Wrong Opinions

[liv]

So, update: I passed my Hebrew test, but the rest of my incoming class didn't, and I think the next stage is yell at the college for setting massively unfair assessments. I may have somewhere temporary to live (undying gratitude to angelofthenorth) for the first two months of term, and if everything comes together very nicely somewhere long term from November.

jack and I planned a week in Brighton visiting my sister, which sort of worked in that we went to Brighton and stayed with my sister, but sort of didn't in that I ended up needing to be in London Monday and Tuesday for college related reasons, and back in Cambridge on Wednesday as I got roped into Tisha b'Av with my home community. So all in all this is the first week I've actually been able to experience the "summer break" I planned between finishing my job and starting my course. I had a lovely weekend with cjwatson and the middle kids, but now there is Covid in their household and I'm worried for them and concerned that I may have been exposed. And on a more minor note I can't hang out with them, which I'm grumpy about. I can't describe how much I hate living with this awful plague.

Anyway, now I have a bit of time, let me rant the rant that's been brewing for a while. This is the kind of thing where I'm kicking back against accepted decent liberal norms and I expect to be told I'm wrong, but actually I would quite like to hear any criticism because I'm really frustrated. The thing is, I basically accept that it's a good idea to look at human interactions and societies through the lens of power differentials. If the underlying social situation isn't symmetrical, it's not fair to treat privileged people identically to oppressed people. I accept that "reverse racism" and "misandry" and "heterophobia" are made-up distractions, I don't at all want to argue that they are real. But I'm increasingly annoyed by what looks like reducing everything to a one-dimensional relationship between "the privileged" who can never experience any harm, and "the oppressed" who can never perpetrate any harm.

Example: The syllogism that goes "Jews of European descent are white. Racism doesn't harm white people. Therefore... oops, I accidentally did a Holocaust denial." That one is probably the root of my frustration, and I feel somewhat confident to hold an opinion about it because I'm directly affected, being a white Jewish person myself.

There are other examples too. People claiming that Christians never experience religious oppression because Christians are the hegemony in the US and to a great extent globally. But I personally know Christians who have experienced religious violence (and that's without considering countries where Christians actually are a religious minority persecuted by fundamentalist Muslims or Hindus or historically speaking fascists and Communists in power). Here's a recent example from someone who is white, mainstream CoE, based in England: As the Churchwarden of an LGBT inclusive church I am telling you that members of the congregation message me, asking if it is safe to come to church. And I cannot say "yes", I can only say that I hope it is. Violence against Christians, specifically as Christians, exists, and much of it is perpetrated by other, sectarian Christians, but it's still violence. If I care about anti-Christian violence, does that mean I'm indifferent to islamophobia and antisemitism? Of course not, but it feels wrong to me to deny the reality that this violence exists, simply to affirm the view that overall, Christians have relative religious privilege.

Recently I was accused of being transphobic because I complained about sexist behaviour by men, without specifying that I meant cis men. But I didn't particularly mean cis men, if a random stranger harasses me on the street or patronizes me in an internet discussion, I have no knowledge of whether that person is cis. When trans people are angry with me for being transphobic it's not a good time to ask for clarification, so I couldn't work out if the view was that trans men would never be sexist jerks because trans men are all essentially good and respectful of women, or whether the argument was that it doesn't count when a trans man harasses a cis woman because cis women in general have more social power than trans men. I reject both those positions. I think it is in fact reasonably likely that I unintentionally hold some transphobic views, I'm not taking the line that I can't possibly be transphobic because I'm a "good person". But I am annoyed by the attempt to make it taboo to ever complain about sexism or gendered violence because it might offend trans men. I don't see how that's different to any other #NotAllMen derail; sure, a poor or disabled or racialized man lacks privilege compared to me, but that doesn't mean he can't be sexist, and the same goes for trans men.

And in what feels like a similar example, I'm on warning on Mastodon because I stated, during US Pride Month, that straight people do in fact experience violence based on their sexuality, from honour killings to forced marriage to discrimination against pregnant people the majority of whom are straight women. The admin of my instance said that this was a homophobic view, which has mainly led me to stop posting on Mastodon at all. If my opinion, as a bi woman, that some straight people experience sexuality-based violence and political harm, is a danger to other LGBTQ+ people on my instance, then I don't know where to go from here. I'm not saying I can't be homophobic because I'm bi, because I don't in fact believe that all homophobia is perpetrated by straight people against gay people. I'm saying that seeking solidarity with straight victims of sexuality-based violence and prejudice is not inherently homophobic.

I have much more faith in my lovely DW circle to tell me why I'm wrong, than random fighty people in internet discussions. So, go ahead, set me right.

Comments

[melannen]

>> The thing is, I basically accept that it's a good idea to look at human interactions and societies through the lens of power differentials.

I think for me, this is the key: Racism (used to be?) widely defined as "prejudice + power" and while that's overly simplistic, the power-based analysis needs to be the basis: you need to look at who has power in a given situation, and whether they're using that power to disadvantage people of other categories.

