The politics of respectability

I try to stay out of discussions of trans-related issues, because it’s not my place, but also because most anti-trans or ‘gender critical’ arguments are shallow and bad faith – post-hoc rationalisations of bigotry. However, debates within the LGBT community are more interesting to me, because all the participants share an overlapping epistemic basis – they have experienced the same oppression, they share the same ‘lived experience’. So we come to a recent [unproductive] ‘debate’ on YouTube between, among others, Clara Sorrenti (a.k.a. keffals), a [controversial] transwoman and streamer, and Buck Angel, a [controversial] transman and well-known gender-critical conservative. In setting out his views (see below from 3:20), Angel essentially made two claims. Firstly, that social recognition of a non-cis gender identity should be contingent on putting in the effort to pass as a gender other than the one assigned at birth; to wit, Angel would use a male bathroom because over multiple decades he had extensively invested in ‘passing’ as a man. And secondly, that the thing that most alienated Angel and ‘ordinary people’ from the so-called trans movement was their authoritarian insistence on ‘compelling’ recognition of their gender identity.

Now, my first inclination was to dismiss all this out of hand. In the first instance, Angel is merely re-stating the well-trodden ‘transmedicalist’ position that what matters is ‘passing’ – that members of the trans community have to conform to stereotypes of the gender binary (to be more masculine than men, to be more feminine than women) in order to exist safely in mainstream society. And the accusation of leftist tyranny or illiberal progressivism is a veritably ancient right-wing canard at this point. But it occurs to me that in actuality these two arguments are the same argument. Moreover, this pattern of argumentation recurs over and over again throughout history – for example, among black communities in the US, among the indigenous community in Australia – and this recurrence of this divide among marginalised peoples reveals something interesting about how humans do politics. And perhaps in a contemporary Australian context, it might help illuminate why the indigenous community takes divergent views on a constitutional Voice, and why large chunks of potential voters find the prospect of a Voice referendum so off-putting.

Respectability Politics

To put it simply, Angel is arguing that recognition (of one’s gender identity) must be earned – mainly through compliance with social norms and expectations. And to put it somewhat uncharitably, progressives demand recognition of their identity, regardless of whether or not they comply with social expectations. It is fair and accurate to say that this dichotomy (spoiler alert, it’s false) is fundamental to the pursuit of social change. Even when progressive movements couch their demands in solid liberal terms of universal access to rights, much of the backlash against them comes from the centrist perception that to demand equality is somehow illegitimate. So, for example, large parts of the LGBT community believed that integrating into respectable society through adherence to monogamous models of marriage and family life were the key to acceptance; black conservatives think their community has to behave ‘respectably’ in order to cut down on police violence; and the modern welfare state makes recipients of state transfers demonstrate their ‘moral worthiness’ before providing them those critical economic supports necessary for their survival. In most cases, access to dignity is conceded upon performance of some ritual humiliation or submission – i.e. compliance with a social norm. For Angel, to demand equality on the other hand is to tacitly admit one has failed to earn it. Or to make an analogy, to ask for state support is to admit one has failed to earn a basic standard of living in the market; and to ask for cultural or linguistic diversity is to admit failure to integrate.

Now, one could argue that Angel’s argument – let’s call it the respectability position – is merely tactical. That members of oppressed minorities consider the most effective route to achieving political change and assess that social compliance is more likely to lead to the majority of the desired gains. And certainly, for trans individuals who can pass sufficiently well to go ‘stealth’, that may be true. But I don’t think that’s all that’s going on. The tactical explanation does not address why this is the dominant view of large swathes or non-minority populations – ranging from well-meaning cis liberals and centrists to right-wing libertarians and other persuadable groups with no stakes in reform. Respect for existing hierarchies is, after all, one of the foundational dimensions of human political personality. And individuals who lean more conservative on other issues are also more likely to adhere to the respectability position. In fact, the demand that liberal societies recognise the actual equal autonomy of all citizens to express themselves and be treated as full members of society regardless of their ethnic, religious, sexual or other status is in fact vanishingly rare.

I’m currently in the middle of researching my next project on the history of liberalism, so this pattern seems very familiar. There’s an inherent contradiction at the heart of liberalism, between it’s idealised expression of the universal equality of all mankind and the reality, which is that for almost the entirety of the liberal era some populations have been considered more equal than others. Thomas Jefferson, who famously wrote that ‘all men are created equal’, just as famously owned and abused slaves. But even beyond the individual hypocrites, just who is considered an ‘active citizen’, a member of the political community deserving of respect, and who forms part of the masses to be governed (‘passive citizens’) has long been contested. The history of progress is by-and-large a history of expanding the conception of what it means to be human. And a core part of that has been moving beyond mere legal or symbolic equality to ensure in Elizabeth Anderson’s phrase, equality of dignity. That includes, of course, the right to be heard and have one’s conception of self recognised as legitimate. By denying marginalised groups their own culture or individuals their right to self-actualisation, liberals require assimilation into the status quo prior to granting recognition of others as full citizens. This contradiction has been the motor driving social reform, while laying a seed of resentful instability that can germinate into fascism.

