
Think Cancel Culture Doesn’t Exist? My Own ‘Lived Experience’ Says Otherwise - jeremylevy
https://quillette.com/2020/07/30/think-cancel-culture-doesnt-exist-my-own-lived-experience-says-otherwise/
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jmeister
Check out this Twitter thread for >200 examples:

[https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s...](https://twitter.com/SoOppressed/status/1282404647160942598?s=20)

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wcerfgba
Throughout the article the author repeatedly conflates sex and gender. He even
links to "an editorial [in Nature] claiming that classifying an individual’s
sex using any combination of anatomy and genetics “has no basis in science.”",
which is actually titled "US proposal for defining gender has no basis in
science".

Sex and gender are not the same this and this lazy fumbling between the two
concepts is a classic trans-exclusionary tactic.

~~~
DanBC
The Nature article is correctly stating that sex is not as simple as
chromosomes or genitalia, and that we should avoid classifying people into
either gender or sex roles based on these.

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DubiousPusher
Of course it exists. It has always existed. People have been ostricised for
holding "unacceptable" views for all of time. That hasn't changed. What has
changed is which views will get you ostricised.

And don't think even now there is only one side to this phenomena. Some are
growing a catalog of infractions by the left but you would surely find
yourself in hot water were you to tell your conservative boss or coworkers
that war is a crime against humanity and all soldiers are therefore criminals
(not my view but an extant one).

~~~
thoughtstheseus
The scale, speed, and medium is also different. Today it’s not hard to seek
out people with specific views and actively work to harm them economically and
socially. My take is that the diversity of allowable view points is decreasing
as a result of a minority of outspoken individuals.

~~~
DubiousPusher
> The scale, speed, and medium is also different.

I don't know how often the thousands of small puritan communities that dotted
Eastern colonial North America drove people off nor how many communist youths
were alienated from their families during the past 150 years but I would guess
the numbers are likely unknowable and am therefore suspicious of any attempt
to create a quantitative comparison.

~~~
bryanrasmussen
I figured scale in this case was not the size of people affected but rather
the size of the area in which someone could be marked as a bad person. I
wouldn't say that size is necessarily global now, but it is at least easy
enough to mark someone throughout a nation the size of the U.S

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fack
I still don't understand what Cancel Culture is, as a concept.

My (potentially flawed) understanding is it's a boycott, but rather than using
normal capital, you use social capital?

Welcome to the marketplace of ideas I guess...

~~~
chrismcb
It is more than a boycott. You go after people's livelihood, and you make such
a big deal and fuss, that it works. I think a perfect example is the young man
who lost his job for cracking his knuckles. The guy was driving down the road
in a work vehicle, his arm hanging it the window. Someone saw him make the
"white power hand sign" and snapped a picture. And posted it to social media.
And the guy got fired. And he wasn't even doing the hand signal. But that is
cancel culture.

~~~
krapp
It doesn't look like he's cracking his knuckles to me[0], but it's admittedly
ambiguous.

And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer
and their policies. Even the person who posted the image on social media has
admitted they may have overreacted and said they didn't intend for the person
to be fired, while your comment assumes that to have been the intent all
along. Yet while the fault lies entirely with the employer, the blame
inevitably is shifted entirely to activists on social media.

[0][https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-
ove...](https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/sdge-worker-fired-over-alleged-
racist-gesture-says-he-was-cracking-knuckles/2347414/)

~~~
gruez
>And it's odd that cancel culture is being blamed here, and not the employer
and their policies.

If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it
in? Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black
person not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or
suspicious, and he ends up getting shot by the police?

~~~
krapp
>If someone got swatted, is it the police's fault or the person who called it
in?

Both. The police certainly have culpability for being willing to send armed
thugs anywhere to bust down doors and start shooting based on nothing but an
anonymous phone call. Swatting wouldn't exist without America's militant
police culture.

>Or when a racist calls 911 to report "suspicious activity" on a black person
not doing anything that can reasonably construed as illegal or suspicious, and
he ends up getting shot by the police?

Again, both. The police are always, and obviously, at fault for pulling the
trigger on someone who doesn't pose an obvious threat. The instigation is the
fault of one party, but the escalation is the fault of the system.

I'm not saying the person who posted the picture isn't at fault, obviously
they have some culpability, and I'm not justifying it either. It's just odd
that the employer is _never_ considered to have any agency or responsibility
in these discussions. The decision to fire the employee was entirely that of
their employer. Presumably when they sat the employee down and asked for his
side of the story, they weren't satisfied with "I was just cracking my
knuckles." They could have taken one look at the photo and decided it was
nonsense, but they decided to do an "internal investigation", suspension and
eventual termination. No one made them. No one put a gun to their head.

~~~
fredsanford
And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face
from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's behalf?

By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing
bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...

~~~
krapp
> And if SDGE did not do an investigation, what consequences would they face
> from the shrieking hordes of twitter taking offense on other people's
> behalf?

Almost certainly none. It was a tempest in a teapot that would have blown over
in a few days, maybe a week. They didn't do an investigation because they were
intimidated by the "shrieking hordes of Twitter" but because their own
policies required it.

