Yes, We Have to Deal with the World as It Really Is - All of Us, All of It

Julian Sanchez makes good sense here on recent bills in Florida designed to regulate and censor LGBTQ content in schools:

Yes, indeed. Kids will learn about LGBTQ issues sooner or later. It’s pointless to try and keep them from finding out about the existence of homosexuality, of gay love, of gay marriage, of trans people and gender nonconformity. They’re gonna find out. They have smartphones, usually much younger than they should. They’re curious and the world is always a click away. It’s foolish to try and prevent them from learning about this stuff. And, in fact, the more that you try to restrict what they learn, the more likely they are to explore this world in a way that openly defies your efforts. LGBTQ people, politics, art, and culture exist. You’re entitled to object to LGBTQ rights, in a free society, but you’re not entitled to (or able to) create a bubble in which others are kept hidden from knowledge of the existence of LGBTQ people. People love that I’m forever tweaking liberals about their attachment to various forms of unreality, to thinking that they can wish away facts of life that they’re uncomfortable with. But it’s the same deal here.

Look, I will acknowledge that some of the reporting on the “Don’t Say Gay” bill has distorted and exaggerated what the bill calls for, and I also think there’s a lot of motivated dismissal about the nature of some of the content that’s being debated. For example, some people have gone to the ramparts to defend access to the book This Book is Gay, which explicitly advertises itself as a guide to sex, despite the fact that the author herself says it’s not for children. (Pictures of the book that are routinely circulated are typically dismissed as conservative fabrications, but you just have to look at the book to know that isn't true.) Probably that particular example is a matter of some groups being lazy when putting together reading lists, but of course there are always going to be debates and edge cases.

Would I ban that book? Of course not. Personally, I’m completely libertarian about this stuff; I’d stock every preschool classroom with The Anarchist’s Cookbook if I could. But there's a difference between holding that position and believing it's credible to pretend that there's literally nothing to debate there. It’s pointless to pretend that books in a public school classroom are going to remain untouched by these disagreements. The views of parents will inevitably be expressed through the democratic apparatus that presides over those schools. Of course people are going to debate this stuff. Vociferously.

Still, the objections are ultimately misguided for the reasons Sanchez says. Plenty of kids in extremely repressive conservative environments dreamed of a future as an openly gay person in a liberal city, before the internet. I've always had qualms about the “born this way” framing - if being gay was a choice, would society have any legitimate right to refuse people from making it? - but the simple reality is that gay people and trans people etc have always transcended restrictive social and religious environments in their interior life, even if it was too dangerous for them to express it. If a kid is gay, they’re gonna figure that out. You don't have to speed along the process, but trying to artificially impede their progress won't work. That's an “is” statement, not an “ought” statement.

I think this was a failure to apply the very reasoning Sanchez demonstrates in the first tweet, which in fairness came two years later.

It should go without saying: child abuse is just as real as LGBTQ issues. The existence of child abuse is just as unavoidable, on a long enough time scale. People will find out about child abuse, one way or another. And its existence will hurt them, as it hurts me and you and everyone who has to think about it. Sadder still, some people have experienced actual physical child abuse themselves. Because that’s the fucked up world we live in. But just as with the existence of LGBTQ people, the truth of child abuse will out. The fact that gay people aren’t bad the way that child abuse is bad doesn’t change the essential point that the world exposes us to its realities whether we’re ready for it or not.

And the basic logic here seems to apply to college even more firmly than to K-12 schools. Trigger warnings are most often found in college and debates about college; I would argue that it’s much better and healthier to engage with that truth through history and literature than in other ways, and college is the perfect time to do it. Like it or not, what follows college is adulthood, and there’s no going back. There are very unpleasant things in our history and current reality. Trigger warnings don’t change that. And they contribute to an intellectual atmosphere where, for example, someone merely reading Mein Kampf on a college campus - where the study of things like history and politics is kind of the whole point - provokes a formal investigation. Current campus offense codes are the embodiment of the belief that we can be shielded from the world with censorship and bureaucracy.

But the campus walls stretch only so far. A fundamental problem I have with the contemporary left-of-center is its addiction to safetyism, the notion that we can and must protect people not only from physical harm as we have traditionally done in society but also from psychic and emotional harm, harms that are defined incredibly broadly. I find this contrary to interpersonal freedom, which despite what you may have heard is core to the left project, and also a doomed and self-defeating effort. Like I said recently: you are you, we are here, this is now. Which includes the good and bad of human existence. And there’s no trigger warnings for life.

