All voices heard.
Can we as writers, researchers, journalists, and those who generally seek to discover and uncover knowledge ever truly be impartial to a topic? This question is particularly topically considering recent online discourse involving LGBTQ and specifically transgender writers and adjacents.
Jesse Singal, an independent writer and journalist, has been the target of trans-rights activists following an article he produced for the Atlantic in 2018 exploring youth gender transitions and destransitions (also known as desistance). His continued defense of his journalism along with calls from activists that he is transphobic, raises questions about who gets voice and how we cover matters of identity when those involved either do or don’t share those salient identities.
One line of critique against Singal and others is that he isn’t himself trans and thus lacks a necessary lens with which to properly analyse trans related subjects. This argument has also been used for racial and cultural coverage, particularly of minority or underprivileged groups. And it certainly has some merit, I would never claim to know the experience of being a Black woman or a trans Asian-American man. How could I?
But at the same time, how do we navigate a more identity sensitive world when identity becomes the gatekeeping tool for all forms of discussion, research, argumentation, or journalism? If writing about complex intersectional topics is only to be done by those who fit the identities they write about we risk a dumbing down on curiosity and a teamification of all things identity. Furthermore, ingrained biases of all persuasions will only limit the level of introspection and fair minded critique that a writer will be able to suss out about matters that affect them deeply.
Identity as a study
In the 1970s, Henry Tajfel, a Polish Jew and social psychologist, was moved by his experience during World War II to research the formation of social groups and group identities. Serving as a French soldier (he had left his native Poland to study in France before the war), Tajfel witnessed his treatment as an enemy combatent after being captured by Nazi’s as dramatically better because of their conception of him as French than it would have been if they had known his Polish and Jewish backgrounds. After the end of the war, Tajfel began studying the creation of identity groups and the biases they produce.
Tajfel discovered that social cohesion and bias are even greater ingrained in human psychology than he could have imagined. In building a baseline control experiment, Tajfel had a group of school boys guess the number of dots on a piece of paper. He then randomly sorted the boys into two caps: boys whom he told had overestimated the number of dots and boys whom he told had underestimated the dots. With two equal groups of participants arbitrarily separated he used a simple ‘sharing game’ where the boys were asked to distribute real money to the other boys. They boys were not allowed to give money to themselves but had to choose between those who overestimated or underestimated the dots in the previous section of the experiment. Even though the overestimation/underestimation designations were supposed to act as the control for the experiment (other boys were randomly sorted into those who more accurately guessed the number of dots and those who were less accurate), Tajfel found that even that seemingly inconsequential grouping led to the boys favoring their recently assigned, entirely arbitrary group over the other group.
This experiment would be the first in what would eventually be dubbed Social Identity Theory. The theory is both deeply useful in understanding basic group dynamics of human beings as well as considering our current moment. If identities of nearly no importance, like over- or under-estimating dots on a page, can have salience in human behavior it's no wonder that easily identifiable identifiers can cause serious discrimination and misunderstanding. The study of in-groups and out-groups and the power dynamics between them have gained strength in the political science community as well.
Ashley Jardina in her book White Identity Politics, demonstrates that the election of Barack Obama as a Black man to the US presidency raised the saliency of previously unidentified whiteness among many American voters. Identity is the driving force behind political decision making and crys of “identity politics” spoiling democratic discourse fails to recognize that politics always revolves around identities whether ingrained or constructed.
“Identity Politics”
I personally find the arguments around “identity politics” spoiling electoral politics to be intellectually shallow. It fundamentally discounts the identities of some while ignoring the identities of others. This is particularly true when “identity politics” is pushing a policy or candidate that the speaker doesn’t agree with. This argument makes a value proposition that only certain identities are allowed place in the political sphere and that all other identities operating there are simply using personality coders, as opposed to concrete data or argumentation, to win votes.
Identity politics has been levied by both right-wing actors as well as left-wing actors to decry what they see as illegitimate political expression. Both camps tend to view politics by identity as a distraction to a more wholesome or pure form of political expression. This framework de facto means that identities are restricted to economics. Poor people should identify as such and work for either the radical overhaul of an oppressive capitalist system, or fight for incremental change which allows them to raise their material well being. Rich people are either the paragons of hard work and deserved wealth, or the robber barons who have gamed the system to their advantage. What both of these critiques miss is that they still call upon individuals to identify with their material well being: their wealth and position on the socio-economic ladder are their identities.
Much of the online space is dominated by discussions which revolve around the strength of identities and the salience to a person’s security. Some identities are fleeting, shifting, or transient while others are set, in-born, and unavoidable. There is also a difference between identities which are unshakable by social convention and those which can be hidden or even lost. Tajfel’s experience as a Polish Jew who was able to avoid the horrific fate that befell millions of others just like him is elucidative of this point. Because Tajfel could pass in appearance as being French, and because he was captured as a French soldier his treatment by the Nazis was vastly different. This is not universally the case. Blacks in America are disproportionately arrested, prosecuted, imprisoned, or killed by the state. Unlike Tajfel, most Blacks are not able to escape the identity placed on them purely through the color of their skin. This is particularly true in a country which tends to view mixed-race people through the prism of not-white regardless of how white their parents or grandparents may have been.
