Progressive thinkers, activists, and politicians need to get much better at cultivating feedback on their ideas and preparing for the inevitable backlash
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]
Likewise it is frustrating to hear a phrase like “the unintended consequences of gender self-identification (ID) is a clear example of what to avoid in the future.” People live in our genders. Trans people have actual life experience with this. We're aware of how gender works. I’m 45 years old and I can’t remember ever personally witnessing a single instance of anyone having to show an ID card at the door of a gendered bathroom. Much of gender works by some combination of how you behave without asking permission, what you explicitly say you are, how people perceive you, and whether friends and strangers have time or interest in interrogating your differences. All of that is part of what it means to “fit in” and to have a gender.
It’s frustrating to hear a suggestion like “liberal-progressive activists need to get much better at welcoming pushback from potential allies who have identified some possible side effects of untested ideas.” I don’t know how to say this with the proper emphasis without swearing, but I’ll try, and you can insert the swears yourself: I’m not an untested idea. I’m a person. The ripple effects of my existence in the world, be they miniscule or notable, are not “side effects.” How I show up in my marriage, for example, is not best described in terms of “side effects” on my spouse, because that term is just not especially respectful of either of us. It doesn’t honor our experiences as human beings. We choose to be married to each other. We take each other seriously. Likewise when I walk down the street and brush elbows with my neighbors as we walk our dogs, they perceive me as a man (regardless of the ID card in my wallet), and none of us would benefit from any type of political “pushback” about the “side effects of untested ideas” amounting to their recognition that I live as a man in the world. I’ve been personally “testing” it since the 1990s. Other people “tested” it before I was born. It works. Gender works. Life works. I was never an experiment, but if I am, can you please declare the test complete? Or no, it will never be complete, I can never prove anything to anyone, because why?
And likewise frustrating: “The input of feminists on how predatory males might exploit well-meaning laws designed for people with gender dysphoria should have been welcomed with open arms!” One of the early “bathroom bills” (anti-trans laws) was attempted in my home state of Massachusetts in 2018. Of course, trans people do live in our genders — that’s where I’d transitioned in the 1990s and lived and worked for years afterward, in my post-transition gender despite the lack of any explicit nondiscrimination protection in bathrooms — and the state finally instituted a bathroom gender nondiscrimination law in 2016. Great, I evidently didn't need it for myself, but other trans people would surely benefit from it. Before the law passed, as well as afterward, no one was assaulted in a bathroom by a trans person nor by anyone pretending to be a trans person. The anti-trans pretext for challenging the nondiscrimination law was, of course: *WHAT IF a man puts on a dress and enters a women’s room just to bother women in there, and then, when called out as a man, falsely claims he’s a trans woman, which will (somehow?) enable him to continue sexually abusing others? WHAT IF?* Voters faced with this referendum sensibly thought it was nonsense and voted to keep the nondiscrimination law. Despite the valiant attempt at anti-trans scaremongering, it is still the case in Massachusetts that no man has ever dressed up as a woman for the purpose of assaulting a woman in a public bathroom. Days after the election, the anti-trans side bragged: “Our side concocted the 'bathroom safety' male predator argument.” Right. They admitted it. Their whole initiative was made-up. It continues to be made-up. Serial killers are not exploiting nondiscrimination laws. When trans-inclusive policies are ripped up, it affects trans people; it does not help put serial killers in jail. Why should people not assume "serial killer?!?!" and go into panic mode whenever they see someone who looks a little bit queer? Is that a real question? We trans people do not welcome this theoretical “input” with open arms, sorry not sorry. I wore out some shoe leather in the days before the election knocking doors to remind people that I’m an ordinary human being who deserves access to public bathrooms so I can continue going out in public as I've done for decades. [2/4, to be continued]
Yes, people who harbor ideas with which we disagree (for me, anti-trans ideas) may nonetheless, in some cases, be properly described as “feminists”; Sophie Lewis has a new book, Enemy Feminisms, all about this. Feminists can disagree with significant parts of each others' ideologies and still recognize each other as feminists — they're just, you know, enemy feminists to each other. A consequence of this realization is that, if trans-exclusive people can be feminists, trans-inclusive people can be feminists too. Some feminisms are trans-exclusive, others trans-inclusive. There was a significant intra-feminist debate about this in the 1970s, when Beth Elliott, a trans lesbian, co-organized the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, and at the conference, Robin Morgan stood up and gave an anti-trans speech against her. This has been going on for over half a century, going just by this example. That a trans woman may live and organize as a woman, as a lesbian, as a feminist is not a “new” idea. Vice versa, trans men can live as men, as gay men (I do), and support gender equality (I certainly try my best).
