B.R.A.V.O.

Radicalization and the science behind why it's a bad idea to dunk on transphobes

Foreword: This article discusses online hate, with the aim of understanding its psychology. It offers only two specific illustrations, both chosen to be non-harmful. It talks about categories of vile things that people believe in as brief a way as possible, with the aim of minimizing harm within the trans community, and particularly incidental harm as we try to fight hate.

Let’s talk about J.K. Rowling for a couple of minutes.

I know, I know, Rowling’s descent into rabid transphobia—and worse—has been beaten like the proverbial dead horse. I promise, we’re not going to linger. More importantly, we’re going to look at things from a different angle than folks generally do, because her very public spiral is really good at showing us a few things that are pretty easy to miss.

Things, with Rowling, started in June of 2020. A nonprofit published an article about making things better after COVID lockdowns for menstruating people, and they chose that term both so that it didn’t include postmemopausal women and women who’d had hysterectomies—people who wouldn’t be affected by what they wanted to talk about—and to be inclusive of transmasculine and some intersex people who may not be women, but who menstruate.

I mean, pretty blasé stuff.

Rowling retweeted the article complaining that ‘people who menstruate’ was not synonymous with ‘women’ anymore. Rowling got backlash, and eventually said the following:

If sex isn’t real, there’s no same-sex attraction. If sex isn’t real, the lived reality of women globally is erased. I know and love trans people, but erasing the concept of sex removes the ability of many to meaningfully discuss their lives. It isn’t hate to speak the truth. The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades, feeling kinship because they’re vulnerable in the same way as women—i.e., to male violence—‘hate’ trans people because they think sex is real and has lived consequences—is a nonsense.

I post that quote in detail because if you put it next to what Rowling says about trans folks these days, well—it’s pretty darn different. In between, her Twitter became a gradually and visibly-increasing smear of rampant transphobia as Rowling got deeper and deeper into that hate movement. Four years later, and she’s so obsessed with public transphobic hatred that another proudly transphobic billionaire, Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in a fit of pique over his trans daughter disowning him, has had to ask her to knock it off:

Like, that’s a long, long, long fall, and Rowling hit a whole series of branches along the way. Most folks resolve the disconnect between those two points by saying that Rowling always believed these things, and the only thing that’s changed is that she’s fully mask-off now, finally being honest about her beliefs. I don’t think so. I really don’t think so. Rhetorically and psychologically speaking, Rowling’s progression fits a very well-understood pattern, and it’s one that happens a lot, all across the internet.

So, what did happen, and why should we care?

The pipeline

A friend of mine wrote their dissertation on online, memetic hatred on 4chan which, if you haven’t heard of it before, is possibly the very worst place on the entire internet. Most importantly, it’s unmoderated, and you don’t need to create an account to post, which lets people say things completely anonymously, and with no possibility of real consequences. My friend looked into how rage, aggression, and hatred got spread around, rhetorically, in such a totally rule-free environment. As you might imagine, the website is absolutely overrun with white supremacists, neo-nazis, homophobes, transphobes, and basically every other variety of horrific hatred I’ve ever heard of, because there’s nobody actively working to keep them out. It’s the crustpunk nazi bar problem—if you don’t give these people the boot instantly as soon as they try to move into any space, physical or digital, they’ll quickly take over the place, running everyone else off.

Just a note: 4chan isn’t the only cesspool of the internet. There are several others, like Kiwi Farms, or the Something Awful forums, that are pretty horrific. We’ll circle back.

People generally find their way into these online spaces when they’re in a transitional place. Maybe they’ve moved to a new town, or they lost their job, or their partner left them, or maybe they’re even figuring out that they’re trans—when they want to scream anonymously into the void about a world that’s intolerable, and face no repercussions. They’re overwhelmingly white, from middle- or upper-classes (or even the wealthy elite), and they’ve been told How The World Is Supposed To Work. Pretty much inevitably they believe, consciously or not, that the world is supposed to meet their needs, that if they do this-or-that, they’ll be rewarded with whatever it is they want. Buy a girl dinner, for instance, and a cishet guy thinks she has to sleep with him.

And it’s not working that way. Not for them.

They look at the world around them, and they see Black folks and Jewish folks and middle eastern folks and gay folks and trans folks enjoying whatever-it-is that they’re frustrated about. Let’s focus on the transphobes—we’re working to understand Rowling, after all.