And it's worth pointing out that we don't know anything about that
investigation other than its outcome.

>By now it should be well known that most companies are spineless when facing
bad publicity, even of the manufactured variety...

Plenty of companies shrug off bad publicity all the time, and we're talking
about a small utility company that, all things being equal, has no reason to
care.

------
natrik
I saw this posted the other day:
[https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/128806975173083...](https://mobile.twitter.com/GlennLoury/status/1288069751730831365)

which also provides examples.

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DoreenMichele
He didn't just express a _politically incorrect_ opinion. He did so in a
fundamentally offensive and dismissive fashion, asserting that he's right and
people who see it otherwise are straight up wrong.

This is not how you do science well. Real science allows for questions and
debate.

It's also just obnoxious and makes you unbearable to be around. It's hard to
imagine he would be faring much better even without a world that has the
phrase _cancel culture,_ whether you believe that's a real thing or not.

~~~
GurnBlandston
Real science is based on the results of experiments, the parameters and
results of which are publicized and available to be reproduced.

Questions and debate are good. They don't invalidate the findings of previous
experiments. No amount of tweets, articles, or outrage are sufficient to
invalidate a scientist's work, and being uncomfortable with the truths*
presented does NOT make it ok to "cancel" someone.

Disagree with the findings? See if they're reproducible. Do another
experiment. Do some real science. Proceed seeking whatever the truth is rather
than evidence for a previously held opinion.

* remembering of course these "truths" are to certain confidences, being open to being proven wrong by future science, and that the whole point is seeking truth.

~~~
DoreenMichele
The people arguing that gender is a social construct are arguing about a
completely different field from human biology per se. Even his remarks about
biology per se look ill informed to me. On top of that, he seems to make zero
effort to make any distinction between sex and gender.

Him insisting he's right is sort of like someone dismissing Freud's theories
based on "I have a PhD in physics, damn it!"

Good for you. And irrelevant.

~~~
thu2111
The whole idea that gender and sex aren't synonyms looks very bizarre to
someone who hasn't paid attention to this whole corner of academia. If someone
said "Make a drop down that lets people specify their sex" I'd interpret that
request in exactly the same way as if someone used the word gender: a radio
button for male or female.

There seem to be people here arguing that if the request said "sex" the radio
button is fine, but if it said "gender" then ... then what? A slider? What
would it even say? Please select the place on the spectrum you feel you are,
where one side is male and one side is female? I've never seen such a form.

~~~
DoreenMichele
That's a reasonable point. I was introduced to the idea that "gender is a
social construct" well before I was introduced to the idea of transsexuals, so
I had some opportunity to think about that as a separate issue from the idea
of "Some people want sex change operations."

I was one of the top ranked students of my graduating high school class and I
tend to speak my mind and do other things that tend to be socially acceptable
for men, but not women. Women like me tend to get a lot of flak from the world
for failing to "know their place" and they get a lot of flak in a way that
questions their gender identity and that causes them to wonder about gender
roles and their own identity and so forth.

So when I was younger, I wondered things like _If having an opinion and
speaking my mind is "masculine," does that say something about my sexuality?_

So I found the whole concept of being a transsexual pretty confusing when I
first ran into it. I wondered did that apply to me in some way and where do
you draw certain lines.

I ran into someone online who talked about having "beard envy" and that was an
Aha! moment for me. I have never felt that way and that was an incident that
helped me feel clear in my mind about the ways in which "gender is a social
construct" negatively impacts my life as a woman and really has nothing to do
with things like sexuality or sex.

So I feel clear that, yup, "I'm a woman" and that's sometimes problematic and
uncomfortable because of how the rest of the world would like to dictate to me
what that means about how I should dress and how I should behave and so forth.
And that fact is even more problematic for some people than it is for me
because they are intersex or they feel their body is the wrong sex (etc).

So I fully get that it's a weird idea the first time you run into it and it
can take some time to understand the distinction people are trying to make.

If you want to say "I have a PhD in biology, so I feel entitled to insist my
(offensive) opinions about sex are right!" then I think you have some
obligation to try to understand the distinction people are trying to make. He
doesn't appear to be doing that.

If you are just a software engineer trying to figure out how to code up radio
buttons on a website and not someone actively promoting your ideas about
biological sex, eh, you may have no real need, personally, to spend a whole
lot of time trying to parse these things. At that point, it makes sense to
basically go "Well, not really something I'm interested in and since I don't
have an informed opinion, I will largely leave it to other people to argue
about this."

If you don't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people
with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they
are talking about. That same general standard should apply in this case as
well. It's okay to not know everything about every subject, assuming you don't
try to cram your uninformed opinions down everyone else's throats.

I will add that human categories are just that: human made concepts. Animals
like the platypus didn't consult with human categories before they evolved
into mammals that lay eggs, which humans have an issue with because it flies
in the face of our nice, neat categories.

Nature is full of examples of things that fail to be readily categorized by
humans in a way that is convenient for us. Our desire to categories things
often runs into friction with actual reality.

