In the wake of the massacre of eleven American Jews this past Saturday, a number of writers have come forward with the claim that we should not “politicize” their deaths — as though the murder of Jews by someone who tweeted about ‘kikes’ could somehow lack an explicit, unwavering, deadly political framework. We absolutely must have the space to mourn. But it would be the height of disrespect to turn our faces away, throw up our hands, and say this was “simply a tragedy.” If we do not, in the words of Angela Davis, seek to ‘grasp things at the root’, we do the dead the greatest dishonor imaginable. Because if we turn our faces from the grim reality of what happened and why, it will absolutely happen again. Tactics, once tried, will be adopted by others; we know too well that individuals who murder us are soon followed by more organized forces. Complacency kills. And if we are going to refuse complacency, we need to assess the conditions in this country that have led to the confluence of antisemitism, white supremacy, anti-blackness and the global rise of militarized fascism.

These conditions begin at home: it is impossible to talk about the present shape of white supremacy in America without acknowledging that Donald Trump has openly advocated for, condoned and implicitly encouraged it from the most public platform in America. This is not new information, but it is vital to understanding Pittsburgh. It is that national platform that legitimized and emboldened Robert Bowers — an avowed white supremacist who subscribed deeply to conspiracy theories about the connections between Jews and immigration to the U.S.. Bowers was particularly obsessed with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and the idea that Jews have a plan to erase white Anglo-Saxons through assisting immigration. Right-wing columnist Shmuley Boteach claimed that because Bowers criticized Trump in his antisemitic tweets, Trump clearly did not assist in creating the conditions that led to the massacre. Bowers stated on the social media platform Gab that “Trump is surrounded by kikes,” and that “there is no #MAGA as long as there is a kike infestation.” But, while Trump may not be antisemitic enough for the shooter, he is no doubt implicated in the spread of antisemitism in the United States and the emboldening of white supremacists nationwide.

What evidence do we have of Trump’s antisemitism? He has tweeted a wide variety of antisemitic propaganda, including that George Soros was behind a movement against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. A major component of his support base includes Richard Spencer, David Duke, and the Stormfront outlet, and their followers — legions of online commentators who share the most archetypal antisemitic caricatures of Jews as rats, scheming moneygrubbers, and shadow puppeteers of governments and media. Many of these figures do espouse views more boldly white supremacist than Trump’s, but he has historically legitimized those views by welcoming their support. His total failure to condemn the August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA, and recent statement that he is “a nationalist” speak volumes. Seen in this context, especially against his voter base, “nationalist” implicitly means “white nationalist.” This rhetoric around antisemitism and white nationalism has instead normalized white supremacy such that yet-more-virulent antisemites like Bowers, who feel Trump doesn’t go far enough, are publicly emboldened and empowered to go kill people.

Another component, and part of what has permitted the person in the highest elected office of this nation to espouse these ideas, is Trump’s unwavering support for Israel’s far-right government. That support sits uneasily but tellingly alongside his wide fanbase of white supremacists — some of whom have expressed support for Israel at the same time as being openly antisemitic, ideas that might at first seem incompatible. Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have repeatedly each lauded the other for the rhetoric of “wall-building” against Arab Palestinians and Central American and Muslim immigrants, respectively. They likewise repeatedly praise other nationalist leaders with authoritarian policies and xenophobic stances; Trump highlighted Philippine leader Rodrigo Duterte’s blood-soaked war on drugs; Duterte has vowed only to buy militarized weapons from Israel, where there are few restrictions. Ukrainian neo-Nazi security forces are likewise equipped with Israeli weaponry. Trump and Netanyahu have both praised fair-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, shortly after brutal raids of Brazilian universities that positioned antifascist organizing as opposing Bolsonaro’s election.

What Trump and Netanyahu have in common, then, is that they are both intent on building states that take xenophobic stances on immigration and borders, encourage militarized policing in the enforcement of border security, are fueled by ultraconservative religious elements, and focus on the expansion of business and colonial settlement-building projects. In service of these goals, they have adopted concurrent national identity projects. These projects implicitly emphasize the first-class treatment of white or light-skinned people over their darker-skinned counterparts. They proclaim the value of Ashkenazi and European-descended Israelis over Jews of Color, Palestinians and Arabs broadly, and of U.S. citizens over “immigrants” — importantly, always a stand in for “immigrants of color.” White immigrants have never been a focus of Trump’s immigration criticisms; Jews of Ashkenazi descent from America and Europe are actively recruited for Israeli immigration. Indeed, this discrepancy is highlighted by Israeli’s sterilization of immigrating Ethiopian Jews making aliyah, deportations of Sudanese refugees, and a legion of abuses against Palestinians and Arabs. Jewishness alone is not the deciding factor for full status in Israel, but proximity to whiteness.

It is not the case, as both Robert Bower’s tweets and Trump’s apologists implicitly claim, that Trump loves Jews. Rather, Trump loves Israel. What’s more, that the broadly-implemented hasbara program encouraging Jewish immigration to Israel does not mean that all Jews are equally welcome to partake in Netanyahu’s national project, built as it is on an ethnonationalist framework. Trump’s praise of the Israeli project — and Netanyahu’s reciprocity — has created a dangerous cover for a white supremacist politic to grow in the fertile ground of nationalism. Fascists and their conspirators wave their love of Israel, red-herring-like, as positive insulation from accusations of antisemitism. But Trump and Netanyahu demonstrate that one can love the Israeli ethnostate while treating Jews, whether American Jewry in the U.S. or Ethiopian immigrants in Israel, not merely as incidental but to be actively disposed of.

Given this landscape, it is unsurprising that Trump’s proposed solution for American synagogues was that they implement heavier security. There are a variety of reasons why this is not only not a viable option, but actively dangerous. Much like American police, security guards are often not capable of stopping violence, and their presence can actually increase its incidence. But much more importantly, like American police forces, security guards are routinely responsible for the deaths and physical abuse of people of color, in shopping malls, department stores, and schools. The fact that Trump’s suggestion and solution is to implement greater institutionalized security is actively part of the white supremacist project. It both increases policing — endangering Black and Brown people, Jewish or not, in our communities — and encourages us to join him in avoiding the root causes of white supremacy and allowing them to grow. Trump’s security recommendation invites us to lean twofold into the project of whiteness, to appeal to the idea that more police and a greater degree of militarization will save us. Yet these selfsame phenomena are part and parcel with the nationalist project that is actively advancing the white supremacy that is killing us. It does not serve our survival or our morality.

White and white-passing American Jews, this brings us to the question of survival. We are now presented with a tipping point, remembering that our fellow Jews of Color have never had the opportunity to make such a choice. We have to be serious and clear about the opportunities whiteness affords us. We have an ethical imperative to protect others from racism and xenophobia, but we are also vulnerable to the false promise whiteness makes us: that those of us who have been in most ways inducted thereto can enjoy its privileges unchecked. We cannot. If white supremacy reaches its logical conclusion, we will absolutely not survive. Ours has always been a privilege with vulnerabilities, and its failures are written in our blood. If we are silent, we are complicit in our own extermination, and complicit in the murders of our Black and Brown, friends, family and community members all along the way. Our quietness or refusal to engage with the political will not protect us or anyone else from the logical conclusion of white supremacy.

