On weaving tangled interwebs

[bcholmes]

I feel like there are strange, difficult edges around some of the conversation about the Amina blogger. Which of these situations are problematic? Is it completely clear where the boundary of problematic-ness is? Are these all examples of plain old deception?

- A blogger makes big news, but is later revealed to have invented just about everything that brought them that attention in the first place

- As above, but the person was motivated by raising awareness about a situation.

- As above, but the person was motivated by seeking a book deal.

- As above, but the person was motivated by the lulz.

- You learn that a sequence of events that you just witnessed, and which engaged you, emotionally, are part of a scripted advertising campaign funded by a large corporation

- A talk radio announcer tries to punk you during a phone call, just for the laughs of their audience

- You learn that an interaction you just took part in involved an actor playing a role (a la Borat), with the intention of making fun of people (say, in a mockumentary)

- The Yes Men impersonate the spokesperson for a large corporation on the evening news, making an announcement that is both socially important but financially ill-advised. The Yes Men are motivated by drawing attention to the issue at the centre of the announcement.

- A media artist such as Joey Skaggs concocts a bogus news story to make the point that the media is really falling down on even the most basic fact-checking.

- You come to realize that a somewhat ridiculous interaction that's taken place around you on the subway car was part of an Improv Everywhere performance.

- You're watching a play, and a member of the audience appears to do something that interrupts the performance, before you realize that the audience member is actually one of the actors.

- The person that you've been flirting with didn't tell you until fairly late in the game that they were in a relationship, but poly.

- You come to realize that the person you've been flirting with might not have been born with the genitals that you assumed.

- You learn that a friend gave you false information to spare your feelings about something.

I chose these situations either because the line between some of them were fuzzy to me, or because I feel like I hear the same concerns used in describing them.

Comments

[lisaquestions]

A lot of these situations demand context. Someone who produces lies about their own lives that aren't really relevant (different career, family, history) in terms of whatever isn't really much of an issue. Someone who misrepresents themselves as a member of a minority and blogs around that misrepresentation can cause actual harm.

A lot of the context surrounding the Amina situation makes the whole thing fairly exploitative and may have caused real trouble for Syrian LGBT bloggers.

That is, sometimes people express concerns because they feel entitled to control of a situation in a way that can harm others (like the genitals question) and sometimes people express concerns because someone else has stepped into a situation and done things that in the long term were harmful (like Amina).

Whatever the reason, I just have trouble putting all of these situations into the same category.

[bcholmes]

*nod* I get that. Especially your last line.

A big part of what was motivating this post was a (locked) post on my friends list in which the author was trying to work through some of zir feelings about the Amina blogger. One of the thoughts expressed in that post was that "you don't have to say who you are, but you do have to be who you say." The post talked about mabye it's okay if you're in spaces in which people have consented to pretend but generally argued the standard that "if I believed you and you were pretending, then that's kinda wrong."

I wasn't comfortable with that assertion because I think that the question of "when is it pretending?" is a question that is controlled by the majority, and the majority haven't always been on the side of trans folk.

To be a bit more concrete, I said, on this other journal entry, that there were times in my life when I used certain online spaces to represent myself as inhabiting a life that I wasn't really inhabiting at the time. For me, that "playing with identity" was in pursuit of figuring out my own feelings about my own gender, so I don't view it as "pretending", but it could be said that I was saying things that weren't literally true. The fact that the life that I was representing, then, strongly resembles the life that I inhabit now makes me think that I was trying to find a realness about my own life. I don't think that's pretending, but I'm also painfully aware that I don't have sole control over how my actions are characterized.

Obviously I agree with you that these situations are in very different categories, but I'm pretty sure that not everyone would feel that way.

[lisaquestions]

I wasn't comfortable with that assertion because I think that the question of "when is it pretending?" is a question that is controlled by the majority, and the majority haven't always been on the side of trans folk.

Yeah, this is a big problem for me.

I mean, as far as it goes, a dude came to QT last night and posted on poisongirl's post about Storm (belated post) that a trans woman who has sex without revealing that she's "biologically male" is effectively committing "rape" and that he can understand why someone would "beat the shit" out of a trans woman for doing that, and then said that mature responses would agree with him. I didn't approve his comment and said it was unacceptable, but this is the kind of thing that accompanies "reveal yourself!" to people.

I am literally unable to see these as anything but very different categories. I do not understand why people would group them into the same category. I know that they would but the worldview that would inform such a thing makes no sense to me.

[maize]

Hmm. Some of those are interesting examples that seem fuzzy to me too. Another that I'd add to the mix is, "The person playing a character in an online game is not the same gender as their chosen character," and, "The person operating an account in an online social space is not the same gender as listed on the account." There are taboos about both of those and yet it seems that a huge number of people seem to do them from time to time. Also, it seems to change depending on the genders (and in some senses for practical reasons -- a man operating a female character in an online space is considered deceitful whereas a woman operating a male character in an online space is assumed to be protecting herself from harassment). I also find it interesting that the boundary between acceptable behaviours shifts slightly depending on whether it's a "game" or not -- "misrepresenting" your gender is considered a worse transgression in, say, Playstation Home, than it is in, say, World of Warcraft.

