As a (very) junior academic who researches gender identity, I often find myself thinking about the art of presenting heresy in the temple.
So far, at least, the trick would seem to be to speak freely, without respecting any of the taboos that have gathered around the subject of gender identity, and with absolute confidence that it's legitimate to ask questions and irresponsible not to. That conviction matters. It’s the steel in your spine and the ground you’re standing on.
I've presented my research to some excruciatingly woke academics. I’m starting to get the impression that if they don’t hear the familiar buzzwords and the usual fleet of apologies and disclaimers that they sometimes forget what they’re meant to be offended by and let themselves think about what’s actually being said instead.
I’d never do this—but let’s say I suffered a serious head injury and decided to start my next talk the way my university’s office of diversity, equity, and inclusion recommends: by saying I use she/her pronouns and disclaiming my “cis privilege.” Maybe I’d even add a warning to my audience that they might find the things I’m about to say triggering but that I want everybody to know that their own experiences—whatever those experiences are—are totally valid. I’d be priming my audience to wonder what right I have to ask any questions at all. I’d be reinforcing the idea that we’re treading on holy ground and that secular standards of reason and evidence don’t apply.
Every concession you make to the keepers of the new orthodoxies and taboos undercuts you because such concessions communicate that what you’re saying doesn't matter enough to speak clearly or that other things—recently cultivated sensitivities, quasi-religious rituals—matter more.
But eschew the anxious niceties and you can draw your interlocutors so deeply into the substance of the matter that they forget that they ever thought it was illegitimate to think about it.
(Or else it's simply too late: they're already thinking about it.)
So, it's showing, not telling. Engulfing, not entreating.
And so far it always feels like performing a minor act of magic, defiantly, but out of submission to some higher faith.
Absolutely. I tread in a different minefield as a playwright in a theatre scene that has changed a lot in the last decades but the sentiment holds true. Have the courage of your convictions. Be bold. Bloody minded and contrary, if necessary. The world has never needed it more.
Good for you. That takes courage which is hard to come by sometimes. It's important that we recognize moments of courage in ourselves and others because they act as stepping stones for us to do the next courageous thing. Gender identity came up at work recently and I brought up misogyny, family dynamics, detransition, and that the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual is not a bible. It may not seem courageous to some but it was a big step for me Let's keep being courageous in any way we can!