I apologize for linking so many articles on this issue recently, but this one provides a great overview of a lot of the issues that have been coming to a head in recent years, and it's nice to see...
I apologize for linking so many articles on this issue recently, but this one provides a great overview of a lot of the issues that have been coming to a head in recent years, and it's nice to see a non-USian, non-British perspective.
Very refreshing to see news coverage about trans rights which is actually about trans peoples' perspectives of how their rights are being eroded, and not a load of TERFy bullshit like we in the UK...
Very refreshing to see news coverage about trans rights which is actually about trans peoples' perspectives of how their rights are being eroded, and not a load of TERFy bullshit like we in the UK keep getting from every single outlet.
This seems like quite a good article, describing the controversy and linking to some interesting studies. I'm not too sure about one of the studies cited. It's called a "nonprobability survey"...
This seems like quite a good article, describing the controversy and linking to some interesting studies.
I'm not too sure about one of the studies cited. It's called a "nonprobability survey" which seems to be jargon for an online survey that's adjusted based on demographics. This raises red flags from a statistical point of view. It's non-representative because some people have no chance of being surveyed. Here's an article about the biases of nonprobability surveys.
I know little about this area - just pointing out that, as always, you have to actually look at how studies are done. Also, sometimes biased surveys are the best you can do, practically, but we should still be aware of their limitations.
I think it's incredibly important to point out a reason behind why opt-in surveys are often employed in medicine and medicine related fields - it can be monolithically difficult to recruit decent...
I think it's incredibly important to point out a reason behind why opt-in surveys are often employed in medicine and medicine related fields - it can be monolithically difficult to recruit decent size sampling pools of people who are relatively rare or sparse. Because of this, there's often a conscious trade-off of representation and perfect accuracy in order to learn something. If you want to learn something about an extremely rare disease which affects 1 in 1,000,000 people, it can be unsurprisingly quite difficult to find people, let alone conduct some kind of a study on them.
Understanding how this can affect results across a variety of subjects is important, and I think it's good to point out that an opt-in survey is likely to not capture the voices of people who are unlikely to exist in the sphere in which the opt-in happens. Which is to say that this particular survey would not capture anyone in the united states who was not online in 2015, would not capture people without the free time and energy to complete this kind of a survey or were not assisted in completing this survey and would also have less participation from minorities which were less likely to contribute to or participate in this kind of a survey. These are all important considerations for which to examine the lens of what's going on, but I also want to point out that this is leaps and bounds above most other science that happens in this field. I've seen plenty of right wing assholes try and justify the 'harms' of transitioning by pointing to studies such as the one which targeted subscribers of the /r/detransition sub, a group of individuals exponentially more likely to have positive opinions on detransitioning as justification for why transitioning is bad or harmful and that access should be gatekept.
I'm a bit on edge to see someone entering a thread like this with a mostly singular negative take on something presented in this article when they only spent one sentence talking about what's well done about this article. It makes me worry about whether someone might read your post and take away the wrong message. Or that perhaps in the worst case that some people are in this thread without good intentions and taking away the wrong message from your post. I would urge you, in the future, to consider how others might feel reading your post, especially those for which detransitioning is pointed to as some scary boogeyman and to be careful about how you word a criticism of a study which scientifically supports a different narrative.
I think we aren't all that far apart. In particular, I expect you're quite right about the difficulty of being truly representative when doing research in this area. Yes, I said hardly anything...
I think we aren't all that far apart. In particular, I expect you're quite right about the difficulty of being truly representative when doing research in this area.
Yes, I said hardly anything about the rest of the article. Given the number of people quoted and links for further reading, it looks thorough and well-researched. I'd have read it more carefully to do it justice. (I was skimming.) And given how little I know, I don't think I'd have much to add without doing a lot more research. I'm not going to outdo the journalist.
I also can't really complain about sounding a cautionary note, given that it's what I do all the time, and that's what I was doing in the post you're responding to.
I am a bit disappointed in your lack of faith in me. We've both been on Tildes a long time, you know? I'm well aware that posts to ~lgbt are sensitive, and so I write pretty cautiously. I had thought I had diffused any potential for my post to be taken as more than a comment on one aspect of one study.
(And I should probably say I'd have to read that study more carefully just to decide what I think of it.)
I apologize if you feel like this was an attack on you - it wasn't. I tried my best to frame my concerns through my own lens - I am worried about x and y happening to someone else and some people...
I apologize if you feel like this was an attack on you - it wasn't. I tried my best to frame my concerns through my own lens - I am worried about x and y happening to someone else and some people reading this thread. I want to be clear that I wasn't accusing you specifically of doing anything wrong, I was attempting to help yourself and others better understand how this specific content was processed by myself, and likely others, and to help build this communities skills in emotional intelligence.
It's clear that I failed in doing this and wish to apologize for a perceived lack of faith. At this point in time I'm actually unsure what I can do differently to prevent this kind of interpretation. If you have the time, I'd love to understand how you parsed my message and what parts stuck out as an attack on you, even if they don't seem as such upon a second closer reading. It is my hope that by better understanding how this comment made you feel I can add in extra wording to ensure this doesn't happen to someone else in the future as I do not wish to alienate anyone who is an ally or a potential ally, but rather to help them understand how to be an even better one.
What do you mean? Does raising a single question/concern reflect poorly on the article in your eyes? Even if @skybrian had not raised the subject, other users might reach a similar conclusion, and...
... a mostly singular negative take
What do you mean? Does raising a single question/concern reflect poorly on the article in your eyes?
Even if @skybrian had not raised the subject, other users might reach a similar conclusion, and thus benefit from the public discourse on the matter. So the two comments put together are a net gain in every way?
I don't think worrying about what some randos could walk away thinking is productive or healthy. They might walk away with harmful opinions, but they might not. You can't know for sure, and you can't really control the outcome. Also consider the odds that someone here would come away with a harmful opinion, versus consumers of British news....
Framing. The key here is framing. Take a look at media by people pushing bigoted opinions or things like climate denial. They'll often attempt to subvert it by presenting a farce of a two sided...
Framing. The key here is framing.
