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“Born This Way”: Strategies for Gay and Fat Acceptance

Birds-eye view of a crowd of people. Some people are in focus and others are blurred.

In light of the recent discussion around Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill, you might have come across the argument that lesbian, bi/pansexual, and gay people did not choose their sexual orientation and cannot alter it and that’s what makes homophobia wrong. Call this the “born this way” argument. Interestingly, a similar response is often given to the question: What makes anti-fat bias wrong? The argument states that people cannot usually exert control over the size of their body, and diets don’t usually work. So, we shouldn’t blame them for or expect them to change something they can’t control.

Are these good answers? While both “born this way” style arguments have some truth to them, I don’t think that either gives us the best strategy for responding to these kinds of questions. Politically, they can only get us so far.

First, there is still some control that individuals can exercise in both cases. Gay people could choose to be celibate or live in a heterosexual marriage, though, of course, those actions are likely to be highly damaging to their happiness. Fat people could choose to continually stay on some diet and access medical interventions, even though they will likely gain the weight back and suffer in the meantime.

This limited control gives the homophobe/anti-fat person a foot in the door. They might argue that gay people should be celibate or force themselves to live in heterosexual relationships and that we can blame them if they fail to do so. Or that fat people should consistently diet and try to change their bodies through any means necessary. If they fail to do so, the anti-fat person can claim that they are blameworthy for not caring about their health.

It should be obvious why these are undesirable outcomes: neither rationale allows the gay person or the fat person to accept and love these core aspects of themselves. Each still effectively marginalizes gay people and fat people. These strategies simply shift the target of blame from the desires/physical tendencies themselves to the person’s response to those desires/physical tendencies. They require that you reject who you love/your own body.

Second, assume that it would be possible to argue that people can’t control their sexuality or weight at all, even to abstain from relationships or go on diets. The “born this way” style of argument blocks blame, but it doesn’t block the general attitudes that it is worse to be gay/fat and that gay/fat people cannot live full and meaningful lives.

Even if being gay or being fat are or have been associated with higher health risks (see, for instance, the recent spate of articles on COVID and obesity), that fact alone is insufficient to see these social identities as somehow inferior. For instance, failing to use sunscreen can contribute to poor health and is under personal control, and yet no one considers that behavior grounds for discrimination. Additionally, health risks such as AIDS or diabetes are not fully explainable by individual behaviors — they are also informed by public health responses, or a lack thereof, as well as by other material and social consequences of discrimination. Creating stigma does not help public health outcomes and it actively harms members of marginalized groups.

These negative associations with fat and gay people fail to take into account the kind of joy that fat and gay people experience when they accept themselves and can live full lives. See, for instance, the deep love that queer people have for each other and the loving families that they create, or the kind of joy felt in appreciating one’s fat body and enjoying living in it. Representation of fat and gay people being happy and living good lives is more likely to lead to health and happiness than campaigns to increase stigma.

Third, the “born this way” style argument, while it can be used to block some of the worst oppressive legislation and attitudes, is not the most helpful for a campaign of liberation. But what would an alternative look like? Probably an argument that shows that homophobic/anti-fat attitudes are wrong, because being gay/fat is a legitimate way to be in the world, and gay/fat people deserve equal respect and rights. In such a world in which gay/fat rights are enshrined by law and respected, gay/fat people can flourish.

With this answer, we haven’t simply blocked the ability to blame gay/fat people, we’ve blocked the judgment that there’s something morally bad or blameworthy about being gay/fat in the first instance. We’ve also avoided thorny issues surrounding what control any given individual has over their situation, and we’ve re-centered the need for positive changes to make life better for gay/fat people, to make them equal citizens, and to encourage their friends and family members to love and accept them. Of course, this project will require that we deal with the specific kinds of oppression that differently legible fat people and different sub-categories of LGBTQ+ people face, as well as how these identities can intersect with each other and with other marginalized identities.

This doesn’t mean that we should totally jettison “born this way” style arguments, but it does mean that we need to re-emphasize building and living into the kind of world we want to see. “Born this way” style arguments might be a part of that strategy, but they can’t be the core of it.

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Under Discussion: Five Arguments Against the Harper’s Letter

photograph of computer screen displaying Harper's Letter

This piece is part of an Under Discussion series. To read more about this week’s topic and see more pieces from this series visit Under Discussion: The Harper’s Letter.

On July 7, 2020, Harper’s Magazine published an open letter warning that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted” by a set of “moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.” The letter obliquely refers to several incidents in which, in the eyes of the letter writers, individuals have been subjected to disproportionate or inappropriate social sanction for perceived transgressions against left-wing norms of thought and speech. “Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class….” Signed by some 150 prominent educators, intellectuals, writers, and artists, the letter provoked a swift backlash by the left-leaning press. That reaction has crystallized around a set of arguments against the letter’s position that I propose to assess in this column.

