Philosophies of Support and Celebration vs. Philosophies of Destabilization and Exclusion

Let’s ditch the telepathic standard of proof for bigotry

Philosophy is often considered the most towering of the ivory disciplines of academe. So much so that many non-philosophers will ask “How is it that doing philosophy impacts real world issues?” Philosophy students are of course aware of some basics, though many have become pap more than anything now. Consider one common response: a person cannot address an issue without understanding it, and philosophical methods can help limit, define, and explore the issue at hand, ultimately increasing understanding of it. True, but hardly mind-blowing, and it does little to point out which methods applied how and when.

Obviously there is quite a bit more to say about applied philosophy and the differences it makes outside of academia, but I wish to focus on the specific case of responding to those who take arguably bigoted actions while claiming to be free of bigotry. What does it mean to contribute to racism or sexism? How can we identify anti-semitism and distinguish it from a critique of Israel’s government or a particular Jewish community? Without clear answers, bigotry and oppression can be enacted without the clear and forceful pushback that is ethically required. I wish to propose tools and methods of using them that can enable more frequent and more effective responses to currently unidentified or uncontested bigotry or oppression.

In too many circumstances the public has accepted a definition of oppression or bigotry that requires an act to be motivated by a philosophy of harming and eradicating. While it is useful that our society has come to general agreement that philosophies of harming and eradicating (PHE) are bad, and that actions undertaken to further such philosophies can be and should be labeled bigoted or oppressive, that leaves quite a bit of room for groups or individuals to harm others in ways that clearly disproportionately or even exclusively impact the marginalized while avoiding the consequences of universal condemnation that come with openly embracing a PHE.

Consider the following:

• I don’t want to kill George Floyd, or anyone, I just want crime to be taken seriously and so I would rather empower than punish the police.

• I don’t have anything against women — I love women, I’m married to one! — but I believe god’s message of complementarity puts the man in headship over his family, including his wife, and I don’t see any reason I should be ashamed of that.

• I don’t hate gays, I just think business owners should be free to hire who they want.

In each of these cases the apocryphal speaker denies motivation by any PHE, and by extension denies that others have reason to call the person, their words, or their associated actions bigoted or oppressive. And in practice, journalists who might be willing to condemn calls for a white ethnostate are frequently unwilling to condemn statements like these.

One traditional challenge to people opposing perceived bigotry is, “You don’t know what’s in my heart.” Yet we can all agree that there can be actions not motivated by bigotry that nonetheless enact racism or another oppression. As a (semi-)hypothetical to prove the point, imagine that homes in several contiguous predominantly Black neighborhoods have lower home values. Imagine further that all of the causes for those lower home values are directly or indirectly traceable to racism.¹ A government that condemns broad swaths of those neighborhoods to create a new interstate highway might not be motivated by a desire to perpetuate racist economic and health harms, but the action nonetheless results in economic harms to those Black communities while centring a new source of pollution in their midst. Should such an action go without opposition until such time as it can be telepathically determined whether government officials were motivated by PHE or whether they were motivated by, say, the lower cost to the government of condemned Black-owned land?

I think the answer is clearly no. But we will still need some sort of methodology to scrutinize such actions that can overcome the “you don’t know my heart” defense. Examining motivations can never be wholly objective, but with a discussion of competing theories of motivation we can start to refine how we define, even how we see, racism and other oppressions and use those new definitions and that new sight to change how we categorize acceptable and unacceptable actions.

Without representing these as an exhaustive list of motivations, the two other categories I suggest examining when considering a decision’s or an action’s relationship to possible bigotry are Philosophies of Support and Celebration (PiSCes) and Philosophies of Destabilization and Exclusion (with apologies to pasta lovers, PhiDEs).

Both of these sets of motivations can easily result in and even intend community-specific effects, and for that reason it is useful to distinguish them in ways that US and Canadian societies rarely do now (and certainly do not do systematically).

Let’s define PiSCes as a group of related motivations seeking to take positive or neutral action with respect to a particular community and its expressions, opportunities, or needs. Benefits here are intentional with the proposal designed to elicit them, while harms are minor, incidental, and willingly minimized.

With this in mind, we can define PhiDEs as a group of related motivations seeking to take neutral or negative actions with respect to a particular community that remove or erode support for the expressions, opportunities, or needs of members of that community in ways that are at least one of the following: substantial, central, or not minimized when made visible. Any benefits to other communities will tend to be implied or inferred as the natural result of a policy with respect to the original community.

