by Robby Soave
But some transgender activists become irate when anyone takes these concerns seriously. Zack Ford, the LGBTQ editor at ThinkProgress, has described desistance as a “myth,” and frequently inveighs against Singal for daring to write about the issue.16
Singal wrote a cover story for the July/August 2018 issue of the Atlantic about trans kids and desistance, prompting more outrage from the activist community. Molloy accused Singal of waging a one-man crusade against trans people.17 Publishing him spreads “pseudoscience and bigotry,” according to the writer Dawn Ennis. He was denounced by the Human Rights Campaign and GLAAD. Jezebel’s Harron Walker structured an entire article around the question “What’s Jesse Singal’s fucking deal?”18 Walker seemed particularly infuriated that Singal would continue to write about trans issues even though some trans people had asked him to stop.
In covering trans issues, Singal in particular has several things working against him: namely, that he is a cis white man. He is not a member of the marginalized community about which he is writing, and thus he is not supposed to disagree with any of its leading members, according to the dictates of intersectionality.
Listening to what marginalized people have to say about their oppression is important, of course. But they should not be beyond reproach, Herzog told me. “Part of the left right now, wanting to always be on the right side of history, especially in light of everything that’s happening with the Trump administration, is this knee-jerk reaction for allies to automatically just believe the trans people who are yelling the loudest, which I don’t think does a service to anybody,” said Herzog. “I understand why people do it, but still, just because a trans person has this perspective, it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily correct.”
Dreger, too, has gotten her fair share of criticism. Like Herzog and Singal, Dreger is no conservative. In fact, she turned down a fellowship at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education because she was concerned that the donors were too right-wing. She has made invaluable contributions to the public understanding of intersex people.
Dreger has also written about controversies relating to transgenderism—in articles, and in her 2015 book, Galileo’s Middle Finger. The book suggests that progressives have often fought as energetically as conservatives when encountering scientific conclusions that clashed with their beliefs. One prominent example highlighted in the book was the trans activist response to the work of psychologist J. Michael Bailey, whom Dreger has defended.
The controversy is complicated, but the gist is this: Bailey had posited that some very effeminate gay men transition to women because this makes it easier for them to pursue sexual relationships with other men, and some other male-to-female transitions arise out of a sexual desire to have a female body, something called autogynephilia. These motivations wouldn’t make the trans women any less female, but some trans activists felt that such reasons would constitute a betrayal of the trans identity.
“The reason the trans activists first came after me was because they were trying to basically silence any discussion of autogynephilia,” Dreger told me. “They came after me in a way that played into the standard progressive narrative, which is anybody who questions or raises anything uncomfortable about trans identity is an enemy of trans people.”
Activists lashed out at Dreger with extreme malice. Some have even tried to get her events canceled by calling in threats of violence. “Some trans activists, not all, it’s a very small number, will call my hosts and will make threats,” said Dreger. “I’ve literally, in many cases, had to have armed guards at my talks. And I just find that ridiculous. Nothing has ever come of it, but it’s concerning.”
When Lambda Literary nominated Galileo’s Middle Finger for a 2016 Lammy Award in the category of LGBT nonfiction, trans activists launched a campaign to have the nomination retracted.19 Their efforts were successful.
The feminist blog Everyday Feminism once asked Dreger if it could reprint an article she had written that had nothing to do with trans issues: “What If We Admitted to Children That Sex Is Primarily About Pleasure?”20 Dreger granted permission, and the article went up at the Everyday Feminism site. Some time later, Dreger discovered that the site’s editors had tossed her piece down the veritable memory hole.
“What happened was that we decided to pull the article from circulation shortly after it went up,” the editors admitted. “We weren’t aware of some of the articles you’ve published on trans issues and after a reader brought it to our attention we looked into them. We then realized that while we very much valued the information in the article on teaching children that sex is about pleasure, the views expressed in several of your other articles directly conflicts with the work we’re trying to do in Everyday Feminism.”
“I’ve seen it over and over again where people are afraid to align with me, be seen with me,” Dreger told me. “They do manage to terrify people into silence.”
It bears repeating: this is not a criticism of the entire trans community, nor a denial of the dignity of trans people. None of the individuals cited here—Dreger, Singal, Herzog—are social conservatives: they all think trans people should be able to transition, and that this is a good choice for a whole lot of people. (And I agree with them.) The fact that they are radioactive in trans activist circles is revealing.
Bathroom Breaks
The desistance debate is inside baseball; readers who aren’t particularly well versed in trans issues have probably never heard of it. I’d be remiss if I didn’t spend some time on the more concrete policy issues that most trans people—and not just the activists—would like to see addressed.
