Cancel culture and my life as an abstraction.

It's been another difficult 24 hours. I am going to start this post with a lengthy quotation from Reni Eddo-Lodge, from The Guardian piece that flowed from her original 2014 post, and was in 2017 about to be turned into her best selling book, 'Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race':

'They’ve never had to think about what it means, in power terms, to be white, so any time they’re vaguely reminded of this fact, they interpret it as an affront. Their eyes glaze over in boredom or widen in indignation. Their mouths start twitching as they get defensive. Their throats open up as they try to interrupt, itching to talk over you but not to really listen, because they need to let you know that you’ve got it wrong. 

The journey towards understanding structural racism still requires people of colour to prioritise white feelings. Even if they can hear you, they’re not really listening. It’s like something happens to the words as they leave our mouths and reach their ears. The words hit a barrier of denial and they don’t get any further. 

That’s the emotional disconnect. It’s not really surprising, because they’ve never known what it means to embrace a person of colour as a true equal, with thoughts and feelings that are as valid as their own. Watching [the documentary] The Color of Fear by Lee Mun Wah, I saw people of colour break down in tears as they struggled to convince a defiant white man that his words were enforcing and perpetuating a white racist standard on them. All the while he stared obliviously, completely confused by this pain, at best trivialising it, at worst ridiculing it. 

I’ve written before about this white denial being the ubiquitous politics of race that operates on its inherent invisibility. So I can’t talk to white people about race any more because of the consequent denials, awkward cartwheels and mental acrobatics that they display when this is brought to their attention. Who really wants to be alerted to a structural system that benefits them at the expense of others?

I can no longer have this conversation, because we’re often coming at it from completely different places. I can’t have a conversation with them about the details of a problem if they don’t even recognise that the problem exists. Worse still is the white person who might be willing to entertain the possibility of said racism, but who thinks we enter this conversation as equals. We don’t.

Not to mention that entering into conversation with defiant white people is a frankly dangerous task for me. As the hackles rise and the defiance grows, I have to tread incredibly carefully, because if I express frustration, anger or exasperation at their refusal to understand, they will tap into their presubscribed racist tropes about angry black people who are a threat to them and their safety. It’s very likely that they’ll then paint me as a bully or an abuser. It’s also likely that their white friends will rally round them, rewrite history and make lies the truth. Trying to engage with them and navigate their racism is not worth that.

I am a white person. I have been very struck by the call to explore my own levels of privilege over the last few months. Many powerful things have been said and they have struck home. I have a lot more work to do on this and lots more listening to do.

But I am also a transgender woman. It seems to me that Eddo-Lodge's words, timely and powerful from her own experience, also speak to the experience of being trans in a cisgender world. Indeed, she has expressed her support for trans women as we are pitched into the dreadful culture war that is currently underway.

The latest manifestation of all this is a media-sticky term that is now being bandied about mostly by those with social capital, resource and a range of platforms with which to put their views to large audiences. This is 'cancel culture'. 

The phrase originated, it's thought, on Twitter, probably up to a decade ago. It's evolved and deepened since then, moving on from a literalistic meaning of trying to cancel the gig that racist or homophobic comedian was due to do in your town and claiming the power to ignore them, into a slang version of it and then into a newly weaponised term much beloved of the right with which to beat the 'woke' generation. Handily conflated with free speech arguments the term is now widely used to punch down, asserting the right of someone with cultural power to keep it as they accuse others who challenge them of attempting to 'cancel' them. They may have overt, explicit power (the author, the journalist with the big following, the politician) or they may have implicit institutionalised power. They may simply be part of the dominant social group, willfully blind to the inequalities and pain suffered by others. In Eddo-Lodge's thesis, they might simply be white. In mine, they might simply be cisgender.

The term is now being widely adopted by those with privilege who feel challenged, perhaps for the first time. The people doing the challenging might be those that have been made invisible, or acknowledged only to be hurt, lied about or oppressed every day of their lives. Or the challenge may be from those standing alongside them. Common to many who claim to be 'cancelled' is another assertion - of their victimhood.

The most grimly comedic version of this is the one performed by those who declaim how brutally their views are being suppressed...and do so from newspaper columns with millions of readers, widely read blogs or vastly followed Twitter accounts. I could leave the argument right there, but if one wants to read their plaintive cries, one would see how awful it is for them to be called out on the misrepresentations they manufacture, the lies they tell, or that some might ask for the cultural status to which they believe they have a right to be withdrawn. Free speech! they yell back. And then yell again, whilst a click-obsessed digital ecosystem rushes to spread their words more widely than ever. Screaming 'I am being cancelled!' seems to be the best way of getting your message out there.