So, now that we have these two tools, how can one use them in practical situations? Let’s examine just a single example relevant to today’s social and political situation: trans participation in sport. To use these tools, we will simply compare what we know of such proposals and their advocates to the definitions to see which most closely matches. If one closely matches and the other does not, we can make reasonable conclusions even in the absence of knowing the inner thoughts of any one particular person advocating a particular policy.

Recently efforts to ban trans people (including but not limited to school children) from gender specific sports have been commonly defended on the basis of fairness and opportunity for women and girls as well as on the basis of encouraging rather than discouraging girls’ athletics. Sometimes this latter point is expanded upon with reference to statistics about how participation in sport correlates with a large number of positive outcomes including lower rates of teen pregnancy, better academic achievement, stronger peer support networks among others. Certainly we want girls to play fair sports, to have the opportunity to choose for themselves whether or not to play sports, and to benefit academically, socially, and personally.

Few journalists or commentators take the time to examine these rationales for trans exclusion policies, instead seeming to accept (in the vast majority of reporting) or reject (in a significant minority of comment) at face value that the persons advocating these policies are either not bigoted or are not bigoted in a way that does not and should not affect public consideration of such bans. The overriding rationale for accepting the position that bigotry is irrelevant or not present appears to be an acceptance of the idea referenced above: that bigotry requires conscious malice — in our language, to be bigoted an action or decision must be based on a PHE. Since any PHE would only be detectable by open admission (not present in this scenario) or telepathic probing, there is a logic to ignoring that possibility.

But with more options to consider, it is not necessary to conclude that because an argument is not based on PHE it is therefore well-meaning, legitimate, or socially acceptable. Instead we can make the case that PhiDEs are also less than well meaning and should, because of intent or effect, be considered less legitimate and acceptable or even illegitimate and unacceptable, while we remain fully supportive of PiSCes.

For journalists or others in active dialog with the person proposing trans bans, it becomes relatively easy to determine which category of motivations the advocate’s personal motivation is likely to fall within. One begins by considering how the proposal from two different perspectives, first from the perspective of supporting and celebrating girls and women, second from the perspective of destabilizing and excluding trans children and adults.

As a potential manifestation of PiSCes, we would analyze the proposal from the point of view of cis women and cis girls, looking for

1. Positive or neutral action with respect to a particular community and its expressions, opportunities, or needs

2. With specific, direct benefits designed into the proposal

3. Harms to others that are minor, incidental, and willingly minimized.

The first criterion is filled: banning trans people from women’s and girls’ sports is neutral with respect to cis girls. It doesn’t reference them directly, but it doesn’t impede any expression, opportunity, or need.

The second criterion is not filled. While some people might insist that banning trans kids from girls’ sports creates more opportunities for cis girls’ participation, this is not, in fact, known. Many squads recruit fewer than the maximum allowable number, and with many sports in many contexts, creating extra teams is plausible. We don’t know how sports leagues will grow or shrink in response to some future level of participation by trans children. Certainly none of the people proposing bans on trans participation have conducted such studies. Now it’s possible that in some circumstances the denial of opportunity to a trans child might create an opportunity for a cis girl that would otherwise not exist for her, but rather than a proposal that designs in a guarantee of increased opportunity, this is a proposal that simply crosses its fingers and wishes for luck.

Likewise some proponents assert that trans participation leads to increased risk of injury, but there is no data showing that playing sports with a trans teammate or against a trans opponent increases health risks. It is not that it is impossible that cis girls might benefit from reduced risk, but that reduced risk — again, if any — is not in any way built in to the proposal. Jurisdictions could provide funding for programs that reduce risk of sports injuries using methodologies known to do so, but posting, “No dogs or trannies,” on the gate is not a validated methodology.

Third, the harms to others are not incidental: this is not a proposal to increase funding for girls’ sports that happens to increase taxes statewide by a few pennies per family. In that case, the bill which is not primarily about taxes but does come with costs could be fairly said to incidentally harms the budgets of some taxpayers. Instead trans people are the named target of the proposal. It can hardly be said that their exclusion is incidental to furthering girls’ sport under these proposals. And while some might argue the harms are minor (and we could concede this point for the purpose of argument) all the statistics marshalled in support of the importance of sports to cis girls and women simply increase our confidence that the harms here are substantial.

