Death Is Bad

Multiple people have been tripped up by my claims in a recent post that “demanding that people call you by incorrect pronouns counts as bullying and harassment.” This is in answer to that.

I went through a lot of titles for this one before settling on “How They/Them Hurts.” The all started with “How They/Them Hurts” but they had different endings.
“How They/Them Hurts Good People With Bad Brains”
“How They/Them Hurts The Neurodivergent”
“How They/Them Hurts The Marginalized”
“How They/Them Hurts The Hurting”

There is a trend here, besides the names getting shorted until the shortest won. This is the story of a non-typical brain architecture. Sometimes it’s called a pathology or a disorder, but I much prefer just “bad brain” because I don’t want my brain medicalized. Making it a medical thing may encourage people to drug it into becoming more typical, and I prefer to just have it be bad in this way. I have a bad laptop too, but it works well enough for me and I don’t want to change it.1

1. Moral Scrupulosity

I think of this Brain Thing as caring strongly about not lying. But apparently it’s one of the variants of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, according to some fancy lab-coat-wearing MFers. “Moral Scrupulosity OCD” (Ten thousand EA’s just sneezed). Symptoms include “pathological guilt, obsession associated with moral or religious issues, over-responsibility for others, fear of offending others, etc”

Let’s play You Might Be Scrupulous If

You Might Be Scrupulous If:

• You sincerely believe that “When you say, “This is not my responsibility,” all you really mean is, “I am not willing to do anything to make this turn out right.”” is a literally true statement in all situations, and applies to things like people being murdered in the next city over, or people ruining their lives with drugs and alcohol, or being not having enough to eat at any time and in any place on earth. And you accept that this is true about yourself in 99.99% of situations, because you literally aren’t doing anything to correct those problems right now.
• The presence of so much evil convinced you that all life should be extinguished, and it took something like Atlas Shrugged to make you realize one could live and be moral at the same time.
• You believe that the optimal society is one of complete transparency, wherein anyone can see anything that anyone is doing at any time, both live-streaming and recordings of the past, and this would solve most of the world’s non-resource-dependent problems. To the point that one had to be convinced that the NSA gathering every bit of information about everyone was net bad (and that this is primarily because they don’t release it).
• You don’t want to have children because there’s a 50% chance you’ll have a male child, and males are “a collection of predators. Driven by an animal nature to destroy and defile and consume.”
• If you always feel guilty when you’re not working. And you feel equally guilty when what you’re working on is creating art, because what you’re doing is creating a drug. One of your favorite essays is the one that reminds you that reading is harmful and authors are drug pushers.
• You constantly doubt your own goodness, and always believe people who think badly of you may have a point, so you should take their criticism seriously and engage them in good faith.
• You have a mild crisis about returning shopping carts.
• Lying hurts. Even white lies. You tried, and still long for, Radical Honesty

2. Compulsive Honesty

The big one for the purposes of this post is Compulsive Honesty.

Scrupulous people really hate the feeling of lying. Hate it! We do it, of course, sometimes. You can’t avoid it. But even white lies feel really bad.

In fact, white lies often feel extra bad, because you are stuck either telling a lie (bad!) or hurting someone you care about (also bad!). Which one is worse? It’s very hard to tell! Generally we err on the side of white lies, because those are socially approved of.

There are, however, some lies that are too big to swallow. Lies like “God exists and loves us.” Those lies must be expelled even at great personal cost.

There are lies that are smaller than the God lie, but that are still a source of significant pain. To quote myself:

When I was young and my brain was being molded, the language parts of my brain were hooked up to the sex-recognition parts of my brain via methods that have been refined through cultural evolution to hook those two parts together very strongly. And it took.

When one insists others use pronouns that contradict with the one’s sexual presentation, I am required to overrule my own lying eyes and instead use arbitrary terms picked by that person. It feels like I am being told there are five lights every single time. Last time it was my church and parents who were telling me there were five lights. Now it’s my friends. :( I am being forced to lie every time I speak of them, and I despise it.

 

I’m not unique in this. I’ve spoken with others that have the same problem. It’s a maddening jabbing in your heart. It’s having a brain sitting on your shoulder screaming ‘THAT’S A WOMAN’ or ‘THAT’S A MAN’ into your ear. It’s the feeling you get when you realize you have to make a car payment of $200 and you need to refill your drug prescriptions for $150, and you only have $220 in the bank, and it’s 13 days until payday. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. that you have to refer to the person.2

3. Comparative Pain Studies

Here’s the thing. This pain is bearable. We bear it often. In addition to this, we understand that trans people also feel pain. They live with the pain of being in the wrong bodies every day. They deal with the pain of hormone injections, surgeries, and slowly reshaping their bodies in a long awkward process. And if there’s one thing scrupulous people are good at, it’s bearing pain for the greater good.

