Yes, you can write characters that don't look like you...

[Ray McCarthy]

Brain structure is just as physical, as is brain chemistry.

Both things we know little about compared to genes, hormones and chromosomes. We don't even know if any differences in brains vs gender identity or brains vs chromosomal sex are cause or effect or even significance. Go do some research instead of telling me I'm an idiot because what I say doesn't fit your world view.

I'm certainly not arbitrating anyone's gender. Society has been making a mess of that, quite without any help from me. You can't physically measure or test for Gender. The science, as yet, doesn't exist. Telling someone what chromosomes, hormone levels and body bits they have neither convinces them of a gender, nor even if you slice up their brain (by scanning or after death) and analyse chemistry can you decide what gender and orientations etc they identify with. Maybe there will be science someday, to day we only go on what the person says. The problem is purely how society treats people, not how they identify.

 

[J D Foster]

Not a huge amount of research, seeing as I know a fair few lesbians and none of them have been from a different planet.

From my experience Wales, but not another planet.

I've been really blessed in my work life to work with people from all over the world and from many sexual and religious backgrounds. My experience and conclusion from this is that no matter what "angle" a person is coming from they are all basically the same. I've tried to remember that when writing, not sure how successful I have been. It's super hard not to write stereotypes into characters I think.

 

[Ursa major]

Both things we know little about compared to genes, hormones and chromosomes. We don't even know if any differences in brains vs gender identity or brains vs chromosomal sex are cause or effect or even significance. Go do some research instead of telling me I'm an idiot because what I say doesn't fit your world view.

First, I haven't, until this sentence, used the word, idiot, mainly because it wasn't, and still isn't, appropriate.

Second, that we know so little about something is not a particularly good platform from which to announce that other people's deep and unavoidable experiences are in any way similar to your and my points of view. To get round this, I've taken on board what these other people say about what they are experiencing; you are, obviously, free to ignore them.

 

[tinkerdan]

There's really little use in throwing each other across the ring and body slamming because the issue here is so complex and there seems in the past to be some unfortuanate tendency to try to push it all under one umbrella. Someone got the bright idea to go with TransGender to umbrella too many things and then creates CisGender to be the opposite or maybe some binary equivalence. Cis vs Trans-this side,other side-right hand-left hand. But there are too many variables.

On the physical side one could try to distill it down to sex-male/female. And on a clinical level that works most of the time but add some chromosomal abnormalities and you get something else occasionally. But digging deeper into that there are so many variants on outward physical characteristics that sometimes, other than genitals, looks can be deceiving and sometimes that's based as much on some social standard as it is actual physical characteristics.

That leads to self image which can play all sorts of devil's games with the system.

This doesn't even cover a persons sexual orientation, which may or may not be affected by their sexual identity.

Add to this the gender issue, which originally was a social issue and should have stayed that way but for the Cis-Trans thing.
My best guess is that Cis-Gender and Trans-Gender have nothing to do directly with gender because it's an umbrella term to encompass an number of things already mentioned but not necessarily all of them.

There are more issues beyond this and more terms, but I'll stop here because if you tried to determine the absolutes for any of these then I think that few if any people would fall in those absolutes and there are so many variables involved in the umbrella terms that fewer if any fall in those categories when approached as absolutes.

People are the sum of all those parts which means in most cases people are like snowflakes.

 

[Ursa major]

the issue here is so complex and there seems in the past to be some unfortuanate tendency to try to push it all under one umbrella

Yes, I think most of us agree (and may already have agreed) that it's very complex.

Perhaps it would help if we could tailor our definitions to the use to which they may be put. So, to give two quite different examples:

1. let the choice of where an individual fits into the various available descriptions (and/or categories) to the person who is best placed to know, i.e. that individual, rather than having others assign them to any particular pigeon hole or other;
2. accept that we can, as a shorthand, use a much smaller number of broader definitions when not considering specific individuals, something we do for just about everything else where we see complexity but don't want to get so bogged down in it that we find it impossible to talk about a subject at all.

 

[SilentRoamer]

Ursa Major your points 1 and 2 seem contradictory.

Point 1 says that people should not be assigning labels to others and that those others are best to create the labels themselves. So the only valid labels are self assigned?
Point 2 argues on using broader definitions when not considering specific people. Which are by definition assigned by the collective.

