That not all words are good words may appear obvious. We know that people lie. People churn out hate-filled, hate-inciting words on the internet on a daily basis. We need to fact-check our politicians because their words can’t be trusted. There are Quakers campaigning on truth and integrity in public life because of how lies are undermining democratic processes. It’s obvious that not all words are good words.
But is it obvious within the Quaker community? When Quakers speak, we seem to think all words are good words. Because anyone can speak during our worship, we seem to think anything said during worship must be Spirit-inspired ministry. Advices and queries 17 asks us to listen to the truth in the words of others, even when they are strange and disturbing, but this has given rise to a taboo against questioning the origins of our words. When we encounter words that feel wrong, it’s easier to assume these words are not for us, rather than challenge the motivations of the speaker. Quakers also seem to believe a plethora of words is required if there is to be unity within the Society. All sides need to be heard, and room must be made for dialogue and debate. Discussion of different views is seen as healthy and inclusive. Not only are all words good words, but the more words the better.
This assumption that Quaker speech is good speech has arisen in a community that has long presumed to occupy the moral high ground. For centuries, Quakers saw themselves as set apart from the world, as a spiritual elite. Quakers built a ‘hedge’ of peculiar speech and dress around themselves, evicting anyone who brought Quakers into disrepute. Even after this hedge came down, Quakers were burdened with a reputational goodness, seen as people naturally at the forefront of philanthropy and social change. Liberal Quakers have also shed the theological language of evil. Quakers prefer to focus on the good in everyone and find it easier to talk of original blessing than original sin. This history and this theology combine to make it very easy to see all Quaker words as good words. To be a Quaker is to be a good person in the company of good people. If something is ‘Quakerly’ then it is ‘good.’ This makes it very difficult to recognise, name and understand those occasions when Quakers speak harmful words, words that come from somewhere other than the Holy Spirit. We find ourselves unable to explain how Quakers’ words can be less than good.
A group of Quakers I see speaking harmful words in Britain today are those pursuing an anti-trans agenda, questioning the legitimacy of trans identities in the name of protecting cis women and children. They appear to operate on the belief that, in Quaker spaces, all words are good words. They insist that debate and dialogue should be ongoing, that room be continually made for their anti-trans views (as in this recent article in the Friend). Dialogue, debate and a pursuit of balance between views is seen as intrinsically good. Resistance to this dialogue is met with accusations of voices being silenced, beliefs being policed, and ministry being supressed.
But dialogue is not always good. Author Sara Ahmed, a cis woman who champions trans-inclusive feminism, explains this succinctly: ‘When you have “dialogue or debate” with those who wish to eliminate you from the conversation (because they do not recognize what is necessary for your survival, or because they don’t even think your existence is possible), then “dialogue and debate” becomes a technique of elimination.’[1] How can dialogue and debate be lifegiving, leading us into greater degrees of love and truth, when one side questions the lived reality of another? When one Friend says to another ‘You are not who you claim to be,’ where can dialogue possibly lead? Certainly not to a deeper level of understanding. Think of those who demand that ‘both sides’ be heard in relation to whether the climate crisis is real or whether vaccinations are effective. Such debate doesn’t give ‘both sides’ a better grasp of reality, it merely allows climate change denial and vaccine misinformation to continue to take up space and proliferate. This kind of debate is ultimately a waste of time. For trans people, the demand that they constantly be ready to debate their lived reality is a form of energy-sapping oppression.
Similarly, refusing to engage in this debate cannot be equated with the silencing of another’s speech. If I don’t want to listen to you, that doesn’t stop you from speaking. In fact, speech about being silenced can itself become a rhetorical tool, a way of talking more and taking up more space. As Sara Ahmed has observed, ‘whenever people keep being given a platform to say they have no platform, or whenever people speak endlessly about being silenced, you not only have a performative contradiction; you are witnessing a mechanism of power.’[2] I witnessed such a performative contradiction at a national Quaker conference where an anti-trans Quaker was given a platform to speak on their position at length, the only Quaker to be granted this opportunity during the whole event. They spent half their allotted time talking about how they had been silenced.
Quakers believe in the principle of the ‘free ministry,’ that the Spirit can speak through anyone, including people traditionally excluded from Christian ministry such as women and openly LGBTQ+ people. The free ministry does not mean all words become ministry because they’re spoken in worship. The free ministry comes with the responsibility of discerning which words are inspired by the Holy Spirit, because not all of them are. We must lay down the burden of reputational goodness and remember Quakers are no different to anyone else. As much as we may think Quakers are especially good, Quakers are no better or worse than the rest of the UK population. Ableism, racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia are all present within the Quaker community. We all speak words inspired by powers other than the Holy Spirit, often unintentionally. We are all sinners with a proclivity to fail in our speech. Our words may have their origins in spirits of fear, anger and self-righteousness, rather than the Spirit of love and truth, and we have a responsibility to tell the difference.
