The invisible work of saying nothing

“I was asking for understanding.”

“You could have chosen not to say anything.”

Exchange between nurse Sandie Peggie and Jane Russell KC

“… the myth of care as an inexhaustible natural resource that we can reap from feminine nature is unshakeable. Because we need it to be.”

Katrine Marçal, Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?

When feminists speak of the ‘invisibility’ of women’s work, what they usually mean is not labour that is literally unseen, but acts which are not classified as ‘work’. They’re things women are assumed to do naturally, out of love, out of instinct, just because they want to, hence there’s no need to reward them for it, and certainly no need to assign any economic value to them. Sure, there would be an enormous cost if all the mothers of the world downed tools, but as long as that unpaid labour keeps coming, it doesn’t have to be counted. As Katrine Marçal puts it, the housework and care work a woman provides can be written off as “just a logical extension of her fair, loving nature”.

There are some things, though, which cannot strictly be described as activities. They’re non-acts. Women’s work consists of the things we do, but also the things we don’t. It’s the things we don’t say, the complaints we never make, the fears we never express, the spaces we don’t take. If it is hard to quantify housework and care work, counting this ‘not doing’ is harder yet.

How do you keep track of things that never happened, things that, as far as anyone else is concerned, were never even possibilities? How do you assign a cost to something which, to the outside world, looks utterly effortless, a simple expression of your passive, contented nature?

In Intercourse, Andrea Dworkin describes women’s response to the public censure that follows should we “speak without apology about the world in which we live”. Women, she writes, “lower our voices”:

“Women whisper. Women apologise. Women shut up. Women trivialize what we know. Women shrink. Women pull back.”

All of this comes at a cost to women’s self-respect and emotional well-being, but it’s a cost that goes unnoticed by the beneficiaries of our silence. As with the housework, this labour is only really appreciated the moment it is no longer provided – the day the silent, unapologetic woman speaks and is no longer sorry.

Because it has already been decreed that her silence costs her nothing, she will be regarded as having no excuse for her rebellion. She cannot be doing it due to the unbearable cost of constant self-suppression, since none of this ever bothered her before (and plenty of other women don’t mind shutting up). She must therefore be doing it out of cruelty and spite.

I thought of this when reading the exchanges taking place at the employment tribunal of nurse Sandie Peggie. Peggie was suspended from her job at Victoria Hospital, Kirkcaldy, after complaining about having to share a female-only changing room with a man. I’m using the term “man” because that is Peggie’s perception (and mine, too), though the man in question claims to be a woman, and had wanted to be referred to as such by everyone, Peggie included. Peggie has had to fight for her right to refer to Dr Beth Upton as a man in her tribunal, arguing, quite rightly, that this is the very reason why she did not want him in the women’s changing rooms. This has not stopped Upton and NHS Fife positioning this request as harassment and bullying. As far as they are concerned, Peggie has two choices: call Upton a man and look like the kind of bigot who doesn’t respect other people’s identities, or call Upton a woman and look like the kind of bigot who thinks only certain women are allowed in female-only spaces. Essentially, anything other than Peggie shutting up, trivialising what she knows, shrinking, pulling back, is bigotry.

The barrister acting on behalf of NHS Fife, Jane Russell KC, has been unremitting in her attempt to position Peggie as acting out of malice as opposed to basic self-respect. This exchange in particular caught my attention, referring to Peggie’s choice to challenge Upton after encountering him in the changing rooms for a third time. Peggie explains that she is trying to make Upton understand why she wants a space of her own; Russell counters that Peggie “could have chosen not to say anything”. After all, she’d said nothing up to that point. She could have continued her nothingness work, which is apparently no work at all.

There is no credit given for all the times Peggie didn’t speak, all the times she stepped aside, allowing Upton’s self-perception to define reality. The male “power of naming”, writes Dworkin, “enables men to define experience, to articulate boundaries and values, to designate to each thing its realm and qualities, to determine what can and cannot be expressed, to control perception itself”. Peggie’s nothingness work is only ever acknowledged to use it to claim that she could have carried on doing it indefinitely – that it is, in fact, her role, and not Upton’s, to make space for and absorb others. It is not cruel for Peggie to be denied the right to describe the world on her own terms – even when the maintenance of her own boundaries depends on it. It is, on the other hand, bullying and harassment for Upton to even have to listen to Peggie use the language she needs (at no point has anyone told Upton he must use the same words as her).

From Upton, there is no “thank you for saying nothing the first two times”. No “the fact you didn’t speak up at first must have cost you something”. No “I didn’t realise I was making you feel this way”. No “how many others feel this way, too, and are saying nothing just to please me?”

It’s not Upton’s job to think any of these thoughts. Just “you shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve done it before. How hard can it be? (For you, obviously. Never me.)”