Finally we frequently see that harms are not willingly minimized. The NAIA recently banned trans participants from women’s athletics in that college division. It had previously had a provision within its policies that regular season competition could freely include trans athletes who met other medical criteria, but that those trans athletes would nonetheless be barred from postseason competition. The new policies exclude trans college athletes from regular season competitions as well, meaning that despite the public discussion of harms and their clear awareness of one provision which might tend to lessen the harm, the governors of the NAIA chose to remove this more generous provision to make the policy more exclusive, more harmful, not less. While not every advocate for trans sports bans has been confronted with information and opportunity to minimize harms, this is certainly one piece of evidence that can be used against some proponents of such bans.

On the whole it’s easy to see that trans sports participation bans do not fit what we would expect to see from a policy that celebrates and supports cis girls in sport.

So how well do such bans fit the pattern of policies molded by PhiDEs? If the policy is molded by an intent to destabilize and exclude, we would expect:

1. The policy takes neutral or negative actions with respect to trans people that remove or erode support for the expressions, opportunities, or needs of members of that community.

2. It does so in ways that are at least one of the following: substantial, central, or not minimized when made visible.

3. Finally, we expect that any benefits to other communities will tend to be implied or inferred as the natural result of a policy with respect to the original community.

First the policy does take negative action with respect to trans players’ opportunities. It also indirectly undermines support for trans expression since children may fear that expressing themselves as trans might jeopardize their ability to participate in sport. While there are some arguments to be made around “needs”, let’s set that aside for now. We only need to satisfy one prong of this test and we have met at least two.

Secondly, we note that the harms are central to the proposal: the entire policy is conceived and discussed as trans exclusion, not as some convoluted policy aimed at boosting cis sports participation that accidentally or incidentally affects trans people. One could imagine a liberal state in an intolerant nation accepting federal money to increase girls’ sports participation that is conditioned on excluding some or all trans children. If the money was sufficiently dramatic, some people might reasonably argue that the policy of giving more money to girls’ sports through accepting the federal grant was the central goal, and trans students and players were affected only unintentionally, through no fault of the local officials. This, to say the least, is not that. The harms also appear substantial, and at least occasionally proponents refuse to minimize the harms associated with their plans. Again it is only necessary to satisfy one prong and we have met at least two.

The final test isn’t, strictly speaking, required, and it is phrased that way: “any benefits to other communities will tend to be” incidental, implied or inferred, rather than designed into the substance of the proposal. Nonetheless, even this test is met in that trans exclusion isn’t designed to guarantee benefits to cis persons, but it is overtly crafted to guarantee harm to trans persons.

Overall, these policies do not resemble PiSCes-motivated efforts and do (very closely!) resemble PhiDEs-motivated efforts.

We can, then, without reading minds, come to the reasonable conclusion that such policies are largely or wholly predicated on PhiDEs.

This system also offers us guidance in examining new instances of similar proposals put forward by different actors. The advocates can be asked what are the intended outcomes, and then examine how those outcomes are guaranteed (or not) by the details of any proposal. Harms can be identified with opportunities presented to minimize those harms while preserving the central positive guarantees of these proposals (if any); the response to this opportunities can also be informative.

None of this is entirely objective. Arguments could be had over terms such as “minor,” “designed,” or “incidental” among others. Still this framework gets us much farther than the current public impasse allowing much bigotry to be introduced into public discussion wearing an offensively inadequate fig leaf. Journalism and comment willing to examine, for instance, white supremacist’s proposals for an ethnostate, can benefit from using these tools instead of accepting at face value Nazi-esque insistence that the proposal is only meant to lift up whites, not express bigotry toward people of color.

Although I use the example of trans sports bans here, I have been frequently distressed by the equation of Black Lives Matter’s efforts with the actions of white racists. It is my fervent hope that using these tools can further discussions that make clear how and why Black Lives Matter is a movement to support while the alt-right groups to which they are frequently compared differ in quality, not merely appearance.

1. E.g. redlining reducing demand by reducing the number of loans to purchase houses in a given neighbourhood, reduced demand from white home purchasers either because of their own racism or fear of being condemned by people they know who are racist, intergenerational loss of wealth by Black families resulting in reduced state of repair and less frequent upgrading/remodelling of homes, etc.)