The "free speech" pushback

In the past year, I've seen numerous pieces appear on a common topic: how identity politics is supposedly erasing free speech. The tone of these articles is ostensibly "progressive but concerned". Basically, these articles' concerns boil down to how the demand for inclusivity and safe spaces is harming public debate and censoring free speech. Never mind that if you run a cursory Google search about the incidents mentioned in these articles, the authors blow them wildly out of proportion, there's something weird about casting a bunch of protesters as a minority powerful enough to get people sacked and change university curricula.

This isn't to say that activists never go overboard. I, too, have seen people with only rudimentary understanding of progressive politics froth at the mouth over what is an inconvenience at worst. I, too, have rolled my eyes at the insistent demand of radicals to fire such and such when the facts are still coming out. But here's the thing: caving in to these fringe elements betrays a lack of understanding on the part of the (supposed) offenders, too. It rerouts the debate back to empty signifying of political correctness and avoiding any sort of meaningful debate.

Let's discuss a few examples. Yale University became a hotbed of tension around Halloween after administrators didn't want to censor students in how they'd dress up, responding to concerns about cultural appropriation or offensive costumes. Some students demanded these types of costumes be banned. I would personally disagree with a ban, but Yale could at least have cautioned students and asked them to consider other people when dressing up. For instance, it wouldn't be illegal for me to dress up as a child molester at a party where survivors of sexual abuse are present, but it would probably not be a move in good taste. Adult people should have freedom of choice, but that doesn't mean that consideration for others should be tossed out of the window.

Another example is the resignation of scientist Tim Hunt after some comments about women in laboratory settings that were most likely jokes in poor taste, and not indicative of any sort of deep-rooted hatred of women. Instead of defending himself, listening to what others had to say about it or entering a debate, he just quit. He could have said: "My joke was bad and I recognise why it has offended some people, no matter how unintended it was." There. Is that so hard? I don't understand why some people caught in the crossfire of controversy feel the need to capitulate to the most radical and emotional demands first.

A third recent example is the demands of trans activists that Germaine Greer be denied speaking slots at feminist events because of her notoriously transphobic views. Once again, I do not think that if an event is not specifically or tangentially about trans matters, that Greer should be outright denied the opportunity to speak. But I do believe that free speech advocates are doing a stupid when they argue people with wrong and regressive ideas should be offered a stage at an event that seeks to engender meaningful discussion. Nobody in their right mind would argue for a KKK representative to speak at an antiracist rally, or for the Westboro Baptist Church to be allotted a speaking slot at a gay event. Or, to take it one step further, why would you invite a creationist to an evolutionary biology conference?

What sort of "debate" are these free speech advocates hoping for, really? Are they really interested in listening to concerns about how university professors probably shouldn't be endorsing sexist, racist or otherwise discriminatory practises and worldviews? Or do they merely want to brush off others' concerns as misguided and shallow? I don't think it's a coincidence that all authors of pieces arguing for the continuation of bad form and bad habit are white, cisgendered and heterosexual. At the same time, these authors are keen to downplay the factor of social context and cast "privilege checking" as a weapon to silence them. It's not a weapon. It's truth. It is well possible for a white person to say something meaningful about racial oppression of non-white groups, but their position is always one of historical power. It's easy for the non-oppressed to say that content matters more than who is bringing that content because it's a consideration they usually don't have to make.

Isolating concerned groups to their most extreme elements and casting it as a mere clash of emotions undermines the broader issues. In a vacuum, of course it doesn't matter if a white person dresses up in blackface or if a man makes an ironically sexist remark. But we don't live in a vacuum, and ignorance is no longer an excuse to do or say stupid things. Insisting that people should be able to do and say as they please or that "their side" ought to be heard as well, is simply a retreat into privilege, highlighting form over function and not contributing in any meaningful debate to an ongoing process of emancipation.

"Free speech" is one of the most misunderstood civil rights in the Western world. At its core, it does mean that you're allowed to say whatever is on your mind. But it doesn't mean that what you say is true or that the words you say don't have impact on others (indeed, why say them at all if they don't?). People with weak arguments will all too often resort to claiming critics are "censoring" and "silencing" them when they're merely being proven wrong. Free speech doesn't mean your opinion matters or is valid - a bitter truth to swallow for a lot of people.

