Sometimes, you know just from the title: “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” Rich as this title is for feminist philosophy’s powers of critique, it was the first two words that arrested me. Defending women. That old canard.
There’s a lot to love about Ida B. Wells’s work, the sheer fact of its existence, for instance. But the lines from Wells’s work that returned to me on reading the executive order were these:
The lynching record for a quarter of a century merits the thoughtful study of the American people. It presents three salient facts: First, lynching is color-line murder. Second, crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause. Third, it is a national crime and requires a national remedy.
Before I read Wells, before I had the resources of her theorization and her activism to shape my understandings of what is possible, I had already seen that “crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause.” She put the point in a way I could carry like a hot coal to warm myself and also use as a weapon, as needed. Theorizing at its best.
Wells was fighting the upsurgence of lynchings of Black people in the US after formal emancipation. As Angela Davis documents, this technique of terror, before the Civil War, had mostly targeted white people advocating abolition. Lynching was quickly repurposed as a means of producing and reproducing a white supremacist racial order after formal emancipation through the targeting of Black people. But as Angela Davis explains, drawing on the work of Wells and Frederick Douglass, it took some work to fine-tune the justifications for this practice. The justification that Black people needed to be terrorized to prevent their revolt lost its power, as Davis says, “when it became evident that these conspiracies, plots and insurrections were fabrications that never materialized.” Enter the myth of the Black rapist.
Davis argues that the invention of this new justifying myth in the post-emancipation era was to ensure the exploitation of Black laborers under new social conditions. On Davis’s analysis, the motivation for what Wells calls color-line murder is capital accumulation. Davis observes of the new tactic of justification: “The repercussions of this new myth were enormous. Not only was opposition to individual lynchings stifled—for who would dare to defend a rapist?—white support for the cause of Black equality in general began to wane.” White people, in other words, were/are ready and willing to take up Black immorality as the ideological justification of white supremacist violence in the service of making money. As Davis points out, that few of the people killed by lynching were even accused of rape or its attempt was irrelevant to the power of this justification. And as Davis also makes clear, part of the reason for the success of this justificatory move is that it helps sustain—cannot help but make more possible—another widespread violence under slavery that has persisted into our own time, “the pattern of institutionalized sexual abuse of Black women.”
Crimes against women is the excuse, not the cause.
For me, I came to an inchoate form of understanding this structure of justification during anti-violence trainings. These were trainings committed to ending persistent and widespread practices of violence that intensely target women and girls, but are by no means limited in their applications by the hegemonic system of gendering. I sought answers and tactics in rooms where people spoke to the horrors of widespread abuse and sought ways to stop it. Sometimes, especially in university spaces, there would be people wearing guns as part of their uniforms, apparently earnestly seeking training. I remember not feeling very safe around the guns or around people who were authorized to use them based on their judgment without fear of censure or regulation. At the time, I didn’t know anyone who wanted to abolish the police or the nation or who questioned phrases such as “legitimate use of force.” I was a young feminist who found the everyday violence that targeted me and mine exhausting, terrifying, and as intractable as it was unnecessary. In seeking spaces of transformation, I so often still found myself feeling unsafe.
It took me time to see that the structures of violence I sought to understand and undo were made more possible by institutions such as police and prisons and the kinds of anti-violence trainings that invoke state violence as a resource in the fight. I had to listen to my own feelings of unsafety. Listening to those feelings has taken me deep into projects such as anti-carceral feminism, prison abolition, and anarchism, as a philosopher and as a person trying to go from one thing to the next in a manner that makes life more possible. Along the way, I have found the work of people such as Wells and Davis not just instructive, but life-saving. I have not been able to live lightly the exhaustion, the terror, and the frustration of knowing things could be otherwise and so often aren’t. The resources to shore myself up and tend myself that my multiple privileges afford me keep me going, but it is the people who fight, in words and deeds, the life-denying hegemonic order that make living possible.
So, seeing the defense of women like me used, once again, as a justification for that special mix of judicial and extrajudicial violence the US has such a long history of producing was, to put it politely, triggering.
My life-sustaining comrades often are not the people the unsafe world has assigned as my proper cohort. No, they are so often the people I am told the violence will keep me safe from. As in this executive order, where the people who build some of the most powerful modes of embodied sociality that I have encountered are supposed to be a threat to me. I try to cultivate trustworthiness to these people who build spaces that sustain my life. I know that these spaces are not built for me. These are, for instance, Black feminist spaces, trans spaces, Indigenous spaces, immigrant spaces. These spaces can be texts, conferences, critical exchanges, podcasts, videos, bars, music, art, and those interstitial conversations where sometimes, preciously, I get included even if I don’t seem to belong. I try to become increasingly trustworthy to the people and relationships of these spaces; just because I cannot to any real degree change my subject position does not mean I am not desperate to change how subjects get made and positioned. “What if… ” I wake up a lot of mornings and think, “…what if we could stop making subjects?”