Therefore, most scrupulous people who feel pain at mis-matching pronouns will nevertheless use them in almost all cases. We want to not cause pain to others, and to alleviate pain when we can. It’s Moral Scrupulosity OCD’s whole thing. Especially when the people whose pain we’re preventing are our friends and family.

And indeed, not all scrupulous-honesty pain is the same! The less something feels like lying, the less painful it is! The absolute easiest case scenario is someone who is literally just a man-ish woman or effeminate man, who was mis-classified at first observation. They just say “I’m actually X.” There is a great deal of embarrassment and apologizing. But the mental model is updated very rapidly, and the switch to using correct pronouns can be painless nearly instantly.

A little harder can be people with hormonal or genetic disorders. My unconscious categorization software will often continue throwing errors for some time, and it can take a period of sustained effort over a long time to correct for it. Like when you meet someone with a facial deformity, and you have to try very hard not to look at it for the first dozen-ish hours that you spend around them. Eventually it fades to the background, and the brain accepts the correction, but it takes effort and a long period of discomfort. Again, absolutely worth it to make someone’s life easier. Especially because it’s not something they can control, they got fucked by life.

The non-passing trans person that is still going through transition is harder. The error flags never fully stop until the transition is succesful. But… part of a successful transition is encouraging your friends. When someone is of ambiguous sex, one of the cues that helps strangers with categorization is how people nearby refer to the ambiguous subject. Eventually it won’t be a lie to use what is currently the “wrong” pronoun, so it’s less bad to start using it early.

These are the things you tell your brain. They make it easier to push through the feeling of lying. It’s for the greater good.

And heck, some of those people are kind enough to allow (or prefer!) the use of Ambiguous They. This helps greatly with alleviating the pain of feeling like I am lying, because I’ve already internalized it as a truthful way to refer to ambiguity! (see previous post)

But then there’s the friggin trolls.

4. Friggin Trolls

I am getting better about my brain issues. Over the last decade, I’ve been able to shed some of the guilt and attendant pathologies. I’ll never be fully neurotypical, but I don’t want to be, that seems really lame. I just want to be more functional, and I’m getting there.

But I don’t want to shed my loathing of, and reflexive pain to, the act of lying. It’s served me well. I think it’s net-good, and I wish more people had it. It will cause me pain sometimes, but I’m willing to take that pain.

Most of the time.

…

This post is long, but you’re almost at the end! Read the last several bits, including the crux of the argument, at my substack. Free, of course.

Is my defensive reaction to wokeism mind-killing me? Well yes, obviously to some extent. How bad of a mental massacre is it, though? Let’s do a post-mortem on a recent failure (or semi-failure?) to find out.

First and foremost, I wish to thank Walter & James, of Rationality: From AI to Zombies podcast fame, for making this possible. One or both of them did a fair bit of research work on a previous statement of mine, and this would not be possible with that work. I am grateful to them, and I mean this sincerely!

 

1. The Tweet

May 18th I heard on a daily humorous/weird news podcast about three 13-year-old boys being investigated for sexual assault because they wouldn’t use they/them pronouns for a classmate. I thought it was more disturbing than funny TBH, so I googled up a link and shared it on Twitter. I pasted relevant text from the article, with the comment “wtf.”

Perhaps more importantly, I also talked about it and opined quite a bit more about the situation on The Mind Killer podcast.

 

2. The Rejoinder

Today (June 3rd) Walter & James posted a reply thread in Twitter, in the hopes of helping me to see how my prejudices are effecting my ability to model the world correctly. I really do appreciate this! I do think I made a few errors, some bigger than others. I also think that a couple places were W&J see errors, I believe I’m correct. So, let’s see what I can learn.

 

Intro

I hope @EneaszWrites will forgive me for the public call-in thread, but it’s an example as clear as fresh spring water of a point we have been trying to make.

Nothing here needs forgiveness, you’re putting forth an argument about something I posted publicly. Honestly, having someone engage me online with a thing I said online is what I’m here for in the first place. :) You are also super polite and reasonable about it, which is a heckin’ cool bonus!

I continue to hold no ill will against him and ultimately, his involvement is only incidental.

Cheers! Me too.

 

Source

Before we continue, I want to pull out a later tweet to address something up front — my source was The Lad Bible.

the journalistic titan that is LADbible (ಠ_ಠ)

This was basically the UK version of Maxim when it launched. It’s evolved a bit, so there’s no longer titties and butts, but it’s primary market is still the equivilant of a Frat Bro, and it retains that vibe. Why did I use this source?

