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This started as a response to a tumblr post about "multiple creators having to publicly out themselves or reveal past traumas in order to get fans to stop yelling at them for representing a certain minority/concept in fiction" which I felt was being too simplistic.
Basically: people should be able to write about their own experience without having to out themselves. Enforcing a narrow idea of who is 'allowed' to write certain stories (or assuming that only privileged people would even want to) hurts everyone.
But I also think criticism should be allowed to sometimes bring up the privilege of creators/actors etc, even when there's a chance they may be in the closet. We just need to be more careful about how we do it.
And I didn't like the implication that there should never be any backlash or concern over this sort of thing.
Note: I scrolled through the OP's blog and they mentioned there was complex cultural stuff going on with the Jamila Jameel thing making it a poor specific example. But that doesn't really affect their argument or mine.
1) I think it’s reasonable to generally encourage own voices etc, or be personally reluctant to trust certain kinds of authors to handle certain topics. But the way to do that is to just consume and promote works that you know are by the relevant group, not attack works that seemingly aren’t.
2)There are certain casting choices where I think it’s reasonable to complain on principle. Like if, say, a cis woman is cast as a trans man character, even though there’s a small but non-zero chance that the actor is actually a closeted trans man. But such criticism should bear in mind the possibility that you’re wrong about the actor and hold up even if you are, and shouldn't say someone is definitely cis/straight etc when all you can say is that they're not known to be anything else.
Like if it turns out that Eddie Redmayne is a closeted trans woman, and the creators of The Danish Girl knew that, I'd say it was still bad to cast someone who was publicly seen as a cis man in the role of a trans woman. So someone could acknowledge the possibility that Eddie Redmayne is actually a woman while still criticising the casting.
If you think it would be ok if the creator/actor etc was X, then that's different, and requires a more thoughtful approach. Like you might complain about the pattern of (seemingly) straight writers creating popular works about queer people, but at most just make a tired sigh about any individual case, which isn't going to do any real harm to the author if they are queer but closeted.
3) There’s messy situations where people do have a problem with the actual portrayal, and find it so offensive they assume it must have been created by a transphobic cis person etc, but then the author comes out and says they were drawing on personal experience and it’s all a mess. See: I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. I mean this would happen a lot less often if so much criticism didn’t assume a simple Problematic-vs-Good Representation dichotomy, and there was more space to acknowledge differing reactions and unfortunate trends without jumping so quickly to This Should Never Have Been Made.
But like... we need to give marginalised people space to work through their reactions to things that hurt them, even if it’s in confronting or controversial ways, in both art and criticism. How we can do that while minimising the hurt we do to each other is a question I have yet seen any simple answers for, though we should all keep trying anyway.
The second OP describes themselves as a "pro-shipper", and while I'm certainly not an anti I do think some pro-shipper/anti-anti rhetoric leans to much into being against any public criticism or negative reactions to media, at least those that bring up social justice issues. I'd like to be able to discuss and critique the things I consume without being being stifling or stifled, and it's not always straight-forward even for me as a random blogger, let alone for more visible critics.
EDIT: Too tired to articulate it but a very important aspect I didn't mention is the power relationships involved. Me criticising Eddie Redmayne up there is one thing, a BNF going after some no-name queer teenage fan for drawing Rule 63 art is quite another.
Basically: people should be able to write about their own experience without having to out themselves. Enforcing a narrow idea of who is 'allowed' to write certain stories (or assuming that only privileged people would even want to) hurts everyone.
But I also think criticism should be allowed to sometimes bring up the privilege of creators/actors etc, even when there's a chance they may be in the closet. We just need to be more careful about how we do it.
And I didn't like the implication that there should never be any backlash or concern over this sort of thing.
Note: I scrolled through the OP's blog and they mentioned there was complex cultural stuff going on with the Jamila Jameel thing making it a poor specific example. But that doesn't really affect their argument or mine.
