Certainly, I agree that intersex babies should not receive surgery without their informed consent to force them to be male or female. Likewise, if a movement arises among polydactyl people to stop amputating a sixth digit and to treat polydactyly as a variant on normal rather than a deformity, I would support it.
At the same time, I also think that acting as if everyone has five fingers -- or as if everyone is male or female -- is a perfectly good working generalization. I do not share the view that all generalizations are bad. Generalizations are necessary to our understanding of the world. They become oppressive only when people stop treating generalizations as general rules with some exceptions and instead treat them as absolutes that everyone must be forced to conform to. Some people are polydactyl. Some people are intersex. Some people are transgender, which is not the same as intersex, even if people sometimes conflate the two.
It oppresses polydactyls to treat them as social outcasts or bar them from opportunities offered to everyone else or make fun of them for being different. It may arguably oppress polydactyls to amputate the sixth digit or call the condition a deformity. But it does not oppress polydactyls to generally not think about them and to simply assume that everyone has five fingers. I don't think this is verry controversial.
I am left-handed myself and sometimes resent the degree to which things are built with the assumption that everyone is right-handed. I wish more desks had an extension to write with the left hand, left-handed scissors were of better quality, and so forth. But there are some activities (playing a string instrument, driving a car with a manual transmission) where left-handed people just have to suck it up and adapt. Likewise, no doubt there are things that can be done to make society more accommodating to people with six fingers.
But now suppose that polydactyls went beyond calling on everyone not to treat polydactyly as a deformity or amputate the sixth finger, or even make, say, hand grips easier for people with six fingers. Suppose polydactyls demanded that other people not refer to the hand as having five fingers because it "says that we don't exist," "erases our existence," and is even "genocide." Suppose polydactyls cried oppression when Sesame Street had characters sing, "Oh, I've got five fingers on my left hand. Five fingers on my right." Suppose they insisted that anatomy classes stop teaching about hands with five fingers and insisted that they teach five or six. Suppose they denounced terms like index finger, middle finger, ring finger, and pinkie as oppressive because they exclude people with six fingers. Hell, suppose the more radical ones even demanded the end of Base Ten as oppressive to people with twelve fingers.
Don't you think that this would engender a certain degree of resentment among the vast majority of the population who have five fingers? In short, asking not to be mocked and treated as social outcasts is a thing every liberal should get behind. Asking to be treated as equals is a just demand. Asking for some degree of accommodation from society is reasonable. But there are limits to how far society can reasonably be asked to go to accommodate a miniscule portion of the population. At the very least, the degree of accommodation is a proper topic of democratic debate. And for a minuscule portion of the population to demand that the broad society rearrange itself to accommodate them, and treating every demand as a matter of basic human rights that permits no compromise is a sure-fire way to incur the resentment of people who otherwise would be willing to live and let live.
No comments:
Post a Comment