Take a look at media by people pushing bigoted opinions or things like climate denial. They'll often attempt to subvert it by presenting a farce of a two sided opinion where they will acknowledge one side's existence very little, but still present it, and then launch into a very wordy 'problem' they see with the other side. With climate change, for example, they might recognize that the planet has warmed and that humans contributed to it in a few sentences, and then spend 2000 words talking about natural cycles on Earth and the 'little ice age' or whatever supports what their readers want to hear.
As I stated, I'm not disagreeing with their point, but when someone comes into a thread chock full of research and evidence to disprove a popular narrative which is being pushed to roll back any possible progress for a very targeted minority, one which has incredibly high incidences of negative health outcomes when they are not socially supported and incredibly low incidences of negative health outcomes when they are socially supported, it makes people like myself and those who voted on my comment understandably concerned or upset about the framing. How can I be sure this person means the best, on the internet where there are many who obscure their true views, and many trolls and others who support what I feel are incredibly uncompassionate viewpoints of this minority which I wish to protect? How can I be sure that people who haven't made up their minds, or are on the fence aren't going to read this and interpret it as a valid criticism which will give them enough 'evidence' to discount everything else on the article?
This kind of discourse is important when it's in the right venue and framed correctly. I'm simply trying my best to offer advice on how to be cognizant of when you're in that right venue or when it is framed correctly. Given that this venue is focused on LGBT issues and somewhere where the LGBT minority of this website may wish to retreat to avoid the persecution they often face in other places on this website, treating this place with extra care is how we can be sure that this minority continues to exist on this website rather than feeling pushed out and eventually becoming disengaged and deleting their accounts or abandoning this place altogether. But also, in the current age of disinformation and people scrambling to find ways to misinterpret data and science in any way they possibly can, giving any ammunition to people looking to spread disinformation without at least adequately priming the layman to understand this isn't a significant issue in the context of this information is something we should all be trying our best to avoid.
I'll try to detail my understanding. You are wary of the comment in question because: It could be used by a malicious actor to discredit the article. It could lead someone to form a harmful...
I'll try to detail my understanding. You are wary of the comment in question because:
It could be used by a malicious actor to discredit the article.
It could lead someone to form a harmful opinion.
Although it calls out the entire article as being quite good and including interesting studies, by raising one issue and not expounding equally on everything that was quite good and the interesting studies, it resembles straw man arguments.
This is an lgbt space and no-one should have to feel uncomfortable or attacked or defensive in one's own space.
Number 1 is impossible to avoid IMO. You could never raise any doubts or provide any constructive criticism, or any feedback at all. Even only positive feedback can be spun as "an echochamber". There is no easy victory against a malicious actor so I feel that this concern is misplaced.
Number 2 should consider the venue, as you say. Who here is reading this article and comment? People who use tildes, people who have a reason to discuss lgbt topics online. I think that if the comment in question is enough to set someone onto a TERF mindset, they were long gone. I really don't understand how this one was something you worried over.
Number 3, I understand where you are coming from, but I think it is unfair to expect someone to have to cover in equal detail things they have acknowledged as good just to raise an issue. You are raising the bar to participate in public discourse, to what end? Would the world be a better place if @skybrian didn't comment?
Number 4, you're right. But this is a public space also, on a website about discussing current events and other things. If anyone felt uncomfortable because of @skybrian's comment, or any of mine, please message me, label my comments as malice, or otherwise signal to me in a way you are comfortable so that I can take extra care not to do so in the future. But I must admit, it feels like the only way to deliver on this promise is for me to remove myself from the discussions entirely, as I genuinely don't think the comment in question is bad. I don't even see how it would contribute to a gradual shift in atmosphere away from an lgbt space. I mean, people have come here to discuss topics in what I feel is a relatively safe space, and if this discourse can not happen here, where on earth can it happen?
Lastly, you have not addressed my remark that lurkers may hold a view similar to @skybrian's, and by engaging with his comment the two of you have provided more information that may alter their opinions. I find it unlikely that anyone in such a scenario would ultimately leave with a more harmful mindset as a result. Someone who did not have that mindset and may have formed it after @skybrian's comment still has the benefit of being able to see yours too, and this all seems like a pointless exercise in speculation.
With regards to number 2, there are lots of people who are drawn to subject areas which they either hold strong opinions on or want to share strong opinions on. A climate denier will find...
With regards to number 2, there are lots of people who are drawn to subject areas which they either hold strong opinions on or want to share strong opinions on. A climate denier will find themselves in threads arguing against climate change in environmentalist areas. This is the person I am trying to avoid, but have no current way to deal with on Tildes. Similarly, someone with a strong opinion who might be a potential ally but has not appropriately dealt with harmful internalizations or has not experienced a life in the shoes of the class they are trying to protect or be an ally with, can cause harm rather than good simply because they do not fully empathize with the person they are trying to protect and can alienate them.
Your response on number 3 is blowing this out of proportion. I simply brought up that framing is important and I would appreciate spending more than 16 words highlighting the good in the article before spending 102 words pointing out a negative and providing a source which proves it is a negative.
However, in the second half of your reply on number 3 I think you bring up a wonderful point
I don't even see how it would contribute to a gradual shift in atmosphere away from an lgbt space.
This is precisely what we are here to help you understand! I'm providing an opinion as to how it makes myself and others uncomfortable here, and I'm providing for you a distinct action plan. I'm asking for you, and others, to think just a little bit harder about the framing of what you are positing and the venue which it is posited in. Take a look at your comment and try to put yourself in the shoes of another person and ask yourself, if I knew nothing about this person and was the minority this article talks about or we are discussing, how might I feel if I were to see a comment like this? How might I allay any concerns of trolling, of bad faith, or of some kind of negative interpretation? Can I soften my language? Can I spend more time supporting the positive sides of this article, before offering a criticism? This isn't about providing the most succinct and accurate debate of a subject, this is about managing the emotions and emotional bandwidth of the people participating in the discussion. How might they need to be protected? How often may they have seen this point before? What am I contributing to the discussion? What might I not know about this set of individuals that perhaps I should ask before contributing?
this all seems like a pointless exercise in speculation.
