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I miss my dead friend.
—Against Me!, Transgender Dysphoria Blues
In the spring of 2021, still deep in covidtide (after the vaccine had begun to be deployed but before it was available to all who wanted it), an old friend got back in touch to tell me we could no longer be friends. We had only been in touch twice since the pandemic began, the latter of which was limited to a simple "happy birthday" I texted on the appropriate occasion, and the emoji with which she replied. But suddenly, it seemed, she wanted to communicate—in order to make it clear we couldn't be friends any more. This friend, whom I will call W.,1 wasn't content to simply ghost me (as she very nearly already had); she wanted to tell me off. And then cease to be friends with me.
Yet W. and I had been extremely close friends for a number of years. Our kids (close to the same age) were friends too—we met as parents—and we often got together while they played. Other times, we would get together just the two of us, over coffee or lunch, for somewhat more intimate (and less interrupted) conversations. I supported her through an emotionally rough divorce (and her subsequent period of being single), on occasion dropping everything for a spur-of-the-moment get-together when some emotional weight pressed upon her suddenly. When she had to see a medical specialist, I drove her to a doctor's appointment in a city an hour away. She referred to me, and I to her—in emails, and in texts, which were her preferred form of communication—as "friend", as though it were a proper name or a nickname ("hello, friend", "I miss you, friend"—that sort of thing). In short, we were close.
But a few years ago W. started pulling back. The timing was such that the cause was ambiguous. It wasn't our kids; although they were different genders and attended different schools, they always played happily together until my friend stopped helping me arrange things. But it might have been that she had at long last started a new romantic relationship, and did not need as much support from a platonic friend. Or she might genuinely have just been busy, with, in the last year, a helping of pandemic overwhelm larded on top of that. Or it might have been a political disagreement we had.
On politics, we were both firmly on what I would refer to as the Warren/Sanders left. We had different areas that tended to engage our attention—I was particularly focused on climate change and political maneuverings; W. tended to engage more about intersectionality and social justice—but neither of us disagreed with the other’s stance on their issues; we just had different interests we focused on. This is not to say our views were identical; she, for instance, was slightly to the right of me on Israel/Palestine issues (despite my being Jewish and she not, which would stereotypically suggest the reverse). But what disagreements we had we would talk about in the ordinary way friends do: exploring, thinking, considering, reconsidering. Sometimes coming to agreement, sometimes not.
Except about one issue.
—And here we come to the difficulty in writing this essay: I want to write about the cancellation, both personally (the pain of it) and what it means for the broader issue (since I think that it has lessons for how we discuss things and what our understanding of cancellation as a phenomenon gets wrong). But if I mention the issue, chances are it will be that that gets the focus, and the debate (to the extent there is any) about this essay will be about what is, in truth, a side issue to it. So I will try to say briefly what can only be said at length, to say simply what can only be parsed with careful complexity, and ask my indulgent readers to listen to the story, not debate the issue.
The issue was the trans debate. It's not that I was anti-trans or anything like that: I firmly support trans rights; I have both friends and family who are trans, and I support them and use their chosen names and pronouns (of course), and certainly oppose the crude and cruel legal policies that Republicans have pushed to try to address this "issue". But I do think that there are genuine questions (in a way that isn't true of, say, race or sex or sexual orientation) that people of good will can in fact disagree on. Many of these are theoretical—issues which you might think of as abstract and philosophical and therefore ones which don't really matter to the broad public, except that it clearly does in fact matter a lot to a lot of people. These include ontological issues (Are trans women really women, or is it simply the moral and polite thing to do to to treat them as such? Or are they perhaps women but not female? How does one define woman anyway?) and historical issues (while acknowledging Caitlyn Jenner as (now) a woman, is it really accurate to say that a woman set the world record in the decathalon in 1976, decades before Jenner transitioned in any fashion?).
And while I think most issues (employment, housing and similar rights, the calling of people by what they wished to be called, access to bathrooms in public spaces) are fairly clear (with justice on the pro-trans side), there are some policy issues at the margin—prisons, with all their threat and opportunities for assault; sports, with their dependence on the most physical traits of sex; children, about whom there is controversy regarding the proper method for ascertaining whether or not medical (rather than just social) transition is appropriate; a few other things like that—where I think there is and ought to be a debate about how to achieve a fair and just and kind result for everyone—trans people very much included, but not exclusively.
