War vs Woo Redux: Calling Myself In
Trying to balance integrity with empathy
This is the first time I am writing a distinct follow up to a previous blog of mine, but I knew it was controversial.
One response I received was:
”As someone who is non-binary, that was super uncomfortable to read, and I regret doing so.”
I am also non-binary, so it’s already pretty clear that people are not going to fully relate to each other just on gender identity alone.
Another I received was:
“I don't think you were overly mean or anything like that, but some people can't handle when something they've linked to their identity is criticized so I can see how some people can be upset.” (anonymous cis woman)
In talking to some folks after the fact I have felt that some additional clarification is necessary.
The root of that last blog for me, was the pain of loneliness that I feel in not being able to connect with many people. That inability to connect stems from a variety of sources - my autism, my ambition, my world view, etc.
But in most people’s lives, we usually tend to connect the most with other people of our same gender. After all, we get segregated with them a lot so we tend to have more contact with them, and a shared experience obviously.
As I noted in the other blog, when I finally got to embrace my femininity and my sense of womanhood (despite technically being non-binary) it was exciting and affirming and I was very pleased to be included and welcomed into several women’s spaces.
But that joy was soon met with discomfort and anxiety over noticing some prevalent patterns (such as astrology) that do not jive with me.
Why not just ‘look past it’ for the sake of connection?
At the heart of this isn’t astrology, or war, or woo. It’s the question of how much cognitive/emotional dissonance we’re able or willing to tolerate in ourselves and each other in exchange for belonging.
I understand why astrology can feel grounding, connective, or affirming, especially in communities that have been historically dismissed or harmed. It serves a communal function and gives people a sense of meaning in a world that often can feel very chaotic and confusing. Of course that is comforting.
In talking it over with a friend last weekend, I attempted to explain that to me, ‘intellectual honesty’ is critically important - and with that comes accepting and adjusting to ‘hard truths’ rather than taking solace in what could be ‘comfortable fictions’.
This is why we all need at least one friend who will tell us what we need to hear even when we don’t want to. The friend I was talking to last weekend grilled me about this very topic, leading in part to this follow up.
This ends up brings up the age-old argument: if a belief isn’t directly harming anyone, is it really a big deal? is it really worth fussing about?
The answer to that question is not black and white - it’s a spectrum.
Should we discourage so called ‘little white lies’ when we could instead focus on ‘bald-faced lies’?
If it were a strict ‘one or the other’ situation, of course you would deal with the bigger liar.
But the thing is, there is plenty of evidence out there that someone who tells little white lies and never gets checked can get more and more comfortable with lying and eventually become a compulsive liar (which can obviously harm people).
Will it happen in every case? No. But that also doesn’t mean we should completely ignore it.
And little white lies aren’t the only thing that can snowball like that.
Superstitions may start as a little thing, and the more a person reinforces the idea/belief, the stronger it gets, and the more their brain will start thinking like that about other things as well. That becomes a problem.
As a hockey fan, I was thrilled when Sidney Crosby broke a decades-old superstition of not touching the conference final award in the playoffs one year - and his team still went on to win the final playoff championship.
Feeling ‘not in control’ is an experience that most humans dislike.
Superstitions function as a way to gain a sense of control, structure, and predictability, which helps mitigate anxiety.
But as the saying goes: ‘worrying is like a rocking chair - it gives you something to do but it doesn’t get you anywhere.’
Superstitions give people something to focus on, but intellectual honesty encourages us to question whether adhering to them actually accomplishes what we hope it does.
Logical fallacies can snowball as well.
Many, many men believe a bunch of logical fallacies and think they’re ‘just being rational’. And they will use that as an excuse to perpetuate any number of harmful behaviours.
This is part of why I feel strongly that intellectual honesty matters.
Though it’s worth making the distinction that some beliefs only harm the believer while others harm other people. But that’s a topic for another post.
Rejection and Isolation
I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things in my life, and that comes from the courage to ask ‘hard’ questions. I might get an answer I don’t like (it happens often), but I will also acknowledge ‘the evidence is clear and if I want to have integrity, I need to act accordingly’.
I have interrogated a lot of aspects of my identity and the world that I live in.
This has come to stem from two of my favourite quotes I’ve ever come across:
“I want to believe as many true things, and as few false things, as possible”
-Matt Dillahunty“You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society that raised you”
-Eliezer Yudkowski
Those two quotes provide a very strong moral and ethical underpinning. I try to live by them.
I have interrogated my gender identity: I was raised and socialized as a cisgender male and I do not identify as any form of ‘male’ anymore. This has resulted in my ‘giving up’ a lot of privilege, and being transgender has certainly made my life harder. But every time I think about trying to ‘go back’ to reduce that hardship, I quickly remember the discomfort I felt pre-transition. Overall, I am less uncomfortable living in truth.
