A Response to Possibly the Most Frustrating Essay I've Ever Read

I commonly read things that I disagree with. I frequently read things that anger me with their poorly thought out arguments and hypocrisy. I sometimes get blamed for the problems that I have to deal with as a trans* person. But never have I read an essay that managed to seemingly exist solely to be the perfect mixture of smugness, "false consciousness" argument, lack of historical or anthropological understanding, uninformed ideas on the method and nature of religion, and victim blaming that this essay seems to exhibit. I am going to assume it is an argument in good faith, but if I were a more cynical person (I know, right?) I would chalk it up to being simply a computer generated, personally tailored collection of things that anger me in an essay.

There is a response from someone else at my school here, but I think i want to run through my own issues with this essay, because that is my Wealth given right/privilege as a person with internet access. I've discussed this somewhat with Anna, so I am also going to credit em with some of the formulations of the thoughts that come out in this response. This is probably going to be what might charitably called "Too Long," so I'll make subject headings, like a "real academic"

Lack of Religious Studies Knowledge/Deconstruction

I find that most of the people writing articles like this seem to think that they are either 'above' reading actual religious studies methodology/scholarship, or they think that it is "the Man" trying to keep them down. I'm just going to say that, unless you are going to pay attention to the last hundred or so years of people discussing what 'religion' means, and whether that is a tenable term for a conversation, then I feel like maybe you should re-examine what you are doing.

But, I will discuss how her definition of religion (or lack thereof, with merely an implication) is a problematic, racist, and imperialistic artifice later. What I really want to address are some of the ridiculous, and provably false things that the author has written.

Anyone who ever writes something like "all religions [x]" or "all atheists [y]" is not only in danger, but willfully setting themselves up to being proven wrong by actual facts. For a person who scoffs at people for thinking that they are absolutely right, she seems to have either not gained any sort of evidence to make her claims worth listening to, or has forgotten all of it in favor of making grandiose statements that are not only false but embarrassing. When you make statements with "all" in them, you are on the track to failure; your faith in your cause has blinded you to nuance. Let alone one that reifies a concept like religion into one mass (which is philosophically unjustifiable anyhow). Although the author assures us that she is very postmodern, apparently this does not apply to her understanding of religion. I had a teacher (Robert Minor) who began his book “When Religion Becomes and Addiction” with the Chapter Title “Religion doesn’t do anything,” which is true. Religion is not a thing, it has no essence, so to treat it like it does is a fallacy. The fact that she uncritically accepts the concept of religion as an essence, and takes the traditional view of what it is undermines her completely objective, rational self identification (which is already a specious concept in and of itself).

So when she says that religions are fundamentally in tension or contradiction with queerness, she first of all misunderstands how queerness functions in other societies, but also how 'faith' does, and how they interact with each other. In fact, saying that "queerness is always counter-intuitive" shows that she has not seemingly read very many books of how queer people function in different religious contexts. Did she know that some religions mandate queer relations? Even in America! I mean, say what you will about how incredibly cissexist some of them are, but I think the entire lesbian women’s/Goddess spirituality movement shows that queerness and religion can be the same thing. I mean, even the Ayatollah of Iran is alright with binary identified trans people. Hot Damn, it's almost like if you make statements like that, you are just asking for people to point out the ways that you are wrong.

That's not even to mention trans* or gender divergence in religious practice. I mean, she even really kind of admits this, but then just is like "WELP, NOT SCIENCE." I mean, do I have to point her to the multiple Indigenous traditions, some Dogon peoples, and the multiple cross dressing saints of the Christian tradition? Believe it or not, what we consider queer was (and is) not always considered 'counter-intuitive' in other cultures. Not only that, but it has not been damaging in ever society at every time. Making statements like that is just begging to look like you are uninformed .

Imperialism and and Western "Everywhere"

Despite her (promised but never delivered, perhaps invisible?) postmodernism, she reminds us for what seems like an uncomfortable amount of space that she is in fact, not being racist or imperialistic. I wish I could magically say I wasn't being racist, and then it be so! Moreover, the truth is that everyone who might make the argument that her essay is racist, are in fact racist themselves. That is a pretty wonderful logical trick that she has going on there, but it's based on a somewhat faulty premise already: she seems to be speaking only to white people.

