Safe spaces exist so that those of us who are marginalized minorities can be with each other, speak and listen to each other, in an environment where we won’t be mocked, belittled, or harassed by people who don’t share our experience. They exist so that we can find words to express and explain our situation, in a world that previously only had derogatory, judgmental, pathology-labeling words for our difference.
Separatism is similar, but more political in scope: that oppressed marginalized people can come together with those who share that specific situation, to unify and decide collectively what to do about their oppression, without the interfering presence of people who are not in that same situation. Separatism is deliberate and positive identity politics, the position that our political interests require a polarization of ourselves against those who are not us, so that we can assert ourselves on our own behalf.
In both cases, they define a negative space, the “people that we are not”. The Other. The ones who don’t belong here.
Since the act of Othering a bunch of people so quickly conjures up images of prejudicial bias against some category of people in the worst and most blindly hateful sense, we tend to be quick to distinguish between Othering people for factors that are built-in and biological or essential to their being, and Othering people for their attitudes and viewpoints and behaviors and perspectives, which we can politicize without being haters. And yet we often do Other people on the basis of essentials anyway! The argument is that if a person’s inborn characteristics in this social context mean that they invariably have a different social experience, and hence a different perspective and world-view, then we aren’t really Othering them because of their skin color or their sex characteristics or the pattern of their sexual attractions, we’re Othering them for the privileged and oppressive mindset that invariably comes as part of the experience of owning those identities in this society.
That’s not to say that we don’t sometimes Other people strictly on the basis of what they think and believe and how they behave, and would accept anyone as one of us regardless of any of their biological innate identity characteristics. Because we do that a lot, too.
Othering people and tying it to one of their innate categories, in pure form — regarding them as permanently, always Other — creates a situation that can’t be readily fixed by any kind of political activism. If they are as they are because their experience (as a cisgender heterosexual white male, for example) invariably means they will have a mindset that you and your colleagues must oppose, then you’ve just defined an enemy that, by your own definition, you can’t change. So your problems with them will persist for as long as they do.
Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, meanwhile, looks a lot less malignant on the surface. “We don’t hate anybody, but we hate the following views and beliefs and attitudes”. On the one hand, it’s entirely reasonable that we get sick and tired of rehashing the same points over and over again, so we create the safe spaces or the separatist environments so we don’t have to.
But Othering on the basis of views and perspectives, in pure form — regarding the matter of these toxic beliefs and viewpoints as fully and permanently settled, that they are wrong and evil and totally not up for discussion ever again — is eventually problematic, too. It creates a litmus test where anything voiced that has even the superficial appearance of belonging to one of the banned viewponts is considered sufficient evidence of being wrong and not up for any consideration. Since the banned-as-wrong views never get discussed, they become undefined and not clearly understood by the people who fervently refuse to give them any consideration. This breeds increasing intransigence and refusal to listen, and an ever-broadening scope of “wrong thinking” that we, as the good people in this safe space or separatist enclave, need to avoid.
Feminist author Lisa Weil and I connected in the course of corresponding about each other’s books (hers: In Search of Pure Lust; mine: That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class). She said her book has often been celebrated for preserving a crucial part of lesbian feminist history, but that people have generally avoided addressing one of her central points — she views her book as “a critical reflection, specifically on the polarizations of identity politics and performative allyship and all the resulting damage and waste”.
I have spoken of these types of Othering in their “pure form” for a reason. They aren’t toxic and can be quite beneficial when deployed as tactics. As temporary or partial approaches. As strategies rather than absolutes.
My employer, the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, is seeking feedback from “WSW” — women who have sex with women — to get a better sense of any health inequities affecting that population. I am a femme, albeit a male one; I don’t tend to refer to myself as “a woman” but other people who were also identified at birth as male, including some who still refer to themselves as such, sometimes do identify as women. I could, if I thought that what this inquiry was trying to get at was something that really ought to include me, take the position that for purposes of this survey I am a WSW insofar as I am a person whose relationships and attractions are indeed towards women.
But I don’t have to defend my option of doing so by taking the position that every single time the word “woman” is used, it always includes me. And in this particular instance I don’t think that it does.
Meanwhile, on Facebook, there are several groups defined as being for lesbian feminists. They are having discussions that I’d like to participate in. The questions that are required to apply to join make it plain that they would not regard me as an appropriate participant.
If they formed other groups in which they didn’t exclude me, it would be a tactic, a strategy. There are no doubt ways in which my experience as a person seen and regarded male all my life does mean my presence would be disruptive and divisive some of the time. But to the extent that they only discuss the things they discuss in groups I can’t join, they make it an absolute. I suspect most of them would find that my views and perspectives actually mesh with theirs and that I have some interesting contributions precisely because of my different viewing angle. Things that might help with the larger project of contending with the world’s shared toxic world-views and changing them in a life-affirming direction. But they aren’t going to ever know that.
I think safe spaces and separatism are useful and necessary as long as some of the time you come out from behind that wall and communicate with the people who are on the outside of it. With the Others.
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My first book, GenderQueer: A Story From a Different Closet, is published by Sunstone Press. It is available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble in paperback, hardback, and ebook, and as ebook only from Apple, Kobo, and directly from Sunstone Press themselves.
My second book, That Guy in Our Women’s Studies Class, has also now been published by Sunstone Press. It’s a sequel to GenderQueer. It is available on Amazon and on Barnes & Noble in paperback. eBook version and hardback versions to follow, stay tuned for details.
Links to published reviews and comments are listed on my Home Page, for GenderQueer now and for Guy in Women’s Studies once they come out.
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genderkitten 