Perhaps most controversially of all, I believe that many gender critical feminists (those who are in fact on the left, and are genuinely feminist, rather than the right-wingers using this issue to drum up hatred and votes) are actually concerned about some of these issues in good faith, and that while they may very well be wrong about some of them, they ought to be engaged with, not shunned or preemptively read out of the debate: that the divide here is not between righteousness and bigotry, but between people with different perspectives trying to think through (and negotiate) in good faith on some issues which are both new and complex.2 Relatedly, I think that while there are plenty of people who use either issues of definition (“what is a woman?”) or the rhetoric of “just asking questions” in a way designed to troll and disguise bigotry, theere are also lots of people who are, in fact, interested in those questions in good faith, and who deserve engagement, not silencing. While it’s true that the debate on these issues is decades old, in the sense that some people have been debating it for that long, it never was settled the way that, say, racism was;3 and more importantly, it wasn’t well chewed over even among intellectuals. Thus when people say, dismissively, that this issue has already been debated, it is true in one sense, but false in another: it is new to many, and it is not settled.
And just to reiterate: none of this, of course, means that trans rights—all the normal protections we take for granted for any sort of vulnerable group, such as protections in employment, housing, etc, and of course the basic physical protection of being unharmed and unthreatened—aren’t vital and important and (of course) human rights. Of course they are. There are just some ongoing philosophical and practical issues that are still being worked out. None of which have central bearing on the vital importance of laws and social norms protecting trans people in the ordinary course of their lives. Trans lives matter!
My sense is that most, or even all, of my marginal heretical positions are fairly widely held. Certainly many trans people hold them! But there is a vocal component on the left that says that any questioning along any of these lines is bigotry and betrayal. As an example: Natalie Wynn, who runs the splendid youtube channel Contrapoints (and is herself a trans woman) recently made an excellent video4 critiquing the podcast called "The Witch Trials of J. K. Rowling" (in which Wynn was among those interviewed). The overwhelming majority of the nearly two-hour video was a sharply intelligent, fierce defense of trans rights against (what she sees as) the attacks of Rowling and the misframing of issue by the podcaster. But at one point, as a very brief aside, she notes that there are issues that could be debated in good conscience without bigotry, such as trans women in sports.5 And when I saw the link on twitter, most of the replies I saw were people decrying her as a bigot and monster just for that one brief aside, and ignoring the rest of the video.
Which is to say, I think my positions are genuinely pro-trans, and in a way that could command a decisive majority, but with just enough questions and caveats that a very vocal group (not including all of trans people, nor including only trans people) would insist that what I am saying is nothing but rank bigotry. This tendency of the left—and this is hardly the only example—to say "you are with us or against us" while drawing a line that makes some people who think of themselves as on your side fall against you is, among many other things, wildly counter-productive. In many ways, one of which I am trying to illustrate with this story, to which I wish to now return.
I need to stress that at the time my friend got back in touch in order to break off our friendship, I had never written publicly about this issue.6 Occasionally—very occasionally, and even then less & less over time—I liked or retweeted a tweet about it. One time in particular was when I retweeted something by Andrea Long Chu—hardly an uncontroversial figure in trans circles, but still a trans woman writing (in my opinion, bravely and thoughtfully and well) about trans issues and the reality of her experience as she understands it. W. saw the retweet, and asked me about it. I explained that I was a Chu fan, and liked all her writing—this was before I realized quite how polarizing this issue was, how even the slightest deviations from the party lines (such as those that Ms. Chu7 commits) can condemn one in all-too-many people’s eyes. My friend was calmed—temporarily. Although in retrospect she seemed to be taking a position that while one might retweet a piece so heretical as that of Chu if one was a Chu fan, it was walking up to a line, and a matter of some real concern.
But I didn't talk about these things publicly. Even among friends, I had only discussed the issue at length with two (not counting my wife), of whom W. was one— but the second one.
The first friend with whom I talked about this—I’ll call her M.8—pushed back, hard, and seemed to be upset that I was uncertain about my position on all these issues. But while our friendship might have cooled slightly— I stopped working where she did soon after, so while I saw less of her, it's hard to disentangle the causes—it certainly didn't stop, and we definitely got together after that, and chatted in the old way, about other things. Still, it was a negative enough reaction that I rather thought that I wouldn't talk about it again, either with her or with anyone else: I didn't want to risk this friend's friendship, nor any others. So I just dropped it, and M., unlike (as we shall see) W., let me.
This was the context in which the issue came up with W., with whom I was closer than I ever was with M. It came up once or twice, and each time I said to W. that I didn't want to talk about it: my views were complex, and anyway I didn't want to risk damaging our friendship. And fundamentally I didn't care enough. It wasn't the focus of my writing or thinking or activism,9 and while it was something I was interested in, I felt no need to push that interest upon anyone else. It wasn’t worth risking losing a dear friend.
