So what is all this kerfuffle around the Toronto Public Library (TPL) renting space to Meghan Murphy? And why should it matter to someone like me, a cisgendered, middle-aged white male i.e. the ideal symbolic stand-in for privilege in all its manifestations?
These are questions worth asking, but first, a little story:
Not too long ago, I took my privileged white male ass on a flight over the Atlantic to visit friends who live near Glasgow. To pass the time, I dipped into Zadie Smith’s 2009 collection of short reflective pieces, Changing My Mind. I was drawn up short by an error and it entered my brain, like Khan’s parasitic ear-worm, and chewed up my memory of everything I had read to that point, and made it impossible to retain anything I read afterwards. All I could think about was the error. What was this horrible error? you ask. Regrettably, Zadie Smith included Douglas Coupland in a list of American authors. How dare she!
In a related incident, my wife and I were on a late night train with our Scottish friends, riding from Queen Street Station to Lenzie. There had been an event in downtown Glasgow so the train was crowded which meant that we couldn’t sit together. The wives found a seat at one end of the car; the husbands found a seat at the other end across from two somewhat younger women who were modestly drunk but not so drunk that they couldn’t carry on a conversation. They asked if we wanted to come back to their flat for a glass of wine and some fun. I politely declined and the more talkative of the two women said: “Oh, so you’re American.” My friend laughed and said in a fake southern accent: “Ooooo. Them’s fightin’ words.” Then he reverted to his local brogue and explained in his usual affable way—or at least affable enough that two moderately drunk women wouldn’t notice the condescension—that conflating Canadians and Americans would never get you very far in a conversation with a Canadian. I think his observation holds doubly true of people who conflate Canadian and American cultural figures.
I tend to forget when I’m home, but become acutely aware when abroad, that I’m extremely protective of my Canadian cultural identity. This is not a matter of patriotism; it’s a matter of survival. Canada is the primary buffer between the rest of the world and the source of an overweening cultural hegemony. I do whatever it takes to maintain a sense of distinctiveness, and when that sense is threatened, my claws come out. To calm myself, I think of my affinity for ironic observations, the anti-myth of our national formation that chose negotiation over bloody revolution, and my passive-aggressive use of the phrase “I’m sorry.” These concerns are important to my personal identity. Although they do not belong to my DNA, they are important all the same.
So, let’s get back to Meghan Murphy and the TPL, shall we? Meghan Murphy is a TERF, a trans-exclusionary radical feminist. I suspect she is a feminist first, which means she takes as her starting point resistance to patriarchal structures that privilege male identity in ways that oppress female identity. I do not dispute the privilege of male identity. I do not doubt that Meghan Murphy has suffered because of it. Moving from her starting point, she rejects trans-gendered identities. In her view, gender exists as a simple binary. A person born with a vagina is a woman and will always be a woman. A person born with a penis is a man and will always be a man. A person born with a penis who says “inside, I feel like a woman” is a liar or deluded and, more to the point, poses a threat to people who have vaginas. Ms. Murphy seeks to eliminate that threat.
I have no idea what it’s like to become aware of a misalignment between my body and my personal experience of gender. I’ve never had that experience. Nevertheless, the fact that I’ve never had that experience cannot, through the customary operations of reason, lead me to conclude that a) such experience is therefore impossible, or that b) those who report having such experience are therefore lying or deluded. The most that I can conclude from my lack of experience is that I lack experience. An admission of ignorance can be a healthy thing. It can be liberating. Despite lack of experience, I believe empathy is possible. One approach to empathy is by analogy. Just as I can discover that a fact (being Canadian) is important to my identity, and just as it disturbs me when someone dismisses that fact, and just as that fact is not dependent upon me being born with a penis, so too a different fact (being transgendered). By analogy, I can make an imaginative leap. I can never understand it as lived experience, but I can understand it enough not to be dismissive.
Advocates of transgendered persons called upon the TPL to cancel the rental agreement with Meghan Murphy. The TPL responded that it would not cancel the agreement because, as a public institution, it is bound to protect freedom of expression which is a constitutionally protected value; Ms. Murphy merely wished to hold a debate about an issue which concerns her. Advocates responded that, while protecting freedom of expression is laudable, it is not an absolute value. Ms. Murphy does not wish to hold a debate; she wishes to assert her highly publicized position that a certain group of people does not exist and therefore is not entitled to rights and freedoms. The TPL was intransigent and the event went ahead while protesters gathered outside the library.
