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Comment by scelerat | Hacker News Reader

> There is a trend on the political left right now that basically equates speech directly with violence (e.g. asking whether a man is capable of getting pregnant is violence)

I must admit I have not seen an argument like this outside of a strawman characterization.

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https://youtu.be/uU7nzwbJ-Hk?t=41

Here is a good example:

> "I want to recognize that your line of questioning is transphobic and opens trans people up to violence"

This is a US senator and a Berkeley law professor talking in court.

That's not making the claim that the line of questioning is itself violence. It's making the claim that a consequence of the line of questioning is going to be violence against trans people (in an unspecified time and place).

I don't know the context, or how sane the claim is. But I don't think it's an example of what GP said.

But making it known that the line of questioning will bring violence to others is implying that if the person continues the line of questioning, they are then knowingly and intentionally bringing violence to trans people. In a lot of legal systems and with informal norms, if you know your action will cause harm to others, and you do it anyway, you are considered a cause of the harm.

Claims that an action can cause violence are ultimately claims that the action causes violence.

Let's start with this: I don't know how I can explain why this kind of discourse opens trans people up to violence if we can't first agree why this is transphobic.

Fundamentally we keep having this conversation in humanity.

"This is wrong (homophobic, transphobic, racist, classist, casteist)"

"No it isn't!"

And over and over and over again. And we look back and think how could it have been possible that we were SO discriminatory in the past, but SO enlightened now, and yet we repeat the same mistakes again.

And you have some feminists that exclude trans women. And you have some black people perpetuating homophobia.

15 years ago we were having EXACTLY the same discourse about gay marriage as we do today about trans rights.

It's exhausting how much some humans are committed to making the lives of other humans on this planet shitty. Fuck, let people live their lives. We all only get one.

> Fuck, let people live their lives. We all only get one.

I think this is greatly simplifying the concerns that people have in transitioning minors, the statistically anomalous rise in minors that identify as trans [1], and the safety of puberty blockers. For example, see the data that guided the recent Swedish health board decisions to mostly stop puberty blockers. I'm pointing out "minors", because it's all I see in serious discussions. These discussions, and even Sweden's decision, is labeled transphobic. It's trivial to find news article with the title "Sweden is killing trans people".

The word "minor" appears to be the wedge driving the trans division, where those that don't support know that minors aren't good with permanent decision, and those that do support it know that the permanent decision needs to be made as early as possible. I don't think the wedge will be removed without hard science proving safety, which natures statement can only impede.

As some evidence that 15 years ago was better for LGB than it is now for T:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dramatic_television_se...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transgender_characters...

Doubled since 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/10/science/transgender-teena...

5x in 13-17 vs 65 years old: https://www.losangelesblade.com/2022/06/10/study-300000-yout...

Did you know that more people came out as left handed when the condition stopped being stigmatized? I don't share your "concerns" about there being more LGBT people in the world because they were always there; now they are just being recognized (by both rights groups and bigots who are currently focusing on them).

I don't see how left and right hand matches the fact that there are 5x more 13-17 than 65 year old identifying as trans, unless you're suggesting that gender is learned, like right handedness was, and like all those older people, who should be trans, are now comfortable the way they are.

But, I'm nobody, looking at numbers I probably don't understand. The problem here is that Nature is saying that these numbers should be considered, but potentially discarded, depending on the conclusion they make.

Trans people are literally being murdered. Kids are kicked out of their homes for being trans. The Republican party is currently centering their platform on hatred towards trans people, blaming them for all societal woes. There are now laws being enacted that ban trans people from public places. Yet you not see how this could discourage people from coming out as trans?

> And you have some feminists that exclude trans women.

No "trans woman" is ever a woman. They're men, males. You're trying to take women's rights from females by denying them a way to uniquely identify themselves.

This right here is why "trans rights", as activists choose to define it, can never happen. If you can take the words woman and female, Germany could redefine Jew and China can redefine Uighur, and everyone could identify as black-descendant-of-slavery to access scholarships.

You're trying to take women's rights from females by denying them a way to uniquely identify themselves.

Rights are not a zero-sum game or some kind of exhaustible resource; I have no idea what you're getting at with this.

I challenge your contention that "a way to uniquely identify themselves" is a right of biological women or other groups. Never heard of any such right; it sounds totally made up.

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The meaning of words is what all people agree on. In the US, marriage used to mean a legally recognized union between a man and a woman of the same race. Otherwise it was miscegenation, or sodomy. Then as times changed, they added a qualifier: "mixed marriage" or "mixed-race marriage". Same thing happened in the last decade with gay marriage. In both cases, it eventually just turned back into marriage again.

You disagree that trans women are women. Fine. Activists are trying to make the case that they are; that womanhood encompasses more than being biologically female, and same for manhood. A lot of people agree.