What, then, is to be done? If we are going to prevent ourselves from leaning into our own demise, it starts by rejecting fascism, by naming that white supremacy is intimately linked with authoritarian governance in the U.S., Israel, and elsewhere. It starts by being real and honest about the ways that racism and nationalism gain safe harbor in our own communities. If we are to reject white supremacy and whiteness, it starts not by disidentifying verbally (“I don’t think of myself as white”) but by dismantling racist policies and practices (“I am enjoying some privileges that people of color don’t, but that unfair system ultimately aims to kill us all.”) Black and Brown people, Jews and non-Jews alike, are fighting related battles to which many of us are late or absent, and it is high time we join. We cannot ignore white supremacy because Trump, Netanyahu, or the Israeli state project supposedly love Jews, because the projects they are engaged with will ultimately lead to our demise. If we do not guard against complacency, if we do not listen to and lift up the people who, like us, are targets, there will be no one left to mourn.

To My Fellow White Jews: On White Supremacy, Fascism, and Survival was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The truth is, I don’t really mind offending people. I swear a lot. I self-describe as queer. I have a fat, trans, disabled body. I offend people just by existing.

And on the flip side, my concern is not whether people offend me. Joel Feinberg has done some great work in legal theory around the concept of offense, which captures a vast range of unpleasant sensations and emotions ranging from moral disgust to personal embarrassment to physical discomfort. The paradigmatic case of offense is at the level of nuisance — that is, an experience that is decidedly uncomfortable (physically, emotionally, or morally) but that causes no real harm. An offensive nuisance is something like stepping in dog poo. Every part of the experience is awful: the sensation of the squish, the immediate sinking feeling of recognition of what has transpired, and the smelly, messy process of cleaning it off shoes and, if you’re especially unlucky, floors you’ve tracked it onto. Stepping in dog poo is an absorbing, unpleasant experience, but it very rarely does any kind of real harm. But the concept of offense is not really about harm, it’s about the immediate emotional and physical response of a person who has experienced an unpleasantness.

That’s why I don’t use it.

I don’t conceptualize my job as being about reducing unpleasant experiences. My job is about reducing harm. Imagine that I step in dog poo on the way into an important job interview; I can either walk in reeking of shit and risk my potential employer being disgusted, or I can take the time to clean my shoes and arrive late — either could cost me the job, a potentially serious harm. Or instead, imagine that I stepped in dog poo every day. The practical inconvenience would be the same, but the emotional burden would be exaggerated by the sisyphean quality of the repeated experience. Based on any number of circumstantial factors, the same offense could be very harmful, mildly harmful, or merely a nuisance.

When we center diversity and inclusion work on offense — on the immediate physical and emotional response to an unpleasant stimulus — we can’t tell the difference between a student experiencing repeated, malicious, or systemic harm (like a student whose access to university resources is being reduced because of bias incidents) and a student who is experiencing unpleasant sensations because they disagree with someone or don’t understand something (like a student who objects to the Black Student Union existing). Both students might be offended. Only one student is being harmed.

Frameworks centered on offensiveness may seek to clarify social expectations to reduce emotional discomfort in group environments, and this is a totally worthwhile thing to do in institutional settings. Adopting social standards that reduce emotional discomfort by standardizing ingroup etiquette is incredibly valuable. But it isn’t generally equity work — and it can actually undermine equity work, especially when a privileged majority insists on etiquette that silences more vulnerable people. Anyone can be “offended,” and a lot of privileged people are offended by even the discussion of inequality. When we weigh educators like Jordan Peterson being offended by nonbinary pronouns versus trans students being offended by being misgendered, many policymakers end up saying that free speech should prevail, because one person’s emotional experience doesn’t supersede the other’s. And just like that, national Title IX protections against intentional misgendering are unwritten.

A common approach to etiquette in offensiveness-based frameworks is to ban discussion of controversial topics —a move that enshrines whatever harmful and inequitable behaviors already exist in the space, because discussion of them is inevitably controversial. These frameworks often seek to set agreements based on consensus agreements about which things are offensive, which means that in spaces that are white dominated, the white majority gets to decide what is reasonable for their coworkers of color to be upset by.

Frameworks based on harm are not consensus-driven. I don’t need to ask everyone to vote on whether having a broken arm is harmful. It just is, whether or not I am demonstrably upset about it. Even if I have broken my arm so many times it’s just routine, it’s still just as broken, and it still needs the same level of care. In offensiveness frameworks, the goal is often to avoid upsetting people, so the person who is most upset may get to claim priority. In a harm framework, we can recognize that people are very often upset while they harm others — and that does not make their needs more urgent than people who are being harmed.

Harm frameworks aren’t at all new — John Stewart Mill famously argued that harm should be the basic metric of what things the state should set limits upon, and which things should be issues of personal liberty. The paradigmatic example is “your right to swing your fist ends at my nose,” which is easy to understand as long as the harm is immediate and obvious. Using an effective harm framework means looking for good evidence and considering not just immediate physical harm but also psychosocial harms, which also have concrete effects on the body but may be harder to spot. It can be challenging to establish clear cause-and-effect chains for psychosocial harms that hold up in criminal cases, but the evidence about which things likely cause psychosocial harms are clear enough to guide institutional best practices, workplace and social space expectations, and personal choices.

Equity frameworks centered on harm look for big-picture effects of immediate circumstances, which provides clarity about which issues to prioritize and what resources they demand. Right-wing critics frequently lambast universities for overinvesting in measures to avoid making students experience adverse emotional reactions, and I think to a degree that’s actually justified. We shouldn’t be concerned with preventing a normal range of emotional experience on college campuses. However, the issues we are investing in and should be investing in are those where the adverse emotional experience is connected with greater unjustified harm in a way that could reasonably have been predicted and avoided.

I don’t work on getting professors to correctly gender trans students because of the momentary experience of humiliation, sadness, or anger that arises in the classroom(although I sympathize with that experience and care about it on a personal level). I work on getting professors to correctly gender trans students because experiences of harassment and rejection in educational settings are a major predictor of suicidality in trans college students (Williams Institute). I personally want trans students to be happy, but professionally I want them to be alive. When we weigh educators like Joran Peterson being offended versus trans students being dead, we are less at risk of making a bad call. There is no evidence that using pronouns for nonbinary students harms Jordan Peterson, and there is a solid body of evidence that refusing to use pronouns does harm nonbinary students. Therefore it is entirely reasonable for a public university to demand that professors like Peterson use students’ correct pronouns.

Promoting equity is hard work. It requires consideration, judgment, and evaluation of non-obvious factors. It would be great if our moral instincts always pointed toward the right answer, but the truth is they don’t. One of the things that has helped me is using a harm framwork in conjunction with evaluation of biopsychosocial harms that may be cumulative and hard to spot in situ. I hope these tools help others as well.

Joel Feinberg “Offense to Others”
Ethics Explainer “The Harm Principle”
Williams Institute “Suicide Attempts Among Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Adults”

I’m not concerned about offensiveness. was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A lot of my job is helping people understand and overcome institutional bias, which means a lot of my job is trying to understand accountability. There’s a specific bias that I think is one of the hardest to unlearn and most uncomfortable to think about, and poses one of the biggest barriers to community building.

