By Maeve G. Howser
There are spaces of public discussion in which the perspective of the oppressed writer/speaker is considered inextricable from the statement or idea itself, and her countless identities are considered as definitive to what she sees—your campus darling CPJ seated well among them. What she sees is somewise contingent upon her identity in such a sense that her statement couldn’t so much as be without her identity.
There are other spaces, however, where this is not the case, and the results are twofold: in one scenario, the identity of the author is treated as a discrediting basis that poisons the well, and the statement itself is seen as biased, pointed, or skewed. In another scenario, it is questioned why this particular speaker feels the need to engage with everything from the same angle or perspective they always have. In these scenarios, I witness that surrounding contemporaries (who are also influenced by their identities, rather than be understood for those traits granted to them by identity), are often lauded for their portrayals of “both sides” of an argument; their perceived fairness in being removed from the moment and affecting themself as effectively apolitical—despite the utter lack of substance in neutrality. There is no broader insight, but rather there is simply a notation of the perceived duality of perspectives. It is worth remembering that there is not such a thing as being apolitical, but there is such a thing as being politically ignorant.
Cis people, men, neurotypical people, liberals, and atheists, among others, have often asked me why I so often exclusively talk about being a trans, autistic, radical Pagan woman—did I say ‘asked’? I meant: demeaned me for the volume at which I talk of this or that thing I’m confident in; adopted a paternalistic, normative tone when doing so; accused me of making my transness my “only” personality trait, or seeking a medal for such a thing, etc. “Not everything is about being trans,” I am told. “You shouldn’t make such a big deal out of these fringe issues,” I am told. “Trans people are a new thing, don’t expect people to know anything about them,” I am told.
I speak critically of the aforementioned element of “both-sidedness”, because I often witness it as either: a. misinterpreted from a statement itself biased, or b. postured for the sake of liberal agreeability. Our statements, try as we might to expand them out to endless applicability, will always be situated within the mind of the person making them. One can try to portray an idea of every perspective, but one cannot fully live everything, and the weight one must bear to make a statement applicable to all is unworldly. It is characteristic of human communication to be biased. The two ways to go about communication are to embrace one’s bias and treat it as the nature of our work, or otherwise to avoid one’s bias, refuse to call attention to it, and instead to pretend that it isn’t even there.
I opt to embrace my bias, because I have seen its absence give rise to disinformation masked by a paltry worldliness applied by the removal of the markers of bias. The years that preceded the Trump administration, as one example, were rife with cries for “unbiased” representation, for unguided questions, and for near-magical clairvoyance on the part of the journalist. These clamoring cries for undoctored recreations of “reality” paved the way for electoral campaign charlatans to be believed foremost. Often, the postured lack of bias gains this status from its perceptible lack of needing to be explained, illuminated, or felt. Although this has the power of making personal accounts feel universal, it also utterly serves privileged, majority experiences that are often widely recognized and understood. You need not explain to a cis man reader, for example, what it means and is like to be a cis man (unless, of course, the reader turns out in the next while not to have been a cis man after all—and even then, we learn how to be cis men well enough to appear as them for years of our lives). You, however, do need to explain to a cis man reader what it might be like to be a trans person, or a woman: and to privileged identities, being told what this or that other life experience entails feels an awful lot like being fed something so opinionated it is, by some perversion of the imagination, obsolete. Non-hegemonic perspectives are very easy to perceive as being so off the beaten path they are “agendas” to be “pushed”, as if the whole of life, and hallmarks of culture even privileged groups engage with (such as the whole of monotheistic religion) are as well not narrative.
To encourage that my doings are completely uninformed by who I am is to encourage a estrangement of my wholeness, and is only a few degrees off from telling me you will accept my being a trans woman or a lesbian so long as I keep it in the house and don’t “shove it down your throat”, and don’t make the world witness to what “degeneracy” is my persuasion. To encourage that I can do all things separate from my parts is to encourage that I grow alienated from those parts, and cease to know myself; cease to harvest the nectar-like knowing that comes from identity and funnels into honeycombs of expression, the mead of poetry. To acknowledge my works with no regards to their maker’s perspective is to fetishize the article; castigate the author. It is not simply a due spoil of the exertion of journalistic duty to not represent how my perspectives and words are irrevocably altered by being trans: it would be an obliteration of the truth of my writing if I were to pretend that every thought I have, especially in our so very gendered society, were not defined by being trans, and possessing a unique relationship to gender. That would be evidence truly doctored. When I write what I write, it’s written through an undefinable transfeminine lens, as well as the lenses of my other identities: there is always a white lens; an American lens; a housed lens; a Pagan lens; an autistic lens; a lesbian lens. Without these natures, my writing couldn’t and wouldn’t be. To remove this; enforce criteria for one to be taken seriously; label an underspoken perspective as cringe, woke, fringe; introduce these systems of civility and acceptability—we destroy statement, life, and opinion: the lattermost being the closest thing humans have to truth. For that dependency we must not weep, but rejoice and dance around the brilliance it takes to feel things.
