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When five men are accused, “all men” bear the guilt — but when a woman errs, she’s just an individual. This piece asks why identity logic only turns rigid on demand.

The way in which unreality has made its way into our public discourse continues to amuse and disturb me.

It amuses and disturbs me in the same way that a man might be amused by a rat wearing a bishop’s mitre: chiefly because it is absurd, but also disturbing since one suspects there might be a serious infestation nearby.

I was reading about the Sydney Swans this morning (is there anything else to read about this morning?) when I came across this in The Sydney Morning Herald:

Sydney fan Ellie Wilkes, 26, said the recent sexual assault allegation was among a number of factors that made it difficult to be a female or non-binary AFL fan at times.

After I finished cleaning up the coffee I had inadvertently spat across the table, I read that sentence again, just to make sure I wasn’t imagining things.

Sure enough, there it was.

A woman (I presume) complaining that sexual assault allegations against Swans footballers made it difficult to be a non-binary AFL fan.

I would have thought chromosomes made it difficult to be a non-binary AFL fan.

But that’s just me and my quaint obsession with ancient relics like biology.

The Sydney fan was then quoted as slamming the AFL’s “insanely privileged men” before suggesting people should focus on the Swans AFLW team, who “need our support now more than ever”.

Here’s my problem.

If you’re going to posit that non-binary is a thing, does that not make the “men” you detest and the Ws in AFLW that you want to support rather redundant?

But more than that…

Why is man apparently a spectrum when it comes to gender, but a homogeneous blob when it comes to guilt?

Why can an individual say, “I am not reducible to the sex I was born into,” while society is expected to say, with equal confidence, “All those other people over there absolutely are”?

The logic seems rather selective.

A Curious Case of Selective Chromosomes

The fan told The Sydney Morning Herald:

“You like to think of your club as having a better culture than the rest, but as women and minorities within the AFL community know too well, it’s never too long before you’re let down once again, by the actions of these insanely privileged men that you put so much of your time and passion into.”

Notice what has happened.

The alleged actions of five men have become the moral property of men in general.

And then, by some strange alchemy, the actions of particular women do not appear to contaminate women in general.

The men’s team becomes the repository of male guilt.

The women’s team becomes the repository of female virtue.

It is a wonderfully primitive system dressed up in remarkably sophisticated vocabulary.

A few men allegedly behave appallingly, and suddenly, “men” become a suspect category.

Yet if a woman behaves appallingly, we are reminded — quite correctly — that she is an individual and that women cannot be judged by the actions of one person.

Quite right.

So let us apply the principle consistently.

Individuals exist on a spectrum.

Some are dirtbags. Some are decent. Some are heroic.

Some are cowardly. Some are selfish. Some are generous.

Most of us, inconveniently, are a mixture of all of these things depending upon the day, the temptation and how much sleep we had last night.

That’s rather the point of being human.

Judge the Person, Not the Label

The old-fashioned idea was that you judged people by what they actually did.

The newer idea appears to be that identity is infinitely complicated — right up until we require a villain.

At which point the complexity vanishes, the categories become rigid, and millions of individuals can suddenly be poured into one convenient moral bucket.

Perhaps there is a lesson here.

If you genuinely believe that people cannot be reduced to categories, then don’t reduce people to categories.

If gender is a spectrum, perhaps morality is one too?

And if an individual can be understood as something more complicated than a label, perhaps we should extend that courtesy even to people whose labels we dislike.

It would be a radical proposition, I realise.

Almost dangerously old-fashioned.

Judge people by their actions.

Imagine that.

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Republished with thanks to The James Macpherson Report. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.