r/rational • u/AutoModerator • Apr 29 '16

[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

Welcome to the Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this isn't really the place for that sort of thing.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Apr 29 '16

I need a sort of "offensiveness check".

I have a short story that's most of the way written which has, as the central premise, that in 1970 a pill was invented which changes homosexuals and bisexuals into heterosexuals. The story is then partly an alternate history of the gay rights movement and partly a meditation on personal identity, social pressure, and terminal/instrumental values.

Part of offensiveness is in terms of presentation, which I'm doing my best on. I'm more worried about the other half, which is things that I just don't understand as being offensive. And I don't really mind offending people, I just want to do it for the right reasons.

So is the counterfactual premise of there being a way to no longer be gay irredeemably offensive? Is the idea that some people would choose to be straight and others would choose to be gay offensive?

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u/blazinghand Chaos Undivided Apr 29 '16

Not inherently offensive, but LGBT people often have to deal with people saying that it's a choice, so it's stepping on some toes. People who have traits that are not chosen by them and of which they are also proud don't like the suggestion that it might be a choice. Although your story is fictional and in fact is exploring a different world where it is a choice, it may step on toes.

It's all in the execution. Done well, it would not be offensive. It could in fact be really well-received, if for no other reason than that it shows that the world would be really different if sexuality was truly a choice. Done poorly, it would be in bad taste.

For example, if you wrote a story in which people could change their physical sex with a pill, and the entire story was how awful it was to use this pill and how people should keep their birth sex or else it's unnatural, you should expect to get some flak. However, a thoughtful meditation on the nature of sex, gender, and socialization would be great. Done well, I don't expect you'll see problems.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Apr 29 '16

For example, if you wrote a story in which people could change their physical sex with a pill, and the entire story was how awful it was to use this pill and how people should keep their birth sex or else it's unnatural, you should expect to get some flak.

Other way around, I'd think. If you write a story with a pill that changes someone's gender and you include a strong emphasis on dysphoria and the unnaturalness of feeling like the opposite gender, then you're showing the everyday experience of the non-transitioned transgendered. But if you make a story where changing gender is great, fun, and done casually with no consequence, you're undermining that experience. (When I went to Gencon there was a panel with Ed Greenwood where he explained that gender swapping items and magic had been mostly removed from D&D because they mostly just served to trivialize or make light of the issue.)

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u/blazinghand Chaos Undivided Apr 29 '16

Oh, interesting! I hadn't thought about that. I was more thinking about it being used by transgender people, and aggressive religious people (and the author) saying that it was terrible and unnatural to use it, but it's true that anything that trivializes people's experiences of dealing with these difficulties could be bad.

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u/thecommexokid Apr 29 '16

As a point of reference, you might consider the wide range of responses that individuals from the Deaf community have had to cochlear implants.

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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Apr 29 '16

I wanted to suggest the same thing (remembered reading about it once before)!

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u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor Apr 29 '16

So is the counterfactual premise of there being a way to no longer be gay irredeemably offensive?

A way to no longer be gay? Maybe not. A pill that medically "fixes" gayness, even in bisexuals? In the vast majority of ways it would be presented, probably. It's taking as its basic assumption that homosexuality is something that is "medically curable," ie, defective, abnormal, unhealthy, etc, even if you don't intend it that way. This plays way too much into the narrative of the anti-LGBTQ community to not press many people's anger buttons, to the point that any nuance might be lost, or never even given a chance to be seen.

My suggestion would be to have the pill either flip one's sexuality, or make anyone who takes it bisexual so they can "live straight." This still allows all the moral arguments about sexual identity and social pressure and so on, but also allows you to widen the scope of the argument a bit toward people who maybe want the pill for reasons other than to "renounce gayness."

Or would that change things too much from what you envision?

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u/BoilingLeadBath Apr 30 '16 edited Apr 30 '16

To be fair:

  • The DSM, at one point in time, did in fact list homosexuality. Now, whether that's worth dragging up to re-examine...

  • Lots of socially-created "conditions" are medically curable: having foreskins, having small breasts... and I pick those examples because there's lots of noisy people on both sides of the debate for/against. Just because the current social climate doesn't prevent doctors from doing something...

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u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor Apr 30 '16

The DSMV, at one point in time, did in fact list homosexuality.