If white people were the only people who were pointing out that the arguments that she was making were culturally imperialist, she might be onto something. The truth though, is that there have been plenty of queer  and trans* women of color who have brought this up. First. Apparently the author either thinks that the arguments that these women of color (also, the invisible trans* men of color [surprise, trans men are invisible!]) make are so far below her that she does not have to deign to answer to them, or that she doesn't have either the argument or the courage to disagree with them. Instead she speaks about people of color to the other white people in her intended audience. Great. Nothing wrong or paternalistic about that.

Anyhow, like I said a little earlier, how she conceptualizes religion is basically imperialistic. Why, you might ask? Well, the very use of the word religion to generalize onto all societies outside of the western is in itself not justifiable in any rational way. She uses what amounts to Sigmund Freud's usage in his seminal Future of An Illusion, where the important part of religion is the dogma (or faith). Of course, this in and of itself is an imperialist concept, and talking about religion as if it has an essence is a function of imperialism. The simple fact of the matter is that privileging beliefs over actions in understanding religion is a very Christian/Western way of doing that, which makes things like ritual invisible. I mean, the fact that the author wants to act like “religion” or “faith” are concepts that you can take and place on other cultures is basically itself not only a fallacy but an imperialist one: only cultures that come from the Greco-Roman tradition actually have the word ‘religion’ in them, or ‘faith’.

What the author seems to be saying is that she can take Western concepts, place them in contexts where they don’t fit, and then judge these other societies by her concept of what faith is. Wow, that doesn’t sound like cultural imperialism at all. Of course, the author then tells us that telling her something is culturally imperialistic is in and of itself culturally imperialistic (I think I see a pattern here). This is an embarrassing tactic which basically shows that she either 1) has no ability to distinguish between societies and people 2)has no argument, and is still speaking to white people only 3) thinks that people who say “you’re intolerant of intolerant people” is a great argument, or 4) all those three. I am going to go with number four.

However, to show how not imperialistic she is, she brings up Buddhism, because WHY NOT? Of course, she doesn’t really have any sort of argument for Buddhism being against trans* people, so she uses what seems to be a vaguely Nietzschean argument that it isn’t life affirming. Not only does she seem to be grasping in this situation, but she also fundamentally misunderstands Buddhism (which she apparently thinks is all one belief system). Of course, she decides that since she has addressed a single non-Abrahamic religion, that obviously her feelings can be extrapolated onto all of history in all societies, including the future. Of course, if she were to address religions that have no concept of anything happening after death, her argument falls apart, but obviously it was painful enough to address not white cultures even for a short paragraph, and she moves on.

Historical Lack of Awareness

Not only is everywhere the West according to the author, but also history never happened! This is understandable, because looking at history reveals that her arguments are specious at best; at the very least, we see that there is a great more deal of nuance going on than a person who says that all (western conceptualizations of) queers are counter-intuitive and religion is always terrible would care to admit.

The most interesting thing going on is that in any sort of realistic sense you could make the argument that much of the oppression of trans* people stems not from religious ideas, but from those of science. the Enlightenment need of categorization that were diametrically opposed led to the binary gender system that exists today, which is where a lot of the problems for trans* people exist. The medicalization of gender, and advent of psychoanlaysis and psychology have generally stood as the vanguard of status quo oppression, and to this day recognize trans* people as mentally ill. That seems much more reactionary than many religious groups that exist today (or historically), but I imagine that the author is probably not going to rush to claim that psychology is a moral intrinsic evil.

We can still see this today, and it is not pastors who hold the keys to the access of hormones, surgeries and other things like that. In fact, I have been more frequently attacked for my gender on the basis of science than of faith (perhaps that is from the circles I run in). What I mean to say is that trying to say “SCIENCE GOOD RELIGION BAD” is a position that not only insults those religious groups and people that are trans* affirming, but also ignoring those secularists that aren’t.