It is percolating down into the wider culture. I have just been through an upsetting little episode with someone on Facebook. I don't wish to reveal too many details of this, but this (cisgender) woman, who I had considered a friend, and who is currently undergoing treatment for something very grim and who has my full sympathy and support in her fight, posted an article by The Times' Janice Turner attacking the poisonous effects of 'cancel culture'. Turner, referencing a recent letter about all this by a group of authors which didn't mention transgender issues decided to frame her piece as an attack on the trans community. This is no surprise at all - Turner has become a leading figure in a campaign led by The Times newspaper to attack trans women, and remove support for trans young people for the last four years. She writes a great deal about this, pursuing what looks very like a vendetta against the trans community and the one organisation which supports trans kids, Mermaids. It's a widely held view in the trans community that Turner has done more than any other single journalist in the UK to fight the struggle by trans people for their own human rights and to ruin the chances of reform of the Gender Recognition Act. She has done much to turn us into an abstract concept steeped in threat. Recent talk of the rollback of trans rights leaking from the UK government will I suspect be music to her ears and to the ears of many thousands of cisgender women whom she has made scared of people like me through her words.

Seeing a friend post Turner's latest words, and express support for them, led to a howl of pain by me. For me, the free speech argument (always used to hurt, always used to protect the privilege of those who have it, always used to silence those who express their pain, because it is only in the service of power that it is given a platform for expression) is no academic exercise. I live in a society that still stares at me sometimes, that is now talking of stopping me using women's toilets. I have been spat on, insulted, called "sick" (and worse), ridiculed, lied about. I lost my house, access to my children, my business, most of my friends and almost all my money at various points in the last 12 years. So when I see Turner's words it brings much back - an experience not unlike PTSD that I have every day from one source or another. This is no exercise in victimhood. These are just facts. There are many more I could share. And I am far from unique amongst those I know.

So I howled at seeing these words. I regard Janice Turner as evil because she has acted with evil intent towards me, from a distance, in what I have read from her. She has lied, spread lies and insulted, frequently. Her words have caused innocent, vulnerable people real distress. I have seen it. She is no good-faith actor.

Could I cancel Janice Turner? Can any of the trans community do anything to stop her getting this stuff into print? She is a well established and much venerated senior journalist, whose husband is Executive Editor of the paper for which she writes. She has privilege in her world and is about as established as it gets. Fat chance. Editors queue up for it. If she decided to leave The Times, she could get a deal at The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Mail, The New Statesman, Spiked or The Spectator within hours.

And so the row with my ex-friend about 'cancelling' people broke out. Except it wasn't much of a row, really. She messaged me defensively, calling me "aggressive" and "negative". Bringing up the sanctity of free speech and debate, again. Talked of a friend who had been shut down over something. Said that people were too frightened to use the word "woman". Said she had support from others who were "too frightened" to speak out.

I was exploring an appropriate response to her, after absorbing the pain of language I have seen so often before and usually used to call people like me a bully. I wanted to try and explain my hurt. I might have mentioned, again, that the "debate" to which I get invited, with its "free speech", seems to always end up being about the right of people like me to even exist. I am so so tired of it. But if she wanted, I would ignore Reni Eddo-Lodge's advice and go through it once more. But it was too late. She unfriended me. Cancelled me, if you like. Maybe she's unreachable anyway.

I try to think charitably. She is going through a very tough time. She doesn't need this, I guess. She took what I said very personally - my hurt that someone I felt understood something of me (though we don't know each other well) but clearly doesn't, showed through, though my anger was directed at seeing Turner pushed at me, and supported in a place I didn't imagine it would happen. I get this stuff all the time. The boundaries around the space both real and digital where I can be confident of not being attacked for who I am are getting smaller and smaller each week.

And thus it ended, a little nothing incident in a small part Zuckerberg's empire. Who cares? Well I did, clearly. I was in tears. My ex-friend seemed upset, from her messages. She has other problems to deal with and I wish her good luck with them.

I guess we can now withdraw back into bubbles of social validation. My small one has been telling me how much I am loved today, as I tried to recover. What hers tells her I can only guess. I hope she is getting support because she does need that just now. But I'd suspect that for some I may just be the dangerous abstraction that is trying to suppress discussion, destroy free speech and 'cancel' the valiant spokespeople for the truth. That's all I am to some.

It really needn't have ended that way, in futile acrimony, but that seems to be how the world is now.