I'm getting pretty irritated at how Freddie deBoer is discussing and handling the issue of large proportions of his comments sections revolving around vaguely anti-LGBTQ views. I'm sympathetic to him in having to deal with the general dilemma of attracting an audience whose views on certain culture war topics tilt in a direction that he finds offensive, or that he doesn't want to have on the face of his blog. (Scott Alexander also had to struggle with this, at least in the earlier Slate Star Codex years.) But I find myself shaking my head at the way FdB is scolding and disciplining his audience about this and right now am inclined to say that it's the wrong approach and that a good bit of FdB's framing is unfair here.
First of all, there's a stigma in general against talking too much about culture war stuff, one which I've internalized myself and struggled with, and in the end I'm not sure the stigma makes sense. Certain topics become culture-warlike in the first place precisely because people care a whole lot about them, because they stoke strong emotions, so why should we be shamed for continuing to care and be emotional about them? I'm tempted to posit that the stigma is a subtly misplaced aversion to getting bogged down in toxic discourse where debaters because of their emotions too often in practice argue in a really low-quality and unconstructive way.
Secondly, FdB himself blogs a ton about culture war stuff! He just avoids certain issues and prefers others. One of the main issues that he's passionate about now is the recent boom in youth mental-illness-happy, diagnosis-happy culture (or at least, that's what he might call it). In his earlier months ranting about this on his blog, a number of commentators chose to take note of some very obvious parallels between what he was pointing out and what appears to be happening with a boom in young people identifying as transgender (note: by "very obvious parallels", I don't mean "absolute parallels" or "without room to rebut by pointing out very salient differences"). Many of the commentators, by being pretty passionately on the side of those issues that is most analogous to FdB's side of the mental illness cultural issue, chose to devolve the comments threads into long discussions about it. FdB decried it as creating an unfriendly environment for trans readers, made vague blanket statements about supporting trans and other LGBTQ rights, ducked addressing the parallels others noted between the opposing views and FdB's views on mental illness stuff, and forbade the topic of transgender youth culture from being discussed going forward.
Commenters mostly stuck to this rule. The comments section of the recent post about drag culture seems to be an unfortunate flagrant exception (you have to dig into the comments a bit, but not terribly far). So I do get why FdB is upset.
But... his characterization of commenters ranting about gender culture war issues -- that they have an unhealthy obsession and would turn any debate about any topic at all however dry into an excuse to rant about gender stuff -- seems way off base to me in multiple ways. First of all, he's angry because commenters started talking about gender stuff in the comments section to a post about the normalization of drag culture which discussed the recent trend of taking kids to drag shows. There is not exactly far for them to reach to get to their favorite topic! And I've never seen them reach from, say, tax cuts for the rich to trans issues (as FdB likes to claim they would when mocking them).
Secondly, I think it's pretty mean to insinuate that they (and conservatives in general, which he lumps them in with, even though my impression is that many of them aren't particularly conservative) are obsessed with gender to the point of it being a mental health problem. His general way of framing it takes only one side's behavior into consideration. You would think that the segment of youth culture in favor of focusing on gender-as-whatever-you-feel-it-to-mean and tons of gender identity labels and so forth is passionate about this in a "proportionate" (to use Freddie's term) way. Has he seen Tumblr? Has he considered the trans activist segment of the current "woke" social movement and its push to incorporate it into our culture? That's a dumb question, of course: he just wrote a post on it, or the part of it having to do with drag shows becoming normalized/sanitized/corporatized -- that is a part of basically said movement promoting trans activism (again, it wasn't exactly a far reach for commenters to jump within it). There is a major subset of the "woke" culture warriors who are visibly passionate about gender issues to the point that the more extreme ones seem obsessive, and there is a major subset of the "anti-woke" culture warriors who are visibly passionate against what they feel are harmful changes the other side is trying to impose to the point that the more extreme ones seem obsessive. (For example, Hasbro bothered to decide and announce that Mr. Potato Head is gender nonbinary, and conservative outlets took the trouble to sneer and whine about it. To me, this is a clear instance of both sides being obsessive. I'm not saying equally in the right -- I'm much more on Hasbro's side here -- just obsessive. I would have to argue that Hasbro has closer to the right idea rather than just point at the Fox News side and say, "Look how freaked out they're getting over a stupid potato toy, lol!".) It's pretty narrow-sighted to point to one side appearing obsessed without realizing that a culture war, or any war really, is about actions and roughly equal reactions happening on both sides.