“I don’t have to take this from you.”

Accountability is really hard, and it’s eleventy million times harder (read: completely impossible) if one person doesn’t feel like they have to care what the other person thinks about them. A really unfortunate thing is that systems of power operate along lines that make people really likely to think things like this.

Not things like, “I don’t care what people of color have to say because I’m a racist.”

It turns out people don’t usually think of themselves as racist even when the whole rest of the world and leading experts in racism think they’re very clearly definitely racist. A great example is Matthew Heimbach, a neo-Nazi who founded a political party designed to bring together neo-Nazis, the KKK, neo-Confederates, and other people any reasonable person would consider textbook racists. Heimbach insists he isn’t racist. So do a lot of his friends.

No, this usually sounds more like, “I can’t believe she would say that to me. DOES SHE KNOW WHO I AM?”

Hierarchy means not having to care about what Those People think as much as you care about what Real People think. You are not answerable to Those People. An easy example: if you work in the US, your boss is probably allowed to make remarks about whether your clothing, hair color, and makeup (if applicable) are workplace appropriate. If you commented on your boss’s clothing being workplace inappropriate, you might get fired.

She doesn’t have to take that from you.

Automatically dismissing criticisms from people lower down on the food chain helps prop up systems of exploitation by reducing the emotional cost for people at the top. “I don’t have to take this from you” means that instead of experiencing discomfort around my own actions and potentially having to change my actions, I get to be mad at you.

This is a big problem in medical equity because there’s already a strong hierarchy between provider and patient (especially MD/patient), and that hierarchy is already being degraded by cultural changes as the US moves toward a more collaborative and less paternalistic style of healthcare management. When the hierarchy is challenged more abruptly by patients who know more than their provider about their condition (as is frequently the case with trans people and people who have chronic diseases), providers can be overtly hostile, undermining and arguing with patients. The same thing can happen in the face of complaints about professionalism or bias, and for the same reason. It inherently threatens the provider’s status, which is already on shaky ground.

“I’m a doctor. I don’t have to take this from you.”

And we see it in our allies, too. A few years ago I taught a Nonbinary 101 seminar at a trans conference. The talk was primarily attended by transgender- and nonbinary-identified people, but there was a group of cisgender teachers who identified as ally activists for trans youth. They were in the room because they felt like they didn’t understand nonbinary identity, which was great. During the talk one of the women asked a long, meandering (comment) question, and a few trans attendees giggled at something she said.

Laughter is a classic accountability tool, and it can be one of the gentlest. Like pointed eye contact and shared pauses, this is a way for marginalized people to safely communicate to each other “oh no, I heard it too.” It’s a survival tool, and it also communicates to the speaker that something went wrong.

Unfortunately the speaker in this case “didn’t have to take that from them.” And her friends didn’t either. After the talk six of them cornered me to explain that they were allies and they were trying and people should give them space to learn and you know this is why people kill trans people because hate generates hate. It was almost an hour before I managed to escape. They were so angry that trans people, in a trans-centered space, had quietly giggled, that they explained to another trans person that giggling is why people like me should be dead.

And I have been those angry white ladies too.

Around the time of the Ferguson protests, I went through a terrible awkward place where I cared a lot about antiracism but fucked up at every turn. I felt immense pressure to get everything right, but I could never seem to stick the landing. I knew silence was complacency, but I also knew I wasn’t supposed to add my own take. So I resolved to signal boost. I shared a post from a Black friend that had a #blacklivesmatter tag and an #alllivesmatter tag.

Someone called me a white supremacist.

And I was Mad. I was white-moderate-bingo mad.

I was following the rules and they were calling me a racist. They were making assumptions about my character. They were making it too hard even though I was trying. It was unfair. They should give me time to learn and maybe even appreciate me. Didn’t they know they were going to alienate people by making it impossible not to be racist? I was angry and resentful and I wanted everyone to be nicer to me because I was helping.

(I was not helping.)

I didn’t have to take that from them.

I sat with this feeling for a while and had a moment where I realized that there were a lot of places in my life where if I messed up or hurt someone’s feelings and someone pointed it out, I didn’t feel angry and resentful. I felt embarrassed, and maybe guilty, but not angry. Certainly it didn’t ruin my week. It didn’t make me feel unsafe and hopeless.

And I got real with myself. I asked myself the prickly question behind that feeling: do you think people of color aren’t allowed to tell you that you’re wrong?

And that question had some more questions inside it.

…do you think people of color can’t be right when you’re wrong?

…do you think it’s okay for people of color to make you feel guilty when you do something harmful to them?

…do you care about racism enough to feel uncomfortable sometimes?

I thought I knew the answers to those questions, but that reflection led me to realize that my emotional reactions and my responses didn’t line up with my values. The decision to be accountable, for me, meant being very intentional about the idea that accountability means feeling uncomfortable sometimes when you don’t have to — and it means that discomfort was yours already. You should feel uncomfortable when you’re hurting people, even by accident. The person holding you accountable just made you aware of the discomfort that was already there. And that’s a pretty caring thing to do.

Very quickly my anger about this went away and, like magic, a lot of the criticism went away at the same time. I wasn’t doing good work and I was suffering inordinately BECAUSE I wasn’t accountable. This is frequently called white fragility, but I think that captures the effect better than the cause. People who get into white fragility (or cis fragility or male fragility) aren’t necessarily lacking in resilience — often, they’re not recognizing the other party as their emotional equal, as someone who might have the right to make them feel unpleasant feelings sometimes. I was fragile because I had unrecognized white supremacist assumptions coloring my perceptions of accountability.

I’ve shared this story with a number of people before (including the cis allies who generously provided that memento mori) in hopes that it can light a path for others. Accountability is hard and messy, but from what I’ve learned so far, it can’t start at all until all parties are more uncomfortable with the idea of doing harm than with being called out.

I don’t have to take this from YOU was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

With that in mind, let’s talk about postmodernism.

The best example I can give for postmodernism is the idiom “your mileage may vary” — postmodernism is an active engagement with the idea that human experiences are meaningfully different from one another in ways that are worth knowing about and considering. YMMV says “I know about this, but I can’t know what you’re going to experience.” It doesn’t devalue the knowing, but it opens up the possibility for the unknown.

Postmodernism is a broad intellectual and creative movement that grapples with and critiques modernism and especially the assumptions underlying Enlightenment-era notions about rationality — that it is possible and desirable, for instance, for humans to operate without emotion or to engage in a search for knowledge without bias or emotional influence. Postmodernism frequently criticizes Enlightenment notions about perfect universals, including morality, truth, and objective reality — which folks like Peterson can expand into beliefs that there is no such thing as morality, truth, or reality.

Critics like Shapiro and Peterson see postmodernism as a nonsensical free-for-all in which nobody has any interest in finding a useful, functional, or accurate representation of the world. I often hear that postmodernists are anti-science, because they want to tear down empiricism and devalue the very notion of evidence. As a researcher who works largely within postmodern paradigms, it’s difficult for me to understand the viewpoint of someone who genuinely believes that there are millions of PhDs in the US laboring in dozens of fields who just don’t give a flying fuck about creating work that is accurate or useful. I wonder if he has talked to any of those people, what he thinks they’re doing all day, and why they would bother.

