Me.

TW: just about everything, up to and including me discussing my own internalized ableism toward ppl w/ trauma

My approach to trigger warnings (this link is important) is a little non-standard, even if it results in me agreeing with those who scrupulously use them and their milder cousins the content notes. See, most times feminists and disability activists are using them for reasons of compassion and inclusivity, which are values they are supporting quite well through their actions. However, there are a lot of people who just cannot be reached via appeals to the greater or even small-scale interpersonal good. So I'll go over the compassion arguments, but then I'll give you my reasoning. If the first bit doesn't resonate with you, stick with me, yeah? Maybe you're just not like them. Maybe you're just like me, is all.

Why's this a conversation all of a sudden?

It is to everybody's great misfortune (except Lukianoff and Haidt, obviously) that their essay The Coddling of the American Mind in the Atlantic was the introduction to the matter for many casual readers and shallow thinkers. I don't normally go so far as to condemn entire readerships as shallow because those are strong words, but I hope I can justify them to your satisfaction.

The thesis of Lukianoff's and Haidt's article is that the export of trigger warnings from the internet to Real Academia has given students a way to hide from the kind of real intellectual and emotional challenges that make education and indeed maturity itself possible.

The alternative they present is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a thoroughly reputable therapeutic approach that entails providing patients with predictable, controlled, and moderated exposure to their trauma triggers in a controlled environment under the supervision of a licensed clinician who is familiar with their history and invested in their recovery. The most glaring failure of their proposed solution is that it cannot be achieved by omitting trigger warnings in classroom settings but only by expanding access to mental health services and allowing the priorities of those treatment programs to dictate levels and schedules of exposure to whatever extent can be reasonably managed.

In short, a professor who has chosen not to tell students they're going to be listening to a rape victim's 911 call is not actually gifting their students a free session of cognitive behavioral therapy; statistically they're more likely to be causing at least one student a neurologically uncontrollable response that will hinder the student's ability to engage with the material that could easily have been prevented by just... telling the students on the syllabus to brace themselves before attending that day.

So before we even get into questions of whether omitting trigger warnings is humane, it's worth asking what it achieves. The very first claim we've seen, that it toughens up those flimsy millenials, is starkly undermined by the very writers who most publicly made it. That's why I call the people who share this article around like it supports the omission of trigger warnings as a cure for millenial fragility casual readers and shallow thinkers, because that's Lukianoff's and Haidt's audience: people who can overlook the authors breaking their own thesis in half. It fails on such a fundamental level as a piece of persuasive writing that it's difficult to take seriously because, come on, look what they did to that poor thesis. They argue for eliminating trigger warnings because they make kids these days into big babies who care about racism and sexism and all kinds of nonsense and then advocate for a treatment method that essentially requires absolutely comprehensive use of trigger warnings across not only academia but all aspects of life. That poor poor thesis.

Even so, this terrible terrible essay started a conversation far better than it merited. 

The conversation that's happening.

One of the biggest bogeymen trigger warnings get turned into is a form of bottom-up censorship, a tyranny of the broken and the oppressed, preventing their stories from being told. By and large, though, a warning is an extra line of content, not a subtraction. Certainly, the way that I use them, I write whatever I like. I add the warnings after I've written whatever I like, tailored to whatever came out. Linear time, being what it is, leaves them no way even to influence my writing.

So if the writing itself isn't being censored, can warnings cause censorship on the other end, on the reader's end? Here's my answer. The people who are likely to be personally traumatized by the content under discussion have already experienced it. Someone who can be triggered by rape already knows reality includes rape. So the warning has hidden nothing from them even should they entirely sidestep the content. We do get to a stickier point when we get to people who haven't been personally traumatized and just are sort of callous and crappy people who don't care what others go through and genuinely don't want to bother to learn.

I had to give some thought to that, and ended up finding an essay that distilled an answer down better than I could, so here you go.

