The Frustrations of a Non-Woke Trans Person
The culture wars ruin everything. Say no to the culture wars.
Let's talk about my frustrations as a non-woke trans person. There are too many to list, but let's start with this one. Something I have become increasingly concerned about is that right wing culture warriors appear to want to collectively punish trans people for the sins of the woke, just because some trans activists have engaged in woke activism. It is no different than how the woke sometimes say that all white people are complicit in white supremacy, or how all men are complicit in patriarchy. It's the same tribalist, us-vs-them mentality.
People like myself have gone to great lengths to make a trans compromise possible. I have even outlined what I think the compromise should look like, and what needs to happen to make it work. However, the culture warriors are simply not going to let any of that happen, because they want the trans community to suffer, to pay for the sins of the woke, even if many trans people are innocent. Which is why, those of us who believe in a reasonable compromise on trans issues need to oppose the culture warriors.
The GOP’s attraction to this second iteration are obvious. The positions increasingly embraced by the Democratic coalition on the relevant cluster of issues — for example, that a woman is anyone who identifies as such, that biological sex is not real, or that present discrimination is needed to counteract past discrimination — are broadly unpopular outside certain affluent, highly educated settings. Moreover, those leading the charge against the new liberal consensus are often disaffected liberals and establishment centrists, which suggests there is a potential for the Right to make inroads beyond its traditional base. Abortion, in contrast, is of greatest concern to religious voters, who make up a rapidly declining share of the electorate...
And yet, Culture War 2.0 will likely prove irresistible to GOP candidates in general elections in the coming years, as the need for culture-war appeals clashes with the unpopularity of Culture 1.0 issues with moderate voters. As The New York Times recently reported: “Polling suggests that the public is less likely to support transgender rights than same-sex marriage and abortion rights” — the same goes, as Kaufmann notes, for teaching critical race theory in schools and racial preferences in admissions and hiring. Surely, given losses like Wisconsin, such a pivot would be prudent.
-The GOP is fighting the wrong culture war by Geoff Shullenberger in Unherd
This article is honest about what the pro-GOP wing of the anti-woke movement is about: waging culture wars so that the GOP can win elections. Even if it hurts innocent people in the process. An utterly immoral position. And no better than the woke cancel culture movement's willingness to get people fired from jobs to advance their own politics.
To put the interests of a political party ahead of the truth, good order and compassion towards all is vile, and we should all be able to agree on that, no matter where we sit on the political spectrum. I believe the only culture war worth fighting is the war against those who use speech for power purposes rather than truth purposes. We oppose wokeism because they believe speech and discourse are about power. We need to oppose the right-wing culture warriors, who essentially do the same thing, at least just as hard.
To put trans rights in the same basket as critical race theory is the most despicable thing here: one is about expanding individual freedom (at least if done properly), the other is anti-individualist to the core. The only justification for right wing culture warriors to categorize trans rights as 'woke', is to collectively punish trans people for the sins of the woke. It is no different than how the woke sometimes say that all white people are complicit in white supremacy, or how all men are complicit in patriarchy. It's the same tribalist, us-vs-them mentality.
By the way, the quote about 'the public is less likely to support transgender rights' is misleading: it is about trans people in competitive sports, which some trans allies, and even some trans people, don't quite support either. Trans rights in everyday life are certainly not as unpopular or unreasonable as CRT, and it is biased reporting to put it that way. And most trans people and allies don't believe that 'biological sex is not real' either. This paints an intellectually dishonest picture of those supporting trans rights.
The fight for transgender rights just opened a new front line in Missouri: gender affirming care for transgender adults. Missouri's Attorney General, through a single executive action, has just banned or limited access to such care for a majority of transgender adults in the state. This unilateral decision is expected to leave tens of thousands of transgender Missourians without crucial medication or treatment. The move threatens to roll back transgender medical care to the level of the 1970s, seemingly fulfilling right-wing political commentators' ominous vows to eradicate transgender individuals altogether.
The full order utilizes emergency rulemaking powers to severely limit gender affirming care for all transgender people. It would require that all trans people have 3 years of severe, persistent gender dysphoria to obtain care, and would require 18 months of therapy sessions designed to “explore influences on the patient’s gender identity and mental health comorbidities.” It would require things like depression and anxiety to be resolved before starting gender affirming care, and would also ban that care for trans adults with autism. It would require tests for “social contagion” and would require 15 years worth of medical follow-ups for all trans adults. Collectively, these requirements would ban gender affirming care for most adults in the state.
