The Serpent's Wisdom

There's a scene in the movie Hedwig and the Angry Inch where Hedwig and her boyfriend Tommy are making out, and he reaches into her skirt... and says, "What's this?" And she replies, softly,



That phrase really stuck with me because i'm hard pressed to come up with anything else that so succinctly and elegantly summarizes what it is like to be transgendered.

Strained family ties, disapproval from clergy, laughter in the streets, unemployment, homelessness, broken marriages, estranged children, loved ones we have hurt or betrayed in one way or another; disjointed bodies at disparate stages of transition -- the remnants of facial hair as breasts begin to form; anger that has nowhere to go, and despair, and guilt, and untreated PTSD, and dissociative identity, and opening your mouth to speak and hearing someone else's voice come out... these broken circumstances are what we have to work with.

A while back i complained that there is no word for what we are. The word "transgendered" is a compound, a word with a prefix, classifying us as marked -- not real, not something with a true essence, but something else with a tainted essence. It is a medical term, reflecting the view that we are pathological and aberrant, in need of correction.

We direly need a real word. I think i'm going to use galla (pl. gallae). This word is transwoman-specific. I'm sorry, i can't think of anything similar for transmen, and maybe it wouldn't be appropriate for me to propose it anyway. It's an ancient word (so i'm not appropriating it from anyone who will miss it) which refers to a sect whose priesthood bore some characteristics in common with modern transsexuals. It's not a perfect word, really, but... it's what we have to work with.

I've been told that some of the things i write come across as attacks on people or things i have no desire to attack. My use of language may have become kind of specialized and i thought i've explained myself as i've gone along, but just to be sure people understand what i'm saying, i will clarify my usage of a few terms.

I've become very bitter and critical towards religion. When i say "religion," i am primarily talking about organized religion: membership movements (you clearly belong to the movement or clearly do not) which require adherence to a particular doctrine (usually kept in writings deemed sacred), defined and maintained by an incorporated edifice of some sort, which ordains an official clergy to perform official rites and rituals. Religious membership almost always requires professing firm belief in unprovable statements.

There's some wiggle room here on what constitutes a "religion," but i think that's good enough for you to see what i mean when i contrast it with "spirituality," "mysticism," and "esoterica."

"Mysticism," in my usage, is subjective examination of one's experiences. I think i use the word to refer to something much more broad than most people do.

"Esoterica," in my usage, is a specific form of mystical inquiry involving the pursuit of certain altered states of awareness.

Most of the time when i use the word "spirituality" my intended definition is very specific, and refers to a pattern of misappropriation whereby some kinds of radical and dissenting speech are turned into safe "religious" speech, cleansed of its political overtones so that it seems only to convey instruction about the supernatural.

So, in my frequent criticisms of religion and spirituality, i am not meaning to criticize anyone's experiences of the supernatural or the numinous. I am not in any way putting anyone down for having such experiences -- i've had them myself and i do not repudiate them. Instead what i am criticizing, is the way that these experiences are stolen and co-opted by organized religion in order to suit agendas of control and exploitation.

Once upon a time, i was a conservative Christian. I turned away from this during my early teens, when i began to realize that certain of my beliefs simply could not be reconciled with logic, science, reality, and my personal experience.

During my years as a non-Christian, as i explored many different approaches to spirituality i never stopped feeling like a spiritual refugee, and so when i learned about Gnostic and liberal Christianity i began to think maybe i had found a way to come home, spiritually speaking.

Liberal theology is rooted in an approach to scripture at odds with the fundamentalist belief that the Bible is literally true, infallible, and designed as a timeless guide to life, belief, and morality. It has nothing to do with liberal politics, though many liberal Christians are also liberal politically.

Finally, a kind of Christianity i could sink my teeth into!

But after years of exploration in the realm of liberal theology, i find i still cannot reconcile Christianity, this time with economics, ethics, philosophy, justice, and again my personal experience.

