Standing athwart history, yelling 'Trans'

My guilty pleasure lately has been listening to Mike Duncan’s Revolutions podcast all the way through. I started a few months ago with Season 1 (the English Civil Wars of 1642-51) and kept going through the American, French, Haitian, and Gran Colombian revolutions. Countless preschool dropoffs and grocery runs later, I’m midway through Season 7: The Revolutions of 1848.

One of the insights of binging through all these revolutions at once is seeing how quickly once-radical philosophies age and are supplanted over time. In one revolution, an idea like republicanism (i.e., “we shouldn’t have a king”) or constitutionalism (“our government should be bound by rules written down somewhere”) might be on the cutting edge. Then, sometimes even before the first revolution is over, they have become hallmarks of moderation, or even the most recalcitrant conservatives. What never seems to change are the broader social tendencies. At every moment, it seems, we have fire-breathing radicals, quivering centrists, and face-stomping reactionaries. Only the specific terms of the argument change.

I was thinking about this yesterday as the Discourse turned back to its favorite sorting topic of late: the existence of trans people. This latest turn was occasioned by a pair of open letters objecting to the New York Times’ ongoing, fear-mongering coverage of that part of the population: one by the LGBTQ+ advocacy group GLAAD, the other signed by over a thousand Times staff and contributors and over 20,000 others (I co-signed that one as a Times contributor). (Tom Scocca recently laid out the issues at play here extremely well.)

In addition to citing specific articles including Emily Bazelon’s “The Battle Over Gender Therapy” (a patently awful piece that was given the cover of the Times Magazine), the contributors’ letter put the current moral panic in properly historical terms, by citing the paper’s participation in similar moral panics of the past. Examples included a 1963 article headlined, “Growth of Overt Homosexuality in City Provokes Wide Concern,” the internal suppression of gay staffers, and former executive editor A.M. Rosenthal’s early cover-up of the AIDS epidemic. The letter also namechecked William F. Buckley, Jr.’s notorious 1986 Times op-ed, in which the National Review editor called for gay people who tested positive for HIV/AIDS to be “tatooed (sic) … on the buttocks, to prevent the victimization of other homosexuals.”

This was both a clever move and the correct one. Buckley’s letter, considered worthy of publication at the time, reads as an absurdly fascist provocation today, which of course it was.1 The Times’ masthead should be aware that, if trends hold, their current coverage of trans people will be regarded with similar disgust by its future readers.

But instead of considering any of these arguments, the Times’ masthead responded in imperial fashion. Executive Editor Joe Kahn and opinion editor Kathleen Kingsbury lumped their contributor-critics in with the separate GLAAD protest action and threatened to fire anyone who publicly criticize the paper’s “coverage of transgender issues.”

Ironically enough, less than twenty-four hours after the open letters were published, Kingsbury’s opinion section ran Pamela Paul’s latest column: “In Defense of J.K. Rowling.” It was a typically incurious, shoddily reported piece. Among other things Paul cites the self-described TERF and anti-trans activist E.J. Rosetta as a source for her claim that Rowling had never written a “single truly transphobic message.”

That is especially funny because all Paul (and her editors) had to do was read the Rowling essay she linked to and quoted at the top. In it, Rowling declares flat out, “I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition.” And then, a few paragraphs down, the Harry Potter author emphatically makes the central argument behind every piece of U.S. anti-trans legislation going back to the North Carolina “bathroom bill” of 2016:

Sounds like fear. And an irrational one at that. What one might call a “phobia.”

This was, it should be said, at least the fourth column that Paul, the former editor of the Times book review, has devoted to defending people accused of transphobia in the nine months she has been in the new job so far.2 And that does not include the additional columns Paul has written in her own voice accusing trans people and those that defend their rights of erasing women and marginalizing (cis) gay people.

Which brings me back to Revolutions. What Rowling and Paul (and possibly Kingsbury) are doing here may be confusing to people unfamiliar with the notion that philosophies and social positions are always changing. Rebelling against monarchy made George Washington and Thomas Jefferson radicals in 1776. By 1791, though, their republic was well-established, and the radicals were people like those in the nearby French colony that would soon become Haiti who were fighting for the immediate abolition of slavery — a position Washington adamantly opposed and would quickly drive Jefferson into revanchism. How could men who risked their lives for liberty only a few decades later live in mortal fear of others’ liberation? The answer may have confounded them. But it is obvious if you think about it for even a moment (or visit Washington and Jefferson’s former slave plantations at Mount Vernon and Monticello).

It’s a remarkably similar situation here. This persuasive, well-remunerated class of anti-trans campaigners — a group that also includes Jonathan Chait, Matt Yglesias, the execrable Jesse Singal and others — are trading on their erstwhile liberal bonafides to disguise their garden-variety conservatism on the “gender question.” How can I be a bigot when I fought for women’s rights? they seemingly ask. How dare you call me a transphobe when I supported same-sex marriage? “As a lesbian feminist …,” a Times letter writer from Queens opened, before showering praise on Paul for defending Rowling and having “the courage” to broach a topic she and the news organization as a whole cannot stop obsessing about. I love and support trans people! — as long as they know their place.

What is happening is that, once again, a fundamental (yet ultimately unimportant) way in which society is organized is being contested on a large scale. Some fear that losing, or changing, the gender binary as they have always understood it will lead to general chaos; just as their intellectual forebearers clung jealously to monarchy or slavery in ages past, and as opponents of feminism and gay rights did more recently. Others perhaps fear that their hard-won rights will get lost in a larger renegotiation. Still more probably just want to deny their political (or Twitter) opponents any kind of victory.

Most, just likely, simply like the way their lives are now and fear any kind of change at all. For them, it’s a time-honored tradition: One day you look in the mirror and see a revolutionary ready to mount the barricades to make a better world. The next, you see the ghostly face of William F. Buckley staring back at you.