I think this points to precisely what I'm trying to highlight here. I'm not trying to speculate here - I'm providing how this comment has made me feel. This isn't about the content, I already said that I agree with the content and supported the point that he brought up. Granted, I did reframe it with some context that I felt was missing, the core content of my message was directed at the environment it was creating and a plea to frame differently in the future. I'm trying to help you and others become emotionally aware about how this kind of framing can be emotionally taxing to a group which already is often disengaged on discussions about the subject because they are overwhelmed by many other things in their life which are keeping them systematically oppressed.
You say that you want to have a discussion in a safe space - this is fantastic! However, the space cannot remain safe if we do not adequately manage it and keep it safe. The best way to keep it safe is to keep in mind how the demands and needs of someone who is systematically oppressed might differ from your own demands and needs and respecting and meeting them where they can be met at, respecting that the world is already taking up their emotional and intellectual bandwidth by systematically oppressing them.
Thanks for responding, this helped me understand your points much more than the others. You have told me now that you have felt these things in this thread, so I won't be an ass and dismiss that....
Thanks for responding, this helped me understand your points much more than the others. You have told me now that you have felt these things in this thread, so I won't be an ass and dismiss that.
I understand now that you are trying to help me understand how this all contributes to a gradual shift away from an lgbt space. I am frustrated because, although I understand that you are trying to help me understand (thank you), I still don't. There is nothing here that I will be able to apply to further interactions with this space, beyond a second serving of self doubt, because it seemingly has not clicked for me. I really am trying though.
My read of the situation (and, for context, I'm not trans, so take my words here with a grain of salt) is that discussions of trans issues here often skip past the emotional weight attached to...
Exemplary
My read of the situation (and, for context, I'm not trans, so take my words here with a grain of salt) is that discussions of trans issues here often skip past the emotional weight attached to genuinely awful and difficult news and tend towards conversations regarding specific pieces of academic correctness. It's not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with a focus on that correctness -- it's that doing so without acknowledging the concurrent emotional weight in the first place can feel very diminishing to those living underneath it.
For example, if I pour my soul out here about 10 different struggles I'm having in my life right now, and the community's primary response is to simply question the legitimacy of struggle #7, that response misses the mark even if they're completely in the right to legitimately question it! The issue isn't just struggle #7 -- it's the aggregate of all those struggles and the corresponding burden that brings to my life -- a burden which might be the very reason I'm potentially misperceiving #7 in the first place!
I think we can get caught up in focusing on specific, individual trees with regards to trans issues, and our hyper-focus on those details can cause us to miss the larger forest in which trans people live -- a forest which still does not ensure them basic rights and dignities and yields frequent and widespread discrimination. That forest comes with a human cost -- a toll that trans people pay in the form of reduced quality of life, opportunities, safety, and happiness.
As allies, when news of this forest's shittiness arises, I think the best thing we can do is affirm the unfairness and the difficulty of that aggregate before we dive into any specific points that we want to pull apart (and, also, questioning whether this is even the time or place to pull those apart given the greater gravity of other issues). If we lead with that, we're showing that we care about and understand the big picture -- if we don't lead with that, it can make us come across as uncaring or oblivious, even when that's not our intention. In a space like ~lgbt in particular, it's paramount that trans people feel seen, heard, and understood because, as we know from the wider forest, in many other spaces in their lives they are not.
Absolutely nailed it. Honestly, I almost want to post articles like this in multiple tildes: once in ~news for typical (and valuable!) Tildes dissection, and once in ~lgbt for discussion of the...
Absolutely nailed it. Honestly, I almost want to post articles like this in multiple tildes: once in ~news for typical (and valuable!) Tildes dissection, and once in ~lgbt for discussion of the social and political situation and consequences for the community.
This is quite counterintuitive for me. My instinct is to try to avoid making conversations emotional, particularly with people I don't know very well or with subjects I don't understand very well....
This is quite counterintuitive for me. My instinct is to try to avoid making conversations emotional, particularly with people I don't know very well or with subjects I don't understand very well. Making things emotional feels like raising the stakes and increasing conflict. Looking for safer ground for discussions feels like de-escalating.
It seems like rushing into the personal and emotional isn't something a newcomer should be doing, when you really don't know what's going on? It seems safer to stick to smalltalk or to talk around it.
In some situations there are conventional ways to handle things. "I'm sorry for your loss" is pretty safe at a funeral even if you hardly know anyone.
I wonder if taking refuge in the superficial would help? There are terrible-sounding news stories where I don't know what's going on and probably won't get to the bottom of it, but "that sounds really bad" seems like a safe thing to say?
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean about this? The ask here is not actually to make the conversation emotional, but to evaluate the emotional affect of your post. To consider how a human, an...
Exemplary
My instinct is to try to avoid making conversations emotional
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean about this? The ask here is not actually to make the conversation emotional, but to evaluate the emotional affect of your post. To consider how a human, an emotional being, might take in the information you present and process it. I legitimately cannot think of a single situation, in which considering messaging through this lens with another human is not a useful skill because emotional states directly effect how we process information from the world.
Have you ever heard of the term fight or flight? Someone who feels threatened does not do the same kind of processing as someone who is not, and they will more or less jam any information presented into one of two buckets - do I fight this or run away from this? The entire body reacts in a way to process information as efficiently as possible to answer this question, because in a life or death situation this is beneficial. Certainly, there are individuals in which the emotional affect is lower or who may have such a unique brain that certain emotions do not even register to the individual or may not ever be felt, but these individuals are rare and our general approach to messaging should always include some level of emotional awareness if our goal is to interact with other humans.
It seems safer to stick to smalltalk or to talk around it.
If you'll re-read my replies to you and others in this thread, you will see that I never advocate for small talk and the questions I pose are all questions around how to phrase the same message that you were originally intending to share. The questions I ask, such as
How might I allay any concerns of trolling, of bad faith, or of some kind of negative interpretation?
Can I soften my language?
Can I spend more time supporting the positive sides of this article, before offering a criticism?
