Being silenced/feeling voiceless

[JeanneDeMontbaston]

Can we talk about this?

There were some amazing threads on here a few years ago, about rape and about 'small' sexual assaults, and I remember so many posters saying they'd suddenly found a way to talk about something that had shaped them as people. It seemed really powerful to me. But I was wondering if we're actually going backwards in terms of feeling able to speak up.

I was in a meeting yesterday, and noticing how some women (including me) do that classic 'I don't know if I'm saying this very well' kind of minimising of their own points. I was really struck that someone said 'I need to learn the language to say this' - as if she was being inarticulate, rather than as if people weren't bothering to listen to what she was saying (which was closer to the case).

I keep on feeling this way, especially about all the debates raging around gender identity issues - I just don't have the language to say what I want to say. I can't help feeling as if all of us who disagree are just miscommunicating. Does anyone else feel that? I don't feel as if I have the language to talk about what makes me feel hurt and upset by words like 'cis' - I think it's a real feeling, and I think it is related to sexual violence, but I don't feel very able to put it into words, especially outside MN.

Does anyone else feel like this?

Jeanne "under, sorry, but that doesn't work for me."

Which bit?

"Because I do see that some people use this terminology productively (for them: it helps them understand who they are)."

Do you mean 'internal self-identity'? Because I agree that having a language of internal descriptors can be helpful- ie psychology and psychotherapy, but when these internal descriptors are at odds with reality, yet are claimed as one's 'identity', it is another thing altogether to then insist others concur reality itself is wrong. My problem with the nature of 'internal self-identification' is it justifies controlling behaviour.

"So I don't want to just say, oh, they're a bunch of deluded fools."

Delusional people are not necessarily foolish. Delusions are common. Here's the OED definition: Characterized by or holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument, typically as a symptom of mental disorder. It isn't disparaging or dismissive to call a delusion a delusion. It is not a slur on a person's intelligence or ability to hold down a job. It is simply a matter of fact.

"I also have issues with 'violence' done by language. I do feel upset and hurt about all of this, and I don't know why really. But I know that people constantly claim that language is 'violent' and I find it Orwellian and frightening - eg., people claiming that radical feminists are literally 'causing violence' to them by speaking. I don't want to go down that road."

A very fair point, apologies - I had to dash to take the kids to school and posted before a proper read-through.

Mmm. I think with whatever term you use, you will get people who are wankers. They would be wankers if they weren't using that term, too.

I know people who use 'genderqueer' in what seems to me a pretty straightfoward way, to say that they don't feel as if they find into a binary view of gender. While I slightly feel inclined to knock that on the grounds most women don't, I can see what they're getting at.

My real issue with 'genderqueer' is that it's part of queer theory, and as an ideology, QT has extremely weak capacity to support real, radical change. In order for some people to define themselves as 'genderqueer', you pretty much have to accept the premise that other people are not genderqueer, that their gender is, if you like 'straight' and cis and absolutely fine. You have to accept gender is a 'real thing'. Or I think you do - I suspect people might disagree with me.

It seems to me it's a perfectly useful way to identify in day-to-day life, but not a radical platform for change, which is what I'd like (and hence radical feminism).

Cross posted.

under - it doesn't work for me to say it's a 'lie'. And, I think you are conflating being trans and being genderqueer, and they're not the same thing, as I understand the terms.

I didn't say people were forcing others to abide by their reality - so, no, I don't mean that. When I said I've seen people us these terms productively, what I mean is, they've found a term, or a way of looking at themselves, that helps them feel comfortable. That's fine by me (or, more precisely, it is fine by me and also none of my business). I think this is quite separate from someone then telling me I must be cis, and cis must mean my life is like thus-and-so.

I admit, there's a grey area when we come down to ideologies behind labels, because QT is incompatible with radical feminism. When I posted my OP, I said I wondered how much of all of this is miscommunication, and this seems relevant here: I do often wonder if what I understand using the outlook of radical feminism, is actually not so very different from what someone else understands through the lens of queer theory. We'll express things very differently, but I wonder if we're not actually perceiving the same stuff. Dunno.

As to delusions - yes, I know what a delusion is. But I don't think people necessarily are deluded. I think, here, we're back to the problem we had at the beginning of the thread: some people on here feel silenced because they know what they think about these issues of gender and identity, and know they can't say it because they'll be deleted. I don't think I know, and don't have the words. But, I'm not convinced other people are delusional for holding a different belief from mine.

