Here’s a little something I said five years ago, on the occasion of a Liberal cabinet minister calling out the prime minister and being congratulated for telling “her truth”:

I’ve been vaguely aware of this expression for a while but I’m not sure where it got started. As near as I can tell, when someone says they appreciate you telling your truth what they’re saying is that they don’t believe what you are saying is true, but they accept that you believe it to be true. It’s very much a backhanded way of saying nothing much. It’s also a perfect political soundbite. In response to the recent accusation of inappropriate behaviour on the part of possible presidential candidate Joe Biden, other Democratic candidates again rushed to acknowledge the complainant coming forward with “her truth.” I guess this covers the bases pretty nicely, without committing anyone to saying what the truth in any particular situation is.

But isn’t this a problem? By just saying that someone has told their truth aren’t we making the claim that no objective truth can be arrived at or is recoverable? That everything is relative to one’s own subjective experience? How is this different from a world where nothing is true and everything is possible?

I found myself thinking about this again recently in response to a couple of news stories, and feel nudged toward saying a bit more. I’ll put it in the form of an appeal: Can we please stop referring to someone as speaking their truth?

The first story has to do with the claim made by Alice Munro’s daughter, Andrea Robin Skinner, that Munro took the side of Skinner’s stepfather after it came to light that he had sexually abused Skinner as a child. I found this revealing in many ways (apparently “everybody knew” about this, but in the approved manner of Canadian literary circles they didn’t talk about it in public), but it was the end of the story that caught my attention. This is from the CBC report:

Munro’s Books, a bookstore Alice Munro founded in Victoria with her first husband, James, posted a statement on its website supporting Skinner. The bookstore has been independently owned since 2014.

“Munro’s Books unequivocally supports Andrea Robin Skinner as she publicly shares her story of her sexual abuse as a child,” the store said. “Learning the details of Andrea’s experience has been heartbreaking.”

The bookstore also released a statement on its website from Andrea, her siblings Jenny and Sheila, and her step-brother Andrew.

“By acknowledging and honouring Andrea’s truth, and being very clear about their wish to end the legacy of silence, the current store owners have become part of our family’s healing,” they said. “We wholly support the owners and staff.”

Is this really unequivocal support? What does it mean to acknowledge and honour “Andrea’s truth”? Doesn’t such a statement imply that they’re not taking a side? Because after all, they’re not saying Skinner is telling the truth, only that she’s telling her truth.

The second story, also reported by the CBC, has it that Indigenous Services Canada is concerned about people who are not of indigenous ancestry claiming identity in that group anyway in order to take advantage of various professional benefits. Apparently this phenomenon is known as “race-shifting” (the people who do it are called “pretendians”) and there are concerns that it is spreading into Canada’s huge public service, which is, as one academic puts it, “fertile ground for race-shifting given the job security, lucrative salaries and its size.”

The solution, according to the Deputy Minister in charge of Indigenous Services? Well, “the key is to honestly tell your truth.” But isn’t that how this problem got started? I don’t want a bunch of frauds telling their truth, however honestly they may go about it.

Hasn’t this nonsense gone on long enough? What does it even mean to speak or tell “your truth”? I suppose the point is that if you believe something is true then it is true for you, and that’s all that matters. Or more poisonously, as George Costanza put it on Seinfeld, it can’t be a lie if you believe it.

In trying to be non-judgmental the term has become a dismissive and condescending insult. “Oh, I’m so glad that you’re telling your truth,” we say. It’s like smiling at someone in therapy. Because we’re quite deliberately not taking any kind of a stand on what the truth is. In fact, as I said five years ago, I think there’s a clear implication when we say someone is telling their truth that we don’t think they’re telling the truth at all.

And are we always so agnostic? Think of election denialism in the United States. Are the people who claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump to be graciously accepted as telling their truth, even if we know they’re not telling the truth? I don’t see that happening.

Yes, there are many different truths out there. And some things may be true for us and not true for others. But truth isn’t always so personal and subjective. To even say of matters that have been adjudicated that they only constitute some individual’s personal truth is to indulge in a relativism so absolute as to be nihilistic. Enough is enough.