1) I think it’s reasonable to generally encourage own voices etc, or be personally reluctant to trust certain kinds of authors to handle certain topics. But the way to do that is to just consume and promote works that you know are by the relevant group, not attack works that seemingly aren’t.
2)There are certain casting choices where I think it’s reasonable to complain on principle. Like if, say, a cis woman is cast as a trans man character, even though there’s a small but non-zero chance that the actor is actually a closeted trans man. But such criticism should bear in mind the possibility that you’re wrong about the actor and hold up even if you are, and shouldn't say someone is definitely cis/straight etc when all you can say is that they're not known to be anything else.
Like if it turns out that Eddie Redmayne is a closeted trans woman, and the creators of The Danish Girl knew that, I'd say it was still bad to cast someone who was publicly seen as a cis man in the role of a trans woman. So someone could acknowledge the possibility that Eddie Redmayne is actually a woman while still criticising the casting.
If you think it would be ok if the creator/actor etc was X, then that's different, and requires a more thoughtful approach. Like you might complain about the pattern of (seemingly) straight writers creating popular works about queer people, but at most just make a tired sigh about any individual case, which isn't going to do any real harm to the author if they are queer but closeted.
3) There’s messy situations where people do have a problem with the actual portrayal, and find it so offensive they assume it must have been created by a transphobic cis person etc, but then the author comes out and says they were drawing on personal experience and it’s all a mess. See: I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter. I mean this would happen a lot less often if so much criticism didn’t assume a simple Problematic-vs-Good Representation dichotomy, and there was more space to acknowledge differing reactions and unfortunate trends without jumping so quickly to This Should Never Have Been Made.
But like... we need to give marginalised people space to work through their reactions to things that hurt them, even if it’s in confronting or controversial ways, in both art and criticism. How we can do that while minimising the hurt we do to each other is a question I have yet seen any simple answers for, though we should all keep trying anyway.
The second OP describes themselves as a "pro-shipper", and while I'm certainly not an anti I do think some pro-shipper/anti-anti rhetoric leans to much into being against any public criticism or negative reactions to media, at least those that bring up social justice issues. I'd like to be able to discuss and critique the things I consume without being being stifling or stifled, and it's not always straight-forward even for me as a random blogger, let alone for more visible critics.
EDIT: Too tired to articulate it but a very important aspect I didn't mention is the power relationships involved. Me criticising Eddie Redmayne up there is one thing, a BNF going after some no-name queer teenage fan for drawing Rule 63 art is quite another.
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First: it is absolutely intolerable that you get pressured to disclose being a survivor because of what you write. I know you know I know that but...just saying it anyway. I've had less extreme experiences along those lines and it was indescribably awful.
You make a very good point about it mattering who exactly is getting criticised, and how. Which is something antis actively erase, even though paying attention to social power is the basic point any social justice analysis has to start from or it's automatically useless. I am going to think about it then edit my post, because it doesn't go without saying.
The way good arguments get coopted to justify harassment etc makes it so hard to have a productive conversation. And unfortunately it goes both ways. Look at the coopting of "cancel culture" by white male celebrities, which of course then gets used as an excuse by antis to say anyone criticising it is the equivalent of a whiny white male celebrity etc. Did you know "politically correct" originally gained popularity as a way for feminists etc to gently poke fun at themselves for being too rigid? And look at the way nazis grabbed onto the idea of free speech, to the extent that people now view the very phrase "free speech" as a right-wing dog-whistle. How do we have a productive discussion of free speech in that context? :(
I don't have much personal interaction with antis so it's less immediately fraught for me, but I totally get why you'd have an intense negative reaction to any arguments which superficially resemble theirs.
My immediate emotional reactions are a bit different, from years of being made to feel like a bad person for mentioning that I thought Stargate was maybe a bit racist etc, and I do worry fandom could swing back to that. Especially since I've seen older anti-antis who very explicitly think fandom's approach back then was 100% ok. Though in more recent years I've also been made to feel bad for defending the existence of ~problematic subjects in porn, and I do also have the worry we'll swing further into anti-ness than we have already. I worry in two directions /o\