Christopher

I just wanted to post in here to say that the first episode was great and also that you should try to get Maddy Meyers on as a guest some time, ideally for the heavily foreshadowed Life Is Strange discussion. She's had some of the most interesting things to say about that game, she's on your coast (Boston, I believe?), and I've always thought she would be a good fit for the Thumbs atmosphere.

I a big fan of Alyssa Rosenberg, but I also think it's more accurate to describe that as what it is: A blog post by Alyssa Rosenberg. She is a pop-culture writer who has been doing thoughtful analysis of media for years. I feel like there's a big gap from Alyssa Rosenberg making yet another excellent blog post on her blog that is currently hosted by The Washington Post and "The Washington Post . . . put[ting] up an article." Here are some of her previous blog posts on Gamergate. She also writes some of my favorite Game of Thrones episode recaps!

Yes. That's why I think this is more about basic etiquette than some complicated nuance that's just impossible to understand. It's impolite to refer to a trans person you know little about as "transitioning" for the same reason it would be impolite ask a cis guy who started growing a beard and wearing backwards baseball caps more frequently if he was finally "transitioning" to at last becoming fully male. It's basically just kind of rude to assume that someone's gender presentation doesn't meet your standards and so they must be in the middle of a "transition" to reach whatever your imagined endpoint is, whether they're trans or cis. On the other hand, if someone is literally transitioning and says they're transitioning and wants people to know they're transitioning (e.g. meaning that they're literally actively in the very process of a change in gender performance/identity/whatever), that's a separate issue entirely.

No, transitioning is not assumed to mean that by itself. However, in the context of this discussion and your previous posts (e.g. "I now know that pre-op is an unacceptable term to describe a trans woman. Can I now say 'transitioning' instead?"), it took on that meaning. So far, I don't believe anything has been said to indicate the girlfriend in question is planning to get genital surgery, or even that the girlfriend is "going through the process of changing genders." So, this is in effect you making a judgement call that she is "transitioning" or "in the process of changing genders." But it's entirely possible this is a trans woman who has a penis, and her process/her transition is done. That's the context that makes both "pre-op" and "transitioning" come across as impolite. So, in this case, "transitioning" is not really very polite either, unless it's how the person explicitly understands their current situation and you're aware of that. Unless that's explicitly how a particular person talks about theirself, it kind of implies you've assessed their gender performance and found it lacking/incomplete. If you know for sure that this girlfriend is considering genital surgery or otherwise says they're transitioning, that's of course fine to say and is potentially relevant information about the topic at hand. Although unfortunately it sounds like maybe the trans woman in question isn't really able to speak for herself here, and her girlfriend called her "pre-op," so maybe there's not really a good source of information on this person at all.

Was this below asking if "transitioning" would be a term that you could use instead of "pre-op" to describe the a situation where the girlfriend had a penis? That was my reading of this statement: If so, then yes, you were implying genital surgery as a necessary endpoint. Someone can be done "transitioning" and not have genital surgery. If you want to use "transitioning" instead of "pre-op" to describe the situation, you aren't addressing the basic problem here, which is an underlying assumption that there is a shared endpoint to "transitioning," and that endpoint is genital surgery. The rule, I still think, is simple: Instead of looking for label, just explain what the situation is. Again: She is dating a trans woman, and her trans girlfriend has a penis. This makes her uncomfortable sexually, and she's not sure what to do. Her trans girlfriend [is/is not] [<--pick one as appropriate] planning to have genital surgery. No confusing terminology or nuance involved. Just the situation described in plain language. If you aren't comfortable with what various terms mean, luckily there is no reason to use them in this case! And, again, this is a pretty crazy edge case and in most circumstances there's really no need to talk about it. But calling someone "pre-op"/"post-op" or using "transitioning" to mean "has not had genital surgery" does carry with it an assumption of genital surgery as a necessary endpoint. This isn't an assumption that exists at a confusing level of nuance that requires a complicated context. It's at the most basic level of language usage and etiquette. Just take a moment to think about it: If you are saying "pre-op"/"post-op" without knowing someone's plans for their genitals, you are assuming that an operation is in the cards, which it may not be. If you "transitioning" to mean "has not had genital surgery," you are assume their transition will involve genital surgery, which it may not.