I see an error occurring a lot in social justice spaces where there's an idea that someone is from a group that is socially less-privileged and therefore could never have the power to commit oppression, and it often leads to horrible identity-based abuses of power by people or groups who refuse to acknowledge they could possibly have power in that axis, even with a smaller community in which they do have institutional or majority power. But on the other hand, the fact that larger societal structures still reinforce one group over another complicates things!

One relatively low-key example: I work in a career where only about 10% of staff are male. At my workplace we generally have about a dozen staff, of whom about one is male. Does our hypothetical one male staffer experience gender-based discrimination as a cis male? I would say yes, I frequently observe things like assumptions that stereotypically-male tasks (like dealing with physically intimidating customers) will be his job, or backroom discussions about men that would absolutely not be ok if it were a majority-male staff talking about women, or being put on the spot to speak for all men. But at the same time he still has structural advantages (he can leave this job and assume he will be in a space where men have more power; the highest-paid jobs within the career still go vastly disproportionately to men) and some of the disadvantages he faces are due to structural discrimination against a majority female group (our pay scales assume everyone has a higher-paid spouse with better health insurance, which hits everybody but hits hardest on the people structurally least likely to have a higher-paid spouse, including cis men, which is a large part of why they're so rare.)

As a church-going Christian who spends a lot of time in subcultural spaces that are not majority Christian I have definitely experienced situations where I felt afraid to mention anything about my church life. Not a fear of physical harm ever, for sure, but a fear that it would lose me status and respect and opportunities within the group if people knew I go to church, or that I even might be specifically asked to keep it quiet, yes, for sure, even as people from other religious traditions are encouraged to be open about their religious lives. Is that discrimination against me as a Christian? Sure. Does it happen partly because many of the people in those subcultures are using them as an escape from smothering structural Christianity outside the space? Definitely. Does that mean it's not actually oppressive use of structural power within the group against a specific identity group? *shrug emoji*

But rather than examine those complexities, and accept that power differentials can very widely in different spaces, and accept that some people can be oppressed and privileged on the same axis at the same time, it's much easier to play oppression olympics and divide the world into Must Always Check Their Privilege and Must Never Check Their Privilege groups.


----All that said though, I don't think most of your examples above are great examples?

The holocaust denial example I think falls into a different fallacy I see of people wanting to group every oppression against a descent or affinity group into "racism". Jews may or may not experience racism in different spaces and circumstances; Jews *always* face antisemitism. It's often useful to group those two together, and the word "racism" has power in the English world that can be important. But it's often the opposite of useful to treat them as synonyms. A lot of indigenous or otherwise discriminated against ethnic groups in Europe have always strongly identified as White and do not want their struggles grouped under racism; and using the term for things like the oppression of minority groups in Eastern Russia or Nigeria can be unhelpfully reductive and also erase some of the unique features of Western racism.

I think other people have addressed the Christianity example - it's absolutely possible for Christians to be discriminated against, even in a culturally Christian society, but Christians being mean to each other is just Christians being Christians, not anti-Christian oppression.

Your straightness example is similar - most of your examples there are specifically discrimination against afab people or against women or against people who can carry pregnancies or against the overlap of those three groups. There are quite a lot of non-straight people who fall into them! (In many cultures forced marriage is *more* likely to affect queer people.) There are situation where straight people (or people in het partnerships) face discrimination for that reason - for example in the US a straight couple living together are more likely to lose their disability benefits than a gay couple living together - but it's distinct from the kinds of things you mentioned.

Your Mastodon example is more complicated though. I don't think it's transphobic to say that men can be sexist! It might be misandrist, and worth looking at from that axis, but it's not transphobic to group trans men and cis men together as men! I think this comes back to the idea that power differentials can vary by space - it's very common for moderators of an online space that is supposed to be a 'safe space' or 'friendly' to a certain group to overlook the fact that this gives that group institutional power within that space. Which is not necessarily a bad thing! But it means you can't come at moderating from the perspective that within the space itself, that group has no power.

[liv]

Thank you, this is helpful and insightful. I definitely think that part of the issue is "who has power" is contextual, not absolute. Really good example of a man in a female dominated profession, it absolutely is true that he may experience anti-male sexism locally, while still benefitting from the general privilege of being male in a male-dominated society.

I'm sorry to hear about your negative experiences as a Christian in non-Christian spaces. Your analysis is more generous and more cogent than I could probably manage in the circumstances, and I definitely find that perspective helpful. I haven't always got it right in terms of how I interact with Christians in interfaith and Jewish spaces, where locally I hold power and authority.

Jews and racism: I am basically ok with conceding the word "racism" to mean structural harm done to BIPOC minorities by white supremacist society, and use a different name for other kinds of ethnic discrimination. You set out a very clear argument for why this might be a more helpful use of language. If a dominant white group commits genocide against a white minority, that's arguably not racism, but it certainly is harm, and it's not oppression that is incidental to the victims' ethnic background.