So you either support broad collective definitions (and their drill down association with specific individuals) or you don't?

 

[tinkerdan]

That's fine;but the discussion is about the OP and the linked article.:

Yes, I think most of us agree (and may already have agreed) that it's very complex.

Perhaps it would help if we could tailor our definitions to the use to which they may be put. So, to give two quite different examples:

1. let the choice of where an individual fits into the various available descriptions (and/or categories) to the person who is best placed to know, i.e. that individual, rather than having others assign them to any particular pigeon hole or other;
2. accept that we can, as a shorthand, use a much smaller number of broader definitions when not considering specific individuals, something we do for just about everything else where we see complexity but don't want to get so bogged down in it that we find it impossible to talk about a subject at all.

In this instance the umbrella term is unnecessary and somewhat confusing the issue. Clearly her focus group is White, Straight,Able bodied men. It's not clear to me why the term Cis was even used because straight belongs in that umbrella but the author didn't think so; so they are using a different umbrella. Maybe she needs to save that one for a rainy day.

Cis is clearly a buzzword that looks good on a certain demographics posts.

 

[Ursa major]

straight belongs in that umbrella but the author

I think that sexual preference (e.g. straight, gay, bisexual) is orthogonal to cis/trans which, as mentioned above, uses the following definition for being cis:

Having a gender identity which matches one's birth sex

A trans man, i.e. someone whose birth sex was given as female but whose gender identity is male, could be straight, gay, bisexual, etc., but would not fit within the group defined by the article's title whatever his sexual preference, because he wouldn't be cis.

 

[tinkerdan]

Okay I'll give you that because, well it's not mine to give it holds true.

But I will say this that White, Straight, Cis, Able-bodied men are not the only ones who live in fear of the subject of her article. And it would have better been titled Conversation is More Useful Than Fear. The rest of the title validates the unnamed gentleman's reaction to his statement based on who he was being interviewed by because it distracts from the real issue being addressed which is
Conversation is More Useful Than Fear which is useful for all writers of diverse background, circumstance and whatever other umbrella's you want to toss out there. It's called sensationalizing.

Then statements like this are true.

As always, the people who most need to read things like this are the least likely to actually do so.

Because the title alienates the target and welcomes those that already agree.

So then the question I have is where is the conversation and what hope does it have when we set out to alienate others by Rhetoric.

 

[Ursa major]

Ursa Major your points 1 and 2 seem contradictory.

Point 1 says that people should not be assigning labels to others and that those others are best to create the labels themselves. So the only valid labels are self assigned?
Point 2 argues on using broader definitions when not considering specific people. Which are by definition assigned by the collective.

So you either support broad collective definitions (and their drill down association with specific individuals) or you don't?

So you either support broad collective definitions when it is useful to use such broad collective definitions in a discussion/debate/analysis/whatever (and their drill down association with specific individuals when you are dealing with specific individuals). Er... Yes, and you use different levels of detail, and other (possibly derived) definitions, when you need to.

An example.... The UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and the US are, basically, democracies and can be described as such usefully in certain circumstances. In other contexts (such as determining where sovereignty lies), these five countries are very different, and might be described in turn, accurately or not (but still in shorthand, just a different one): a constitutional monarchy, a (more-or-less centralised) presidential republic (in which most power lies with its directly elected president), a federal republic (whose president is its head of state, but not its head of government and who isn't directly elected), a confederation (too complex to categorise easily!), a constitutional republic (in which the directly elected president is but one leg of three within the (federal) government).

But if we look at all the countries of the world more closely, are any two of them organised the same way? Almost certainly not.

 

[Ursa major]

And it would have better been titled Conversation is More Useful Than Fear.

Agreed.

But I will say this that White, Straight, Cis, Able-bodied men are not the only ones who live in fear of the subject of her article.

As was pointed out by the (Hugo-winning) journalist, Laura J. Mixon, Requires Hate's most frequent targets of attack were not straight white men, as her reputation would have suggested before the truth came out, but women of colour.