So, feminists (some of whom are trans) do indeed criticize each other, and if we're going to talk about the sense in which there is a “full-blown attack,” I ask you to please look at what’s being done to trans people worldwide over the past few years, and notably in the US and UK.
To look just at the US, with which I'm familiar: Over the last two-and-a-half years, the ACLU has tracked two hundred anti-LGBTQ (mostly anti-trans) state laws that actually passed, plus another fifteen hundred that were proposed to state legislatures and didn’t pass but nevertheless took up legislative time and influenced the culture. This is to say nothing of the downstream effects of those laws (e.g., teachers fired or forced to resign in Florida because of the “don’t say gay” law), plus court rulings, at least a dozen executive orders since Trump’s inauguration in January, Trump’s deletion of LGBTQ history from government websites, his deletion of existing research data, his defunding of ongoing research that has led to the cancellation of surveys and studies, local book bans (libraries just toss out any book that is alleged to be LGBTQ or is written by a known LGBTQ person, regardless of what the book actually says), problems with healthcare access (also related to repro rights and the defunding of healthcare in general), or a county in New York organizing a neighborhood armed militia (for what purpose?) and simultaneously declaring that trans people can't play sports at the local rec center with their friends (oh, that purpose). On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that immediately affects trans kids but is written in such a way that it will also be used against trans adults and appears to support conversion therapy which could affect gay people too. VPOTUS Vance responded to the ruling by opening a new social media account just to gloat about the court ruling and to continue trolling us about how Big Pharma is transing everyone’s kids. (Good to know he’s on THAT problem instead of trying to prevent an Israel-Iran nuclear war within the declared two-week window for diplomatic negotiations.) We are exhausted from making the list over and over. Our existence is labeled “DEI,” and DEI is declared illegal.
“As ideas take form and get ready for prime time—” My god, I’m 45 years old. I got a philosophy degree. Then I got a journalism degree. I was not out to my professors; I studied things other than my own sexuality and gender. I genuinely wanted to study other things, like philosophy and journalism "in general," and I also thought if I bought into "respectability" to some degree (i.e., not continually outing myself as gay and trans) that other people would respect me as a serious person. I’ve been living in my gender for nearly three decades. Stop telling me I’m mentally not ready for prime time. I’m not a child. I’m an adult human in the world. Plus, my penis is not an idea; it’s my penis. It exists in meatspace regardless of what ideas you form of it.
