I'm back. Having written more in the last month than I think I ever have done since I started this blog, I got ill and decided to focus on my recovery more than argue about politics!
It's actually an experience I had when I was ill that is the inspiration for today's blog. My Facebook news feed is, for some reason, absolutely filled with Harry Potter-related items (perhaps the algorithms haven't yet caught on to the fact that I no longer like to discuss Harry Potter in public, in protest against the harm its author has caused the transgender community). Although I was ill and wasn't really in the right frame of mind, I did leave one comment (perhaps ill-advisedly); and as usual, what I got back was a lot of people challenging what I was saying.
Normally I'm all right to politely reply to people in these kinds of circumstances (I wrote this blog a few weeks back about how to have a political discussion online). But on this occasion, I wasn't really feeling up to it, so I asked someone who had agreed with me if they could deal with these questions. I then had a lot of responses back from that essentially saying that I had no business making any kind of political statement in the first place if I wasn't prepared to back it up. I responded to one person in particular saying that I would when I felt better, and even eventually relented and said, 'Okay, if you sum up your questions, I'll write you a diplomatic reply, but just to you.' But this person continued to speak to me in an aggressive and hostile way, with very little acknowledgement for the fact that I was feeling ill, and in the end I stopped replying because I felt disrespected.
I think what I've experienced here is a comparatively minor form of quite an interesting phenomenon that I think it's important to address, which is that transphobia and ableism often go together, and people who express one are often not that far from expressing another. In my case, I wasn't that ill and I could probably have mustered the energy to write a decent reply if I'd really tried - but the people I was talking to had so little regard for my wellbeing that I really didn't feel inclined to at that point. Given that they don't know me and I didn't go into detail about how I was ill, I did think to myself, what if I'd been far more ill than I was? What if I was in chronic pain, bed bound or severely disabled? What if it had taken all the energy I had to even write my first initial comment? Thankfully, I was nowhere near as seriously ill as this, but these people didn't know that, and it did hit home to me how they might treat someone who was.
To be clear, I do think it's important, if you're going to express political views on the Internet, to be able to back them up with facts. I have been called ableist in the past for expressing that view, so perhaps this makes me a hypocrite. However, it being important to be able to back up your points doesn't mean you have to do so straight away someone asks, or be willing to engage if the other person is clearly not in good faith. If you're to take the 'don't express views unless you can back them up' to an extreme, this would mean that no one whose energy or emotional capacity is limited in any way should ever express any kind of opinion that someone might disagree with. This is an ableist view.
This made me think more about other ways the gender-critical movement has proven itself quite ableist as well. The recent Cass Report talks a bit about neurodivergent people, suggesting that they are more likely to question their gender identity and want to transition, and that the rules should be particularly strict for them. I have no idea if there's any correlation between being neurodivergent and being transgender, but what I do know is that this is extremely threatening to the idea of anyone with a disability or a learning difficulty having independence. The insinuation is that if someone has one of these conditions, that they're less likely to be able to fully understand the consequences of their decisions and that this is a barrier to being able to consent to their own medical treatment. This logic, if applied, would surely not just apply to decisions relating to gender transitions, but to medical and cosmetic treatment generally. I've written quite a lot about mine and my partner's work campaigning for disability rights, and a major part of this work has been based around making it easier for people with disabilities to live independently, making their own life decisions and not having to rely on family members and carers to make them by proxy. To the best of my knowledge, none of the people we work with are transgender (although of course, any of them could be and have not told us, or perhaps not realised themselves); but regardless, I find the Cass Report to be a grave concern to the future of what we do, and I have addressed this issue with fellow campaigners, who have agreed with me.
One final example is that the gender-critical movement, when talking about their feelings on things, tend to be predominantly making assumptions that the cisgender people they claim to be protecting are able-bodied. The best example of this is the constant (and tedious) obsession with gendered toilets. I was discussing this matter recently with a trans-woman who also has Cerebral Palsy, and she pointed out that this has rarely been a problem for her, because she uses disabled toilets which aren't usually gendered. I must admit that this had never occurred to me. My solution to the matter of toilets would be to make all toilets unisex and single-occupancy, and the fact that disabled toilets usually already are is quite a good indicator of the fact that this would be a very easy and non-controversial solution. But I have never heard any gender-critical person express concern for anyone specifically with a disability when discussing these matters.
Ultimately, I think the reason that so many people with transphobia problems also express views that are quite ableist are because transphobia and ableism ultimately come from the same place - the place that there are specific, and desirable, ways of being a human being. Being cisgender and able-bodied are seen as 'normal' - if someone is trans, or someone is disabled, this is seen as a deviation from the norm, and therefore not legitimate. Having viewed someone like this, the most sympathetic way you can treat them is by patronising them. What is needed is a completely different outlook on what it means to be a human being - one that recognises that we are all legitimate and all equally worthy of respect.
No comments:
Post a Comment