Where has the middle gone?

A post by PaulL, regular commenter and sometime contributor.

Once again in NZ we’re seeing our public discourse being taken over by the fringes, and no room left for anything in the middle. You’re with us or you’re against us.

I see both sides feeling threatened, but not a lot of empathy for each other. I see both sides talking past each other, and attributing sinister motives to the other side.

I also see a lot of common ground, common ground that isn’t being identified and agreed upon, and that isn’t being talked about in the media. Without common ground there really cannot be discussion. This is a worrying trend I’ve seen overseas, and I guess Bryce Edwards is right when he says that it’s an ugly stoking of culture wars in an election year.

I see a debate that isn’t going to be easily resolved by focusing on rights. Because the core of the debate is a conflict between two different sets of rights, a conflict that can only be resolved by compromise. But compromise only occurs with discussion. I don’t understand what the path is to a resolution that is acceptable to both sides.

Let me unpick what I see are the competing viewpoints.

On one side we have a set of trans people and their supporters. They have history of being discriminated against, and as a group experience a lot of violence against them. They are concerned for their safety, and they believe that the rights they’ve fought for may get lost. Their narrative focuses on the historical and current injustices against trans people, in particular including violence against them, and their entirely reasonable desire for it to stop.

They passionately believe that Posie Parker / Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull would like to “extinguish” or “sterilise” them, that the “stand up for women” group would like trans people to simply not exist. And, to be fair, we can find comments from Posie Parker or those associated with her that can be interpreted in that way.

Then we have the “stand up for women” group. They strongly feel that women fought for generations to get basic rights for women. They are worried for women’s safety, and provide examples of women’s spaces being accessed by those who are biologically male, and of women being assaulted. They worry about women’s sports when male-bodied trans women can enter, and the safety of girls and women when any male can self identify as a women and access women’s spaces. They are asking what the boundaries are.

These both appear to be reasonable positions, and there is a lot of area where there isn’t disagreement.

I think most reasonable people would agree that:

• Trans people should not be subjected to violence or discrimination, and should not be “extinguished” or “sterilised”
• Many trans women may not be safe in men’s changing rooms, men’s toilets etc. There is a safety issue for them
• It is polite to make a reasonable effort to refer to someone by their chosen name and pronouns, but to also acknowledge that when someone has made an effort, we shouldn’t judge them if they forget, didn’t know, or simply get it wrong. We should also acknowledge that a lot of people are impolite, and you cannot enforce politeness

Conversely, I also think that most reasonable people would agree that:

• There are biological men (trans or not) who have accessed women’s spaces and assaulted or raped women or girls, and this is a safety concern for women and girls, and a religious concern for some groups
• We need to be careful with children self identifying as trans and taking irreversible medical steps, in particular if that’s done without the agreement of their parents and families
• There are legitimate concerns with male-bodied people participating in women’s sports

Where a clear conflict comes is in the area of safety. In simple terms, many women/girls feel that someone with a penis shouldn’t be in women’s toilets or changing rooms. Conversely, you can’t really ask everyone who wants to enter women’s toilets or changing rooms to show their genitals in order to prove their right to enter, and it is unreasonable to expect most trans women to use male bathrooms and changing rooms.

I see trans activists minimising this concern – implying that since there are separate cubicles it’s not a problem, saying that only a small number of men would misuse the self id provisions as if that makes the assaults OK, or saying they personally have no concern with it, as if that somehow means a young Muslim women similarly shouldn’t have a concern.

I see women’s rights activists making statements that could be interpreted as denying that trans women exist at all – basically saying “they’re men, they need to use the men’s bathrooms,” even where that trans women has fully transitioned.

A resolution cannot be reached on this without discussion and debate. Simply codifying a right to self id, and therefore a right to access those spaces, without consulting those who feel unsafe is a problem. Simply classifying all trans women as men, and requiring them to use male bathrooms is also a problem.

Women’s sport similarly presents a conflict. Women’s sport wasn’t created because women liked playing with people who looked like them / identified the same way they did. It was created because it was considered unfair to expect women to compete against men in sports where being born male or going through male puberty conferred a physiological advantage. Conversely, asking a trans women to compete in men’s sports is also unfair and doesn’t recognise their trans status. The sporting world is grappling with this, and no resolution will be reached without discussion and compromise.

What we saw over the last few days was a media and a public space that had no nuance, no discussion of the fact that there was a conflict of rights. We had (some) women’s rights campaigners focusing on the rights that women have to their own spaces without recognising that trans women also have a right to safety. We had (some) trans rights campaigners focusing on the rights that trans women have to safety without recognising that (some) women are very uncomfortable with people with penises in their spaces.

Unfortunately this is an area that it is hard to discuss without being labelled and without being abused. The extremists are shouting down the moderates, and there are extremists on both sides. Posie Parker has expressed views that are extreme, she is a polarising figure. Many activists on the other side are also very polarising, and some of the things I’m seeing said on twitter are frankly ridiculous. Unless you’re JK Rowling with enough money to just not care (and presumably to pay for security to protect her), you have to be very careful what you say in public spaces.

The media are (mostly) failing to reflect the centre, or to even acknowledge that there is a centre. The reality is that the media need page views and clicks, and outrage drives clicks. Moderating the discussion, and showing that there’s a lot of common ground, simply won’t drive the traffic they need to survive.

Our politicians similarly should have an obligation to articulate a position that illuminates rather than obscures. Even acknowledging that there is an underlying conflict of rights, and that the disagreement isn’t caused by one side or the other being unreasonable, would be a useful start. Better still would be finding the middle ground and advocating for it. However, politically speaking, it is much more beneficial to be unclear. Making a clear statement is unlikely to win you votes, but is quite likely to lead to one side or the other whipping up dissension and losing you votes. Only the Greens and Act can really afford to be clear – because they’re unlikely to drive any of their voters away.

If this is the way we’ll have debates in the future, then I fear we’ll become an increasingly divided society. I don’t understand what will bring us back together, what will help us to find common ground and common cause.

I fear that we’re further driving people away from traditional media, and they will in future get their information from non-traditional sources. Those sources can also be full of disinformation, and some people appear to have difficulty in telling the difference. If they can see some examples where the media is clearly driving an agenda, what’s to say that everything in the media isn’t an agenda? Why wouldn’t I just believe every time someone on the internet tells me the media is lying – because I’ve seen them lie.

* I’m a cis white male. Whilst some will think (and I’m sure will say) that I should shut up as I’m not impacted (being neither trans nor a woman), I’m saying my piece anyway. I live in this country, and when you stand by silently and let things happen that means you’re endorsing those things. It’s not an easy area to put your head above the parapet. I’m doing it because I don’t like seeing the extreme positions dominating the public space, and I don’t like seeing people ignore both the areas of agreement, but also the legitimate conflict at the heart of the disagreement.