“Trying to rush through changes while silencing criticism—“ I’ve never silenced an anti-trans person, quite apart from the question of whether I’d like to. They. Talk. Nonstop. Every. Day. They have billions of dollars of funding. There is an anti-trans media machine. I may have all kinds of ideas and opinions about what it is to be a human in the world, and I don’t know why you'd peg me as the one who is “proposing new ways of organising society” (thereby somehow having lots of power and remaining unaware of other people’s feelings) while the ones who want to tell me my gender is fake, culturally destructive, and predatory, and, bonus! that I’m ugly too!, are the “critics” who must never, ever be told to be quiet (they must be allowed and even encouraged to insult my penis publicly every single day, or else society will never have “time to catch up with the progressive agenda”). [3/4, to be continued]
Regarding this sentence, in a paragraph about the US: “Hardly anyone on the hard right questions gay marriage nowadays as a result.” This is false. This is what I really came here to say, since I think it may be the part you're most open to hear. If you’re talking about public support, roughly a quarter of U.S. voters do still oppose gay marriage, which suggests where the far-right is. If you’re talking about institutional support, the Texas Republican Party platform (for example) endorses “God’s biblical design for marriage and family between one biological man and one biological woman” and says they “oppose homosexual marriage, regardless of state of origin” (i.e., even if you married in New York, they intend to derecognize your marriage if you set foot in Texas). Republicans were given power in the 2024 election, so now they're in the implementation phase. They're knocking down the easy targets first, then they'll get to others at the end of the line of dominos. So, for one thing, paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys show up to Pride marches and kids' story hours at libraries. The Chaya Raichik followers called in multiple bomb threats to children's hospitals. Christians put a lot of legal energy into the idea of what they call “religious liberty,” i.e., even if people can enter same-sex marriages, Christians demand the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in business, healthcare, social services, etc. But they're going bigger. On June 10, just four days before you wrote your blog post, the Southern Baptist Convention voted (for the first time!) to actively try to overturn the legal right to same-sex marriage in the US. It’s been 10 years since the Obergefell Supreme Court case ensured the right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states, and the Southern Baptists are just now gearing up against it, officially and in full force, which means they see a real window of opportunity. If gay people and our allies don't admit this is happening and don't actually fight back, gay marriage can be overturned. They’ll find a way. If the Supreme Court could delete the right to abortion three years ago by overturning Roe v. Wade, how much more easily can it delete the right to same-sex marriage by overturning Obergefell. U.S. public opinion is roughly the same on abortion as it is on same-sex marriage. The far-right is, indeed, questioning these things.
Please. I’m not a lab experiment nor a business prototype, but if you insist on seeing me that way, why do you not see my life as part of the “series of small-scale tests” you asked for? I’ve been doing this with my actual life since the 1990s. Others did it before me. We have been here. “Point to successful experiments—“ Hell, our moms told us not to point at strangers, but you could just see me. We have been part of history. We are in the present moment.
I might provide whatever data point might be asked for, but then, the right-wing isn’t interested in reasons or evidence. A few days after you published your essay, the Supreme Court came out with its opinion about trans kids (U.S. v. Skrmetti). You might have a look at Clarence Thomas’s part of the opinion (pp. 30–52) in which he refers to the doctors representing major medical organizations as “so-called experts,” “alleged experts,” and “those who hold themselves out as experts” who only babble “elite sentiment…under the guise of scientific judgment.” He explicitly empowered politicians to continue regulating trans people’s bodies and lives without getting any information from doctors. He said that doctors can only “distort and stifle democratic debate” about healthcare. It's impossible to provide information to people who have sealed themselves up in a little hermetic bubble saying that trans people and our allies and healthcare providers should be shut out of the democratic process because our opinions distort the democratic process. Even if you're uninterested in the effects on trans people, perhaps you'll be interested in how it will affect other people too, like anyone who wants any type of healthcare. This happened just this week. It's a culmination of what's been happening every day for the last few years. And yet it will, somehow, get worse. This is what "silencing" means to me. [4/4]
Finally, I appreciate the respectful tone of the conversation. Please let me apologise if you feel offended by my words. I did try to choose them carefully to distinguish between policies (such as frictionless self-ID) and the way that adults choose to live their lives. There was no implication that you (or anyone else) is "a lab experiment nor a business prototype." This was a reference to policy and not to people.
The bathroom laws were clearly discriminatory. You are right! However, I mentioned Scotland in the previous comment. Did you follow the Isa Bryson case? Lots of people felt that a rapist declaring a trans identity and gaining access to a female prison was problematic, to put it mildly. This is clearly not a criticism of 99.9999% of trans people. However, it is an unintended consequence of a well-meaning law.