I have interrogated my beliefs: I was raised catholic and after interrogating many of the ideas and beliefs that I encountered and experienced within religion, I determined that atheism made the most sense to me.
Of course the wrinkle here is that it is impossible to ‘prove’ a negative. No one can ‘prove’ that God doesn’t exist, but each individual can look at the arguments and evidence for existence and decide for themselves. But somewhat like ‘giving up’ privilege in ceasing to live as a man, many social and institutional structures favour theists.
I have interrogated my racial privilege: I used to be a white apologist. Over time I eventually realized I was indeed indoctrinated into white privilege. Even later I realized I was living within a system built upon white supremacy from the top down.
It is not enough to not actively participate in that anymore, the correct response is that white people need to become more actively anti-racist. Aka, affirmative action. Again, it would be easier and more comfortable to keep acting ‘the old way’, but it’s not correct.
Those are just a few examples.
As I said, in many aspects of my lived experience and reality I have taken a good hard look at things. In doing so, I determined based on the evidence that what I’d been taught was false, and had to change myself, my behaviours, or my beliefs accordingly.
Each of those examples are common, ‘popular’ social systems that a majority of people follow and help them to unite. Rejecting those systems put me at odds with many.
To be clear, I’m not saying this to be like ‘look at me, I’m so much more intellectually honest than you!’
I don’t necessarily take joy in writing these things.
As I said, there is pain involved because rejecting these faulty identities and beliefs has served to isolate me. I don’t want to be isolated. I want to connect.
This causes me cognitive and emotional dissonance.
The two quotes I included above might feel logic-heavy but intersectional feminism derives from empathy and integrity. From caring about the well-being of others, and recognizing the ways in which we have intersecting and overlapping privilege and oppression.
I will point out a couple of contrasting quotes from another previous blog of mine: “Great Minds Think Alike”:
‘Time decides who you meet in life,
your heart decides who you want in your life,
and your behaviour decides who stays in your life’
-Ziad K. Abdelnour
I think this one does a good job of illustrating the empathy and emotional side. We are constantly doing a dance in our lives - trying to find symbiotic people, but also trying to live our values.
Ideally I would connect really well with most people that I meet, but that is not reality.
“Always strive to be nice, but never fail to be kind”
-Dr. Who
This is another all-time favourite of mine, and this is also where a lot of cognitive-emotional dissonance comes in for me. The distinction here is that ‘nice’ is performative and ‘kind’ is empathetic.
I don’t want to be an asshole to people who don’t share my beliefs, but if it’s something I’ve already determined is a harmful belief (like believing that being gay is bad) then I’m not going to just zip my lips in the name of respectability politics.
But there is a way to express that which is still kind rather than combative: ‘your belief is harmful and I think you should reconsider it’ rather than ‘you’re a bigoted piece of crap and you should get beat up’. The former can lead to a dialogue, the latter is just throwing a gauntlet.
Support, Family, and Identity
I would suggest you can’t really be an intersectional feminist if you want to pick and choose which things you acknowledge.
But acknowledging these differences, and striving to ‘do the work’ to grow and evolve and be the best person you can be does have a tendency to isolate a person.
Because not a ton of people do that work, and depending on how serious and dedicated one is about the work, they might still end up far ahead of their peers.
I had already lived a really lonely life before I really got into the meat of the changes I’ve gone through.
I’m in my 40s and I do not have a consistent, reliable, in-person social network. I care about personal growth, about striving to stay aware, keep learning, and ultimately to try and help others.
Here’s a quote that is directly relevant to that, and one that I feel in my bones:
“Sometimes we expect more from others because we would be willing to do that much for them”
-Unknown
I have a good amount of friends in my life (mostly virtually) who align with many of my beliefs and values. They are called ‘chosen family’ for a reason.
But for example - my family isn’t as aligned, at least not in as many aspects.
My family ‘supports’ me, but more in a ‘passive’ way.
If I tried to sit down with them to have a real conversation focused on white privilege, it would be a hard sell. Let alone taking any real action. I could ask them to donate to particular charities (or avoid particular ones), but they would likely not accompany me to an in-person protest.
I recall telling my mom once something to the effect of ‘it would be incredibly meaningful to me if you offered to attend a protest with me without me having to ask’.
To me, that would show that she truly understands my values and wants to show the utmost support. That’s the sort of person I strive to be myself. And that’s the sort of person I value and respect highly. It’s one of the highest forms of living your values, and supporting people who are not as privileged as you.
Sadly, I no longer have the physical capacity (or financial security) to be able to attend protests like I used to. But you get the idea.
In fairness, my sister is raising two special needs children as a single parent, and my mom (who is now in her 70s) spends a lot of her time and energy helping with that.
I do understand that neither of them have as much ‘spare bandwidth’ to worry about greater social justice as I do. The special needs aspect is more directly prescient to them. And even there - it speaks to some of my own privileges that I do have the capacity to worry about all these other injustices.