"Transitioning" can mean a lot of different things. Again, the reason that transitioning doesn't work here is the same reason that "pre-op" and "post-op" don't work. If you use "transitioning" to mean "has not had genital surgery," it incorrectly positions genital surgery as an implied and necessary endpoint. But that's not everyone's plan for their genitals, so saying that someone is "transitioning" doesn't really tell you anything about their genitals at all. You don't know what their endgame is, and unless you've very close to them, you probably won't and don't need to. Unless you know a lot about the specific circumstances of the trans person in particular, it's just basic etiquette to avoid terms that accidentally strongly imply what you think they should be doing with their genitals. Maybe the letter writer knows her trans girlfriend intends to get genital surgery, and that's why she's using that term. Or maybe the letter writer is insensitive or uniformed about trans issues and is just using the term too broadly. We don't really know, so it's best not to repeat it just because someone else said it. (This is the same way that, if a racist white uncle told a story about his new black girlfriend using racial slurs, I wouldn't repeat those slurs.) The solution here is really simple. Just mention the specific situation that's going on: She is dating a trans woman, and her trans girlfriend has a penis. This makes her uncomfortable sexually, and she's not sure what to do. That conveys all the necessary information without accidentally making any judgements about what anybody should be doing with their genitals. If the trans girlfriend is planning to have surgery but hasn't yet, just say exactly that. There's nothing complicated about this! Just convey the information simply, without making assumptions or judgements about anyone's plans for their genitals.

It might be hard to find a physical copy, but you might want to consider Matsumoto Toshio's Funderal Parade of Roses. It's an experimental film from 1969 covering that era's underground gay culture in Tokyo. It's a classic of both Japanese experimental cinema and LGBTQ cinema. The link in this post is to a low quality youtube upload, but it does have English subtitles. The story is kind of a retelling of Oedipus, but the director also played with a lot of documentary techniques. It's been too long since I've seen it and it's kind of hard to classify, but it's worth a try and will give you a glimpse into a cultural moment you might not otherwise be able to experience.

I also quit Isometric around that time. I miss hearing Maddy, Steve, and Georgia, but I find Wu to be abrasive in that performatively aggressive nerd way that I find most video game podcast hosts to be abrasive. I would love if Maddy was a guest form time to time on Idle Weekend, now that there is a thumbs shows based out of the east coast.

First, I want to say that I loved this episode, as usual. But, I have to admit I found it very frustrating that you had a thoughtful discussion about how absurd conventions regarding spoilers prevent critical discourse about gaming . . . and then you went on to obey those absurd conventions by having Nick not talk about the endgame of MGS5 critically because of spoilers! I'm begging you: Please let Nick talk more about the ending to MGS5 in a future podcast! As someone who agrees with you that spoiler conventions limit critical discourse in an absurd way, and as someone who also needs to throw away my gamer card because I'm not going to be putting in the 50 hours to beat MGS5 any time soon, I would love to hear what Nick had to say but couldn't/didn't. Keep up the great work!

Interesting! Thank you for breaking that down.

This is not quite accurate and a little inflammatory in comparison to what happened. No Awards were not given in "most of the categories with a Puppy nominee." They were given only in 5 categories, in which all the nominees were both (1) all from the Puppies Slates and (2) those puppy slate nominees were of low quality and/or obviously there for political reasons. (So, for example, Guardians of the Galaxy still won for best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, even though it was on a puppies slate, because obviously the movie itself was not affiliated with the puppies movement. Works did not appear to be voted down out of spite for being on a puppy slate, but instead based on whether or not they were good or bad. As it happens, almost all of them were very bad!) They absolutely did not "basically decide to blow up the bridges rather than risk a Puppy nomination." They did a sensible thing and used the standard Hugo runoff voting system to rank No Award above bad works. A calm and level headed reaction playing entirely within the preexisting rules, and assigning awards based on the artistic merit of the nominated works. If you read GRRM's blogs handicapping the Hugos from a few days ago and compare it to the list of winners, it gives good context for what happened.