Somewhere deep in their mind, there’s the idea of “a real man/woman”—basically, their understanding of what it means to be a man or a woman, and that’s almost always mired in gender essentialist nonsense. Buried deep down, they see “transman” or “transwoman,” no space, as separate, close-but-no-cigar categories of not-quite-your-gender. They look at trans folks, they see us doing the things that don’t work for them, but it works for us. They fester. They ask themselves, why are you, this not-quite, second-best, better off then they are.

Their resentment grows. Their frustrated entitlement.

So they read a few articles that got linked on 4chan, and watch a few videos, and then they read some more. (Side note: seriously, if you haven’t seen that video, get a drink, settle in, and watch it end-to-end. It’s important.) They talk about the articles and videos on the social media cesspool they’ve chosen, and are celebrated when they do. They get told by these articles and these videos that they have a right to the life you lucked into. That your existence stole it from them somehow. Almost all of the people who get drawn into this are white men who grew up learning that society has divinely ordained that they should sit atop the social order, but there are a few white women in there, looking to lock in their second-place status in the caste.

So they sit, and they stew.

And as they think about their frustrated entitlement, rather than coming to the realization that the system is horrendously broken and unfair, and needs to be replaced, they decide that trans folks are cheating. That we’re somehow stealing their birthright from them. Ideas that would once have been horrifying to them begin to make logical sense, drip-fed to them by hardened white supremacists who understand that building hatred for a specific group of people almost always turns into a more generalized white supremacy.

So, eventually they find their way onto Kiwi Farms, or maybe the Something Awful forums, or maybe the deeper, darker corners of 4chan. And on those websites, they find detailed instructions, which they follow. They spin up a couple of VPNs, routing their internet connection through one after another in an attempt to turn the whole internet into 4chan.

And they start sending out death threats from a series of sock-puppet throwaway accounts.

Doing so is a felony, but the instructions on the forum they stumbled through tells them (wrongly) that their VPN’s, and maybe TOR, will protect them. Never mind that we live in a police state, and the FBI (or your national investigating body, as appropriate) can pierce those “protections” with very little effort indeed.

Distributed hatred

Existing online as an out trans person almost inevitably makes you a target for random, distributed hatred from people who you have never and will never meet. The way the internet is set up makes it just plain easy for one person to make a dozen, fifty, a thousand accounts to bombard any target of their pent-up rage with abuse, and to do so largely consequence-free, and anonymously.

Well, again, until the FBI takes note. Police state and all that.

What that means in practice is that there’s a relatively small proportion—keeping in mind that there are a whole lot of people alive, so even a small proportion can easily be tens of thousands of people—of people who manufacture an absolute shitload of the cesspool of hatred that the internet has generally turned into, especially for trans folks.

There’s no central plan that white supremacists share with each other, not really. No overall goal, no driving objective. They might tell themselves there is—maybe racial purity garbage or some second civil war accellerationist claptrap—but the reality is that the only goal of their whole movement is radicalizing more people. They’re working to spread their ideology like a virus: cast a thousand bite-sized pieces of public hatred into the wild, and hope one of them lodges in a reader’s mind.

Not much, mind you. They expect that the overwhelming majority of their little viral seeds of hatred will wither and die. They’re hoping that just enough get through to get that reader to maybe read an article or two, or watch a Youtube video, and feel rewarded by their peers when they repeat the hateful party-line back to other white supremacists.

Like Rowling did.

This, mind you, is what the study of memetics, which I mentioned a little while ago, is all about: how an idea can become viral. Not viral as in “ha-ha, look at this cat video then show it to your friend.” Viral as in COVID.

It gets inside you, changes you, and turns you into a machine for reproducing itself.

The thing you need to understand about radicalization

Radicalization happens to everyone on some issue or another. For instance, I’m a radical abolitionist when it comes to America’s current for-profit healthcare system—I believe it’s morally abhorrent for anyone to profit from the death, disability, or from denying care to another human being, and any system which rewards that behavior needs to be abolished. Radicalization is not an inherently bad thing. But it does turn our ability to listen and incorporate conflicting information into our understanding way, way down, if not completely off. You could show me some really compelling data about financial incentives to innovate under a profit-driven healthcare model, for instance, but I really wouldn’t care; you’re not making an argument that matters to me, not responding to anything like the exigence I see. This insulation from being challenged can be doubly powerful when a person builds an identity and a community around it.