The typical defense of trigger warnings is to insist that they’re just warnings, and what could be wrong with that? But in fact it’s never just warnings. Consider this controversy at Cornell - what was demanded was not merely trigger warnings but a policy such that “students who choose to opt out of exposure to triggering content will not be penalized, contingent on their responsibility to make up any missed content.” This is very similar to the policy passed by the student senate at the University of California Santa Barbara, which in addition to calling for trigger warnings asked that students be absolved of any negative repercussions for their grades if they were absent or left class early because of fear of being triggered. It should go without saying that, as a practical matter, this would effectively give students a justification to skip out on any material they wanted to, given that the definition of what’s triggering is inherently subjective and known only to the individual. And even if everyone agrees that a given part of the curriculum is in some sense provocative or upsetting, that doesn’t suggest that students should be able to avoid the content, as part of becoming educated simply is being exposed to things that are provocative or upsetting. That’s core to the educational process, learning stuff that you’d rather not know, engaging with what disturbs you. That’s especially true for higher education, which is voluntary and mostly filled with young adults.

It’s easy to say that warnings are just warnings. But once you’ve marked a particular text as triggering, you’ve accepted the notion that it’s in some way inappropriate or untoward, which is often the very point that faculty object to when they push back against trigger warnings. There are no objective criteria for what counts as potentially triggering; it’s an inherently ideology-laden designation. (You can imagine how well it would go if Dartmouth labeled Giovanni’s Room potentially triggering because of its gay themes, but as those parents in Florida show, some people are very much triggered by gay themes.) Purely advisory trigger warnings also create an excuse structure whereby the application of future restrictions becomes more likely. Even if there’s no formal right to be excused from work labeled triggering, for example, you can imagine a litigious student demanding to be free from having to make up work after skipping triggering content. Arguments pressuring the deans write themselves: you say you won’t excuse this student from the content they skipped, professor, but you yourself marked that content as potentially harmful! And all of this is to say nothing of the fact that “triggering” was originally a concept associated with PTSD, a diagnosable medical condition, and that PTSD triggers in actual medical practice tend not to be distressing stories but instead loud noises, a familiar smell, a particular way that light plays off the environment. Real PTSD triggers are much less mechanistic than the kind discussed in this debate.

And the broader point remains. Listen to the justification of a student involved in the Cornell push.

For a Korean American literature class, the woman was reading “The Surrendered,” a novel by Chang-rae Lee about a Korean girl orphaned by the Korean War that includes a graphic rape scene. Ms. Ting’s friend had recently testified at a campus hearing against a student who she said sexually assaulted her, the woman said in an interview. Reading the passage so soon afterward left her feeling unmoored.

Ms. Ting, a member of Cornell’s undergraduate student assembly, believed her friend deserved a heads-up about the upsetting material. That day, she drafted a resolution urging instructors to provide warnings on the syllabus about “traumatic content” that might be discussed in class, including sexual assault, self-harm and transphobic violence.

I’m a lot more sympathetic to this student than you might think. But here’s the question I have for you: was Ting’s friend really someone who was hurt by reading a novel? Or was she someone who was hurt by the fact that sexual assault exists, that she had to experience it, and that others have had to experience it? What ultimately is the source of her pain? In what way would a “heads up” really protect her from having to confront this kind of trauma? And isn’t there something to be said for using education as a site to build the strength and resilience to handle these things in the form of literature, which has the advantage of not being real?

Under culture war, all argument forms are subservient to argumentative content and all argumentative content subservient to argumentative position - that is, the reasoning behind any argument is taken to apply only insofar as it buttresses the right side and weakens the wrong. But I find the progressive argument that children in public K-12 schools should not be artificially “protected” from facts about the existence of LGBTQ people, love, and lifestyles because they will inevitably be exposed to that reality to also be a powerful rejoinder to progressive ideas about safetyism and trauma. Kids grow up. They will be exposed to the world. And whether 9 or 19 or 99 years old, as Linda Pastan eloquently expressed, none of us can be saved. Sooner or later the world comes for us all.