Can We Have Difference As Well As Community? – Forbes

Can we square the cultivation of difference with a search for common ground?

Leaders in business, technology, politics, and education increasingly find themselves facing a relatively novel issue: how do we accommodate people who change their gender? Even more daunting, perhaps, is the question of how leaders will deal with people who reject the idea that there are only two genders to begin with–who are, in the current parlance, nonbinary.

This challenge became more apparent to me as I read an op-ed in last Sunday’s New York Times by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich, an assistant professor of English at Bowdoin College. The author posed the question, arising from months of Covid-induced isolation, “Who are we, when no one is looking?” The dilemma arose for Marzano-Lesnevich because, they (I don’t know his/her/their gender, so I will default to “they”) asked, “Where did my own gender reside, if not in sending signals of difference?”

It took a couple of reads for me to understand what the writer of this op-ed was after. They indicated that being who they are revolves in “normal” (non-pandemic) life around the problem of others’ acknowledgment of their self-understanding as nonbinary.

This concern with recognition is in some sense a natural progression from the gay liberation movement that prized the freedom to come out of the closet–i.e., to no longer feel the need to hide one’s love for people of the same sex/gender. After coming out, gay men and lesbians were concerned that others not merely accept them, but that those people acknowledge their otherness as well.

Although I teach sociology at the graduate level, I felt ill-positioned to understand what was at stake in Marzano-Lesnevich’s article. Yet I thought I should try to do so, both as a scholar and as a citizen. Accordingly, I tried to reason by analogy and by comparison. I asked myself two questions: What is this like? What is it different from?

The first possible analogy that came to mind as I thought about what Marzano-Lesnevich regards as “liberation” was the civil rights movement, our national template for modern progressive social change. The problem for the Black freedom movement, of course, was not “recognition,” at least not in the same sense. African-Americans were all too recognizable in American society, and were discriminated against precisely for standing out from the white norm. They suffered job exclusion, housing discrimination, wage disparities, the denial of their voting rights, and violence merely because of what they looked like—that is, on the grounds of their difference.

The goal of the civil rights movement was thus anti-discrimination, equal treatment, fair housing, inclusion—in short, racial equality. That is why the prominent (and gay) civil rights activist Bayard Rustin opposed the Black studies courses being proposed by some in the late 1960s; in his view, the whole point of racial equality was to be able to do the same things that white people did and, especially, to have the same skills and opportunities that white people had.

To be sure, gays, lesbians, and trans people have been discriminated against on account of their difference. Still, Marzano-Lesnevich’s ideas about difference reminded me of what used to happen in the 1960s when someone who had special culinary needs would come over for dinner.  In those days, one brought one’s own food; one would not have expected the host to prepare a separate meal that met the needs of the guest. That has changed, of course; it now seems to go without saying that hosts must accommodate the “difference” of guests who may need to eat other food than that being served to the rest of the group.

In this sense, society has clearly changed in the direction of the acknowledgment and accommodation of difference. Yet it’s notable that this change is not a matter of public policy, but of social norms. Against that background, Marzano-Lesnevich’s hope for acknowledgment of their nonbinariness might not seem so unusual, but neither is it obvious that there is that much we can do about it as a society.

As a liberal society, we must support the idea that everyone should be able to be who they want to be. But how much can public policy address the needs of people for whom recognition of their difference is so central? It’s hard enough to adopt policies such as universal health insurance that address large numbers of people; the exceptions obviously complicate matters. Marzano-Lesnevich did mention that many trans youth had “lost access to gender-affirming health care” during the pandemic, the one point in the piece that seems remediable by laws and policies.

But aside from health care concerns, the author is mainly describing the sense of disorientation occasioned by pandemic isolation and the way that confused their quest to “be nonbinary.” Without other people to affirm the choice, the question lost meaning; they simply became part of the ordinary non-crowd.

Yet, much as we all want affirmation, I can see no way to require that people acknowledge one’s difference in ordinary social intercourse. To someone not engaged in or connected to a desire to be nonbinary, the quest may begin to seem like a search for extreme individuality that must somehow be recognized by others.

Such quests are of course deeply rooted in American libertarian thinking, which enjoins above all: Be yourself! Which inevitably means: Be different (somehow)! In the end, the piece recalled for me John Donne’s famous observation that “no man is an island.” Stripped of the obsolete gendered language, Donne was insisting that we were all, at bottom, the same; “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.”

All this raises the question: Can we have both the existential pursuit of acknowledged difference and the sense that “we’re all in this together”? Those two things seem to be, at the very least, in tension with each other. If we are not to dissolve into isolated islands of selves, we need to find a balance where those two aims–difference and community—go hand-in-hand.

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