Hi. I welcome your feedback! The point I am trying to make is about frictionless self-ID, ie, that anyone can declare their gender at any point with no loopholes whatsoever. Of course, trans people who have taken certain steps, as you did, should have the right to change your legal status. I am worried that taking away the steps as a legal requirement (as we saw in Scotland) hadn't been tested.
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.
I couldn't have written this essay - our background knowledge is too different - but I agree with most of it.
I'd call myself a conservative, if the term hadn't been co-opted by people who I'd prefer to call "regressive". I want less and smaller changes, with due consideration to unintended consequences. The visible (louder) right, in the main, wants drastic changes, often portrayed as returning to an idealized past. (Hence my "regressive" label.) I absolutely wouldn't go farther than restoring a few of the good parts of life as it was when I came of age (late 70s). The visible (louder) left also wants massive changes. I see a few injustices worth remedying - maybe even more than a few - but prefer not to make massive changes. Many could be addressed by enforcing laws that already exist.
As it happens, I live in the US, and am a member of several groups scapegoated by the radical right. So I don't have much choice in which political party I support. But I fear it will be a cold day in hell before the Democrats pay attention to anything else I care about. They should listen to you.
All good observations. I would add that progressives need to realize that the majority of people think and react on an intuitive level, and do not easily connect with deliberative explanations and arguments. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains it, minds are changed by appealing to the intuitive and emotional “elephant.” and not to the deliberative-thinking “rider.” The left can learn some useful lessons on this from their opponents on the right, who are much better at it.
It's important not to try so hard to win that one becomes essentially identical to one's opponents. I've seen that with those concerned about Climate Change - lots of argumentative techniques that, to me, sounded like they came from the playbook of snake oil salesmen.
I was hounded off a forum associated with a MOOC ostensibly teaching about climate change science, for asking questions that made it obvious to my opponents that I was a climate change denier come to troll. I *should* have become a true believer, with no need to understand, when told what % of climate scientists believed climate change was real, and joined them in silencing people who asked questions about the scale of the predicted impact, let alone about the certainty level of specific predictions.
I eventually found a source of actual science, complete with explanations, research citations, etc. But if the issue had been less prominent, that experience in the MOOC forums would have been sufficient for me to class the climate change issue as "probably fraudulent, not worth my time to investigate farther".
I know bad arguments when I see them. I'd rather not see them supporting things that are actually true.
Please check out this book, DinoNerd: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345802845/ You were probably approaching environmentalism as a pragmatist, seeing it as a problem to be solved, while the others saw it in apocalyptic terms.
I should clarify that my comment was in regard to political messaging optimized for the persuasion of voters and winning elections. Case in point is messaging during the Biden administration in response to inflation. All of the arguments aside, as to the cause of inflationary pressures and what the Biden did, didn't, or could have done about it; the messaging coming out of the White House was a perfect example of progressives using rational, deliberative arguments and explanations to address an audience that was listening from an intuitive and emotional mindset.
When you are living paycheck to paycheck, and your grocery bill has gone up 80% over the past 4 years, messaging about how the "rate" of inflation is down -- whether it is true or not -- is likely just to frustrate you (or piss you off), and cause you to vote for the opposing candidate in hopes that maybe he/she will bring some relief.
What progressives should be doing (and their opponents are better at) is speaking to voters where are emotionally -- what they are feeling. In this case, simply by acknowledging that the baked-in price increases were causing financial pain (who cares what the current inflation rate is), the administration could have established an emotional common-ground connection with some (not all) voters, and opened the door for them hearing an ideally well-tested (as Rupert proposes) deliberative argument. Instead, all the rational and presumably fact-based arguments likely fell on deaf ears.
