Sometimes I feel like my fedi feed is 50% "People need to stop harassing volunteer devs who give up their free time to maintaining software for you" and 50% "Wow I wish someone could tell this person on GitHub what a jerk they are".
I'm not saying these necessarily come from the same accounts but it seems to represent a collective dissonance. It's important to understand that the definition of harassment is not dependent on whether you are right or wrong.
When I made the above post six weeks ago, five people reacted to it. I understand from this post that one of those five is now dead, and that it’s for reasons not-unrelated to what I was complaining about. I didn’t know POSS beyond that single interaction, don’t know what exactly preceded ’eir death, and don’t want to speak where it’s not my place while people in my community who did know ’em are grieving. But nonetheless I feel obliged to elaborate on what I said six weeks ago, because apparently that didn’t magically fix all harassment within our community. So the rest of this is about the general case, not about a specific person. Anytime I say “you” or “some people”, I don’t have any one person in mind; in a way, I have all of us in mind, because this is a collective failure, even by those of us who are trying to be part of the solution.
The general form of my earlier point is this: If you consider yourself against harassment and bullying and abuse, but you make exceptions if you like the person doing it, or you don’t like the person receiving it, or the thing being alleged is just extra bad and it resonates with you in some way, you aren’t really against those things. In fact, the people you criticize as bullies probably see things exactly the way you do; y’all just have different standards for what makes you set aside your half-hearted opposition to harassment.
I’ve said before that the most dangerous idea to ever enter the queer community is that you can’t tell people they’re wrong to be upset about something. This single norm, misappropriated from therapeutic contexts where it has some value within the four walls of a counseling room,[1] has been weaponized to devastating effect when applied to interpersonal conflict within our community. It becomes a get-out-of-jail-free card to believe unverified accusations, feelings of hurt that assume all experienced harm is intended harm, and thinly-veiled bigotry of the sort our community is supposedly so “woke” against. It seems completely lost on a large subset of the queer community that the people most targeted in this way—trans and especially nonbinary, neurodivergent and especially not-just-“regular”-autistic neurodivergent—are the same sorts of people who fascists target, and that often we don’t even know for sure that it isn’t those same fascists starting or amplifying the harassment.
If you’d told me a few days ago that I was going to get called out in an Ashley Rindsberg article in Fox News, I would have had no trouble believing you. My first guess for the cause of the callout would not have been a fairly tame Wikipedia article I wrote that just lists some works that depict Jesus as queer—not even my edgiest article on that topic—but I wouldn’t have been surprised either. I would have also readily believed that Mr. Rindsberg would put scare-quotes around “trans” and “nonbinary” while also not volunteering any alternative label. I have been, I must confess, a regular reader of FoxNews.com for over a decade, in which time I’ve become somewhat obsessed with the chaotic dynamic between normal journalistic practice and frothing propaganda that plays out in their coverage, sometimes in the span of a single sentence, which often leads to this comical refusal to either affirm or reject trans people’s genders.
[Image caption: The object of Mr. Rindsberg’s ire. The last link goes to “Gender abolition”, although I think I’ll change it to point to this essay.]
¶What’s more surprising is the way Mr. Rindsberg continued that sentence, noting that I “reject[ ] the notion of gender identity”. One friend, who wisely does not spend much of her time reading FoxNews.com or its comments section, had a charmingly charitable interpretation as this being an accusation of hypocrisy on my part. But I am pretty confident that, even if Ashley Rindsberg actually took the time to parse my words, he well enough knows the readership of Christian-outrage-bait schlock to not expect them to understand that. (Scroll down to the comments and you can see, among other things, people complaining that Wikipedia is scared to say anything negative about Muhammad, who at press time we describe as having had sex with a nine-year-old.) No, I think Mr. Rindsberg’s point is much simpler: “Tranny says woke thing.”