***

When I was a child, the adult men in my family – and, learning from them, the younger ones, too – would frequently disparage the appearance of famous women. They’d discuss who was fat, who was ugly. Many a woman earned the designation “double bagger” (“you’d need to put two bags on her head in case the first fell off”). Very occasionally I would protest about this, whereupon I’d be told “it’s just the truth” (or some Northern bullshit “ah speak as ah find” version of this). As if that justified it. As long as it’s the truth – if the woman you are calling fat is not in fact thin, if the woman you are calling old is not young – you’re allowed to point it out, again and again. Of course, when I developed my own fears of being similarly disparaged, this was nothing to do with their comments, merely proof that I – like all girls – was frivolous and vain.

I don’t think the fact that something is true necessarily means it should be said. What matters is the purpose it’s serving. There’s that poster in many a primary classroom: THINK before you speak. Is it True / Helpful / Inspiring / Necessary / Kind? This has always seemed to me too high a standard. Speaking out can sometimes be necessary without it being inspiring or kind. I even think that sometimes, a lie can be justified. Facts might not care about your feelings, but we are surely sophisticated enough to make judgements about which facts matter, and the consequences of saying something as opposed to letting it go.

Another exchange from the Peggie tribunal:

Russell: - do you accept that calling [Upton] a man, that not a woman is likely to cause immense distress

Peggie: - when I'm in the situation, feeling intimidated and embarrassed, I needed to explain that he was a man

Russell: - did not answer my question, is it offensive

Peggie: - it's the truth

Peggie is saying something which, from Upton’s perspective, may not be kind but is entirely necessary. Otherwise how can she explain the cause of her discomfort and distress? It is not his ‘transness’ but his maleness. It is justifiable for women to want spaces away from men. It is not justifiable for women to want single-sex spaces which exclude a certain type of woman for nebulous reasons, which is what Russell would like to force Peggie into saying. If Peggie’s definition is offensive to some people, one might also ask whether it is it offensive to others to define women, not as adult human females, but a bunch of random feminine stereotypes. Is it offensive when the trans writer Andrea Long Chu writes “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is”? Does anyone in that courtroom even care? (It would seem not.) When Peggie says “it’s the truth”, she is not aiming to cause hurt. Her access to a single-sex space in which to get changed at work depends on this truth being recognised.

Yet Russell treats it as though Peggie is behaving no differently to my male relatives plonked in front of the TV in the eighties, passing judgement on the width of a woman’s thighs or the state of her jawline. Why say it? Why say it, when you could just not? Why use the truth to be mean?

Russell: - the truth is it is profoundly offensive to call a TW a man, it undermines her dignity

Peggie: - my dignity was also undermined by DU being in the DR

Russell: - you've ignored by question about DU's dignity

Peggie: - my dignity as a female is important to me

Note that Russell pretends not to understand the point that Peggie is making with reference to her own dignity – that for hers to be respected depends on an acknowledgement of Upton’s sex. This is not ‘ignoring’ any displeasure caused to Upton. It’s saying that this is outweighed by the cost to Peggie of not stating the truth. Russell speaks as though Peggie’s “truth” is no different to the “truth” of mocking someone’s appearance, just for kicks. “My dignity as a female” isn’t a thing. It isn’t allowed to be. It would only get in the way.

***

In The Right to Sex, Amia Srinivasan is scathing about lesbians who do not wish to “share womanhood itself with the ‘wrong’ kinds of woman”. That sounds awful, doesn’t it? Until you realise she just means men. She’s having a go at lesbians who don’t want to sleep with males (she claims to find the “reduction of sexual orientation to genitalia – what’s more, genitalia from birth – puzzling”. One does not need to imagine where that sort of thinking leads). Srinivasan’s position seems to me politically unforgiveable, not to mention cruel, yet her choice to frame it as a refusal to “share” with the “‘wrong’ kinds of woman” turns the moral expectation on its head. Hey, aren’t those lesbians nasty? Couldn’t they just not object to sleeping with male people? Failing that, couldn’t they keep it to themselves and choose not to say anything? (In a world where corrective rape remains a thing, who needs a clear definition of lesbianism anyways?)

Elsewhere in her essay, Srinivasan complains that trans women “often face sexual exclusion from lesbian cis women who at the same time claim to take them seriously as women”. What hypocrites those lesbian cis women are! A similar point is made in Lorna Finlayson, Katharine Jenkins and Rosie Worsdale’s essay ‘I’m not transphobic, but …’, with reference to arguments for female-only spaces:

“When keeping women’s spaces for cis women only is held to be safest for cis women, or ‘females’, is the tacit assumption that trans women are not (‘really’) women, and hence not a population which feminism needs to represent? If so, it would certainly be good to have this claim out in the open, since feminist opponents of inclusivity sometimes claim either to regard trans women as women or to be ‘agnostic’ on that issue.”

Yeah, ‘feminist opponents of inclusivity’! Just say what you really mean!