Because I didn’t have any better one. I was made aware of this story by a funny-news podcast. When I searched for a link to share, mostly what I got was a bunch of right wing newsites which I am loathe to link to, because I detest most of their politics. Many of them were very aggro about the story, and very hostile to the school district. There was not a single left wing source that covered this story in any way. It is a sign of my continued naiviety that I was surprised by this. I should have figured that of course no left wing source would cover blatent injustice perpatrated in the name of wokeism. But still, it sucks that they left the field open to just the crazies that were foaming about it. :/

Lad Bible was the most non-hostile source I could find. I was working to avoid blood libel and vitriol. I believe I mostly succeeded. The article definitely shares the anti-woke perspective (more below), but it isn’t hostile or deliberately inflamatory like the other sources were. It did, however, get some key things wrong. Let’s continue.

 

Priors

a criminal charge of sexual harassment for a single wrong pronoun would be ridiculous (!).

Yes it would. The Woke do something this ridiculous every few months. My priors for “nothing this ridiculous could be true” have been ground down over the years, and it’s disheartening.

 

How Much Bullying?

This bullying is not limited to using the incorrect pronouns (!). The parent of the student in question reports that their child came home in tears “as they’ve been the target of homophobic slurs and harassment”.

I don’t want to sound insensitive, but I’m about to say two things that are kinda insensitive, so uh…. good luck to me.

First, this isn’t evidence of bullying. Every day there are thousands of incidents of culture warriors declaring they are “in tears,” “literally shaking,” “feeling nauseous,” and that’s just from watching a milquetoast award show. I’m pretty sure tears and shaking are the standard reactions of any failure of the world to live up to fully utopian ideals. It’s completely consistent with past evidence that a child would come home in tears because they couldn’t bully someone into using they/them pronouns. Actual evidence of actual acts that went beyond rejection of they/them pronoun requests is requested, ty.

Second, these are 13 year olds in middle school. This is the worst time in the life of any American adolescent, in an incredibly dysfunction enviroment. Middle school is actively damaging to the mental and emotional health of kids, it’s a fucking social warzone. No one should be subjected to it, and the fact that adults allow this institution to continue to exist is an indictment of our entire civilization. It’s not surprising when any child comes home in tears. I don’t want to make excuses for anyone involved in bullying. But also, maybe don’t send your children to hellish part-time prisons.

Third — (I don’t include this in the “things that are kinda insenstive” catagory) — W&J say that the bullying wasn’t limited to using the incorrect pronoun, by citing that the kid was “the target of homophobic slurs and harasment.” They say in the next tweet (below) that rejecting they/them pronoun requests counts as homophobic slurs and harasment. If using “he” or “she” rather than “they” is a homophobic slur, then I can’t trust any claim that there were actual homophobic slurs besides the incidents in question. I will need a source that differentiates the two before I am willing to believe this.

 

They/Them Pronoun Requests

That school has an evidently queer student, that asked their classmates to use they/them pronouns.

The student is not evidently queer. In fact, they seem to be straight and cis. I assume so because if they were gay or trans, it would be shouted from every leftist source. Instead all sources I can find are very tight-lipped about this. While I realize “queer” can now refer to straight cis people, it’s misleading to use that context here.

And I will absolutely defend the notion that deliberately calling people by the wrong name or the wrong pronouns counts as bullying and harassment.

Here I think we’ve identified a major crux. I agree that deliberately calling people by the wrong name or the wrong pronouns counts as harassment. But, importantly, they/them pronouns are never correct pronouns for a person whose sex isn’t ambiguous. An obviously cis person can request to be refered to by they/them pronouns. Others can humor them if they wish. It is not bullying to not refer to someone by the wrong pronouns.

A 13 year old weeb may request that everyone call him “Eneasz-sama.” It is cool of people to do so. It is not harassment if the people who don’t like Eneasz-sama don’t want to play along. If Eneasz-sama begins to verbally attack people, or even assault them, unless they refer to him as Eneasz-sama, then Eneasz is the bully.

From original article

[The accuser] “had been screaming at one of Braden’s friends to use proper pronouns, calling him profanity, and this friend is very soft-spoken, and kind of just sunk down into his chair,”

So my counter-claim is that demanding that people call you by incorrect pronouns counts as bullying and harassment.

Before I am accused of trolling, please be assured I mean this completely and literally. I am personally harmed (a very small amount) when others ask me to use wrong pronouns. For my friends, I absorb this cost, because I like them and I want them to be happy, even if that means a bit of suffering on my part. I am not willing to suffer for my enemies. Demands that I suffer for their comfort is an attempt at domination. It is a demand that I degrade myself, to appease my betters, and I won’t stand for it. It amplifies what was a small hurt into a major attack. Repeatedly doing so, while using threats of social, reputational, or physical attacks, is bullying and harassment.