W. assured me: that could never happen with us: my other friendship may have been harmed by this—but ours couldn't be. We were too close. Whatever it was, I could say anything.
And we had talked about so many personal things. We had talked about our marriages, our kids, our problems, our lives—as well as about politics and books and many other things, too. Deeply personal things: in various realms I had told her things about myself, opened up in (specific) ways I hadn't with any other friend, or anyone except my wife (in the way that all friendships have their particular dialogues that don’t overlap with other even equally close friends). So, I thought, maybe....
So we talked about it. And since it is a tricky issue, and is one I disagree (maybe; a little; sometimes) with my ideological cohorts about, I was, briefly, happy to be able to begin to explore it intellectually in what I had been assured was a safe space. Why did I doubt? Was I missing something that my side all saw, or was this an issue that my side, our side, was perhaps slightly off-kilter on? So we spoke, and disagreed, and went back and forth—and parted, I thought, on good terms.
But it was then a while before we got together again—longer than had, over the prior years, become our custom—and when we finally did get back together, W. admitted, as our kids raced off to play together, that the delay was in part because that conversation had upset her. "Would it help," I asked, "if I told you that I support trans rights to housing and employment and to use the bathrooms they are comfortable with and to be free from violence and all that?"
She smiled and said, "Yeah, actually, it would help a lot!"
I should have seen as a warning sign that she was surprised by that declaration of beliefs. I had said nothing, nothing, that could indicate the contrary— unless one took any expression of doubt or dissent in any area (however marginal) as a revelation that one might be on the other side, within a framework in which there are only two starkly opposed sides. So that she thought I might not have supported those things was a red flag, and if I had seen it I might have done things differently (although I don’t know what). It also escaped my notice that while I had reassured her, she had not (also) reassured me.
Even though I had missed these (in retrospect clear) warning signs, I still didn't want to continue the conversation. But she did, and so, after some reluctance, I agreed. So we spoke about it again, at some length.
Both of those conversations were had on (lengthy) playdates with our kids—and thus were interrupted whenever they came back from whatever game they were playing to say they were hungry or tired or bored. We fell silent, not only because it was a serious adult conversation, and thus one that is boring to kids, nor just because it is a sensitive issue, but because my thoughts on it are complex enough that I wouldn't want to have kids exposed to fragments of it. I'd have answered my kid if he had asked, but only if he was willing to talk about it seriously, and at length. I don’t want bits overheard and misunderstood. So neither of those first two talks occurred in what I would call good environments for delicate, serious conversations.
And then, the next time we got together, after an even-longer-than-usual interval, it was just us. And my friend, once again, raised the topic. She even said (again) that she hadn't called in a while because she was disturbed about what I thought on it. So she wanted to talk about it.
"I'm don't think we should talk about it," I said (roughly, paraphrasing from memory). "I care much more about our friendship than I do about this issue. I don't talk about it with most people. I just think about it because it's a big issue in politics these days, and I think about most of those. But it's not that important to me. So can we just not discuss it?"
But she insisted; so we did. We talked about very basic things—was biological sex a real thing, for instance, or was it simply and purely an arbitrary social construction—not about detailed social policy, or anything like that. This was probably a mistake, since my views on policy were close to the mainstream liberal consensus, whereas I harbored serious questions about some of the more outlandish ontological claims made by activists. But in any event I raised some doubts about the undiluted trans activist view of things; she rebutted. She was clearly upset by what I was saying, and I repeatedly tried to end the conversation; eventually, I forced the ending.
That third conversation may have been (my memory is uncertain) the last time I saw her.
I should stress again: in none of those conversations was I able to really go into depth about what I thought. The issues are too complex; my feelings too muddied and uncertain, requiring towers of caveats and zig-zags that I didn't have time to build; and her reaction every time I raised a single thread of an issue was to insist on debating that, rather than the whole. In my mind we had just begun to embark (at least the first two times) on what would be (if we continued it) a long conversational project, one which would have taken months or more to go through, and which would inevitably have intermingled with our other conversations and our friendship in other ways (like many other ongoing conversations we had had, and were having). We had, in other words, only had the beginnings, explored the edges, of what I would consider true conversation. And from her reaction to that, I would have let the matter drop, so we could remain friends. But she insisted. Until she stopped getting together with me altogether.