As anti-trans culture warriors wield their speech for the sake of political power, and engage in biased reporting to whip up anti-trans sentiment as much as possible, real world consequences like this occur. There is nothing to be gained by anyone in making trans health care difficult to access for adults with gender dysphoria. It makes people suffer for no good reason, and is therefore genuinely evil. Normal people wouldn't support such insanity if they were allowed to reflect upon it with their own consciences. Yet the culture war has no room for morals and consciences, and they lead to terrible outcomes like this.
Anti-trans culture warriors want trans people to suffer, because they want us to pay for the sins of the woke collectively. Just like how some extreme wokeists want all men to pay for sexism, to turn the tables of oppression. The ugly side of human nature is on full display here. This is why I say that the only culture war worth fighting is to end the culture wars for good. To side with one side against another is no good, because they are likely just as bad as each other. They all crave power, and don't care about the truth. And they don't care that people will suffer either.
You can see evidence of his reluctance to go all-in on the culture wars during his time as governor, as well. After that abortion ban went into effect, he said he regretted that it didn’t include more exceptions, such as those for rape and incest. Meanwhile, he helped keep in place a unique Medicaid expansion that was instituted by his Democratic predecessor under the Affordable Care Act, despite pressure from other Republicans in the state to overturn it. (Although he did attempt to institute work requirements for the program that were overturned by the courts.)
And while he signed a law banning transgender girls and women from playing on school sport teams consistent with their gender, he vetoed another bill banning gender-affirming care for minors, which, if it had gone into effect, would have been the first of its kind in the nation. In explaining his veto, Hutchinson appealed to conservative economics, saying it was “a vast government overreach” and would have interfered with family medical decisions. “[T]hey deserve the guiding hand of their parents and the health care professionals that their family has chosen,” he said during a press conference.
I included this to remind everyone that there are indeed still decent conservatives left who won't play the culture wars in a way that doesn't care about hurting people. As I've said before, I have nothing against conservatives, and I believe a classical liberal political landscape definitely has plenty of room for conservative voices. Just not those who will wage the culture war at all costs (who probably shouldn't even be called conservatives because they don't appreciate the importance of limited government at all).
“The ‘60s” get a pretty unfairly negative reputation. People like Pete Buttigieg and Barack Obama use “‘60s” as a kind of pejorative, to suggest an irrational utopian radicalism. In fact, the activists of the ‘60s achieved some of the most important social and political progress in the history of human civilization. They shattered the Jim Crow regime, they put massive cracks in the patriarchy, they ultimately helped to force an end to the atrocity of the Vietnam War (and restrained the U.S. use of illegitimate military force for the next several decades), and they pushed LGBTQ rights into the mainstream. They certainly did not do it by accepting that there’s a time to protest and a time to follow the rules. Instead, they followed the slogan of May ‘68 in France: Be realistic, demand the impossible.
'Demand the impossible'? This is how woke activists destroy all possibility of reasonable social progress, create massive backlash to the people they say they support, and let others suffer while they enjoy their supposed moral high ground. I'm fed up with it, to be honest. To 'demand the impossible' is to invite backlash, a luxury that is affordable to only very privileged people. Right now, trans people are unfairly paying the price for woke insanity, and the woke activists won't even allow us to hold them responsible.
To demand the possible is much more responsible and constructive. The 60s rightly deserves its bad reputation, because of what came next. Everything must be judged by their consequences, and political radicalism is no exception. Political radicals are clearly no friend of minorities, judging by this criteria. (By the way, LGBT rights didn't achieve mainstream support until 10-15 years ago. Reasonable activists who demanded the possible reform of marriage equality in the aughts made that happen, not the radicals of the 60s.)
The Montana House voted on Wednesday to censure the state's first openly transgender legislator Zooey Zephyr, who called for her colleagues to vote against a gender-affirming care ban for transgender youth. The House voted 68-32 to censure Zephyr, who is barred from participating from the House floor...
On April 20, Zephyr told conservative lawmakers they would have "blood on their hands" during debate on SB99, which would ban gender-affirming care for transgender youth.
