Abstract
We’ve entered an era when who is speaking is more important than what they’re saying. It’s a lose-lose situation, argues
As unsatisfactory as the “speaking as a” phenomenon is, it attempts to answers a genuine current societal problem. Who, after all, still gets to do most of the speaking in society? White, middle-class men. Having frequently pitched up in debates about reproductive rights against men who blithely recommend adoption as an alternative to termination, I’m very familiar with the problem of solipsism in politics. (It’s easier to think that pregnancy and labour are trifling matters if your particular body makes pregnancy and labour an entirely abstract prospect.)
And yet the argument that comes from a place of identity is a debunk that leads to a dead end.
Speaking as a woman, I have experiences a man can only imagine. But if another woman speaks against me, appealing to the authority of my sex is no longer any good. What then? And what if a man has genuine expertise, despite his sex? The history of men-speaking-about-women has not always been a happy one. The entire works of Sigmund Freud regarding women could be fairly dispatched with: “As a man, you would say that, wouldn’t you?” In the same way that femaleness can be seen as validating an opinion on women today, maleness in the past has been seen as a guarantee of objectivity and reason, giving weight to some of the most specious masculine emissions on women’s lives.
But men are capable of objective insight and knowledge about women. James Baldwin’s extraordinarily sensitive insights into gender made him a key source for feminist and writer Andrea Dworkin in developing her own analysis, for example. And there’s Alan Caton, a former head of public protection with a UK police force who oversaw the investigation into a series of murders of women in prostitution, and has since used his experience to inform policy debate on violence against women.
When we determine someone’s right to speak on the basis of what they’re speaking as, we resign from the world of argument and slide into a parallel world of competitive disadvantage. Phoebe Malz Bovy, in her book The Perils of “Privilege”, astutely points out that this then becomes less about identifying and elevating the perspective of actual underdogs and more about “constructing an underdog stance. It’s about making as if you’re craning your neck to look (and punch) up, regardless of where you’re actually situated”.
Hence, there’s a perverse kind of privilege in declaring your lack of privilege, and an incentive to claim for yourself the most downtrodden identities you can muster. You’ve then won the argument before it even starts. Right and wrong in fact or principle are swept aside in favour of discriminating between the right person and the wrong person.
CREDIT: Otto Dettmer/Ikon
Another problem is that being able to declare yourself the arbiter of a particular argument suggests a certain amount of privilege. What happens if you don’t have that privilege? In the debates leading up to the recent Irish referendum on abortion, pro-choice campaigners (mostly women) had no choice but to engage with their opposition (often men). They simply were not in a position to dictate terms and shout over everyone. In the end, though, that was probably better for their argument. It meant they were building consensus rather than imposing their will, and drawing on the facts rather than an identity that not all would share. It helped to turn an often bitterly divisive subject into a transformative national conversation, which drew support from women and, crucially, men. Having to engage with your opposition isn’t just a necessity, it’s a genuine good.
And there are real harms in avoiding discussion. The dispute between women who want to maintain single-sex spaces and trans activists who believe all facilities should be made available on the basis of an individual’s own avowed gender identity, regardless of where they are in the process of transition, is a particularly virulent one. Many people prefer to avoid the substance of the conflict entirely and settle it with a calculus of identity: this is a trans issue, so only trans people should be heard.
Debbie Hayton, a trans woman, takes a position that marks her as unusual within trans politics, actively choosing debate about the consequences of changing the law on recognising gender identity. So long as discussion is made impossible, she argues, “the rights, protections and identities of trans people are being gambled, not in a court of law but in the court of public opinion”. Good policy can emerge only from a free and thoughtful exchange of views.
We need to be attentive to who gets to speak and recognise the legacy of oppression that has resulted in certain groups having louder voices than others. But we also need to test contributions against stronger criteria than which mouth they come out of. Women can be misogynistic, trans people can be wrong, and how much credence you think my position merits – speaking as a woman – is a question to be settled by your judgment rather than my sex.