Welcome back to my blog. This is the second post in a multi-part series about the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and their policies on children’s gender and sexual health. This post is about accountability, from a feminist/intersectional perspective. If you don’t know who I am, check out my Re:Introduction. And if you’d like to start at the beginning, here is the first post of the series.
I’m pulling alt-tarot cards as inspiration for making connections, shifting perspectives, and being open to surprise (h/t Cynthia Enloe in The Curious Feminist). As Edward Gorey – wait, no I mean Madame Groeda Weyrd – tells us through her veil of mystery, “the meanings given are selective rather than exhaustive, and hints rather than assertions.”” Let’s jump in to the tarot reading.
The Limb
Today I counted all the tarot cards: 20. Then I shuffled them. I cut them and counted the top and bottom stacks. 9+11 = 20. What a disaster. I pull the top card.
So bleak. I dunno, maybe everything is too heavy right now. It’s October 2023, not February, and for a lot of people it has not been a fun time. But when things are darkest, when promises have been broken, when a miscarriage of justice has occurred, when we all live in a generalized calamity… maybe that’s when we need accountability the most. And a prosthetic limb might sometimes represent that an accident or calamity has occurred, but to many people a prosthetic represents joy, freedom, independence, and life. Before we journey into accountability together, take a moment and remind yourself to exercise your perspective-shifting abilities.
What is Accountability?
Accountability is a process about ongoing connection and negotiation of boundaries. I’m primarily quoting these ideas contained in the book Feminist Accountability by Ann Russo. Accountability is “an internal resource for recognizing and redressing the harms we have caused to ourselves and others” rather than as “something that happens to bad people” (p. 19). Accountability is something we engage in, not something that happens to us, and it’s definitely not something that happens only to bad people. “Rather than locating the causes of oppressive behaviors and actions in individual “bad apple” behavior, a praxis of accountability makes the inequities and divides open to ongoing collective scrutiny, intervention, and transformation” (p. 10). Russo has compiled the ideas of different experts, activists, collectives, and other front-line groups into a handy tour guide. One stop on the tour that I really want to take you to is Connie Burk’s Think. Rethink. Accountable Communities.
“We understand people who are surviving abuse to be agents—people who are the subjects of their own lives, not simply objects of abusers’ control and exploitation. As survivors, we recognize that being able to think critically about our own choices, knowing that what we do matters, and being able to be accountable to ourselves for our actions (even while locating those choices within the context of abuse and exploitation) are hallmarks of “being in charge of one’s own life.” For survivors, being accountable to the people who are battering them is not a real option.
But, like all people, survivors need the products of accountability: release from guilt and shame, reconciliation with oneself and one’s community, being out from under the obligation that comes from harming another. Even when actions are wholly justifiable in their context, folks who have remorse or grief about their actions can benefit from accountability.
An Accountable Communities approach promotes the individual and collective ability to assert choices (self-determination) and take responsibility for one’s actions within their full context. To understand one’s actions in their full context, a person must understand that systems of institutional oppression and privilege, personal challenges and aptitudes, and situational conditions profoundly impact the options s/he has to choose among. The limitations themselves do not exempt one from taking responsibility. However, the context matters. The context shapes what it looks like to “take responsibility” for the choice.”
Connie Burk
The Power of Accountability
The power of accountability is to move from interpersonal harm to repair and re-connection by escaping false dichotomies. “Either/or thinking is crucial to the maintenance of racism and other forms of group oppression. Whenever we think in terms of both/and we are better situated to do the work of community building.” (bell hooks in Teaching Community, quoted in Russo on p. 49). Such binary thinking leads to people clinging to claims of innocence to escape feelings of guilt, claims of naiveté to escape feelings of incompetence, or claims of oppression to avoid acknowledging complicity in harming others. “We tend to defend our individual intentions, rather than address the impact of our behavior and its relationship to broader systemic oppression.” (p. 22). Practicing accountability enables us to step into our best selves to address conflict and harm. It promotes integrity over shame, righteousness over self-righteousness. It helps us walk through life with “humility, compassion, and a sense of proportion” (p. 23). Accountability reduces anxiety when stepping out of one’s comfort zone because it builds self-confidence that when one makes mistakes or breaks a promise, which will inevitably happen, that mistake can be faced head-on to repair connection between people and communities. Accountability is a process of building and restoring trust and interpersonal connection. Doesn’t that seem powerful?
An Example of Accountability
Since each and every one of us has been in the position of being harmed, of being the harmer, and of witnessing harm, we already have the ability to recognize multiple sides of a conflict. Tapping into these experiences-telling each other our stories-can help us reflect on each other’s humanity, on our shared desire for release from morbid sensations. Russo shares an example in Feminist Accountability about an angry young man who was a student in her course. This young man poured out his anger in class, making each session a tense experience for everyone in the room. When Russo confronted him after, asking him why he even took the course, active listening became a powerful tool of accountability for both Russo and her student. The young man was able to talk aloud of his experiences of child sexual abuse and, through Russo’s active listening and willingness to be open to surprise, together they moved to “a very different place from where we had begun. We now found ourselves talking about strategies to cope with self-hatred and despair (feelings I had had myself), and I shared a few resources in the area for male survivors of sexual abuse” (p. 80).
Because Russo practiced accountability, recognizing the “invisibility of sexualized violence against men and its impact on all of our lives” (p. 80), the young man was able to see that she was not his enemy, shifting his perspective from resentful outsider to interconnected student, a person who was cared for by others and who was now more empowered to care for himself and others. Because Russo practiced accountability, this young man was enabled and invited to practice accountability, too.
“I understood from this experience that I needed a different approach to harm – not one that would simply write him off as a misogynist, but rather one that would recognize the sources of his pain and anger while also insisting on a practice of mutual accountability-both his and mine-for the impasse of the class and his attacks on the members of the class, including myself” (p. 80).
Ann Russo
A Poverty of Accountability
In my previous writing I called for the AAP to adopt a unified position on genital modifications. However, in truth I don’t believe that action is sufficient. Unless the AAP builds into their process ways to be accountable to patients, then even a unified position on genital modifications, whatever that position might be, will not do anything to address the harm caused by the AAP’s policy positions-past, present or future. Remember, accountability is about addressing harm and rebuilding trust, and its main benefits are to increase care for each other and ourselves and to address the systemic power (along lines of race, gender, geography, class, etc.) influencing how we interact person to person and community to community. To discuss how the AAP might step into accountability, then, requires much more than can fit in the space remaining.
On Mastodon I promised I would talk about mistakes I’ve made in this post, but I must apologize for that forged snapshot I offered. That too will need to wait until next week’s post. I have a poverty of space and time! Check back next Wednesday to hear about how naughty and awful I am, and what accountability might look like for the AAP.
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TTP, PHD 
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