Christianity is based on the idea that humans are separated from God in some profound way. The conservative Christians talk about "original sin" and "sin nature" which passes from father to offspring. In the Calvinist formulation, people are inherently "totally depraved," utterly incapable of embracing good and worthy by default of eternal damnation.

The problem with this belief is that it is damagingly divisive. Someone who is "lost in sin" is too easy to see as less than fully human, less than fully capable, worthy of pity or rejection. It is too easy to justify to oneself participating in the mistreatment of people who are called by one's leaders less than fully human; and history bears out the problems this has allowed.

Liberal Christians understand how divisive this belief has been and rejects its overt forms. But most of the liberal theology i've encountered does not, in the end, truly reject it -- because they still rely on Christ for some sort of salvation.

Spong, for example, proposed we understand humanity as "incomplete," still a work in progress. Other liberal theologians describe us as in need of healing from without, in need of divine guidance or leadership.

In the past, i looked to the idea of soteria as "healing" or self-improvement in the hopes of understanding Christian doctrine in a non-divisive way. This approach can only work if and only if healing is seen as voluntary, as something we seek if we recognize a need for change in ourselves. It should never be seen as something which all of us must undertake -- because then it becomes, in turn, an "us vs. them," a question of "who is seeking healing and who isn't?"

But the idea of Christ as an envoy from God, or a reflection within humankind of the divine presence, makes it impossible to think of healing as something voluntary -- because Christ, as the perfect human, the ideal to which we are to aspire, is a yardstick by which we will always come up short.

The fundamentalists see Christ as God in human form. Liberal theologians are likely to see Christ as a metaphor for human potential, or the divine presence in an understandable form; or they see Jesus as an extraordinary person, someone of immense charisma who moved socio-political mountains and taught people a lot about tolerance and love and co-operation.

I was striken then very hard by the observation of Elisabeth Schuessler Fiorenza that perhaps the proper way to view the early Christian movement is not one that starts and ends with Jesus, a single extraordinary individual, a man who saves us all by leading the way to a bright new world, but as a broad and diverse social movement to which many people contributed with their bravery and their witness. In this view, Jesus is simply a person who became, for a time, the movement's chief galvanizer and spokesperson.

To take a galvanizing figure and make him a figure of worship or emulation and to make him the central focus of theological inquiry takes the emphasis from where it must be (justice and compassion). The idea of Christ is therefore misappropriation; it diverts inquiry from the hard questions of justice and ethics and spins us in a whirlpool of philosophical auto-eroticism. (ETA: Alright, i know that's harsh. But immersion in a quasi-Marxian-inspired point of view has made it difficult for me to see anything that does not immediately contribute to justice as a potential contributor to the status quo, by taking our energy away from the important areas of focus. I've always been accused of being too serious for my own good.)

Is there any way to preserve the idea of Christ and maintain a focus on justice and compassion? I eagerly sought one. The best i could come up with is the idea that Christ is something which those who follow the Christian path are called upon to become or to embody when we they confronted with a person in need or an ethical dilemma.

But if that's the way it works, then phrasing it in terms of "Christ" or "savior" is distraction -- or worse, because the loaded cultural values of these terms means that phrasing discourse about acting justly or compassionately in this way makes us forever in danger of being diverted away from ethics and onto the distraction of Christology. It's safer just to say, "We have to be just and compassionate with one another," than to bring a religious term into it that risks diversion.

This leads to another concern i had, which is that once you apply a word to something for ease of description, people take the word and run with it as a label, and use it in a normative way to distinguish between one thing and another. Similarly, any kind of organization formed by people of one generation to solve the problems they face becomes a rigidified edifice which tends to cause problems in future generations.

In other words, anything resembling "systematic" theology or philosophy -- the attempt to coalesce one's worldview into a concise set of concepts -- puts us in danger of creating fodder for the perpetuation or justification of injustice.

That's a damn drastic thing to say, i know: but i've expounded several times in recent months on why i have concluded that there is no way any ideology can be "the answer" to human ills. This is a thunderous insight that continues to reverberate throughout my brain and shake down wall after wall. It's a threatening idea to anyone who has a pet ideology, and i even sometimes find myself resisting it. But if there is anything that has been shown to be true by the witness of human experience, it is this.

