After that now infamous tape of Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women’s private parts came out on Friday, film critic Devin Faraci — a self-described feminist and one of the more aggressive opponents of GamerGate — took to Twitter to excoriate Trump’s abominable remarks.
Then this happened:
In a series of tweets, @spacecrone told the whole story:
The accusation stopped Faraci in his tracks. He didn’t quite admit that it was true, but he also kind of did. And he asked for forgiveness for something he said he couldn’t remember doing.
This was on Sunday. Today, Faraci resigned as Editor-In-Chief of Birth.Movies.Death, saying:
This weekend allegations were made about my past behavior. Because I take these types of claims seriously I feel my only honorable course of action is to step down from my position as Editor-in-Chief of Birth.Movies.Death. I will use the coming weeks and months to work on becoming a better person who is, I hope, worthy of the trust and loyalty of my friends and readers.
He still hasn’t quite admitted to anything, but @spacecrone says she’s heartened that Faraci seems sincere in his contrition.
“I am really happy that it sounds like Devin is interested in getting help about this, and I’m open to any accountability processing that might be part of his treatment,” she told Variety.
I really hope this can be a moment of self-interrogation for all of us, myself included, about the ways we might use positions of power to silence people, and the ways we all turn away from things that might seem a little too complicated to deal with.
Faraci’s alleged assault is more proof (as if we needed any) that being on the “right side” on the issues — in Faraci’s case, taking on GamerGaters, calling for greater representation of women in the movie business, and so forth — does not automatically make you a good person. (Hugo Schwyzer, anyone?)
As it turns out (as it so often turns out) plenty of people — and not just GamerGaters — have been pointing out seriously assholish language (and behavior) from Faraci for some time. In the wake of @spacecrone’s accusation, writer and Bibliodaze co-editor @Ceilidhann set forth some of her issues with Faraci on Twitter:
Devin Faraci sexually assaults women, tries to goad people into suicide & cyber-stalks basically everyone but sure, fandom is the problem.
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) October 9, 2016
Honestly, the continuing silence over his years of bullying & attacks on this site & elsewhere make this round utterly unsurprising. https://t.co/ewLVAUxjoN
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) October 10, 2016
(By “this site” she means Twitter.)
Faraci's bullying & misogyny were blatantly clear to everyone for a long time & many still harboured him at the expense of those he hurt.
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) October 10, 2016
Naturally, the Gamergaters, have seized on Faraci’s alleged sexual assault as an excuse to attack, well, the same women they always attack.
It took less than an hour for my tweets on D*vin F*raci to be used by GG/MRAs as an excuse to attack Anita Sarkeesian & SJWs. Typical.
— Kayleigh Donaldson (@Ceilidhann) October 9, 2016
Because of course.
H/T — The Daily Dot, NYMag, GamerGhazi
@Axecalibur
Hm, I hope this is still relevant. Anyhow: This sounds like gender essentialism, i.e. believing that a person is fundamentally “male” or “female” instead of the usual notion of sex and gender being social constructs (with the latter being introduced to sort of patch the hole that the empowerment of transgender people left in twogender informed biologist ideology). A major problematic point on this is that trans folk like me often struggle exactly on this point, trying in vain to prove “who they really are”, not realizing the extent that their doubts and anguishes are caused primarily by fear of the reaction of others and internalized shame, yet another is that it helps people to rationalize hurtful conditioning as innate. In that regard I’ve had endless “fun” discussions (the same sort of fun as trying to help a nerd trans girl debug herself by introducing yet more complexity, abstraction and distance) with women for whom being oppressed is a beloved pastime despite and sorta because it hurts them. In the end I usually equate it as some sort of subconscious BDSM-play with about the same constraints and of course I hold “doms” to a much higher standard.
@ axe
No worries, just maybe stick down your initial thoughts? Don’t need a full paper with citations and footnotes. Be interested in what’s bugging you.
@ tragedy, weatherwax & olhmann
Oh yeah, it’s obviously not for me to dictate what any individual feminist encompasses within their own feminism. And I can see the arguments that patriarchy has a negative affect not just on women. And I can also see the whole interectionality thing.