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You say that everyone could identify as black-descendant-of-slavery to access scholarships. I say you are making a laughable category error. (Did people start marrying their dogs after Obergefell was decided? They did not.)

The reason someone identifies as something other than their birth gender isn't well-understood, but it is fair to say that hormones and the development of the brain play a significant role in the way people think and behave. Hormones have strong ties to sex and gender. They have very, very little to do with race. Category error.

If non-black people started identifying as black to claim their piece of a societal debt to the ancestors of slaves, they would be (and have been[1]) ridiculed. Most people don't try this, because the vast majority of society agrees that is not acceptable.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

> I challenge your contention that "a way to uniquely identify themselves" is a right of biological women or other groups. Never heard of any such right; it sounds totally made up.

And yet you've heard of a right for males to claim female's sex-based rights?

> Rights are not a zero-sum game or some kind of exhaustible resource;

Actually they are. Women have a right to sex-segregated spaces for example, and that doesn't work if they can't claim exclusive use of sex-based identifiers. Women can't have exclusively-women's prisons if men can call themselves women.

> You disagree that trans women are women. Fine. Activists are trying to make the case that they are; that womanhood encompasses more than being biologically female, and same for manhood. A lot of people agree.

You can volunteer to share your spaces however you like, but you can't make that decision for others no matter how many people you claim agree.

Also, you're being disingenuous. Transwomen claim to be female these days - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Levine - which is clearly untrue even to people who might believe in gender identities.

> You say that everyone could identify as black-descendant-of-slavery to access scholarships. I say you are making a laughable category error.

But then you reference Rachel, who did exactly that. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rachel_Dolezal

Thanks to the modern intentional acceptance of appropriation and colonization other Dolezals aren't being rejected, leading some to simultaneously claim racial and sexual benefits belonging to others. [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gwen_Benaway

> I challenge your contention that "a way to uniquely identify themselves" is a right of biological women or other groups. Never heard of any such right; it sounds totally made up.

See, for example, the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the United Nations Rules for the Treatment of Women Prisoners and Non-custodial Measures for Women Offenders. Both entirely meaningless if men can self-identify as women.

She didn't say the words were themselves violence, which was the original claim. She said that transphobia opens trans people to violence. Those are different things.

There is a quality of leftish ideas and initiatives that people find discomfiting, even those with liberal values like myself.

"Speech is violence" is an over-simplification of this quality. It is easy to dismiss in its sensationalism, and its lack of prominent examples.

It's a special case of the real insidiousness - what you should really be looking for when people say things that don't sound right to you:

    You are not only responsible for what you do and say, but for what anyone chooses to do or say as a result, at *any* time.

The legal definition of incitement is something like "the deliberate encouragement of imminent lawless action". Remove "imminent" and replace "deliberate" with "inadvertent" and you'll have something resembling a explanation of the impulse behind "speech is violence".

"Speech is violence" means that by expressing opinions that are critical of X (or arguments for policy that protects X), you are making it more likely that bad actors will commit violence against X.

From a non-legal perspective, aren’t we all responsible for what people do in reaction to our speech, if we reasonably knew the outcome of our speech at the time?

The alternative is that we allow stochastic terrorism, where figures know statistically that if they keep denigrating a person long enough some unhinged person will take action. And legally we do allow this, as it isn’t incitement. But are we required to ignore the obvious reality in front of our eyes and not call the stochastic terrorists out on it?

Anyone talking about a Final Solution in 1938 was complicit in the violence, full stop. They knew or should have known what their speech enabled. The same with Rwanda and even now with Russia - every genocide has always been accompanied by a large group of people not explicitly engaged in violence but speaking that it wouldn’t be so bad if something maybe happened to this group. Non-inciting speech like that by enough people creates genocide.

From a non-legal perspective, aren’t we all responsible for what people do in reaction to our speech, if we reasonably knew the outcome of our speech at the time?

Yep, I don't disagree with that in the slightest.

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figures know statistically that if they keep denigrating a person long enough some unhinged person will take action

Guessing by "figures" you mean public figures, or otherwise someone with a platform. Yeah, absolutely there's a "who will rid me of this meddlesome priest" dynamic that's troublesome, and I believe anyone who uses their platform to do this is deeply unethical and irresponsible.

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Anyone talking about a Final Solution in 1938 was complicit in the violence

The same with Rwanda and even now with Russia

"it wouldn’t be so bad if something maybe happened to this group"

These are all examples of speech that advocates for or suggests there is value in violence, genocidal or otherwise. If the people who claim speech is violence are referring exclusively to speech like this, I would have to agree with them.

But that's not the full scope of what some people mean. Some people include in their definition unpleasant speech, speech that offends, shocks or otherwise stands in opposition to their strongly held beliefs.