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]
Likewise it is frustrating to hear a phrase like “the unintended consequences of gender self-identification (ID) is a clear example of what to avoid in the future.” People live in our genders. Trans people have actual life experience with this. We're aware of how gender works. I’m 45 years old and I can’t remember ever personally witnessing a single instance of anyone having to show an ID card at the door of a gendered bathroom. Much of gender works by some combination of how you behave without asking permission, what you explicitly say you are, how people perceive you, and whether friends and strangers have time or interest in interrogating your differences. All of that is part of what it means to “fit in” and to have a gender.
It’s frustrating to hear a suggestion like “liberal-progressive activists need to get much better at welcoming pushback from potential allies who have identified some possible side effects of untested ideas.” I don’t know how to say this with the proper emphasis without swearing, but I’ll try, and you can insert the swears yourself: I’m not an untested idea. I’m a person. The ripple effects of my existence in the world, be they miniscule or notable, are not “side effects.” How I show up in my marriage, for example, is not best described in terms of “side effects” on my spouse, because that term is just not especially respectful of either of us. It doesn’t honor our experiences as human beings. We choose to be married to each other. We take each other seriously. Likewise when I walk down the street and brush elbows with my neighbors as we walk our dogs, they perceive me as a man (regardless of the ID card in my wallet), and none of us would benefit from any type of political “pushback” about the “side effects of untested ideas” amounting to their recognition that I live as a man in the world. I’ve been personally “testing” it since the 1990s. Other people “tested” it before I was born. It works. Gender works. Life works. I was never an experiment, but if I am, can you please declare the test complete? Or no, it will never be complete, I can never prove anything to anyone, because why?
And likewise frustrating: “The input of feminists on how predatory males might exploit well-meaning laws designed for people with gender dysphoria should have been welcomed with open arms!” One of the early “bathroom bills” (anti-trans laws) was attempted in my home state of Massachusetts in 2018. Of course, trans people do live in our genders — that’s where I’d transitioned in the 1990s and lived and worked for years afterward, in my post-transition gender despite the lack of any explicit nondiscrimination protection in bathrooms — and the state finally instituted a bathroom gender nondiscrimination law in 2016. Great, I evidently didn't need it for myself, but other trans people would surely benefit from it. Before the law passed, as well as afterward, no one was assaulted in a bathroom by a trans person nor by anyone pretending to be a trans person. The anti-trans pretext for challenging the nondiscrimination law was, of course: *WHAT IF a man puts on a dress and enters a women’s room just to bother women in there, and then, when called out as a man, falsely claims he’s a trans woman, which will (somehow?) enable him to continue sexually abusing others? WHAT IF?* Voters faced with this referendum sensibly thought it was nonsense and voted to keep the nondiscrimination law. Despite the valiant attempt at anti-trans scaremongering, it is still the case in Massachusetts that no man has ever dressed up as a woman for the purpose of assaulting a woman in a public bathroom. Days after the election, the anti-trans side bragged: “Our side concocted the 'bathroom safety' male predator argument.” Right. They admitted it. Their whole initiative was made-up. It continues to be made-up. Serial killers are not exploiting nondiscrimination laws. When trans-inclusive policies are ripped up, it affects trans people; it does not help put serial killers in jail. Why should people not assume "serial killer?!?!" and go into panic mode whenever they see someone who looks a little bit queer? Is that a real question? We trans people do not welcome this theoretical “input” with open arms, sorry not sorry. I wore out some shoe leather in the days before the election knocking doors to remind people that I’m an ordinary human being who deserves access to public bathrooms so I can continue going out in public as I've done for decades. [2/4, to be continued]
Yes, people who harbor ideas with which we disagree (for me, anti-trans ideas) may nonetheless, in some cases, be properly described as “feminists”; Sophie Lewis has a new book, Enemy Feminisms, all about this. Feminists can disagree with significant parts of each others' ideologies and still recognize each other as feminists — they're just, you know, enemy feminists to each other. A consequence of this realization is that, if trans-exclusive people can be feminists, trans-inclusive people can be feminists too. Some feminisms are trans-exclusive, others trans-inclusive. There was a significant intra-feminist debate about this in the 1970s, when Beth Elliott, a trans lesbian, co-organized the 1973 West Coast Lesbian Conference, and at the conference, Robin Morgan stood up and gave an anti-trans speech against her. This has been going on for over half a century, going just by this example. That a trans woman may live and organize as a woman, as a lesbian, as a feminist is not a “new” idea. Vice versa, trans men can live as men, as gay men (I do), and support gender equality (I certainly try my best).