I don't know if any of you out there have the same automatic internal reaction as i do when i see articles or essays that talk about a scientist's funding or other potential biases. My immediate reaction is to want to reject any such concern as "ad hominem" and therefore irrelevant to discourse about whatever matter is at hand. So, this may really only be targeted at an audience of one (me).

A while back lady_babalon linked to this news story about a researcher who examined the funding sources of scholars and clinicians who developed the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders (DSM).

( Read more... )

Here's a study describing some of the ways researchers finagle the bounds and methods of their research in order to tweak results so that they are favorable to the pharmaceutical companies funding their research.

Objective To investigate whether funding of drug studies by the pharmaceutical industry is associated with outcomes that are favourable to the funder and whether the methods of trials funded by pharmaceutical companies differ from the methods in trials with other sources of support.

... Conclusion Systematic bias favours products which are made by the company funding the research. Explanations include the selection of an inappropriate comparator to the product being investigated and publication bias.

Add to this a study which "reveals" (as if none of us could have possibly known) that FDA panelists who have financial ties to the pharmaceutical industry are more likely to vote to approve drugs:

( Read more... )

As an interesting aside, see an article here which tries to slant this to show that there is no conflict-of-interest in FDA drug-approval votes: "The study finds that the removal of all of those advisory committee members [with dubious funding] would not have reversed the results of any of the votes at meetings between 2001 and 2004, although their removal could have made some decisions less favorable."

One is inclined to wonder how we might correct for the warping effect of big pharma as an 800-lb gorilla in the medical field. Something that big and influential is bound to force people consider their careers and personal well-being when making decisions like this, even if they do not receive direct funding from the pharma companies.

When contemplating things like this a piece of my brain shouts, "That's an ad hominem argument!" I've been trained to overlook, as much as possible, any personal information about a person making an argument and look at the merits of the argument itself. And according to the survey linked above, the merits of the research papers themselves do reveal, upon close examination, the obvious favorable tweakings in methodology.

But the public doesn't get to examine the methodology of any given study. Usually results are just presented in the media as holy proclamations. "Scientists say blah-de-blah-blah in a new report to be published today in the Journal of Very Respectable We Assure You Science." The average American may be vaguely aware of the steps in the scientific method, but unless she has been a scholar of science she is generally not hip to the subtle ways in which methodology can be tweaked to bring results in line with expectations.

And let's take this a step further and see who it is who is alleging bias in pharmaceutical research -- mostly it is people with the organization Public Citizen, who themselves can be justifiably accused of potential bias! It never ends.

Allegations of bias in science become even more explosive when you consider various research offered to support fundamentalist agenda items. The tone of sciencific speech can be adopted even by people as thoroughly discredited as anti-gay "researcher" Paul Cameron, and the media will play along, especially if it is operated by people favorable to the agenda at hand.

The idea of personal bias in researchers is like scientific kryptonite. Science is understood as a form of inquiry that allows people to pursue knowledge removed from economic, institutional, and ideological pressures. Supposedly bias is detected during the peer review process. Therefore, people are supposedly taken out of the equation, and results stand on their own as proclamations which have the blessing of an entire community, therefore carrying more weight than the simple assertions of a few individuals.

But if the reviewing peers are biased too, what then? What if "common sense" itself is biased?

We want to pretend that bias does not exist in science, or if it does, that it is rare. If bias can be sneaked into the proclamations of science, the "scientific mystique" might be undermined. Therefore it's easier to just dismiss any kind of talk about a researcher's funding or background as trivial and over-personal. Doing so belies the reality that science falls into ruts called paradigms, which in large part reflect the biases of culture and "common sense," which in turn is shaped by oppression.

Our ability to understand and make judgments about our environment evolved out of the need to know what is going on around us in order to find food or keep from becoming food. It is linked to some of the 'oldest' parts of the brain such as the amygdala, a portion of the brain that sifts through sensory data for threats and governs emotional responses like fear and fight-or-flight.

