I Am Not Interested In Making Bigots Comfortable
On recent events, my evolving philosophy surrounding activism, and my latest project
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Originally, I had planned on launching this blog in the New Year.
It seemed like a good, solid time to launch a new project, allowing everyone to get through the holidays with minimal issue.
And then Jerry Coyne happened.
If you are in the state-church space you may have seen that the Freedom From Religion Foundation recently posted a column by biologist and old guard atheist thinker Jerry Coyne, “rebutting” my “What is a Woman” blog, also written for Freethought Now. Now deleted, Coyne’s blog argued that we should not ignore “biology,” as well as cited a debunked British study as “proof” that transgender women are more likely to commit acts of sexual violence. To put a long story short, the blog was bad. Coyne combined straw man arguments and stochastic terrorism to create an essay that was almost comically bad, if it weren’t for the sheer danger it presented.
I can’t go into detail as to how that column came to be, only that the situation is slightly more complicated than it appears, in ways that I both disagree with and understand. Life is weird like that sometimes.
I’m not going to give an in-depth response to Coyne’s blog. I don’t think it’s productive. Coyne has been going after my work for the past two and a half years, and I do not believe that he is engaging in this topic with any degree of intellectual honesty or integrity. If he was he would have at least engaged with my argument directly instead of making up claims that appear nowhere in the piece he was responding to.
Instead I want to make a larger point about where I am at with my activism work, and the tone I intend to set with this project.
I am no longer interested in making bigots comfortable in my activism.
I’ve spent a lot of my career so far trying to “compromise” by taking an approach of not appearing too “extreme” so as not to alienate anyone. As a transgender person of faith who values diversity of thought and pluralism and free expression, that’s pretty par for the course. I’ve tried to play the part of being cool with “well meaning” transphobia and taking on the role of constant educator to people who could care less about my safety and comfort. I’ve tried to follow the conventional wisdom that we must be unfailingly nice to people who hold harmful views so that we do not chase them away to further extremism.
What I’ve learned from this experience is that this strategy is doing more harm than it is good. I do not think it is bringing the people with good intent who are actively trying to deconstruct their views into our circle. Instead, all it is accomplishing is forcing those of us who are most impacted by these views, who are most put in danger by them, out. When it comes to social issues, we do not learn by being comfortable. We have to sit in a level of discomfort in order to be able to learn.
A common framework used in activism and advocacy spaces to describe how we learn and grow is called the “circles of growth” or sometimes “circles of discomfort.”
This model posits that everyone has four zones that they move through in certain situations. We spend most of our time, either intentionally or unintentionally, in our comfort zone. This is where we are most familiar with the things being discussed, and experience the most confidence. The most difficult zone to move past is the fear zone. We enter the fear zone in situations where we are uneasy and afraid to make mistakes. We become paralyzed by fear of failure or looking unintelligent, and choose not to engage, or become defensive of the beliefs that are being challenged. The sweet spot for personal growth lies when we push beyond that fear zone into the learning and growth zones. When we enter the learning zone, we are able to acquire new knowledge and skills, build confidence, and expand our comfort zone. Lastly, we enter the growth zone when we apply that new knowledge, set new goals, and find new purpose from what we’ve learned.
Becoming familiar with how we experience these circles is important, and takes a lot of work and self reflection, but it starts with challenging ourselves to step out of our comfort zones and intentionally seeking out discomfort. We have to be ok with making mistakes and experiencing unease, or we will be completely and utterly incapable of evolving.
As activists, we need to not only be personally aware of this paradigm, but also aware of how we build community spaces that foster this process for growth. We shouldn’t throw people out of our spaces for mistakes that are rooted in unintentional ignorance, or for common missteps as they’re learning. But we also shouldn’t excuse bigotry for fear of driving them away or being accused of “censorship.” How we handle bigotry, intentional or otherwise, is a value statement. If we are going to claim that we value the lives and safety of marginalized individuals, we cannot prioritize the comfort of those whose beliefs cause real and significant harm to them. We have to live up to our values by holding people accountable, and balancing the grace required to allow people to grow with the boundaries necessary to keep people safe.
There are plenty of things that we can, and should, disagree about in the quest to create a better, kinder, more just word. We can disagree about the best way to engage politicians, the nitty gritty details of policy making, the merits of violence as political action, and how much pizza to order for meetings. Disagreement and open debate is generally speaking, a good thing that I encourage. It allows us to develop better ideas and better frameworks of existence. But there is a difference between fostering debate and being permissive towards harm and bigotry, and we need to do a better job of both responding to harm and preventing it before it happens. We have to set standards and boundaries in order to protect the very people we claim to be fighting for, first and foremost, and create guardrails that allow people to effectively learn and grow, as well as repair the damage their beliefs have caused.
Finally, lest someone accuse me of engaging in “cancel culture” let me make it clear that I am a strong believer of “killing the cop in your mind,” grace, and forgiveness. I am trained in restorative justice mediation techniques, and regularly take steps to reexamine my own biases and world views. If Jerry Coyne and his followers one day evolve to understand trans issues, and come forward to genuinely own up to and repair the harm they are actively causing, I would warmly welcome that with open arms and would be happy to play a role in that learning process.
Regardless, we have a responsibility to loudly and actively condemn transphobia and all other forms of bigotry in the state-church movement, and I do so with every part of my being. Despite the slurs and baseless accusations that have been constantly hurled directly at me as a result of Coyne’s work (and believe me that this is not an isolated incident), I will not be bullied out of the movement. I will not be spoken down to, especially in my area of expertise. And I certainly will not allow my community and the people I love and care for to be attacked with junk science and poorly constructed rhetoric.
So welcome, one and all, to TransingBoundaries, your latest place to find trans perspectives on law, state-church separation, religion, LGBTQIA+ rights, and the fight for a better, more just world. I hope you’ll join me.