14/ For instance, what could it possibly mean—a post-postmodernist might ask—for a person misgendering another person to simultaneously be aggressor and victim? By the same token, what would it mean if a transgender person who was being misgendered was both aggressor and victim?
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15/ To be clear, these are metamodernist (post-postmodernist) thought experiments, and they are inductive—meaning, they muse on how overlapping metanarratives could produce a novel solution to an otherwise intractable problem. They do not assume a certain result is the right one.
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16/ If we ask the facially silly but fundamentally metamodern and utilitarian question, "Could a person who is misgendering another—or who is being misgendered themselves—ever occupy the role of *both* aggressor and victim?" we suddenly discover that we've come to a new solution.
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17/ In many jurisdictions, a criminal assault is reduced to a non-criminal violation if the two parties mutually consented to enter into physical combat—the term often used is "mutual combat." In such situations, the parties' implied consent to fight makes the fight non-criminal.
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18/ Within the context of "mutual combat" we have something called the "fighting words doctrine"—which says that certain insults aren't protected by the First Amendment because they fundamentally operate as an invitation to a fist-fight and therefore run counter to public safety.
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19/ So—for instance—if a white man calls an African-American man the n-word, in many jurisdictions if the African-American man then assaults the white man "fighting words doctrine" will be an affirmative defense against a criminal conviction. It theoretically acts as a deterrent.
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20/ Having a "fighting words doctrine" is preferable to a "prior restraint" on speech—a government telling people what they can and can't say—because it discourages (rather than restrains) certain speech by saying that the law might not be on your side if you get your ass kicked.
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21/ A metamodernist thought experiment imagining how or when a person misgendering another person and/or a transgender person being misgendered might be both aggressor and victim at once would immediately light upon the possibility of mutual combat in response to a misgendering.
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22/ When we imagine a transgender person who is misgendered as a victim only, the only possible result is a statute protecting that victim. Allowing for only that one possibility allows demagogues like Peterson to get famous by playing one side of a artificially narrow question.
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23/ But what if we told those who want to deliberately misgender others as a personal insult that if you do and if you then *get your fucking ass kicked*, the law may not deem that a crime because your deliberate misgendering constituted "fighting words" (i.e. consent to combat)?
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