On Legislating Sexuality, Gender, and Race(ism): Hannah Arendt and the Loss of Plurality

There are many possible responses to the myriad attempts to legislate gender, sexuality, and race across the country, including:

Florida’s recently passed “Don’t Say Gay” bill (https://www.npr.org/2022/03/28/1089221657/dont-say-gay-florida-desantis)
Texas’s prosecution of gender-affirming care for minors as child abuse (https://www.texastribune.org/2022/03/22/texas-transgender-teenagers-medical-care/)
Numerous states’ attempts to ban the teaching of what has come to be called Critical Race Theory (https://www.edweek.org/policy-politics/map-where-critical-race-theory-is-under-attack/2021/06)
Book banning attempts that have also been sweeping the nation, including Florida’s banning of many math textbooks (https://www.npr.org/2022/04/18/1093277449/florida-mathematics-textbooks)

On the one hand, these moves seem like desperate attempts to control the uncontrollable by folks who feel threatened by anything that reeks of “difference.” In that sense, the whole situation is almost laughable—you can’t actually make gay and trans people disappear by refusing to talk about them, and you can’t eradicate racism by insisting it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, there is the potential for real harm in these attempts, harms to those most marginalized and vulnerable in our society, who are already most likely to suffer from violence, whether bullying or police brutality. People who have spoken up against Florida’s ban on talking about sex in grade schools have received death threats, for instance, or been accused of “grooming” (this accusation, if not the word itself, is a long-standing slur against LGBTQ+ people that has long since been debunked: https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/groomer-pedophile-old-tropes-find-new-life-anti-lgbtq-movement-rcna23931). These harms are very real, and we should be deeply concerned about them. But there is also potential for harm to all of us: refusing to acknowledge marginalized voices or allow them into the public sphere actually makes it more difficult for us to understand our common world. In Hannah Arendt’s terms, we suffer the loss of plurality, which is necessary for a robust sense of the real.

The term plurality, in its most basic sense, refers to the fact that there are numerous people on the face of the earth; our world is shared with others. Now that seems rather obvious, so what is its relevance? Why should we care? Without the others with whom we share the world, we will have a limited, impoverished sense of the world itself and of ourselves. Why? Well, because we ourselves are limited: we each come to the world from different locations, so we each have a different perspective on it. I see what I see of the world based on my experiences within it, which are necessarily limited by my literal location and by my social locations: my race, sex, gender, class, religious upbringing, all influence how I see the world and those around me. As someone raised in the Northeast, I see “Midwest nice” very differently from people who are from the Midwest, as a mundane example. What I take to be true or real is usually the result of these limited experiences and is hence partial at best and possibly completely wrong. To understand the world in its fullness (and I should!), I need the perspectives of others who are situated differently within it to expand my view.

Arendt’s ideal is a world in which as many perspectives on our shared world as possible make it into the public sphere, so that we can have as expansive an understanding of that world as we can. We do not, however, live in that ideal. Rather, there are strong social forces that work against plurality and the multiple perspectives that should accompany it, what Arendt terms “the social.” The social works to foreclose plurality by enforcing conformity to social expectations and a narrow range of acceptable behaviors; these expectations and behaviors assume and require a “oneness” of interest and opinion. This oneness of opinion and interest is the requirement of social conformity—the goal is to fit into the dominant culture by embodying proper behavior, which leads to the dominance of one way of thinking and one way of being. Attempts to legislate gender, race, and sexuality are perfect examples of closing down plurality: the explicit goal is to keep some perspectives from the public sphere, consolidating dominant cultural norms and maintaining systems of social power that acknowledge only some ways of being as legitimate.

Consider Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, named “Don’t Say Gay” by its opponents: it forbids any discussion of gay and/or transgender issues until the 4^th grade, after which any discussion or instruction must be “age appropriate” (who decides what counts as age appropriate remains unclear, though the official name of the law indicates that parents can decide, which could easily mean that one homo- or trans-phobic parent could dictate the curriculum for all students). In practice, this law could prevent LGBTQ+ teachers from even mentioning their home lives in casual conversation in the classroom, and it will prevent students who may be LGBTQ+, or whose parents are, or who are questioning themselves, or are even curious about such issues, from exploring them in that setting. Preventing such conversations or explorations leaves heterosexuality in place as the only acceptable form of family, implicitly positioning any LGBTQ+ family configurations as lesser, abnormal, perhaps even dangerous. The folks who passed this bill into law seem to fully understand that this normalizing view of heterosexuality can stand only if alternative views of LGBTQ+ lives are indeed cut out of public discussion. That is, their goal is quite clearly to shut down plurality.

Attempts to restrict the teaching of Critical Race Theory are meant to have a similar effect: only those perspectives that see the US as a shining beacon of freedom and equality would be allowed a voice in classrooms. Specific restrictions include claims that some people possess unconscious bias, and that the US is fundamentally racist and/or sexist. In this case, both grade schools and colleges are targeted for regulation. These restrictions position systemic analyses of racism and sexism as unpatriotic but also as attacks on white men, who might end up feeling bad if they were taught about their unearned privilege. Analyses of power and privilege are themselves thus silenced, marginalized, and seen as power plays rather than as attempts to understand and address injustice. Without access to other ways of understanding both the history of and current power relations within the US, only one perspective is allowed a public hearing: that the nation embodies freedom, equality, and justice for all. Anyone who questions this view is thus seen as deluded or trying to get an unjust advantage over others (the language of “special rights” levied against Critical Race Theorists, feminists, and LGBTQ+ folks would be a case in point).

Anti-trans legislation is even more obviously aimed at closing down plurality, in this case what we might call gender plurality. Laws that require trans people to use bathrooms or participate in sports that correspond to the sex they were assigned at birth rather than their gender identity work to erase their transness, which positions their trans identities as unreal, or unnatural, or dangerous to ciswomen. These attempts to make trans lives invisible, or to conflate them with mental illness or willful lying, reinforce the sex/gender binary. Assuming that people are only male or female, and that they correspond naturally to masculine and feminine gender identities ignores not only trans peoples’ lives and experiences, but the very existence of intersex people, whose biological sex does not fit neatly into either male or female.

The problem here, apart from the obvious one of attacks on marginalized people, is the closing down of multiple perspectives on our common world. How can we know for sure that heterosexuality is the best way to be if lesbians and gay men are not allowed to discuss their lives and experiences? How can we be sure that racism isn’t structural if we can never confront the evidence suggesting it is? How can we know that gender identity and biological sex are naturally correlated if we prevent trans people from living their lives as they choose? The world itself becomes unknowable when it is seen through one dominant lens. We end up living a big, fat lie rather than the messy truth. For Arendt, the messy truth is preferable, precisely because it’s the truth, but also because the lie requires the silencing of marginalized voices and experiences: the lie is built on oppression.

Share this:

Related

Leave a comment Cancel reply