What qualifies one person to speak for another? Empathy
Desmond Cole’s feature article about his experience with carding helped change the mayor’s mind through the ‘authenticity ethos’
Who can speak for whom?
That’s turned into such an interesting and heated question lately when it comes to certain groups — transgender people, aboriginal survivors of residential schools and their descendants, and Toronto’s many people of colour caught up in the police system of carding — who were victimized in the past and want to claim a new future for themselves.
We are heading toward an ethos that will profoundly affect our lives and our politics and our culture — let’s call it the authenticity of experience.
It worked beautifully in a recent remarkable cover story in Toronto Life magazine’s May issue. Journalist Desmond Cole wrote such a powerful piece about being black and stopped 50 times on the street by cops for no good reason that Mayor John Tory credited Cole with helping to change his mind and call for an end to carding. Cole’s first-person piece generated the one emotion necessary to change people’s minds: empathy. But what also spurred Tory on was a group of diverse civic leaders who spoke out and said carding had to end. The conversation embraced both personal experience and expertise.
In another instance, I found the “authenticity ethos” hampered a necessary conversation.
Could I, born a woman, legitimately criticize the decisions a celebrity trans woman makes on how she introduces herself to the world? I did — in last week’s column.
It was about the choice Caitlyn Jenner made to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair in a corset, and how that image reinforced an ages old female stereotype.
While many readers agreed with me, some told me it was none of my business. How could I “possibly understand” what she was going through? They said I had no right to comment. Why not? She is now a woman, in the same gender group I belong to, and if women can’t talk about female image, beauty and the pressure to look a certain way, who can?
Elinor Burkett, an Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker, ran into similar objections last weekend after publishing an essay in the New York Times, “What Makes A Woman?,” in which she not only criticized Jenner’s choices, but described how some trans activists had objected to the use of the word “vagina” in a pro choice campaign, with one blogger saying the term was “exclusionary and harmful.” Huh?
Some of the Twitter reaction to Burkett’s piece labelled it “hate speech,” “awful” and “harmful.” It was none of that, just a thoughtful and tough look at the conflicts between trans women and feminists who have fought for years to not have appearance be the primary way people relate to women.
Yet even Burkett claimed a kind of “been there, done that” legitimacy that enraged her trans critics, declaring “their truth is not my truth” and listing experiences that only those born female could have — “they haven’t had to cope with the onset of their periods in the middle of a crowded subway, the humiliation of discovering their male work partners’ cheques were far larger than theirs or the fear of being too weak to ward off rapists.”
That last line set off a storm, and while I defended her piece, I agree with commenters who argued that fear of rape can be gender neutral. (Although far more women than men fear rape.)
What I don’t agree with is narrowing the field of who has the right to comment. Or limiting artistic choices, saying that it’s wrong to cast a white woman in a movie in which her character has one-quarter Asian and one-quarter Hawaiian blood. (Many people with ethnic blood look like they belong to another group. Maybe that’s the point.)
Director Cameron Crowe subsequently apologized for casting Emma Stone in this role in his new movie Aloha, when all he should have said sorry for was making a lousy movie.
The ethos of authenticity brings more faces, more voices, more urgency to the forefront. Who better to tell us what happened and what should be done about it than those who went through it?
I found for example, the direct testimony of the residential school survivors — and the powerful verbatim accounts of lives hitherto unexplored — such as Maclean’s remarkable stories “It Could Have Been Me” from 13 women who narrowly missed being among the murdered and missing women — affected me in a way no politician, academic or journalist not directly involved could ever have done.
These testimonies galvanized my outrage. I wept. I vowed to pay much closer attention to what our leaders are saying — or, in the case of Stephen Harper, not saying — about how we move ahead now that the final Truth and Reconciliation report is in. I learned from the reaction to my Jenner piece that trans women don’t speak with one voice. Some found Jenner’s pose disquieting, others offered context — that because Jenner grew up in the ’50s and longed to be “other,” that pin-up image may well have been one of her most vivid dreams for herself.
Almost all the voices I heard from made me more empathic. Here’s the truth: we are all in this together.
If we don’t allow a wide spectrum of voices, if we shout down those who we think couldn’t “possibly understand,” we end up in solitary confinement in what I call “the prison of I.”
Our world becomes even more narcissistic and exclusionary.
Judith Timson writes weekly about cultural, social and political issues. You can reach her at judith.timson@sympatico.ca and follow her on Twitter @judithtimson.