Are all questions about how to shape how a message is delivered. If I tell you that we must do something or that we should do something, the same idea that something should change is still there, it's just a difference of universality versus something shaped through a specific lens. If I spend more time addressing what is good about an article before launching into criticism I'm still sharing the same idea that I both agree with and disagree with parts of what was presented, it's just a difference of how clear I feel on both subjects because I'm putting more on the table. The same is true of how much time I spend ensuring the other person that I am an ally - unless I present hard evidence that is counterfactual, I have already presented this agreement or at least implied it, the difference is how much is explicitly stated.
In all of these examples the idea, the conceptual or abstract behind the words, is not significantly different between a statement with my suggestions taken and the output before the suggestions were considered. However, when the suggestions are taken the words used to explain this abstract are different - the words I use differ, the amount of time I spend on one subject differs, the consideration I give to the person consuming my data has changed.
I think it's an interesting framework because people are often taught how to be concise in school - how to make a point with less words, how to avoid spending excessive words on a point that was already made, how to assess the weight behind a point. I could write up a million words about how I feel about climate change, but in the eyes of academia and science it's not necessarily a compelling argument so it makes sense to learn about this. But we don't spend a lot of time talking about the actual human outcome of our words. If I'm an asshole when I make a point, does anyone even listen to me? Does it matter if my argument is bulletproof if it presents one which humans are unwilling to consume? Might my argument alienate others or make them afraid? Outside of the arts, we spend very little time teaching people to consider how and when being less concise is actually beneficial. How considering the emotion of the viewer and how we are shaping that emotional state can be incredibly useful to conveying an idea or a thought or shaping the very environment in which they are participating.
I'd also like a second to quickly address @mtset 's suggestion, learning to not comment until you've spent an adequate amount of time in a space you're unfamiliar with. I also am not going to tell you to not participate, but when you do participate if you aren't already intimately aware with a space in which you have not spent a lot of time in, you should expect to see some amount of pushback. This is not a failing of yours, it's a recognition that the norms and expectations in spaces differ and that humans are incredibly diverse. I've seen what is playing out here play out a million times in person, in minority spaces, very often between allies and the very people they wish to be allied with. It's almost never a bad idea to hang back for awhile and feel out a space before interacting. It's almost never a bad idea to reach out to people in the space and ask them about how they've been interpreting your interactions, whether you are new to the space in general or simply new to the specific space you are interacting with. As I mentioned before, humans are incredibly diverse and recognizing this diversity and doing what you can to appreciate and respect it goes a long way.
It took me a long time to respond because I found the request to "evaluate the emotional affect of your post" to be more difficult than you probably intended. Let me explain. Usually, when we...
It took me a long time to respond because I found the request to "evaluate the emotional affect of your post" to be more difficult than you probably intended. Let me explain.
Usually, when we write, we have some hypothetical reader in mind. Your imagined reader might be someone specific (when writing to someone you know well) or a generic "reasonable person" or something else.
If you think of your reader as a reasonable person who is somewhat sympathetic and forgiving of mistakes then imagining the emotional impact of your post is going to be a lot more fun than if you think of them as someone who is potentially hostile and likely to take what you say the wrong way.
I think that for me, my hypothetical reader in ~lgbt has been, well, someone who's going to tell me I'm doing it wrong for reasons that are difficult to predict. It feels like a tense place? The fight-or-flight reaction you describe is something I can relate to. This reader might blow up at me unpredictably. So judging their emotional response isn't easy.
But you know what? That reader is mostly in my head. (Maybe based on real examples, but still a construct.)
Yes, it's quite likely that I've contributed to this feeling of tenseness in others. I tend to be a fault-finder, posting about things that don't seem right. I'm working on that, and I try not to make it personal (for what it's worth).
I think that for people to be comfortable writing, the reactions they get need to be somewhat predictable, and social media is often a chaotic place where you never know what's going to happen. We have some rules and conversational norms here but it still can be surprising.
I'm not sure we can warn our way out of this. Giving people a bunch of warnings about what not to do is going to make things more forbidding. Maybe positive examples would be better?
I think that reassurance helps, though I'm definitely not in the habit of doing this. I have a perhaps irrational but deep-seated concern that it's going to sound fake. Like back when Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain." What did he know about other people's pain? (For related reasons, I'm uncomfortable with the term "ally.")
Writing for a diverse set of people seems like a noble goal. As a writer, I think one might put it into practice by imagining various personas and how they might react. It seems like this is going to increasingly challenging the more diverse you imagine them, though? (Consider variations in reading levels, differing cultural backgrounds, etc.)
I don't want to tell you not to comment on things, but I had to train myself to simply not contribute to discussions on racism, even when I felt I had something valuable to say, when the...
I don't want to tell you not to comment on things, but I had to train myself to simply not contribute to discussions on racism, even when I felt I had something valuable to say, when the discussion was happening in a larger context that I didn't have expertise on. Otherwise, I ran the risk of derailing the conversation, because however accurate my critique was, if it wasn't as impactful as the larger conversation, it wouldn't be useful.
This is one issue with the comment-as-interaction we have here. It's largely a good thing, but we don't have the "like" button of Twitter and Mastodon (or the "sympathy" reaction of Facebook) to voice an individual but not individualized reaction to a post, so in order to interact at all it often feels necessary to dig deeply into the technical metits of the material at hand.
let me try to give some insight. hi. trans person here. I really do not care to engage with what cis people think about trans issues online. much of the time they are engaging in bad faith. other...
let me try to give some insight. hi. trans person here. I really do not care to engage with what cis people think about trans issues online. much of the time they are engaging in bad faith. other times they are willfully ignorant. the minority is well-meaning but usually lacking a full grasp of the situation. think about what this means when reading comments like the first in this thread.
click when you have thought about it
it is the CONSTANT (online and off) sorting of people into friend or foe. will this person hurt me, will they say things that leave me a wreck for the rest of the day, are they someone to be trusted. I do not like that I have to do this.
I try to assess the character of a space before saying anything. on tildes, this means "what has been posted in this thread." someone JAQing off or being argumentative without an EXPLICIT declaration of allyship and that it's coming from a good place makes me not want to engage. I do not feel safe doing so. the default environment is hostility; unless there are flashing signs saying that's not the case, for my own emotional well-being, I will assume it is.