In closing, here's another consideration. The authors of think pieces concerned about the sound and fury that sometimes comes with identity politics often explicitly see themselves as progressive people. Allies who indeed recognise that racism is bad, sexual violence is evil and that we still have ways to go to create an egalitarian society. So I'm not going to say these people have a hidden conservative agenda. But, as in the controversy around Zwarte Piet in the Netherlands and Belgium, it's not that every proponent of Zwarte Piet is racist - every racist is a proponent of Zwarte Piet. Similarly, not everyone who defended Tim Hunt was a sexist, but sexists and misogynists of all stripes unified behind Hunt. There does a come a time when the "free speech" advocates need to ask themselves what kind of friends they truly have.

Identity and truth

Quite recently, I was involved in a protracted discussion on identity following a Gawker article that highlighted a few of the more eccentric and reviled social justice corners of Tumblr. The question basically is: do people who believe that they are animals or mythical beings inhabiting a human body (otherkin), people who are convinced they were born the wrong 'race' or culture (transethnics) and people who feel they have a physical condition not reflected in their actual body (transdisabled) a place in the broader social justice movement, and why (not)?

My answer, in most cases*, is a resounding no. Let's unpack.

Identity is not a 'get out of jail free' card

The basic two arguments for inclusion that keep getting brought up are (1) who are you to deny someone's self-reported identity and (2) that this identity denial was broadly accepted until a few decades ago as an argument against transgendered people (and still is among TERFs**).

The problem with (1) is that what someone believes about themselves may not necessarily be true. Or are people who suffer from body dismorphic disorder 'transobese'? It seems dangerous to me to accept at face value identity concepts that are clearly problematic or may end up being harmful for the believer as well as their environment. I'm not required to believe people who claim to be Napoleon or the Son of God, even if they believe themselves to be the deceased French Emperor or Jesus Christ come again.

To frame this argument from a different perspective: on basis of rational thinking and logic, I think it is so unlikely that leprechauns exist that people who do believe in them shouldn't expect me to entertain their beliefs. I won't be hostile to them, either, as long as they don't cause harm, but the point with the Tumblr fringe is that they are causing harm to social justice, by playing right into the cards of reactionaries who love painting the entire social justice movement as a collective group therapy for the mentally ill and deranged.

Cosplay or illness?

As said in (2), the lines of reasoning above make some people uncomfortable because the same things were said - are still being said - about homosexuals or the transgendered. Yesterday's DSM disorder might be tomorrow's accepted identity. There's a flaw in this line of thinking, though. While the arguments are similar, the underlying roots of the condition are totally different. Human beings can come in a great variety of experiences in terms of gender and sex - it is all fundamentally part of the human condition. Being an animal is not (I'll get back to the other two groups soon). Men and women can plausibly, if often with difficulty, imagine what life as each other might be like, but what human can truly fathom what being an elephant, let alone a unicorn would be like?

Suppose that someone is convinced they are a wolf and wants to express this identity. From what I've seen around the Internet, most of these people still want to function in human society, drive cars, indeed surf the Internet, and so on. I'm sure there are many ways of being a wolf, but I've never heard of a wolf in the wild driving a car or ordering books on Amazon. In short, this strikes me more like nth-degree cosplay, or might even be similar to drag. There is nothing wrong with either, but it's not a functional identity concept on par with male/female or straight/gay - and everything plus and minus.

Now, if someone does go 'all out' and decides to start living like an animal, this quickly becomes very problematic for society as a whole, and this person may end up dying soon. Human stomachs are not meant to digest raw meat, and the human body can't survive without clothing and shelter during long winter nights in snowy woodlands. Undomesticated animals and humans don't tend to mix. Should society be prepared to let these people act out and risk death? I think this clearly falls within the boundaries of mental illness.

Transethnicity appropriation station

For transethnicity, one might bring up that this is still a part of the human experience I referred to earlier, and that while not easy to imagine life as part of a different culture or race (in the sense of race as a social construct), it is not impossible. I might even be very supportive of people who wished to move to a different part of the world to feel more at home and part of a culture they have a stronger individual connection with than their own.