Serious Logical flaws And Oppression Reductionism

Of course, it is not only the lack of thinking that anything outside of the modern West has ever existed that makes this essay wrong. There are also ridiculously flawed arguments within it that, even granting that the author is not imperialistic, make this a sad work that insults our intelligence.

First, there is the simple fact that this is basically working as an oppression reductionism. This is similar (although not identical) to when people say that there really isn’t racism, but just prejudice towards poor people. What the author seems to be saying is that trans* oppression is relaly just a function of religious oppression (which is only a tenable position if you ignore vast amounts of reality), and therefore we should worry more about getting rid of the oppression of religion than trying to solve its symptoms (ie. cissexism). Of course, this could only be a tenable position if the only oppression of trans* people came from religious sources; this is in my experience not true. I have had too many people say that there are scientifically only two genders, and they are chromosomal, to even grant that as a realistic analysis of the problem of trans* oppression. It is transphobic in the same way that saying racial oppression is only class based is racist.

Unfortunately, that is not the only flaw worth speaking to. Of course, the main thrust of the argument basically says that trans* people participate in their own oppression because by saying God exists, you legitimate the position of people who are not trans* affirming. The fact that this argument is something that the author finds logical seriously undermines the idea that religious people are defined by their lack of rationality, and that atheists are always the most ardent followers of Reason (capitalized for reification purposes)

First of all, this argument reasonably leads to the only moral action being complete monastic withdrawal (which is ironic), or suicide. If ascribing to ideas legitimates the worst elements of that idea, then there is basically no way that one can not be constantly legitimating the worst horrors of the human race. That is basically akin to saying that if you think that using the scientific method can be used to better people’s lives, then you are legitimating the underlying ideologies of eugenics, scientific racism, ablebodied supremacy, anti-queer and gender binarist thinking, all of it. They all think/thought the same thing about science too. In fact, believing in an ethic at all supports the underlying idea of ethics, and therefore you are supporting every other single person who has ‘ethics’ no matter how horrific they are. This argument can be taken to such ridiculously absurd conclusions that it is worthless in any form. Are you an anarchist? Well, if you believe that the material world exists, it turns out you are supporting Stalin/Franco/every other authoritarian in the world since you legitimate the idea of an existent material reality that under-girds their authoritarian philosophy. And so on.

False Consciousness/Victim Blaming

But why oh why would trans* people be in religious practice if it obviously always hurts them in every place in every time (including the future)? Obviously there is nothing good that they can gain out of it, and we shouldn’t actually... I don’t know, listen to these actual trans* people. So what the author decides to do is use the particularly annoying tool of false consciousness. Basically saying, “I know you why you do that better than you do,” which is extremely condescending, and really has no response. If the person is legitimately no longer listening to the people that they are actually describing, it feels to me like she is basically doing the same thing Western anthropologists did in other cultures for years: act like they were the objective arbiters of everything as opposed to the people who were actually living it. It’s basically a very convenient way to say that in reality, if religious trans* people weren’t so goddamn stupid/naive/brainwashed, then they would agree with the author. I’m not saying that this is particular to her argument: you come across false consciousness attacks with an unfortunate frequency, really. But that doesn’t make it any less frustrating.

So why could trans* people possibly be religious, since it validates the vague notions of the reified concept of religion? Well, the answer for the author is that trans* people who are religious are like battered spouses (the author implies a gendering of this, an abused woman. I’m unsure whether this is because when she says ‘trans people’ she only means ‘trans women’, as has been characteristic of her essay, or what). This is honestly insulting and condescending as hell, not only to trans* religious people, but also to abuse survivors/victims/whatever they identify as.

This metaphor is not only completely unsuitable, but also leads to a really unfortunate implication, when you take her argument into account. Not only does her “trans* religious people validate religion, which is always evil” sound basically like lesbian separatism (which has always been kind to trans* people,), insofar as one could say “being in a non abusive heterosexual relationship validates the heterosexuality of abusive relationships,” but it also ends up making what amounts to a victim blaming argument.