 

[MWagner]

I'm in two minds about linking to this, because it's close to pure politics, of a non-party-political sort. However, it expresses itself better than I could have done, and states the fact that changing language doesn't (necessarily) change reality. I suppose some might see it as a sort of charter allowing anyone to say anything about anyone, but I don't think that's what the author, Nick Cohen, is intending. It seems to me more to be a call to avoid point-scoring and self-censorship that limits free speech.

http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/how-to-defend-the-arts-using-liberal-values/

Thanks for the link. Excellent article. Of particular interest to writers:

If you are in a newsroom, or study on a campus or work in the arts you must have noticed the upsurge of puritanism around you. New reasons to censor are being created: intersectionality, micro-aggressions, privilege.

Liberal institutions are hopeless at challenging them because they do not know how to handle attacks from ‘our side’. They do not understand that they do not come their ‘side’, but from their enemies.

One day, soon I hope, they will realise that the division between those who believe that ideas should be given a hearing and those who believe they should be silenced is a division as deep, if not deeper, than the division between left and right...

I don’t know what conditions produce art worth seeing. But I do know what doesn’t. The low- level hysteria around so many sexual, ethnic and political questions. The conformism of liberal culture. The inability to tolerate alternative points of view, let alone show them neutrally in the service of building a convincing character or narrative.

Left unchecked these forces will produce work which is as ‘appropriate’ as a 1950s’ country house drama or a sentimental Victorian novel – and just as forgettable​

 

[MWagner]

Sorry, but I found the original article unpersuasive, and saddled with all the worst biases and unchallenged assumptions of the modern identity politics movement. The author sees every person primarily through a lens of gender, race, and sexual orientation; she refers to a "white, straight, cis, able-bodied male friend." How about "Darryl?" Or "my earnest writer friend." She fiercely polices language, calling a fairly innocuous term like exotic "problematic."

And I find comments like this chilling:

We’re not going to skip the part where you have to learn things and change your behavior.​

Most distasteful of all, in her closing comments she reveals an outlook both deeply prejudicial and smugly self-satisfied:

We don’t need your fear, and we don’t need your guilt. Fear and guilt are useless. We need your participation. We need your action. We need you to be willing participants in the conversation. We need you to be fearless in your compassion.

We need you to listen before you create.​

Apparently, the author believes women, racial minorities, non-straights, and the handicapped are not only a collective 'we', but that she's qualified to be a spokesman for that greater part of the human species, while straight white males are a collective 'they' who are in desperate need of re-education and behavioural modification. Nonsense.

If her point is that people should try to do research and be thoughtful about writing about characters outside their own experience, well, she's stating the blindingly obvious. What I don't see is what it has to do with race and gender. If I - a Canadian of mixed ethnic background raised in late-20th century suburban Canada - wanted to write a novel about a black American in World War 1, I should try to inform myself in order to offer the most accurate representation I could. And I should do the same thing writing about a white Welshman in World War 1. Both are far outside my personal experience. Why, then, should I expect to be taken to task by a random black critic in 2015 if I choose the former? Frankly, as I have a fairly keen interest in history, I may very well be able to understand and evoke that black character who lived a century ago better than a black writer living today who has no such interest. But according to the author, race and gender are paramount considerations when it comes to creating and appraising creative works.

Basically, her outlook is the antithesis of liberalism.

 

[Toby Frost]

There's a certain earnest fury, and a lack of compromise and self-awareness, about all of this that makes me wonder if some of the people setting themselves up as experts on the internet are actually very young. When I read articles made purely out of jargon, many of them much less comprehensible than this one, I wonder who they are really aimed at and what they are meant to achieve. Certainly they won't change the majority of people, even if the majority of people were willing to be told off and pelted with jargon. Politics and social change begin to resemble a parlour game or an in-joke, instead of a force for change.

Frankly, and this would automatically be read as horrible bigotry by right-thinking sorts, if someone asked me for my advice, I'd say "Don't get involved. Don't listen to angry people on the internet. Listen to people who actually are in the know. Do actual, genuine research. Get a feel for what you don't know about and learn about it. Read history books by historians. Ultimately, write a good book about whatever you like and do it well."

Alternatively, write comedy. Nobody gives comedy much consideration these days, as if it's all utter slapstick. You won't win any awards, but you can say pretty much whatever you like provided that you've not got a "serious issues" hat on.

 

[MWagner]

There's a certain earnest fury, and a lack of compromise and self-awareness, about all of this that makes me wonder if some of the people setting themselves up as experts on the internet are actually very young.