Dodos - love your oppression top trumps analogy. I find the whole "well I've suffered more than you so shut up" attitude incredibly tedious. Isn't oppression supposed to create solidarity, not competition?

Jeanne, the "verbal violence" thing really gets me. It's an insidious threat to free speech in my opinion. Violence is violence, words are words. And why are we not allowed to claim trans activists are doing us "violence" when they describe us in terms that we are not comfortable with, or worse, try to make us adopt those terms without our enthusiastic consent? Or when they threaten women who object to their ideology with actual violence?

Yeah, it really gets me too.

OTOH, I do think words have power and can cause damage. I'm interested in it as a historical issue. But I think women have been coping with words used violently against them for millenia, and part of the reason it is peculiarly hurtful to be told you are doing violence by trying to describe yourself, is that history.

It isn't just about gender issues, it's the whole of the fourth wave - they do the same thing with sex work, calling it 'violence' to talk about criminalizing people who buy sex.

Words have great power, and can cause great pain. But the right to freedom of expression extends (in my head at least) as the right to call myself what I want. I don't think that it necessarily extends to choosing what I get to call other people, because that can cause them pain. So other people can call themselves trans/cis/gender queer or whatever else they want. But I have the right to reject any/all of those labels.

However, I wouldn't describe words as being 'violent' because 'violent' means, to me at least, physical harm. Which is quite distinct from mental harm.

I also think that the right to freedom of expression doesn't extend as far as redefining collective nouns to include me. Because that tramples on other people's right to freedom of expression. Where a collective noun is to be extended / redefined it needs to be done with the consent of (at least the majority of) people already covered by the collective noun.

"I'm not convinced other people are delusional for holding a different belief from mine."

I am utterly opposed to queer theory, in fact any philosophical system created by induction and intuition (eg- religion), being put forward as a means for arriving at the truth or being used as a basis for secular decision-making, eg- laws, the legal definition of 'woman' - etc. Scepticism and empiricism are essential for finding out the facts and underpinning a fair and rational society - (and as a feminist - I just want things to be fair!)

I am not being absolutist about it - for example, AA is 'God-centred' and it is one of the most effective forms of staying sober out there. This doesn't mean that God exists, but it does show how helpful a belief in God can be. This tells us something about our psychology and how believing in things that have no evidence or defy logic can help us at times - eg - bereavement.

But helpful beliefs and facts are very different things, so I don't believe these disagreements are just about miscommunication - it is about fundamentally disagreeing. Queer theory is to radical politics what religion is to science.

I'm opposed to queer theory too.

Your point about belief in God being helpful whether or not God exists is, I think, what I'm getting at when I say I can see how people find identifying as genderqueer useful. I can't understand what it is that they're understanding, but it doesn't matter. It works for them.

The problem is, while helpful beliefs and facts are different, I'm less sure than you that I know how to tell the difference all of the time.

I'm not convinced other people are delusional for holding a different belief from mine

Just trying to understand this (rather than making a point). Are you saying that you are open to the idea that the belief that a person has been "born into the wrong body" is not a delusion?

I think that to be a 'fact' something simply has to be supported by all the available evidence.

A belief is something which is felt to be true but does not need (or unusually have) any supporting evidence.

An opinion is somewhere in between. It is something of a feeling, but is supported by evidence, though that evidence may be incomplete (ie may be personal experience or biased).

I was thinking about being genderqueer, TBH. Which I find easier to understand.

But yes, I think I am open to that, because I think language is pretty limited, and I can believe someone could feel that describes how they are.

Obviously, because I am a (kind of) radfem, I also believe that if you could put that person into a society without patriarchy, they wouldn't feel that way. But we can't.

I'm not terribly comfortable talking about this, FWIW. (Not trying to shut you down, just saying I might go silent.)

"The problem is, while helpful beliefs and facts are different, I'm less sure than you that I know how to tell the difference all of the time."

It is just scientific method - scepticism, evidence, logic.... I don't claim to know the difference all the time - that wouldn't be sceptical, I just wish more people - okay - more women... would trust in their own senses, their appraisal of the evidence, their own ability to use irrefutable logic.

I mean ... someone who believes they were born into the wrong body and should in fact have been born a fox, is deluded. Because we do not live in a society that is entirely organized around an oppressive view of foxes, and fox-stereotyping, and so on. There is no cultural reasoning why someone should believe they should have been born a fox.

But, where gender is concerned, it is different: we live in a patriarchy, and it is fucked up, and I can believe that one response to that would be to think 'I've been born in the wrong body'.