Much of the panic about trigger warnings in classrooms also focuses on the fear that privileged students will avoid material that makes them uncomfortable. So if you put “TW: misogyny, sexual violence” on a syllabus next to an assignment, male students might think, “Ugh, I don’t want to read about that" and avoid it.

But privileged students already avoid material that makes them uncomfortable; that may be one reason you see way too few white students in courses on African-American literature. Trigger warnings might make this slightly easier, but it doesn’t fix the larger, systemic problem of people choosing not to engage with material that challenges their worldview.

Further, avoiding trigger warnings for the sake of tricking privileged students into reading material on racism, sexism, and other unpleasant topics means potentially triggering underprivileged students by refusing to warn them that the upcoming reading assignment concerns traumatic things they may have experienced. People who lack privilege relative to others are constantly being asked to sacrifice their mental health and safety for the sake of educating those others, and this is just a continuation of that unjust pattern.

Basically, your callous douchebags are already being callous douchebags, so please don't sacrifice your more vulnerable students on the altar of trying to de-douche the douches. They'll probably still be douches afterward. 

We talk about this a lot in an academic context, but frankly as much as professors worry about mandatory trigger warnings, they're not... really facing that? I mean, they're seriously not. The ones who're using them are typically doing so because they've come to the independent conclusion that it'll help their students better engage with the material without a lot of trauma from outside the classroom crashing down and interfering with their schoolwork.

Why trigger warnings are compassionate! 

PTSD is bad. I mean, I hope I don't have to get into this, but PTSD is potentially life-shreddingly bad, and while not every potential trigger can be predicted and warned for (anybody who knows anything about PTSD knows this and adjusts for it, including advocates for trigger warnings), there are common ones.

Discussion of rape, child sexual abuse (often abbreviated to CSA), animal abuse, drug use, self-harm (these two can trigger relapses, which yikes bad), racism, misogyny, transantagonism, domestic violence, child death.... I mean, I could go on, but I don't actually have to, because I'm sure you get the idea. You don't have to warn for every imaginable thing like lizards and marshmallows and daisies and hair, so chill. You get a feel for it, and people with super edge triggers aren't as aggressive and uncharitable as you think they'll be. PTSD is bad, and frequently people who've got it feel so friggin unsafe that the fact that you'd even try makes a big difference. So just try. 

I have to reiterate, being triggered isn't about being uncomfortable. It's not about being offended. Offense is crap, and I don't care about offense any more than anyone else with sense. It's about having the past entirely hijack your brain. There's a special sort of helplessness and terror people known to who've almost been killed by their parents, who've seen their friends die in war, who've had to kill an abusive spouse to save their children, there's a special sort of time travel hell that happens in your brain and if you have felt it you've felt it and if you haven't you haven't.

I've hated a few people in my life, but I have never allowed myself to deliberately trigger someone's PTSD, because that is inhumane on a level that I couldn't ever wash off my hands. I've hated people with glaring weak places I could have dug my thumbs into, people I could have hurled back into their pasts. I could have fed them into the furnace of their childhood suffering, passed them backward into the hands of every kind of menace you could imagine. I could have sent them through everything that had ever broken them and watched it break them all over again while I stood safe on the kitchen carpet, watching. And it's the most evil thing I can think of. It's beneath the person I have decided I'm to be.

So understand what it looks like to me when people argue that they are claiming some kind of moral high ground to do this to their students in classrooms in public. Understand what I see when I look inside those people and see the piece of me they're choosing to indulge. Understand what kind of person I know you have to be to not only take advantage of such an opportunity but to feel smugly superior about it. At least I'd have known what I was doing, but there's something particularly slimy about people who convince themselves that doing so makes them uniquely good. The layer of self-aggrandizement just... ech. It's so petty. I don't know how that element of it can bother me so much, but somehow it does.

Now that I've established I'm actually pretty awful...