The first argument, best articulated by The New Republic’s Otisa Nwanevu, is that the moral (and legal) right of free association gives private organizations, including newspapers and private colleges or universities, the right to decide what ideas they are and aren’t interested in promoting and what people they believe will or will not be an asset to them. Hence, no individual has the right to use such an organization as a platform for expressing their ideas, and these organizations, in turn, have no duty to be maximally permissive of ideas with which they disagree. The argument is surely correct that, for example, Tom Cotton had no right to be published in The New York Times, and The New York Times had no duty to publish him. Yet the wrongs that worry the signatories of the Harper’s letter are not, it seems, grounded in these alleged rights or duties. Instead, they are at least in part grounded in the conception of certain types of organization as aiming at certain morally worthy ends. For example, it can be plausibly argued that the role of private colleges and universities, just as much as public ones, is to generate knowledge and serve as forums for debate about pressing political issues. But these commitments seem to ground an obligation to promote debate and discussion. And while this obligation does not require giving a platform to any particular individual or group, it does require giving a platform to some individuals or groups that represent relevant, if ideologically heterodox views. Similarly, in cases of wrongful termination, the idea is not that the organization had a duty to provide a platform for any idea, no matter how offensive; rather, it is that termination of individuals who are not guilty of the offenses of which they are accused is wrongful.

The second argument is that the signatories overplay the importance of a handful of relatively isolated controversies, even if the latter do, in fact, involve wrongdoing on the part of left-wing activists or Twitter mobs. It is undeniable that most critical discussions of progressive identity politics focus on a handful of anecdotes, perhaps mainly because there is no central database of incidents from which to draw. However, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) does compile large databases of free speech-related incidents and policies on college campuses, including disinvitations, free-speech codes, and so on. Whether these databases, together with the anecdotes, amount to a troubling cultural trend is for the reader to decide.

The third argument, which is even more dismissive than the second, is that the consequences faced by victims of so-called “cancellation” are relatively minor, particularly given the signatories’ elite status; moreover, they are usually deserved. As Jessica Valenti put it in a Medium.com article, the signatories “want to be able to say whatever they want without consequence and paint themselves as the victims even as they wield more institutional and systemic power than anyone criticizing them.” The Atlantic’s Hannah Giorgis agrees, writing that “facing widespread criticism on Twitter, undergoing an internal workplace review, or having one’s book panned does not, in fact, erode one’s constitutional rights or endanger a liberal society.” However, the anecdotes that seem to prompt worries about left-wing censoriousness feature consequences to individuals that go far beyond mere criticism, as the stories of wrongful termination referenced above attest. These individuals are usually not members of the cultural elite. Moreover, undergoing an internal workplace review, which is the outcome of so many of these cases, is very different from facing public criticism; it represents a potential threat to one’s livelihood. To have one’s livelihood threatened because of one’s personal speech is bound to have a chilling effect. Finally, there is a distinction between legitimate criticism of one’s ideas and attacks on one’s reputation or threats to one’s safety, tactics often wielded by social media users on both the left and right. These are serious and often disproportionate forms of social sanction, even when directed at powerful members of society.

The fourth argument is that there are much more pressing threats to free speech upon which the writers of the Harper’s letter ought to have focused their attention, such as violence against journalists, economic threats to journalism and academia, and so on. Logically speaking, this is not really an argument against concern about threats to free speech from the left. To see this, consider the argument that charity X ought to focus more attention on tropical disease Y rather than tropical disease Z, since the former kills five times the number of people. This is not an argument against addressing tropical disease Z, but an argument for proportioning attention and resources appropriately. Furthermore, it does not seem fair to claim that the letter itself does not acknowledge the threat from the right, or that those behind it have ignored that threat. At a number of points the letter alludes to the right-wing threat to free speech, although clearly the issue it squarely addresses is the threat from the left. Thomas Chatterton Williams, who spearheaded the letter, recently called President Trump the “Canceler in Chief”; and Yascha Mounk, a prominent signatory, has written that the primary threat posed to liberal democracy is from the populist right.

The final argument is similar to the last: it is that there are much more pressing political issues than the threat to free speech from the left. As Tom Scocca of Slate puts it, referring to Tom Cotton’s op-ed, “[i]n the world of the Harper’s letter, the threat that mattered was the one to the careers of veteran editors—not the threat that had bullets and bayonets behind it…” Again, this is not an argument against concern about the threat to free speech from the left, and it seems uncharitable to claim that simply because the letter concerns this issue, it is therefore the only issue that matters to its signatories.