For a while, we continued to have text conversations from time to time; when we did, she was nice, if a little distant. We caught up on each other’s lives. But she didn't accept my suggestions about getting together—either just us, or with our kids—making vague excuses about being busy. But for a while there were still a few conversations, until eventually those dwindled to birthday salutations and emojis.
Until, one evening in the spring of 2021, she texted me out of the blue, months after our last communication (those birthday wishes), and perhaps two years after she started pulling back emotionally, and long after I had decided, mournfully, that whatever the cause, the friendship had died. Here's what she wrote:
Hi Stephen, I am sorry to say I have some hard things to share with you about our friendship. I have wrestled with this for a couple of years, and I now feel like I have found the words. I wondered if you would prefer to hear my thoughts by email or by phone. It is also fair to say that you don't want to hear what I have to say and our friendship can end here. With appreciation for all we have shared, W.10
Ten minutes later, after confirming with my family it was a good time, I phoned. She said, "How are you?", but I felt it would be genuinely weird to try to answer that under the circumstances, so instead I simply said, "You had something you wanted to say to me?" So she did.
She acknowledged how close we had been, and how I had helped her through her divorce. But, she said, she had pulled back. And she didn't want me to think that it was just because she had gotten a new partner, or for any of the other reasons that one might think. She wanted it to be perfectly, absolutely clear that that she was ending our friendship because of my beliefs.
What beliefs, I asked.
She said that I "didn't believe that everyone had full human rights", or perhaps she said “deserved” full human rights—which would actually be a slander if applied even to most of the avowedly gender critical feminists I have read, let alone to me, who simply has questions on the margins. Nevertheless I did not interrupt.
She went on to say that if she met a new person with my views, she wouldn't have befriended them, but that she had been making an exception for me. But this, she knew, was wrong. I needed to be shunned—as a moral issue, but also as a safety issue. I was not safe to have around her child or her neighbors. What if I said something about this issue and her daughter overheard? (This issue that I tried desperately not to speak of, even to her; that I fell silent upon when our kids approached; that I generally don't speak of, at all.)
But mostly the issue was presented as moral: it would be immoral of her to associate with me. It came across as something religious: I was tref, polluting, taboo, and needed to be cast away. "If thy eye offend thee, strike it out!" was the tone. It could be nothing I did, since I did nothing and had done nothing (not even spoken about it, unless pressed); as I have said, I signed no petitions and wrote nothing on the topic. Her objection was simply to my beliefs.—My heresy.
The weirdest part, I think, was that it was not a call to repentance. That would have made some sort of sense: to say, we used to be friends, but I can't be friends with you any more unless you repent your wicked ways. Then I would have understood the purpose of the phone call: it would have been (from her point of view) my last chance at redemption.
But that wasn't what she was doing. Only about halfway into the conversation did she even get around to asking if I had changed my views since we last spoke. Mostly, she wanted to make it perfectly clear why we were no longer friends.
When she finished, I asked if she wanted to hear what I had to say, or if she just wanted to hang up. She said she wanted to hear it.
So then I spoke.
I spoke first about how betrayed I felt—how I had desperately wanted not to risk the friendship by talking about this, about how she had assured me that we were too close to part over this and that speaking with her was a safe space. Secondly, and perhaps most urgently, I tried to suggest that she doesn't understand what I really thought; that the views she described in her opening monologue were flatly not ones that I held; that to describe me as she did was outright slander; that the monster she saw was in her mind, not reality. That she saying to me "depart ye cursed into eternal fire" without even finding out what I really thought.
"Well, what do you think?" she replied.
But I answered that I refused to discuss an issue that was complex, about which my feelings were muddled, under these circumstances. That I would not stand ideological trial to find out if I were worthy of her friendship. That she, as she was now, didn't get to know that. I would have, at one time, been willing to explore these issues with her—if doing so didn't cause me to risk what she assured me I could not lose, but which I ultimately lost long before any real exploration could happen: our friendship. But now, in these circumstances? No. I would not explain myself. She asked me a few questions, pressing me a bit; I mostly refused to answer. Taking the fifth is really the only reasonable response to "are you now, or have you ever been, a communist?" The question—in that tone of voice, in that context—is illegitimate, and must be refused, not replied to.
The final thing I tried to communicate was that the only one of us who was hurting any actual person was her. She was hurting me—had hurt me, badly enough that the friendship was probably dead no matter what happened. That I did not act on these issues in any way contrary to how she would have had me act. I never misgender anyone; I have trans friends and relatives I love. I never discussed the issue. I was doing nothing that could cause harm. Whereas she was causing harm, emotional harm, to a real live person. To me. If someone was being treated as less than fully human, it was her friend, not any purely-hypothetical victims of my wrongthink.