(Also, more minor point: if you look at individuals in these comments section back-and-forths, rather than considering the comments section as a whole, I find it easy to empathize with them as each simply writing a few long comments thoroughly expounding a point of view, then naturally wanting to respond a couple of times once someone has pushed back on it. Which is... all pretty normal behavior for someone who cares enough and has thought enough about a topic to feel like commenting on it under a blog post and responding to pushback. It doesn't, on the individual level, come across to me as an unrelenting obsession, at least not with most of the commenters?)
I get that FdB wants to be an ally of LGBTQ people and doesn't want his comments sections to turn into a place that might feel hostile to many or most of them. I'd like to feel that my attitude would be similar if I ran a blog like his. I don't know exactly how someone in this position should deal with this, given that a lot of the controversial-among-progressives views he does espouse have, as I've said, pretty obvious parallels to certain other views that run counter to today's LGBTQ-activist model of gender and society. Naturally a lot of his audience is going to make those connections either way (and even some LGBTQ members of his audience might also be unorthodox in their views on some of their community's activist rhetoric and gender views, I'd tend to imagine some would be!).
One thing that occurs to me he could do is ban all comments that he deems unnecessarily aggressive, hostile, sarcastic, sneering towards LGBTQ issues, etc. -- in other words, gross, mean comments. When banning discussion of trans issues, for instance, he cited a commenter calling women's prisons an "all-you-can-rape buffet" for trans women. This comment is really gross, and in a way that's completely unnecessary to the discussion. So ban those comments and the commenters who make them. In other words, follow Scott Alexander's original maxim that SSC comments should satisfy at least two of the qualities of being true, necessary, and kind. The "all-you-can-rape buffet" comment, even if true in the mind of the commenter, very clearly was neither necessary nor kind. Sure there will always be some subjectivity in what "kind" entails, so it's not a perfect system. And ironically, Scott did eventually have to override this criterion for admitting comments and just start banning people who turned every single discussion into an excuse to propagandize neoreaction (remember when that was a thing?). So I don't know.
What I do feel fairly sure about is that FdB is not ultimately doing his cause favors by avoiding addressing what much of his audience sees as parallels between some of his views and the views he's banning on in his comments section. FdB just characterized his views on all LGBTQ issues and the current standard progressive ones as having no daylight between them. Yet, for instance, when asked about teenagers being put on gender-related medical treatments, he says things like he has to be agnostic because he doesn't know enough about that type of medicine, reversibility, etc. Which, fine, I'm basically agnostic too, for similar reasons. But he can't with a sweep of his hand declare himself completely in line with today's progressive Left on gender stuff (while being extremely critical of that same subculture on other, not entirely unrelated, things) and keep being vague when pressed on what he actually thinks about the gender stuff, without coming across as disingenuous. His occasional repeated proclamations of "I'm completely supportive of all transgender and queer activist issues [with a few extremely vague embellishments and minor qualifications]" in place of engaging in a discussion about why, say, his views on the social contagion aspect of the youth's mental illness culture do not imply an analogous criticism of the subculture focused on gender identity, honestly makes it appear that he is hiding something about his true views. In fact, it looks a lot like FdB doesn't feel like dealing with the backlash that would come his way if he fully exposed what his true views are.
Or to put it another way, I would like to see FdB actually address the reasons why young people over-diagnosing themselves with mental illnesses is distinct in a salient way from the boom among young people in identifying as transgender. Presumably he thinks such a rebuttal to the alleged parallels exists, so why does he appear to be strenuously ducking the question? I'm genuinely curious as to how he really makes these distinctions. And who knows, maybe whatever arguments he could put forth would nudge some of his more devoted readers into being more pro-trans-rights!
Instead, it really sort of comes across that ironically, the man who recently wrote "Be Independent -- No, Not Like That!", who happily embraces one side of the political spectrum while strenuously criticizing much of the rhetoric/narrative that comes out of the associated tribe and even celebrates his intellectual right to do this, is also someone who shuts down his commenters from strenuously criticizing a different strain of the rhetoric/narrative that comes from that tribe because, you see, he disagrees with and is offended by that other form of criticism. ("Be critical of today's progressive culture even if you're otherwise progressive yourself -- no, not like that!")
Uncharitable, I know, and looking at it another way I want to see FdB as just someone who likes the LGBTQ community and is simply concerned about not alienating it. Gaah.