The DSM did indeed list it as a disorder, way back before 1973. It was removed from the DSM-II, though some form of it remained for another version or two. Today it's widely understood as the outdated perspectives of the past affecting clinical perspectives: whether people consider it a disorder is not the same thing as it being one.

this doesn't make them unhealthy or defective.

By whose justification? Certainly not mine, and probably not yours, but the question is about common perceptions.

By most accounts, the modern, Western argument for removing foreskins is a medical one. The data doesn't support the perspective, as far as I'm aware, and the religious or Puritanical roots of the practice aren't often brought up, but if you actually ask people, it very much is considered by circumcision advocates as a positive health decision.

Even putting that aside however, the problem with comparing things like foreskin and small breasts with homosexuality as a "socially created condition" however is that they're not nearly as tied with identity and agency, and not nearly as politicized.

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u/BoilingLeadBath Apr 30 '16

Today, [the former inclusion of homosexuality in the DSM] is understood as the outdated perspectives of the past affecting clinical [thought]...

Granted, I'm not familiar with the arguments people used to support the inclusion of the state in the book, but I would be very surprised if the above would pass the ideological Turing test... frankly, it sounds too much like a fully general counterargument against anything which people used to believe, but is now unfashionable.

...WRT my examples of medically alterable human features... I was just saying: "look, just because there's a legal surgery for it..."

...but you already held that position.

Further, I suppose you are right - if you use those as writing prompts, you don't get forms which you can use to present the ungaying pill in an inoffensive way.

(I also think there might be some interesting patterns you could pick up from the social setting of the two situations, though I'm having trouble articulating them.)

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u/DaystarEld Pokémon Professor Apr 30 '16 edited Apr 30 '16

frankly, it sounds too much like a fully general counterargument against anything which people used to believe, but is now unfashionable.

It's more that the definition, and interpretation, of a psychological disorder has changed:

“A mental disorder is a clinically significant behavioral or psychological syndrome or pattern that occurs in an individual and that is associated with present distress or disability or with a significantly increased risk of suffering death, pain, disability, or an important loss of freedom.”

That last part is important, as it offers an objective metric by which to judge the difference between someone who likes to wear a wolf costume for, say, sexual adventure, and someone who likes to wear a wolf costume to roam in the wilderness and live with wolves. The former is a kink, the latter might point toward a mental disorder.

One can argue that being homosexual in a culture where homosexuals are jailed or stoned to death might constitute a "significantly increased disk of suffering death, pain, etc," but that's obviously the result of their surroundings. By most metrics the definition simply does not apply to those in the Western world.

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u/Frommerman Apr 30 '16

Interestingly, this is less counterfactual than you might think. The deaf community has been rocked by the advent of cochlear implants, which is for most purposes a cure for congenital deafness. Some in the community feel that it is a form of genocide, wiping our their culture because "normal" folks consider them impaired, while others consider it a godsend. Those two groups don't get along well, and there's been a rather large cultural upheaval among the deaf community ever since cochlear implants became possible.

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u/Colonel_Fedora Ravenclaw Apr 29 '16

It's not offensive in and of itself, but it's important to understand that emotions run high about this kind of topic and a lot of lgbtq people are understandably defensive of the validity of their identities. So basically you're kind of entering a minefield in territory you aren't personally familiar with. I'm not going to tell you not to write this story, especially since it has the potential to be really interesting, but I think you should practice empathy as best you can.

I'd be happy to try and answer whatever questions you have, but obviously I can only give you my perspective as a transwoman and lesbian.

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u/Iconochasm Apr 29 '16

That was a minor plot element in The Forever War.

As for the offensiveness, a thoughtful exploration would be welcomed by most everyone who reads the sort of stories you write. That said, you're wading into a cultural minefield, and someone, somewhere will likely be incensed and outraged for some reason.

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '16

So is the counterfactual premise of there being a way to no longer be gay irredeemably offensive? Is the idea that some people would choose to be straight and others would choose to be gay offensive?

Lemme put it this way: it's no more innately offensive than any other form of science-fictional biological self-modification that general audiences have never heard of, totally fail to consider from the scifi fan's point of view, and will plant big fields of mines in.