She had, basically, two responses to this point. The first was that what was going on was really my doing, at least partly. Here, I think, she was copying, not the words, but the structure of thought very familiar in left-wing online spaces: that harm done by criticizing a wrongdoer is not harm done by the critic. If X hadn't done Y, or would stop doing Z, there would be no criticism. And, of course, in many cases this is perfectly true: if the police stopped killing people, then criticism of them (at least on that issue) would stop; if sexual harassers didn’t harass, they wouldn’t be canceled. The difference here, of course, was that all I was really doing was believing — and that I couldn't stop just by willing it; in order to stop, I needed to be convinced. Presumably on some level she knew this, which is why this wasn’t a call to repentance: I had no actions to repent. Just heresy.
In the actual conversation, I didn't get much beyond the "I'm not doing anything; you're the only one hurting someone" point. This led to her second response: you're accusing me of something just like I'm accusing you of something. In other words, we were equivalent.
I pointed out the obvious, glaring asymmetry here: she was accusing me of immoral beliefs, despite my protestations that I didn't believe what she thought I did; whereas all I was saying that she was doing was what she was doing, explicitly, right then. She was wrong about what I thought, and had to admit at least to uncertainty (and no, I wouldn’t explain—not under these circumstances). Whereas there was no uncertainty about what she was doing. "You are doing it right now, as we speak," I said. "There's no doubt about that."
It was around this point that she hung up on me. I have no reason to think I will ever hear from nor see her again.
I think that this story puts debates over cancel culture in a different light. The most frequent response to the issue of cancel culture from the left side of the political spectrum is to alternate between two positions: the denial that it exists, and the denial that it is of any significance as there are only a handful of cases of excess. Of course, the incident I have described hits pretty much every vector upon which leftists minimize or deny incidents of cancel culture. I was not harmed in any material way — I was not fired, for instance. My feelings were hurt; I lost a dear friend. That is all. ("All": what a culture we live in, which sneers at feelings and friendships as though those were nothing!) Unless my former friend is going around slandering me to mutual friends, hardly anyone even knew about it until I published this.
But I think that when people worry about cancel culture, incidents of this sort are at least as common a fear as actually losing employment. People fear social shunning. Most people care about their friends; to lose them hurts. (We often hear the sneer: "so and so will be fine", by which is meant, "has enough money", as though poverty were the only harm a person can suffer.)
Further, the claim, so common on the left, that you are only shunned if you are actually a Nazi or do something horrific is falsified by my story. All I did was doubt—not even believe anything concretely, beyond "sex is real and different from gender identity (while of course the latter is important and needs to be protected)" and "the principle that we should call people what they want to be called should apply to gender critical feminists (so don't call them TERFs) just as much as to trans women (so don't deadname or misgender them)." But canceling is not about preventing harm; it is about preventing thought.
Of course, most people would not call this canceling: as I said, I have not lost a job or anything concrete like that. But that's the point. People see cancel culture, and they feel it as an overarching threat. Censorship is always more effective in what it gets people not to say on their own than in the actual censoring. How many people shut themselves up on this topic to avoid precisely what I went through—the losing of good friends? I myself did this—I didn't speak about this at all, recall, save with one other friend and W., and certainly never wrote about it—and even that didn't protect me!
Let me try to explain, briefly, why this matters.
Start with the fact I already mentioned: that this was not a call to repentance; that there was nothing in particular my friend was asking me to do—save, perhaps, announce that I had changed my mind. There was nothing else to ask me to do! I wasn’t doing anything about trans issues—I misgendered or otherwise ill-treated no one; I did not express my views; I signed no petitions and went to no marches. On other grounds I was voting only for left-wing candidates, all of whom were, in the natural course of things, pro trans rights. And I was happy—eager—to drop the issue with her and never talk about it again. It was not a call to repentance because there was nothing for me to cease doing. Nor was there anything for her to fear: if we had stayed friends, she would never (had we agreed, as I wished, to set the issue aside) have noticed my disagreement with her again.11
But she knew all that, and it wasn’t good enough. What she wanted was not to be friends with anyone who thought such things (although she did not really understand what I thought, not at all). The (implicit) opportunity she gave me to change were not behave differently or I shall unfriend you, for there was no behavior to change; the demand was think differently or I shall unfriend you.
I wonder if she ever stopped and considered how impossible a demand that is.