It’s just that (and I stress, this is just my own take) whilst those issues may need addressing, incorporating them within feminism may dilute the idea of feminism as a specific solution to address the particular problems women face (as a result of being women).
I very much understand the distinction between ‘feminism does address other issues’ and ‘feminism should address them’; but at the same time I think there’s a danger that if feminism becomes all encompassing we get into that ‘we don’t need feminism, we need egalitarianism’ thing.
Again, I hope that makes some sense?
@Valkyrine:
In my view, the rule for commenting on old threads is “one week UNLESS you’re VioletBeauregarde.”
My view of necroing is that if a thread is inactive for ~two to three days, that thread is finished. Some conversations just keep going and going, and that’s fine.
However, it’s not actually a necro until ~a month or so has passed. Until then, a person is just posting on an old thread and risking their comment being missed.
YMMV
@EJ (The Orphic Lizard)
Okay, thanks! Heh, this blog seems a bit faster than most others I’ve seen, but I guess I’ll just have to try to keep up. :3
Also, is it alright if maybe in the future I could shorten your nym, like “EJ (TOL)” or something? If not, that’s fine with me too. owo’
@lyzzy: quick question: my understanding is that sex is determined entirely by anatomy (mostly male or female, although there are a couple of exception, such as hermaphrodites or individuals with androgen insensitivity syndrome), while gender is the set of social constructs surrounding that anatomy (which includes the full range of genders). At least, that’s what I was taught in school. Has the paradigm changed?
If that’s an offensive question to ask, please ignore (I’m sure Ax will tell me exactly why it’s offensive, so you don’t need to). The regulars here can tell you that I routinely put my feet in my mouth, and that my mouth is big enough to hold both of my size 14 feet.
@Valkyrine:
You are welcome to shorten it to EJ(TOL) if you wish, or indeed to any other nickname form which is still distinguishable.
@Joekster
This is truth according to biology on the level you’d get thought in schools / most medicine. Some people would apply more rigor to the anatomy part (genotype, epigenetics etc) but it should pretty much sum up current understanding outside of maybe genetics — or you could call it ideology if you follow the feminist analytic. One example would be Judith Butler and contemporaries (like Cordelia Fine’s Delusions of Gender which states that since gender is the main perspective on human biology, its findings are deeply biased to uphold the status quo. Variations on all levels of the process of the human genome finding a way to reproduce itself are willfully ignored because two neatly differentiated genders are handy on all levels of society.
It mostly comes down to the problem of what you want to do with your knowledge. If you’re a paramedic (like I’m training to be at the moment), dividing people in male and female according to name, hair, beard, boobs and voice and making it a higher priority to ask the latter if they could be pregnant, is sound. You can still ask the former if there’s time but you’re buying that social subversion with time and probably patient trust so you probably won’t.
If, on the other hand, you’re a transgender activist or teacher (I really hope that’ll work out too) and you teach people that sex is a fact while gender is innate, you limit the subversion potential of transgender people to a minimum, set them up to be pathologized and generally play into the whole “identity package” deal that is so frigging handy in late capitalism. I truly think that the social construct of sex/gender is much too fun to play with and to important to explore to let lay-level medical half-truths (i.e empiricism and reductionasm based on gender-affirming analysis) in the way. This is a part of radical feminism that is becoming increasingly more mainstream as far as I understand it.
Edit: No worries, I love teaching and there was no hurt on my part.
Not to my knowledge. It’s what was being taught in the local university as recently as 3 years ago (which is the last of my knowledge about it).
Not speaking for Lyzzy, however, IMHO there are major problems with that paradigm. What is “biological sex,” for instance? By that, people usually mean “the way a person is physically shaped,” but why should we restrict “sex” to that meaning? If there are physical differences of some kind between a trans man and a cis woman, why are those not included in the meaning of “sex”? Saying there are no physical differences kind of erases the experiences of trans people, so I’m not willing to do that, and the alternative is just entirely omitted by the usual definition of “sex.” Why should that be the case?