-Transgender lawmaker censured by Montana House Republicans by Kiara Alfonseca in ABC News
The classical liberal way is that one can say whatever they believe, and nobody should be canceled because of what they have to say. We oppose the woke because of their frequent use of cancel culture. But this example makes it clear that right-wing cancel culture is also a thing. Regardless of what you think of Zephyr's stance, she should have the right to say it. She was simply saying what she believed, and was not out to disrupt the order of the House. To 'discipline' her would be cancel culture, plain and simple.
To strawman is to argue against a position that is not actually your opponent’s position, without acknowledging the manoeuvre. For example, I might say, “I think transgender status and sex should be protected separately under anti-discrimination law,” and my opponent might respond, “Holly thinks transgender people don’t deserve anti-discrimination protections, and she’s wrong because…” When you strawman a person’s argument, you’re creating a caricatured version of it that you can more easily refute. This is an intellectually dishonest tactic that prevents any real conversation from taking place.
The opposite of strawmanning is “steelmanning”: creating a version of your opponent’s argument that is as strong as possible, and arguing against that version. In my academic field, philosophy, where we care very much about good arguments, strawmanning is considered a central vice, and steelmanning is considered a central virtue....
It is my personal view that the ideology behind trans activism—by which I mean the idea that self-described gender identity must be treated, in all areas of law and policy, as a definitive marker of identity that supersedes biological sex—is in its death throes; and so we’re seeing desperate rearguard actions by its proponents to keep it propped up.
-The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling Continue by Holly Lawford-Smith in Quillette
This is an article responding to YouTuber ContraPoint's most recent video, from the gender critical feminist perspective. While I generally don't agree with that philosophy, I congratulate the author for reminding us the need to steelman, rather than strawman, our opponents' arguments. Personally, I have never strawmanned the arguments of those who have concerns about the demands of certain trans activists, and I have long argued that the trans community should stop doing so, so that we can finally have the healthy discussion that is needed for reform to occur.
However, I think the author has engaged in a bit of strawmanning herself in this article, by characterizing all trans activism as 'the idea that self-described gender identity must be treated, in all areas of law and policy, as a definitive marker of identity that supersedes biological sex'. While there are certainly activists who think like that, there are also more moderate voices for trans rights reform. I personally support a compromise where trans identity is legally recognized but not in a way that 'supersedes biological sex', and I have recently described how that could look. In that same article, I described why reform is needed. But the issues I raised seem to be deliberately ignored by gender criticals and their allies, who keep saying that trans people don't need extra rights, when our community still faces high unemployment and severe social disadvantage.
What I am frustrated about is that many of those who say they are concerned about extreme trans activism won't engage with our more moderate proposals, which I contend would resolve most, if not all, of their concerns. What I am more frustrated about is that they often choose to side with the kind of reactionary politics that constantly strawman trans arguments and are out to whip up anti-trans sentiment. It has recently become clear how far the reactionaries want to take things: they are now advocating draconian abortion bans, banning books from libraries, banning drag queens from performing in public, and rigidly enforcing gender stereotypes by equating men in dresses (I'm talking about like Harry Styles, not drag) with wokeness or even obscenity. I think that, when you have the choice of working with moderate, reasonable trans people or working with reactionary people who want to aggressively turn the clock back 50 years or more, the choice you make says a lot about your priorities.
The department, which is led by the elected Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, distributed a memo to employees last week informing them that they’re required to dress in a “manner consistent with their biological gender,” according to the Texas Observer, which obtained the memo and published it in part on Monday.
The memo, which is clearly aimed at transgender and gender non-conforming employees, goes on to say that repeated violations of the policy will be subject to “corrective action” up to and including being fired, according to the Observer.
An actual recent example to show how far authoritarian and regressive the culture warriors want to take things. Even if it is in violation of US federal law, as decided by the Supreme Court in 2020. Just shows why we can't pretend everything is OK. We need to stand up and insist on protecting our liberties before it's too late. I'm usually a calm and rational person, but as a classical liberal, this blatant attack on individual freedom makes me angry, and rightly so! This is indeed no different than the woke trying to get people fired for disagreeing with them, and it merits the same kind of anger. If the right wants to know why classical liberals and libertarians are so opposed to them nowadays, they need to look no further than examples like these. If we could accept this, we wouldn't have complained about the woke in the first place.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who recently published her autobiography The TaraElla Story, in which she described the events that inspired her writing.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory.
Very good points. Culture wars are zero-sum game and very bad for freedom and individualism