It is easy, after all, to say whatever is required—for instance, that one believes that trans women are women, full stop, no qualifications or differences.12 It is almost as easy to act as if one believes that. But if you do not, in fact, believe it, can you really make yourself believe something different at will?
To change beliefs, you need persuasion. You need reasons. Anything else is either to pretend to change belief, or perhaps try and force yourself to accept a meta-argument ("other people know better, and believe this, therefore I should outsource my beliefs to them"—good reasoning, I think, on technical issues about which we don't have expertise, but not persuasive about moral or political ones). But to actually stop believing it I needed to be convinced.
And to be convinced, I would need to think it through—and thought requires freedom to genuinely consider all sides of an issue. Otherwise it's not thinking; it's lawyering. Starting with your end result gets you nowhere.
At one point in our final conversation, my friend had, indeed, said she had (earlier) insisted we speak about it because thought she could convince me, and that was also why she said that it was safe for us to talk about it. Which is a particular naiveté common on the left: it assumes that someone who disagrees with you must be making a simple and obvious mistake. I had read at least as much as she had on this issue, and thought about it at least as much as she; why was she so confident she could convince me? And not only convince me, but convince me quickly, not through delving with me into a long and complex ongoing conversation about these issues (the one that I had briefly fooled myself into thinking we might have), but in a quick one-two punch.
She thought she could convince me because she thought there was no issue here, no real matter about which reasonable minds might disagree. It is a level of certainty that the left often has, and often to its detriment: it not only keeps the left from , but it keeps the left from persuading, since we will not allow people the mental space to think things through.
The ultimate demand is to agree without thought, or with (at most) only show trials of the intellect that know the verdict before beginning. I suspect that W. and I would, in fact, agree on most matters in the end—certainly on most policy issues, ranging from the importance of antidescrimination bills to protect trans people to how one ought to address trans people one meets. But that I even considered the contrary was heretical—at least considering it longer than a brief conversation, which was all that was allowed me to see the light. Actual thought—which, again, comes only from actually trying to see all sides, and consider all arguments, to be open to them—is not only discouraged, but actively forbidden.
And yet, and yet, and yet. Be honest, Stephen. Do you not feel this way about issues dear to your heart? Take the issue you feel most fervently about, climate change. Do you not feel this way about that?
Well, sort of; but not really. It differs in two basic ways.
First, there is a fundamental difference between the two issues: the truth of anthropogenic climate change is a scientific question, while how to deal with trans issues is a moral (and political and social and cultural) question. Scientific questions are genuinely open to (understood and evaluated by) experts within the field. And scientific questions are based upon empirical evidence: we go look at the world, and make arguments based on that.13 Moral (and political and social and cultural) issues, in contrast, are about values: they are up to all of us, and while facts are relevant to our discussions, they are not determinative in any simple way. Which is to say, it is possible to be empirically wrong about climate change in ways it is not about trans issues.
(Of course, these issues intersect: that climate change is occurring is a scientific issue, but how deal with it is a political (etc) one; on the latter there is room for debate, as long as one sticks within the bounds of science’s empirical findings. Similarly, one can have whatever views one wishes of trans issues, but one ought to bear in mind relevant facts (about, e.g., what would happen to trans women if they are refused entrance to women’s bathrooms), and not deny them.)
So that is one key difference. But even more important is the second: I would not deny a friendship over this.
I know this is true because I did find out that a (different) dear friend of mine was a climate change denier. Oh, I knew he was in general on the right. But since he was a doctor (and had done some grad school in the sciences), I didn’t think he would go that far. And then I found out. And truth be told, when I did, it squicked me out. It seemed to say something about his personality, his being, that made me rethink who he was as a person.
And I think I had better cause for upset with him than W. did with me. He is taking action—at the very least, voting for candidates who implement policies which will do enormous harm to the planet, kill many people, and may possibly end up destroying civilization and even causing the extinction of the human race. And given the nature of the issues, climate change is simply a more dire problem than trans issues, whatever one thinks about the latter.14
But you know what? I got over it. We had one disturbing conversation, I grumped and fretted a bit, and then the next time we got together we talked about... all the other things we usually talk about. And while I would be lying if I said that it did not bother me at all, I do not let that bother enter my actions. Because he was my friend. Because friendship is a value, and it matters just as much as any other value matters. Oh, sure, I also knew that if I defriended him it wouldn’t do any good: it wouldn’t convince him, nor anyone. But I don’t think that I would have—and I certainly don’t think I should have—defriended him over this even if I thought that doing so might change his mind. To think otherwise is a shallow and nasty view of friendship; it is to reduce a person to nothing but a series of positions. It is anti-human, in the deepest sense.
