On the limits of inclusion

Quaker creed

When visiting relatives, I went to a Christian church service, and it was remarkable how every activity of the service was focused on creed – a permanent and explicit list of beliefs. They talked about, chanted, explained, recited, acted out, and worshiped creed and did nothing else. Meanwhile I was able to find silence to have my own worship which comes from my practice of experiential religion, a kind of opposite orientation to a creed or doctrinal religion.

During that silence, some ways quakers may be susceptible to creed crystallized for me. These ways are in curriculum, in forms and practices, and in peace and justice work.

In my mind, quaker curricula are ideally minimal and open ended starting points, like lists of games and crafting ideas, not actual lessons. However I’ve heard frustration expressed that we don’t teach explicitly enough and so there are now more formal lessons including an attempt to make a “complete” list of what the testimonies are: simplicity, equality and so on. This attempt to pin down, or enshrine what was once living, could be (worst case) received by children as a creed, which makes the whole thing feel like the rest of society. If that is allowed to progress too far in that direction, it threatens to close off the experience of learning from within in each moment.

In the area of forms and practices, I’m talking about having a one hour meeting, the expectations around interruptions, where to sit, what to wear and so on. I have overheard and been part of interactions where a new person is asking about these forms, and is expecting clear answers. But from someone who grew up this way, it did not occur that there could be answers, so it was hard to know what to say. For example if you have a cough, should you leave the room? All I can say is that sometimes people do and sometimes they don’t. When I feel a practice is really mine, then it is mine to shape, not just to follow. To the extent that a meeting is formalized to exactly one hour with a bunch of rules, then it is less living, closer to creed and farther from experience.

In the area of peace and justice, the side-taking and slogan-based ways of political movements are very much like creed (or ideology). Worst case we can adopt a warlike stance in the fight for peace, or kick people out of a group because they don’t share our same beliefs about inclusion. Those versed in movement-building can clash with quakers like me who never adopt a loyalty to one side. Pressure to believe alike can replace actual listening.

In all cases, the wider society in which ideological loyalty is the norm exerts a pressure on the enclave of quakers, which is most noticeable when new people come in and bring the ways of a business office or a school or protest movement with them. A doctrinal religion like Christianity is honest about having a creed, while we are at risk of pretending there is no creed while acting on an unwritten one.

Othering goes both ways

I remember the moment I first doubted the inevitability of being marginalized among quakers. There was a single other disabled person in a business meeting, who talked about the deep and persistent othering and belittling she had lived with among quakers for her whole life. She made it sound like it does not have to be this way, and the light switch went on for me that it was never about me failing to be good enough, but it was about the accepted norms of leadership, centrality and marginalization as a system. I felt equal in that meeting because she was there, but I don’t normally feel that way.

An aspect of my disability, which is true for a lot of autistic people, is that I can follow social rules if I know what they are, but it is very hard to memorize them and apply abstract rules to particular situations. I’m always afraid that I will accidentally say or do something that I wasn’t aware was symbolic of criminality. There are fairly easy ones, such as the OK hand gesture that was co-opted by white nationalists. I can remember to avoid that one. But I worry some day I might be walking towards a coffee shop, for example, and find myself walking with people who are unlawfully protesting, then be arrested for being a part of a riot, and then not be able to convince them otherwise because perhaps I was dressed like them or made some other gesture that I was not aware was a cultural symbol.

That fear is grounded in the many times I’ve been assumed to be a central figure in powerful bloc, by people who oppose that bloc, and who often feel marginalized themselves. I’ve been told I’m part of a Christian church, various anti-progressive movements, and even the highway lobby.

These efforts to separate people from people are connected to loyalties to creeds – either the beliefs of the insiders or those of the outsiders. The insiders see me as out and the outsiders see me as in, I guess, because I’m so creed-resistant by nature.

Language policing can be ethnocentric

I saw a movie recently in which a Sunni leader is shown advocating to expel someone from the community because “It is against the Quran to misquote the scripture”. This is literal language policing, above board and honest. But I worry about language policing in “inclusive” communities which could be more disingenuous.