There is a reason I started off with practical arguments, because I'm going to return to them here. The bare fact of the matter is that I generally find other people's emotional responses pretty tiresome. I'm aware that tolerating and even encouraging them is a pro-social behavior, and because I choose my actions based on building the sort of world I want to live in, I frequently choose not to act on my exhaustion or annoyance. It's there, though. I give people the support they deserve even when I am inwardly rolling my eyes that Feelings are happening. I do a fair imitation of a bleeding heart who feels everybody's feelings and has the pains when people are suffering but really.... I just... would prefer to live in a world where such support happens, because it is the best way to ensure that such suffering is handled humanely and responsibly and thereby minimized.

The realest reason I use trigger warnings (and their milder cousins the content notes)? I use them because people in the grip of PTSD are actually just about the least capable of rationality and careful critical engagement of any human being, because their brains have been hijacked and there is absolutely zero room for me to expect them to be anything but a neurological disaster. And, just... ugh. 

Seriously, ugh. 

Trigger warnings are the fence I put up around my writing that says, "If this content is going to give you Feelings Problems, then honestly just... just make different choices." 

And the miracle of it is... it works! 

And it works by giving people the tools to manage themselves! It works by placing all responsibility on the shoulders of people who need to learn to know and adjust for their own bugs, their own failure conditions, and lets me do whatever the hell I wanna do. I am telling people to take responsibility for their own shit in a way that actually makes it possible for them to do the thing I want them to do! This is great! 

It sounds like such an elementary thing that I don't know how to break it down more without sounding really patronizing, but this is the real reason. I am not qualified to manage other people's mental illness or trauma recovery. I am so beyond not qualified. Nor am I particularly motivated most of the time to participate in that process. If what I want is for people to be responsible for their own recovery rather than spilling it all over me, I can make it more likely that happens, and this is great!

It's like I I was born into a world that was raining torrential failed trauma recovery and it was only when I reached adulthood that the internet handed me the raincoat and umbrella of Nope I Told You What This Was.

So to my fellow disinterested callous selfish jerks:

You don't owe me anything. Obviously! But in a world full of people spilling suffering everywhere, there are things we can do to actively make their recovery less our problem and more under their control. As Sarah Seltzer discusses trigger warnings, they allow the people around us to prepare for what they're about to engage with, prevent the brain-hijacking effects of PTSD, and remain more even and rational and capable. Totally aside from how empowering that is for them... doesn't that sound nice for us, too? It's an extra line of text, just a heads up, and it makes everybody else soooo much less exhausting. 

You don't have to be my brand of selfish. But I hope you can at least see how trigger warnings fit into my brand of self-interest. By helping the people around me take control of their own trauma recovery, I am keeping with my general goal of helping edge the world closer and closer to one I find more comfortable for myself. You don't have to help me, though obviously I hope you will. Maybe at least you understand better.

TW: mention of all kinds of bigotry

I was going to write this as a FB comment in reply to a thread, but that would likely have resulted in me losing it forever to the flood of other content. And good gracious, what a waste that'd be. So far I have two parts to this. One is establishing the distinction between "offense" and "harm" that I'll be using. The second is intended to establish that verbal bigotry is itself harmful, rather than merely offensive. Then I'll explain why this even matters to me. There are various subcontentions here, but those are the main points.

( Read more... )

CN: family pains, complicated heritage thoughts, white privilege white privilege white privilege. Maybe don't read this if you are full up on navel-gazing White Thoughts for the year. It is okay to have zero interest in this. It isn't a pressing social issue I have here. It is just personal.
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When I don't wear makeup to choose how my face looks, I see people in it I try hard to avoid resembling any other way. There is my mother's smile on my father's mouth. There are my mother's eyes with my father's near-black irises. There are my father's cheeks with my mother's cheekbones. There are my mother's arms with my father's hair on them. There are my mother's hands with my father's bitten cuticles.

The only people I can look at myself and see the stamp of their genes without cringing and looking away are people I don't have the right to talk about because our family got back so quickly to being white that I'm constantly weaponized against the family I have most worth my loyalty just by existing and receiving the training that formed me to hurt them without even trying.