What I mean is that trans* religious people are “doing it to themselves” in this metaphor. She compares religious trans* people to abused people, yet also says that they perpetuate their own abuse and the abuse of others; the abuse is their fault, and that they are complicit. And what is her advice? “Just get out of the relationship,” basically, which I’m sure has never been said to a person in an abusive relationship. I hope I am not the only person who sees that argument/metaphor combination as completely messed up. Comparing people you disagree with to abuse victims takes away their agency almost as much as calling them barnyard animals (sheeple), but telling them that they are basically their own abusers is just the exact same victim blaming attitude that perpetuates sexism in our larger culture.


Conclusion

I don’t really have a conclusion, other than to say that I’m writing this conclusion long after I wrote the original piece. My friend asked me why I felt compelled to write it if I wasn’t personally hurt by it, which led me to ask myself what about this hurt me?

Part of it is that it really angers me when people talk about religion like they know what they are talking about, when in fact they are completely incorrect. The conservativism that was present in this essay angered me in the same way that other conservativism does: I felt like it is a step backward in trying to achieve respect and liberation for all people. I also feel upset that my identity is being used in order to attack other people’s cultures, along with my own. I’m not deluded enough to think that anything I said will change someone’s mind if they already believe that religion is/was/will always be evil: that is, in itself, a faith claim and moral judgment that is improvable. But don’t act like you are being a jerk on my behalf, please.

Is something ever 'just a preference'? (Pt. 2)

Right when Anna talks about how insightful I am, I have a post about Ska puns. Sorry if anyone was expecting any different.

But! In my last real post I was talking about whether something being 'just a preference' was a way of avoiding responsibility if the preference seems racist. I think that using that example, I was able to show that it is not really  tenable to say that showing racial preference has no ties to racist thinking, and that it being out of one's control doesn't really make it any less of a problem. At the very least, I think that I raised questions as to the legitimacy of the 'well that's just what I like", and why at least in the instance of desiring other people, that is not a complete defense against criticism. At the end, I said that I was going to bring this question to gender, and look at whether this criticism of 'just my preference'  could be extended in the same way.

Just for some background in my feelings on gender: I think that it is completely a social construct. That isn't to say that there aren't personality traits that might be inborn; there are certain physical characteristics that one might be born with, or a set that one feels more comfortable with. However, the grouping of 'male/men' and 'female/women' is socially constructed, and the ways that we understand people as being grouped into them  is definitely not some sort of objective reasoning. Let alone that there are two definite categories, male/female, is its own opinion, not fact. Just to give a quick, very cursory Gender theory 101.

So in the light of that thinking (which postulates both race and gender as categories which are socially created) we come to a challenging thought. If your sexual preference being based on race feels to many people as intuitively prejudiced, then why is it different with gender (barring heterosexism/cissexism/tradition)? That is to say, don't all the arguments that I made in the previous post about race apply in perhaps similar ways to identities like 'straight' or perhaps even 'gay' or 'lesbian'?

What pushed me to write this this time was a recent news article where Cynthia Nixon said that her gayness "is a choice". Later, she withdrew that statement. This drew a large amount of ire from the mainstream LGB people who believe that there is some sort of physiological or genetic cause to their orientation. I disagree with them, based on the notion of gender that I have above, but I don't really want to discuss that at this post.

The question might be: "Is it problematic (not a word I enjoy, but I'll use here) to distinguish between who you are attracted to based on gender/sex?" As we saw before, the majority of arguments are going to fall along the same two lines that the race question did, although this time with much more emphasis on the first response than the second. To show those again in this new argument, it would be:

1) Not being sexually attracted to (or especially to) a certain gender/sex is not (cis)sexist

2) If it is (cis)sexist, then since it is not under my control, it is not unethical (/I'm not (cis)sexist)

Now, we see that a lot of the reasons that people brought up for finding certain races preferable are also used for having a certain orientation. However, there is a change in emphasis.

The one that is most obvious is that people will hold that the genders are biologically different in ways that races aren't, namely dealing with how genitals and secondary sex characteristics are configured. This sounds similar to Devin's comment that people might use race as a shorthand to mean certain physical characteristics, although in this instance it is much more obvious. There are two problems with this argument from what I can see: it denies the variety of different types of people might have the same primary (and secondary) sex characteristics (and is therefore cissexist/transphobic), and it is also based almost completely on bodily objectification of other people.