The human capacity for thought is still connected to the amygdala. The need to understand is fundamentally an emotional need. Failure to come up with an answer to an important question is deemed a threat.

The brain is capable of holding myriad complex and even contradictory thoughts at once, because it is not a CPU but is more like a house with several rooms. One room can hold one thought and another room can hold another thought which is in direct contradiction to the first.

This kind of inconsistency does not always cause dissonance. When it does, though, the dissonance creates an emotional dilemma, activating the amygdala which adds an exclamation point to demands for a resolution to the crisis.

When this happens, the brain looks for a quick answer it can apply to make the distress stop. There is even a biosociological theory of religion rooted in this observation. A while ago i built on this and suggested that it creates an opportunity for memetic parasites to thrive in human culture.

There is another way in which emotion can get in the way of logic, and that is the emotional investment which most (if not all) people put into thoughts, concepts, ideas, or cultural labels. These things become a part of our identity, and so information that contradicts what we have invested in is perceived as a threat to our well-being.

It was because of all this that i was not surprised by results which i cited a couple of weeks ago about the way in which emotion prevents some information from being processed logically or rationally.

Now, let me be clear that this does not mean that we are totally helpless in the face of our emotional response. One of the beauties of the human mind is that we have the capability to override our emotions with force of will. But this emotional response makes it difficult, and also makes it possible for memes to override logic or rationality.

[By the way, awareness of this does not make one automatically immune to it, which leads to some interesting sensations when you realizing you're reacting in ways you 'know' are "irrational" but which still make sense, because they reflect your experiences rather than the concepts you are able to parrot back on demand.]

I bring this up now because there is also a dimension of restriction that comes with the experience of trauma related to oppression. It is very difficult to communicate beyond this trauma, especially if someone associates a certain kind of language with the mistreatment they received.

For example, it is very hard for me (and many of the people i know and/or love) to remain rational when we hear certain kinds of religious language which we came, during the course of our lives, to associate with mistreatment. When this happens, the words are not "communication of ideas" but "signal of impending threat."

I make the effort to see things rationally, but do not always succeed.

These are all powerful impediments to peaceful co-existence and rational dialogue between people, which it should be a cultural priority to address.

This is a very difficult topic to grasp at, as both a writer and a reader, because our patterns of perception and conceptuality have been formed in ways that facilitate the kyriarchal status-quo.

Some forms of oppression are visible, and we can have awareness of them, because there have been somewhat successful movements to raise that awareness. Even so, one must undertake constant positive effort -- as if one were swimming upstream -- to avoid allowing sexist, racist, or classist presumptions to intrude into one's language. Consider the depth of effort and vigilance required -- and witness the consequent resentment many have against "political correctness" -- for an illustration of how deeply our brains have been colonized by oppression.

It sometimes seems like a fruitless undertaking to be conscious of sexist/racist language, because what we've witnessed in recent decades is a flowering of tacit forms of sexist or racist expression -- and the sense that "we all know what's really going on, so why candy coat it?" The best answer i can give involves the transmission of oppressive memes to our children. It is now well-known that the brain is exceedingly plastic when we are children, but not so when we are adults. Our brains were wired with racism and sexism when we were young, watching the way adults treated us and each other, in actions and words. In the brain there is no real distinction between hardware and software -- this is why the "software upgrade" of oppression awareness does not automatically fix our internalized sexism/racism. It may only seem like a faulty pretense, but there's a chance that the next generation will observe our struggles, and our attempts to address them, and will be better equipped to handle the struggle against institutional oppression.

Some forms of oppression are just now coming to public awareness, such as the oppression of queer people, transpeople and people with disabilities. Other struggles have yet to come to public awareness, such as the mistreatment of neuro-atypical or fat people. Modern oppression of these people includes marginalization by way of patterns like medicalization (the above are treated by modern society as medical disorders, as femininity was and still is in some ways), moralization (they are treated as moral failings or psychological errors fixable by therapy or religious intervention), fetishization (cultures of 'chasers' and 'admirers' have been established around these characteristics), and ridicule (much "humor" depends on the ridiculousness of being fat or transgendered or neuro-atypical). Light is made of our plight and then we are told, "What, can't you take a joke"?

