Last December, the Quebec government announced the composition of its committee of wise men on gender identity, which had never been requested by either the groups or Quebec experts linked to gender identity. Of the three people chosen, none are trans or non-binary.
As soon as the announcement was made, voices were raised in LGBTQ+ communities to denounce the CAQ initiative. Paying lip service, the Minister of Families, Suzanne Roy, ended up admitting that a trans or non-binary person could have had a “representative” role on the committee, but that the government had “decided to do otherwise” .
I think there is an opportunity in this fiasco to look more closely at this notion of “representation”, which has taken more and more space in our understanding of equity and social inclusion in the last decade. .
Since December, many have already drawn a parallel with the women’s issue. Would we dare today to create a committee of wise men on the status of women – or even on abortion, more precisely – without there being any women around the table? Of course not. But why ?
Not only because women must be “represented” when discussing what concerns them. But also because women have life experience which, when combined with a quest for knowledge and understanding of this experience, results in an expertise in the female condition that is difficult to match. Because medicine was developed by and for men, a body of knowledge about their own bodies that women had has long been devalued by Western science. And even today, the underrepresentation of women in sciences at university plays a role in the priorities that are established in medical research. Many aspects of reproductive health are understudied because the people who manage funds in these areas do not reflect the population.
It is not a question here, therefore, of simple “representation”. But from a perspective integrating lived experience, as well as an expertise developed by an almost obsessive thirst for knowledge, which it is rare to develop at such a level unless this knowledge is linked to our life story.
There is also an attention to detail, a perfectionism, even a lack of “right to make mistakes” which sets in when we know that almost no person who looks like us has access to the place of power to which we access. When we know that a blunder could have an impact on an entire community that is already marginalized and socially weakened, but which is dear to us and with which we share part of our daily lives and our most intimate relationships, we develop a sense of ethics. particularly in our relationship to work.
If the committee of wise men on gender identity adopts recommendations that ultimately harm young trans and non-binary people in Quebec, will its members, in the way their social circles are established, have to look these young people in the eyes, in their personal lives, once their public mandate is over? Or will they be able to escape the consequences of their actions by turning off their television and closing their newspapers?
These are just a few aspects of this notion of “representation” rarely explained in our social debates on “diversity” in places of power. The superficiality with which the issue is understood leads to blunders whose consequences are not experienced by the people who commit them.
When the committee was announced, the Minister of the Status of Women, Martine Biron, saw in the composition a group that would be “capable of rising a little”. In this perspective, there is a popular belief which it is also appropriate to focus on.
If the minorities of a society (or people who have been marginalized in places of power, such as women) are often perceived as “representatives” of the groups to which they belong, individuals from majority groups, would be “neutral”, above the fray, objective, better capable of intellectual independence.
However, it is not because an individual has been less forced by his society to develop explicit reflection on the groups to which he belongs that he belongs less to these groups. The majority is a group. Cisgender people, in this case, too.
We see this clearly in the CAQ discourse on the concerns of “the population” relating to gender issues. The subtext of all the party’s statements is that “the public”, “concerned parents” and “the ordinary world” do not include trans and non-binary people.
Regardless of what the three people who were appointed to the committee think, it must be understood that the Coalition Avenir Québec placed them there in the hope of making them “representatives” of this “population” understood as excluding minorities from gender. There is therefore no “representation” for these minorities and no “neutrality” for the “wise” ones. But it is indeed a political choice to only represent the majority perspective in a committee responsible for looking into gender minorities.
Because life experience and lived experience do not only influence the expertise developed by people from minority groups: all humans are made up of their life experience and their more or less developed capacity to experience empathy and curiosity for people who are not like them.
There is not, on the majority side, the universal and the “capacity to elevate oneself a little”, and, on the other, “particularism”. Society is formed by our perspectives, our blind spots, our networks and our interests, for everyone, everywhere, at all times.