The first problem here is that when one says woman, they mean 'vagina' and when they say men, they mean 'penis'. This looks over the fact that there are women with penises, men with vaginas, and a range of possibilities in between. And, to be blunt, you can not see someone with clothes on and know for certain what is going to be under them. Not only that, but there is a great deal of overlap in body shape, type and so on between people of all genders. So saying that you are using shorthand to certain physical characteristics is presupposing that there is only one type of each gender. This is cissexist/transphobic in ways that are, to me, rather obvious.

The second problem is that when one says this, they are basically saying "all I care about in my partner is what junk they have," which while I wouldn't qualify it as transphobic, I would certainly say is either sexist or just generally unethical. to use an example: A straight man is into women, generally. But if he meets a transsexual woman who has not had any surgery (because she doesn't have money, doesn't want to, etc.) most of the time he will not count her as a person to sexually desire. What this implicitly says is that it's not being a woman that he is attracted to, but that the vagina is the most important quality when it comes to his attraction to women. This seems obviously objectifying, and kind of unethical. This likewise goes for gay men who don't want to date someone without a penis, lesbian women who don't want to date someone with a penis, straight women who don't want to date someone with a vagina, and all the people who would not date intersex people. It would appear that the preference is not for the person, but only for their body, which I find to be somewhat unethical.

Another argument for it being 'just a preference' is that people are attracted to a certain 'je ne sais quoi' about people of a certain gender. A lot of times, I kind of consider this to be a form of essentialism, but we can see how this basically trades in stereotypes just like people saying that 'asians are more [x]'. This will not always be the case, and to try to exclude people because their stereotype doesn't fit your attraction is not beyond criticism.

For instance, there are plenty of women who are just as masculine as most men. Beyond the objectifying primacy of genitals (as just discussed) it is hard for me to see why someone who is attracted to men for their masculinity would not likewise be attracted to masculine women. To say that it's a different form of masculinity seems to me to just be essentializing women as not being able to be as masculine as men.

So I guess that would be my response to the first point. Maybe not as fleshed out as I would want, but I can always add to it later. Now, onto the second response: this occurs much less frequently dealing with gender than race, mainly because the first response is still very acceptable. But I think the second response falls apart for many of the same reasons it did in the earlier post.

One perhaps can not change their desire, but one can certainly change how you look at people, how you group and categorize them. I reject the essentialism that someone can just instantly spot who a man or woman  instinctively. And grouping people into 'man' and 'woman' is what allows for identities like 'gay' and 'straight' to exist. Without understanding people first as (definitely either) man or woman, the categories of gay and straight become very hard to use, and mostly unhelpful. So in that way, I would say being straight or gay is a choice: a choice to see men and women as the two main categories of people that exist, and to choose your partner based on that. I'm just not sure how ethical I think that choice is.

Moral beliefs, objectivity, and cultural imperialism

Something that has been on my mind a lot:

There seems to be a sort of paradox when I think about discussions of morality and ethics. I think this has come into a kind of stark relief since I go not only to a school where many students are very vocal (rightly) about moral beliefs, but also about the dangers and missteps of oppressions like colonialism, racism, (hetero)(cis)sexism, ableism, and the like. The latter concern (that of oppression) is usually voiced through modern academic theory of some sort. Post-colonial, queer, or any other number of poststructuralist/postmodernist kind of theories are used to try to 'decolonize' or queer theology or generally argue against these oppressions. And usually the irony is that these are done in a modernist way: stating that something is objectively wrong.

I'm not sure where I stand on this, so bear with me, and if I say something that appears incredibly problematic or stupid, then tell me. What I'm saying is that i'm not playing devil's advocate or whatever. I'm going to start off with the idea that there is some sort of objective morality, and then kind of think through how that might be problematic, at least in a post-colonial sense.

Ok, so let's say that we have things that we can all agree are pretty dang terrible. And that these things are universally terrible, insofar as I mean that somehow they can be seen as being intrinsically evil/bad (I don't care about Nietzsche, I'm going to equivocate those two). I mean, in some sense, we can see how that is the case. In fact, I would say this is how most people would really act. To take an example: Many people would say that genocide is a bad deal. Or rape. I'm trying to do this in a way that doesn't make anyone feel like I'm using their history to win debate points, but those are two things that could conceivably be seen as intrinsically bad.