Whole industries have been set up to make a profit off the plight of the oppressed. The beauty and diet industries are huge; politicians make political and financial capital by promoting homophobia; neuro-atypical people are medicated or unwillingly hospitalized.

These marginalizations are "common sense" -- we all know and understand them and they are the expected social attitude towards people with these attributes. Since they are common sense, the person who questions these attitudes or agitates for their reversal can be characterized as unreasonable (especially if, heaven help them, they have a bit of anger in their voice) -- and can then be told their errors in a "calm, reasonable" tone of voice. Other language tactics of avoidance are employed -- the accusation of having an agenda beyond the scope of one's actual comments, or the use of cavil to draw attention to the details of one's statement and away from the wider implications.

In all of these ways the deck is stacked against the targets of oppression, so that it is impossible for us to win; to turn our abuse in on ourselves, to make it our fault, to traumatize us, to deny the perception of the larger pattern, to isolate us, to desensitize us to the reality of what is going on, to break up our coalitions, to render us more helpless, to make it easier to exploit us economically, emotionally, sexually. And this cannibalism is the bottom line, why it is all done.

A lot of difference in opinion and understanding comes down to a difference in style of interpreting the way words, labels, and concepts hold meaning. There's a generally "soft" or "fuzzy" way, and there's a "hard" way.

The "soft/fuzzy" way means that a word, concept, idea, label, points to a perceived pattern or persistence. It is meant as a loosely-descriptive term to illustrate how we think a thing we perceive fits into the way the world works.

The "hard" way means that a word, concept, idea, label, not only points to perceived patterns, but when applied to something concrete, is assumed to tells us things about the referent that we didn't know before.

In other words, in the "soft" way of using a word, the word does not affect our perception of the object. We do not expect the object to fit the mold of the word, label, concept exactly. So discovering that the word does not apply in every aspect of its meaning does not automatically disqualify the word as a term of reference for it. In contrast, the "hard" way of using a word involves a kind of inflexibility towards things we have yet to learn about the referent.

This is kinda abstract and imprecise, so let me get specific. Take, for example, the word "heterosexual." In the "hard" sense of the word, this refers to people who never, ever have any sexual interest in people of the same sex. In the "soft" sense, it gives us a general idea about a person's preferences, life, and actions, but does not stop applying if the person reveals that he once had an 'interesting' weekend.

This distinction can extend out to interpreting statements in general. A number of the debates i've had regarding religion, and specifically the interpretation of scripture, come down to differences in word-use style. I tend to read statements in more of a "soft" or "fuzzy" way. Some of the people with whom i've debated religion use a "hard" style. Here's an example:

[John 14:6] Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.
[7] If you really knew me, you would know my Father as well. From now on, you do know him and have seen him."

The "hard" style sees a clear statement of inclusion and exclusion here. And this is how many or most of us are taught to read scripture -- because the "hard" style insists that words have precise meanings and therefore we should expect precision from statements. A "soft" style does not necessarily see this passage as being about inclusion or exclusion, but rather, as illustrative instruction.

I worry lately that i'm losing my sense of humor. Leftists in general seem to be a rather humorless lot when it comes to society and politics, but i'm not convinced that's a bad thing, since most political "humor" is dehumanization and ridicule.

Lately i've been thinking a lot about Robert Heinlein's take on laughter and humor in Stranger in a Strange Land, that it is a response to pain. Any quantum of humor involves a situation that occurs at someone's expense, but since laughter involves the release of endorphins and reduces our stress level we're inclined to think it's a good thing. Since a lot of humor involves a hint of the unexpected, i will guess that it involves the startle response. But if we didn't have ways to relax the startle response, we'd be overly cautious and aloof, frightened by everything and everyone, incapable of friendship and love.