And I hate it. But I'll never be a totally safe neighbor to my Penobscot fam. No matter how I try, the poison that is all the rest of my blood will never be 100% gone. It may end with me, but poison has a way of leeching out. Ethnic cleansing turns children into battlefields, and my life is easier because I'm a battlefield considered won for whiteness. I'm a born traitor. It's not a guilt thing. It's just an ugly truth. The only way for me to give back to the best people I see in the mirror is to give back in the ways that involve me myself the least.

So I give money. I chew off the faces of white people who assume I'll be glad I'm a weapon against the best in me. I spread the word about things that matter to the family I can't go too near. But I stay away. Otherwise I would hurt them even more from that more intimate distance and I'm sick enough at the harm I cause as it is.

This isn't a problem worth solving. Me feeling scant detriments amid the overwhelming benefits of white privilege isn't worth spending time and energy on that could be going to ethnic cleansing's primary victims who are still being screwed over by the white supremacy protecting me. But sometimes people remark that I don't post anything "personal" online so here is something personal.

In some Frankenstein movie (idk if it is from the book) someone referred to the monster as "evil stitched to evil stitched to evil," and in my case it is mostly true. It's visibly true if you know how to look. There is a little bit of good in me, though, just enough that I can feel myself as a living betrayal of it. Sometimes it feels shitty is all, that the best I can do for the source of that tiny bit of pride, is hold myself at a distance from the folks I have to thank for it.

But the people who filled my veins with poison and themselves punished me for being able to see each other in me? Nah. I help them keep winning no matter what I do (at best sometimes managing to be slightly less helpful than I was designed to be).

I don't hate myself by a long shot, but whiteness? I'll be its weapon until it's gone. That I do hate.

First things first:

1. Ableism is a real thing. It matters. It is absolutely ableist (and gaslighty to boot) to insist that people should be forcing themselves to experience different feelings than they are actually experiencing.

2. Disability can intersect with white privilege because they coexist without negating each other.

3. Legitimate access needs can conflict without any of the access needs becoming less legitimate as a result.

So, context.

Good Men Project posted White Women’s Tears and the Men Who Love Them, and a giant mass of white disabled people absolutely lost their shit. What they frequently read is, "Your emotions are inappropriate and you are bad to feel them, and you are even worse if anybody sees you cry for any reason, even out of empathy." This is a pattern of misreading and escalation that comes up whenever the phrase "white tears" is used, and it is uncool white people behavior. Possibly not always a preventable false positive, but uncool. It is, in fact, a white supremacist and ableist behavior.

Truly, there is plenty of ableism in assuming that all POC are abled and could fight for their survival and simultaneously take care of all white feelings and would do so infinitely if they weren't so callous and mean. If you indulge this, it becomes easier to see telling white people to be responsible about the impact of our theatrical mourning as yet more abled gaslighting, abuse, and unfair expectations. Considering, though, that you have to completely depart from the reality of the situation into an impossible hypothetical to support that... it's probably a poor hill to die on.

White people whose emotional disabilities reduce the quality of solidarity we are providing are not producing better solidarity and being better allies just because we have a more credible excuse than other white people. This matters, especially when you factor in the possibility of POC also being mentally ill. There are disabled POC in anti-racist spaces who could probably stand to benefit from a little of the emotional work white folks suck up when we assume our every emotional impulse is welcome and anybody who disagrees is ableist. There is only one reason we'd assume a conflict of identical access needs ought always be resolved in favor of the white person: white supremacy.

So here's my personal note to my fellow white neuroatypicals. If any POC want a white neuroatypical in a Pokéball to throw into these discussions, you can send this.