Presumably it's because the awards will be announced this week.

I'm not sure I agree with this reading of the Maron piece. (Setting aside the fan comic drawing it, which does come across to me as a bit too didactic.) The piece, specifically, is not lecturing people on their emotional immaturity as if he himself is not emotionally immature. It's precisely the opposite: he is talking about his own emotional immaturity and need for recognition. He is exposing his own human weakness to the audience both to provoke laughter and also greater insight into the way that we all might have a similar experience. And that, in general, is one of the important functions of standup comedy in the style Maron performs. His work is deeply personal, not criticizing society as if here were an objective observer not facing the same problems. So, it's absolutely not "rich," as if you are realizing hypocrisy he does not see. How this overlaps with his own personality is explicitly central to how the piece functions, not something he is unaware of.

Even if you accept the "it's based on Polish history" example, there is just no defense of the exclusion all non-white characters in Witcher. For a really well known example of a work of european fantasy that includes at least some diverse characters because it's influenced by history history and not white supremacist myth history, just look at the Song of Ice and Fire books (much less so the Game of Thrones tv show). Yes, the continent is largely white, but the book also recognizes the fact that people can and do (did) travel across borders. The history and present day politics of the land is strongly informed by immigration across borders, and larger cities are places where you can meet people from other cultures/races. If Witcher was similarly informed by history history and not a magical racial purity bubble history, it could have done this as well George R R Martin's inclusion of people from outside cultures doesn't ruin the text's ostensible links to its historical inspirations. It paints a better picture of the world, and it shows a much stronger knowlege of history than pulp garbage like Witcher. (Linking this to some tangential topics coming up here, the landmasses that we now know of as Korea and Japan similarly did not live in a racial purity bubble either.) You can create a racial purity bubble when you tell your myths, but it's a conscious choice, not something that can be justified with a claim to historical accuracy. It's a retroactive revision of history based on national borders in the modern world, not related at all to actual history, which is much more complicated. It doesn't mean that every kind of work needs every ethnic and racial group in the world, but once you start creating work for a global audience, you are open for criticism from that audience. You can reject that criticism or not, but it's valid criticism.

This is not quite right. Japan was actively colonizing the surrounding area from the late 1800s in a way that was undeniably cultural imperialism, occupying places like Taiwan and Korea, treating the natives as primitives, and trying to "civilize" them. It got much worse the 1940s within Japan, but imperialism outside Japan was a pretty fundamental aspect of Meiji and beyond, not a brief aberration. From more or less the moment Japan became something we would understand as a modern nation state, it was practicing the cultural imperialism associated with the major modern nation states of its era. Additionally (not related to your post, but related to this discussion), the degree to which Japan was isolated from the world during its "closed nation" period (and also before then, obviously) is itself something of a cultural myth, precisely analogous to the way games like Witcher and other works of fantasy pulp portray a cultural myth of white homogeneity in Europe. The frequency and nature of the relationship between Japan and the continent shifted based on their respective political situations, but basically any aspect of Japan known via recorded history is necessarily a record of Japan after it has been transformed by substantial cultural exchange with people living in places now known as Korea and China. (Because the earliest extant Japanese myth-histories are written with Chinese characters and modeled after Chinese histories.)

And then Steam can ignore it, like all the reviews of Depression Quest talking about how Zoe Quinn gave them a blowjob. I've reported a ton of this kind of stuff and seen very little follow up. Steam seems just not to care about that they have become a very welcoming environment for racist and misogynist hate groups.

Yes, absolutely. Again, I think the problem here is not the specific story, which is messy but it's one that resonates with me. The problem is that there aren't also more queer characters already to make this feel like one version of a coming out story instead of the coming out story.

