One area that I haven't written about much in my column is the rise of identity politics. This term refers to groups who require the state to recognize elements of their identity in order to gain access to rights. A right is something that the state affords its citizens and can lead to important recognition that can help to end structural discrimination.
One area where identity politics emerged in Canada was through the recognition of Canada as a multicultural nation. It can sometimes be confusing to look at Canada and the United States and make a distinction between political cultures. In terms of percentages, the diversity of ethnicity in Canada does not look much different than in the U.S but what is different is that Canada has chosen to accept ethnic identity as the basis of rights.
Over the past fifty years identity politics have become part of the political landscape. Each request for recognition is usually framed by the claim that more freedom is needed to achieve personal well-being and the full expression of individual identity. Over the last half century the call for identity recognition has grown beyond ethnicity.
I was thinking about this the other day when I heard an interview on the CNN show "Piers Morgan Live." I came in a bit after the interview had started and realized quickly that this was a follow up interview that Morgan was doing with a guest named Janet Mock. Mock had been on the show sometime earlier and had started a firestorm when she tweeted a comment about Morgan's ignorance about the transgender community.
Mock wrote a book entitled, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love and So Much More in which she describes her life as a transgendered woman. During the first interview Morgan had said that Mock had been "born a boy" but at 18 had had surgery to change her gender. Mock tried to correct this misconception and the interview I heard was Morgan and Mock trying to reconcile their differences. Morgan was confused about what he had done wrong and Mock, it seemed to me, could not articulate what was problematic about Morgan's statement.
Now I'm the kind of person who does not like conflict and so when people argue at cross purposes I tend to get stressed. I was driving along thinking that the interview needed to be stopped and that someone needed to intervene with a calm, clear explanation of the crux of the misunderstanding.
What Morgan could not understand is that Mock was arguing that "gender" is something we construct. We might be born with the anatomy of a male or female but gender is a completely different thing. Mock tried to explain that we really don't have a sense of our gender until we are old enough to accept the roles that society has created for us. Girls do this ... boys do that... There have, of course, been attempts to blend or dispel gender roles by, for example, "allowing" children to play sports traditionally constructed as male and female but we still tend to see roles as largely pre-determined.
These kinds of discussions about identity are extremely difficult to have because they are complex and because they require individuals to think quite differently about ideas that seem to be generalized truths. In other words, we just think that it is true that roles are naturally assigned. Asking people to stop thinking about gender as something disconnected from anatomy is a big shift.
So why is this important in our consideration of politics? Recognition of identity in the political realm has become more and more the trend as a way to move society toward a greater understanding of the scope of personal freedom. For example, gay rights activists have asked the courts to recognize their identity and to strike down state laws that are discriminatory. We saw this recently in the United States over the Defense of Marriage Act. In Canada, many years ago, our Supreme Court extended the meaning of "sex" in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to mean "sexual orientation."
Rights for transgendered persons will likely follow the same path so taking a few minutes to try to understand the Mock / Morgan debate could help us all to make a more informed decision about the extension of human rights.
