Katherine Cross has written an excellent piece on distinguishing legitimate from illegitimate tone policing: Words for Cutting: Why We Need to Stop Abusing The Tone Argument. The article is a valuable read all through. Do not regard my summary here as its replacement. My aim is only to expand on it.

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Cross makes two overarching points. One is that though intention is not magic, it does matter (as she says, it’s still data). And we should acknowledge that. I shall have nothing to say about that; it’s obviously correct (see Dan Fincke). The other is that while it is legitimate to denounce tone policing in many cases (and not only because it’s a fallacy), this should not become a non-circumstantial rule that applies to every instance, as if all tone policing were bad. It’s not.

Within that overarching point she makes the following supporting points:

• Tone policing someone who is defending the oppressed or victimized is often illegitimate. Because when someone does that, “while they claim to be attacking tone, they are actually attacking the message, and often as not the very identity of the messenger.” This is thoroughly explained at GeekFeminismWiki. In these cases, tone isn’t really the issue. It’s just being used to silence someone or avoid addressing the point they are making. And that’s wrong. If you try to do that, you deserve to get called out on your shit. Own it. Then stop it. And do better in future. (I think this can also be done in ignorance—not just as a deliberate tactic, but out of not appreciating the context that evokes a particular tone, as I noted in the case of JT Eberhard’s attempt to tone-police Bria Crutchfield two years ago.)
• Anger and other so-called negative emotions are important and have tremendous personal and social utility (without which, see Miranda). Anger is not irrational. Anger is data and motivation. You can be angry for irrational reasons. But not all reasons to be angry are irrational. Nevertheless, as Cross says, “like any emotion or tool, there are right and wrong ways to deploy it.” Thus, calling someone out for (let’s say) calling for sexists to be killed (even in jest) is not an illegitimate tone argument. That is a fully legitimate tone argument. If you are doing that, your tone is fucked. Sort that shit out.
• Genuinely censurable tone can include threats, ill-wishing, calls for violence, ad hominems, or just plain abuse (see my article The Art of the Insult & The Sin of the Slur for more on that last point).

In short, in Cross’s words:

To put it simply: sometimes someone is being too angry. Sometimes an activist’s rage is doing more harm than good. Sometimes there is no good being done by it whatsoever. Not every emotion we have is a great strike against oppressive forces. Sometimes you are just being too loud, abusing people verbally, triggering them, and so forth. Sometimes you are just being a jerk and your tone is a fairly reliable indicator of this.

Quite. There are some things I think that could be added, though…

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Enhancement the First — extreme vs. reasonable; tone vs. content:

Essentially, Cross is arguing against the use of classifying an argument as a tone policing fallacy, when it’s not a fallacy. And essentially, Cross is focusing on one particular case when it’s not a fallacy: when the tone is itself an evil. Then it is legitimate to call it such. It is not a silencing or derailing tactic, but a legitimate point. More particularly, it’s an honest statement of fact: what you are saying is horrible. And the examples that she focuses on are, accordingly, genuinely horrible.

I actually have not encountered this very often. It’s certainly a thing. Cross documents actual instances. And maybe we are nipping it in the bud with this. But most tone policing I see is not calling out someone for saying something horrible. It is almost always calling them out for saying something reasonable (even if wrong), but just with choices of vocabulary or turns of phrase that are deemed “harsh.” There is no other content than the argument being made or relevant fact being described, the very content which the tone cop claims would not offend them were it described in nicer words. Thus, in these (I think almost all) cases, when someone attacks the tone, there is no actual content to what they are attacking. They are in fact ignoring all the content, and using their dislike of the tone as an excuse to do so.

For example, Cross describes how someone attacked a colleague’s argument with insults against their appearance. This isn’t really a tone issue, per se. Of course, it’s an ad hominem (their appearance is irrelevant to the merits of their argument). And it is indeed a harshly toned ad hominem, so there is that. But more importantly, what is harsh about it is that its content is odious. Therefore, it is actually the content that is being attacked as inappropriate, and not its tone as such—the tone makes it worse, but it would remain bad even if the insult to their appearance were politely verbalized. By contrast, if I say someone’s book sucks, and someone attacks my conclusion by saying I shouldn’t use such a harsh tone (“sucks” being “too rude” a word), that is attacking tone. Because there is no content to my statement that is being attacked. I could say literally exactly entirely the same thing, with exactly all the same content, without the word “sucks,” just by translating that into, let’s say, “was flawed.” Thus, attacking my use of the word “sucks” is tone policing.

