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Tucker Lieberman's avatar

I’ve subscribed to your blog for four years. I don’t read everything, so I’ve missed some of your beliefs and opinions you may have expressed, but I do read sometimes. When I happened to see the email notification of this post a week ago, I opened it because I was concerned about the phrase “cancel culture” in the title; the ideas this term typically expresses are, in my estimation, false and harmful.

My understanding of how “cancel culture” is typically used is that one person makes a set of pointed arguments; another says they disagree, which might be for any number of reasons having to do with factual observations, feelings, ethics, the logical validity of what was said, the aesthetics of it, or its consequences for others; and the first person, not wanting to acknowledge or address the disagreement, complains that the person who disagrees has somehow “canceled” them, i.e., disagreed with them. The first person may face consequences, big or small, for having said something false, offensive, or nonsensical, even losing some of their own audience or organizational affiliations, especially if they refuse to clean up their own mess. That's how life works. No one is entitled to anyone else's attention or endorsement. As thinkers, writers, creators, etc., we have to earn it. Words mean something and have power — we wouldn’t want it any other way, right? — and so people reap the consequences of their choices. I don't like the phrase “cancel culture” because it shifts the scrutiny onto “the culture,” as if the true problem lies with an undiscerning audience rather than with the speaker’s unjust comment that their audience correctly and justly discerns.

On the matter of what’s often called “cancel culture,” in your fourth paragraph you say “the burden of proof should be on people proposing new ways of organising society…not on those who offer criticism of new ideas.” Here I observe, and would like to add, that in a dialogue, the roles of proposer and critic are ever-shifting, and whether their ideas are old or new is subject to evaluation. For example, where you say in your first paragraph that “libertarianism deserves some credit with people on the left as one of the least toxic forms of right-wing politics,” are you proposing something or criticizing something else? Are you reaffirming something old or offering something new? Are there definitive answers to those two questions, and do the answers determine whether anyone who interacts with you is themselves a proposer or critic, saying something old or new, and does the answer determine which of you should have the burden of proof in your conversation?

Anyway, I was jolted awake when I saw your post (it was the first thing I read that day, before sunrise) and it has been troubling me deeply since. I have not made time to comment until now because I don’t know whether you’re open to feedback on this point, what level of feedback you’re open to, how to express it briefly so it fits in a comment box, and whether this is a good use of my time — that last judgment hanging on whether you might be willing to change your mind, as I could do this exercise with various levels of productivity with countless others on the internet who make similar comments. Another reason I was too preoccupied to comment over the past week is that there was a wave of bad political news; I mention that because the particular sort of bad political news is relevant to what you said.

I see that in your fourth paragraph you do literally refer to “the need to welcome feedback,” but I don’t know if you intend to apply this to your own essay. I don’t mean this to be snarky. I seriously don’t know if you are open to feedback on this. I’ve spent some early-morning moments lying awake this week (it’s before sunrise, here, again) wondering about this.

My issue:

In the 1990s, in my final year of high school, I transitioned away from living as a girl and began living as a man. At 17, I began taking testosterone, started to grow a beard and got a deeper voice, and I asked people to recognize me as a boy, call me by a new name, and refer to me in third-person as “he.” For the most part, they did. Some immediately, and for others it took a few months, but they did. Shortly after I turned 18, I legally changed my first name and the gender marker on all my identity documents and had a chest reconstruction surgery so I could have a flat chest. I went to college in 1998 as a young man, which is how I was perceived; no one I met had any reason to imagine that I was “transsexual” unless I told them; the staff at student services, behind the scenes, did know (as I had been accepted to the school as a girl on paper yet had shown up as a man), and they assigned me a male roommate, and he and I had a quite nice year rooming together.

It is therefore frustrating to me to hear your assertion that “self-ID had never been tested in the wild.” Trans people have always lived in the real world among other humans, and our gender transitions have typically involved some period of so-called “self-ID” because that’s part of the coming-out process: You tell people your gender and ask them to start treating you that way. One day you're having an ice cream at the mall, you need to go to the bathroom to wash your hands, and, for the first time in your life, you choose the bathroom of the "other" gender because, despite the enormous fear barrier you likely feel and the existential implications of this moment for the rest of your life, it seems to be right and necessary. Depending on your appearance, strangers may start automatically treating you as a member of your "new" gender. Some people are perceived as another gender with as little effort as a change of clothes and a haircut. Others need hormones, surgery, voice training, and a whole new social and professional circle in a new city where no one knows them. Mid-20th-century psychologists’ expectations for trans people were that we’d live full-time in our genders, and they saw our ability to do so as a *prerequisite* for approving us for surgery. That is, they required us to do self-ID for a couple years, and if we could hack it and were “successful” at it (playing tennis without a net!), they’d formally grant us an approved ID. If you try to imagine how you'd go about transitioning to living in a new gender, some degree of self-ID would probably be part of the process for pursuing official approval, right? You'd likely be curious to know whether the world could perceive you as a woman before you went through a years-long government application process to get an F on your ID, right? [1/4, to be continued]

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Alex Fernandez's avatar

Thanks for this article. I was just today discussing with my daughter how just asking questions about many progressive issues can lead to being labeled a bigot, so many people in the left just avoid them. (You expose a few very good examples in your article, like the "unintended consequences of gender self-identification".) This is not healthy thinking. I believe we should welcome challenges to progressive ideas, as they give us an opportunity to test and refine them for the common good.

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