Yes, you're absolute correct that it's just another arm of heteronormativity! Similarly, don't suggest that it's not a privilege to have the option of engaging in an opposite sex relationship with all the legal and social approval that entails, which seems to be implicit in your current argument about bisexual erasure. Being mistaken as straight is, as you say, not a privilege. However, having the ability to engage in opposite sex relationships is a profound privilege, and it's why many gay youth do go through this bargaining period. That's precisely why it's an erasure of the gay coming out experience to suggest that depictions of that struggle with heteronormativity can never be shown.A stronger critical apparatus for approaching bisexual erasure would recognize this and allow for fictional representations of gay coming out stories where the power of heteronormativity leads to situations like Bobby's, because it's a real situation that occurs. A major factor in bisexual erasure is the inability to distinguish between this bargaining process gay youth frequently face and real bisexuality. To the extent that you are arguing that this bargaining process cannot or should not be depicted in fiction, your efforts to combat bisexual erasure are counterproductive because they participate in that blurring. Instead, a less brittle and more robust critical apparatus to combat bisexual erasure would need to recognize and distinguish between these two discrete phenomena, rather than arguing that the gay coming out experience should itself be erased. I am arguing that both coming out experiences like Bobby's and the experiences of bisexual people are deserving of fictional representation. Admitting that gay people struggle with heteronormativity in their coming out process does not erase the bisexual experience. Rather, it more clearly distinguishes the challenges of the bisexual experience from that challenges of the gay experience. Both exist as queer experiences, and depicting one does not erase the other. Thank you for your thoughtful response. I also do feel like we're very close to agreeing, to be honest. Personally, I absolutely do agree that it is a privilege of a kind that single gay people can go out and be assumed to be straight, and that this is a privilege worth discussing. Like with the issue of being "mistaken" for being straight versus having the privilege of the option to engaging in opposite sex relationships, this is another privilege of passing that comes with its own negative aspects.

I think it's maybe condescending to assume that Bendis unaware of what he's doing or that life experiences that resonate with my own are insulting tropes. Again, this reads to me as saying a realistic coming out process that reflects my own lived experiences (again, minus telepathy, obviously) is just a set of cliched tropes that should not be depicted. Surely the path to avoiding bisexual erasure isn't to erase representations of the coming out process of many gay people, right? This story is not a problem in itself. The problem is the larger context of a lack of bisexual characters in general, not the circumstances of Bobby's outing. I also feel like the particular mode of the bisexual erasure argument coming up in discourse surrounding Bobby's outing, as well intentioned as it may be, fails to confront the privilege inherent in being able to pass by means of the option to engage in an opposite sex relationship. Many young gay people go through a bargaining period precisely because they want to hold on to the privilege of having the option of being in a relationship with someone of the opposite sex. By arguing that this bargaining should be suppressed or is otherwise unacceptable in fictional representations, I feel that people arguing that this is primarily an act of bisexual erasure (as opposed to gay bargaining) are not acknowledging the reality of the privilege that the option of an opposite sex relationship provides. Again, this doesn't mean that bisexual people aren't real or that bisexuality is a phase. Bisexual people are real, and there should be more of them in media. But, for many people who are more or less exclusively gay, this is a real part of the coming out process, and acknowledging it does not erase bisexuality. In my opinion, an argument for better bisexual representation that rests on erasing the messy details of gay coming out experiences is not going to be productive as a critical apparatus for analyzing media, and it is also unlikely to be successful as a strategy for getting better bisexual representation.

Except that Rachel Edidin's point isn't that the details of telepathy makes this better. Her arguments are that: (1) Jean is not portrayed as a model here, she is portrayed as a confused teenager earnestly but imperfectly trying to help her friend. To the extent that people complain that this is not a perfect how to manual for being a good ally, they completely miss the mark. (2) There is not one perfect coming out scenario. Some people (including Rachel Edidin herself and also me) had experiences like Bobby's (minus the telepathy, of course), and we were grateful for it, even if it's not in the best practices of how to come out. (3) Arguments about bisexual erasure in this portrayal of Bobby conflate two discrete phenomena. Phenomenon 1: Bisexual erasure is real and it sucks. Phenomenon 2: Gay youth frequently do, in fact, go through a bargaining stage where they identify as bi. This doesn't mean that bisexuality is a phase. It does mean, though, that gay youth are frequently scared of fully accepting their identity as gay. The arguments about bisexual erasure in this case take an accurate portrayal of Bobby's bargaining and present it as a portrayal of problematic bisexual erasure. Bobby's coming out narrative rings absolutely true to my own experience, from Jean's imperfection as an ally to Bobby's bargaining phase. I don't think this is anyone's intention, but the arguments about this scene as bisexual erasure have, to me, come across as an attempt to erase my own sexuality.