So to a degree, I do need to ‘pick my battles’.
And this brings us back to the topic of ‘woo’ and ‘is it really hurting anyone?’
As I said, I understand why astrology (among other things) serves as a communal touchpoint, but that doesn’t change the fact that yes, I also believe it can be harmful.
Not that anyone is committing grave atrocities in the name of Scorpios everywhere, but I’ve heard one too many people genuinely make comments about how you should ‘never’ date someone of a certain star sign.
That’s harmful. That’s influencing people’s life choices and impacting their happiness based on something that truly does not matter any more than their height or eye colour. Some people make their living from astrological ‘guidance’. And I think that can be dangerous.
And yes, I do feel like a bit of an asshole for saying that, because I know this can feel like a rejection of something people have woven deeply into their identity.
But there is a danger in making certain things your identity - that’s a big part of why self-interrogation is painful and scary, and that’s partly what I was referring to when I wrote in the other post that ‘people get really emotionally attached to the answers they believe they have found’.
Some people might be thinking ‘what about picking your battles Lacey? you’re spending a lot of energy going after astrology instead of fascism!’
As a queer, disabled, transgender person, I am very aware of the threat of fascism. Yes, there are bigger fish to fry, but that doesn’t mean this doesn’t still matter. Anyone who looks at my social media will see that I regularly speak out against the bigger fish.
And lest I not be fair, I do also want to take an aside to call out men again.
Lots and lots of men wrap themselves in the false security of ‘rationality’. They believe (as I once did) that if they fully give themselves over to logic and intellectualism, they will have all the answers and can never be wrong and so they don’t have to worry about being embarrassed and looking dumb (which many men are terrified of).
Many men make ‘rationality’ their identity, but it’s a just a ruse they are playing on themselves.
Here is another quote that i’ll use to call myself in:
“The true mark of maturity is when someone hurts you,
you try to understand their situation instead of hurting them back”
-Unknown
Has astrology hurt me personally?
No, but as I said I do feel pain at in the dissonance of wanting to connect with fellow queers and sapphics who really like astrology, but my desire to live my values and beliefs authentically is an opposite magnetic force.
And I found myself frustrated because for me science clearly demonstrates that astrology, as it is commonly presented and practised, does not hold up to evidence. (ps smug atheists are also annoying as heck).
It’s hard for me not to be honest within the community about my stance, but that puts me at odds with a lot of people who I want to connect with.
Most of the time I just say ‘I don’t really believe in that’, but for me that feels akin to being passive about white privilege. It’s somewhat intellectually dishonest.
And that’s why I dug into the question of ‘why do so many women, queer, and non-binary people get into this stuff? it’s clearly a pattern so there’s a reason’, and that’s what led to the analysis of women ‘over-optimizing’ for intuition and men ‘over-optimizing’ for logic.
And me stuck in between.
Feeling & Thinking
This is why I specifically I chose ‘Feeling Thinker’ as opposed to ‘Thinking Feeler’ as the label of choice.
Empathy absolutely matters and is important, but emotions are often irrational. This is why when we are on the verge of making an impulsive decision (which stems from emotion), we might ask someone we trust ‘should I go ahead with this?’
External people are not governed by your emotions so they can give a rational, well-reasoned answer.
If we only ever followed our emotions we would get ourselves into terrible trouble. This comes back to the argument from the previous article about an endless history of men leading humanity into wars, ironically under the guise of ‘logic’ but really guided by emotion.
And that’s building one’s identity around things that make an individual feel good but don’t necessarily hold up to scrutiny - creates for me a sense of cognitive and emotional dissonance. Like a mosquito inside my skull that I can’t get rid of.
One last quote:
“Feelings are like children, you don’t want to let them drive
but you don’t want to stuff them in the trunk either”
-Quote from the movie ‘Thanks For Sharing’
I consider myself a Feeling Thinker because the feelings inform, but I try to ensure that logic guides.
I’m frustrated by how it feels like so many of the people I would otherwise connect with believe things that very explicitly conflict with what I have learned after so much intentional self-interrogation, and unpacking my own privilege. Some things I can let go, and some I can’t.
I’m still working to find the balance to reconcile intellectual honesty and belonging. I know that pretending doesn’t really work for me.
Ultimately I’m trying to find others who are also able and willing to sit in discomfort in the name of integrity. We don’t have to agree on everything, I don’t even agree on everything with my closest friends.
But as long as we’re all being honest, genuine, and actively trying to be our best selves, that feels like common ground for any meaningful connection.
Lacey Artemis (she/they) is a neurodivergent speaker, consultant, and media producer. She is the founder of Neuromix Consulting which provides sensory comfort and accessibility consulting. She also writes the Beyond Quiet Rooms blog, also on Substack.
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