If a white neuroatypical ally's access need is "I need to be free to be as disruptive to POC's grieving process and activism as my every impulse would prompt," I think it's reasonable for people whose access need is to not be disrupted to say, "Okay then please do that elsewhere." I mean, has every defender of white fragility FORGOTTEN that mental disability happens to POC too? White people aren't the first and only ones being asked to consider the impact of our behavior; not even the only disabled people. What about disabled POC who need room in their own spaces? Where the hell are they in this "your access needs are ableist" screed? I get it. They come second. Again. Of course they do, right? But no, that's not y'all's depression or autism that causes you to put them second to yourselves when they have an identical access need to yours. That's white supremacy.

Whatever emotional disregulation or impulse control issues a white person may have WILL be COINCIDING with our whiteness! White people are prone to sucking up the emotional labor even of people they claim they're standing in solidarity with, and that doesn't stop being a destructive and corrosive pattern of white behavior just because some white folks end up reproducing it even when doing their genuine best not to.

It's hard to handle the fact that our allyship is going to be weighed and evaluated by the people with whom we're trying to stand in solidarity. I get that! It's hard! White fragility is a legitimately difficult thing to work past even for the sturdiest of us. And it sucks! And it's gonna be harder and suck more for people whose resilience or impulse control are struggling even with a whiteness-coated experience of the world. That is a fact. But POC need to be freely able to evaluate the job we are doing as allies, and that means not pretending we're producing better solidarity than we are just because our solidarity shortfall is happening for an understandable reason (and our all-important comfort means we need reassurance that they know that and love us anyway).

It is not ableist to say that POC are allowed to have access needs to their own spaces that may exclude people who cannot control their behavior. That is part of truly centering THEM. And remember, white people, for every minute we spend publicly weeping and gnashing our teeth and claiming we cannot possibly control ourselves, there is a disabled POC who has had to bite back their words and shut down their heart and turn away from their own grieving spaces because the WHITE disabled people sucked all the air out of the room and left none for disabled POC.

There is a limited amount of human energy and organizational power in the world. Every space is finite. Every single one. And I would caution all white disabled folks to consider how much time, energy, space, and emotional labor you are willing to wolf down when there are disabled POC who have to settle for whatever crumbs are left after you're satiated.

Signed,

a neuroatypical white person

"You can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you." -- Eric Hoffer

This is a major page in the "destroy your abuser" manual, at least for me.

I remember this when someone tries to isolate their target from me because I am a source of external "influence" (aka support and validation and connection to reality). Losing their victims, their targets, their sources of energy, is the worst thing they can imagine and therefore it's how they punish everyone who steps out of line. I remember this when someone compares me to people who have hurt me, because it's always someone who has matured into their own abuser. I remember this when someone trains their targets to infiltrate the lives of those who've escaped to deal crueler and more intimate damage, because they live in perpetual paranoia that they'll be betrayed first.

This is why none of my parents can control me the way they have learned to control each other. I grew up learning them like their fears were cautionary marks on maps of a minefield, and I can detonate them any time I want from any distance. The real reason I don't punish them is that there's always the slight chance that they'll learn as much about my fears as I have learned from them. It's not a big chance, but it's there. I'd rather they go on trying to control me using their own weaknesses rather than my own, even if it means they live easier lives than they deserve. I'm just too important, certainly moreso than they are. They're not worth sacrificing myself for, so I won't sacrifice myself over them either. Their normal baseline level of self-created misery will do.

It makes me wrinkle my nose when people try to correct my self-image because they think I have some kind of negative messaging tape playing that's making me think wrong things. If I say that my first impulse is not to offer comfort, that is not an opportunity to correct me and tell me I really truly am a good person honest. If I say that I have disdain and contempt for things that I consider unethical to act upon, that is not an opportunity to tell me that I'm loving. There is seldom any actual practical reason to tell me I am being too hard on myself.

Trust. I love myself. I love myself more than I love everybody else in the entire world. You, if you are reading this? I probably like you. I may even love you. But loooooooooool no I come first. Always. I love myself. I am on my own side and I will not betray myself. I will, however, view myself accurately. Anybody who can't handle me doing that is just demonstrating that they aren't ready to participate in or even spectate on my process.

