Delegitimising social critique and dissent on the left

Eszter Kováts writes that censoriousness is not the way to deal with legitimate concerns about social-justice claims.

In its satirical, late-night Friday show, ZDF Magazin Royale (think John Oliver), the German public broadcaster recently addressed the controversy around a coming gender self-identification bill, under which trans-identifying individuals could change their legal sex without prior psychological or medical evaluation. The moderator, Jan Böhmermann, ridiculed all opposing arguments raised in the name of women’s rights and single-sex spaces, asserting these were just transphobia disguised as concerns for women. He likened Alice Schwarzer, an iconic figure of the West German women´s movement of the second wave, to the far right and applied the activist slur TERF (‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’) to those who expressed doubts about the bill.

Perhaps his most stunning affirmation was: ‘It has long been a scientific consensus that there are more than two biological sexes.’ Even if intersex individuals would constitute a separate biological sex (which, lacking a third gamete, they do not), this would not make sex a spectrum. Intersex individuals’ claims of bodily integrity are routinely instrumentalised to legitimise any trans and queer identity claims.

The show trashed all critics, arrogantly questioning their feminist credentials—implying that the correct feminist stance, according to Böhmermann, was to support the bill without reservations. His ‘mansplaining’ of feminism to women was not however to convince dissenters but to delegitimise them in front of any bystander: no decent person could hold such views, since they were clearly coming from the far right.

This show, viewed by millions, illustrates the main discursive strategy of a censorious social-justice activism in the west, which goes beyond gender issues. Intentionally or not, linking dissent to the far right has two delegitimising logics: any counter-argument comes from a morally wrong place and any purported social critique is in fact a conspiracy theory.

Nor is this ZDF episode extreme or rare. For instance, the recent report of the Brussels-based, transgender-lobby organisation TGEU describes right-wing anti-gender movements and gender-critical feminists in the same vein; other pro-trans charities accuse the latter even of a genocidal ideology. Or check out ‘TERF’ on Google Scholar and you will find myriad academic publications uncritically adopting these activist vocabularies about exclusion, hate and so-called far-right logics. The controversies around the Oxford University Press books about sex/gender by Holly Lawford-Smith and Alex Byrne hint at serious problems in philosophy and academic publishing.

Moralistic discourse

Certain concepts, political goals and claims pursued by the postmodern left have been under fire for quite some time now. These critiques come not only from the right (still less the far right) but also from Marxist corners, liberal defenders of free speech and academic freedom, various strands of feminist, gay- and lesbian-rights advocates and concerned parents. Faced with such criticism, the reaction is often aggressive and zealous: the critic is not only wrong but a despicable person, who hides hate or bigotry behind arguments which the righteous should disdain.

All of us as individuals should be accountable and it is quite plausible that we do not see our own self-serving blindspots. But it is quite a leap, for instance, to label any critique of individual-bullying tendencies within anti-racist activism as ‘white fragility’. A similar recent elision was in the podcast series The Witch Trials of JK Rowling. The YouTube celebrity Natalie Wynn (as Contrapoints) recalled her earlier charge of indirect bigotry against the author, calling any reference to concerns about women’s safety or children’s vulnerability in relation to gender self-identification a smokescreen for transphobia.

A common slip in this moralistic discourse is to identify the concerns of members of certain groups with the goals and strategies of associated social movements—as if to criticise the latter must be to ignore the former or even add, directly or indirectly, to the harms inflicted upon them. Any critique of #metoo is then sexism, of the surrogacy industry homophobia, of the prostitution industry sex-worker exclusion. It becomes racism to challenge the Excel-sheet totting-up of ‘intersectional’ identities and trans- and queerphobia not to accept blindly any particular identity claims.

This is built into the definitions used. One might naïvely think a ‘phobia’ should include some actual fear or contempt. Yet the definition of transphobia by the prestigious LGBT+ charity Stonewall includes any ‘denying their gender identity or refusing to accept it’ as such. Or if one thinks that equality of gays/lesbians with heterosexuals entails an equal right to a child, then any questioning of such a right—for instance, on the basis of the exploitation of the bodies of the poorest women as surrogates—appears as an affront.

Legitimate question

While these actors certainly act with the best of convictions, these in turn preclude critical discussion. Also off limits becomes anycritique of the elites involved. Yet it is a legitimate empirical question to ask who are the dominant voices behind certain social causes and which groups benefit from certain policies. There are also very convincing accounts which problematise the connection between this type of politics and media and academia elites.

If one speaks of lobbies, one is dimissed as a conspiracy theorist. But there is a trans lobby, just as there is a feminist lobby (it’s in the name of the European Women’s Lobby), a Catholic lobby, a large-families lobby and so on. They all aggregate forces, build coalitions and press political institutions to adopt legislation in their favour, be it on national or European levels. Yet talking about these issues has become like walking on eggshells.

Critical thinking should not be tuned down but amplified, including to understand better how certain seemingly progressive causes can be recruited to the interests of capital—be that whether Big Pharma profits from individuals put on lifelong medical treatments following a gender transition or companies push their female employees to egg-freezing and postponing family plans or employees are busy with LGBT+ resource groups rather than trade unions.

‘Neoliberalism is in the intellectual air we breathe,’ say gender scholars who claim that gender theory has got trapped in the ideology of individualism, overly focused on individual identities. Legitimate commitments to wider social justice (as in acceptance of trans people) are then based on false individual claims (reproducing the essentialist, ‘born this way’ narrative which contradicts any social-science basics about how identities are formed in interaction with the environment).

Individualising the political imaginary

Most importantly, this delegitimisation of social critique reinforces the individualisation of our political imaginary. As Marc Saxer puts it, ‘Fights about moral issues and identity are a typical feature of the neoliberal age: many citizens have lost confidence in the state’s ability and, indeed, will to shape society. Change is now only possible on a grand scale if enough individuals see a need to change their behaviour.’ This preoccupation with getting recognition for one’s particular identity, and then policing one another’s speech, is testimony to a deep resignation and pessimism: the maximum we can then hope for (in a very sad case of Neoliberal Order Breakdown Syndrome) is that my bigot fellows do not speak their oppressive opinions out loud any more.

How representative, widespread and systemic these discourses are in civil society is another empirical question, to investigate in more depth. But they are not isolated cases on the most extreme fringes: they are present in the media, social movements, policy-making and academia. Nor are they descriptionsof real cleavages—for or against equality and inclusion—but discursive political strategies to create cleavages and win hegemony for a particular version of social justice.

Yet while bullying people, by saying ‘you are either with us or you are a right-wing conspiracy theorist morally on the wrong side of history’, might have a chilling effect and silence people out of fear, it will hardly win a majority for anything in the long run. It will rather radicalise those on the receiving end.

This is a joint publication by Social Europe and IPS-Journal