Of all the expressions of support for the TPL position, the most puzzling came from Pen Canada whose tagline is “Free Expression Matters.” (I have reproduced the statement at the end of this post.) For a writers advocacy organization, the Pen Canada statement is astonishingly incoherent. Viewed from a distance (which is the only perspective from which the statement even approaches something resembling sense), Pen seems to be saying that, while it thinks Meghan Murphy is a nasty piece of work, she still deserves a platform because (insert tagline here). As an aside, I take exception to the phrase “a legal threshold for exclusion under the library’s rental policy” which engages the organization in a lovely piece of tautological reasoning (which is no reasoning at all). It subjects the rental policy to a legal threshold while implying that the legal threshold is something internal to the rental policy. Pen Canada wants to express disdain for Ms. Murphy without appearing to undermine its own mandate. The result is toothless and cowardly.
I want to underscore two problems here:
The first is structural. The matter has been framed in such a way that it stymies well intentioned people when they try to think their way through it. The far right understands this and uses it to advantage. In structure, it is identical to debates around Israel and Palestine. How do you demand accountability for the oppressive actions of an oppressed people? The far right calls accountability oppression and the possibility of being stigmatized as an oppressor drives away the well intentioned people. They become strangely mute and the evil continues unchecked.
The second is formal. Pen Canada addresses the matter through a rational statement. However, the matter affects real people through the felt experience of their bodies. This is perhaps the chief misalignment at play. In the circumstances, Pen’s application of reason is unreasonable.
Here I invoke John Berger’s essay “The Hour of Poetry” which he wrote in 1982 in response to the rise of US-backed fascist regimes in South and Central America. He points to the end-game of people who seek to define entire classes of people out of existence. The end-game is violence and, if not death, then disappearance. But long before the end are the ideological gestures which scarcely hint at what might follow.
There are formal and informal schools for torturers, mostly state-financed. But the first conditioning begins, before the school, with ideological propositions that a certain category of people are fundamentally different and that their difference constitutes a supreme threat. The tearing apart of the third person, them, from us and you. The next lesson, now in the schools for torture, is that their bodies are lies because, as bodies, they claim not to be so different: torture is a punishment for this lie.
In a late capitalist society like ours, the state does not torture, but if the path remains, it leads to violence all the same. Later, Berger challenges the utility of reason as a method of resistance:
During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries many protests against social injustice were written in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason; and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means so clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constantly ineradicable reality.
The unreason of poetry is one way to address such evil:
Physical pain can usually be lessened or stopped by action. All other human pain, however, is caused by one form or another of separation. And here the act of assuagement is less direct. Poetry can repair no loss but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual labour of reassembling what has been scattered.
In a serendipitous piece of timing, winners of the Governor General’s Award for Literature were announced on the very evening that the TPL was hosting Meghan Murphy. And the winner of the poetry award? Gwen Benaway for her collection, Holy Wild. Gwen Benaway identifies as a trans girl of Anishinaabe and Métis descent and her poems explore, among other things, transphobia. I can’t think of a better response.
The Pen Canada Statement:
As a writers’ organization that supports freedom of expression in all its forms, PEN Canada considers the Toronto Public Library an important ally. Its rental policy recognizes the necessity of barring the use of Library premises from “any individual or group … for a purpose that is likely to promote, or would have the effect of promoting discrimination, contempt or hatred for” a very wide range of groups, including those marginalized “on the basis of sex, gender identity, gender expression … (or) sexual orientation.”
PEN Canada supports the Toronto Public Library’s decision to honour its commitment to a booking for a controversial third-party event scheduled at its Palmerston branch on October 29. Ms Meghan Murphy’s opinions do not meet a legal threshold for exclusion under the library’s rental policy, though they are clearly at odds with the inclusive spirit which should inform its enforcement. Recognizing that some views held by Ms Murphy are repugnant to many, PEN nevertheless believes, as a matter of principle, that the Library cannot be forced to adjudicate which opinions – short of those which violate the Criminal Code – can be aired by a third party on its premises.
Freedom of expression takes many forms including the freedom to choose one’s self-presentation and express one’s identity. It is threatened by conditions of social exclusion, marginalization, and violence, whether physical or psychological. Trans people in Canada are routinely subjected to violence; adding social exclusion further limits the scope within which they and other marginalized sexual and gender identities and expressions can freely express themselves. Advocating for trans people to be barred from gendered public spaces although it contravenes no laws, clearly fosters discrimination against them.
PEN does not support the deplatforming of controversial speakers but it does recognize the felt need for better oversight of the library’s comprehensive rental policy, with its laudable commitment to preserving the freedom of expression that flows from “a welcoming and supportive environment free from discrimination and harassment.”