Unfortunately, these are questions a postmodernist would ask. You can’t measure them empirically.

A basic principle of the Enlightenment paradigm of positivism is that all knowledge (anything worth knowing or true) can be collected in ways that are inherently separable from the researcher — i.e. could be learned by anyone of adequate mental capacity and training . Thus, allowing the educated men of Europe to observe, measure, and count phenomena is totally sufficient to collecting all possible knowledge. This contains socially conservative ideological implications, because it means that educating people outside the traditional elite — women, people of color, the poor — would offer no benefit to society. If wealthy white men can know everything, their voices are adequate on every topic. Allowing women, people of color, or the poor to even become literate would be pointless. This framework de-emphasizes the researcher, creating the impression that any researcher going through the same movements would produce the same results.

In contrast, postmodernism says that there are certain things that are true and worth knowing that cannot be adequately learned in this way — and that methods that make such explorations possible should be considered valid. Postmodernist ideas about standpoint, for instance, say that people are experts in their own lives, and empowering people to educate the world about their own communities and experiences will result in better quality knowledge than observation from an outsider. For example, anthropologists who engage in ethnographic research methods within cultures to which they have a personal link are often able to access more information and produce more insightful analysis than relative outsiders. People in insular or marginalized communities may trust a similarly-positioned person more than an outsider — and the inside researcher is more likely to maintain trust and avoid faux pas. Keeping the formal research methods exactly the same, one researcher may be able to learn substantially more than another because of who they are relative to their subjects.

Medical science is generally thought to be in the positivist camp — people who rely on empirical, detached methods to learn about hard truths. Medical studies about human pain are generally reliant on participants verbally explaining their experience of pain to researchers. In empirical terms, pain isn’t “real.” It cannot be measured except through the subjective experiences of those who experience it. Does this mean that pain doesn’t exist, or that it is not fit for scientific study? Of course not. It means we have to rely on subjective data to learn about pain. Postmodernism says that using subjective data is okay, because it’s worthwhile to learn about stuff that can’t necessarily be measured by empirical means.

It also says that even though physicians know a lot more about medicine than most of their patients, there are certain pieces of medical knowledge that only patients have access to — and these pieces of medical knowledge matter. Since the birth of postmodernism, medicine in the US has gone from being very authoritarian in nature, wherein the provider knows everything and shares certain knowledge with the patient, to more collaborative, wherein the provider and patient share information with one another. The provider’s job is to combine their medical knowledge with the patient’s self-knowledge — and including patient self-knowledge in evaluation and treatment is empirically linked to better outcomes for both patients and providers.

Postmodernism questions whether scientific study can ever really be detached or unbiased. Research is resource-intensive. People invest in it for reasons, and their approaches to research contain inherent assumptions about the world — and they have to, because otherwise you’d have to objectively prove the existence of the universe on page one of every study! Thinking about a pain study, why would people invest the resources in studying pain? What assumptions have to be present? Well, we have to assume that people experience pain. There may be an assumption that experiencing pain is non-optimal — studies of pain usually focus on populations that are experiencing unwanted pain, rather than, for instance, BSDM practitioners who are experiencing pain voluntarily. In a medical study, we are likely operating from ideas that it is possible and desirable to reduce pain, either by identifying causes of pain or by evaluating pain reduction methods. And as mentioned earlier, we have to assume that we can collect valid measurements of pain, even though we cannot usually measure pain empirically.

Studying stuff that can’t be measured by empirical means presents some unique challenges. Sometimes subjects tell us stuff that’s really outrageous — by which I mean that it’s far outside our expectations. The postmodern value of honoring different perspectives means that a researcher should consider what could explain a very surprising piece of data rather than immediately dismissing it. Often this can point to a mistaken assumption about the world. For example, I did a study about fat trans people’s experiences of transitioning. When subjects talked about feeling like people invalidated their gender post-transition because of their body size, that fit with my preconceptions about how gender transition interacted with size policing. However, I was surprised by people saying that pre-transition, their assigned genders were also invalidated because of their body size. This did not fit with my assumptions about the world. Standpoint theory suggested that these lived experiences were a valid source of knowledge — that their interpretations of their own social experiences were more likely to be correct than my assumption about the world (even though my assumption was grounded in my understanding of theory).

This kind of mismatch could also point to differences in interpretation. It could be that transgender people are more likely to interpret certain types of interactions as body policing, where cisgender people would interpret the same interactions differently, so this pattern did not appear in studies of cis people that I had read. Depending on the purpose of the research, a researcher might describe this mismatch between cisgender and transgender perceptions in different ways. A positivist framework would be more likely to start from a picture of a universal “normal” human experience based on more-studied populations (cisgender people), and assign a negative value judgment on transgender experiences by describing them as deviant. This could mean noting that trans people tend to misinterpret social situations or experience social paranoia. A postmodern framework would be more likely to understand trans experiences as valid even if they differ from cis experiences, and describe increased vulnerability to body criticism in terms of microaggressions or minority stress.

I’m using language like “could” because this bit is conjecture! There were some pretty clear findings from my research about what kind of experiences trans people have around body fat at different stages of transition and where it can create barriers to care, but what gives rise to those experiences is outside the scope of my study. Even though my research is subjective, I still draw a clear line between things I can back up with evidence and things I can only speculate about.

Does postmodernism mean every perspective is equally correct? Of course not. If you ask 1,000 random Americans how many US presidents there have been, you can learn a lot — you can learn about conventions of US behavior around embarrassment and not-knowing, you can learn how effectively the US education system instills lifelong awareness of political history, you can learn English curse words — but you may or may not learn how many US presidents there have been. Public awareness of the presidency has no effect on the actual number of people who have held the office, and it’s not anti-postmodernist to say so.

As a postmodernist scholar who values individual perspective, I think Jordan Peterson’s description of postmodernism can teach us a lot about political polarization in the academy, the efficacy of pseudo-academic propaganda campaigns on highly educated people, and the low degree to which academic disciplines understand and value one another — but unfortunately (or fortunately, ymmv) it cannot teach very much about postmodernism itself.

What is Postmodernism? YMMV was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

This year, I was lucky enough to attend one of the largest transgender health conferences in the world. I have wanted to attend this conference for several years but was previously unable to secure funding. A major theme of the event was accessibility, including attendees’ responsibility to carry what we learned back to our home communities. To that end, I took very detailed notes at each session I attended, and with the exception of closed spaces where it was not appropriate to share detailed descriptions of what was discussed.

I have created a folder of notes and I invite everyone to read and share. If other conference attendees want to share their notes, I welcome you to upload them there, annotate the notes that exist, or add your own resources. I especially welcome contributions from folks who attended sessions focused on trans women & femmes, as I attended mostly sessions that were general-interest and a few sessions focused on trans men & masculine folks. If you share notes, I request that you consider the privacy of other attendees—when sharing questions others asked or insights derived from other people’s lived experiences, consider how you can express things non-identifiable and general terms.

Without further ado, 10+ things I learned!