In terms of the specific examples, there's definitely a fuzzy line for me in the last case -- a friend giving false information to protect my feelings. I think it would depend on what exactly they lied about, and in any case, even if I didn't want them to do it, if we hadn't had a discussion about that I would try to take it as an understandable thing and just ask them not to do that again. But even then, I think there are some situations where it's expected, to a degree and where it might not upset me.

The "You come to realize that the person you've been flirting with might not have been born with the genitals that you assumed," one is the one that really sticks out to me as different than the others, because it seems to be about my assumptions rather than the other person's actions. Unless they specifically lied to me about the genitals they were born with, they haven't misrepresented themselves -- I've just made an incorrect assumption.

The poly one seems like it should fall under the same aegis on the surface, but I think that I'd consider more of a "good faith" requirement to make some kind of disclosure. But I think I'm bad at flirting, so I might need to make more allowances for what people call "flirting without intent" -- flirting just to flirt, but not to actually engage in any sort of behaviour beyond that. Maybe if you don't intend to "follow up" on the flirting (and if your partner doesn't mind you flirting), there's no good-faith requirement to disclose relationship status?

On the flip side of the examples you came up with about bogus press from independent people, there's the corporate-driven "viral" marketing that I think everyone's familiar with but which most people seem to have a bad taste in their mouth about in most cases, but another top-down example that happened recently is that the head of a conservative political action and lobbying group papered a bunch of houses in Detroit with fake eviction notices designed to get the residents afraid of publically-funded bridge project that the group opposed (and thus to get them to rally against it and lobby against it). This seems like an easy one to decry, of course, because it's preying rather cruelly on people's fears and manipulating them in a particularly nasty way. However, is it that fundamentally different from the Yes Men example?

There was a bit in this ethics and morality class that I watched online where the professor said that studying philosophy is in some ways bad (and in some ways good) for one's ability to participate in the public moral discourse, because abstracting everything out to fundamental principles distances you from the issues in ways that may not always be positive.

[wild_irises]

BC asks great questions!

I think that one factor that has to be taken into account here is time. I have a different reaction to long-term deception than short-term (I know that still leaves gray areas). This means that there's a difference (for me) between extended or ongoing blogging as someone else and an Improv Everywhere performance or even (though it would infuriate me) a Borat-type acting deception.

Another is intimacy. I simply can't put the poly and different genitals and friend-giving-false information questions in the same group with the others, because all of the others are not about me being deceived as me, but about me being deceived as part of a group, or because I'm in the deceived's place at the deceived's time.

The other three are personal, and that changes everything. I happen to be a person who likes full, early disclosure, so I would prefer to know especially about the poly relationship thing. I don't want to be fed false information to save my feelings, but I know people will do that.

Like maize, I think the genitals one is another subcategory. If someone who is flirting with me identifies strongly in a different gender than zir genitals convey, that I think I have a "right" to know (certainly a desire to know) before we get much past social flirting. For example, a non-op MTF who doesn't consider zir penis to be a sex toy should probably tell anyone zie goes to bed with. But if zir genitals match zir identification and not zir history, I don't think that's my business unless we become truly intimate, and even then it's (as everything truly intimate is), zir call.

Now, if I've shown myself to be pantsless, please tell me.

[aquaeri]

I've had a big think about this because I understand the issue you have (I think) and I've been wondering about that, myself.

[Warning: I have been clueless and hurtful about trans issues in the past, and it's far from impossible I still am.]

The examples I'd been trying to compare and contrast were between a white person claiming access to (eg) Native American spirituality or even that they're "really Indian" (which i think is generally agreed to be clueless white person cultural appropriation); and a MAAB identifying as a (trans) woman (which some radfems would see as a similar appropriation, but has to be okay to recognise trans rights).

And I was similarly struggling with defining why one situation was okay when the other wasn't. The Amina thing has actually helped me resolve what I now think is an important difference: the bad pretending or claiming of alternate identity tends to be about supplanting or replacing the real people with that identity (Tom McMaster clearly thought he could be a better Syrian lesbian than any real Syrian lesbian) whereas as far as I can tell, trans women want to join other women, not supplant them.

I think this is tied up in your example of "pretending" to be a woman online before being sure of your identity, where as you say, who you are now is very much who you were trying to be; I don't think Tom McMaster had any intention of ever perhaps becoming a Syrian lesbian, you know? He's sure that right now, as a white American cis man, he can represent lesbians as well as they can themselves.

These links have been relevant to my thinking:
http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/1456236.html (I can't imagine a trans or considering-the-possibility-they're-trans person thinking of that gender as somewhere they have discovered and need to tell the rest of the world about)
http://cofax7.dreamwidth.org/816157.html?thread=10841373#cmt10841373
(I think the issue of who the audience is, is highly relevant to separating "good" and "bad" pretending.)
http://delux-vivens.livejournal.com/2338071.html?thread=10491415#t10491415 (I agree the "killing" language speaks volumes).