¶Which is funny because I don’t think most woke people would consider rejecting the concept of gender identity to be woke. I also don’t think Fox News’s editors, who routinely give “gender identity” the scare-quote treatment too, would consider it to be woke. So there is a certain hilarity of being criticized by a journalist who’s deep in the tank for Donald Trump for agreeing with Mr. Trump that gender identity isn’t real.
If you ever needed proof that the American right cares more about spreading hate against #trans people than any substantive matters of gender discourse, #FoxNews has criticized me for saying that I reject the concept of gender identity… You know, the same thing their president says 🤣
The old man at the café in Bangkok was from New Jersey too. His birthplace in Newark was on the far side of the state from my home in Cape May, but I told him that Newark was still significant to me because it was the last bit of U.S. soil I touched. I told him that we’d fled the U.S. on the day the airport’s ATC went haywire. He hadn’t heard about that. He hadn’t heard about the plane crash in D.C. in January either. He hadn’t heard about a lot of things. But he was happy to listen.
He was 70. He walked with a cane and used the ASL “I love you” sign to say hello and goodbye. For 18 years he’d been living almost as far as possible from home. He was, in his own words, a mystic; he spent hours each day in deep meditation, learning about the outside world only from chance encounters. His main source of information was another American expatriate, who’d often invite him over for dinner and regale him with the day’s news from Fox. He found the stories interesting, but knew they represented but one narrative. He got some news from videos that came across his YouTube feed, but had been burned enough by AI fake news as to not fully trust anything. He’d never heard of Wikipedia.
I invited him to sit down across from me, and we spoke for an hour about the earthly world he’d left behind. He made clear his own perspective: He bore no ill will to anyone and saw a beauty in everyone’s experience of this world in which he merely superficially resided. He was moved but not surprised by my assessment that the U.S. as we knew it was in its final years. But when I tried to explain why, a funny thing happened: I found I couldn’t explain what anyone was fighting about.
A lot of my time every day is spent watching people argue about American politics. Less of it since I left, but my media consumption still skews American, most of my friends and family are still in America, and as a Wikipedia administrator I choose to, for whatever reason, spend a lot of my allotted hobby time intervening in disputes among people with very strong opinions on American politics. But talking to someone with only limited exposure to American politics since the G.W. Bush administration, how was I to explain the political polarization so ever-present that civil war is increasingly seen as likely?1
In much of the world, bitter political divides are about starkly different visions for a country. Capitalist or socialist? Monarchical or republican? Secular or religious law? Aligned with one great power or with another? As I tried to explain American politics to the mystic, I was struck by how little of that kind of division there was. Most Americans believe in a federalist representative republican democracy with an individualist and moderately libertarian attitude toward private life, a capitalist economy, a strong sense of national identity and patriotism, and (even if many wouldn’t describe it this way) culturally Christian values. America has had the same constitutional structure for almost a quarter-millennium, and almost everyone likes it that way. There are, to be sure, those who favor more radical change, and these groups do influence the broader movements they are a part of, but they are nonetheless relatively niche.
The political issues that actually get fought over in Congress and the state legislatures are almost always questions of degree, not kind: The military should be powerful, but how powerful? Drugs should be illegal, but how illegal? Crimes should be punished with draconian prison sentences, but how draconian? The government should provide a moderate amount of social safety nets, but to whom and under what conditions? In a vacuum, none of these debates sound like those of a heavily divided body politic. These sound like implementation details for fairly strong national consensuses.
The exception are what broadly get categorized as “social issues”, especially immigration, abortion, and LGBTQ rights. But when Americans approach these with a political mindset, there’s not as much division as you’d expect. Most Americans think abortion should sometimes be allowed and sometimes not. Most Americans dislike it when illegal immigrants commit crimes but like it when they do cheap labor that citizens wouldn’t want to do. Most Americans generally favor being decent to queer people, while rejecting more ideological aspects of modern queer thought. There is more division on these issues than on, say, drug policy, but still not as much as you’d think from the degree of rancor associated with them.