However, in practise - again, my evidence is anecdotal - the same scenario seems to play out over and over again: the transethnic person in question reduces the target culture to a grab bag of stereotypes and seems more interested in fantasising about social acceptance than actually making the effort to learn about the culture in question. Claiming a transethnic identity to me seems like a lazy cop-out of this (under the assumption identities don't require proof), and again, more like drag and cosplay than anything else.

Transableism and Münchhausen

By far the most widely criticised group of the three, but paradoxically one with at least some amount of documented evidence beyond Tumblr say-so. Autonomous hand syndrome and BIID are but two examples of conditions that one might conceivably label as being 'trans' in nature, but have very harmful effects on the affected. The key here, as would be with the 100% 'living life as an animal' condition, is harm. Labeling it as an identity is not only dangerous because it trivialises the severity of such conditions, but it is also essentialising: sufferers from mental or physical illnesses don't like being reduced to their condition.

Apart from the essentalisation (which is also a huge factor in transethnicity), which is completely at odds with the intersectional social justice movement of today, there is also the appropriation of the visible pain and suffering of others. For example, people with cancer go through costly treatments, anxiety and pain - and that's if they are lucky. People who might claim to be affected with 'transcancer' have none of that suffering, but would feel entitled to the same sympathy. Indeed, I suspect that this is what drives people to make such claims, and if that's the case, we already have a name for that: Münchhausen Syndrome. At any rate, mental or physical illnesses are not identities, so that should be that.

Some closing words

In a distant future, perhaps we will have the technology to transform the human body into that of animals, or to upload cultural awereness directly into our brains. Today, we don't. And as I pointed out, two out of three groups described above run into a vast list of potentially harmful situations if they were to live out their self-perceived identity.

However, in most cases, it appears to me that it's a form of extreme cosplay - or in some cases, legitimate mental disorder - that combines with a sense of entitlement and social grief to form this unholy Tumblr trinity. Part of it is escapism: it's nicer to imagine life as a majestic animal or being accepted into a fantasy version of a culture than to face a socially bleak reality. And unfortunately, the rhetoric of social justice lends itself to be abused by those who not only refuse to get help or help themselves, but would want their social justice cosplay to be taken for legitimate. In that sense, there's an eerie similarity to MRA, which has the rhetorical trappings of a social justice movement, but none of its goals or underlying realities.

In closing, let's not overstate the existence of these fringe groups. They perhaps draw far more ire than they're worth, although that's easy to say for a privileged person like me. But, the key point is that we shouldn't allow campaigns to be derailed by them, nor have people seriously consider them as the advocates we would like to be represented by.

* In case of otherkin and transethnic people, I'm willing to make an exception for feral children or people who might have grown up in a totally different cultural enclave.

** Trans-exclusionary radical feminists.

About speaking up

All changes in society come from people who decide to stand up and say "well, this is not okay". Paradoxically, even the most bitter reactionairies begin that way. But when standing up for a progressive cause (i.e. towards a more inclusive, more egalitarian and less prejudiced society), you go against the established hierarchy. That can be kind of scary.

Recently I submitted something to the Tumblr 'Men Against Assholes & Misogyny' started by the comedian Jen Kirkman, who had grown tired of all the internet sexism and the people who didn't speak out against it. Submitting something seemed like a no-brainer. It's just the internet, the safest space of all if you've got something to say, right?

Actually, as I was writing, I considered that it might be read by those same vile sexists that throw out casual rape threats and exclusively judge women by their appearance. I wasn't sure if I was prepared to, at best, roll my eyes at the number of people that would suggest I was gay, would surely be able to beat my ass in a fist fight or thought I was making a clever ploy to reel in all of the internet's sweet pussy. I also started worrying a bit about portraying myself as too much of a feminist - you know, a misguided progressive can harm their own cause much more than a malicious reactionary ever would. To paraphrase Nietzsche: "the most insiduous way to undermine a cause is to defend it with the wrong arguments."

I got over these thoughts, of course, but it was then that it occurred to me that speaking up in real life must be very hard for a lot of people, too. As I wrote in my short piece, I'm getting better at it. It's still not easy to be in between a rock and a hard place. You don't want to always be That Guy who goes off on a social justice tangent in every setting. But you also don't want to get idiots get away with harmful opinions.