It seems fairly stable. Judging from the lowest effort GG activism possible (signing an online petition) and assuming no sock puppets, they have pretty consistently had a core of about 3000-4000 supporters. Remember Mark Kern's hilariously stupid petition? He didn't understand how small the membership was, and set the goal at 5000 people. He's still sitting around 3600. Internet petitions from earlier in GG also had around the same amount of support. It's enough core supporters to ruin someone's life with harassment and enough to trick a company into thinking they matter, but it's a stagnant group of core conspiracy theorists.

You're giving him too much credit. Last fall he was up in 8chan posting with the scum of the earth in heinous threads primarily dedicated to harassing Quinn/Sarkeesian/Wu, for the explicit purpose of giving the movement moral support. Yes, it's an anonymous message board, but he was so sure that he wanted everyone to know he was doing that that he verified that it was really him on his twitter feed. Total Biscuit did it it too. I watched both of these things happen in real time. Both of them knew exactly what this was, and always have since the beginning. The only real credit you can give Boogie is that he has tried to distance himself from it because it was a terrible fit for his "I'm-a-nice-guy" persona, whereas it's a perfect fit for TB's "Bill-O'Reily-of-video-games" persona.

I don't think they're less fanatical. I just think reddit culture is susceptible to a certain rhetorical style that makes it easier to mount a very specific kind of debunking. But it's precisely that same weakness to this rhetorical style that also makes it a hotbed for women-in-games-with-red-lines.pngs presented as insurmountable evidence of collusion. Stuff like this frequently rises to the top of the subreddit, for example: No group who sees three words in a steam press release and Nathan Grayson providing a second hand quote from Zoe Quinn from another article as evidence of corruption is capable of being convinced. I'm being honest when I say that it's a total waste of my time. The core belief systems of being oppressed by ess-jay-dubyahs is so ingrained that the best you can do is stop one particular conspiracy theory from taking off in one specific instance. But like Remo said in the Idle Thumbs cast on this, it's like a hydra of misinformation where new heads just sprout up, no matter how many you cut off.

I will say this for KiA: I have what I consider to be a distressingly/embarrassingly high amount of reddit karma points on KiA, which I have gotten entirely from posts strangling budding conspiracy theories in their infancy. I know it's a waste of my time and a pointless game of whack-a-mole, but it is possible to get through, change their narrative, and have them reward you for it with meaningless reddit points under the following conditions: (1) You post within an hour of so of the OP, before a crazy narrative builds up. Once they've internalized something into their core belief system, it's too late. (2) You write like a Vulcan, because reddit culture rewards a certain tone of "this-is-just-pure-logic" that is actually total bullshit but they eat it up. (3) You just stick to factual corrections and don't mention that not only is this particular conspiracy about Anita Sarkeesian/Brianna Wu/Zoe Quinn wrong, but also that you think hate against Anita Sarkeesian/Brianna Wu/Zoe Quinn is misdirected in general. (This is really just a subset of the first point, which is that you can't challenge their core beliefs.) Just to be clear, this is an absolutely pointless exercise and I know it. But sometimes when I glance over there to see what new insanity is building up, I give in to the urge to prune some conspiracy or another before it builds into a new harassment narrative. It can be done, but the timing has to be right and you have to learn to speak their language. It's kind of a shuffling deck chairs on the titanic situation though, because they're incredibly resistant to challenges to their core narrative. None of this works on 8chan, obviously, where group consensus is created by who shouts the loudest and most frequently. There is a really significant cultural split between them in that way. A post debunking a conspiracy that might have been the most upvoted on a KiA thread gets shouted down and ignored 8chan. . . . please nobody waste their time interacting with these people like I do, it's not worth it . . .

If it wasn't outright banned, it would be down-voted enough that no one would see it except the first dozen people.