I mean, if you want the truth... some people's brains tend toward anxiety. Some have a hair trigger on guilt. Some have a vast reservoir of fuel for rage to burn and all it takes is a spark a block away. Mine has a reflexive contempt and disgust for weakness. This is a known thing, and when I state it about myself I am not drawing from self-loathing. I am doing the wise and mature thing and staying aware of bugs in my system, of anything that raises the error rate of my thinking.

If I say this, I am taking the risk of allowing someone to get closer to an accurate understanding of what I'm really like. I want people to understand that I have to work harder than many people to achieve something like the same warmth and care that comes so naturally to so many, and when you tell me that you don't believe me when I say that... it makes me not trust you, because there is this gigantic thing that is a big part of why I think I am lovable and worthy that you can't even bring yourself to approach with your eyes open. If you tell me that I am saying things about myself that aren't true, you are telling me way shittier things than I ever tell myself.

1. You're telling me that you are a better evaluator of who I am and what I'm like than I am. And fuck you for that gaslighting horse assery.

2. You're telling me that the version of me you respect is founded on a fundamental misunderstanding--perhaps even willful denial--of what sort of person I am.

3. You're telling me that if you were to find out that I wasn't just talking myself down, that maybe I actually know myself a little, you would stop thinking I am good and have worth.

When I am explaining who I am and I get hit with those three implicit assertions, it does one extra thing. It prompts me to have to distance myself from people I am reflexively prone to consider to be less than I am. Do not encourage me to behave this way. I have to work hard enough thinking of certain kinds of people as being comparable to myself; don't make it harder by drawing a mental map of me that looks like them and arguing with me that yours is better than mine. I do not need your fucking help to see myself as acceptable. I have to work hard enough not indulging in the kind of self-aggrandizement that would actually hinder my moral development, so maybe when I speak honestly about a known bug you should let me do that.

I have a lot of good qualities. My self esteem is one of them. So is my self-awareness. Let me bring both of those to our way of relating and I will. But if you don't let me, I won't show up at all. Because fuck that and fuck you.

I am bothered by people who insist that because their gaslighting attempts are unsuccessful, a higher-level brainwashing force must have gotten to me first. Is the notion of DECISIONS so foreign to some people? I am not an empty vessel to be filled with pre-conditioned allegiances according to the first programmer to get hold of me. I am an independent creature. Maybe if these sad failures grew a little initiative they'd realize they always were, too.

Part of me is really touched to see it on the outside, portrayed by someone outside, and part of me is just sort of... sad that yeah this feels like the reality of it. Most of the time the system takes care of itself but every now and again on a very rare day something needs maintenance that's hard for me to reach with my own hands. And at that moment the illusion is broken.


robot by lanxingxxxx on DeviantArt

Image description: A boy and girl kneel on the bathroom floor. The skin of her back is open to expose mechanical workings, and the tools for repair are on the floor around them.

If you had to be someone else for 24 hours, who would you choose and why? What would you do?

I would like to briefly be Charles or David Koch. I would use my single day to cash out all my assets and give them to Doctors Without Borders. I figure that'll take a few hours. The rest of it could be spent laughing and laughing and laughing and laughing.

That's really all I've got for this one. I like being me. I would only be someone else if I had some specific goal that could only be accomplished that way. Elsewise, me = best.

People who object to public breastfeeding are weird. I don't get it. Personally I object to public SCREAMING HUNGRY BABIES. The fact that there are people out there who can make a hungry baby shut all the way up by putting a nipple in the kid's mouth? You are a hero.

I don't like kids. Please feed them wherever you are, because they will certainly scream no matter where they are and we all really do have the option of just not staring at your boobs if it bothers anybody so damn much. Ignoring shrill babywails? Less feasible.

Maybe the next time I hear someone get salty about someone breastfeeding I will pull them aside and get really close to direct my words right to their ear and then I will SHRIEK FOR AN ETERNITY or until they repent their backward ways.