How the respectability politics of fairness will lead us nowhere

“Fairness” is the latest iteration of the respectability politics that has shaped the LGBTQ+ equal rights agenda for the past 35 years. Its weaponization by the leadership class across the political spectrum — from US President Donald Trump to California Governor Gavin Newsom, to former US Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — threatens the lives of society’s most marginalized people and further proves that equality will not free us.

Because equality politics demands respectability politics.

Rather than tear down or smash or, even more kindly, transform the patriarchal institutions of marriage and the military, gays sought inclusion into them — the impulse of heteronormativity and the democratic ideal of equality too deeply conditioned into their mindset. The gay politics of respectability reasoned that formal inclusion in the nation’s institutions was tantamount to, or at least would induce, societal acceptance. (To wit, the gay defense of marriage proffers nonsensical arguments that marriage is necessary because the marriage contract prevents their kids from being bullied at school for having two mothers.) The resulting equality politics excised the movement’s liberatory and revolutionary demands and instead positioned the LGBTQ+ community in the subservient and submissive position of asking — politely, of course — for what the straights have. Recall the popular marriage campaign mantra of “same rights, not special rights” — we don’t want more, we don’t want different, we just want the same.

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Equality as a political endgame requires capitulation to the very supremacist and capitalist systems that function on oppression and extraction. The irony is that equality and all its iterations — including objectivity, neutrality, fairness — are impossible to fully realize in practice because they are defined and implemented into law and policy by the people in power. So, in Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College (2023), the Supreme Court overturned affirmative action because, as the Court’s conservative majority declared, the law is unbiased, impartial. Fair. As séance expert Justice Clarence Thomas, the great champion of “originalism” who Ouija-boards the Founding Fathers on the regular, wrote in his opinion: “The Constitution’s colorblind rule reflects one of the core principles upon which our Nation was founded: that ‘all men are created equal.’ And, he argues, “under the Fourteenth Amendment [and, in particular, the Equal Protection Clause], the law must disregard all racial distinctions.”

The hypocrisy, of course, is that “colorblindness” is a complete fiction—a fabrication that cloaks reality and blankets white people’s discomfort about the nation’s racist history and origins. College admissions have always considered race, most notably in legacy admissions that have privileged certain classes of white people for generations. To live in a white supremacist society is to be conditioned to misconstrue white privilege as equality, as just the “normal” and “traditional” ways that society has existed. And because the Constitution is “colorblind,” any systemic redress of racism is perceived as “reverse racism.” It is thus “unfair” for college admissions offices to consider how racism affects Black and brown children’s lives. Here, the etymology of “fairness,” or “fair,” is relevant to its contemporary usage: The word originally connoted “light of complexion or color” prior to meaning “equitable, impartial.” Conservatives evoke the word’s double meaning in their efforts to police womanhood and especially to regulate women’s sports: From tennis legends Venus and Serena Williams to runner Caster Semenya, from boxer Imane Khelif to Taiwanese boxer Lin Yu-Ting, significantly more women of color, especially women of color from the Global South, are accused of being men or transgender than white, Anglo and European women.

This same supremacist logic, manifest in the framework of equality and through the language of fairness, is at work in society’s treatment of queer and trans people.

Fairness is a potent form of respectability politics because it is used under the guise of impartiality — as if impartiality were possible — to disguise its discriminatory function in the language of “protection.”

“We’re going to protect fairness in women’s sports,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said upon signing the “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” in 2021. Several states, including Arkansas, Mississippi, and Idaho, have enacted laws that use the word “fairness” to discriminate against trans women and girls. Other states swapped in “protection” for “fairness” — in January, the US House of Representatives passed the “Protection of Women and Girls in Sports Act.” Democratic party leaders have adopted this same language. In his debut podcast episode this spring, Gavin Newsom wholeheartedly agreed with MAGA mouthpiece Charlie Kirk that trans girls and women should not be allowed to compete in sports because it is “an issue of fairness — it’s deeply unfair,” he said to Kirk. “I totally agree with you.”

Pete Buttigieg, presumed to be the other White Guy Democratic Presidential Contender for 2028 and Current Gay Figurehead of Respectability Politics, has also jumped on the fairness bandwagon. His response to a question about trans athletes in sports (and, lez be honest, the question always takes aim at trans women and girls) in an NPR interview last month was saturated with the logic and language of equality, from bothsidesism to fairness.

“I think the approach starts with compassion … and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them, like wondering, wait a minute; I got a daughter in a sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now? Right? And just taking everybody seriously. … I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women’s sports.”