Language is the single most important inclusion strategy for making wellness spaces more accessible to trans folks. Using the correct name and pronouns came up over and over throughout the conference as a top priority for making spaces welcoming to trans folks. Part of the reason is because virtually everyone trans folks interact with in a wellness space will use this kind of language when talking to and about them — and part of the reason is because for many of those people, this is the only way that transness will be relevant to their encounter. Many people talked about dental offices as a space where trans-sensitive care was critically needed. You don’t think of gender as being particularly relevant to dentistry, and it’s not — except that in dentistry, the provider is going to spend MOST of the appointment talking about the patient in the third person, which means that it matters a LOT that pronouns are correct.

Notes from “Mis-Gendering My Health”

Referral letters for surgery expire after one year. The process of accessing surgical care can take more than a year for some people, but providers may not feel comfortable providing an updated letter if they haven’t seen the person since they wrote the original letter. Be aware of your surgical timeline and create a plan for securing an updated letter if you end up needing one. Additionally, it is fine to have two letters from independent providers at the same agency or institution, but it’s critical that the letters are sufficiently different that it’s clear they are truly two letters.

Notes from “Getting Your Ducks in a Row: Preparing for Gender-Confirming Surgery”

A lot of data about nonbinary people has been collected but not fully analyzed or communicated. The largest-ever study of transgender people, the 2015 US Transgender Survey, had 27,715 respondents. One third were nonbinary, but the survey wasn’t prepared to handle that data, so a lot of the findings were presented in binary terms. In 2020 the survey will be administered again, with a mind to capturing nonbinary experiences more fully.

Notes from “Using U.S. Transgender Survey Data in Advocacy”

Transgender people are 97 times more likely to experience sexual assault in ICE detention than cisgender people. Sexual assault in detention facilities is a massive problem for criminal detention as well. It is very difficult for incarcerated victims to receive care and protection from their assailants.

Notes from “Interactions with Law Enforcement and Transgender Prisoners’ Rights”

Trans men & nonbinary people who undergo “top” (chest) surgery can experience Post-Mastectomy Pain Syndrome (PMPS), but this is not well-understood in trans populations. The syndrome is the result of nerve signal confusion and makes the chest very sensitive and sore. It can feel like having a very bad sunburn for as long as six months. The prescription medication gabapentin, topical capsaicin, gentle massage, and desensitization through warm, cool, and textured sensations can help relieve pain.

Notes from “Let’s Break the Silence: All About Post-op Depression, Pain Syndromes, Difficult Revisions, Gender Neutral Results, and Other Tough FTM/N Top Surgery Topics That We Should Discuss”

The way fitness professionals talk to trans people often reinforces disordered eating and self-harm behaviors. These are incredibly prevalent in trans communities — trans people are more likely than any other group to experience disordered eating. Rather than pushing trans people toward gender body norms or centering weight loss, we can support physical and mental health by centering self-love through action and a holistic view of health that takes each person’s total situation into account. The notes have some fantastic links for more information about how to do that.

Notes from “Can Body-Positive Wellness and Dysphoria Coexist?”

Adding web content allows support groups to serve massively more people in their service area than will ever come to an actual support group. By adding resources to their website and optimizing web search, this support group brought in many more people to their support group, while also making the website itself a valuable resource for local trans people and their allies.

Notes from “One Size Does Not Fit All: Building a Better Support Group”

The most effective anti-suicide intervention is putting time and space in between the suicidal person and the lethal means they plan to use. People very rarely switch to a new plan, so even relatively small inconveniences can be very effective. For example, installing barriers on bridges reduces suicide rates for the whole area — it doesn’t just shift people toward different means.

Notes from “Talk Saves Lives”

The narrative of being “trapped in the wrong body” emerged from a system of pathologizing trans bodies that required trans people to present themselves as being not at fault for their transness. While some trans people do feel like this narrative reflects their experience, others feel stuck between two or more viable possibilities — and the emphasis on determinism makes less space for people who do feel “ in the wrong body” to explore uncertainties about what to do about it. By centering trans care on the value of bodily autonomy, we can hold space for a wide variety of experiences and help transitioning people find the answers that are right for them, regardless of how they conceptualize their body, gender, and transition.

Notes from “Trans Identity Today: Who’s Afraid of Choice?”

Many trans men and transmasculine people experience sexual rejection because of their genitals, and many partnered trans men and transmasculine people experience relationship strain because they struggle to tolerate being seen or touched sexually because of dysphoria. These experiences were complicated by fetishized expectations about Black men’s bodies in particular. Wearing a binder or shirt during sexual activity can help those who have not yet had top surgery but experience chest dysphoria. Those who had been successful in overcoming sexual barriers talked about the importance of good communication and a partner who respected their boundaries and helped make sexual activity safe for them by honoring their need to not be touched or seen in certain ways or parts.

Notes from this session are not available because this was a restricted session.

BONUS: Accessibility is a team project. Throughout the conference, it impressed me how accessible the space seemed to be to people with disabilities, and a lot of that was made possible through the cooperation and advocacy of participants themselves, not just the choices of individual presenters or event organizers. Mindfulness about lighting, movement space, bathrooms, and sound are everyone’s job. Oh, and don’t ask who can’t hear you — they can’t respond to a question they can’t hear!

EXTRA BONUS: The Trump administration is expected to roll back Affordable Care Act protections against anti-trans discrimination in healthcare. While these protections are obviously not a magic bullet, revoking protections removes a powerful tool for self-advocacy. The Trump administration is already refusing to hear discrimination complaints based on transgender status or gender expression, but this new policy will make things even worse. You can help stop this from happening — go to www.protecttranshealth.org and sign up for updates. When this policy drops, you’ll be invited to share your opinion with the administration and help create public pressure to keep trans care protections. Raise your voice about this, and ask your care providers, your spiritual leaders, your PTA, and everyone else you know to do the same.

10+ Things I Learned at the 2018 Philadelphia Trans Wellness Conference was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There is a predictable and largely bad-faith debate underway about whether Mark Anthony Conditt can be properly called a terrorist after creating seven bombs, killing a Black adult and a Black child, and injuring five others, including the Black child’s mother, a Latina woman, and three white people. Conditt initially targeted prominent Black and non-Black people of color, leading to an initial assumption that his motive was essentially racist. His fifth bomb injured a white package handler — probably not the intended target — but his fourth bomb injured two white people who activated a tripwire in a predominantly white neighborhood, leaving the press and police questioning their initial assumption.

This doubt is predicated on two major errors: first, that white supremacists won’t hurt white people on purpose (assuming that the two injured were the bomber’s actual target in the first place), and second, that bombings are just as likely to be apolitical as political.

The first of these is perhaps easier to dispel. Throughout the history of white supremacist violence in the US, we see evidence that white supremacists are primarily invested in other white supremacists. While the passive spoils of whiteness are distributed to racists and antiracists alike, explicit and mobilized racism has a narrower ingroup and “race traitors” might be marked for violence — perhaps more often, white supremacists are simply willing to accept collateral damage to other whites in the process of harming Black people.