It isn’t so much that I don’t want to be a nice, cis, white lady, although I’d be good with not being one. It’s that the world that makes nice, cis, white ladies is not safe for me or pretty much anyone I care about, or know, or have heard about. That’s part of the special pain of seeing, again and again, the safety of people positioned like me invoked, cynically and sincerely, to deny life to those building life-sustaining worlds. That move makes the violence it claims to combat more likely, more possible, and more hidden. Talia Mae Bettcher has recently written of such arguments: “Crucially, the point of citing the calamity isn’t to protect females at all. Rather, it is to constitute females as ever in need of protection.” I will cite just one instance, since it so clearly makes this rhetorical move to target the first openly trans person serving in Congress, and it is parsimonious in its deployment: “There are a number of us on the Hill, not just members of Congress, but female employees and staffers, who are also survivors of assault or sexual violence. The idea of a man and his genitals being in our private spaces is just absurd, and it makes us, as women, more vulnerable.” Since this is out of context, I’ll make clear here that “private spaces” in this quotation is meant to reference places such as public bathrooms and shared locker/dressing/changing rooms in public venues. The speaker—an elected representative—is misgendering trans women. Before I illustrate the unsafety this argument helps sustain, I want to affirm that fighting her on this project of trans exclusion will increase her safety. I’m not fighting for her—to whatever degree I can, I fight against the projects of her and hers. But I accept that making this world safe enough for all of us means making a world safe enough for a lot of people who my resentful heart won’t ever think deserving.
I get misgendered regularly. Once, when I was eight months pregnant, someone tried to stop me from going into a women’s bathroom. “Sir! Sir!” It wasn’t funny to me as I stiffened and prepared to turn around, arms now protectively crossing what is culturally often coded as the hilarious fecundity of my body. Unthinkingly, I was trying to hide, to keep safe, the very thing that would credential my belonging in the room marked with the figure in the skirt. I have learned that you never really know how someone will react upon finding they made a mistake. But that this person called out—that they felt themselves deputized into the policing—I’ve also learned that that is a good predictor they will not react well. I peed myself a bit as the pressure on my bladder brooked no quarter. I wasn’t, thankfully, physically assaulted that day. Placentas get increasingly friable towards the end of pregnancy, and I could no longer move very fast. No one was made safer. Policing doesn’t do that.
One thing I’ve noticed, most trans spaces make going to the bathroom feel like a thing I can just do—pregnant, wearing a coat, wearing a hat, posture excellent, slouching around. Another thing, I feel specific and often painfully tense parts of my body relax in spaces where no one ever asks: “is it a boy or girl or what?” I experience actual physical relief (in my neck, my shoulders) being in spaces where people engage in conscious and unconscious practices of interaction that counter abusive structures of gendering. I have felt profoundly welcomed to exist in many of the trans spaces I have gotten to travel in because no one was credentialing or policing my gender. I love learning how to be more trustworthy to the people and relations that build and sustain those spaces. I feel safe enough to make jokes and tease and laugh and live.
Of course, as Wells knew, part of why one says they are defending women with the lynching and the policing is to prevent people like me from daring to travel in those spaces. I would roll my eyes at the recapitulation of this move exemplified in the executive order, except that it is so effective at enabling the murders, the neglects, the vilifications, the abandonments, the cruelties. As Davis shows, it took white women unconscionable decades and thousands of deaths to organize themselves against the practice of lynching and with the Black women who had already done all the work. Defending (white) women is an old excuse being proffered, once again. For those feminist philosophers who still think there’s life in that justificatory structure, wake up. For fuck’s sake. The world is burning and it need not.
Thank you to Andrew Dilts, Josh Fuson, Sarah Hagelin, Sid Hansen, Amy Hasinoff, Lucia Navarro, and Gillian Silverman for their comments on earlier drafts. Thank you to Jonesy for the use of her picture.
The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Alida Liberman or the Associate Editor Elisabeth Paquette.
Sarah Tyson
Sarah Tyson is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliated faculty with Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Denver, which is on Ute, Arapaho, and Cheyenne land. Her research focuses on questions of authority, history, and exclusion with a particular interest in voices that have been marginalized in the history of thinking. She is the author of Where Are the Women? Why Expanding the Archive Makes Philosophy Better (Columbia University Press, 2018) and co-editor of Philosophy Imprisoned: The Love of Wisdom in the Age of Mass Incarceration (Lexington Books, 2014). She is co-host (with Robert Talisse, Carrie Figdor, and Malcolm Keating) of New Books in Philosophy, a podcast channel with the New Books Network.