In 2018, for instance, the Trump administration made good on a year-old promise to ban trans people from serving in the U.S. military. “Transgender persons with a history or diagnosis of gender dysphoria—individuals who the policies state may require substantial medical treatment, including medications and surgery—are disqualified from military service except under certain limited circumstances,” according to a White House memo. The new approach called to mind the toxic “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy implemented during the Clinton administration, which barred gay individuals from serving openly in the military. Its repeal in 2011 was a major victory for supporters of LGBT equality, and the idea that this progress could suddenly be reversed for trans service members came as something of a shock.
Candidate Trump, after all, never seemed like a true believer in the cause of social conservatism. In fact, in his speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016, he promised to “do everything in my power to protect our LGBTQ citizens from the violence and oppression” of radical Islam. Advance copies of the planned remarks omitted the “Q” in LGBTQ, but Trump included it when the time came.21
President Trump, however, has discovered that evangelical voters are his most reliable supporters, and playing to this base is just good politics. Liberty University president Jerry Falwell Jr. described Trump as a “dream president,” and Faith and Freedom Coalition president Ralph Reed told the New York Times that Trump had kept every one of his promises.22 “God must have quite a sense of humor to have brought evangelicals and Donald Trump together,” he said.23 Members of the LGBT community—trans people most of all—are not laughing.
Trans people also feel threatened by government action at the state level. The Human Rights Campaign claimed that at least 129 bills that would have curtailed the rights of trans people were introduced in state legislatures during 2017.24 Many of these bills, though, were fundamentally different from the ban on trans military members in that they did not actually mandate discrimination—they merely permitted private entities to decline to serve trans people. As most readers are no doubt aware, whether or not a private business such as a bakery can refuse to make a cake for a gay wedding on a First Amendment basis is among the most contentious modern legal questions.
Some anti-trans bills in the states go further than merely allowing private entities to engage in discrimination in
accordance with their religious beliefs. A North Carolina law, in effect between 2016 and 2017, mandated that government buildings must require all people to use the public restroom that corresponds with the sex listed on their birth certificate, a problem for trans people who have not been able to get their status formally changed. The law’s defenders claimed it was about safety, but there’s no evidence that forcing trans women to use the men’s room or trans men to use the women’s room would do anything other than embarrass trans people.
“I feel like I, as a human being, should have that right to at least not have to basically announce, ‘Hello, people of this restaurant, these are the genitals I was born with,’” Molloy told me.
Teen Vogue, the go-to site for progressive Zillennials, has called on states to mandate the use of gender-neutral bathrooms in order to “help remove the gender binary from everyday life.”25 Some public restrooms now feature a single room with a communal sink area and highly compartmentalized stalls that are much more private and secluded than in typical bathrooms. This seems like a promising development, regardless of whether erasing all gender distinctions is a worthwhile government pursuit.
The truly thorny public accommodation issue isn’t bathrooms but school locker rooms, where students often have to change clothing in front of each other. There’s an obvious conflict here: a trans person who identifies as a girl but still has a boy’s body may feel uncomfortable using the boys’ locker room, while other girls might feel uncomfortable sharing a locker room with the trans girl. Some conservatives have even suggested that mischief-making boys might announce that they identify as girls in order to gain access to the girls’ locker room.
In 2016, the Obama administration’s Justice and Education Departments issued guidance to schools instructing them that they were required under federal law to “treat students consistent with their gender identity even if their education records or identification documents indicate a different sex.”26 The law that obligated such action on the part of schools—at least in the minds of Obama-era bureaucrats—was Title IX, the gender equality statute discussed exhaustively in Chapter Four. Interestingly enough, the feds stopped short of recommending similarly egalitarian measures for school athletics. Title IX permits schools to maintain sex-segregated sports teams “when selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or when the activity involved is a contact sport.” I’m not sure how any reasonable person could have wrung such elaborate distinctions out of a one-sentence statute passed in 1972, but then again I am not the assistant secretary for civil rights. In any case, the Trump administration formally rescinded this guidance in 2017. To truly protect trans kids, activists and allies must lobby legislatures to pass laws that make these matters explicit.
Pronoun Problems
And then there are pronouns.
Many trans women—individuals who were born in male bodies but think of themselves as female—would like to be identified with feminine pronouns: “she,” “her,” “hers.” Post-transition, this isn’t quite so controversial: many trans women are indistinguishable from cis women, anyway. But trans individuals who still possess the sex characteristics of the gender with which they no longer associate may aspire to be identified using other pronouns, and this irks some people, many of them conservatives, who think language itself is being erased.
“I’m not in the mood for countenancing lies about what men and women are, specifically when I think that there is a goal of redefining a key term for the entire society,” Ben Shapiro said in response to a question from a University of Connecticut student in January 2018. “A lie is detrimental to society.”27 I would posit that this isn’t a particularly sympathetic position, and that affording people basic dignity would generally mean referring to trans women as women.