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Here's a couple of representative examples from a set of op-eds[1] justifying violent protest against a speech by Milo Yiannopolous at Berkeley in 2017:

"the ideology they peddle perpetuates ideas that urgently endanger members of our community"

(Given the subject of the protest, the ideas here are presumably about the rights of trans people and undocumented immigrants)

How do ideas endanger people, let alone urgently? Obviously we are excepting the direct advocation of violence, which I addressed above.

Say someone publicly announces their opposition to (for instance) DACA on the grounds of their belief that it will cause more illegal immigration, which they oppose. Someone hears this statement and is inspired to commit a violent act against a person of color. What (non-legal) responsibility does the speaker have for this?

I posit, and am curious whether you agree that in the general case, advocating for or against a particular law or policy is not and cannot be violence.

"asking people to maintain peaceful dialogue with those who legitimately do not think their lives matter is a violent act"

I find this a particularly distasteful example of semantic gymnastics, and one that seeks to use the concept of speech-as-violence to justify actual violence against the speaker or related entities.

"[A]sking people to maintain peaceful dialogue" is an evasive way of saying "requiring that people are not violent". "[People] who legitimately do not think their lives matter" are presumably people that deserve violence for having the wrong opinion and sharing it.

Granted: Milo Yiannopolous has frequently skirted the line you and I agree on, naming undocumented immigrants, outing trans people, etc. This is unacceptable behavior and an obvious example of the "meddlesome priest" dynamic.

BUT - the quoted author cares little for the specific context of Yiannopolous' past actions, making a sweeping statement that is unquestionably intended to draw a rhetorical line in the sand on what generally constitutes violence. Not sure about you, but I find this hypocritical, counter-productive in the extreme, and yeah, kinda evil.

[1]: https://www.dailycal.org/2017/02/07/violence-self-defense/

I have been directly told this several times. In one case, in an awareness presentation at a large tech company.

I suspect many of us have had this experience.

Perhaps you hadn't yet encountered the subject of Epistemic Violence, in that case:

“I have thus defined epistemic violence as a forced delegitimation, sanctioning and repression […] of certain possibilities of knowing, going hand in hand with an attempted enforcement […] of other possibilities of knowing.”

Sebastian Garbe 2013

https://epistemicviolence.aau.at/index.php/en/home-2/

https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-epistemic-violence/

In fact, there were even claims during the 2020 riots that "White silence is violence." See e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSVUrvnJFXs. That's right, even _not_ saying anything at all (including not parroting the expected slogans) is a direct act of violence.

This is not the same thing.

If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the violence happening to the kid. If you do something (call child services, for example) and it fails, you tried, and should try again lest you fall in the same trap.

It is similar with police violence and racism. If you sit idly by and don't demand change, despite knowing people are getting beaten and things like that, you are partially responsible.

I'm pretty sure the same thing happens with other things too: You knew someone was taking money from the company yet did nothing, you are at risk of getting in trouble too. It isn't a concept that exist in only one arena.

Yes, but see what you did there? You're comparing an individual case where you have personal information to a general vibe promoted by the media.

The general public has been led to believe that thousands of unarmed black men are killed by the police every year. In reality it's around 20. [1][2]

Saying that "silence is violence" coupled with misleading information is a means of manipulating people.

I prefer the old fashioned "sicks and stones, ...", "due process", "innocent until proven guilty", ...

[1]: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2020/07/03/police-blac... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unarmed_African_Americ...

You're missing the point. You DO have personal information that you can do things with in your daily life.

A simple example: challenging racist or sexist jokes from your friends.

What about yo momma jokes?

The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours.

A failed intervention may carry the risk of violence being used against you as revenge. If you’re unfortunate, the police may refuse normal interaction if you later need it (say, because they found no evidence, or if they for some reason ignore domestic violence as a rule of thumb). You’re sticking your head out for someone who you don’t even know.

Even assuming that there are reasons to help that particular person, why is there suddenly a burden on me to do or say something? Doing or saying nothing will of course mean that I’m an an asshole, sociopath, or <insert derogatory term >, but that still shouldn’t compel me to do or say anything. Compelled action and speech aren’t compatible with personal freedoms, or so I gather from the current consensus - so why is there suddenly a pressure to act?

"The obvious, yet clearly heartless way question to ask is, why should you care? In the first example, the kid is not yours."

I'm sorry, are you really asking why I wouldn't care about others in general? In some cases, it doesn't matter if I know them.

> If you know the kid next door is being abused - and you do nothing about it, you are partially at fault for the violence happening to the kid.

You're doing something bad in this hypothetical scenario, but it's not violence. Maybe it's "accessory to violence" or "willful ignorance" or some other immoral or illegal thing that you should be jailed for, but it's not literally "violence". Blurring this distinction is dangerous; people will start using actual violence against figurative "violence" in a kind of aggressive "self-defense".

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