I would sincerely hope people wouldn't feel like that outside of a patriarchy, but I dunno.

where gender is concerned, it is different: we live in a patriarchy, and it is fucked up, and I can believe that one response to that would be to think 'I've been born in the wrong body'

Thanks I understand where you're coming from and I think I agree. For me, whichever way you look at it, the idea that you can be "born into the wrong body" is a delusion. We are our bodies (the major part of which of course is our brain), and who we are is of course hugely determined by how we interact with the environment. And that interaction with the environment can make our minds feel desperately unhappy with - and even disconnected from - the body, and we can seek to change the body, but the idea that it is the "wrong one for our minds" is a delusion, because it is our bodies that give rise to our minds, which are then heavily shaped by the environment in which we exist.

I just don't feel comfortable saying it is a delusion, when it's someone else's brain and body.

Not judging either way, just saying why I wouldn't.

Jeanne - I completely understand that position.

The thing for me is, our brain is our body.

But there's an awful lot we don't know about brains. And - I know I keep saying this - we often don't have the language to say what we think we do know.

Sure, there's an awful lot we don't know about brains… but I'm not sure that this affects the idea that it is our bodies (and their interaction with environment) that give rise to our minds… that minds do not exist without bodies…? Unless you take some sort of spiritual stance and think that we are 'minds' or 'souls' that require no physical body for existence I guess.

You keep saying it because it's the topic of your thread

I don't pretend to know how it feels to live inside any mind or body than my own. I do claim to understand gender and believe it is, overall, harmful to humans.

For some years my mind believed itself to be part of a really fat body. It was a delusion. This was caused by social influences interacting with oddnesses in my bio-chemistry. Without the social influences, I may have experienced some delusions anyway but they are unlikely to have taken this specific form, which interrupted feedback from the rest of my body quite spectacularly.

I do kind of resent that people who've suffered body dysmorphia are not 'allowed' to connect it with gender dysphoria. It strikes me there are several similarities. If they are similar, it would suggest that social influences are causing the nature of the problem/delusion/dysmorphia/etc. That's probably why we're not allowed to discuss it!

Physiologically intersex people, as far as I can find out, don't generally suffer gender dysphoria. Specifically, "Research has shown gender identities of intersex individuals to be independent of sexual orientation, though some intersex conditions also affect an individual's sexual orientation." (Wikipedia, quoteing this) If dysphoria were a thing with routine physiological causes, one might expect that most intersex people would.

I am biased. I want us to get the hell rid of gender, and see what folks make of it. I think this is happening despite what seems to be a re-entrenchment phase lately.

Sorry, I quoted the wrong bit. Here, with refs: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersex#Gender_identities_and_identification_documents

I do kind of resent that people who've suffered body dysmorphia are not 'allowed' to connect it with gender dysphoria.

This with bells on - I've posted before about the similarities I see between my thought patterns when I had anorexia and the behaviour of some transactivists. Rather than engaging with any points I was told point blank it wasn't the same, even though to my mind there is a lot of overlap.

Thankfully, doctors helped me regain an acceptance of my body rather than aiding me in starving myself to death - they don't appear to be as kind when you're wedded to the concept of gender.

But this reaction, again, is a silencing - I cannot know what it's like to feel transgender (although I can't say I "feel" like a woman so much as I'm stuck as one) - but then a transperson cannot know what it's like to be anorexic unless they've also suffered with it. How can they know it's completely different?

laurierf "Unless you take some sort of spiritual stance and think that we are 'minds' or 'souls' that require no physical body for existence I guess."

That's an interesting point, it has given me a bit of a lightbulb moment as to why religious conservatives embrace the idea of transgenderism.

It gives me such a strong urge to take Ockham's razor to it...

Since you do not need disembodied souls or minds to explain reality, belief systems based on it are creative with the truth.. Because even if we do have souls/ transcendent minds - what makes them male or female? Since reproduction is something that happens by a physical process involving opposite sex physical bodies - are we now going down the road of fancy where disembodied souls can have sex and produce baby souls? And do these new baby souls enter the bodies of human babies? If so, who are these sexually reproductive souls? It is all postulation and conjecture - and a bit ridiculous.

So even if there are souls it is unlikely they would have a reproductive sex, since reproduction is physical.

I wonder if it is better to question the idea that the mind is somehow separate from the body in terms of 'illusion' rather than 'delusion', because I think it's the word 'delusion' that has made some uncomfortable. People will argue (rightly or wrongly) that 'free will' is an illusion without coming under 'how dare you say that?' sort of fire, even though people naturally feel that free will is most certainly not an illusion.