‘I Have A Marginalised Friend’
Our social circle isn’t a reflection of our character
I am, for all intents and purposes, an extrovert. I won’t say I make friends quickly, but I connect with people easily, and my social circle is pretty broad. At the core are my nearest and dearest, a select few with whom I maintain regular contact. From my very close friends to the more casual ones, all the way out to acquaintances, are people of many embodiments and identities.
As someone who is queer, white and identifies as a woman, a lot of my friends share at least one of these identities as well. As someone from a middle-class background, again, a significant portion of my social circle is also middle-class. But there is, of course, variation. I have friends who are Black or call themselves brown. I have had friends who identify as Christian and friends who are practising Muslims. I have had friends who are first and second generation immigrants. I have had friends for whom English is not their first language. I have had friends with visual impairments and friends who use wheelchairs.
At different times in my life, I’ve been closer with some of these people than I am now, or I’ve become closer to them now than I was when we first met, such is the nature of relationships.
As I navigate the world and meet people, I learn how my particular social circle might give me some insights. For example, I don’t struggle with using ‘they’ as a pronoun. It seems obvious to me, and not at all a challenge to call someone by a different name and set of pronouns than they used when we first met. I realise that this is in no small part because of my years as a Drag King in a close-knit troupe of gender-bending, multi-oriented individuals. I am aware, as I meet new people, that while I can think of over half a dozen people in my social circle who just happen to be transgender or genderqueer, a lot of people have never met anyone who is either.
Despite not being transgender, it could be very tempting for me to state an opinion about trans experience as if it has extra weight by virtue of my social circle. You know the line I’m talking about, the line that almost always proceeds a statement of ignorance or assertion of an opinion as if it is a fact:
“I have a lot of [insert marginalised group here] friends, and [insert misinformed opinion or blanket statement]”
I get why it’s tempting to invoke who we know as a way to give weight to what we think about a particular topic. I get why who I ‘know’ feels like it should give what I’m going to say some credibility. The assumption is I have some special insight into an experience I’ve never had by virtue of my social circle.
Such a statement actually does the opposite of giving weight to what we have to say. Just because you ‘know’ someone doesn’t mean you understand their experience. Association isn’t insight; it’s just association. All I can confirm by stating that I have transgender friends is that I have transgender friends. Invoking them to strengthen my viewpoint is an abuse of that relationship.
Who we know is not proof that we can relate to someone who has a different embodiment or different experiences to us. Who we know is not a reflection of our character. Who we know does not prove anything about our insights into what it is to be human.
At this point, you might be thinking that actually, we can gather something from who a person knows. For example, if someone associates with bigots, that is probably a good indication that they too are a bigot. This is why it’s so tempting, if we see our social circle as diverse, to claim that this is proof that we are not bigots. It’s a great way to avoid looking at implicit bias.
There are a great many reasons why a person associates with other people. It could be that those are the only people within proximity to them. It could be they are conducting a sociological study to understand a way of life very different to theirs. It could be out of preference, or it could simply be circumstances.
Context matters. Outside perceptions do not always capture the reality of the situation. I learned this from working with youth in care. When I told people what I did, the assumption a majority of people made was that these kids had done something to be taken into care, or that they were all ‘troubled’. In the minds of these individuals, they were ‘bad’ kids or ‘problem’ kids.
I, however, had come to see that they were as varied as any group of kids in any setting. They had many different backgrounds, and a great variety of circumstances had led them to be wards of the province. But I also saw how working with youth in care didn’t guarantee this understanding. Many of the group home staff and social workers I encountered had the same limited ideas as people I met who had never worked with youth in care. To provide just one example, I worked with one young man who happened to be gay. One of the staff at his group home told him he should just ‘be straight’ until he left care because it would be ‘easier’.
This brings me to the other reason why who we ‘know’ gives little weight to our opinions of other people’s experiences. No one is just one way.
I am a non-binary queer white woman. These identities play on my experience in different ways. There is overlap. My class, racialisation, education and where I was born change how I experience being a woman and being queer. I am not unique in my embodiment, as there are a lot of queer women out there. But my experience of both is unique. For this reason, I would not ever presume to represent all women nor all queer-identified people, nor all non-binary folks or all middle-class folks and so on.
If I use my identity to express an opinion, I can only do it from my experience:
“As a woman, I have rarely experienced street harassment, and never anything that made me fearful.”
I do not think my single experience of less street harassment means that street harassment is not a problem that women face. I also don’t think this is a form of sexism that is less problematic and damaging to society just because I don’t find it personally problematic and harmful. I am also aware that belonging to a group does not mean we can’t or don’t discriminate against that group.
If knowing our experience doesn’t make us an authority on anything beyond our experience, who we know certainly doesn’t make us an authority on the experience of anyone else.
Anytime you are tempted to invoke your social circle as a mark of some special insight you think you have, pause and reflect. Take time to write down the statement without your social circle mentioned and consider if it still carries the same weight.
If our opinions and views can’t stand up without a statement of who we know, then it’s best we go back and reflect on them further. Better yet, it’s worth talking to those friends of ours and asking them about their experience directly, and genuinely listening to what they have to say. We might be surprised to realise just how many assumptions we’ve made about their experience from our view of it on the sidelines.
And for those times when you encounter someone invoking their social circle, invite the individual to own their statement. Let them know you want to know about their experience, not the experience of someone you have not met for whom they think they can speak.
Visit www.KaitlynSCHatch.com to see more of my work in the world, including the podcast Everything is Workable, a collection of my artwork, and the books I’ve written.
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