A clear example is found in James Fields Jr’s killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville last year. Heyer was white — but white supremacists didn’t mourn her killing. Heyer was killed when Fields drove his truck into a mixed-race group of antiracist protesters. The attack was one in a growing series of vehicle strikes on antiracist protesters characterizing the rising alt right. This type of attack has a specific meaning and salience within this group, and it is directed specifically at antiracists, especially Black antiracists. Heyer happened to be the one to die in the attack, but the attack was essentially racist in character. Afterward, white supremacists in alt right spaces online commented that her death was inevitable, because white women shouldn’t have sex with Black men. Her antiracist activism was explicitly interpreted as a sexual violation of whiteness, and death was judged a fitting outcome.

The consistent employment of vehicle attacks on Black antiracists and their allies also illustrates that violence has particular signatures and meanings. Just as the alt right has a signature haircut and fashion style, there are signature features of violence. The alt right is invested in guns, often turning up to demonstrations open-carrying — with a preference for weapons invoking police and military aesthetics. “Patriot Militias” turn up in camouflage, with modern rifles and ear protection, while neo-Nazis like Lugers and Walther P38s. A unifying feature of the alt right is an affinity with state authority, and the use of military and police weapons (modern and historical) communicates that. They view the state as essentially white and frequently present themselves as metaphorical agents of the state. Using military weaponry helps communicate affiliations to the US military or to Nazi Germany. (It also references historic and ongoing bonds between these informal but pro-state movements and actual state agents.)

In contrast, anarchists don’t tend to open carry (some carry concealed firearms but these guns are not an aesthetic feature), and they don’t tend to use weapons that have strong associations with state authority — again, there’s an ideological parallel to the aesthetic choice. The aesthetic-ideological ties are so strong that they can pretty effectively predict who will do what kinds of violence and who won’t. An anarchist might punch someone, hit them with a pole, throw a tear gas canister back at cops, even toss a molotov — but when you hear stories about anarchists pepper spraying people, they usually turn out to be fabricated. Pepper spray is a police weapon — a weapon of the state. Anarchist violence takes a shape that is anarchist — it’s improvised, it’s anti-state, and it references a history of anti-state actions and working-class toolsets, just as fascist violence is formalized, open, and references the state and earlier fascist movements.

Throughout history, forms of violence are assigned not just political meanings but many other meanings as well. Certain forms of violence are coded as masculine (punching, shooting) or feminine (poisoning, cutting). They are coded Christian (self-flagellation, ritual burning, ritual drowning) or unchristian (crucifixion, beheading). White (shooting, hanging, gas chambers) or otherwise racialized (cannibalism, punitive amputation). There is nothing inherently masculine about guns, but they have such a strong cultural attachment to masculinity that their use strongly predicts the gender of the user.

With religion and race, intergroup violence troubles the patterns — in some cases, dominant groups develop stereotypes associating violence with marginalized groups and then use that type of violence against others along the same axis of power. Over the last two decades, acid attacks have been strongly associated with Islam, but anti-Muslim neofascists have begun to encourage acid attacks against Muslims. Similarly, white Europeans and Americans associate punitive amputation with the Middle East, but historically this practice has consistently been a feature of European colonization, considerably predating this stereotype. Although it is less common in the modern Anglophone world, there is a long history of white associations between Blackness and cannibalism, but cases of cannibalism in US history show a stark pattern of white people consuming Black people (e.g. the Essex disaster, the Donner party).

These inversions, whether associating victims with the crime already committed or committing the same type of violence in symbolic revenge, nevertheless reference the association. Going back to the murder of Heather Heyer and similar killings, we can confidently interpret these as terrorist attacks not only because of the context of the attack (a clash between two opposed political demonstrations) but also because of the investment in the alt right in monitoring vehicle attacks by Muslims. The preoccupation with this form of violence as terrorism within the alt right indicates that when the alt right does this form of violence, it references terrorism and is intended as terrorism.

The histories of specific methods of violence imbue violence with additional meaning, visible not just to the victims but to many others. When a Black man is found hung from a tree, it is not just a murder. It is a message to all Black people in that city and beyond. The motive informs the method — even if there is another motive in addition to racism, the reference to historic lynching positions the murder within a broader pattern of race-based killing and indicates clearly that racism was a factor. Every lynching or mock-lynching is terrorism, because every performance of lynching intentionally invokes the threat of white supremacist violence as a political tool.

The connection between motive and method also invites exculpatory meaning. Some patterns are associated with established defenses and assumptions that protect perpetrators from blame. Police killings are a very obvious example, but another is domestic violence. Violence against women and children that follows established patterns of male dominance is treated as less serious than forms of violence that confound expectations about maleness.

Police (and others) are often hesitant to name something a hate crime without an explicit statement by the perpetrator that motive was linked to bias, even when a perpetrator is clearly involved with relevant hate groups. The details of the crime itself are frequently not considered, or at least not cited as evidence in public discussions. Over the last few years, there have been multiple murders of transgender women of color where the woman’s genitals were mutilated and/or her body burned and left in a public place, often near or in trash — only to have the murder declared to be not a hate crime, not responsive to her transgender status.

Though all murders in some sense destroy the body in that they destroy the functioning of the body, the burning of bodies references histories of mass disposal, of genocide. Leaving a body with the trash does likewise. Mutilation of the genitals locates the specific objection to the body, referencing not other murders of women (which, when they incorporate mutilation, tend to destroy the face — depersonalizing the body) but attacks of sexually violent men. Assaults on the genitals are typical of sexual revenge — most often retribution for rape or infidelity, but sometimes other specifically sexual slights. When a trans woman is killed and her genitals mutilated, the killer is expressing in clear and very traditional language that she is a sexually violent man, that the presence of her penis (or the site of an imagined penis she does not have) is a sexual slight against another person.

This connects very clearly to devaluing narratives about trans women, from Janice Raymond’s interpretation of feminizing transition itself as metaphorical rape of all cisgender women to straight male anxieties about trans women “deceiving” them into homosexuality. While it is completely possible that a transgender woman could be murdered for all the same reasons as a cisgender woman — something that also happens far too often — a transgender woman killed without specific transphobic motives would not center an objection to genitals. As in the case of the hanging mentioned earlier, the method belies the motive in a very clear way — even if other motives are also present, this form of violence is oriented toward the destruction and intimidation of trans women in general, not just the victim.

What does this have to do with bombs?

Plenty.

Letterbombs use a government agency (the mail) to deliver a shocking and destructive attack. Unsurprisingly, they generally indicate an attack on power, often connected with challenges to state power. This is not just a method of murder but a method of assassination. Letterbombs have been sent to heads of state, federal judges, military recruitment centers, financial powerhouses, and transnational corporations. They’ve also been sent to challengers of state power, sometimes by state agents (official and unofficial).

Bombs in general are a weapon of state power, of war — and improvised bombs have historically been used to either make a bid for greater political agency (as by independence movements in a number of former European colonies) or to deny a bid for greater political agency (as in the bombing of civil rights leaders’ homes and churches).

Bombing is an unusual murder method. Someone has to choose it for a reason. The most probable reason is the same reason most people choose violence that conforms to their cultural context — because bombs have a meaning that matches their specific project. When someone sends bombs to the homes of prominent Black folks and also other places, we should ask how the other bombings connect — but we shouldn’t stop suspecting that racial terrorism was the central goal.

[5/31/2020: this article has been updated to improve language around race and racism and to add information about white cannibalism of Black victims.]

