There is no such thing as the perfect minority: the logical fallacy of respectability politics
Sarah Jane Baker’s acquittal on 31st August 2023 raises interesting questions about how trans people should act and talk in public. Personally, I am very much against her version of protect, especially its espousal of violence, yet that does not mean she has no right to say it, just that she has to accept any consequences for doing so. During second wave feminism’s evolution respectability politics became part of the conversation, namely that queer folk need to align as closely to heteronormative values and standards otherwise they will be shunned. Black feminism, and eventually intersectional feminism, atomised this, showing that no matter how well behaved you are one slip up and you will be punished and ostracised from those you cling to.
Trans activists face the same dilemma. Defend trans sports and Lia Thomas is thrown in your face, whose only crime was actually winning a handful of races. Defend trans sexual abuse survivors and they throw all the sex offenders who transitioned after they committed their crimes. Indeed, defend trans medicine and you get John Money thrown in your face and Ray Blanchard’s work held up as proof against. Simply advocating for trans right is enough to set off a fire storm, even all the personal insults they can think of in the moment.
No minority group within society can ever assimilate perfectly, otherwise they simply become the norm and lose their sense of identity. Hannah Arendt did a masterful takedown of this in Origins of Totalitarianism, highlighting that no amount of assimilation saved the minorities in Germany after 1933, political, religious or racial. Trans activists know this, yet exclusionary feminists pull one or two excesses and shout very loudly about how trans folk are oppressing women’s rights. That some trans folk do commit crimes and lack a degree of self-awareness is a matter of personal taste, what it does not show is that being trans is deviant, as there are legion of cis folk who do all the same behaviours without recourse to public shaming.
No human is perfect or infallible, it is part of the human condition. We all have agency and decision-making powers that impact our lives in ways we cannot yet comprehend. No trans person is a saint, and nor should they be expected to be. Yet, as with all things, there is a fine line between personal expression and lacking an awareness of what your actions could result in. No-one deserves to be bullied or harassed, no-one deserves to be victim blamed, yet in the age of social media both are done with glee and abandon.
How you present yourself in the digital world has a lifetime’s worth of consequences, and often we forget this when we post an image or comment online. I learnt this the hard way in the early days of Facebook, and ever since I have run a cordon sanitaire around my online identity. You can trace me back to my real world identity, but I am much more circumspect about posting anything online, and every post I make I am accountable for. This is my approach to my online self, though each of us makes our own decisions.
And this is why dog piling, harassment, bullying, name calling, doxing, and all other forms of online abuse are abhorrent. No-one will hold up to scrutiny if their online personas are scrutinised in full detail, we all fall short of someone else’s ideals. No minority person is every responsible for all the other members of that group. To be held up as an exemplar, like Laverne Cox or Elliot Page, or a detestable beast, like the multitude of post-conviction trans sex offenders, only shows the disparity between dark and light, not the infinite texture that runs in between. No paragon survives eternal scrutiny, and it is exhausting being the standard bearer, as you will always fall without support.
No two trans people are the same, and the insidious suggestion that all trans women are sexual predators in waiting flows directly from the assumption that all men are sexual predators in waiting. Same as saying that transing kids makes trans folk groomers. No-one is transing trans kids, no trans person is grooming the next generation because being trans is an innate part of some kid’s innate selves. The logical fallacy of seeing being trans as sexualising bodies condemns trans kids to a potential purgatory of the wrong puberty that they then have to spend the rest of their lives correcting. By pushing the narrative that all trans folk are deviant because being trans is inherently deviant because of those one or two high profile trans criminals is frankly absurd.
And yes, this is a messy and complex subject. No two people come to their trans identities the same way. Some trans folk are un-medicalised, others, like me, have transitioned, had surgery, and are societally affirmed in our genders. Being trans is not a competition, we are not racing each other to get to some mythic finishing line. And much of the argument about trans identities stems from those who are unable or do not want to medicalise. There is no perfect minority because trying to define trans identities in their broad inclusive hinterland will always fall short of the breadth of our community.
This is same for any minority where only one axis of identity is used to define who we are. My level of personal privilege is different from another trans person, as they are to the next. Because of this our ability to build solidarity is compromised by the messiness of the fight. I refuse to use TERF because I think exclusionary feminism is a better term, I refuse to advocate violence because I do not believe it works, and I refuse to call anyone names because I hate bullying of all shades. Yet, there are plenty, indeed likely the majority, of trans folk who will disagree on one or more of those points. That is perfectly acceptable because those are my personal opinions and code of conduct, not something I project onto others.
Paradoxes are not always solvable, and the paradox of being a minority in a society that is actively setting out to abnegate your rights is complicated. Arendt’s solution was to retain a degree of otherness with enough political capital to fight back against oppression. I think she is right to a point, but also misses a wider point. I think that it is plurality that is essential, not just enforced normative standards. What is normative is ever shifting, and much like power dynamics within a group there needs to be an understanding of how to normalize the broad breadth of trans identities, not just snipe out in the hope that a narrow band of trans folk retain whatever rights they have obtained as scraps from the table.
Perfect minorities exist only to further entrench the power of those who decide what is normative. It has no benefits for those deemed imperfect and something lesser. We do not live in zoos or menageries, we are not specimens for public delectation; no, trans folk are of the world and part of the world, as much of the tapestry as cis folk. Pull on our threads and we have the same tastes, likes, passions, and connections as everyone else in our cultures and societies, we are not people apart from the world. Our power lies in part in our ability to disrupt, question, and remake old assumptions, which is at the core of all feminism. Trans folk may not be perfect, but we are part of society’s lifeblood, right where we belong.