This is an issue because Cross is only writing about extreme cases—tone as threats, for example, rather than tone as “uses the word wanker.” And yet most people who might cite her as defending their tone policing are the people who complain about being called a wanker. People who are the recipients of wishes for their death who cite her as defending their tone policing, would be spot on. That’s exactly the tone policing she is defending. But people who chafe at being called a wanker? I don’t think she’s talking about them. At least not when this occurs precisely when it has become evident civil dialogue is useless.

And let me carry the analogy through to make this clear.

Just as “sucks” simply means “was flawed” (the one a harsh or “impolite” tone, the other a soft or “polite” tone), and therefore complaining about the use of the word “sucks” is tone policing, so also “wanker” simply means someone who persistently engages in “egotistical and self-indulgent” behavior (see Wikipedia), and therefore complaining about the use of the word “wanker” is tone policing. Because in both cases, that complaint doesn’t address the actual content. It’s one thing to argue that someone’s conclusion that a book was flawed is wrong. But to argue that they are wrong to use the word “sucks” is a wholly different thing, often a completely useless and pathetic thing, a thing everyone should be ashamed to do.

Address the content. Stop whining about the tone. That should be everyone’s rule.

Except, as Cross explains, when the tone itself is genuinely horrible. But when it is, it’s usually because the offending tone contains horrible content and it is precisely that horrible content we are criticizing, not quite really the tone. At most, the tone is also at issue, when intentionally designed to hurt someone unjustly. But even a string of unsupported invectives conveys content (it makes claims about a person, rather than their argument), so when that content is odious, so is the act of abusing someone in that way. Insulting someone’s appearance contains the content not only of making claims about their appearance, but also of implying claims about its relevance to the discussion, and furthermore, it contains the content of wishing them harmed by such an irrelevancy. That’s what I mean by saying that it isn’t really the tone that’s the issue here. It’s actually the content.

By contrast, if someone genuinely believes another person is persistently engaging in egotistical and self-indulgent behavior, indeed if they even document them doing so, and say so, not to attack an unrelated argument they made somewhere, but simply to describe their behavior (and your feelings about it), that’s not an issue of tone. If you say exactly this same thing, but just in a more common dialect, to wit, “they are a wanker,” a statement that has exactly the same content as “they are persistently engaging in egotistical and self-indulgent behavior,” then someone can attack the tone (“For swoon! What manner of horrid person calleth his fellow men wankers!?”). And in doing so they are avoiding having to defend themselves against the content. That’s a dodge. Not a legitimate argument.

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Enhancement the Second — towards a taxonomy of legitimate and illegitimate tone policing:

Which brings me to one inadvertent defect of Cross’s article. She was rightly focused on the one issue that concerned her (using the tone argument to defend even unconscionable abusiveness). But this did have the consequence of eliding other aspects of the more general problem of resolving when tone policing is legitimate, and when it is not.

To redress that oversight, here are some other examples to consider (probably not all there are):

• (1) Often tone policing is classism.

Trying to police the dialect someone chooses to speak in, and thus attempting to police their audience reach (and who they are as a person, being the sort of person who regularly in their life speaks a certain way), is illegitimate tone policing. As when a professor condemns an activist as “angry” and “to be disregarded” because they use the word “sucks” instead of “is flawed” in a review to describe that professor’s book. That is simply an elitist repulsion against the language of the lower classes, and an attempt to browbeat them into not speaking the language of their audience and thus diminishing their reach and appeal to that audience. It also reflects an irrational obsession with language taboo that characterizes oppressors. It is also a shameful tactic to avoid confronting the content of what someone says (as discussed already above).

• (2) Often tone is an issue of power.

Tone gets attention. Enemies of content know this. Therefore they police tone as a silencing tactic. Not only in the sense Cross already very excellently explains. As she puts it:

[W]hat “the tone argument” refers to is the way in which historically marginalized people can be easily dismissed through recourse to our supposed anger. The bitch, the angry black man/angry black woman, the angry tranny, the fiery Latina, all provide stock figures ready to be deployed against anyone who speaks out against inequality or oppression. But what is often forgotten is that it is deployed against us regardless of our actual “tones.” No matter how gentle you are, no matter how evenhanded your speech, your “tone” is judged by your thesis and not by your intonations or choice of words. If you make a radical or discomfiting argument there will always be a rapscallion in the wings waiting to fit you into the cookie-cutter “angry x” stereotype. While they claim to be attacking tone, they are actually attacking the message, and often as not the very identity of the messenger.

