would read it as me trying to get at you & M personally, so I’m having a moment of being v relieved to see your comment! Glad you think it’s useful.
@ GallingGalla – just saw your comment & now I have to go out!
looking forward to replying more properly later…
Getting back to this…
Thanks – glad to hear it seemed basically OK.
Yeah – I don’t generally read Feministe but I’ve “seen you around” @ QT.
::grins::
Hmmmm yeah. This is very interesting.
What I hear in what you’re saying (which may or may not be what you originally meant :-) ) is about a human tendency towards ignorance / obliviousness / self-centredness, which we all have and either take responsibility for or don’t.
I’m thinking now about the nature and experience of that.
E.g. maybe like “Oh surely I don’t have to learn even more. Do I really have to stretch my comprehension to encompass yet another issue which doesn’t have all that much effect on me personally? Can’t what I know already be enough? Can’t I just go on as I was?”
or sometimes “You mean I have to just be quiet and listen, and my views on this aren’t actually that important?”
or, the version possibly most familiar to me from living it and noticing it, “Oh no, not another really depressing story about people’s inhumanity to other people, don’t know if I can face that today”. (whereas some people don’t have any choice but to face it, because they’re in it.)
which all have in common a resistance to leaving what’s comfortable. (though both curiosity and compassion can overcome it sometimes.)
Does that sound to you like the same kind of thing as what you’re talking about?
and yeah, if so, I agree it deserves attention. And I could imagine some value in describing and cataloguing more of its flavours and payoffs, so that people have more chance of recognising when it’s “running them”.
-
But then I have a whole other train of thought about the word “intention” and the connotations of that, versus calling it, say, a “drive” or “drift” or even “human nature”.
I can easily imagine a conversation which started off with “you did that intentionally” quickly devolving into a not very useful debate of whether it was or wasn’t intentional, and to what degree it was conscious or unconscious. (along the lines of ye olde “But I didn’t meeeeeean it that way!”) And I’ve often seen it argued that you don’t have to intend to do harm for it to happen, and you don’t have to intend to be complicit in some dubious situation in order to be part of it – which is true.
So although I agree with you that humans are often run by considerable resistance to new awareness, I’m curious about why you’re stressing the “intention” angle here, unlike all those other “intent is not the point” arguments. Why is that important here (not saying it isn’t important), or what am I missing to understand where you’re coming from?
-
Also thanks for the food for thought – this has kept my brain busy through two swimming sessions so far, as well as prompting some daydreams of blog articles I might write one day :-)
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