These identities are inborn, not because there are any actual physiological differences between an American white person and an American Black person, but purely because of cultural demarcations of race and identity. Unable to escape the identity assumed on them by birth, many have leaned into and accepted identities to define that identify themselves. These attempts are often labeled as identity politics. In reality, they are the outgrowth of hegemonic othering, where certain people are told they are marginal and upon accepting that label and organizing for greater voice or power they are criticised for only using their marginal status to gain power.
But the role of identity in politics also leads to the greater hardening of acceptable and unacceptable speech. On the whole, this phenomenon is positive. As marginalized communities have organized into stronger political units their concerns can be heard and hegemonic identities are forced to listen. Following the murder of George Floyd by a white officer in Minneapolis, support for Black Lives Matter ballooned to 65% of whites surpassing 50% for the first time ever. While those numbers have since subsided, they are indicative of the ways in which continued activism can change minds, even if tragically paired with awful examples of the wrongs activist groups are attempting to right.
Greater power leads to a greater belief in the possible. As activist groups organized around particular identities have gained in strength and support, they’ve been able to demand societal changes previously thought impossible. Persistent fighting from LGBTQ activists led to the persuasion of the conservative led Supreme Court to make gay marriage legal in all states in Obergefell v. Hodges. The civil rights movement of the 1960s led to the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. The women’s suffrage movement led to the passage of the 19th amendment granting women the right to vote.
Accountability and Representation
But greater organized power has also led to hyper speech concern. On the right, commentators and politicians have called this phenomenon “cancel culture” in which speech is policed and a misstep is the end of a career. These arguments are mostly held in bad faith. The vast majority of cancel culture boils down to responsibility for a public facing person’s statements or actions. But while cancel culture has been levied by right-wing provocateurs about the excesses of identity politics and “woke ideology,” there have been some genuine instances of good faith argumentation or simply data sharing which has led to writers, journalists, and academics losing their jobs or status.
Following the murder of George Floyd and the world-wide street activism that proceeded it, a data scientist was fired from a progressive analytics firm because he tweeted data that showed Democrats lost votes following the riots that followed the assassination of MLK. His firing came after backlash for his perceived ‘concern trolling.’ But his job as a data consultant was in getting Democrats elected and the information he shared was pursuant to that end.
In early 2021, two journalists were both punished for either using the N-word in the context of explaining its history as a slur or for clarifying its use in a separate instance. Donald McNeil Jr. was fired from the New York Times after it was revealed that he had used the slur while discussing an incident of its use among a group of high school students. The matter had been internally investigated by the Times which resulted in no serious punishment but following an article in the Daily Beast employees at the Times decided they no longer wanted to work with McNeil and the veteran reporter of 45 years was fired. In a separate incident, long time podcaster for Slate, Mike Pesca, was put on indefinite leave-of-absence over an internal organizational slack communication where Pesca argued that the word should be allowed to be used editorially when it is the subject of the story or has the proper context applied.
Both of these episodes represent a troubling backsliding on democratic freedom of speech. While I agree that the slur should never be used flippantly or without qualification, to suggest that the word may never be uttered under any circumstances is neither helpful for Blacks or for societal norms more broadly. When the policing of acceptable speech loses a focus on intent, it creates a space devoid of context. Writers, regardless of sensitivity or concern for the matters about which they write, may fear to explore topics, lest they accidentally misstep.
Discriminating Amongst Voices
When subjects are reserved only for the people who experience them they, by procedure, become less understood. While I find immense value in the grounding of subjects related to race, gender, ethnicity, culture, religion and sexual identity in the voices which have lived experience to share, I don’t think the exclusion of outsiders from those spaces makes for a more understandable world.
We do not expect assumed identities like profession, passion, hobbies, or fandoms to only be covered or discussed by those who live those experiences. In fact, we find the experiences of those most deeply involved in those soft identities to be the least biased. While I understand that hearing from marginalized voices is important, the omission of any other voice on the matter doesn’t make for a more equitable and understanding society either.
Fundamentally I fear that the concern over outside identity voices covering a topic with which they don’t have a lived experience, will lead to activism over information. If only those with lived experiences are allowed to write or research the experiences of those like them, we run the risk of losing neutral perspectives or even outsider biases which can lead to a more wholesome understanding. Of course, I’m not suggesting that affected voices will invariably lead to activism. But losing outsider perspectives narrows the totality of information we can learn. We, on a societal level, need to do a better job of giving lived-experiences a more prominent role in the coverage or research of human based phenomena and events. But the elimination of all non-lived experience voices from those issues will continue the power striating norms of the past, not bring for a more just and equitable future.
Activism is necessary and has been a staggering force for good for marginalized identities as well as society as a whole. But we don’t turn exclusively to activists when we want to paint a holistic picture of any phenomenon. Activists have their role, just as journalists, academics, and researchers have theirs. Sometimes those roles intersect but often times they don’t, or even shouldn’t. All people have ingrained biases, instead of eliminating some biases in favor of others, we should strive for representation from all biases together.
As a society we’ve come a long way towards listening to marginalized voices, and we still have a long way to go. But if we are going to insist upon a form of intersectional extremism, where identities must match ideas, then we will do more harm than good in moving past universal representation to a truly equitable future.