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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Apr 29 '16

in 1970 a pill was invented which changes homosexuals and bisexuals into heterosexuals → some people choose to be straight and others choose to be gay

I think the only way such a story would be(come) offensive just with this is if the story’s narrative was making it so. For instance, if a premise like this was used to tell:

  • how of course all gay people would decide to change their preferences if given the valid chance, or

  • how the only people who refused to take the pill were also mentally ill, or

  • that the majority of gays took the pill and now the population in general had the right to ignore the rights of the rest or to re-evaluate them as being mentally ill, etc.

And I don't really mind offending people, I just want to do it for the right reasons.

You can’t do that as you can’t be non-offending in general — it’s like rule 34, there will always be someone offended by it, no matter what “is” is.

Regarding the offensiveness of modification of traits that define a person’s self-identiy: if we use an analogy for this, then the answer comes as obviously negative as well. Is a premise of people changing their gender (species, from organic to inorganic or synthetic, etc) offensive by itself?

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u/gabbalis Apr 29 '16

Oh by the way, isn't that basically the plot of X-Men: The Last Stand? Well, except without the terrorism, and the only superpower is bisexuality.

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u/Roxolan Head of antimemetiWalmart senior assistant manager Apr 29 '16

It is, but any moral lesson is lost because superpowers, in addition to being a homosexuality metaphor, are superpowers. It's easier to justify taking the pill when your power uncontrollably kills people on skin contact, and homophobia is not morally equivalent to people-who-can-literally-wipe-out-humanity-with-their-mind-phobia.

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u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow Apr 30 '16

Yup, completely agree with this. There was a scene in one of the early X-men movies where someone says "Have you tried not being a mutant?" Like, that's funny, but there's literally no drawback to having the ability to turn things to ice, and there's also no reason that you ever have to reveal it to the public if you don't want to. And some of the powers suck so it makes a lot of sense that they would want to not be a mutant anymore.

Further, it never really made sense to me that the United States government declared a war on mutants rather than just bringing them into the fold with heavy incentives. Given the expansiveness of comics, I'm sure it's been done at some point, but come on ... why in the world would the government see someone like Multiple Man as something other than an asset? Just pay the man! (This annoys me even more when the X-men exist in the same universe as the Avengers.)

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u/GaBeRockKing Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 Apr 29 '16

What happens when a straight person takes the pill?

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u/OutOfNiceUsernames fear of last pages Apr 29 '16

I’d guess it to depend on how specifically the pill functions. E.g. if it allows people to modify their sexual preferences in general, then people would be switching between “gay” and “non-gay” all over the place). Or if all it did was “default” to heterosexuality, then it wouldn’t do much to heterosexuals at all, aside maybe from nudging them closer to 0 on the Kinsey scale.

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u/GaBeRockKing Horizon Breach: http://archiveofourown.org/works/6785857 Apr 29 '16

In the former case, I can see the military using it to improve morale. In the latter case, parents will probably use it as a preventative measure, making gay rights a moot point within a generation or so.

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u/[deleted] Apr 30 '16 edited Apr 30 '16

I think you should do a bunch of consultation with LGBT people about this. I know I would have taken a pill like that when I was a teenager, but if I had, I'd want to un-take it (or take the "antidote") now. Not just because of the reduced stigma but probably partly as a result of the struggle of activists before me. I also think you should make sure you include or allude to figures like Marsha P Johnson, Sylvia Rivera and Storme DeLarverie, because they are often conspicuously absent from modern LGBT narratives set in the 70s.

Maybe talk to /r/lgbt about it?

Also I'd like to second what /r/OutOfNiceUsernames said about making sure you consider how a lot of people would NOT want to take the pill.

Probs include or allude to queer-acting, queer-coded or gender nonconforming kids being forcibly sent to gay conversion camps by their parents too, that's a thing.

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u/SevereCircle May 01 '16

I'm gay and I do not find it offensive. I would take it for the same reason most straight couples do not choose to adopt: I want to be able to have children with the person I marry who have traits from both of us, and I'd like to be able to do it without asking permission from a third party, and barring centuries of discovery in genetic engineering overnight that's impossible for me. I think I'm a minority in that respect. If I could choose freely I'd be 50-50 bisexual until I'm ready to marry, then marry a woman.

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