But when you’ve been radicalized in whatever way for a while, you eventually do notice that you’ve been radicalized.

The thing, with radicalization, is that when you realize you’re a radical in something, three paths present themselves. First, you might deradicalize, and give up whatever community there is around you to try to reintegrate with a wider world that you probably pissed off in a big way. Deradicalizing can come with some pretty hefty social costs and extended atonement if whatever you had been radicalized on harmed the people around you. Second, you might float on the edges of your radicalization, passively supporting whatever-it-is. Finally, you might actively dig in to your own radicalization, further rejecting the common views of those around you and accepting the reinforcement of your radicalized beliefs from that community. Put another way: nobody ever deradicalizes another person. Either a radical deradicalizes themselves by their own choice, or they further radicalize themselves.

Any of these outcomes is good, as far as a transphobe or white supremacist is concerned. The first group of people are shamed and disempowered, largely neutralized as an effective opponent to their message. The second group might never do a thing to help the hardened white supremacists and fascists at the core of these hate movements, but neither will they oppose them. They have been permanently removed as potential opposition. I don’t think I need to explain why the third group is attractive to those who spread hate.

That’s kind of the nature of radicalization. Just look at PETA, which was, once upon a time, an organization that existed to try to reduce the number of pets that got killed in animal shelters, and which now runs shelters with some of the highest kill rates in the world. Radicalization makes you lose the plot, and abandoning your radicalized beliefs comes with a deep cost and personal culpability for whatever you did while radicalized.

That’s why few radicals leave.

Many decades ago, a rather famous dead-white-guy thinker named Jean-Paul Sartre stared deeply into the worst of this sort of radicalized hatred the world has ever seen, as he studied antisemitism by the Nazis leading up to and during the Second World War. The means and some of the targets of mass, radicalized hatred has shifted over the years, but in his work on antisemitism could easily speak to any variety of racialized, religious, homophobic, transphobic, and of course current antisemitic hatred, without modification:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

The thing that Sartre understood here, and which few people remember, is that white supremacists and transphobes and all the rest don’t actually care about convincing you. They don’t care about hurting you, even—and I know that sounds paradoxical! The hurting is just a bonus to them.

What they’re actually doing is putting on a performance for a whole other audience entirely.

The ice cream scene

There’s an old movie called Thank You For Smoking that most people have forgotten about, but it’s one that I absolutely love.

And there’s one clip in particular I really want you to watch.

I’ve talked a little about rhetoric before, but now we’re getting into a specialized area called public rhetorics. Most folks, when we learn how to argue, it’s a dig your heels in and shout at someone until they see your way sort of thing, but public rhetorics is when and where we look at how the arguments made by a single person can persuade a much wider group of people.

One of the dangers in that, though, is that many people respond to someone making a public rhetorical argument with individual rhetorics—basically, one person is trying to persuade the other person who cannot be persuaded, while that person is trying to persuade the audience.

And when that happens, the person working in individual rhetorics loses virtually every single time.

Public rhetoric is a huge area of study, with dozens of scholarly books and massive mounds of scholarly research into its nuances, because when you move from one-on-one rhetoric to public rhetoric, you’re moving from a simple model of the rhetorical situation to a massively interwoven, interconnected, and shifting network of speakers, audiences, and perceived exigences, where any member of the audience can suddenly become a speaker with no notice whatsoever, with that process recurring infinitely. Any summary of research into public rhetorics I could give you would be a ludicrous oversimplification of the research that has been done in that area. What’s worse is that, unlike research in psychology or biology or medicine, virtually all scholarly work in rhetoric is paywalled, because we don’t get grant money for our research. So, for instance, I could easily link Edbauer’s massively important work on rhetorical ecologies, which is a very important framework for understanding public rhetorics… but basically none of you could actually read it. That makes my usual link-as-we-go rhythm pretty tough.

So, all that being said, let me ludicrously oversimplify a few things.

When one person tries to persuade their argumentative opponent while that opponent is trying to persuade the audience, the difference is a lot like the difference between water and steam. It’s the same thing in principle, but it acts in radically different ways and under different conditions, and interacts with the world around it in utterly distinct ways.