So, feminists (some of whom are trans) do indeed criticize each other, and if we're going to talk about the sense in which there is a “full-blown attack,” I ask you to please look at what’s being done to trans people worldwide over the past few years, and notably in the US and UK.
To look just at the US, with which I'm familiar: Over the last two-and-a-half years, the ACLU has tracked two hundred anti-LGBTQ (mostly anti-trans) state laws that actually passed, plus another fifteen hundred that were proposed to state legislatures and didn’t pass but nevertheless took up legislative time and influenced the culture. This is to say nothing of the downstream effects of those laws (e.g., teachers fired or forced to resign in Florida because of the “don’t say gay” law), plus court rulings, at least a dozen executive orders since Trump’s inauguration in January, Trump’s deletion of LGBTQ history from government websites, his deletion of existing research data, his defunding of ongoing research that has led to the cancellation of surveys and studies, local book bans (libraries just toss out any book that is alleged to be LGBTQ or is written by a known LGBTQ person, regardless of what the book actually says), problems with healthcare access (also related to repro rights and the defunding of healthcare in general), or a county in New York organizing a neighborhood armed militia (for what purpose?) and simultaneously declaring that trans people can't play sports at the local rec center with their friends (oh, that purpose). On Wednesday, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that immediately affects trans kids but is written in such a way that it will also be used against trans adults and appears to support conversion therapy which could affect gay people too. VPOTUS Vance responded to the ruling by opening a new social media account just to gloat about the court ruling and to continue trolling us about how Big Pharma is transing everyone’s kids. (Good to know he’s on THAT problem instead of trying to prevent an Israel-Iran nuclear war within the declared two-week window for diplomatic negotiations.) We are exhausted from making the list over and over. Our existence is labeled “DEI,” and DEI is declared illegal.
“As ideas take form and get ready for prime time—” My god, I’m 45 years old. I got a philosophy degree. Then I got a journalism degree. I was not out to my professors; I studied things other than my own sexuality and gender. I genuinely wanted to study other things, like philosophy and journalism "in general," and I also thought if I bought into "respectability" to some degree (i.e., not continually outing myself as gay and trans) that other people would respect me as a serious person. I’ve been living in my gender for nearly three decades. Stop telling me I’m mentally not ready for prime time. I’m not a child. I’m an adult human in the world. Plus, my penis is not an idea; it’s my penis. It exists in meatspace regardless of what ideas you form of it.