The fourth and fifth arguments can also be interpreted as attacks upon the signatories’ motives. Giorgis writes that “it’s telling that the censoriousness they identify as a national plague isn’t the racism that keeps Black journalists from reporting on political issues, or the transphobia that threatens colleagues’ lives.” On Giorgis’s view, what this tells us is that the signatories don’t care, or at least don’t care enough, about the issues she identifies. But arguments about the motives of one’s interlocutor have no bearing on the merits of their position: if they don’t care about these issues that may make them morally bad people, but it does not mean that there is no threat to free speech from the left. In any case, it again seems uncharitable to conclude that they don’t care about some other issues simply because they’ve chosen to focus a certain amount of attention upon this one.

To conclude, my view is that among the arguments in the popular press against the Harper’s letter, the most difficult to answer is that worries about the threat to free speech from the left are overblown. It is simply difficult to tell when a series of incidents becomes a trend, and how concerned we should be about that trend. Beyond this, the arguments miss the mark for the most part. Of course, this does not mean that the letter’s claims are valid, and I have not defended them in this column.

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Is Biden Trapped by Identity Politics?

photograph of Biden at rally pointing to the crowd

As anticipation continues to build over Joe Biden’s choice of running mate, he’s announced  that his preference is for a candidate of a different race and gender than himself and followed this up with a commitment to selecting a candidate of a different gender. This rankles many people, even some with otherwise liberal leanings. The thought, it seems to them, is that candidates for office should be selected entirely on the basis of their qualifications, without consideration of their sex or race. To think otherwise, now, has come to be pejoratively called “identity politics”, and as more Democrats push for Biden to choose a Black woman, right-wing voices delight in the insistence that Biden is being held hostage by identity politics. What’s so bad about that?

Identity politics is often treated as a term of abuse. This is not surprising, as the concept now so often stands for politicians using their racial or gender identity — or proximity to such — as a means to achieve political aims such as winning an election or silencing critics. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, for example, has seemingly attempted to counter the growing number of criticisms from African-American former allies by increasing public appearances with his African-American wife, Chirlane McCray.

Such uses of identity politics appear cynically calculated to influence voters’ decisions not through sound argument or policy, but by appealing to a desire to support one’s group. In the worst-case scenario, identity politics in this sense is meant to deceive voters: it tells them that a candidate is one of them, or on their side, while endorsing policies that harm them. Identity politics can, of course, be abused in this way, in what Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò has called “elite capture”: the process by which a movement is exploited by elites to serve their own purposes rather than those of the people it is supposed to help. But abuse of this kind is not unique to identity politics, and so not a reason to dismiss it as harmful in itself.

It would be objectionable if Biden or those pressuring him were using identity politics in order to manipulate voters into acting in ways that harm them while helping Biden or his party. But for that to be the case, it would have to be true that he is actively pushing for policies that would harm the voters such a stratagem is designed to win over, and it’s unclear that he is — at least compared to his opponent. Moreover, for him to be using identity politics in this way, it would need to be the case that distracting voters from their real interests were his main reason for leaning toward a Black woman as a running mate. But there is no evidence of this, and it seems unlikely considering the chorus of his supporters pushing him to make this choice. It’s true, of course, that Biden is trying to win the election, and any running mate he chooses will be someone calculated to help him do that. But presumably he does a lot of things with that aim, most of them unobjectionable. If his purported reliance on identity politics is a problem, then, there must be a further reason.

One common objection to identity politics holds that voters have “been presented with a narrative and arguments convincing them to rely on identity politics, or in other words, shallow stereotypes,” as Tammy Bruce puts it. On this uncharitable view of identity politics, it functions primarily by reducing people to representatives of particular identities rather than recognizing them as individuals. Perhaps, then, the critics mean that in having to choose a Black woman candidate, Biden is ensuring that whoever he eventually chooses is not chosen for her qualifications, but for her gender and race alone. This is a popular take on identity politics, but it comes with its own set of problems.

First, to think that the pressure on Biden forces him to choose not a person but a stereotype seems to itself reduce Black women to stereotypes, since simply committing to a Black woman candidate does not imply either that anyone who meets that description is equally qualified nor that everyone who meets that description is qualified. The thought, instead, could be that although a number of Black women are perfectly qualified to be vice president, no one from that demographic has ever been chosen for the role due to a social depreciation of their race and sex. Seen in this light, a commitment to choosing a Black woman need not appear as a commitment to choosing a stereotype, but to choosing from a typically overlooked pool of excellent candidates.

