On Validity and Legitimacy

Validity and legitimacy are two different things. I repeat. Validity and legitimacy are two different things.

One statement can be valid without being legitimate, or vice versa (rarer but hypothetically), especially when it describes an internal state of a person. Similarly, questioning the legitimacy of a statement does not entail questioning the validity of it. One can accept a statement as-is at the current snapshot time while questioning the legitimacy of it, or suggesting to explore it. Conflating the two is a huge misunderstanding of the question in dolus eventualis or gross negligence, motivated to keep denying the unseen truth or not wanting to dismantle the problematic notion they have.

Especially in contemporary politics, people deliberately conflate the argument against validity and legitimacy for authoritarian or privilege-protective reasons. Gender essentialism, xenophobia or anti-immigration sentiment, and the dominance of a certain neurotype are all examples of it. However, the ‘discomfort’ they feel at the moment can be valid without being legitimate. TERFs saying “I’m afraid of someone with male genitals around me in bathrooms or changing rooms”, xenophobes saying “I’m concerned about the immigrants not assimilating into our society”, and ableists saying “I’m uncomfortable with disabled people interacting with me” are actually all valid descriptions of one’s internal state while being illegitimate because the legitimacy asks whether the statement is grounded on evidence-based and well-informed assessment of what they’re describing, while the validity does not ask that question. Hence, it can be valid and legitimate if and only if it is an honest good-faith description of one’s internal state and also if and only if based on an assessment as objective and evidence-based as possible under the resouces and the data they have, provided the dataset is not biased or mitigated possible biases.

There are two types of errors where people conflate the two: One is thinking illegitimacy necessarily means invalidity, which is often seen in people who want a moral license to declare someone as unethical and give them a private punishment. Another is thinking that questioning the legitimacy automatically invalidates the internal state of the one describing it, that is often seen in people who don’t want to change or assert dominance over someone questioning it. The two start from different motives and approach, but both are the same in a sense that they think validity == legitimacy.

Autistic or broader neurodivergent people, especially who started unmasking earlier than the other party, can question the legitimacy of someone’s description of their internal state, like boundary setting or fear, without invalidating the statement at all. It usually manifests as something like “I get what you feel, and your feelings are valid, but let’s think if it’s well-founded and not biased from your learned shame”. Reading it as a personal attack on their internal state, ironically, tells you that the person is moving the goalpost constantly and trying to force their rigid internal state to the other party, and it’s something like how failed states like North Korea deals with international diplomatic relationship (“Do not ever expect any change from me!”).

In other words, conflating the two is one of the biggest bad faith moves one can do in terms of friendship and broader interpersonal relationships. It deliberately assumes the other party who questioned the legitimacy of one’s internal state invalidated it in a bad faith move, and the contemporary philosophy, law, and politics agree that assuming someone of bad faith without evidence-based grounds or a legitimate concern is, by itself, a bad faith move.