Your brain on trans ideology

Mar 12th, 2023 | By
Category: Notes and Comment Blog

I saw this from Hadley Freeman –

So I went looking. It’s New Yorker editor David Remnick talking to New Yorker writer Masha Gessen, who went all they/them recently, much to my surprise too (too along with Hadley Freeman). I’d thought she was a grownup. The interview is on what we talk about when we talk about trans rights. It’s beyond depressing to see adults carrying on this way.

Remnick first encountered Gessen in Moscow more than 30 years ago.

As a reporter for the Washington Post, I was trying to keep track of the countless ways in which Soviet society was changing. For a long time, despite all the other radical shifts consuming the country, discussion of gay rights was largely absent. In those days, public figures would sometimes proclaim that homosexuality was a repugnant peculiarity of the West and did not exist at home. In the late eighties, the official press declared that H.I.V. was alien to the Soviet Union and had been created by the U.S. defense establishment, in a bioweapons-research lab at Fort Detrick, in Maryland. But by 1990 or so this, too, began to shift. For me, at least, one of the embodiments of this change was the sight of a determined young journalist and activist at the head of a small gay-rights rally near the Bolshoi Theatre. This was Masha Gessen.

Gessen has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2017 and is best known for their writing on Russia, human rights, democracy and authoritarianism, and, for the past thirteen months, the war in Ukraine.

Thud. First paragraph, adult talking. Second paragraph, CLANG. That “their” – are we in high school all of a sudden? Masha Gessen is one person, not two or more. She’s also a woman.

Recently, not long after Gessen returned from a reporting trip to Ukraine, I sent them an e-mail pointing out some of the debates over the way trans issues are being covered and discussed. The latest flash point had been at the New York Times. I asked Gessen, who identifies as trans and nonbinary, how The New Yorker should be thinking about its own coverage and approach. The reply led to an interview on The New Yorker Radio Hour.

Step one: don’t consult people who tell you to refer to them with “they/them” on this subject.

Remnick starts:

Masha, to hear many Republicans right now, you’d think that L.G.B.T.Q. rights are somehow as big a threat as the new Cold War, or nuclear war. I spoke with Michaela Cavanaugh, a Democratic state senator in Nebraska, who is fighting to block a bill that would withhold gender-affirming care from trans kids, including mental-health care.

There are no “LGBTQ” rights. T and Q rights are in conflict with LGB rights. And “gender-affirming care” is another verbal nudge to agree with dangerous bullshit.

Gessen: Note that Putin’s war in Ukraine goes hand in hand with extreme anti-L.G.B.T. rhetoric. In his last speech, he took time to assert that God is male, and that the crazy Europeans and the “Nazi” Ukrainians are trying to make God gender-fluid. I’m not kidding.

Remnick: Men are men and women are women, and that’s the end of the story.

Gessen: Right. That simplicity—women are women, men are men. There’s social and financial stability. Where relevant, there’s whiteness.

But men are men and women are women and tautologies are tautologies. Some women and men like to mix up gender conventions; that doesn’t mean they become the sex they’re not. A rabbit in a tutu is still a rabbit.

Gessen: Professionally, I started out in gay and lesbian journalism, as it was known, in the mid-eighties. At the time, it was obvious that, if somebody was doing gay and lesbian journalism, they were at least queer. Growing up, I was most definitely trans-identified, except I didn’t have words for it.

What does “queer” mean there? Something more than lesbian and gay? Or just a way of repeating lesbian and gay, but then why bother to say LG=queer? Does it mean something like “halfway to being trans”? I don’t know. I don’t know what she means.

Gessen: And then I went through puberty and I could no longer live as a boy so clearly. Then I was a lesbian for many, many years, or more likely queer. But I’ve always thought of myself as having more of a gender identity than a sexual orientation.

What does “queer” mean there?

Remnick: One of the things that became part of the language at a certain period of time was the following sentence: “Gender is a construct.” I think most people over the centuries thought of gender as something provided by biology. What is the origin of the notion of gender as a construct?

It’s simpler than that. Gender was just another word for sex, and useful because “sex” also means the activity, so “gender” disambiguates.

Gessen: Judith Butler, who certainly did not invent the phrase “gender as a construct” but did a lot to popularize that idea, and an idea of gender as performance, which I think is even more relevant to what we’re talking about—she said fairly recently—or, I’m sorry, they said fairly recently—in an interview that—

Remnick: I think it’ll be heartening for some to know that you made this mistake. We’re leaving it in!

More like profoundly irritating. See? See? This is one major reason it’s such a stupid idea – it’s impossible to remember and thus a source of pointless stress and distraction.

Gessen: One of the best quotes I’ve heard from somebody who studies gender and medical intervention was “Look, the gender of a five-year-old girl and a fifty-year-old woman is not the same.” I thought, You’re right. We think of these things as stable and knowable, but they’re not. They’re fluid by definition, and in our lived experience they’re fluid.

Oh shut up. Congratulations, you’ve discovered “personality.” It’s not the gender of a 5 and a 50 that is different.

Remnick: How would you approach talking about trans people? What is the state of the conversation? Where are we? Why is it so fraught and so often painful?

Gessen: I think it’s so painful and so fraught because it is very difficult, in discussing transness, in covering transness, to avoid engaging with the argument about whether trans people actually exist or have the right to exist. That is deeply painful to trans people—and, I would imagine, to people who love trans people. That’s actually something that should be off limits. 

Another manipulative ambiguity. She’s shocking. There is no “argument about whether trans people have the right to exist.” The issue is what people call themselves and try to force everyone else to call them, not anyone’s “right to exist.” No one is proposing a genocide of trans people. She knows that, but she’s pretending not to. It’s disgusting. Remnick should have interrupted there.

Gessen: That is deeply painful to trans people—and, I would imagine, to people who love trans people. That’s actually something that should be off limits. But it is very hard, because, for example, in Emily Bazelon’s excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine last summer about the battle over transgender treatment, there’s a [paraphrased] quote from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay journalist, who says, Well, maybe these people would’ve been gay—implying they’re really gay and not really transgender. That really clearly veers into the territory of saying “These people don’t exist. They’re not who they say they are.” So that’s why it’s so painful.

No, no, no. Disputing people’s descriptions of themselves is not the same as saying they don’t exist.

One expects this kind of dreck from The Independent or The Guardian, but not from The New Yorker.

Remnick: So you’re saying that Emily Bazelon should not have referenced Andrew Sullivan on that? I think it was a paraphrase of Sullivan rather than a quotation.

Gessen: I wouldn’t have. I think that piece would’ve been even better without that. As journalists, we’re not under obligation to quote every single view on an issue. I think we have the right to exclude the view that somebody’s not who they say they are.

So if we say Putin’s not who he says he is, that should be excluded? We “have the right” to exclude it?

By the way, Andrew Sullivan is pissed.

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