I'd like to talk to some LGBT LWers.

Solvent

When _ozymandias posted zir introduction post a few days ago, I went off and binged on blogs from the trans/men's rights/feminist spectrum. I found them absolutely fascinating. I've always had lots of sympathy for transgendered people in particular, and care a lot about all those issues. I don't know what I think of making up new pronouns, and I get a bit offput by trying to remember the non-offensive terms for everything. For example, I'm sure that LGBT as a term offends people, and I agree that lumping the T with the LGB is a bit dubious, but I don't know any other equivalent term that everyone will understand. I'm going to keep using it.

However, I don't currently know any LGBT people who I can talk to about these things. In particular, the whole LGBT and feminist and so on community seems to be prone to taking unnecessary offense, and believing in subjectivism and silly things like that.

So I'd really like to talk with some LWers who have experience with these things. I've got questions that I think would be better answered by an IM conversation than by just reading blogs.

If anyone wants to have an IM conversation about this, please message me. I'd be very grateful.

EDIT: Wow, that's an amazing response. Thank you all for your kind offers. I'll talk to as many of you as I can get around to.

So I'd really like to talk with some LWers who have experience with these things. I've got questions that I think would be better answered by an IM conversation than by just reading blogs.

If anyone wants to have an IM conversation about this, please message me. I'd be very grateful.

EDIT: Wow, that's an amazing response. Thank you all for your kind offers. I'll talk to as many of you as I can get around to.

To a certain degree, different brands of feminism could function as different parties (certainly in academic feminism they do). A Christina-Hoff-Sommers-esque conservative feminist is unlikely to agree much with a Dworkinite radical feminist. For instance, "rape is a subset of violence with no particularly gendered component" and "rape is the natural outgrowth of a culture in which women's subordination to men is eroticized" are two substantially different positions (both of which I disagree with).*

Admittedly, the average person is not particularly clear on the distinct branches of feminism; hell, there is still a widespread belief that radical feminist means "a feminist who's really extreme" as opposed to a distinct framework of theories and political beliefs. And even among the different groups of feminists there are usually some common premises (gender being at least partially a social construct, men being privileged over women, etc.).

That said, I too would like more variation in the gender politics space; some groups (most notably, men) are distinctly underserved by the current gender discourse, and more competition in the marketplace of ideas can only be a good thing. :)

*I am somewhat cheating here by picking an issue on which there is a lot of disagreement among different branches of feminism, as opposed to (say) the gender gap, in which the primary disagreement is between feminists who do and do not suck at math.

I too would like more variation in the gender politics space; some groups (most notably, men) are distinctly underserved by the current gender discourse, and more competition in the marketplace of ideas can only be a good thing. :)

What if an idea is highly competitive but factually wrong? Or even actively harmful?

7HughRistik15y

You are quite correct. There are large disagreements and fissures within feminism. These disagreements might not be obvious or cared about by non-feminists (similar to how many feminists don't recognize the differences within MRAs and PUAs). See out-group homogeneity bias. As you also observe correctly, there are some common premises (and biases) even within these different groups of feminists. Although there are widely varying feminist opinions on porn, trans people, race issues, etc, there unfortunately seems to be a lot of homogeneity in how feminists view men's issues. For example, the notion that "men are privileged over women" is very common, and I wish that there was more debate within feminism about whether that was an acceptable generalization, and what it means. The acceptance of these concepts is merely a case of the availability heuristic. Women's oppression (and men's privilege) is more cognitively available to feminist women, so their theories often fail to account for oppression towards men and female privileges. This bias is not completely universal across feminist factions, but it's very broad. I hope that if examples of male suffering, female perpetration, and female advantages were more cognitively available to feminists, then some of them would eventually update their theories into a form of feminism that is more inclusive. I think you've been taking a step in that direction with your blogging, with your posts on undiagnosed brain injury in the military, how sexual violence, domestic violence, and abuse are much less gendered than the traditional feminist portrayal according to new surveying, and the underreporting and cover-up of sexual violence towards men in African conflict zones. [...] I couldn't agree more.