“Trying to rush through changes while silencing criticism—“ I’ve never silenced an anti-trans person, quite apart from the question of whether I’d like to. They. Talk. Nonstop. Every. Day. They have billions of dollars of funding. There is an anti-trans media machine. I may have all kinds of ideas and opinions about what it is to be a human in the world, and I don’t know why you'd peg me as the one who is “proposing new ways of organising society” (thereby somehow having lots of power and remaining unaware of other people’s feelings) while the ones who want to tell me my gender is fake, culturally destructive, and predatory, and, bonus! that I’m ugly too!, are the “critics” who must never, ever be told to be quiet (they must be allowed and even encouraged to insult my penis publicly every single day, or else society will never have “time to catch up with the progressive agenda”). [3/4, to be continued]
Regarding this sentence, in a paragraph about the US: “Hardly anyone on the hard right questions gay marriage nowadays as a result.” This is false. This is what I really came here to say, since I think it may be the part you're most open to hear. If you’re talking about public support, roughly a quarter of U.S. voters do still oppose gay marriage, which suggests where the far-right is. If you’re talking about institutional support, the Texas Republican Party platform (for example) endorses “God’s biblical design for marriage and family between one biological man and one biological woman” and says they “oppose homosexual marriage, regardless of state of origin” (i.e., even if you married in New York, they intend to derecognize your marriage if you set foot in Texas). Republicans were given power in the 2024 election, so now they're in the implementation phase. They're knocking down the easy targets first, then they'll get to others at the end of the line of dominos. So, for one thing, paramilitary groups like the Proud Boys show up to Pride marches and kids' story hours at libraries. The Chaya Raichik followers called in multiple bomb threats to children's hospitals. Christians put a lot of legal energy into the idea of what they call “religious liberty,” i.e., even if people can enter same-sex marriages, Christians demand the right to discriminate against LGBTQ people in business, healthcare, social services, etc. But they're going bigger. On June 10, just four days before you wrote your blog post, the Southern Baptist Convention voted (for the first time!) to actively try to overturn the legal right to same-sex marriage in the US. It’s been 10 years since the Obergefell Supreme Court case ensured the right to same-sex marriage in all 50 states, and the Southern Baptists are just now gearing up against it, officially and in full force, which means they see a real window of opportunity. If gay people and our allies don't admit this is happening and don't actually fight back, gay marriage can be overturned. They’ll find a way. If the Supreme Court could delete the right to abortion three years ago by overturning Roe v. Wade, how much more easily can it delete the right to same-sex marriage by overturning Obergefell. U.S. public opinion is roughly the same on abortion as it is on same-sex marriage. The far-right is, indeed, questioning these things.
Please. I’m not a lab experiment nor a business prototype, but if you insist on seeing me that way, why do you not see my life as part of the “series of small-scale tests” you asked for? I’ve been doing this with my actual life since the 1990s. Others did it before me. We have been here. “Point to successful experiments—“ Hell, our moms told us not to point at strangers, but you could just see me. We have been part of history. We are in the present moment.
I might provide whatever data point might be asked for, but then, the right-wing isn’t interested in reasons or evidence. A few days after you published your essay, the Supreme Court came out with its opinion about trans kids (U.S. v. Skrmetti). You might have a look at Clarence Thomas’s part of the opinion (pp. 30–52) in which he refers to the doctors representing major medical organizations as “so-called experts,” “alleged experts,” and “those who hold themselves out as experts” who only babble “elite sentiment…under the guise of scientific judgment.” He explicitly empowered politicians to continue regulating trans people’s bodies and lives without getting any information from doctors. He said that doctors can only “distort and stifle democratic debate” about healthcare. It's impossible to provide information to people who have sealed themselves up in a little hermetic bubble saying that trans people and our allies and healthcare providers should be shut out of the democratic process because our opinions distort the democratic process. Even if you're uninterested in the effects on trans people, perhaps you'll be interested in how it will affect other people too, like anyone who wants any type of healthcare. This happened just this week. It's a culmination of what's been happening every day for the last few years. And yet it will, somehow, get worse. This is what "silencing" means to me. [4/4]
Finally, I appreciate the respectful tone of the conversation. Please let me apologise if you feel offended by my words. I did try to choose them carefully to distinguish between policies (such as frictionless self-ID) and the way that adults choose to live their lives. There was no implication that you (or anyone else) is "a lab experiment nor a business prototype." This was a reference to policy and not to people.
I agree that the hard right is probably worse when it comes to "cancel culture" than the "woke" left.
The bathroom laws were clearly discriminatory. You are right! However, I mentioned Scotland in the previous comment. Did you follow the Isa Bryson case? Lots of people felt that a rapist declaring a trans identity and gaining access to a female prison was problematic, to put it mildly. This is clearly not a criticism of 99.9999% of trans people. However, it is an unintended consequence of a well-meaning law.