With that in mind, the problem comes from the fact that once one makes any one thing an intrinsic evil, it seems impossible to me that one doesn't cross into the line of cultural imperialism. Using rape as an example, one could easily rate societies by prevalence of rape, and that would seem to imply that those societies with the highest prevalence of rape were in some way, less moral or ethical than those with lower incidence of rape. Now that is simplistic, but you can see what I'm getting at here.

Not only that, but let's imagine that there were a society that had some sort of institutional or societally required rape and/or genocide. We would, granting an objective view of those acts inherent badness, have to determine that that society is structurally less ethical than a society without this institutionalized unethical behavior. I imagine that you can start seeing how this might lead to some really messed up ideas. In this instance, it would be morally justifiable to try to end the incidences of rape or genocide in these other societies, and this has been the story of cultural imperialism for the past hundreds of years. Although, granted that the colonial powers in many cases were not attacking things that seem as intuitively immoral as rape or genocide, it is the same basic worldview that we are trapped in when we start making any moral claims at all.

So is there a way of voicing any sort of moral claim without in some way sanctioning cultural imperialism?

This is where the more post-colonial theories come into the picture. The use of things like morality and ethics in order to colonize other people has not only been overt in the past, but continues to be so today. For an instance of this, look at the French government's recent fiasco regarding the niqab and women's veils. Many western feminists argue against this upon their idea of what is objectively bad for women, but many people would say that this objective morality is really a subjective cultural one.

The very premise of postmodernist arguments (which are the basis of postcolonial ones) is that the absolute truths and idea of objective knowledge, and progress are themselves cultural constructs. So this presents the picture of a complete ethical relativism in a cultural sense. The problem I see with a lot of these theories is that they seem to at the same time enforce cultural/ethical relativism, while at the same time enforcing an objective morality. I mean, one of the base ideas of most of the authors that we cite have argued that morality itself is a construct of society; those who don't (Mary Daly, being a feminist example) are in some ways the bane of the poststructuralist/postmodern concept of how ethics and morality are formed.

For instance, I would say that many of the people who I know who use these critiques of colonialism/heteronormativity/etc do hold some sort of beliefs on some sort of morality. For instance, I try to make world a more livable place for queer people. Any activism is the statement of some sort of moral belief, in this way.

What is hard to understand about this is that we take this post-colonial or post-modern view in a macro sense, but refuse to use it in a micro sense (even though the same critiques would still apply). Like, the critiques against enforcing one's morals upon other cultures could just as easily apply to our own cultures; in fact, the migration of peoples makes it impossible to really distinguish in any meaningful way. To say that we can have moral statements and pronouncements about our home society/countries seems to be acknowledging the nation state as a unified thing. Put more plainly, what right do I have to be angry over making being queer illegal in Montana, since that is simply a different culture than mine? Wouldn't it be similarly culturally imperialistic to make prescriptions to Montanans, just to a different degree than maybe Uganda?

Taken even more to closer view, the same critiques exist in inter-personal interactions. Someone could be raised in a different culture, and to say that my viewpoints are right and theirs need to be changed is the exact same argument that colonizers make.

Another problem comes from the very nature of naming oppression or colonialism is in itself a value judgment of an objective nature. Although we are to believe that morality is a social construct, and not objective, somehow we are still to treat oppression as if it is objectively wrong. Which starts to raise the question: in a postmodern viewpoint, how can one actually say that colonization is bad, and decolonization good? In a framework with no objective criterion, then there is simply things that people do. To make the claim of queer theory or postcolonial theory, there seems to be a paradox: one has to maintain the objective morality (against oppression or colonialism) that is critiqued as a contributor to colonialism.

Maybe I'll write more on this. But that is what I'm kind of thinking about now: is it possible to take the tenets of a post-modernist/poststructuralist or post-colonial theory earnestly and consistently, and be able to make any claim about ethics?