“Gender is a social construct” is also problematic, because it elides the social experience of gender with the subjective experience of gender and pretends that those are identical. My social experience is that of a cis woman, but I don’t identify as a cis woman. Using the same word and the same definition for both of these things, with that definition conveniently encompassing only the social experience aspect of gender, erases the fact that I do not experience gender on a personal level in the same way a cis woman experiences it, despite our effectively identical social experience.
“Gender is a social construct, sex is biological” only addresses the cis experience of sex and gender. It works splendidly for cis people, but it doesn’t work at all for anyone who does not experience sex and gender in a cis manner. That’s a problem. It makes the entire paradigm anti-trans and anti-non-binary, which I personally reject. I therefore reject the paradigm.
@EJ(TOL)
appreciated ^^
Ah, thanks for the reminder, @Policy of Madness
I should have written “while at least some part of gender is innate (usually the part called gender identity)” in my second to last paragraph.
@NotABul
Let me be blunt: This isn’t college. We are not here to have our ‘minds opened’ or ‘preconceptions challenged’. I am not your lecturer. I am not here to ensure that you are developed to your fullest potential and emerge as a self-actualized adult.
When you come in here, with your hand earnestly raised, asking “hey, this might sound crazy, but what if we’re being too hard on this sexual abuser?”, you have to realize that you are asking real, living people who’ve been through much more than you questions that, in their minds, have already been fully settled by years of lived experience.
It doesn’t matter how many endlessly-repeated caveats you preface it with; asking the question is, in itself, offensive to begin with. This isn’t a detached intellectual position that many people here can take. We’re not dealing with abstract hypotheticals.
If you wish to learn how to defend your positions better, begin by asking yourself critically what your position is. Even if you wish to take the contrary position as a “devil’s advocate”, you have to realize that it’s not a simple inversion of premises; that’s a facile tactic that is only fit for the debate club. Every matter of import has a whole raft of preconceptions and baggage attached to it. Do your homework, don’t shoot from the hip.
If, instead, you wish to learn more about topics that you don’t know, realize that framing it as a debate automatically puts people on the back foot, and that it will limit your chances of getting a helpful answer. If you are already appearing to take sides on an issue, you are not signalling an openness to what the other party has to say.
@Joekster
I understand it was the word you were taught in school and you probably weren’t aware, but hermaphrodite is inaccurate and considered offensive by some. The correct term to use is intersex. You can find more info here: http://www.isna.org/faq/hermaphrodite
@Lyzzy, PoM: Thank you for responding. It looks like the subject is more complicated than I was thinking, and I appreciate the teaching.
Full disclosure for Lyzzy (I haven’t seen any of your posts, so not sure if you’ve seen any of mine before): I’m an internal medicine/geriatrics doctor. That means (as you probably know), that I’ve been through medical school, but am deeply uncomfortable dealing with anything below the waist, as my family practice colleagues like to say. So, I’ve got a fair bit of training, but am nowhere near an expert on sexual issues 🙂
Regarding PoM’s question about ‘physical differences between trans man and a cis woman’, I was taught that a trans man (that is, one who has been through sexual reassignment surgery) should be referred to as ‘trans-sexual’, because he is physiologically male, but still has the internal sexual organs (ovaries, uterus) of a female, and can still develop things like ovarian cancer or uterine fibroids, which cis-sexual men cannot. Keep in mind, this was all in med school, which was over half a decade ago for me, so it may be outdated language.
By convention, we use physiology to determine sex, rather then genetics. It gets a bit complicated in cases such as androgen insensitivity, where the individual is genotypically male (has XY chromosomes) but phenotypically female (has breasts, vagina, etc). I believe there are some cases with the reverse, but it’s been a while since medical school, so I can’t name them off-hand.
A better question might be, ‘does the distinction between sex and gender matter?’ Obviously, it matters to medical professionals such as myself and Lyzzy (grats on the EMS work, by the way. I often think you people do more to save lives than we doctors do on receiving your patients), but should it matter to anyone else?