Hi. I welcome your feedback! The point I am trying to make is about frictionless self-ID, ie, that anyone can declare their gender at any point with no loopholes whatsoever. Of course, trans people who have taken certain steps, as you did, should have the right to change your legal status. I am worried that taking away the steps as a legal requirement (as we saw in Scotland) hadn't been tested.
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.
Thanks, Alex!
Preach it, Brother!
I couldn't have written this essay - our background knowledge is too different - but I agree with most of it.
I'd call myself a conservative, if the term hadn't been co-opted by people who I'd prefer to call "regressive". I want less and smaller changes, with due consideration to unintended consequences. The visible (louder) right, in the main, wants drastic changes, often portrayed as returning to an idealized past. (Hence my "regressive" label.) I absolutely wouldn't go farther than restoring a few of the good parts of life as it was when I came of age (late 70s). The visible (louder) left also wants massive changes. I see a few injustices worth remedying - maybe even more than a few - but prefer not to make massive changes. Many could be addressed by enforcing laws that already exist.
As it happens, I live in the US, and am a member of several groups scapegoated by the radical right. So I don't have much choice in which political party I support. But I fear it will be a cold day in hell before the Democrats pay attention to anything else I care about. They should listen to you.
All good observations. I would add that progressives need to realize that the majority of people think and react on an intuitive level, and do not easily connect with deliberative explanations and arguments. As psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains it, minds are changed by appealing to the intuitive and emotional “elephant.” and not to the deliberative-thinking “rider.” The left can learn some useful lessons on this from their opponents on the right, who are much better at it.
It's important not to try so hard to win that one becomes essentially identical to one's opponents. I've seen that with those concerned about Climate Change - lots of argumentative techniques that, to me, sounded like they came from the playbook of snake oil salesmen.
I was hounded off a forum associated with a MOOC ostensibly teaching about climate change science, for asking questions that made it obvious to my opponents that I was a climate change denier come to troll. I *should* have become a true believer, with no need to understand, when told what % of climate scientists believed climate change was real, and joined them in silencing people who asked questions about the scale of the predicted impact, let alone about the certainty level of specific predictions.
I eventually found a source of actual science, complete with explanations, research citations, etc. But if the issue had been less prominent, that experience in the MOOC forums would have been sufficient for me to class the climate change issue as "probably fraudulent, not worth my time to investigate farther".
I know bad arguments when I see them. I'd rather not see them supporting things that are actually true.
Please check out this book, DinoNerd: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0345802845/ You were probably approaching environmentalism as a pragmatist, seeing it as a problem to be solved, while the others saw it in apocalyptic terms.
Added to my overgrown to-be-read (TBR) list. Thank you.
You should see my Kindle wishlist! It is slightly ridiculous...
I should clarify that my comment was in regard to political messaging optimized for the persuasion of voters and winning elections. Case in point is messaging during the Biden administration in response to inflation. All of the arguments aside, as to the cause of inflationary pressures and what the Biden did, didn't, or could have done about it; the messaging coming out of the White House was a perfect example of progressives using rational, deliberative arguments and explanations to address an audience that was listening from an intuitive and emotional mindset.
When you are living paycheck to paycheck, and your grocery bill has gone up 80% over the past 4 years, messaging about how the "rate" of inflation is down -- whether it is true or not -- is likely just to frustrate you (or piss you off), and cause you to vote for the opposing candidate in hopes that maybe he/she will bring some relief.
What progressives should be doing (and their opponents are better at) is speaking to voters where are emotionally -- what they are feeling. In this case, simply by acknowledging that the baked-in price increases were causing financial pain (who cares what the current inflation rate is), the administration could have established an emotional common-ground connection with some (not all) voters, and opened the door for them hearing an ideally well-tested (as Rupert proposes) deliberative argument. Instead, all the rational and presumably fact-based arguments likely fell on deaf ears.
Good point, Jim.