Aesthetics of Violence: The “Apolitical” Bomb and Other Fictions was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Impact Over Intent

One popular idea around good faith is “impact over intent” — that good intentions are meaningless and only impact matters. Everyday Feminism has an article that shows the basic perspective on this. It centers around the person who is told they’re being racist or sexist or homophobic and responds that they meant well (so you should just lay off). And that’s bullshit! But intent doesn’t show up only when people are trying to get out of accountability. Intention is an important aspect of moral responsibility, and impact-only formulations throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The problem with “but I meant well!!!” isn’t that good intent isn’t meaningful, it’s that this response is in bad faith. Meaning well isn’t a “get out of jail free” card and someone who means well doesn’t try to use it as one — but it still has an important function in reconciliation. A person who says “I meant well, so lay off” doesn’t mean well, they just want to end the conversation.

But if you accidentally hurt someone you care about, you probably do say something like “I’m so sorry — it was an accident.” A real apology usually comes with an assurance of good faith, because part of assuring the wronged party that we’ll fix it and do better is assuring them that we wouldn’t have done it to hurt them. Impact-over-intent, through a filter of callout culture, can become impact-only, and that quickly becomes treating every conflict as a worst-case scenario of its type.

That’s a problem for several reasons. First, it’s really stressful for the person interpreting the situation. But it’s also really unfair. A good faith mistake has different moral value than a malicious act, it demands a different kind of correction, and it has different implications about the future. If my partner breaks my laptop because he tripped and dropped his coffee on my keyboard, I have a broken laptop and my partner should take on the responsibility of fixing it. If my partner breaks my laptop because he’s mad at me and decided to pour his coffee into my keyboard, my biggest problem is an abusive relationship. The laptop is just as broken, but the intent changes the situation dramatically.

When something goes wrong, it’s important to know why, and that why includes intent in most if not all social conflict. “I didn’t mean to” is part of preserving or regaining trust after conflict, because if the person who wronged you doesn’t care about not harming you, you are having a way bigger problem. Accordingly, judging fairly whether someone’s error was in good faith (and responding appropriately) is also part of maintaining trust. If we’re about justice, we can’t ignore mens rea completely.

The purpose of holding someone accountable is to maintain the mutual dignity and humanity of all parties — and managing that means considering both impact and intent.

Which brings us to…

“All Lives Matter”

I wasn’t surprised that Alicia Garza talked about the “all lives matter” trope but I was surprised at what she said. We’re all familiar with the standard line on this, put bluntly in the HuffPost headline “Every Time You Say All Lives Matter You’re Being An Accidental Racist.” The thesis of this article is that “all lives matter” always means “we should not highlight that black lives matter because all lives matter.” This is a very clear impact-over-intent position, and we’ve likely all seen (and maybe participated in) a coming-to-Jesus moment because someone tweeted #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter.

But Garza had something else to say. Oh, she had some words for people who use “all lives matter” to shut down conversations about racism: “‘all lives matter’ is not a very courageous way of saying ‘I don’t believe there are disparities in the way Black people are treated in this country.’” That part I expected — but Garza doesn’t extend this criticism to everyone who says those words. When it comes to people who say “all lives” and mean all lives, including hers, she has no beef. She said that when people say “all lives matter” to communicate that they are standing in the shared liberatory struggle that includes the defense of Black lives, she will stand next to that person and have no issues.

It surprised me. In social justice circles (especially online), there can be a lot of pressure to never say the wrong words, even if you mean the right thing. But the postmodernist practice of hearing only the worst possible meaning of a statement, regardless of context, lends itself to bad-faith holdings. Garza wasn’t responding to a question when she delivered this defense of good faith “all lives matter” statements. She decided to talk about it. What I took from that was that when the stakes are survival, making sure everyone uses the same words can’t be our top priority.

Part of this is likely because the surface meaning of “all lives matter” is not problematic — it is problematic because it is used to imply something racist, so someone could easily say it in good faith. That doesn’t extend to all such errors, but again — that’s a matter of fairly judging why an error occurred.

A Movement of Millions

Garza deemphasizing shared vocabularies in favor of shared values is further explained by another part of her speech: the call for a movement of millions that tears down the “siloing” of social justice issues into separate projects. Garza warned of the growing fascist and white supremacist movement in the US and the world. As she put it, white supremacists are no longer an “embarrassing fringe” — “there are Neo-Nazis in the streets punching people in the face like ‘this our hood now’!” Fascism is everyone’s problem. The shit has hit the fan and we need to be there for each other.

A movement of millions, tearing down the boundaries between issues to take up our shared struggles as one body means bringing together a vast array of groups that don’t know very much about each other. Every issue contains a universe of knowledge and norms that isn’t shared with other issues. That is always going to be true.

The rising tide of fascism is an existential threat to many, many communities. To survive, we have to come together like we never have before. Building a team of millions will mean different competencies, different vocabularies, different methodologies, and different visions. We need to find a way for our different specialties to be a strength and not a weakness.

Garza’s different responses to the “all lives matter” folks — a callout for some and solidarity with others — model an approach to consider. There are certainly egregious faux pas that no amount of good faith will cover, but if a founder of Black Lives Matter can be unruffled by a good-faith proclamation that all lives matter, there are places in my activism that I can make room for good-faith differences too.

In Good Faith: Intent & Impact in Social Justice was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

What is a social construct?
The popular understanding of social construct is something that is “made up” through social beliefs, practices, traditions, etc — which isn’t a bad definition. But people tend to imagine that the opposite of “socially constructed” is “real” — and that’s where we get into trouble. Antiracists say that race is a social construct, and the Alt-Right counters that they support “race realism.” Feminists say that gender is a social construct, and anti-feminists point to genitals as proof that gender is real. Transfeminists say even the concept of biological sex is socially constructed, and any number of critics again point to genitals. See, they exist!

And of course they do.

There’s nothing about a social construct that says it shouldn’t interact with reality. A social construct that didn’t interact with reality would be useless. Since highly contentious examples make things harder to understand, I’ll lay aside race, sex, and gender for now. Let’s consider another social construct with very important implications for reality: President of the United States.

The President of the United States is a social construct. Unlike most social constructs, we can say exactly when, how, and by whom this social construct was introduced (and subsequently altered). Specific, individual human beings got together and said “we’ve made up this country and it should have a leader” (or something like that) and they defined, intentionally, what that should mean. There are specific but made-up rules about what a President is, how they behave, what they can do, and what it means to be presidential, and we all more or less understand them (even acknowledging disagreements). That is what it means to be a social construct.

The President of the United States is also real. Donald J. Trump is a real person who exists, and his actions as President of the United States have undeniable influence on reality. A social construct is not a fiction, but a way of creating meaning and shaping the social world that also itself emerges from the social world. People decided that the United States should exist, it should have a president, and that person should be Donald J. Trump. They could in any of those stages have defined the President of the United States totally differently or not at all — but since they did define it this way, there are very real, objectively observable facts that coincide with that constructed reality. Donald J. Trump really, objectively is the President of the United States. He has access to Air Force One, people call him “Mr. President,” and when he creates Executive Orders, it has a much greater impact on the world than when I do it.