Edit: And I just realized I totally forgot to include trans-sexual on my list of ‘neither male nor female’. My apologies. trans-sex people should definitely be considered a distinct sex from cis-sex for medical reasons.
@Kupo: thank you. I will start using ‘intersex’ instead of ‘hermaphrodite’.
@Joexter
Cool, I really like Doctors and really look forward to work with them. Much thanks for sharing your perspective and please don’t belittle your profession. You people do all the hard work so we get to play heroes. Also please remember to take my medical opinions with a huge grain of salt since you’re more of a pro on your level of care.
Anyhow, regarding terminology:
I’m used to the same thing here in Germany (we have less of a problem with the suffix -sexual) and I trust patients generally understand when your speech is centered on improving and protecting their health. That said, a lot of them would probably prefer “transgender” to “transsexual”, “gender affirmation surgery” to “sexual reassigment surgery” and likely choose their gender irrelevant of present or planned medical interventions (afaik ~90% of trans men and ~60% of trans women do not opt for surgery, although that number is obviously skewed by access, social pressure and results). You sound polite enough to never much run into the problem anyhow.
I kind a have a personal anecdote that underscores my point but I’m afraid it’s very much below the belt and rather bloody.
Edit: Almost forgot. Please o please be very very carefull when equating intersex and trans* people. It’s a giant hornet nest politically, since a lot of intersex people rightfully gripe about their experiences being erased in the media by the ever-present-and-oh-so-glamorous trans girls.
I’ve said this here before, with inadvisable vehemence, but I stand by it – at a social level, I don’t think a distinction between the concepts of “sex” and “gender” serves any benefit. I feel that, all too often, it’s used like “your subjective personal internal ‘gender’ that only you know about is A, but your real actual physical objective demonstrable ‘sex’ (that -I- can see, and I am of course the expert here) is B – but I’ll still humour you! …on my terms, naturally.”
Re: intersex terminology – I’ve had interesting, highly speculative and generally thoroughly impractical discussions before about genetics and twins and the mythical Hermaphroditus and different sexual configurations in different critters, but it’s a pretty big digression so I’ll stow it unless someone really wants to delve into all that.
@Lyzzy: Thank you for the terminology pointers 🙂 You’re more of an expert than I am about gender identity, certainly. Also, I’m generally polite unless the conversation strays into areas where I happen to be an expert, such as diabetes, heart disease, etc. Then I’ve got a bad habit of going into professor mode and start docsplaining big time.
That’s a fair point about intersex vs trans*. I always thought that intersex referred to individuals who self-identify as neither male or female, but digging through the site that Kupo pointed me to, it looks like the term is also used to identify the whole range of people with what I was taught to call ‘ambiguous genitalia’ (is there a less offensive term for this? Google didn’t provide me any), such as Prader-Willi, Turner’s, Klinefelters, etc. I can easily see why people with such conditions would be offended by being grouped with transgender/transsexual people.
Totally off topic, but what is the law in Germany regarding DNI/DNR? here in the states, the laws vary state by state. In Iowa, EMT’s were legally obligated to resuscitate people unless they were wearing a DNR/DNI bracelet or happened to have the DNR order sheet on their chest when they collapsed, but in Illinois, EMTs were legally obligated to at least check the obvious places (front door, refrigerator door, etc) for a POLST (physician order for life-sustaining treatment) prior to starting resuscitation.
Again, totally irrelevant to the above discussion, but it’s a topic dear to my heart, as it were.
@Diptych: I think you may have a point about the distinction between sex and gender. I suspect it should be important only to any medical professionals currently involved in a persons care (I phrase it that way because even though I am a medical professional, the physiological sex of a person I run into at the supermarket or church is still none of my business). I personally would be interested in anything you have to say about intersex, if it’s not triggering for anyone here who isn’t cishet.
Unfortunately, I have to go to work now. I’ll check in tonight (work work).
Speaking only for myself, I’ve never heard “intersex” used to describe gender identity; only people born with ambiguous genitalia. With regard to identity, you’ll hear terms like genderqueer, agender, gender fluid, non-binary or enby, and probably more that I’m not aware of.
