Perhaps not all ‘underdog causes’ are created equal.
What do a Scottish children’s author and a mid-century Brazilian political theorist have in common? Answer: a recognition that movements founded on liberation can become instruments of the very institutional power they once opposed . . . though neither would likely appreciate the comparison.
J. K. Rowling and Paulo Freire make unlikely intellectual bedfellows. But Rowling’s latest essay on transgender activism offers an occasion to revisit a warning embedded in Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.
In his work, Freire offered the warning that “the oppressed, instead of striving for liberation, tend themselves to become oppressors, or ‘sub-oppressors.’” Liberation, in his account, required more than exchanging places with one’s oppressors. It demanded a transformation of the relationship to power itself.
In Rowling’s account, the contemporary transgender-rights movement has acquired considerable institutional influence, while the costs of policies advanced in its name fall unevenly on women. As she observes, the more privileged a woman is, the less likely she may be to experience those costs. There is a peculiar luxury in advocating sacrifices that one will never personally be called on to make.
The popular conception of the trans-rights movement is, as Rowling puts it, that it’s “just one more champion-the-underdog cause, right?” To that she gives a resounding no.
Rowling acknowledges that trans activism “doesn’t impact all women negatively.” Rather, “the more privileged you are, the less it tends to affect you, and the more it might actually benefit you.” That distinction becomes particularly acute in the case of battered women’s shelters or other single-sex refuges. The debate over how to accommodate competing needs remains contentious. Rowling’s concern is that decisions about those spaces can be made by people who will never depend on them, while the women who do are left with little recourse.
Rowling acknowledges that transgender people deserve protection from violence and discrimination. But she argues that the policies adopted to secure that protection don’t adequately consider the rights and needs of others who are similarly vulnerable.
The trans-rights movement is, to Rowling, inherently different in its relationship to power than the civil, gay, and women’s rights movements that preceded it. Those were scrappy, grassroots efforts to challenge entrenched prejudices and discrimination. Contemporary trans activism, by contrast, is “elitist to its core,” nursed in philosophy and gender studies departments. Flipping the grassroots model, the ideology has been imposed top-down, taking over “cultural, political and state-run institutions” as the “progressive cause du jour.”
The achievements of the civil rights and women’s rights movements remind us that justice sometimes demands institutional change. But the movements’ achievements also impose an obligation on their successors: to remain answerable to the people in whose name they claim to act.
Rowling’s account suggests an uncomfortable irony: In the many institutions where trans activism has acquired influence, the language of liberation can become a means of dismissing the concerns of vulnerable women. The aim was never liberation, but rather trans activists attempting to grasp the power they coveted.
Freire warned that the oppressed might become oppressors themselves. The trans-activist movement might need to look in a mirror.