Although I believe Quakers with anti-trans views are wrong, I don’t believe they are evil, or at least no more evil than everyone else. We’re all sinners together. There are no innocents. I also don’t doubt these Friends are sincere in their views. From my encounters with such Friends, their views are deeply and passionately held, and their intentions are good in that they speak about wanting people to be safe. But, because we are all sinners, our sincerity and intentions cannot be a measure of truth. Deeply and passionately held beliefs can still be wrong and harmful. Good intentions can be used to justify violence and abuse. Quaker theologian Rachel Muers has written that when we rely purely on our individual leadings, on being true to our conscience, we ‘dodge the question of whether the conscience is itself “good” or “evil” – and the question of the correspondence of individual discernments of truth with the reality of God and the world.’[3] Our individual sincerity is not a substitute for our collective discernment between good and evil.
In 2021, Quakers in Britain collectively discerned we were to ‘provide places of worship and community that are welcoming and supportive to trans and non-binary people who want to be among us. Belonging is more than fitting in. With glad hearts we acknowledge and affirm the trans and gender diverse Friends in our Quaker communities, and express appreciation for the contribution and gifts that they bring to our meetings, which are communities made up of people with a diverse range of gender expressions.’[4] We discerned the leadings of the Holy Spirit, and this Spirit of love and truth led us to welcome, support, acknowledge and affirm trans people.
Welcome, support, acknowledgment and affirmation cannot coexist with continuing ‘debate and dialogue.’ Many cis Quakers have much to discover about the lived reality of trans people, and so there should always be space for discussion fuelled by the genuine desire to learn. But there comes a point where ‘debate and dialogue’ must end, where speech that does not measure up to our collectively discerned standards of love and truth needs to be halted. Either Quakers welcome and support trans people, which includes at a minimum believing they are who they say they are, or Quakers don’t. Or Quakers are using the word ‘welcome’ in such a weak manner as to render it meaningless. To truly welcome trans people means allowing trans people to set the terms for that welcome. We cannot welcome trans people and at the same time keep space open for anti-trans rhetoric. Friends who continue to tolerate this ‘debate’ set themselves against the wellbeing of trans people and against the leadings of the Holy Spirit as discerned by the Yearly Meeting. Compromise cannot be made with the spirit of fear that drives the anti-trans moral panic.
One of the great tragedies of Quaker transphobia is that some of its perpetrators are LGB people. It is tragic because, as Sara Ahmed writes, transphobia has displaced homophobia ‘whilst taking its exact form.’[5] When I first came out, Christians I knew thought they could still love me whilst refusing to embrace my queerness. I didn’t experience that as love. When anti-trans Quakers claim they can welcome a trans man as a child of God whilst rejecting his claim to be a man, they are replicating the abusive homophobic trope of ‘love the sinner, hate the sin.’ Anti-trans Quakers cannot claim to love and welcome trans people whilst continuing to question the legitimacy of their identities.
I grew up in the shadow of ‘Section 28,’ when it was enshrined in law that homosexual love was a ‘pretended family relationship.’ During my childhood it was publicly and politically acceptable to debate the morality of gay existence. People have sincerely believed being gay is just a phase, that gay people like me are dirty, unnatural, untrustworthy and lecherous, that gay people are a danger to children. There are still many people who believe these things. I came to Quakers because they were the only faith group I knew of who would accept me as a gay man. I have always felt at home in Quaker spaces as a gay person, confident that homophobia will be challenged. But if Quakers began to insist that space should be made for Friends to express homophobic views, and if the letters page of the Friend was regularly taken up with debate about whether it was safe for me to work with children, then the Yearly Meeting would no longer be a welcoming place for me. There is no difference between this and the current demands of anti-trans Quakers.
Being a Quaker is not about making space for all speech, or about blessing all speech as good. Being a Quaker is about silencing those things which obscure the voice of the Holy Spirit from whom all good words come.
It may appear hypocritical for me to call for an end to debate, whilst appearing to contribute to a debate. But I haven’t written this post to convince anti-trans Quakers they’re wrong. This post is to let trans and trans-affirming Friends know I stand with them, and to make it clear that requesting space for ongoing anti-trans rhetoric within the Yearly Meeting undermines the authority of our collective discernment, a core Quaker theological principle. As I’m not engaging in debate, I won’t respond to any pushback to this post. People who seek to disagree and debate with me will be blocked. This is for my own well-being and that of my trans and trans-affirming readers. There are plenty of other places online where Quaker anti-trans speech has found a home, and I refuse to let this blog be one of them.
[1] Sara Ahmed, ‘An Affinity of Hammers’, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 3, no. 1–2 (1 May 2016): 31.
[2] Ahmed, 27.
[3] Rachel Muers, ‘“It Is Worse to Be Evil than to Do Evil”: Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Challenge to the Quaker Conscience’, in Good and Evil: Quaker Perspectives, ed. Jackie Leach Scully and Pink Dandelion (Aldershot, England ; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 177.
[4] Minute 31: Acknowledging and Welcoming Gender Diverse People ‘Minutes of the Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) In Britain At The Yearly Meeting Gathering Held Online, 19 July – 8 August 2021’, August 2021, https://www.quaker.org.uk/ym/all-meetings/yearly-meeting-gathering-2021.
[5] Sara Ahmed, The Feminist Killjoy Handbook (Penguin Books, 2024), 104.
Featured image photo by Katie Rainbow 🏳️🌈 on Unsplash
Jolly Quaker 