Recognition must be given – or taken

So here’s why the divide between earning and demanding rights is something of a false one. In both cases, recognition must ultimately be given by someone with power to someone without. I am not enough of a liberal to believe that rights have a transcendent quality that pre-exist social relationships – recognition and substantiation of rights requires collective, social action. Ultimately, respectability politics of the type advocated for by Buck Angel, or Thomas Sowell, or Noel Pearson, doesn’t work because the position of a plurality of opponents is driven by base disgust and fear of loss – particularly, an irrational fear of a relative loss of social position. Most gender-critical men and women will never tolerate trans people – not even within the prescribed margins tacitly conceded by the transmedicalists – because they view the existence of any trans person at all as a threat, driven by feelings of personal disgust, confusion and rejection. As keffals points out, throughout history minority groups have been met with both public and private violence, legal suppression and harassment. American conservatives have basically already conceded that bills banning trans healthcare for minors, or to ban trans individuals from sport etc., are the thin end of the wedge towards their complete removal from public existence. Out of sight, out of mind.  

But it’s not enough to merely demand recognition, either. And doing so, as we have seen, may alienate those liberals and centrists who resent any expectation that they have to act to improve society somewhat. The notion that they cannot be existentially secure in their [undeserved] social position until and unless marginalised people are also secure is a truth that threatens the very core of their immense self-regard. Until and unless minority groups have the power and organisation to take recognition by force – to seize influence over key institutions and win rights on their own terms – that recognition will continue to be withheld. And in all honesty, the trans community – and indigenous peoples here in Australia – probably lack the sheer numbers to prevail in that kind of political fight. I’m not saying don’t do it. Pressure needs to be exerted from all directions and coercion is an essential part of building any social norm. But galling as it may be, progress will probably be won when the vast body of self-satisfied liberals deign to grant recognition of minority rights ‘as a gift’. The act of charitable giving re-enforces the centrist’s own sense of moral superiority and generosity. So there must be a fine balance between bullying and cajoling; a battered liberal will just as easily become a fascist.

Politics as charity

Does this carry any relevance for the referendum campaign for a Voice for indigenous Australians? I’m on the record as supporting the Voice proposal as a route to political representation, but I’m afraid that the mood of the public is souring and the window to make a make a positive case for constitutional change is narrowing. But the motivation of the Voice’s non-indigenous but well-meaning supporters appears to be not constitutional re-design but recognition of colonised peoples as full citizens. For liberals, the symbolism of the Voice - including their ‘recognition’ in the constitution - is the point; it will cost the centre nothing in real terms. So I think the Prime Minister’s messaging about relying on Australians’ ‘best qualities’ is probably his best saving throw at this point. The referendum will get up if and only if the government is able to convince sufficient voters that they’re good enough people to make the most minor of symbolic concessions to a historically marginalised group of people, whose land and culture we stole. Some might think that’s an easy victory; for me, it appears to sit on a knife’s edge. The politics of this kind of political charity may be frustrating and insulting to genuine leftists - we don’t beg - but fortunately, it’s a skill at which most high-status liberals excel.

The Politics of Recognition, a Second Look

In anticipation of this blog's imminent one year anniversary, I've been looking over my older posts to see what, if anything, I might do differently twelve months later. In particular, the piece "Identity Politics, a Second Look", which was conceived at the height of the Bernie Bro v Hillarycrat post-election acrimony, caught my eye. It's one of the more popular and controversial older posts (with >100 views), and I stand by its conclusions: intersectionality, as a practice, is vital and necessary but pure identarianism is both illiberal and undemocratic and is correctly disavowed by everyone to the right of "dictatorship of the proletariat" communists and to the left of ethnic supremacists. However, today's I'm going to offer a refinement of part of my earlier analysis that I now feel was undercooked. 

The Politics of Difference

In short, I was too dismissive and imprecise in the central part of the analysis regarding the liberal version of identity politics. By this I meant redistribution policies predicated on the demonstration of significant statistical differences in outcomes for socially defined groups of people, for example: the underrepresentation of women and other minorities in positions of political and corporate authority. In this form, identity politics or the politics of difference is  consistent with both the liberal universalist tradition and limited redistributionary policy aims. To summarise: if all citizens are equal in formal opportunity, then measurable group-level differences in outcome must have a hidden or informal cause. We can argue about what those causes are, and what mix of redistribution or prevention is best to prevent those differences from recurring, but the acknowledgement of structural-level privilege and oppression, whether it's called the patriarchy, structural racism or the capitalist mode of production, is the sine qua non of left-of-centre politics (and its denial the sina qua non of right-of-centre politics).

The struggle for LGBT rights is the most salient example, here, because it's so fresh in the memory of most people. The lifting of legal prohibitions on homosexuality and the granting of marriage equality sees LGBT people treated equality before the law, but outcomes for LGBT people remain challenging in many areas: LGBT individuals are more likely to be living in poverty, to be victims of violence, and to self-harm. The job of activists, at least in the West, will likely change from a fight for recognition to fighting for policies to remedy these persistent economic, cultural and historical patterns of disadvantage, so long as they persist. In much the same way as legal equality for women left the greater work of challenging the second-class status of women undone, and the dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the United States kept the economic structure of African-American disadvantage intact, all movements transition eventually from fighting for equal recognition to fighting for equal distribution. 