I hate that most of the comments on this post are meta conversation.
I don't like my comment but rather than editing it for another 20m or deleting it I will post in case it is useful.
Thanks. Yeah, this is probably what the offtopic label is for. Someone earlier said that sometimes even presenting a declaration of allyship can look like maliciousness or someone setting up a...
Thanks. Yeah, this is probably what the offtopic label is for. Someone earlier said that sometimes even presenting a declaration of allyship can look like maliciousness or someone setting up a straw man argument. Do comments that at first seem positive regularly give you pause and a reason to be concerned about that, or is it relatively a non-issue compared to other difficulties you face online?
I don't worry so much about people who put on a nice face in order to be malicious, I would sooner think a comment with sweet words but poor effect was someone unintentionally repeating myths...
Do comments that at first seem positive regularly give you pause and a reason to be concerned about that, or is it relatively a non-issue compared to other difficulties you face online?
I don't worry so much about people who put on a nice face in order to be malicious, I would sooner think a comment with sweet words but poor effect was someone unintentionally repeating myths they'd heard, or something like that.
Um, thanks, but I'd rather speak for myself. This is threatening to turn into a broader discussion of what ~lgbt is for and I'd rather not get into that.
Um, thanks, but I'd rather speak for myself. This is threatening to turn into a broader discussion of what ~lgbt is for and I'd rather not get into that.
Gently, lovingly, it's more than this. There's an existence threat here; see a very old philosophy tube from before Abigail came out. It's not just clothes, bodies, behavior, it's existence that's...
Gently, lovingly, it's more than this. There's an existence threat here; see a very old philosophy tube from before Abigail came out. It's not just clothes, bodies, behavior, it's existence that's being threatened.
I apologize for linking so many articles on this issue recently, but this one provides a great overview of a lot of the issues that have been coming to a head in recent years, and it's nice to see a non-USian, non-British perspective.
Very refreshing to see news coverage about trans rights which is actually about trans peoples' perspectives of how their rights are being eroded, and not a load of TERFy bullshit like we in the UK keep getting from every single outlet.
My heart goes out to all our trans users here. You have been dealt some absolute shit hands recently and deserve so much better.
This seems like quite a good article, describing the controversy and linking to some interesting studies.
I'm not too sure about one of the studies cited. It's called a "nonprobability survey" which seems to be jargon for an online survey that's adjusted based on demographics. This raises red flags from a statistical point of view. It's non-representative because some people have no chance of being surveyed. Here's an article about the biases of nonprobability surveys.
I know little about this area - just pointing out that, as always, you have to actually look at how studies are done. Also, sometimes biased surveys are the best you can do, practically, but we should still be aware of their limitations.
I think it's incredibly important to point out a reason behind why opt-in surveys are often employed in medicine and medicine related fields - it can be monolithically difficult to recruit decent size sampling pools of people who are relatively rare or sparse. Because of this, there's often a conscious trade-off of representation and perfect accuracy in order to learn something. If you want to learn something about an extremely rare disease which affects 1 in 1,000,000 people, it can be unsurprisingly quite difficult to find people, let alone conduct some kind of a study on them.
Understanding how this can affect results across a variety of subjects is important, and I think it's good to point out that an opt-in survey is likely to not capture the voices of people who are unlikely to exist in the sphere in which the opt-in happens. Which is to say that this particular survey would not capture anyone in the united states who was not online in 2015, would not capture people without the free time and energy to complete this kind of a survey or were not assisted in completing this survey and would also have less participation from minorities which were less likely to contribute to or participate in this kind of a survey. These are all important considerations for which to examine the lens of what's going on, but I also want to point out that this is leaps and bounds above most other science that happens in this field. I've seen plenty of right wing assholes try and justify the 'harms' of transitioning by pointing to studies such as the one which targeted subscribers of the /r/detransition sub, a group of individuals exponentially more likely to have positive opinions on detransitioning as justification for why transitioning is bad or harmful and that access should be gatekept.
I'm a bit on edge to see someone entering a thread like this with a mostly singular negative take on something presented in this article when they only spent one sentence talking about what's well done about this article. It makes me worry about whether someone might read your post and take away the wrong message. Or that perhaps in the worst case that some people are in this thread without good intentions and taking away the wrong message from your post. I would urge you, in the future, to consider how others might feel reading your post, especially those for which detransitioning is pointed to as some scary boogeyman and to be careful about how you word a criticism of a study which scientifically supports a different narrative.
I think we aren't all that far apart. In particular, I expect you're quite right about the difficulty of being truly representative when doing research in this area.
Yes, I said hardly anything about the rest of the article. Given the number of people quoted and links for further reading, it looks thorough and well-researched. I'd have read it more carefully to do it justice. (I was skimming.) And given how little I know, I don't think I'd have much to add without doing a lot more research. I'm not going to outdo the journalist.
I also can't really complain about sounding a cautionary note, given that it's what I do all the time, and that's what I was doing in the post you're responding to.
I am a bit disappointed in your lack of faith in me. We've both been on Tildes a long time, you know? I'm well aware that posts to ~lgbt are sensitive, and so I write pretty cautiously. I had thought I had diffused any potential for my post to be taken as more than a comment on one aspect of one study.
(And I should probably say I'd have to read that study more carefully just to decide what I think of it.)
I apologize if you feel like this was an attack on you - it wasn't. I tried my best to frame my concerns through my own lens - I am worried about x and y happening to someone else and some people reading this thread. I want to be clear that I wasn't accusing you specifically of doing anything wrong, I was attempting to help yourself and others better understand how this specific content was processed by myself, and likely others, and to help build this communities skills in emotional intelligence.
It's clear that I failed in doing this and wish to apologize for a perceived lack of faith. At this point in time I'm actually unsure what I can do differently to prevent this kind of interpretation. If you have the time, I'd love to understand how you parsed my message and what parts stuck out as an attack on you, even if they don't seem as such upon a second closer reading. It is my hope that by better understanding how this comment made you feel I can add in extra wording to ensure this doesn't happen to someone else in the future as I do not wish to alienate anyone who is an ally or a potential ally, but rather to help them understand how to be an even better one.