Lots of oppressions that harm straight people also harm LGBTQ+ people, definitely no denial there. But because, say, pregnancy discrimination harms non-women who are pregnant, doesn't mean that straight pregnant women are completely safe because of their straightness. Homophobia can harm some straight people who are GNC and mistaken for gay even when they're not, or forced to restrict their behaviour and self-expression to avoid being called gay, but it's still homophobia. There are rare circumstances (like the disability benefits one) where a same-sex relationship may fly under the radar and an opposite sex relationship may be directly targeted, though I'm not sure that is really a "privilege" for people in same sex relationships exactly. The point is not that straight people are discriminated against uniquely based on being straight, but that they are discriminated against or subjected to violence based on their sexuality. They might be oppressed for having sex with the wrong people or in the wrong situation or the wrong way, and I'm frustrated with claims that that can never happen because only LGBTQ+ people are discriminated against because of their sexuality.

[vyvyanx]

I've been reading this discussion with great interest, and I wonder whether part of the problem comes from different understandings of the word "sexuality". The OED (not that I generally want to use dictionaries as arbiters of how people should use their own language, but it's quite useful as a descriptive resource in this instance!) lists two relatively distinct meanings (actually three, but two of relevance here):

1. Sexual nature, instinct, or feelings; the possession or expression of these.
2. A person's sexual identity in relation to the gender to which he or she is typically attracted; the fact of being heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual; sexual orientation.

Your examples of straight people being "discriminated against or subjected to violence based on their sexuality" all seem to be examples of (real, serious) discrimination and/or violence associated with them as sexual beings, capable of forming or being coerced into sexual relationships, having sex, getting pregnant etc. - in other words, definition 1 of "sexuality". However, other people (including myself, and perhaps your Mastodon admin) seem to be reading you as referring to definition 2 of "sexuality", which is probably more salient during Pride month and in the context of people discussing homophobic discrimination and violence. That is, you give the impression of saying you think straight people are being discriminated against or attacked specifically because they are straight i.e. the "heterophobia" you yourself dismiss as a "made-up distraction" at the start of your post.

[liv]

That would actually make a lot of sense, if people are taking sexuality to mean only: do you tick the 'gay' box or the 'straight' box? So straight people aren't oppressed based on their sexuality, because their sexuality is merely "straight". (Straight trans people might be oppressed because of being trans, but I think all sides of this debate agree that transphobia exists and is harmful.) I really appreciate your shedding light on the miscommunication.

[melannen]

I do want to clarify that my shrug at the end of my discussion of Christian experiences was heartfelt! I don't think that occasionally shutting up about church when I'm in a group of people who are tired of dealing with Christians is necessarily the sort of ongoing harm that needs remediation. (But it might be in some cases! Things are ok in hobby groups that are less ok at jobs or homeless shelters.) And I've definitely also been in non-Christian-majority or non-Christian-led interfaith spaces that still gave Christians extra consideration above other people. But it's unhelpful to come to a discussion with the postulate that no Christians can ever have had experiences anything like that, because there *are* spaces where they don't have the structural power within the space.

And Jews do experience racism sometimes (even non-BIPOC Jews). But sometimes the discrimination Jews face is qualitatively different from racism. And sometimes groups experiencing ethnic oppression that isn't White-supremacy centered do want to claim racism as their term and should. I don't know, this stuff is hard and it's something that's been annoying me disproportionately lately in history discussions where "racism" is used uncritically to condemn, like, cultural assimilation in the Roman Empire, or on the other end when it's used to write off any ethnic oppression that isn't white people oppressing Black or Indigenous people. So I might be the overly annoyed one who needs told I'm wrong here. But yeah I do think 'Jews don't experience racism = Holocaust denial' is often about people wanting to deny there are forms of ethnicity/descent based oppression other than American white people being racist (and also of course just about antisemitism generally.)

Yeah, I think the question of what is oppression of straight people vs. a) what is oppression of people that cisheternormativity classes as women in order to reinforce cisheteronormativity and b) what is oppression of *all* sexuality or sexual expression or c) what is oppression of certain types of sexual expression within the context of straightness can get complicated.

But if you're talking in context of a discussion that started as comparisons with the ways LGB-perceived people are oppressed you really do need to parallel directly with the idea of oppression that happens *primarily* because they are straight or they are having straight sex or you will be seen as sealioning (and yeah any discussion that starts with "we don't need Straight Pride" should probably be allowed to end there as well, even if they are being peripherally Wrong on the Internet about other things). I don't think anyone would argue that straight people can't face oppression - that's the whole idea of intersectionality! - but, say, a Black man who faces discrimination because of stereotypes about Black male sexuality isn't being oppressed because of his straightness, it's primarily because of his Blackness, and straight pride and straight rights won't help him with that. And in the same way, a pregnant woman who faces discrimination because of her pregnancy isn't being discriminated against because she's straight, and a rape victim who has had consensual sex with men isn't being discriminated against because she didn't have sex with women. And focusing on rights for straight people won't do them any good either.