Second, there is an underlying assumption that one’s sex or race is irrelevant to one’s qualification for a job. But clearly this is not always the case. It makes good sense, for example, to choose a Black spokesperson for the NAACP or a woman to consult women on reproductive issues. In these cases, a candidate’s race or sex is a qualification for the position, though it is not the only qualification and may not even be a necessary one. If, for example, a reproductive counselor is needed but no women with the requisite training can be found, it would make sense to choose a man. Still, to strongly prefer a woman for that position is not in itself problematic. There is no reason that the same might not be true of a candidate for vice president, especially if we consider that what qualifies one for that role is not some fixed set of laws, but an interplay of the historical and cultural context with the presidential candidate’s and their party’s strategy and priorities.

But there is an even more widespread, and perhaps slightly more highbrow criticism of identity politics, leveled by pundits from the liberal middle to the far right of the spectrum, such as Mark Lilla, Francis Fukuyama, Jonah Goldberg, and the Heritage Foundation. The spirit of this criticism isn’t so much that identity politics encourages us to see each other — and ourselves — as stereotypes. Instead, while such critics sometimes express sympathy for identity politics, they argue that by focusing on group identities it undermines the communal ties that bind us together. On this view, identity politics weakens our shared values by encouraging us to view ourselves primarily as members of sub-national groups and to focus on the interests of our group rather than those of the country. From this perspective, in expressing a preference for a running mate of a particular race and sex, Biden is sending a signal to some social groups that he is on their side but simultaneously telling other groups that he is not on theirs, and that he represents a fundamentally different culture from their own: one that prizes diversity over their interests.

But the view of identity politics as essentially divisive only works if we assume the divisions aren’t there to start with, or that they are minor enough that drawing attention to them causes more harm than good. If the divisions are already there, however, the options are to ignore them or to work to repair them, which cannot be done without recognizing that they exist. Now suppose that an electorate overwhelmingly votes for white men, regardless of the qualifications of others in the running. We might think that such an electorate is flawed. Waiting for the political landscape to improve on its own might work, but it also might not, since the electorate reproduces its biases with every election, choosing the person who “looks right” for the job, and thereby ensuring that that’s the kind of person who looks right for the job. In the meantime, an entire field of highly qualified candidates is left out. Another alternative, then, is to change the landscape by providing extra support for the candidates who don’t fit that type.

Identity politics — or at least the term itself — began life with the statement composed by the Combahee River Collective in 1977. The Black lesbian activists who comprised the collective did not take the concept to mean that they should get special treatment simply because they were Black, women, and lesbians. Instead, the thought was that insofar as society is structured in a way that does not treat all equally, they have a better insight into the inequalities that affect them than Black men, or straight women, might have. But the goal is not to splinter into ever-smaller groups, each demanding different treatment. The goal, rather, is for each group to lay out the ways in which it is not treated equally, so that different groups can come together in solidarity to help right each other’s injustices. Identity politics is the means; solidarity is the end. Elizabeth Drew asks, “But why does a woman necessarily merit a head start on the next presidential nomination?” The answer, perhaps, is that it’s time that women — and especially Black women — have the platform from which to present their own solutions to injustice.

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Was Obama Truly a Post-Racial President?

A photo of Barack Obama speaking behind a podium.

“There is not a liberal America and a conservative America—there is the United States of America. There is not a Black America and a White America and Latino America and Asian America… there’s the United States of America.” These words were pronounced by Barack Obama in the 2004 Democratic Convention. A relatively obscure politician at the time, this speech proved to be momentous, as it struck a chord with American voters, and four years later, Obama was the first African American president elected in U.S. history.

Continue reading “Was Obama Truly a Post-Racial President?”

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The Demagoguery of Shamanism in Latin America

It’s no secret that indigenous populations in Latin American countries have suffered all sorts of abuses ever since Columbus’ arrival to the so-called “New World” 500 years ago. It is undeniably true that there is the ethical obligation of bringing social justice to these peoples, and that ever since independence from the Spanish Crown in the 19th Century, criollo governments have failed to do so.

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Evaluating Climate Change’s Post-Election Importance

Former Vice President Al Gore is making headlines after his meeting with President-elect Donald Trump on December 5th. After the meeting, he sat for an interview with the Guardian about their conversation  and the election in general. In the interview, Gore stated that, for the sake of the environment, we do not have “time to despair” over the results of the election and that “despair is just another form of denial.” Gore is known for his environmental activism, most specifically his documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” which highlighted the urgency of climate change in 2006. Gore even won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to combat climate change. Though many environmentalists might agree with Gore, are his statements acceptable? Is it fair to compare grief from the election to denial? And is Gore failing to recognize the marginalized identities that are at stake as a result of the election?

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