What do you mean? Does raising a single question/concern reflect poorly on the article in your eyes?
Even if @skybrian had not raised the subject, other users might reach a similar conclusion, and thus benefit from the public discourse on the matter. So the two comments put together are a net gain in every way?
I don't think worrying about what some randos could walk away thinking is productive or healthy. They might walk away with harmful opinions, but they might not. You can't know for sure, and you can't really control the outcome. Also consider the odds that someone here would come away with a harmful opinion, versus consumers of British news....
Framing. The key here is framing.
Take a look at media by people pushing bigoted opinions or things like climate denial. They'll often attempt to subvert it by presenting a farce of a two sided opinion where they will acknowledge one side's existence very little, but still present it, and then launch into a very wordy 'problem' they see with the other side. With climate change, for example, they might recognize that the planet has warmed and that humans contributed to it in a few sentences, and then spend 2000 words talking about natural cycles on Earth and the 'little ice age' or whatever supports what their readers want to hear.
As I stated, I'm not disagreeing with their point, but when someone comes into a thread chock full of research and evidence to disprove a popular narrative which is being pushed to roll back any possible progress for a very targeted minority, one which has incredibly high incidences of negative health outcomes when they are not socially supported and incredibly low incidences of negative health outcomes when they are socially supported, it makes people like myself and those who voted on my comment understandably concerned or upset about the framing. How can I be sure this person means the best, on the internet where there are many who obscure their true views, and many trolls and others who support what I feel are incredibly uncompassionate viewpoints of this minority which I wish to protect? How can I be sure that people who haven't made up their minds, or are on the fence aren't going to read this and interpret it as a valid criticism which will give them enough 'evidence' to discount everything else on the article?
This kind of discourse is important when it's in the right venue and framed correctly. I'm simply trying my best to offer advice on how to be cognizant of when you're in that right venue or when it is framed correctly. Given that this venue is focused on LGBT issues and somewhere where the LGBT minority of this website may wish to retreat to avoid the persecution they often face in other places on this website, treating this place with extra care is how we can be sure that this minority continues to exist on this website rather than feeling pushed out and eventually becoming disengaged and deleting their accounts or abandoning this place altogether. But also, in the current age of disinformation and people scrambling to find ways to misinterpret data and science in any way they possibly can, giving any ammunition to people looking to spread disinformation without at least adequately priming the layman to understand this isn't a significant issue in the context of this information is something we should all be trying our best to avoid.
I'll try to detail my understanding. You are wary of the comment in question because:
It could be used by a malicious actor to discredit the article.
It could lead someone to form a harmful opinion.
Although it calls out the entire article as being quite good and including interesting studies, by raising one issue and not expounding equally on everything that was quite good and the interesting studies, it resembles straw man arguments.
This is an lgbt space and no-one should have to feel uncomfortable or attacked or defensive in one's own space.
Number 1 is impossible to avoid IMO. You could never raise any doubts or provide any constructive criticism, or any feedback at all. Even only positive feedback can be spun as "an echochamber". There is no easy victory against a malicious actor so I feel that this concern is misplaced.
Number 2 should consider the venue, as you say. Who here is reading this article and comment? People who use tildes, people who have a reason to discuss lgbt topics online. I think that if the comment in question is enough to set someone onto a TERF mindset, they were long gone. I really don't understand how this one was something you worried over.
Number 3, I understand where you are coming from, but I think it is unfair to expect someone to have to cover in equal detail things they have acknowledged as good just to raise an issue. You are raising the bar to participate in public discourse, to what end? Would the world be a better place if @skybrian didn't comment?
Number 4, you're right. But this is a public space also, on a website about discussing current events and other things. If anyone felt uncomfortable because of @skybrian's comment, or any of mine, please message me, label my comments as malice, or otherwise signal to me in a way you are comfortable so that I can take extra care not to do so in the future. But I must admit, it feels like the only way to deliver on this promise is for me to remove myself from the discussions entirely, as I genuinely don't think the comment in question is bad. I don't even see how it would contribute to a gradual shift in atmosphere away from an lgbt space. I mean, people have come here to discuss topics in what I feel is a relatively safe space, and if this discourse can not happen here, where on earth can it happen?
Lastly, you have not addressed my remark that lurkers may hold a view similar to @skybrian's, and by engaging with his comment the two of you have provided more information that may alter their opinions. I find it unlikely that anyone in such a scenario would ultimately leave with a more harmful mindset as a result. Someone who did not have that mindset and may have formed it after @skybrian's comment still has the benefit of being able to see yours too, and this all seems like a pointless exercise in speculation.
With regards to number 2, there are lots of people who are drawn to subject areas which they either hold strong opinions on or want to share strong opinions on. A climate denier will find themselves in threads arguing against climate change in environmentalist areas. This is the person I am trying to avoid, but have no current way to deal with on Tildes. Similarly, someone with a strong opinion who might be a potential ally but has not appropriately dealt with harmful internalizations or has not experienced a life in the shoes of the class they are trying to protect or be an ally with, can cause harm rather than good simply because they do not fully empathize with the person they are trying to protect and can alienate them.
Your response on number 3 is blowing this out of proportion. I simply brought up that framing is important and I would appreciate spending more than 16 words highlighting the good in the article before spending 102 words pointing out a negative and providing a source which proves it is a negative.
However, in the second half of your reply on number 3 I think you bring up a wonderful point
This is precisely what we are here to help you understand! I'm providing an opinion as to how it makes myself and others uncomfortable here, and I'm providing for you a distinct action plan. I'm asking for you, and others, to think just a little bit harder about the framing of what you are positing and the venue which it is posited in. Take a look at your comment and try to put yourself in the shoes of another person and ask yourself, if I knew nothing about this person and was the minority this article talks about or we are discussing, how might I feel if I were to see a comment like this? How might I allay any concerns of trolling, of bad faith, or of some kind of negative interpretation? Can I soften my language? Can I spend more time supporting the positive sides of this article, before offering a criticism? This isn't about providing the most succinct and accurate debate of a subject, this is about managing the emotions and emotional bandwidth of the people participating in the discussion. How might they need to be protected? How often may they have seen this point before? What am I contributing to the discussion? What might I not know about this set of individuals that perhaps I should ask before contributing?