Indeed. But there is an even broader issue here. If you convince activists to be polite, no one reads them; so they aren’t heard; and their message doesn’t get out; and since spreading awareness is their only weapon, this entails a near total disarmament. I have seen someone react to a harshly toned critique of something they said, while completely ignoring the measured-tone critiques of the same thing by other activists. As a result, the softly toned message gets ignored and unknown. The harshly toned message gets signal boosted and legendary. Just another manifestation of Squeaky Wheel Theory.

That oppressors do this is practically teaching activists the lesson that harsh tone gets results. And yeah, it does. The trick is to not go too far with it. And Cross’s article does a good job of laying out what too far means. But that’s about dialing back to an effective setting, not switching the dial to zero. Hence attempting to blunt the tools of your critics is not a legitimate use for tone policing, either. Harsh tone = power. It gets attention. It gets awareness. It gets a response. It therefore has a valid use in activism. Often when someone opposes it, what they really oppose is that it empowers their enemies.

• (3) Often tone is really just affect.

Cross does (somewhat briefly) address the fact that what people often mean by “tone” is actually just an expression of the actual emotions a person is experiencing. And to tell people to shut up about how they feel is also illegitimate tone policing. This point could get lost, I fear, because Cross’s article is about extreme cases like threats and vile wishes and intentional emotional harm, which are not expressions of emotion but substantive statements about desires or attitudes and values. The inattentive (in other words, most people) I fear will not notice the difference, or not notice that Cross intended them to notice the difference. So it bears repeating: if you are telling someone to stop expressing their feelings, you might want to rethink why it’s so important to you that they be silenced about how they feel.

• (4) Often tone is for rallying and morale.

All too often critics of tone mistakenly think the only function of speech is to persuade people who disagree. Nope. Another major function of speech is to rally, motivate, and boost the morale of the people who agree. It is for their sanity. To say, then, that it will “only turn people off” is to miss the point entirely of what it is for. That such speech would turn people off is precisely the insanity such speech is seeking to rescue people from. And it does so not by aiming to convert the unconverted, but to reassure the already converted that they aren’t alone in noticing and thinking and feeling these things, and (perhaps) to motivate them to do something about it, to effect social change.

And that’s an issue we should not forget. Effective activism requires motivating large numbers of people to change something. And that requires acting on their emotions (for which there are many legitimate uses of tone) and also keeping morale up by letting fellows know that they are not alone in their anger or bewilderment or whatever state they are in, and therefore they are not isolated, and therefore their cause is not hopeless. “Why is no one else outraged/horrified/shocked/astonished/bewilderd by this?” is a legitimate question, one that will unfortunately get asked more often if tone is everywhere policed.

Motivating the troops and keeping their morale up requires the use of tone in various ways (e.g. the effectiveness of humor, satire, parody, and all forms of well targeted ridicule). Tone policing legitimate uses of that is also illegitimate. Because it’s an attempt to disarm and demotivate and demoralize. That’s why some Muslims today (as many Christians once did) so abhor the ridicule of their religion that they will seek to use violence to stop it. Religious terrorism is the most horrific instantiation of tone policing in the world. But tone policing it is.

• (5) Often tone is the means of effecting social justice.

Shame and ridicule, when targeted at the genuinely shameful and ridiculous (and in correct proportion), is a legitimate deterrent. It is in fact the lowest level of social deterrence against bad behavior that we can deploy (above that is economic action, then civil judgment, then criminal judgment). Like the other forms of deterrence (economic punishment, physical punishment, imprisonment, death), this can be used for evil (e.g. shaming others’ sexuality in order to control it) or for good. In the latter case, for example: shaming racists and misogynists actually causes fewer people to want to be like them (that’s a legitimate goal, and is genuinely achieved by it the more widely society shows its support for it, e.g. shaming homophobia has played a potent role in diminishing it); it even causes some of them to stop being like that (when they realize what they were doing or thinking really was shameful or ridiculous) or causes many of them to stop ruining environments by voicing their vile thoughts in them (for instance, this is how we fight rape culture, by shaming and ridiculing rape mentalities). For example, when FOX News tries to argue that calling out racism is itself racist, you are looking at the illegitimate tone policing of legitimate social shaming. Sometimes tone is really just a fully deserved shaming or ridicule. But the ethics and epistemology of shame and ridicule are a whole other complex issue.

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In short, I think a better taxonomy of illegitimate and legitimate tone policing is needed somewhere. Cross writes a good contribution to that project. But it’s just one taxon.