In the case of individual and public rhetorics, individual rhetoric is a lot like water—it’s cool, tends to congregate, and often wears away at a single point, sometimes with great force. It affects the environment, in other words, but in specific, localized ways. Public rhetorics, by contrast, are expansive, vaporous, and are as affected by the environment as the environment is by them, because expanding the act of argument to encompass such a wide audience means that you have to more or less give up on the single, agreed-upon exigence that individual rhetorics rely on. The line between the speaker and the audience gets blurry, because the audience becomes saturated with the rhetoric of the original speaker, becoming a whole series of new speakers, appearing unpredictably, who take and tweak that original rhetoric as they make their own arguments. The terrain becomes saturated in unexpected places, and sometimes ruptures or slides away under its own weight.

Put a different way, Stained Glass Woman is an act of public rhetoric. It works to persuade people that neither nurture nor nature can ever describe what it means to be trans, but that a loving investigation of both is a celebration of that very transness. That together, we can learn and grow and heal in ways we could never have predicted. That by understanding ourselves better, in a systematic way, we can give ourselves the tools we need to make our liberation real.

When I write Stained Glass Woman, I’m casting seeds into the wind, hoping they’ll find a home.

And that’s the exact same thing that transphobes are doing all the time. It’s what J.K. Rowling is doing. I’m just trying to do things ethically, with healing and hope and kindness as goals, while fighting like hell to keep everything I write grounded in the best data we have available and resisting the pull toward memetic reproduction as hard as I can. There’s a reason I write longform articles instead of making videoessays—videoessays get reproduced so much more easily, and are absorbed by your brain along fundamentally different, and less analytical, pathways.

But if the decentralized nature of hateful public rhetorics makes them so hard to respond to, how do we stop them?

Fighting fire

The danger of hateful uses of public rhetorics is that they’re being used in a fundamentally unethical way. Hate speakers use thought-terminating cliches and rhetorical fallacies to make nonsense sound truthy. They knowingly, deliberately, and consciously act with no regard to fact, data, or the state of scientific research, because representing truth is not their goal. What is?

Power.

This is the secret. We feel their hands pressing downwards on our faces, we struggle to breathe under their oppression, and so we see only that half of things, but the other half, the more important half to them, is that these people are trying to push themselves upward at our expense. That happens when they persuade more people to their position, either actively or passively, and reduce how many people oppose them.

The violence they inflict on us is incidental to them.

In many ways, they’re running around with matches and trying to start a big fire by lighting hundreds and hundreds of little ones. When some jackass shouts a transphobic slur at a trans person in the mall, what he really wants is for the other people at the mall to echo his hate, or at least stand by and do nothing. When they do, he has asserted his social dominance over you, and it’s gone unchallenged—it is now a fact, in that same truthy way I mentioned earlier, in your mind and, more importantly, the minds of everyone witnessing it.

If hate speech acts very much like a fire, though, we can take lessons on fighting it from firefighting.

A fire has three things it needs: fuel, heat, and air. Without any of the three, the fire will die. In this model, you (or any other minoritized person the white supremacist chooses to target) are the fuel. They, screaming at you are the heat. And access to their the audience is the air.

Most people who try to fight hate speech focus on cutting out the heat—removing hate speakers by deplatforming them, either removing them from whatever online forum they’re using to reach their audience or getting their in-person speaking opportunities canceled. It’s an extremely effective tactic when it works, and I absolutely cannot overstate how important it is to deplatform major hate speakers. Every one of them that gets silenced drops the heat dramatically, and deplatforming can be incredibly effective because the companies that host their content almost all operate in countries that strictly ban the platforming of hate speech—specifically for these reasons. The problem is, when those platforms and speaking venues are owned by people who at the very least are sympathetic to the hate speakers, it just plain doesn’t work. To go back to the crustpunk bar problem, demanding that the owner of a Nazi bar throw out Nazis isn’t going to end well for you.

Now, there are asterisks to this. Many nations around the world have strict anti-hate speech laws that places like Twitter have to follow. But those investigations take time, and just delaying them can be all the hate speakers really need for their fire to grow out of control. Finally, while major speakers, like Rowling, are the people who make the most radicalizing content, the overwhelming majority of people who actually harass us are their followers. If we take Rowling’s platform away, they’ll complain, but they’ll go right on harassing us in her absence.

So we’re left with fuel and air as the ways we can fight these fires.