Someone I know dropped a class because the teacher could not use their pronouns correctly; to them the teacher was unacceptable. Pronouns are language, and language is culture, and there are different subcultures. People use lots of words differently within the same overall English language. We can push against culture and language, and it does sometimes change because of persistent efforts, but to say that we cannot accept someone who is rooted in a different culture and dialect is ethnocentric and intolerant. In this student’s case, maybe quitting was indicative of being intolerant, or maybe it was an act of defiance in order to push on the language.

In English until recently, pronouns reflect on the speaker’s perception, but do not rely on the preference of the person referred to. (Other languages vary!) In contrast, many people now use an intentional dialect where pronouns are self-determined. Maybe the larger language will evolve that way, or maybe it will not. If people are coming from two regions of the language, we need to be tolerant that they are just different, not label one as wrong. Both people are simply speaking in ways normal to them – it is not a matter of respect or disrespect, but a matter of language and dialect.

Of course people can say some hateful thing and then claim “it’s just how I speak”, and that is not what I’m wanting to protect. We can protect the diversity of culture and viewpoints and communicate about culture clashes without drawing a line of intolerance.

The use of self-determined pronouns has gotten such a strong foothold in quakerism that it has become, in my mind, dangerously close to creed. When you have creed, you have the grounds to expel someone from the community.

A personal example

The national group of queer quakers runs an email list that anyone can post to. Well, anyone except me. A year or more ago I was put on notice for having “oppressive opinions” and posting misinformation. I had only posted about 8 things, some of the “worst” being:

• I said “regular women” in contrast to trans-women. Someone wrote back finding that offensive and suggested that he knew what my real agenda was.
• I said my friend had found several trans-women that she dated to be sexually predatory and that she felt most trans-women she had met feel like men to her. I was not supposed to say that, according to one person, because it furthers a false narrative.
• I noted there was some news reporting raising an alarm about trans-women prisoners in women’s prisons because their sexual aggression appears to far exceed that of male prisoners on average, and this puts regular women at higher risk. Supposedly that also furthers a false narrative.

So it’s all on the same topic, and the “false narrative” appears equivalent to the Sunni leader blaming someone for misquoting scripture.

I don’t say a lot, and don’t post often, and never make broad judgments, but sometimes I post an observation or fact or a thought experiment, it goes against what someone wants to be true and it threatens the group ideology. So I’m deemed to have certain opinions which are disrespectful or oppressive. Since other people deserve a space where they can be included without being triggered, I have to be excluded. (You know, because full inclusion because we respect everyone…) It’s about as grounded as making the assumption that I’m part of the highway lobby.

As a diversion I will give you the full thought experiment about women prisoners’ potential risk from trans-women. The male prison population is ten times the size of the female prison population. Women’s rate of sexual offenses is very low; men in prison are there 15-18% of the time for sexual offenses (the range is from different sources of statistics); and trans-women are there 48% for sexual offenses (from a smaller sample). That means a trans-woman is three times more likely to be in prison for a sexual offense than a man. In the language of corrections systems, trans-women as a whole tend to have the criminal profile of men, not of women. If we accept those facts, the hypothetical is what if people could be housed in the women’s prison simply by stating they identify as women. It seems to me that a sizable percent of men would opt for that if there were no downsides, particularly those who were actually sexual predators. Given that they outnumber women by ten to one, even a few percent going to women’s prisons would clearly outnumber the regular women.

I gave some short version of this on the list. I didn’t say I thought it was currently happening or what I thought should happen. In retrospect there was no reason to get carried away in a thought experiment. So I’m guilty of wasting people’s time, but I was put on notice for opinions, not for the waste of time. The fact that I didn’t include any of my opinions in the posts tells me that the real reason is not about my opinions, but is about my lack of loyalty to creed.

The transgender and pronoun-related conflicts are where so much of the current dogma is, so that’s exactly where we need to resist the pressure.

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