The opposite of “socially constructed” can also be found in the decision to have a President of the United States rather than something else. Earlier in the Enlightenment, it was claimed that the monarch had a natural or divine right to be in charge of a country. When something is natural or divine, there is no sense trying to change it or even critique it. It’s not useful or even intelligible to criticize an earthquake. It’s bad, sure, but knowing that it’s bad doesn’t mean we can not have earthquakes. The natural and the divine are nonnegotiable. The king simply is the king. A king is also socially constructed, but he pretends to be natural or divine to avoid criticism. A president is openly socially constructed, acknowledging the potential for renegotiation. The office is just as powerful either way, and the head of state just as real. The opposite of socially constructed, then, is something like nonnegotiable. The opposite of socially constructed is, for reason of nature or God or anything else, nonarbitrary.

What separates social constructs from other stuff?
When you get into categorizing manifest objects like bodies, rather than complete fabrications like political offices, the distinction between the socially constructed part and the natural (or God-given, if you like) part is less intuitive. The question of what part of a thing’s being is tied up in how it is conceptualized and named appears in Juliet’s distress about Romeo’s construction as a Montegue (“a rose by any other name”). Through her, Shakespeare considers that the literal manifestation of a rose or a lover are in some ways distinct from their description and categorization. A rose could have been called something else. It could have had different cultural meanings. It would still have the same shape, color, and smell — yet the social construct intrudes even here, as the cultural meanings have inspired selective breeding which DID change the shape, color, and smell. Moreover, social meanings about features of a rose leads gardeners to interfere directly with the way roses look and grow. Is a rose in a garden more socially constructed than a wild rose?

One major criticism of the concept of social constructs is that it tends to devolve into “fashionable nonsense” (as Sokal & Bricmont put it). There are nonnegotiable features of the world, but we can only describe and conceptualize them through language and systems of categorization that are essentially arbitrary. It’s a good criticism. The unsolvedness and potential unsolveability of identifying the boundary between socially constructed and non-socially constructed is a serious issue. That said, there are clear cases.

All systems of categorization are social constructs. All of them. Ever.

Human beings invented every classification system ever. And I mean highly formalized and relatively stable ones like Linnean taxonomy and international borders as well as highly informal and contentious ones like “things that do or do not go on a pizza.” Social processes and human interests determine which differences matter enough to warrant a category boundary and which do not. Pineapple and tomato are both botanically fruits. Do they both go on a pizza? The lines between different orders of life and what things go on pizza are as imaginary as the lines between nations or races. They reference concrete, observable features of the world, but the precise location of the boundaries could have been otherwise (and indeed, they have moved). Linnaeus divided all life into only two kingdoms, animal and plant. Today there are six kingdoms. The construct of six kingdoms works better than two for what we need it, so we changed it. Mushrooms are now fungi, not plants — but their characteristics have not changed.

So what does this mean for race, gender, and sex?
Well, they’re all certainly social constructs because they’re all systems of classification. But this gets back to the problem of what we mean when we say “social construct.” The current popular understanding of “constructed” as an antonym to “real” creates easy opportunities to mess up regardless of which one we choose.

People who believe that race is natural or God-given must believe that if one race has an advantage, it is because of natural fitness or the will of God, and thus it cannot be changed and nobody is at fault. Thus it is just and right, and can only continue as it does. This is straightforwardly the logic of racism, and appears as the moral underpinning of colonialism, slavery, and eugenics. It is reappearing now in conjunction with white nationalism, and is inseparable from it. It is not possible to believe that race is natural in a way that isn’t racist, because this proposition combined with very real racial inequalities can lead only to the conclusion that powerful racial groups are innately better than less powerful ones.

Conversely, if we recognize that race is socially constructed but take “socially constructed” to mean “not real,” we end up with race denial. This ideology goes something like this: “There’s no such thing as race, so we can all stop talking about it! It was a malicious lie but now that we’ve seen through it, it can just disappear.” This is performative colorblindness, a pernicious ideology which serves to ignore and protect racism instead of acknowledging it. That isn’t much better, and some argue that it’s worse. A better understanding of race as a social construct is that race is both unnatural and real — that it has very real consequences in the world and also that the cultural traditions giving rise to these consequences can intelligibly be challenged and rewritten.

Similarly, people who believe that gender is natural or God-given (in the newer formulation, “gender realists”) conclude that “sexism” is just being realistic about the differences between men and women. If one gender enjoys an advantage over another, it is because of natural superiority or the will of God, and thus cannot be changed and nobody is at fault. This is the logic of patriarchy and as with the previous example, is inseparable from injustice. While feminism from the second wave has generally included the notion that gender is a social construct, some feminists (particularly “gender abolitionists”) have taken this to mean that gender is “not real” and has no social purpose, concluding that only genitals themselves divide men from women.

Critically, gender abolitionists (unlike their racial counterparts) do not deny the material consequences of gender. Both, however, share the idea that abolishing the construct will abolish the harm. The difference, then, may not be conceptual so much as developmental — a post-racial age has been declared, but a post-gender age is merely proposed. If so, a post-gender age would have the same effect as racial colorblindness. Both the “gender realists” and the “gender abolitionists” base their concepts of gender differences around genitals, typically rejecting the possibility of transgender legitimacy in the process. Other feminist concepts of gender align with an “unnatural and real” model. This says that gender has material consequences and important meanings but is nonetheless socially defined and can be rewritten to suit.

More recently, biological sex has started to come up as a social construct. At this point most people would agree that biological sex is natural (“biological” is right there in the name!), by which they usually mean that there are two non-overlapping sexes, male and female, and all others are anomalies (i.e. medical problems). It’s very easy for people to assume that biological sex is inherently natural because we think of it as being “about” our bodies (which are more or less natural) and because most people do fall into the concept of two non-overlapping sexes etc.

However, neither describing our bodies nor being mostly-true would make something necessarily not a social construct.

Race also describes our bodies, but it’s made up. Similarly, a significant majority of people in the world are Asian, white, or Black, but there is no natural logic in insisting that all others are merely diseased forms. Like with the other examples, though, we cannot simply dismiss biological sex (at least without instituting some better system). While the categorization system we call biological sex is in some sense arbitrary, it serves some pretty important functions. As a sex educator, the one that always stands out to me is helping people understand their reproductive capacities, options, and how to avoid unwanted pregnancies. If we simply ruled out all language of sex with no replacement, it would be really difficult to talk about the unmatched-pairing features of human reproduction!

And this brings us back to the most important feature of social constructs: we made them up, so we get to decide if they’re working. Identifying something as a social construct so often comes packaged with the implication that the thing is necessarily harmful or suspect, but all systems of categorization are social constructs and we can’t just stop categorizing things. We will keep recognizing the difference, in our own culture and time, between a door and a window. And that’s really okay. But we can engage critically with systems of categorization, identify where they are not serving us. We may decide that whole systems of categorization (virgin/non-virgin, for example) just don’t serve any useful function for our society anymore. Or we may decide that elements of a system are useful — such as the feature of the sex categorization system that facilitates talking about reproductive health — but not others, like the binarist feature that leads to intersex infants being subjected to genital mutilation.

What’s the opposite of “socially constructed”? was originally published in Radical Reference on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.