A friend is a person; a political cause, any political cause, is an abstraction. Friends, along with family, are what makes a person who they are. To deny that is deep and terrible. I am reminded of E. M. Forster’s famous line “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” I know a lot of people will disagree with that; but it seems to me plain and clear truth.15
But it’s even more than that. People need friends; people need conversation to think. To refuse to be friends with people for whom you disagree is to block the way of inquiry. To think at all requires being able to test and play with ideas that you don’t ultimately find you agree with. And friends are, ultimately, the people we test our ideas with, whom we learn with, through conversation. Not to allow people the freedom to be wrong without social banishment is not only anti-human; it is anti-rationality, even anti-thought.
And being cruel is, I think, an even worse thing than that.16
Let me end with a word on my epigraph.
It’s from an album by the punk group Against Me!, whose lead singer and chief songwriter, Laura Jane Grace, came out as trans mid-career. In fact, it’s the album where she began to (publicly) work through her pain about being trans. It’s a great album; I like it a lot.
Grace, of course, was talking in the song about a dead friend in the literal sense, one who has gone to the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. But the pun is there: in trans culture, one speaks of dead names, that is, names that no longer apply to oneself. It is in that sense that W. is my dead friend.17 (I trust that she is not dead in any other sense, although I am not sure I would find out if, heaven forfend, she died.)
This is true, I think, in a somewhat deeper way than “dead” simply being a substitute term for “former”. A trans woman’s dead name is more than a former name (such as people who change their names for other reasons might have). It is a pain, a wound, one that can never heal. In part this is because while it doesn’t apply to her, it did: it remains there, in her past; there will always be people know her by it. It sits in their memories: it sits in hers. She cannot ever be entirely rid of it, however much she tries (although, of course, we should help and not make matters worse insofar as we can). It is and will remain attached to her, even though it doesn’t fit, and isn’t really her name any more, and (in some sense) maybe never really was.
Similarly, W. is more than simply a former friend; she is a pain, a wound, one that can never heal. In part this is because while the term “friend” doesn’t apply to her, it did: it, she, sits in my memories. I often think of her fondly; other times I hate her—for being small minded, for having betrayed my trust. I both want no harm to come to her and dearly hope she feels anguished by guilt for what she did.18 No, it is not that sometimes I think of her fondly and sometimes I hate: I do both, whenever some treacherous madeleine brings her to mind. The conflict is just there, in me.
Even if she were to come to me and say she’d been wrong, could we be friends again?—I mean, I’d try. But I can’t imagine trusting her ever to be really friends again, not as close as we were. I can’t imagine, for instance, talking to her about these issues—even as I desperately hope that, somehow, she finds this blog and reads this post (she won’t).
I cannot ever entirely be rid of her friendship. It is not my present, but is my past. She was my friend, and remains so in my head, although it’s a burden: the word doesn’t fit. It’s not really true any more. Maybe it never was. And at the same time, she’s not anything else to me, either.
I miss my dead friend.
Note: After initial publication (and emailing), this essay’s subtitle was changed. The earlier subtitle was “Talkin’ About my C-C-C-C-C-C-C…”. I had in fact meant to publish it with the new subtitle (which I thought of later), but forgot to change the actual electronic text.
Not, obviously, her true first (or last) initial. In the spirit of our times, I should introduce her by categories: she is a white cis lesbian.
To be clear, I think that (many) otherwise left-wing gender critical feminists are arguing out of good faith; I think that (many of the) right-wing opponents of trans people are simply acting out of bigotry. It's a fine line, but the basic division in my view is whether you are trying to achieve a just and fair and decent result for everyone, including trans people, or whether you are trying to push trans people out of public life.
Many people will, undoutedly, object to this characterization of racism. It’s a complex point and I can’t fully address it here. But what I mean is this: if you read the speeches of politicians and mainstream intellectuals around 1900 or before, they are open and unabashed racists. Even those who were, compared to their opposition, on the side of African Americans’ rights spoke about their racism overtly (“I… am in favor of the race to which I belong, having the superior position” — Abraham Lincoln, 1858). By 1950, however, this was far less true: racist policies were disguised as neutral, and the leading opponents of the Civil Rights Movement (not the klan, but the politicians) claimed that segregation was good for both races and that they were not racists at all. (“No one voted for me in the 1964 Presidential primary who is anti-Negro. I am not myself, and I ran no such campaign, nor have I ever run a campaign that was anti-Negro.” — George Wallace, 1968.) Which is to say, the most basic issue—the fundamental fact that to be racist was wrong as such—was resolved (again, in mainstream society: there were a lot of dissenting voices on the margins, who, alas, still remain, and if anything are emboldened from where they were before); what remained, and remains, were debates over what that means. Many historians, I think, would say that this fact is of little importance, but I myself disagree: I think that the philosophical and rhetorical changes behind it were key in the eventual successes (real albeit partial) of the Civil Rights Movement.