About a week later in a Substack interview, Buttigieg double-downed on his position using the very same blatant transphobic tactic of “asking questions” that is peddled as a kind of respectability politics: “I think in order to bring people together on this, we also have to take everyone seriously, including parents who have questions,” he said. “People who have questions or wonder what this means ... they’re going to have questions about how to make sure that’s fair, and we should take those questions seriously and face those together.”

The slick, bad faith of this response, which rests on the respectability framework of equality, recalls that of Democratic Representative Sarah McBride’s remarks in a New York Times interview with Ezra Klein that that the Left “overplay[ed] its hand” when it came to fighting for trans rights in the past election cycle. In her insightful analysis of the interview, journalist Erin Reed explained how McBride “plays into damaging narratives about transgender people, telling Klein, for instance, that transgender medical standards of care ‘might have gotten too lenient.’ In doing so, she hands Fox News and other right-wing outlets the headlines they crave — ammunition to say, ‘See, even they admit they went to far.’”

This logic isn’t too far from the nauseating statement that there are “so few, maybe a dozen, trans women collegiate athletes.” The impact is so small, these folks reason, so it’s really no big deal if they compete. Statements like these, however, are rooted in the transphobic logic that being trans is wrong, and that therefore allowing trans women to compete in sports is wrong and unfair. Trans athletes will continue to face harassment and exclusion as long as we continue to argue from this perspective and willingly engage bigots on their field of morality — including “seriously” entertaining bad faith questions (“I got a daughter in a sports league. Is she going to be competing with boys right now? Right?”) as Buttigieg claims we must.

We need to push back on the language of fairness. Not only asking fairness for whom but also interrogating the baseline metric that is used in its deployment. In the context of sports, why is fairness predicated on the medical classification system of the gender binary, which has been well established as a Western-colonialist, racist and patriarchal invention? Why is fairness determined by an arbitrary hormone-level range, extrapolated through the historically racist and eugenicist testing of blood, established by long-dead white men? Why is puberty, and testosterone specifically, heralded as the absolute determinant of fairness? Testosterone is an anabolic steroid hormone that builds complex muscle mass, but the power produced by muscle mass is just one factor in athletic ability. Successful competitive athletes need to develop expert technique and skill, endurance, and mental acumen, among other things that most if not all require a lot of money. Money for coaching, for joining sports leagues, for entrance into competitions, for equipment, for training camps, and so forth.

You know, I’m just asking questions, here. But isn’t it strange that we don’t we talk about fairness in terms of wealth — clearly the greatest determinant of access to competitive sports (and, arguably in sports like tennis and golf, professional success)?

Of course, the goal has never been fairness. Rather, it has been to exclude trans people from living fulfilling and joyful lives and from participating and belonging in society. And, as a former competitive athlete myself, let me just add nothing is “fair” about competition. Should Italian tennis star Jasmine Paolini’s opponents be lopped off at the knees to play at her diminutive height of 5’4”? Should American Olympic swimming legend Michael Phelps have had his wingspan cut so to “level the playing field” in the pool? So dumb. So tiresome. Grow up.

Respectability will not save us. Fifteen years ago, the late lesbian-feminist Urvashi Vaid criticized the LGBTQ+ equal rights movement for seeking affirmation and inclusion: “The world to which we seek so desperately to belong is crumbling all around us,” she said in a 2011 keynote address at Vassar College. “We submit ourselves to the confining forms of propriety, adherence to tradition, and legibility that this form of capitalism demands. I look forward to a political praxis for the queer movement that does not limit itself to a politics of inclusion — which tends to leave the limitations of the status quo in place. I look forward to the second wave of a liberation movement whose dominant symbol is not an equal sign but the greater-than sign.”

We must heed Vaid’s call if we are to truly become a common movement for all of us, not just the middle- and upper-class white gays. We must fully reject respectability politics and those who espouse it — now is no time for capitulation or compromise.

One essential and relatively easy starting place is to stop debating bigots in their own discursive fields by refusing the language of fairness. Instead, we should adopt the language of freedom — of opportunity, self-determination, and dignity. Dignity, in fact, is an antidote to the respectability politics of equality. “Demands for dignity are demands for a fundamental recognition of one’s inherent humanity,” Black feminist and author Brittney C. Cooper wrote in Beyond Respectability. “Demands for respectability assume that unassailable social propriety will prove one’s dignity. Dignity, unlike respectability, is not socially contingent. It is intrinsic and, therefore, not up for debate.”

Indeed, the dignity of trans people is not up for debate. We don’t need to ask questions or take polls of the general public’s approval of trans folks’ freedom, self-determination, or care. We don’t need to minimize either the number of trans women in competitive sports or their success to make their participation acceptable to bigots and people who clearly have no idea what the spirit of competition actually means. We don’t need compassion for all sides. What we need is some fucking integrity.