But there are somewhat trickier cases. Many trans people do not identify with either masculine or feminine pronouns and would prefer the generic pronoun “they.” But “they” is a plural pronoun—it refers to more than one person. And while “they” is sometimes inserted into dialogue when “he or she” would be clunky, it can create confusion—at least in written language—when trying to single out an individual person in a conversation that contains multiple people. Abuse of “they” provides somewhat better evidence that rules of language are being eroded, and not for the better: a man can become a woman (though again, the activists would say that the person in question was always a woman), but a single person cannot become multiple people.
A potential solution to this problem is the invented gender-neutral singular pronouns, which are preferred by some members of the trans community—particularly on college campuses. The most common ones seem to be “ze” and “xe.” For instance: “I saw Ashley at the protest yesterday. Xe was carrying a sign. Xer sign read, ‘Impeach Trump.’”
There are others. The University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee’s LGBT Resource Center lists “fae/faer/faers,” “ey/em/eirs,” “per/per/pers,” “ve/ver/vis,” “xe/xem/xyrs,” and “ze/hir/hirs.”28 These haven’t exactly caught fire, and they sound awkward to many people. Conservatives have had a field day parodying them. When the University of Michigan gave students the option of logging in to the web portal and choosing the pronoun that would accompany their headshot and be sent to teachers, conservative student Grant Strobl selected “His Majesty.” He later clarified that he wasn’t opposed to making reasonable accommodations for students outside the gender binary, but he didn’t think it made sense to institutionalize such a policy.29
The most infamous stand against mandatory trans pronouns, of course, was made by University of Toronto psychologist Jordan Peterson. Peterson has become one of the best-known public intellectuals in recent years: his books, podcast appearances, and videos cater to a large audience of (predominantly, though not exclusively) young males who share his skepticism of political correctness. In 2016, Peterson claimed that a proposed revision to Canada’s Human Rights Act would imperil his free speech rights. The bill, C-16, added gender identity and expression to a list of protected categories; Peterson said this would make it a crime to misgender a trans person or refuse that person’s choice of pronouns. Peterson expressed varying degrees of willingness to use trans people’s preferred pronouns but objected to the newer, activist terminology—“ze”/“xe” and the like—because these represented a postmodern neo-Marxist assault on the English language, in his view.
Peterson was never actually accused of misgendering a specific student—and told a young trans woman who wished to be called “she” that he would do so—but thought his commitment to free speech obligated him to denounce C-16, which became law the following year.30
Critics in the activist community accused Peterson of encouraging violence against trans people. Nicholas Matte, a lecturer in trans studies at the University of Toronto, alleged that Peterson was abusing students.31 Matte also asserted that pronouns themselves were “part of a cisnormative culture”—that is, a culture in which the cis identity is wrongly seen as normal.
At Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, a teaching assistant named Lindsay Shepherd showed a clip from a YouTube video of Peterson discussing his perspective on the pronoun issue. In response, Shepherd was called before the university administration and warned about legitimizing perspectives that would make some students uncomfortable. Permitting a debate about whether to use gender-neutral pronouns had the effect of marginalizing the trans community and contributing to trans erasure—the systematic removal of trans people and the trans experience from public life.32
“These debates, regardless of how ‘neutrally’ they are presented, constitute a form of epistemic violence that dehumanizes trans people by denying the validity of trans experience,” wrote Wilfrid’s Rainbow Centre on its Facebook page. “We cannot allow for this profound violence to be continued.”33
Jay Rideout, who identifies as a trans nonbinary queer person, claimed that allowing a debate about pronouns would silence trans students and constitute an e
ndorsement of violence against them. “We need to acknowledge that debates that invalidate the existence of trans and non-binary people or dehumanize us based on gender are both a form of transphobia and gendered violence,” wrote Rideout in an op-ed.
It’s certainly true that members of the trans community experience a disproportionate share of violence. Trans people, especially trans women of color, are more likely to be killed than members of the general population.34 The rate of attempted suicide among trans people is a whopping 41 percent, compared to just 5 percent among the general population, according to one study.35 And of course there’s at least some connection between trans people being treated disrespectfully and trans people dying or attempting suicide. But many in the activist community see offensive language itself as a form of violence, having accepted the postmodern arguments detailed in Chapter Two. Words can break bones just as easily as sticks and stones do.
Rebecca Tuvel, an assistant professor of philosophy at Rhodes College, found this out the hard way after penning a defense of Rachel Dolezal, the racial justice activist and African studies instructor who drew universal condemnation for identifying as black even though she was born white. In her “Defense of Transracialism,” published in the feminist journal Hypatia, Tuvel argued that Dolezal’s actions were much less ridiculous than they seemed; if we accept, as many on the left do, that people can identify as female even though they were born male, why is it unthinkable for people to identify as black when they were born white? How can the left embrace transgender people without even considering the possibility that there could be transracial people? (Race, after all, is more obviously socially constructed than gender. While our conception of gender is at least partly based on biological differences between the sexes, the same is not obviously true for race.)36