 

Suicide Study

simply respecting a queer teen’s chosen name and pronouns correlates amazingly with lower incidence of depression and suicide rate. Pronouns are suicide prevention!

I defy the data. There is a similar lie that is propagated regularly at the highest levels of society. The statistics linked by W&J is a single 3-bar graph that purports to summerize an online survey of 34,759 respondents. No other data or details are available at the link unless I fork over $40. Based on prior experience and general incredulity, I don’t believe this stat.

 

Title IX

Next, the music teacher (!) notices the ongoing harassment and decides to file a Title IX complaint with the school district. Title IX forbids any harassment or discrimination ‘based on sex’. This probably only referred to biology for Nixon, but has included discrimination based on gender identity at least since Obama. Including deliberate misgendering is a fair interpretation.

Whether not complying with they/them pronoun demands is good reason to file a Title IX complaint is a question I’ll leave up to the reader. I will, however, draw the readers attention to the fact that the school district decided it was not, and dropped the action.

The school district now has a Title IX complaint in their hands. This sets legal machinery in motion, such as informing the students involved about the investigation and their presumption of innocence. The school district _by law_ has to open such an investigation, once a complaint is filed, if it wants to stay federally funded. It was not a political decision, it was a legal necessity.

This is the first place I feel I could have done better. I did not know that an investigation must be launched after every and any filed complaint out of legal necessity. I wish I had known this. I wish any of the sources I had gone through had mentioned this. I was unaware, and it seems that the sources either didn’t know or didn’t care. For me, this is moderately embarrasing. For the sources it should be either very embarrasing, or a sign that they are bad actors and wanted to funnel anger at the school. (I assume Lad Bible didn’t know the details of US discrimination law)

If I had known this, I wouldn’t have expressed anger/exasperation at the school district enforcing woke lunacy on The Mind-Killer podcast. I would have instead expressed anger/exasperation at a legal system that took a directive meant to protect trans people from bigotry and now could credibly threaten a school district if they didn’t investigating kids standing up to pronoun-agression bullies. To no one’s surprise, I blame Wokeism for this corruption of justice. (But I acknowledge it’s maybe been going on for much longer).

I would have likely also expresed anger/exasperation at a music teacher (!) being so wrapped up in woke extremism that he or she would file a freakin Title IX complaint against kids refusing a they/them pronoun request! This teacher should, morally, be fired. But legally, probably cannot be. Ideally, the families should be able to file a civil suit, but I doubt that’s possible.

So, yes, I was wrong in who I blamed. :(

 

The Courts Were Not Involved

This investigation by a school district, however, is not the same as the kids or anyone being “taken to court”. […] nothing like criminal charges against them existed. Only the T-IX complaint.

This is absolutely correct. Again, this was my failure. I did not know T-IX procedure. My sources were wrong, and I hadn’t done additional investigation. T-IX demands that the institution conduct an investigation, and then take appropriate action, which could just be “find the charges are BS and drop the whole matter.” No harm no foul.

 

No harm no foul?

nothing like criminal charges against them existed. Only the T-IX complaint.

A T-IX complaint isn’t a criminal case, this is true. There are some downsides to this. Schools use a lower standard of proof than criminal courts. Often they demand proof of innocence rather than proof of guilt. They are mostly biased against the accused. In the universities, this is because “a fair process might lead to a not-guilty finding — which, if leaked to the public, might bring bad publicity.” (A 2nd Circuit appeals court ruled this is no defence for the school, fortunately.) Being a target of a T-IX investigation is dangerous even if you’re ridiculously innocent.

In this case it doesn’t matter, because they boys are totally guilty of refusing a they/them request. Which is fine. It’s like being guilty of watching every Marvel movie. Everyone can get behind watching Spiderman: No Way Home, but did you REALLY need to watch Eternals?

Except in this case, watching Eternals can get you kicked out of school permanently, and you end up labeled a sex offender for the rest of your life. Would this happen? Hard to say. It’s happened before. Is getting kicked out of a public middle school that big of a deal? It’s not as bad as getting kicked out of a university, but it’ll definitely impose major costs on the families. Would the sex offender label be sealed behind minor-protection walls after they turn 18? Maybe not. And anyone who sees a Title-IX violation on a man’s record knows that such violations are in response to sexual assault.

 

…

This post is long! To read the rest of it, go to my substack. I’m slowly transitioning over to there, and this is one nudge to switch over. The whole thing is up for free, as is everything I’ve ever blogged about.

It includes lines like “Truth-seeking is done not as an individual alone, but as a network of people who have a wide spectrum of biases and priors” and “at this point, I expect the district will do the right thing.”