@Joekster
As paramedics we do not honor even explicit DNR (like heckling relatives, tattoos, people threatening lawsuits on motorcycle helmets etc). I’ve never heard of DNI but would probably ignore it unless of course I was sure that intubating would result in an airway problem. The closest thing you can get to DNR in Germany is a “PatientenverfĂĽgung” (Living will) which can cause the “Notarzt”(emergency phycician, i.e any physician on the scene) to give a “no resuscitation/ stop resuscitating” order to us. The only other reasons not to resuscitate are sure signs of death, self endangerment, inability to work or triage. Theoretically, something like a known non-shockable pacemaker would too but that’s not supposed to happen.
Yeah, I think it’s one of those things where one should be mindful of others in ones self-identification.
Philosophically I don’t see that much of a difference between having a non-binary-conforming brain and a non-binary-conforming rest of the body. Still, it’s a political fact that there is (probably because of the mind-body dichotomy), so I won’t call myself intersexual and risk speaking over people who are already erased enough. I wish non-binary affectionate bisexuals would draw a parallel conclusion, but that’s probably not the most important of issues.
@ lyzzy (hello by the way) & jokester
I used to lecture to our paramedics on this very subject. The starting position is of course that treating someone who doesn’t consent technically amounts to an assault. The courts however take a very pragmatic approach when it comes to first responders. Essentially our prosecuting authorities won’t go ahead with cases even if people complain after the fact.
The ‘policy’ reason is just to protect people who do a valuable job. They have enough to worry about without weighing up legal considerations.
The legal justification is that only people with capacity can refuse treatment; and first responders aren’t in a position to know if someone has capacity.
So to take two common scenarios; if someone after a fight or accident refuses treatment the courts will assume that, for all the paramedics know, the person may have an undiagnosed head wound that affects their judgment. Similarly if they attend a suicide attempt there may be underlying mental health issues that affect capacity.
The situation in hospitals is of course different. But there there’s more time to assess capacity. In those circumstances anyone who is ‘Gillick competent’ (so that’s all adults and minors who have the maturity to make a considered decision) can refuse treatment.
Where someone is unable to communicate their wishes (say because they’re in a PVS) there’ll be a court hearing which will consider what a person’s attitude was likely to be and things like quality of life issues etc.
@Joekster – Naturally, a doctor should know all the relevant facts about their patient’s physiology – but, the more I think about that, the more I think that supports my contention that assigning people wholesale to categories based on their sexual characteristics just isn’t sound. We’ve compiled a grand list of phenomena and conditions that complicate the binary, and I know there are still more we could name – we’re proving that, from a medical point of view, assumptions about “male” and “female” can be incredibly misleading. External characteristics, hormones, chromosomes – all of these metrics have significant, and in some cases commonplace, exceptions. Leaving the broad categories behind just looks like sensible medical practice to me.
@Alan
Hi and thanks for the insights, your country (might I ask which?) sure seems to have a freedom-based approach. Ours seems more sanctity-of-life-based (for reasons of recent history) but there’s wiggle room for people who truly believe they can walk away from a high-speed car crash. However, they need to convince the academic (i.e the doctor) when it’s getting life-threatening as that’s above our paygrade. And to be honest, I guess in most cases the doctor would just call the police if arguments wouldn’t suffice. When the stakes are more quality-of-live, we can ask patients to sign a refusal-to-be-transported agreement or document that they refused to sign that.
@ lyzzy
That’s the situation in England & Wales. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own separate legal systems. Anecdotally I’ve heard that although our laws are similar on paper N. Ireland in practice takes a more ‘sanctity of life’ approach in a hospital context. Perhaps that’s the influence of the Catholic tradition?
And our, English, paramedics also have those ‘refusal of treatment/transport’ forms too. In fact the ability to complete one unassisted is sometimes used as a test of capacity. However theres still a tendency to default to treating. You’ll probably be familiar with the situation of someone insisting they’re fine then collapsing on the way home or dying in their sleep. Then of course the families start bringing legal proceedings. Hence the tendency to at least get them to hospital and let the doctors deal with the hassle.