One major result of "political correctness" has been raised awareness of the ways in which certain styles of humor occur at the expense of oppressed and exploited people, and therefore contribute to stereotyping. That which is laughed at widely enough becomes that which is laughable.

As a transperson i know this probably better than most of you, because sometimes people will laugh simply because they look at me. I am walking ridicule, just add eyesight. There are so many jokes that involve men dressed as women that the very perception thereof elicits the humor response. Like rubber chickens or eyebrow glasses, a man in a dress is just inherently funny. And yet, some of those jokes are funny to me too. So what am i supposed to do, curtail my sense of humor?

"Political correctness" in speech simply means having some consideration for people who by way of oppression are at a social disadvantage. Many jokes that men enjoy about women, for example, are not funny to women at all, but instead are hurtful. They contribute to the othering and dehumanizing of women. The same goes for racist jokes, and so on.

A lot of the resistance i see to "political correctness" seems to be a kind of "awareness fatigue." Being forcefully made aware of disadvantage or discrimination is definitely an imposition. However, that awareness is already being imposed to a much greater degree on the people who live with the oppression. The expenditure it takes to be "politically correct" in one's speech is miniscule compared to the expenditure of being oppressed. (There are ways in which PC has been misused, particularly in cases where people have lost their jobs, and trust me, that annoys me just as much as it annoys you.)

So there is open rebellion and backlash against "political correctness" which essentially comes down to, people are tired of being asked to show one another human decency. They want to be allowed to make "lighthearted" remarks at the expense of women or Jews or black people or queers. And, look at all the race jokes Mel Brooks has made, and no one accuses him of being a racist. (Of course, Brooks's use of irony to deconstruct racism is a whole other topic...)

One recent form of this that i'm not sure how i feel about is renewed use of the pejorative, "Oh you're being so gay," as a way to put someone down for being in their judgment overly sensitive. Mostly i see this among people in their late teens and early twenties, who have grown up in a world where homosexuality and queer people are on constant public display. Much of the time people who use the word this way either are queer or have demonstrated their alliance to the queer community. Thus the implication is that this is a "lighthearted" use of the pejorative, as if one can use the term that way and still be in rebellion against bigotry rather than in support of it.

The nuance is complex. Is it a deconstruction of homophobic stereotypes? Or does it signal tacit support for them? The boundary between what is funny and what is offensive is more of a fractal than a nice straight line.

In my last post, I wrote that "I do not have the privilege of having my articulations taken as value-neutral." I added to that, in a comment, "Our silence is presumed, so therefore our speech is assertion."

To illustrate that, imagine public discourse as a microphone. In our culture, that microphone is presumed to be in the hands of someone who is white, male, wealthy, able-bodied, slender, sane, cisgendered, and heterosexual. The "malestream" culture is primed to hear a white male heterosexual voice in neutral terms, even when an agenda is being promoted. At the same time, the culture is primed to hear the voice of a conspicuous "other" in non-neutral terms, assuming that she is promoting an agenda even when she is not.

I use the microphone metaphor because the culture reacts as if a conspicuous "other" who is speaking grabbed the mike away from the malestream voice. "Why does she have the mike? It must be because she wants something."

This is why you see people described as a "feminist author" or an "African-American author" but you never see "white male author." The white male author might be promoting a pro-white pro-male agenda, but he is not called on it the way a feminist or black author is. The pro-white pro-male agenda is presumed; it is value-neutral. It is not an "agenda," even when it is.

The soothing voiceover intones the chant of domination, while we each scramble for our survival.

In real_philosophy lately there has been a lot of give-and-take on a priori, a posteriori, synthetic, and analytic statements. In college I was fascinated enough by philosophy of language to take a course on the subject.

However, I can't muster any excitement for it now. Besides, the monistic perspective makes that whole argument seem like just a bunch of wanking. Without an underlying assumption of dualism the distinction between a priori and a posteriori is weak.

And also, didn't Quine put all of that to rest anyway?