Michael Ian Black is a bad thinker

I don't watch TV. My mom called it the boob tube, and I've never shaken that impression. I don't know who Michael Ian Black is, but he wrote about me! Turns out I'm a subject-matter expert on the topic and, sadly, he got most of it wrong. That doesn't make him a bad person; good people make mistakes. At least his are interesting.

He wrote, emphasis mine: "As a younger person, my activism looked more like what the commentator seemed to want: marching and raising my fist and singing along to whatever the shitty acoustic guitarist played from the jerry-rigged riser." I invite you to read our exchange for yourself. Where did I ask him to go march, to go sing? I don't want Michael to sing. Please Mike, please don't sing. That's the last thing we need right now.

I suspect Mike saw a combative tranny in his replies and pattern-matched her to a pre-packaged template of an angry activist, a familiar blue-haired phantasm. Perhaps he conflated my position with those of other posters, an odd mistake since he wrote a thousand-word article about me, not the others. You'd think he'd have taken the time to understand the specifics of his interlocutor's position. So much for nuance, eh?

Now, look, he's right that I was trying to get something from him; he just incorrectly assumed I was driving him towards some pet thesis of mine. That's not my MO. You can't engage in good faith if you're pushing a perspective on the sly. All I brought were questions, because all I want from Mike--all I ever want from anyone--is clarity of thinking.

That's why it's heartbreaking that he saddled me with assuming nefarious intentions on his part. I don't make a habit of engaging with transphobes. Transphobes are crazy! Transphobes send SWAT teams to your home. I'm not into that. No, I saw in Mike a well-meaning, ignorant, guy in a relatable bind: he'd posted a take without thinking it through and was now being accused of believing things he didn't say. Go read our exchange again: that's how public discourse is supposed to work. Good on both of us! I asked him questions, and he clarified his position until a reasonable take came into view.

Because here, speaking of nuance, is the thing. Here are two different arguments--each entails different stakes and leads to different prescriptions:

Which of these two was Mike arguing against? His first post was phrased as an argument against #1. As he quickly found out, argument #1 is quite hard to attack because financial support of Harry Potter is funnelled directly into a political movement that aims to strip millions of our human rights. Now, granted, we all do unethical things, and it may be that there are differences of degree between watching Harry Potter as an adult (baffling) and letting your annoying children watch it, between pirating the show and watching it on HBO Max, between watching the show and buying merch, whatever. The fact remains, watching Harry Potter is unethical, and the most ethical posture available is to join the boycott of this vapid media franchise.

That's why Mike pivoted, in conversation with myself and others, from an argument against #1, to an argument against #2. He's right that we shouldn't disengage from uninformed watchers "who don't think about this stuff very much," that we should seek to inform them. He's so right, in fact, that no one was arguing otherwise.

How would one even argue for disengagement? "People who watch Harry Potter" is not a coherent demographic like, say, Jewish people, trans people, Canadians. You can't engage with them, or disengage from them, in aggregate. They have no newspapers you can write to, no restaurants to boycott, no identifying physical traits. They are an arbitrary collection of atomized individuals making a consumer choice. The only way to engage with "people who watch Harry Potter" is by individuating, and at that point, Mike concedes , it may be fair to cut people off depending on the circumstances.

I hear you yell "but the OP!" Here's the OP: "If you watch or support [Harry Potter] you’re a bad person btw. I’m not arguing about it with you either." The key word is arguing. She's not disengaging from people who watch Harry Potter: her engagement consists of informing them they're funding a genocidal rampage, then turning away if they insist they're not. That's it. This operates, again, on individuals rather than aggregates and, critically, operates after informing those individuals. Mike showed up to argue against an inherently incoherent position that nobody was actually defending. This is only possible because he unintentionally misread the OP, and the direction of his misreading isn't neutral.

Trans women are often stereotyped as angry, unreasonable, hyper-sensitive, insular, eager to cancel anyone who fails to adhere to some inscrutable code. We are continually subject to an epistemic vandalism where our interlocutors hear words said not by us, but by imaginary visions of us. It goes like this: tranny says X. Cis person writes "tranny said Y." Tranny says X again. Cis person writes "tranny got REALLY UPSET and said Y."

This epistemic gap is how Mike can continually misread what's being said by yours truly, the OP, the people in his comments. It's the same epistemic gap that keeps him ignorant of the state of a conversation that's been going since Joanne came out as coocoo in 2019. He shows up saying "where's the line? I'm worried you've drawn an unreasonable line!" and it turns out that, no, we're, in the main, pretty sensible people who've spent lots of time since 2019 negotiating a consensus on where the line is. It's just that the consensus is implicit, unstated, case-by-case, nuanced, and thus quite hard to explain to outsiders in 300 characters. That's also why the consensus sounds contradictory when we try to explain it: it's one way in some cases, a different way in others.

This is what I tried to explain in a series of responses Mike read as "upset:" if you wanna comment on controversy, it's wise to understand the nuances at hand. Mike showed up with a provocative statement, retracted it immediately, and pivoted to arguing against a strawman. What does that contribute? Controversy is expensive: it risks spawning enmities and damaging its participants' reputations. At the same time, controversy can be useful in advancing our understanding of difficult topics. The question, always, is "what are you bringing to the table, at what cost?" Mike brought nothing to the table, at the cost of entrenching everyone's position and widening the epistemic gap. Trans people saw another cis person who couldn't listen, and Mike's audience saw trans people being unreasonable, proving once more that anyone who touches this topic gets instantly canceled. Everyone lost.

The only way to keep this from happening every two weeks is for cis people to put work into bridging that epistemic gap. Listen to us. Actively seek out our perspectives. Try to have something to say when you open your mouth. These are good skills regardless. How many of our problems are rooted in an inability to bridge epistemic gaps across racial, religious, generational, geographic lines? I can't stop thinking of William Hazlitt's essay "The Spirit of Controversy":

It is one of the worst consequences of this very spirit of controversy that it has led men to regard things too much in a single and exaggerated point of view. Truth is not one thing, but has many aspects and many shades of difference; it is neither all black nor all white; sees something wrong on its own side, something right in others; makes concessions to an adversary, allowances for human frailty, and is nearer akin to charity than the dealers in controversy or the declaimers against it are apt to imagine.

Watching from up here as you guys tear your country apart, I worry that the American discursive apparatus isn't able to orient towards truth. You're all too eager to mass-produce your takes, to fit people and perspectives into neat little boxes sold cut-rate at Walmart. But you know what gives me hope? This conversation. It takes courage to open the floor to a rhetorical opponent the way Mike did. It takes courage to admit you don't have the answers, and stumble publicly in search of them.

I don't know what to do about Joanne, but we won't figure it out if only trans people are capable of discussing transphobia. Over the course of this shitstorm, lots of people have shouted at Mike to just shut the fuck up, to stop speaking out of turn. That just lets him off the hook. I think he deserves better. I wouldn't have spent all this time arguing with him if I didn't think him capable of rising to the responsibility of having a platform and engaging in commentary.

Perhaps he could talk to trans people, hear our perspectives, tell our stories. He could explore the links between Joanne and other stripes of fascist weirdos. It'd be valuable to see a guy like Mike educate himself in public. He's shown that he doesn't mind making people angry, maybe next time he can piss off the transphobes instead. Here's an easy way to do it: discuss the sports thing. Wouldn't you rather we gained a reliable ally? Isn't that better than shutting him up? Unless he starts singing, that is.