I think this points to precisely what I'm trying to highlight here. I'm not trying to speculate here - I'm providing how this comment has made me feel. This isn't about the content, I already said that I agree with the content and supported the point that he brought up. Granted, I did reframe it with some context that I felt was missing, the core content of my message was directed at the environment it was creating and a plea to frame differently in the future. I'm trying to help you and others become emotionally aware about how this kind of framing can be emotionally taxing to a group which already is often disengaged on discussions about the subject because they are overwhelmed by many other things in their life which are keeping them systematically oppressed.
You say that you want to have a discussion in a safe space - this is fantastic! However, the space cannot remain safe if we do not adequately manage it and keep it safe. The best way to keep it safe is to keep in mind how the demands and needs of someone who is systematically oppressed might differ from your own demands and needs and respecting and meeting them where they can be met at, respecting that the world is already taking up their emotional and intellectual bandwidth by systematically oppressing them.
Thanks for responding, this helped me understand your points much more than the others. You have told me now that you have felt these things in this thread, so I won't be an ass and dismiss that.
I understand now that you are trying to help me understand how this all contributes to a gradual shift away from an lgbt space. I am frustrated because, although I understand that you are trying to help me understand (thank you), I still don't. There is nothing here that I will be able to apply to further interactions with this space, beyond a second serving of self doubt, because it seemingly has not clicked for me. I really am trying though.
:(
My read of the situation (and, for context, I'm not trans, so take my words here with a grain of salt) is that discussions of trans issues here often skip past the emotional weight attached to genuinely awful and difficult news and tend towards conversations regarding specific pieces of academic correctness. It's not that there's anything fundamentally wrong with a focus on that correctness -- it's that doing so without acknowledging the concurrent emotional weight in the first place can feel very diminishing to those living underneath it.
For example, if I pour my soul out here about 10 different struggles I'm having in my life right now, and the community's primary response is to simply question the legitimacy of struggle #7, that response misses the mark even if they're completely in the right to legitimately question it! The issue isn't just struggle #7 -- it's the aggregate of all those struggles and the corresponding burden that brings to my life -- a burden which might be the very reason I'm potentially misperceiving #7 in the first place!
I think we can get caught up in focusing on specific, individual trees with regards to trans issues, and our hyper-focus on those details can cause us to miss the larger forest in which trans people live -- a forest which still does not ensure them basic rights and dignities and yields frequent and widespread discrimination. That forest comes with a human cost -- a toll that trans people pay in the form of reduced quality of life, opportunities, safety, and happiness.
As allies, when news of this forest's shittiness arises, I think the best thing we can do is affirm the unfairness and the difficulty of that aggregate before we dive into any specific points that we want to pull apart (and, also, questioning whether this is even the time or place to pull those apart given the greater gravity of other issues). If we lead with that, we're showing that we care about and understand the big picture -- if we don't lead with that, it can make us come across as uncaring or oblivious, even when that's not our intention. In a space like ~lgbt in particular, it's paramount that trans people feel seen, heard, and understood because, as we know from the wider forest, in many other spaces in their lives they are not.
Absolutely nailed it. Honestly, I almost want to post articles like this in multiple tildes: once in ~news for typical (and valuable!) Tildes dissection, and once in ~lgbt for discussion of the social and political situation and consequences for the community.
This is quite counterintuitive for me. My instinct is to try to avoid making conversations emotional, particularly with people I don't know very well or with subjects I don't understand very well. Making things emotional feels like raising the stakes and increasing conflict. Looking for safer ground for discussions feels like de-escalating.
It seems like rushing into the personal and emotional isn't something a newcomer should be doing, when you really don't know what's going on? It seems safer to stick to smalltalk or to talk around it.
In some situations there are conventional ways to handle things. "I'm sorry for your loss" is pretty safe at a funeral even if you hardly know anyone.
I wonder if taking refuge in the superficial would help? There are terrible-sounding news stories where I don't know what's going on and probably won't get to the bottom of it, but "that sounds really bad" seems like a safe thing to say?
Can you elaborate a bit on what you mean about this? The ask here is not actually to make the conversation emotional, but to evaluate the emotional affect of your post. To consider how a human, an emotional being, might take in the information you present and process it. I legitimately cannot think of a single situation, in which considering messaging through this lens with another human is not a useful skill because emotional states directly effect how we process information from the world.
Have you ever heard of the term fight or flight? Someone who feels threatened does not do the same kind of processing as someone who is not, and they will more or less jam any information presented into one of two buckets - do I fight this or run away from this? The entire body reacts in a way to process information as efficiently as possible to answer this question, because in a life or death situation this is beneficial. Certainly, there are individuals in which the emotional affect is lower or who may have such a unique brain that certain emotions do not even register to the individual or may not ever be felt, but these individuals are rare and our general approach to messaging should always include some level of emotional awareness if our goal is to interact with other humans.
If you'll re-read my replies to you and others in this thread, you will see that I never advocate for small talk and the questions I pose are all questions around how to phrase the same message that you were originally intending to share. The questions I ask, such as
Are all questions about how to shape how a message is delivered. If I tell you that we must do something or that we should do something, the same idea that something should change is still there, it's just a difference of universality versus something shaped through a specific lens. If I spend more time addressing what is good about an article before launching into criticism I'm still sharing the same idea that I both agree with and disagree with parts of what was presented, it's just a difference of how clear I feel on both subjects because I'm putting more on the table. The same is true of how much time I spend ensuring the other person that I am an ally - unless I present hard evidence that is counterfactual, I have already presented this agreement or at least implied it, the difference is how much is explicitly stated.
In all of these examples the idea, the conceptual or abstract behind the words, is not significantly different between a statement with my suggestions taken and the output before the suggestions were considered. However, when the suggestions are taken the words used to explain this abstract are different - the words I use differ, the amount of time I spend on one subject differs, the consideration I give to the person consuming my data has changed.
