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A Set of Evolving Principles
Democracy requires a good challenge, and it does not always arrive in soft tones. The further development of democracy requires difficult struggles, and it still does. When we live in a democracy, we assume that we’re living according to certain principles — equality, freedom, justice — and yet we’re constantly learning what freedom is, and what equality is, and what justice can be.
In other words, for a long time slaves weren’t free, and we called ourselves a democracy. Well, the emancipation of slavery made us more democratic than we were before, at least in the United States and in other slave-holding nations. The rights of women to vote or to hold property without the permission of husbands or fathers turns out to redescribe what equality means. We learn something new about what equality means when we understand equality for women. The rights of people not to be harassed, or discriminated against, or criminalized on the basis of their sexuality — once we understand that, we actually revise our idea of what justice is.
But each of those struggles toward greater democracy involve challenging people’s existing ideas of who’s equal, who has the right to be free, and how do we define justice? All of those notions had to be redefined by virtue of those challenges, and those challenges are necessary for democracy.
An Invitation to Challenge
The anti-slavery movement, the suffrage movement, the movement for LGBTQIA+ rights, I mean, none of these have been quiet. None of these have been easy. There have been people who said no and who had strong investments in denying those freedoms, denying that form of equality, and denying justice. Even among progressive and liberal people I know, there can sometimes be a real resistance to thinking about trans rights, or lesbian and gay rights, or even women’s rights to reproductive freedom or equal pay. They sometimes say that these are secondary issues and not really at the center of politics or it simply makes them uncomfortable. Why should I have to refer to someone as a he, or a she, or a they? Why do I need to adjust my vocabulary?
It can be convulsive to be confronted with new linguistic conventions and new social conventions. Is a gay marriage really a marriage? Are two people who are parenting a child who are of the same gender, who’s the real parent, right? There are responses like this that refuse to accept new social structures because they’re holding to the old ones or they think their sense of the order of the world depends on staying within an older vocabulary and an older framework.
But we have to allow ourselves to be challenged and accept the invitation to revise our ways of thinking because that’s the only way of being open to people who are trying to make their claim, sometimes for the very first time, to be heard, to be known, to be acknowledged.
A Struggle for Freedom
Freedom is a struggle. I think Angela Davis puts it that way. Freedom is a struggle because there’s so much in our world that’s telling us not to be free with our bodies, and if we are seeking to love in a free way, to live and move in a free way, we actually have to struggle to claim that freedom. So my idea of freedom is not some individualistic idea of radical freedom. It’s a collective idea of freedom as a struggle. When gay and lesbian people started coming out or when trans people started living openly or women were very clear about their desires socially and publicly, something changed in the world.
Some people didn’t like those changes and they resisted those changes, like why don’t those people be quiet or go back to older ways? But the fact is that by appearing, speaking, acting in certain ways, reality changed and it has changed. Gender is appearing in many ways that it never appeared before, and I think this is happening throughout the world. Whether it’s women insisting on appearing in some way they weren’t allowed to appear, with or without hijab, for instance, or whether it’s trans people on the streets, or gay and lesbian people openly married or with children. We no longer speak about family, woman, man, desire, sex in the same way.