What these arguments utterly fail to acknowledge (even though I doubt very much that their authors are unaware of it) is that these supposed ‘hypocrites’ may well not see trans women as ‘real women’. The fact is, they’re being kind. They’re doing precisely what everyone tells them to do. They’re making a sacrifice. They’re putting aside their own feelings and beliefs in instances where, as women, they can – and so often do – reason that their own dignity and self-respect can take a hit. They are only withdrawing their services – services to which no one should have any entitlement in the first place – when the stakes become too high. When it’s not a matter of flattering his ego, but ceding your space to him, undressing in front of him, fucking him. At that point, the woman becomes, not someone who’s been pushed too far, but a bitch who’s been lying all along.

This dynamic is everywhere (think of Kristen Roupenian’s Cat Person), even if liberal feminism only wishes to acknowledge it in certain circumstances. We’ve all been there. Sod it, we think. I’ll indulge him. I’ll smile at him. I’ll laugh at his jokes. I’ll use his words. I’ll pretend I don’t mind. I mean, how important is it really? What does it cost me really? If it makes him happy, what kind of nonsense is ‘my dignity’ anyways? We are never, ever thanked for this, only punished when we reach the point of saying ‘no’. It costs nothing to smile – well, only a little self-respect – but that smile will be taken as a promise.

Another example from the Peggie tribunal:

Russell: - you would refer to DU using female pronouns while on the ward at work, and when other people were around

Peggie: - yes, when I could remember

Russell: - but when no one was watching you felt free to call him a man

Peggie: - it was appropriate in the situation I was in, I felt he could understand

Russell: - isn't that classic bullying behaviour - one way, when people around another in private

By that definition, every woman who has ever humoured a man who has made her feel fear, disgust or pity is a classic bully. Peggie’s choice not to insist on her dignity being respected at all times – her willingness to defer to Upton’s worldview in public, to not make a fuss, to “trivialise what [she knows]” – is not appreciated as generosity, or even as work that is expected of her but not of him. Instead, it’s treated as evidence that Peggie is dishonest and manipulative. The patriarchal dynamic forces women to lie – telling us that our truths, such little things, don’t matter anyways – then castigates us for being deceitful.

There is no way to win. Women can be kind but our kindness – that “logical extension” of our “fair, loving nature[s]” – will be unappreciated and unacknowledged until the moment it is absent, whereupon it will be used against us. We’re not meant to be ugly, but if we care, we are vain. We’re not meant to have inner lives, but if we reveal them, it only shows all those years of accommodation – all that silence – was a sham. It is often said that femininity is a double bind insofar as women must choose between being punished for not conforming to its standards, or conforming, which is a punishment in and of itself. The situation is worse than that. The moment we don’t conform, we receive an additional punishment for having ‘deceitfully’ conformed in the past.

It would be good to have things “out in the open”, Finlayson, Jenkins and Worsdale claim. Only it wouldn’t. You’d only say that proved you right.

***

We have all heard stories of nice heterosexual couples who have been together for a very long time when all of a sudden the man just “snaps”. It is then claimed by those who knew them – especially if both have died – that there was never any violence before. It is a mystery, a tragedy, poor them.

I tend to be doubtful about these claims. There is so much violence that goes unseen, and so many places men know to hit that won’t be seen by others. I don’t think it’s impossible, though, that in some cases the fatal blow was the first blow. In those cases, I can’t help suspecting that what others see as “peace” was actually just silence and compliance, of the sort that can go on for years. The nothingness work of letting him define the world, until one day, you can’t stay silent any more, or silence is no longer enough.

I think men who know your compliance is coerced can eventually get even angrier for it. They know you don’t mean it, and it shames them, and that shame has to be projected back onto you. I think there are dead women who spent their entire lives doing the work of keeping the men who killed them happy, soothing their egos, saying whatever words these men demanded, and this work will never be appreciated. No one knows they did it. At best, the man who “snaps” will be recalled as a tortured soul, his victim, a docile, simple, untroubled wife who happened to get in the way. What can she know about dark nights of the soul? Perhaps there will be another discussion of men’s mental health, and why he never gets to discuss his problems. Her? Well, she had nothing to say. She could have kept her mouth shut and look, she did.

The attitudes displayed in the courtroom during the Peggie tribunal are not, I think, unrelated to the way in which women’s privileging of male worldviews goes unseen until the moment we are punished for not doing it any more. Sometimes the truth comes out in arguments. “Now the mask is off!”, a man might say. “See, now we know what she’s really like!” And this will be understood, not as evidence that we have not been permitted to be what we are “really like” at other times – evidence that we have needs that are unrecognised, experiences that are ours alone. It’s just evidence that we are vindictive. We’re bullies. We’re spiteful. We “could have chosen not to say anything” yet here we are.

A final exchange:

Russell: No-one else complained?

Peggie: No one else has come forward and they don’t want to be in my position

Why can’t you be more like the others, the quiet ones? It doesn’t bother them. Not that we’re thanking them for this.

It’s just what they’re there for. It’s just the way they are.