At that point, you have to admit that the mental is defective rather than
trying to insist reality is behaving badly and should stop doing that already.

~~~
thu2111
Thanks for the interesting comment.

It feels like what you're describing here is what I'd use the words
masculinity and femininity for. You do indeed use that term in the third
paragraph. If someone said "Please define a form where someone can specify
their masculinity or femininity" then I'd consider the request rather odd, but
I'd also immediately imagine a slider. As indeed, I'm sure everyone has met
people who whilst possessing the anatomy of a particular gender behaved more
like the opposite, in terms of behavioural stereotypes.

As there are already words to describe this spectrum and the existence of it
is uncontroversial, I struggle to understand why there's an academic attempt
to redefine the word gender. It feels abusive, like the behaviour described in
1984 or Animal Farm, where people play games with language in order to create
artificial crimes they can accuse their opponents of. If all these people mean
by "gender is a social construct" is "there are masculine women and feminine
men" then why don't they just say that?

Over the years I've come to learn that people who are paid for their
production of ideas are often tempted to obfuscate their language in various
ways, or at the very least, aren't bothered by their field redefining standard
words in ways that have unintuitive meanings. This behaviour isn't organised
or deliberately malicious, it just arises from the incentives they have to
carve out an intellectual space in which they make the rules and other people
find it hard to enter. It's difficult not to conclude this is happening with
the redefinition of the word "gender".

 _If you don 't know much about math, you probably aren't going to tell people
with PhDs in math that they are wrong because you don't understand what they
are talking about_

Actually I have told people with PhDs in maths things to that effect ;)

Cryptography is essentially (semi)applied maths. Mathematicians and
theoretical cryptographers do have an unfortunate tendency to redefine
standard mathematical terms and operators to mean something different in
different contexts, or sometimes even things that are misleading. For example
they like to say, "we have proven this scheme correct in the generic group
model", which means a proof has been provided that assumes attackers can only
solve a very small set of allowed equations and thus doesn't prove much of
anything. Yet to anyone outside the field it sounds very impressive, like if
there is no flaw in the proof then the proposition is completely true. They
also like to redefine the meaning of + and * in some contexts, like when
working with elliptic curves, such that equations that look like normal math
actually mean something totally different. They could use different symbols or
even words, but, they don't.

There's often no need for this. Jargon is unavoidable in any technical field
but often phrasing things in plain English loses no precision and can only
illuminate. Gender/critical theory seems to be filled with bizarre
redefinitions of terms to mean the opposite of what they normally mean, like
the way they pretend racism means something else such that their obviously
racist statements, by their definition, aren't, and statements that aren't
racist by their definition are.

I've found over time that I prefer reading papers from corporate research
teams, as they tend to engage less in this sort of obfuscation.

~~~
DoreenMichele
There are lots of terms in the world that get used differently by different
people, sometimes to mean the exact opposite of what other people mean. One
example is "decriminalization" (of prostitution). I have taken to stating up
front which way I mean that because it's so consistently misconstrued if I
don't.

I don't think masculinity and feminity really works to express the desired
idea here. In the past, I have been told that I read as very feminine. A lot
of that is behavioral and is rooted in things like body language.

More than a decade ago, I cut my hair very short for health reasons. I
continued to be interpreted as clearly female.

Then I spent some homeless. I began wearing men's t-shirts and sweatpants for
practical reasons, including the fact that a man's t-shirt gives better
coverage when I am braless.

Initially, I continued to be read as female. But after a year on the street,
people sometimes called me "sir " especially if they were seeing me from the
back (and I think the lack of a bra helped convince people I was male -- you
can see the outline of bra straps through clothing).

I don't feel less feminine. I can't tell you what I'm doing differently.
Whatever it is, it isn't conscious and intentional.

As far as I can tell, I still have the default character traits that are
'typically' feminine that probably helped get me read as extremely feminine in
my youth. But something about my demeanor changed in ways I cannot pinpoint.

And, yet, the social construct of gender continues to get in my way in many
important ways and interfere with me making my life work. I still do not feel
I have escaped that prison and the poverty it helps impose on my life.

Life constrains people by what other people expect of them and de facto insist
on as a role they must play. I think this is a separate issue from masculinity
or feminity. I think it is reasonable for people to try to invent language to
talk about such ideas.

I did qualify my remark about math with "probably."

I'm okay with having this discussion with you. Many people knowledgeable about
this topic wouldn't be.

You will notice other people here talk about "this is a standard trans
excluding tactic" and I've said no such thing. People who are negatively
impacted by certain practices tend to conclude that they are being
intentionally and consciously mistreated and excluded.

I generally don't make that assumption. I tend to believe that much friction
of this sort is genuinely due to some people honestly not understanding what
the issue is and why it matters to some people.

I don't make that assumption even for things that do directly negatively
impact me. And that's not the norm.

------
fabiofzero
Mental note: never click a Quilette link again.

~~~
ThA0x2
Why?

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nebulosa
Anecdotes don't make data. I'm keen to see any significant study that
demonstrates the existence of so-called cancel culture, but for now it seems
to be making a big fuss over a few overzealous institutions and some well-
meaning but decidedly myopic liberals.