The catch is that most people do not in fact approach these issues with a political mindset. The labels are what matter. A 2018 Gallup survey showed that people are significantly more likely to support first-trimester abortion than identify as pro-choice, and significantly more likely to oppose second-trimester abortion than identify as pro-life. But those labels matter more than a specific set of opinions on the nuances of abortion policy. They and other social-issue labels represent cultural camps, ones only orthogonal to any particular political views.
nimi sin discourse is a staple of Toki Pona. Often it’s fun, sometimes it’s not, and it’s addictive enough that I’ve had to restart this essay twice to avoid getting bogged down in my personal opinions on which nimi sin are crucial and which are a disgrace to the language.
Let’s say this instead: the 120 nimi pu, minus at most 3[1] and plus at most 20,[2] give you enough to have a completely satisfying conversation with anyone in the world. The exact number you settle on largely depends on whether you think the nimi pu adequately express a few basic concepts like “cut” or “take”. Different people will answer those questions differently, and that’s fine. As long as most speakers understand the 142 words that make up the vast majority of Toki Pona as actually used, it doesn’t really matter whether a given speaker thinks that “medicine” is adequately conveyed by “pona”, or whether it’s sufficiently distinct to warrant the nimi sin3 “misikeke”.
Beyond that buffer of 25 non-unanimously-used words, I will be honest, I think most nimi sin discourse has been A Bad Thing. It’s not that I have a problem with coming up with new nimi; we’ll get to some of that later. It’s that the discourse doesn’t really seem to represent natural language development by people who routinely speak a language. One level of this is obvious in the form of the ubiquitous “I just started learning Toki Pona and I think we need a word for this” post, such a staple of the community that it’s become its own genre of memes and humor. A subtler issue, though, comes from the fact that much nimi sin discourse seems to focus on “How would you say X?”, not “How do you say X?”
For a lot of people, Toki Pona is more of a thought experiment or artistic tool than a language they intend to have fully fluent conversations in. This is a great and beautiful aspect of the artlang, but it is not a great breeding ground for actual language development. A common phenomenon in Toki Pona spaces is the person who declares that they use a certain word in some unusual, provocative way. After some amount of discourse over whether this is good usage, someone may ask the person, “Do you ever actually use the word that way?” and it becomes apparent that no, they just think it’s interesting to say that they do.4 This betrays an important truth, which is that for every person who routinely uses Toki Pona in their daily life, there’s probably 20 who speak the language fairly well but aren’t frequently confronting new situations and having to think about how to describe them in Toki Pona.
This bedevils the nimi sin situation because most nimi sin are, at their core, an argument that some lexical gap exists. “lanpan” argues that “pana” and “jo” need an antonym. “leko” argues that “sike” needs a counterpart. “tonsi”, perhaps the most persuasively, argues that “meli” and “mije” really oughtn’t be a binary. And so on. But how can a community tell where the lexical gaps are when most of its members don’t use the language day-in-day-out, don’t become fluent enough that they can facilely talk through complex abstract subjects only to find that there are still one or two concepts that are unwieldy to describe and would be abetted with a nimi sin?
So here’s my take: We have enough nimi sin. Usage seems to have found an equilibrium. For one reason or another, the community mostly feels like fear is distinct enough from general badness that it needs its own word, but that shame isn’t; that we need a word to cover gender variance but not ones to cover sexual orientation; and so on. There may be some movement left to be seen,5 but I don’t think we’re going to see another word where a large chunk of the community all say “Oh wow, yeah, we really can’t make do without a word for that.”
We don’t need more nimi sin. What we need is something much, much cooler than that. And something we’re going to get naturally, as long as one thing happens: More people speak Toki Pona face to face.
Human rights are not something we grant to one another. They exist inherently, created either by G‑d or by the invisible mesh that ties all humans to one another. The best and worst among us are equally entitled to them, and the most someone should ever have to do in order to exercise them is ask.