Well, removing fuel is the way we fight wildfires, but when that fuel is people, the approach doesn’t work so well. And, just as importantly, fire follows its fuel. That’s why social media websites built for people who were exiled from mainstream platforms, like Ovarit, a Reddit-competitor for people who got kicked off for their transphobia, never succeed to any significant degree. There’s no fuel for their hate there.

But we can do things about the air supply, to smother hate.

Bluesky is probably the most successful Twitter-inheritor, and if you’re trans and on it, you’ll notice something pretty shocking:

There just… aren’t any transphobes there. Or overt white supremacists, or any of the rest.

Early on, it was picked up by a lot of marginalized folks, trans people included, as a way to move forward with a social media environment that worked like Twitter, but wasn’t Twitter. Until recently, it had no central moderation, so users made, for themselves, massive mute and ban lists, and were very serious about adding new hate accounts to what was then called “The Contraption,” a user-moderated mutelist that people could subscribe to so they’d never see anything posted by anyone on the list.

And a lot of people subscribed.

A funny thing happened. As ever, transphobes followed their fuel, trying the same old hate speech again and again… but basically nobody responded. All anyone would do was tag the administrator of that mute list with the new account, the hate speaker would be added, and then nobody ever saw them again. Within weeks, even days, the person running the hate speech account would give up and leave.

Nowadays, moderation is in the hands of the Bluesky team themselves, and they inherited The Contraption to use as a base banlist for the site.

But the culture there persists. Don’t respond to transphobes. Just deny them access to what they absolutely, positively require for their hate speech to work:

Air.

B.R.A.V.O

In the end, the legal requirements for platforms to fight hate speech push online platforms like Reddit and Bluesky and, yes, even Twitter, quite hard to fight hate speech, and that means banning racist, transphobic, homophobic, sexist, ableist hate speakers, or face daunting fines. Most places are pretty serious about it, not because they’re good people, but because they have a financial stake in being serious about it.

To fight hate speech, first, remove yourself from hateful environments. If you’re trans, get the hell off of 4chan or Twitter or any other space that either endorses or, at least, doesn’t moderate against hate speech. If you hang out with Nazis, the best case scenario is that they beat you up. The worst case is you become one of them. Unless you depend on that platform for your survival, all you’re doing by staying there is giving people the chance to hurt you and use that pain to radicalize more onlookers.

But elsewhere? It’s B.R.A.V.O. time: Block, Report, And Vibe On with your day.

As an acronym, B.R.A.V.O. is meant as a way to punish the disproportionate effort transphobes have to use to get the responses they want out of you. It takes them time to find people they think are vulnerable and build followings big enough that their hate has an audience worth trying to radicalize. Meanwhile, it takes you about twenty seconds to report and block them—and if people do so consistently and uniformly, it utterly deprives hate speakers of the air that their hate speech requires for it to spread.

And, most importantly of all, never, ever screenshot and bash these idiots, whether it’s the big-name hatemongers like Rowling or some no-name bobjonesbunchanumbers account. At most, share your response to “a transphobe.” No details of what they said. Not one single spark of their message gets out to spread and maybe light a new little fire. We stop the memetic spread of their ideas.

Maybe the hardest part of all of this is the Vibing On, or not letting them rattle you as you continue your day. The thing is, though, since they don’t actually care about you—remember, they’re recycling prepackaged hate, vomited outward indiscriminately in an attempt to influence people who are not you—you don’t need to either fully read or even process their crap. As soon as you see that a thing is full of transphobia, just report it and block the account. If someone shouts at you at the mall, walk into a store and force them to come in after you, where they’ll be bounced and banned from the venue for being disruptive.

Give.

Them.

Nothing.

It’s not perfect. Nothing is. But they’re not the only ones using public rhetorics to try to change the world—we are too.

And, unlike them, despite the passage of a distressing number of hate laws, our public rhetoric is actually working.

Fighting fires is a process. It takes time.

But, contrary to what you might think, we’re stamping them out. And a lot more successfully than you might imagine.

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Afterword: Stained Glass Woman will be on an extended hiatus after this article, probably until mid-to-late August. I’ve got several little summer vacations I’ll be going on with my family, and I’m under contract to write a scholarly manuscript, which I’ve fallen a little behind on. As much as I adore everything about SGW, my family and my obligations need to come first.