The nasty authority of identity in social justice narratives. (first draft).
This is a longer version of a post I already made about how social justice communities often use being part of an oppressed group as a form of authority. Which basically boils down to ‘If a trans person is speaking about transphobia, they are right. If the person disagreeing with them is cis, they are wrong.’ Replace transphobia, with racism, misogyny, ableism, etc and repeat.
This is an understandable system. “believe the person with actual lives experience, not the person with privilege to protect” is a good social instinct to have, We live in a world where having privilege is presented as being ‘objective’, and thus more right and where people who speak on their own experiences of oppression are constantly required to provide proof of the bleeding obvious. (And make no mistake: the constant demand that we proof that racism/sexism/transphobia/etc exists is an exhaustion mechanism designed to keep us from doing the real work of destroying these things).
But where someone is automatically believed and does not need to prove their points, there is authority. And authority comes with a long range of problems. I’m going to list a few:
1. It doesn’t help us to get to the truth.
The fact that there are a lot of different narratives about what it means to be trans, all by transgender people, should be a first clue that being a member of an oppressed group doesn’t make you right. Some trans people claim that only those who experience ‘gender dysphoria’ are transgender, others reject this. They can’t both be right.
Yet a cis person is told always to believe a trans person, even if there seem to be flaws in their stories and theories. This may seem like a thing that protects trans people, but actually, it has the convenient side effect of relieving cis people of the burden of figuring out who is right. If trans people are always right, then cis people can stop thinking for themselves. But to quote cool-yubari:
If someone’s arguments aren’t adding up, automatically expecting that they’re acting in the interests of all oppressed people simply as a result of being oppressed is wrong. […] Being victimized, or having been victimized, doesn’t automatically give you wisdom, and it sure as hell doesn’t teach you kindness.
We are not achieving the best possible understanding of our world by using oppression-group-membership as a requirement to speak at all, and even less by automatically assuming that every member of a group is always right. Sometimes we’re wrong. And as controversial as it is to say this: being a member of an oppressor group can produce really valuable insights that we need. Some of the best writing on how toxic masculinity can be and how exactly ‘boy’s don’t cry’ is connected to rape and violence has been done by men. Some of the work of unraveling cissexism and transphobia must be done by cis people.
2. It results in a tyranny of definition.
When being a member of an oppressed group grants authority and being a member of an oppressor group means shutting up and sitting back, the result is that identifying becomes mandatory. Welcome to a social justice conversation, please name your side, rank and number. Label all your privileges and lacks of them. This is violence, because so many of us do not identify as one thing or another or do not want to always be known by the identity labels that we sometimes use.
Does a person who does not define their gender experience male privilege? Do they experience misogyny? Do they experience either of these things dependent on who encounters them and when?
MRA’s and feminists alike erupt in rage when they do not know how to label us, when we do not name our privileges and our sides. This tyranny is often enforced as ruthlessly by those who made the norms as by those who resist them. There has always been special punishments reserved for combatants who do not wear a uniform or list a rank and number.
When we do not identify, people do not know what to expect from us. But they also do not know which authority to ascribe to us and where to rank us in the order of ‘allowed to speak’ and ‘probably right’. Instead, they have to actually listen to our words to figure out if they’re worth something. Which, as I mentioned above, is work we’ve been told we don’t have to do.
3. Authority can be used by abusers.
There are abusers who can and will use any system to their advantage, no matter how awesome that system is under normal circumstances.We have important social cues in social justice communities, like “always believe people who say they have been victimized”. And 99,9% of the time, that’s a really good social routine to have.But even that routine can be abused and I’ve seen that happen a few times by people who were just plain bullies and abusers and who used this specific social routine to do their abusing, capitalizing on their ‘more oppressed than the person I’m bullying’ status to get away with it.
In the case I’ve witnessed, the abuser started out calling out real shit (and continued to do that) going on in a community and as a result gained a lot of respect and status, to the point of being considered sort of the expert on transphobia.
Then they started capitalizing on that gained status by using the treat of a call out as a weapon in any situation. First they’d see if they could get away with minor bullying by calling the bullied person transphobic or responding to a minor act with a massive lash out, then they’d expand on that. Eventually, they’d create a climate of fear within their community, a “you better not mess with me or I will find any excuse to call you transphobic and in that case I will scream in your face and use any violence I deem necessary and people will support me because I am a trans person calling you transphobic and they have been trained to respect that”.
All the while, they’d continue to be an actual valuable activist calling out actual transphobia, but they’d also become a person who could bully anyone, abuse anyone, because no one would dare mess with them anymore for fear of being expelled from the group as a transphobe.
There are many other ways an abuser can use these social routines to their advantage, and we’re going to have to recognize each instance as it happens. But also, we’re going to have to recognize that these kind of things to not happen by pure coincidence, they happen because we created systems of automatic authority that abusers can capitalize on. I’m pretty sure this abuser, as others, used different bullying techniques before they discovered social justice lingo as a tool. But once they found that tool, it proved incredibly powerful because of all the authority that we ascribe to people without acknowledging that that power can be absed.
4. Authority brings out the worst in all of us.
While an abuser can use the ‘rules’ os a social justice oriented community for their own game in ways that are really manipulative and cruel, any of us, and most of us, abuse those same rules to some extend. In a culture where being ‘wrong’ or not having a response to a ‘call out’ is viewed as a very negative thing, the pressure to always win an argument (even if we’re not sure we’re right) is on. And if we have lived experience of an issue and our opponent does not, then it’s not hard to use the ‘rules’ to make ourselves look right and reaffirm our feelings of rightness.
But the response “sit down and take a lesson” or “I’m right because I belong to the group who gets to talk about this” is not just a smackdown without real arguments, it’s an act of domination. It’s using your authority in this social justice space to silence someone else. The amount of institutional power as this person may have over you doesn’t change that. The fact that you felt hurt and attacked doesn’t change that, a lot of dominant acts come from a place of feeling vulnerable and not liking it.
None of us like being wrong. None of us like losing an argument. Most of us like the feeling of having ‘smacked down’ someone who we perceived as wrong. And to be a little blunter: let’s not pretend to be social justice monks meditating on a pure state of being. Most of us, on some level, like winning, being admired, and feeling like our words are authoritative. These things feel good, but they are an ugly side of us.
The authority of being able to say ‘I am right because I am identity X’, brings out that nasty, dominating side in us. I, for one, don’t think that is good for our communities or ourselves.
These are some problems and there are probably more. But that doesn’t mean we should throw everything we have out of the window. We came from a place where newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people doing the opressing. And we build a place that works the other way around. That’s good.
But we need to be much much more aware of the fact that we, in a search for easy answers, are creating authority and power relationships in our communities that are not helping. In fact, that are suffocating conversations, creating a tyranny of always identifying yourself, that are empowering abusers and bringing out the worst in all of us.
