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Jesse Spafford is a research fellow at Trinity College Dublin working on the project REAL – Rights and Egalitarianism. His research is focused on ethics and political philosophy with particular attention paid to debates between libertarians, socialists, and anarchists over the moral status of the market and the state.
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I was talking to someone last night. I won’t say who, but someone fairly well known, known for taking part in public debate, robust, intense debate, debates where people are strongly committed to their side of the argument, and aren’t afraid to let you know that.
They’d been listening to the podcasts that I did a while back on trans rights and the associated issues with Aoife Gallagher, and they said to me that although they had talked publicly about a number of thorny political topics, they had steered away from what is called the trans debate. I don’t think that’s a very good name for it, but I don’t have a better one, so I’ll go with that. They had steered away from what is called the trans debate, not because they don’t have opinions on it, not because they don’t think it’s interesting, but purely because they were afraid of the potential backlash if they said the wrong thing, and they didn’t really believe the ‘right’ thing, so they said nothing.
This isn’t the first time that this has happened. Previously I talked to a well known public figure, someone whose name I’m sure every listener would recognise, and again, someone not shy to state their opinions strongly in robust debates on all sorts of topics.
That person had also decided never again to comment on the trans issue. They had commented on it previously; what they said was in no way hateful, in no way bigoted, and for the most part supportive the pro-trans position. But, in an attempt to sensibly analyse the topic, had strayed from some details of what is sometimes sarcastically called the ‘orthodox’ pro-trans rights position, and had received a barrage of abuse and name-calling for as a result.
That person decided that they would not discuss the topic publicly ever again.
So to be clear, someone who is an opinion former, an influential person, who publicly supported vindicating the rights of trans people will not now discuss the topic, because of the abuse they received for not supporting trans rights in the perfectly acceptable way.
This is not the way a healthy debate happens.
And this has consequences.
One of the consequences – and it’s only one of them, there are many negative impacts of this – but one of the consequences is that the quality of the debate on this topic is poorer for it. I got feedback from a couple of listeners to the interview with Aoife Gallagher who remarked on one question that I asked had made them think. Aoife couldn’t answer the question – she was very straight up about the fact that it hadn’t occurred to her, but it’s interesting that such an obvious question hasn’t been teased out. The question was this:
Why is organising groups by sex, by biological sex, seen by some as unacceptable discrimination, but organising them by socially-constructed gender is seen as required to vindicate trans people’s rights. That’s especially curious when the rationale for the separate groupings is based in sex characteristics. So the rationale for having separate rugby teams, or separate changing rooms, or separate services for new parents, that rationale springs directly from the differences between the biological sexes. It’s not the same as having separate, let’s say, separate knitting groups, or separate school debating teams, those separations are clearly based on socially-constructed gender.
Now you could argue that the sex differences between people are sufficiently small as to mean that you don’t need to have, say, separate changing rooms, I won’t get into that, but there is no question that the rationale for having separate rugby teams is that the overwhelming majority of women who now play rugby could not do so if a separate women’s team did not exist, and that rationale for a separate team flows from differences of biological sex, it has little or nothing to do with socially-constructed gender roles.
The question that hasn’t been answered – it hasn’t even been asked much as far as I can tell – is why would separating rugby teams, or reproductive health services, by sex be considered unacceptable exclusion of trans people, but segregating them by gender is not only all right, but actually in some way signalling how progressive you are. I genuinely can’t understand that rationale.
I also noted the case of Ngozi Fulani, and a woman with the ludicrous title Susan Hussey, Baroness Hussey of North Bradley, a Lady of the Household, which basically means someone considered posh enough to run errands for English Royalty. Susan Hussey asked Ngozi Fulani where she was from. In fact Ngozi Fulani was born in London, with the name Marlene Headley, but I’ve no doubt that question may well have been asked in a hostile or insensitive that it wouldn’t have been if Ms Fulani wasn’t black.
But there was some comment around that incident that basically implied that ever asking any member of a minority that question is automatically racist, or at a minimum so insensitive as to be unacceptable.
I would hope that Irish people can see through that overextension. It’s a pretty normal thing, maybe it’s a small country thing, for Irish people, when first meeting to ask each other where they’re from, it’s a form of negotiating social relations, and in many cases people can pretty quickly identify an acquaintance in common.
It has got more common to meet people from outside the country in social situations – whether they are immigrants, foreign students, refugees or whatever – and conversation often starts off with asking the person where they are from. I think this is mostly expressing an interest in the other person, and is mostly accepted as that, but I can understand that if your appearance or accent marks you out as unlikely to be native Irish, that could get a bit tiresome after a while.
But I don’t think this comes nearly to the level to justify saying, as the Stanford University ‘Harmful Language’ policy did until it was pulled after much ridicule, that asking that question in any context was necessarily racist. That’s obviously a nonsensical overextension.
But here’s the unaddressed contradiction. Some people have chosen to put their preferred pronouns in their email signature lines or on social media. Except that’s wrong, according the Stanford University ‘Harmful Language’ policy, it’s unacceptable to use the phrase ‘preferred pronouns’, because that could call their validity into question, we should just say ‘pronouns’. So people publish their pronouns, well that’s fine, that’s up to them.
Except it isn’t always. Marks & Spencer employees in the UK were told that their pronouns would be printed on their name badges, as part of the company’s inclusion and diversity policy. In theory, this was optional for staff, but in reality staff who didn’t want this had to contact the Marks & Spencer HR department and opt out, implicitly telling their employer that they were against inclusion and diversity. That’s a pretty significant deterrent to a supposedly optional policy, but the British bank Halifax didn’t offer any options, when they announced similar name badges for their staff. On their official Twitter account they said. “We strive for inclusion, equality and, quite simply, in doing what’s right. If you disagree with our values, you’re welcome to close your account.” Both companies were praised by various progressive groups for their new policies.
It’s not hard to imagine that a member of staff might think that if they voiced disagreement, they would be told they are welcome to find a job elsewhere.
Now pronouns are not an issue I care about at all, I think that it is so trivial that it’s not worth discussion, and I think that linguistic battles are a proxy for real battles, and we should just have the discussion about the real issue.
But it seems glaringly obvious to me that enquiring into someone’s personal, possibly sensitive information in one context is being blasted as racist, even if it is done in a friendly and pro-social way, but in another context, demanding that you literally wear a badge displaying personal, possibly sensitive information on pain risking your job is seen as praiseworthy – this is glaringly inconsistent.
I can put my hand on my heart and say I have never heard this inconsistency raised or discussed, let alone explained, before. And I think that there is a reason for this.
The reason is that the pussyfooting around the trans issue by people who are, possibly rightly, terrified that if they inadvertently say something that some self-appointed judge of what is and is not allowed to be said pronounces as unacceptable, they will be subject to a flood of complaints, at best unpleasant and stressful, at worst costing them their career.
As I said, I just don’t care about pronouns, do what you like, but this is what I do care about; when there is no debate, bad ideas, inconsistent ideas don’t get challenged. Remember that you don’t learn from someone who you agree with on everything. Your ideas are improved by being challenged, by you thinking about the challenge, and rising to the challenge to refine them, or explain them better.
The fact is that, to my personal knowledge, people refuse to enter that discussion because of its toxicity; that is not a win. If you think that bullying people out of disagreeing with you makes your argument stronger, you are very, very wrong.