This is a nice idea. It is, at least in the moral philosophy I subscribe to, true. It is also completely irrelevant to how human rights actually work, a process in which oppressed groups have to find some way to convince privileged groups that they deserve those rights, sometimes with great difficulty and only through making painful concessions.
I’m from Washington, D.C., a city where it sometimes feels like more things are named after Malcolm X than after any president, and also a city where the incomplete success of the civil rights movement is on display mere miles from where Martin Luther King presented his Dream to the world.1 It was always hard not to wonder, when I was younger, whether the moral of the civil rights movement was that Brother Malcolm’s strategy should have won out, not Dr. King’s.
As a queer teenage boy in the early ’10s, the rhetoric around gay marriage always annoyed me for how much it was tailored toward normativity. Sure, it was good to have the right to marry a guy with a good career, settle down in the suburbs, and adopt two girls from a foreign country… but didn’t I also have the right to get trashed in Vegas and wake up wearing a $100 wedding ring in the bed of a guy whose name I couldn’t remember?
A lot of queer folk from my generation, the kids who grew up with marriage equality in the air and radical Tumblr discourse on our minds, felt the same way. And when we got our chance to take charge of our own movement, the chance for our generation of trans and nonbinary teens and twentysomethings to broaden what our transsexual forebears had started, it was clear whose strategy we were going to follow. We would finally get an answer to the question of what would have happened if Malcolm X had been in charge.
And you know what? It turns out things go really badly.
How we got here
My first inkling something was amiss came before my own transition. I was in AmeriCorps, assigned to a school in a very socially conservative community, the Benning neighborhood of Washington, D.C.2 A new corpsmember told the team they were nonbinary, and another member asked their preferred pronouns. Before answering they prefaced, “Well, they’re not preferred pronouns. They’re mandatory.” On another occasion, a supervisor asked how they wound up with their name (a feminine name that is also a common noun, and is not common in that supervisor’s community). They snapped back, “Don’t you know it’s rude to ask a trans person about their name?”3
I understood their frustration. They dealt with transphobia daily in that school. I dealt with a lot of the same, being open as a gay man at the time. But it wasn’t so simple as “conservative community so everyone’s shitty to the queers”. The single most popular teacher in that school, beloved by students and colleagues alike, was a she/he/they nonbinary butch lesbian, who talked frequently about their wife and ran the schools’s LGBTQ club.4 I don’t want to dwell too much on this example, to talk about what that teacher did right and that corpsmember did wrong, in large part because I do think the latter was a good person under a lot of stress, and to their credit they were infinitely patient with the students when it came to gender. But still, it illustrated a difference: some trans and nonbinary people were thriving in trans-skeptical communities, and some weren’t.
One day I accidentally described myself as nonbinary to that teacher—saying something I’d casually identified as but never voiced—and after that found I couldn’t unsay it. In January 2019 I decided to transition, and that’s when I began to explore the trans Internet. I learned a lot about what to expect from my transition. I found a community where I could fit in. But I also kept seeing things that bothered me. A girl, early in her transition, wanting to cut ties with her grandmother for accidentally misgendering her, and people encouraging her to. A college student insisting there’d be no problem with switching the whole country to single-gender bathrooms, on the basis that it worked fine in her dorm. So many other comments that seemed utterly disconnected from the realities not just of cis Americans, but—it became clear, as I started my social transition—of most trans Americans.
It started to dawn on me that a lot of the people establishing the orthodoxy of transgender thought were not actually living representative trans lives. They weren’t the teacher I worked with. They weren’t my transfem enby redneck friend who works at a hardware store and makes their own rifle ammo by hand. They weren’t the girl I met from Atlantic City with the most utterly stereotypical Jersey-girl life except for the part where it started as a boy. They were living in their own ivory bubble, and from within it deciding what the rest of us had to do.