I think it's an interesting framework because people are often taught how to be concise in school - how to make a point with less words, how to avoid spending excessive words on a point that was already made, how to assess the weight behind a point. I could write up a million words about how I feel about climate change, but in the eyes of academia and science it's not necessarily a compelling argument so it makes sense to learn about this. But we don't spend a lot of time talking about the actual human outcome of our words. If I'm an asshole when I make a point, does anyone even listen to me? Does it matter if my argument is bulletproof if it presents one which humans are unwilling to consume? Might my argument alienate others or make them afraid? Outside of the arts, we spend very little time teaching people to consider how and when being less concise is actually beneficial. How considering the emotion of the viewer and how we are shaping that emotional state can be incredibly useful to conveying an idea or a thought or shaping the very environment in which they are participating.
I'd also like a second to quickly address @mtset 's suggestion, learning to not comment until you've spent an adequate amount of time in a space you're unfamiliar with. I also am not going to tell you to not participate, but when you do participate if you aren't already intimately aware with a space in which you have not spent a lot of time in, you should expect to see some amount of pushback. This is not a failing of yours, it's a recognition that the norms and expectations in spaces differ and that humans are incredibly diverse. I've seen what is playing out here play out a million times in person, in minority spaces, very often between allies and the very people they wish to be allied with. It's almost never a bad idea to hang back for awhile and feel out a space before interacting. It's almost never a bad idea to reach out to people in the space and ask them about how they've been interpreting your interactions, whether you are new to the space in general or simply new to the specific space you are interacting with. As I mentioned before, humans are incredibly diverse and recognizing this diversity and doing what you can to appreciate and respect it goes a long way.
It took me a long time to respond because I found the request to "evaluate the emotional affect of your post" to be more difficult than you probably intended. Let me explain.
Usually, when we write, we have some hypothetical reader in mind. Your imagined reader might be someone specific (when writing to someone you know well) or a generic "reasonable person" or something else.
If you think of your reader as a reasonable person who is somewhat sympathetic and forgiving of mistakes then imagining the emotional impact of your post is going to be a lot more fun than if you think of them as someone who is potentially hostile and likely to take what you say the wrong way.
I think that for me, my hypothetical reader in ~lgbt has been, well, someone who's going to tell me I'm doing it wrong for reasons that are difficult to predict. It feels like a tense place? The fight-or-flight reaction you describe is something I can relate to. This reader might blow up at me unpredictably. So judging their emotional response isn't easy.
But you know what? That reader is mostly in my head. (Maybe based on real examples, but still a construct.)
Yes, it's quite likely that I've contributed to this feeling of tenseness in others. I tend to be a fault-finder, posting about things that don't seem right. I'm working on that, and I try not to make it personal (for what it's worth).
I think that for people to be comfortable writing, the reactions they get need to be somewhat predictable, and social media is often a chaotic place where you never know what's going to happen. We have some rules and conversational norms here but it still can be surprising.
I'm not sure we can warn our way out of this. Giving people a bunch of warnings about what not to do is going to make things more forbidding. Maybe positive examples would be better?
I think that reassurance helps, though I'm definitely not in the habit of doing this. I have a perhaps irrational but deep-seated concern that it's going to sound fake. Like back when Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain." What did he know about other people's pain? (For related reasons, I'm uncomfortable with the term "ally.")
Writing for a diverse set of people seems like a noble goal. As a writer, I think one might put it into practice by imagining various personas and how they might react. It seems like this is going to increasingly challenging the more diverse you imagine them, though? (Consider variations in reading levels, differing cultural backgrounds, etc.)
I don't want to tell you not to comment on things, but I had to train myself to simply not contribute to discussions on racism, even when I felt I had something valuable to say, when the discussion was happening in a larger context that I didn't have expertise on. Otherwise, I ran the risk of derailing the conversation, because however accurate my critique was, if it wasn't as impactful as the larger conversation, it wouldn't be useful.
This is one issue with the comment-as-interaction we have here. It's largely a good thing, but we don't have the "like" button of Twitter and Mastodon (or the "sympathy" reaction of Facebook) to voice an individual but not individualized reaction to a post, so in order to interact at all it often feels necessary to dig deeply into the technical metits of the material at hand.
let me try to give some insight. hi. trans person here. I really do not care to engage with what cis people think about trans issues online. much of the time they are engaging in bad faith. other times they are willfully ignorant. the minority is well-meaning but usually lacking a full grasp of the situation. think about what this means when reading comments like the first in this thread.
click when you have thought about it
it is the CONSTANT (online and off) sorting of people into friend or foe. will this person hurt me, will they say things that leave me a wreck for the rest of the day, are they someone to be trusted. I do not like that I have to do this.I try to assess the character of a space before saying anything. on tildes, this means "what has been posted in this thread." someone JAQing off or being argumentative without an EXPLICIT declaration of allyship and that it's coming from a good place makes me not want to engage. I do not feel safe doing so. the default environment is hostility; unless there are flashing signs saying that's not the case, for my own emotional well-being, I will assume it is.
I hate that most of the comments on this post are meta conversation.
I don't like my comment but rather than editing it for another 20m or deleting it I will post in case it is useful.
Thanks. Yeah, this is probably what the offtopic label is for. Someone earlier said that sometimes even presenting a declaration of allyship can look like maliciousness or someone setting up a straw man argument. Do comments that at first seem positive regularly give you pause and a reason to be concerned about that, or is it relatively a non-issue compared to other difficulties you face online?
I don't worry so much about people who put on a nice face in order to be malicious, I would sooner think a comment with sweet words but poor effect was someone unintentionally repeating myths they'd heard, or something like that.
Um, thanks, but I'd rather speak for myself. This is threatening to turn into a broader discussion of what ~lgbt is for and I'd rather not get into that.
Cool, but I still would like to better understand how to interact in this space. I suppose this really isn't the thread for that though.
I can't believe how much energy is wasted on deciding what other people are allowed to do with their clothes, bodies, and behavior.
Gently, lovingly, it's more than this. There's an existence threat here; see a very old philosophy tube from before Abigail came out. It's not just clothes, bodies, behavior, it's existence that's being threatened.