UNPRECEDENTED TIMES
Solidarity is the only response to the ‘angry white man’ pushback against the open society. Our individual freedoms are only guaranteed and protected when everyone’s rights and freedoms are protected.
On Saturday last, the dog and I took a walk around the city of Dublin. Armed with a bottle of water and a roll of poo bags, Baxter and I took part in Dublin Pride. Neither he (as far as I know) nor I are gay. He, being a two-year-old Foot Beagle, may be considered at times excessively happy (not something I suffer from myself), but he hasn’t let on he’s a homosexualist. No, we made the decision to join the parade this year because recent events — online and in politics — have highlighted the need to demonstrate solidarity. Pride is both an opportunity for LGBTQ people to celebrate their presence in a society which has often been hostile to them and their existence and a protest against the structures built into society that discriminate against them and their rights and freedoms.
This idea of solidarity is important. Much is said these days about allyship, the idea that we should be allies of the oppressed and the marginalised. This, however, is not ideal. It is an imperfect conception of social justice action. Consider for a moment what an ally is. The ally is an individual or a group which aligns itself with another in common purpose. An alliance is an agreement between two or more parties to work together towards a common end because this end benefits each of the parties. Alliances break down when one of three things happen; when the end has been achieved, when the campaign has been defeated, or when the alliance no longer meets the needs or suits the objectives of one or more of the allies.
Alliances are contingent agreements in times of crisis or conflict — that is, in emergencies. The idea of alliances in our everyday lives implies, then, that our ordinary lives are lived in a constant state of crisis and emergency. It certainly may feel as though this is the case, and certainly those who are working to destroy the commonweal want us to feel like we are in a constant state of war, but this is not the case. The open society; the liberal democratic society based on rights and the rule of law, is normality. This is the status quo. It is far from perfect, but the direction of travel — towards greater tolerance and inclusion — is and must remain the way things are. This normality does not need alliances. It needs solidarity.
Unlike the contingent nature of alliances, however well-meaning, solidarity — denoting sturdiness — is a mode of living in ordinary time within a healthy, strong, and cohesive society in which each person is obliged to defend the other to the benefit of the whole. The open society; the only society in which individual rights and freedoms are guaranteed and protected, can only exist in societies marked by solidary commitment. As the adage goes, the house divided against itself cannot stand (Matthew 12:25), and indeed there are dark agendas at work in our society attempting to divide us against one another. Resisting these requires solidarity.
It is no coincidence that the counter-revolutionary right has chosen this moment to declare war on ‘transgenderism’ and drag performers; deploying against them the same tired old anti-gay rhetoric of the ultra-conservatives of the 1970s. And it is important to note that this assault on transgender people and drag artists is ‘homophobia adjacent.’ Since the 1990s gay men and women have won — and only after a long and painful struggle — full social and legal acceptance, together with the right to same-sex marriage (or ‘marriage’ as it should be called) and the right to adopt children and establish a family. These victories must not be considered a change to the normal, but rather a recovery of the normal and a movement in the direction of more normality.
Let us be clear, freedom is the normal state of all human beings — without exception. Any reality in which people are not free or limited in their freedoms is not normal. It is abnormal by definition. Slavery could never have been described as normality, no matter how normal it felt to the slave owner at the time. Slavery is always a grave violation of natural law. The same can be said of segregation (even ‘separate but equal’) in the United States, Apartheid in South Africa, and today in the occupation and colonial settlement of Palestine. Prevailing injustice, when it has existed for a long enough period of time, may seem normal to those benefiting from it, but this can never be normality. Justice exists only when people are free. Everything else is injustice.
Conservatives, the social and political right, are those who benefited from the social structures in which others were deprived of justice and freedom. These are people whose imaginative constructs of the world are shaped by injustice and who feel that the normal of their past was better and that the current extension of rights is making things worse. They truly believe the 1950s complementarian view of marriage was a past, now lost, perfection. It was an ideal. It benefited men over women and straight people over gay people. The conservatives believe colonialism and imperialism were likewise past, now lost, perfections. They benefited white people over and against black and brown people. Their perfection is a nostalgia for an authoritarian hierarchy in which the straight white cis-gender man was master over his women and all inferior races and classes.
There can be no surprise, then, that the pushback against transgender rights and drag performances (which have been wrongly identified as an expression of trans identity) is coming from the conservative ‘angry white man.’ The ‘TERF’ phenomenon — as concerned women fighting to defend their ‘hard won’ rights — is an illusion. The majority of women are supportive of trans rights and trans inclusion, and the overwhelming majority of actual feminists include trans women in their definition of ‘woman.’ The ‘concerned woman’ is an agent of the patriarchy. These are the unreconstructed conservative women who see themselves as women as the daughters, mothers, wives, and child-bearers of the men at the top of the patriarchal hierarchy. Most high-profile ‘gender critical’ women have openly stated that they are not feminists.
Trans-exclusionary radical feminism (TERF); so-called ‘gender critical’ feminism, is not actually feminism. It is merely part of the angry white man pushback, and this is happening because the imagined perfection of the straight white male domination of the past has been defeated (yes, its defeat is already a fait accompli). What the goal of this pushback is is obvious; this is about dismantling the progress we have made. This is about undoing the justice we have brought about, and returning us to a deeply abnormal situation in which the ‘commanders’ (a nod here to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale from someone who has actually read it) once again have charge over their women and dominance over their inferiors.
So this is why I call Pride normal. Not that it is normal that all people should be gay or queer, but that being gay and queer is normal — it is people living their freedom as their own human nature determines. For sure, Pride is about a bold display of pride in one’s identity after decades of brutal homophobic injustice. Pride is also a life-affirming statement of normality as that freedom extended to all; for all people to live their freedom as their nature determines. This is both natural and normal. Everything short of this is abnormal and therefore injustice. The attack on trans people and drag artists from the right is hate in its own right, but it is tactical — it is a means to a greater end; an effort from the right to claw back the rights all LGBTQ people have won.
Solidarity is the only response to this. Each member of the open society is obliged to live in solidary with his, her, and their (check me with the pronouns) neighbour. This is why taking the dog for a walk on Saturday was so important. We live in a world where online ‘alliances’ are no longer enough. It is time to defend our freedom, and this is only defended and protected when we defend everyone’s freedom. Remember, no man is an island. We are all part of the main and we are made the weaker when any part of it is washed away. Being ‘woke’ (a term the right now uses as a cover for its old favourite slurs) means exactly this; being awake, alert, and vigilant to those who really want us to be docile and asleep. It means not being in the dark — and why did the sun never set on the British Empire? Because God couldn’t trust them in the dark. Stay woke!
Jason Michael McCann M.Phil.
Biblical Studies and Hebrew
Race, Ethnicity, and Conflict
Unprecedented Times 