Have you ever got yourself into an argument with someone because the issue at stake is just theoretical to you whereas it’s very personal to them? It can happen with a loved one. Your spouse has lost a family heirloom and you embark on a monologue on how “attachment is the root of all unhappiness”, while they were hoping for a hug and a sympathetic ear because Uncle Billy’s GAA medal is gone for good.
Such crossed wires can get more tense in the political realm. On an issue like the Israel-Palestine conflict, the loss of life can be deeply felt for some. For others, debating the conflict is a kind of intellectual sport.
Understanding the two modes of engaging your brain can help to explain why discussion about transgender rights have been so fraught in recent years. For a considerable number of people, it’s an abstract matter that relates to a wider discourse about so called “woke” causes. But for a much smaller cohort, it’s the most personal thing imaginable – perhaps because they are transgender or because they have a loved one with gender dysphoria.
It’s not that views line up neatly on one side and the other, but a person who approaches a question theoretically may come up with a very different answer to someone who approaches it through direct experience.
This tension between the conceptual and the personal has always fascinated Sophie Grace Chappell. Among the British philosopher’s many books is Epiphanies, exploring whether moral truths emerge from the “game” of constructing arguments or rather from Eureka-like moments allied to your intuitions. In Trans Figured, she builds off that inquiry, suggesting the question ethicists should start with is: What is it like to be a human being? “Start with that. Don’t start with a moral theory, start with where you actually are,” writes Chappell.
“I have always wanted to say: Forget about your ideology, let’s hear about your experience,” she explains further in an interview on Zoom. Chappell is transgender and hopes the book can model a different way of debating issues that have become part of a somewhat uncivil culture war.
If people realise a lot of what society does to us causes us and our families and our friends considerable pain, I think that will change things
“I think it’s a great shame the discussion has debased itself into trench warfare. And if there has to be trench warfare then we should at least play the odd game of football in no man’s land.”
The language of rights can be a sticking point at the outset, as each side asserts the priority of one set of rights over another: be it trans rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, or wider civil rights.
“I am very happy with the language of rights,” says Chappell, who is professor of philosophy at The Open University. “Of course you have to work up to the societal situation: Which laws are actually feasible?” However, she says, “I think the problem with rights discourse is that it is often too simple – it just doesn’t engage with all the complexities. And ‘rights’ is a big banner that people like to march behind – sometimes I’m happy to do that myself – but the discourse can become very much hitting the other side over the head.”
[ Varadkar hopes Ireland can avoid ‘culture wars’ between ‘woke and anti-woke’Opens in new window ]
Chappell, who was in Ireland last month speaking at a philosophy event at University College Cork, is a Christian of the Scottish Episcopal Church. This provides another personal insight.
“I approach every question as a Christian – as a sort of ‘small c’ catholic ... My attitudes to transgender were very much shaped both by my previous more hardline evangelical views – I was hardline against trans too – and the story of my life since 1988 is the story of that position softening and then disappearing, partly because I realised – to quote a slogan the other side uses – ‘God doesn’t make mistakes’ and, if I was trans, it was because I was meant to be.”
In the 2015 marriage equality referendum, the Yes campaign made a tactical decision to foreground human stories rather than abstract debating points. Is there a lesson here for the trans rights movement? Chappell believes so. “If people realise a lot of what society does to us causes us and our families and our friends considerable pain, I think that will change things.”
None of this is to say that feelings should automatically trump logic. Hard-headed thinking needs to be deployed on matters of public concern. Indeed, a case can be made that we didn’t do enough of it at the time of the same-sex marriage poll. During the family referendum last March, several commentators lamented the abolition of civil partnership on foot of the 2015 vote. Had the “marriage-like” institution been retained a decade ago – something which would have required an adjustment to the referendum wording at the time – it could have avoided the whole palaver about creating a new constitutional amendment for “durable relationships”.
On the question of experience versus theory, Chappell stresses it is not a case of either/or. Rather, both have their place.
Just don’t lose sight of the “the starting point”, Chappell adds, “which is two human beings looking each other in the eye asking: what would it be like to be decent to each other, to be fair to each other, to be respectful to each other, to be kind to each other, in this situation?”