Abstract
If you fail to speak out, are you complicit in accepting what is going on?
It’s not that I doubt the truth and importance of those few words. It’s simply that if I post them I might become a target for trolls, and an organisation I work for could also come under fire. It’s not worth the hassle. Or at least that’s how it seems. But I worry. Has my self-censorship made me complicit in a suppression of free speech and the promotion of a viewpoint I believe needs challenging?
The idea that silence equals complicity has become popular wisdom, with Einstein and Martin Luther King among those quoted endorsing it. At an exhibition by a pro-Palestinian group, one of the volunteers told me: “If we don’t do anything about this injustice, we’re complicit in it.”
It’s powerful rhetoric, but it cannot be right. There are innumerable injustices around the world. Save for a handful of full-time activists and professionals in organisations such as Index, the finite supply of time ensures that most of us are silent about the vast majority of them.
Still, there are sins of omission. Not speaking up about one of thousands of injustices unconnected to you is not the same as keeping quiet about one happening under your very nose. I remember such a situation when I was a student working over the Christmas holidays at a Children’s World store. In a break, one of the staff told a young female British Asian employee that he was racist. It was an odd exchange, without menace or overt hostility, but still completely unacceptable.
A few of us were there. None of us said anything, no doubt telling ourselves that he was a crank, very possibly drunk, and wasn’t actually causing anyone harm. But I look back with shame at my silence. By keeping quiet we all implicitly endorsed the idea that what he said was within the realm of acceptable speech. We also failed to reassure a fellow employee from a group which commonly faced discrimination that we were fully on her side, no doubt adding to her discomfort.
A powerful tool to help understand this is the philosopher J.L. Austin’s concept of a “speech act”. The key idea is very simple: words do not only convey information, they can actually do things. When a boss says “You’re fired”, a person loses their job. When a male manager says something misogynistic, he diminishes the status of female colleagues and makes their opinions count for less.
I’m not sure if Austin ever talked about the corollary of speech acts: acts of silence. When people do things with words, the way others react can either counter or reinforce this. In both my examples, imagine that a more senior (male) manager is there. By speaking he can cancel the dismissal or pull up the colleague on his misogyny. Both speech acts change the effects of the first.
If, however, he is silent, he endorses the primary speech acts and allows to happen things that he could easily stop. Remaining silent can be an act one chooses to do, with consequences.
With distant injustices, things are different. When a lone citizen says nothing about, say, the plight if the Uyghurs in China, this has negligible endorsing or tolerating effect. When we are face to face with an injustice, however, silence can not only be a form of complicity, it can also serve to bolster wrongdoing.
This is what I fear I did when I deleted my tweet. It was triggered by responses to a tweet by JK Rowling in December 2019:
“Dress however you please.
Call yourself whatever you like.
Sleep with any consenting adult who’ll have you.
Live your best life in peace and security.
But force women out of their jobs for stating that sex is real?
#IStandWithMaya #ThisIsNotADrill”
The hashtag “IStandWithMaya” referred to the case of Maya Forstater, whose contract with a think-tank was not renewed after she made a series of tweets opposing government plans to reform the Gender Recognition Act. This would allow people to self-identify as the opposite sex. The most notorious of these tweets stated “Men cannot change into women”.
CREDIT: Lee Woodgate/Ikon
Transgender rights have become some of the most bitterly contested issues of our time. Yet the nub of the disagreement is not about the rights of trans people to live their lives free from prejudice and discrimination. It is between those who insist that it is entirely the individual’s choice which sex they are and those who insist that there are also objective, biological considerations.
Those who maintain that biology has a role call themselves “gender critical” feminists while their opponents dismiss them as “Terfs” – trans-exclusionary radical feminists – with the suggestion that their views are inherently transphobic. This accusation seems unfounded. At the moment it is clear that intelligent, unprejudiced people disagree about this. So my position is simple: one side is wrong, we don’t know for sure which, but that does not mean they are hateful or bigoted.
Rowling set off a Twitter-storm in which she was denounced as “going full Terf”. She was accused of indicating that discrimination against a tweeter’s trans daughter was “perfectly fine behaviour for an employee”, of using her platform “to be cruel and exclusionary to one of the world’s most vulnerable populations”, of “defending racists, transphobes and abusers”, and much more. That is what inspired this deleted tweet: Spot the difference:
“JK Rowling is dangerously wrong about sex and gender.
JK Rowling hates trans people & denies their right to exist.
If you believe the 1st please don’t tweet the 2nd.
(And don’t tell me I hate trans people for saying this. I absolutely do not.)”
Reading it now, it seems innocuous, unobjectionable. And yet, I did not post it. It was not simply that I did not want to become an object of hate, too. I thought about how being drawn into the mire would affect my partner and the Royal Institute of Philosophy for which I have a part-time role as academic director. I had organised a debate for the RIP in which a so-called Terf had spoken. It stoked a Twitter-storm that in the end came to nothing, but we had to get in extra security for the event just in case.
My reasoning is completely understandable. And yet I worry it resulted in a form a self-censorship that added up to complicity. If so, I know I am not alone. Ever since I got drawn into the trans debate I’ve been asking every female philosopher I meet to explain to me what they make of it.
One or two have defended the anti-gender critical line, none to my satisfaction. The majority have said they stand with gender-critical feminists. But few say anything publicly. They don’t want their students boycotting their lectures or calling for their dismissal. The price of solidarity is just too high for them. I’m deeply disturbed by the ease with which they and I convince ourselves that it’s best to keep out of this one and let the battle be fought by the zealots alone.
By not speaking out, I feel complicit in the persecution of reasonable people who are putting forward a position on the trans issue disputed by opponents with louder voices.
The idea that we all have an obligation to speak out about any and every injustice is too strong. But when we silence ourselves to make our own lives easier, we surely are being cowards, allowing questionable views to go unquestioned and abandoning those braver than ourselves to fend for themselves.