As a socialist, I see the politics of difference as necessary but insufficient. Discovering LGBT individuals or ethnic minorities have a greater than expected chance of living in poverty is important, but it doesn't answer the question of why *anyone* is living in poverty. Any measurement of structural disadvantage for particular sub-populations takes as an implicit reference point the status quo division of resources. The politics of difference is relational, not absolute: we can say that the relative deprivation of minorities is unjust, but liberal identity politics lack a framework to critique the justice of the entire social order. Without linking these individual struggles together to see the bigger picture, we risk leaving an otherwise unjust system intact or, worse, setting it as our explicit goal! 

From Distribution to Recognition

Already, however, I have made a distinction between struggles for equal recognition and struggles for equal opportunity. Logically, the former must precede the latter. A person must be recognised by others as a social subject, entitled to equal regard by both the law and other citizens, before the conditions of equal opportunity laid out in the liberal social contract can be tested and remedied. This excellent explainer video by Ollie at PhilosophyTube sets out the argument and its origin in Hegel. Achieving recognition as a social subject is not only a feature of liberal societies: expansionary empires with religious characteristics typically regard their 'heathen' colonial subjects as less than human. It's only after colonial subjects convert to the faith of their colonizer that they win some level of minimal social status. 

Liberalism played this role for the European colonial empires, at least in their later stage. It justified, for the conquerors, the overthrow of "pre-modern" societies but it in turn provided tools for colonised people to re-claim recognition from their oppressors. By fighting for acknowledgement of their dignity as equal human subjects, Gandhi, Nkrumah and the other products of a colonial education re-established the sovereignty of their peoples in terms recognised, albeit begrudgingly, by the imperial centers (It goes without saying that colonialism and the denial of their common humanity was unjust from the outset). But the winning of recognition, of sovereignty, did not redress the vast material inequality of social outcomes between newly liberated states and the metropolitan powers. 

Charles Taylor, the communitarian philosopher, coined this version of the politics of recognition in a 1994 article. I'm not a fan of Taylor or his work in general, but this aspect of it is so widely referenced that it deserves discussion. Taylor recognised that an individual's identity is not somehow intrinsic to themselves but rather worked out through dialogue with others, and that therefore our sense of ourselves is defined relationally. The denial of this mutual recognition generates harm to oneself and one's sense of identity, which for a social species like humans leads to a wide variety of destructive behaviours and outcomes. Kant, Rawls and the other social-contract liberals have transformed this philosophical or psychological need into a universal principle: dignity under liberalism means that, prior to any other consideration, we enter into a society on the basis of the mutual recognition of each other's shared humanity. 

Not Just One or the Other

Prior to any engagement as political subjects of a liberal democracy on matters of distributional justice a marginalised group must therefore fight for recognition of its dignity: it must win legal equality for its members and the right to have rights, free of discrimination. But while equal recognition and material equality are distinct components of justice, they are not entirely separate ones. Denial of recognition generates material inequality, and sufficiently severe levels of substantive inequality may constitute an de facto denial of equal dignity. Dignity is not an absolute category, but rather relative to the dignity afforded to other members of society. 

In Chapters VIII and IX of my book, "Politics for the New Dark Age: Staying Positive Amidst Disorder", I argue that a similar distinction lies at the explanatory heart of the difference between poverty and inequality. Poverty, like dignity, is often articulated in terms of the absolute denial of an individual's rights, whereas equality is relative to a society's overall level of affluence. But, as I argue in the book, poverty is also relative. What constitutes the denial of an adequate education, housing or standard of medical care can only be defined with reference to what is broadly possible in a given social and economic context. Poverty can exist by chance in even relatively egalitarian societies, but poverty becomes structural under conditions of high inequality. I wish I could claim credit for this argument about the twin bases of injustice, but I've learned subsequently that it's also the view of American feminist and philosopher Nancy Fraser. 

So too with dignity and recognition: if the material conditions under which a group is disadvantaged are so severe that their deprivation is not even acknowledged to be unjust by society as a whole, then they are not being afforded equal dignity. For example, while indigenous groups mostly enjoy equal citizenship in settler states, their social and material conditions are often so poor that it's easy to argue that the colonial society does not recognise them as equal human subjects. So too when the West granted women the right to vote, but continued to control and limit their sexuality and to grant spouses violent dominion over the household: it's straightforward to argue that under those conditions society had not fully acknowledged the status of women to be equal with that of men. Dismantling slavery was a win for African-Americans, but Black Lives Matter argues that disproportional state violence demonstrates that their community is still not being treated as equal social subjects. 

To wrap up, if I was re-writing my earlier piece on identity politics today, I'd hold on to my critique of the politics of difference as providing an insufficient critique of structural inequality. However, where inequality of outcomes is so severe as to represent a de facto denial of a group's equal citizenship, or where that denial of equal dignity is established by law and norms, I think both affected groups and supportive allies have a responsibility to put higher priority on redressing their alienation from the social contract.