I'm certain that's the case. And while there's nothing new about earnest youth taking on the world with enthusiasm uncompromised by experience, I worry that online culture, with its echo-chambers where fellow-travellers reinforce one another's prejudices, is delaying the onset of the more nuanced outlook that most of us grow into.

When I read articles made purely out of jargon, many of them much less comprehensible than this one, I wonder who they are really aimed at and what they are meant to achieve. Certainly they won't change the majority of people, even if the majority of people were willing to be told off and pelted with jargon. Politics and social change begin to resemble a parlour game or an in-joke, instead of a force for change.

It helps if you recognize that the dogmatic religious mode of thinking that we associate with earlier times, and with conservatism, has been reborn in a secular form among the modern cultural left. Many people prefer to feel than to think, and long to belong to something greater than themselves. The point of their efforts isn't to persuade - it's to present the starkest moral tableaux possible, and to affirm their piety in the eyes of other true believers.

I regard it as a failure of education. It seems a great many people can pass through our post-secondary education system today without having any of their beliefs subjected to the hammer and tongs of reason and logic, or understanding the heritage of Western thought. How else to explain the lack of understanding that the truth of a statement or a moral claim is not contingent on the identity of the person who makes the claim? Post-modernism has spawned a generation of unreflective zealots who resemble nothing so much as the ostentatiously pious congregation of a fundamentalist church.

 

[Nick B]

She's correct about the use of the word, exotic, though. As someone who is truly exotic -- those with** red hair are very small component of the world's population -- I find it appalling that this term is applied to those whose appearance is in no way rare (outside of gated communities*** and the membership of country clubs***, that is).


** - Although I'm now blond, which may be affecting the quality of argument in my posts....

*** - Other beacons of oppression are available.

About half the world is female (slightly less due to abortions and infanticide).
A minority is "White", though to Northern Europeans, some Southern European look more "coloured" than some Indian subcontinent groups.
There are about five skin types, NOT TWO! (categorised by ability to cope with UV, the most delicate is Northern European in origin, but has best ability to produce vitamin D from little sunshine). Referring to people's skin colour at ALL, is bigotry. It's not a personal choice and maybe to do with where your ancestors lived 100 to 5,000 years ago. IMO "White Caucasian" and "Person of Color" equally display American bigotry. Tribe or Ethnic Origin is better than Race, which DOESN'T exist! Only Albinos have no colour in the skin.

Red hair is really exotic.
Real Blonde less so (most you see is as fake as purple hair), but overwhelmingly most people are brown to black, till they are white haired with age. Maybe "white" hair is the majority. I'm told some Chinese / Han go white earlier than many Europeans, but the women dye it.
Brown eyes is the common. Blue rarer, real green rather than hazel/grey is pretty rare.

I'd like to colour my hair, but people mock grey haired older white men doing that (not my original colour, but orange to purple, gold to copper, what ever takes my fancy. Why should it only be acceptable for punks, goths, trans, and women?).

That makes me extremely exotic, red hair, green eyes, pale white skin with a dappled brown covering. Man, I am like in the smallest exotic group ever.
I will write the characters I want to write. They are diverse in the extreme, not because I am politicaly correct, but because that is what my stories need. The day I think to myself 'hmm, I'd better make one of my characters an XXX or people might think I am XXXist, it is the day I need to stop writing.

I know, work with and am friends with people of many ethnicities and not one of them refers to themselves as a 'person of colour'. What a ridiculous term.

 

[Nick B]

@MWagner I believe you have hit the nail on the head. Most of the articles like this that I have read are exactly that. Circlejerk is the term used amongst gamers, and that seems to be the appropriate term here. This kind of thing isnt written for the general public, but for the writers own group/circle. It is very self congratulatory and appears to be looking for praise/recognition.
It seems to be popular at the moment to demonise white, straight, able bodied men.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

@Quellist - are you a lephrechaun? (red hair, pale skin, dappled, endangered species.)

 

[tinkerdan]

I think its appropriate though.

It poses the question of why can't we have a conversation and then gives a perfect example of why we can't have a conversation, which is that her idea of a conversation is her talking and someone else listening. And as I've mentioned before it alienates the person they supposedly want conversation with; to make sure that the conversation won't take place. And as mentioned above they encourage only their circle to read and lament along with them.

 

[Nick B]

I also like to wear green, and do have a ( short) beard.
You are welcome to make assumptions at leasure.