In contrast, the fundamental issues around trans identity—what does it mean to transition from one sex/gender to another—remained in debate and were never as fully resolved; there remained, all the way through, feminists who embraced and feminists who rejected trans women among them (trans men were less spoken about until recently). While activists for trans rights like to claim the issues are resolved, I think that is untrue, and has never been true, if public consensus is the measure. Which is why atttempts to shut down debate feel so different in this case.
Not to say I agree with eveyrthing Wynn says, nor even think all of it is fair and just, but it is intelligent and thought-provoking and well-made and entertaining and raises important points in a worthwhile way and what more do you need to call a video excellent?
Although Wynn also correctly notes that that issue is complicated, and that there is a difference between, say, an elementary school sports team and world championships, as well as between a trans woman who never went through male puberty and someone who just came out and has been on hormone replacement therapy only a short time. You know, the sorts of issues that those who wish to discuss this issue rather than pass crudely-aimed laws or write crudely-aimed insults would naturally think about.
With the publication of this essay I now have, at least to some minor extent, deviated from that. It's still not something I want to talk about at length, but I couldn't think of any way to tell this story without saying, specifically, what I was cancelled for, and (at least roughly) what I think about the issue I was exiled upon. The fact that trying to bully me in the way that W. did backfired (insofar as her aim was not simply to isolate herself from (what she perceived to be) my views, but to influence in some small way the world)) should not surprise: intellectual bullying often leads to a strong reaction. The left, it hardly needs to be said, really needs to internalize this lesson.
Or is she Dr. Chu by now? I’ve lost track.
Also not her actual initial.
Such as it was; I actually doubt anything I do rises to the rather grand level of “activism”. But I didn’t, e.g., sign petitions about it or write to congresscritters about it or anything like that.
This is verbatim except, of course, that she signed her real name, not "W.".
The closest thing she had to a fear is a comment she made about being worried that I might make some remark in the presence of her kid. The mental model here is bigotry, so that it will find its way out even if the person does not realize it, and it will harm anyone who hears it (by persuading them? By offending them? It’s unclear.) If she had paid me the basic respect of thinking I might have actually disagreed with her, she would realize I was no more likely to burst out about this issue unwanted than I was about, oh, the idiocy of the filibuster or the necessity for gun control. I only bring those up when I (and those I am with) want to talk about them. Further, if she had thought of it as disagreement, she would have realized that even if I had made a stray remark (which, again, I wouldn’t have) it wouldn’t hurt her kid in any way: at worst her kid might have thought I was a bad person—which now she is sure to think, since presumably W. has explained to her kid why she can’t be friends with my kid any more.
Note that I am not saying I disbelieve that; I don’t believe either that or the contrary; I think it's complicated and involves a lot of careful defining of categories. I do believe that trans women ought to be treated as women in nearly all circumstances (with some minor exceptions for things like, e.g., sports, where physicality is such a big part of the issue, at least for those trans women who went through male puberty), even as we ought to be able to explore the underlying ontology of that in the meantime.
And in the case of climate change, there has, of course, been an overwhelming consensus of experts for decades, and the evidence for it accumulates further every year.
This is why I am always stunned to see someone say that they will no longer vote left due to trans (or other culture war) issues. If there is an issue that is life or death for the species, is there really any other issue that matters?
Although if you disagree, we can still be friends!
Although it’s close.
Cue accusations of appropriation in five, four, three…
I am virtually certain she doesn’t.
I'm sorry you went through that; it sucks to lose a friend, and in such a frustrating way too.
I've been through a similar experience; my elementary school and jr high school best friend blocked and ghosted me about a decade ago, after we had a political argument on Facebook. I sort of shrugged it off at the time, figuring that eventually he'd cool down and we'd open communications again. Then, sadly, he passed away. :-(
First, my sympathy. I'll straight up say she just put you in a crappy situation, and it's pretty clear to me that, if she's been brooding on this for that long, then it really is "her problem," whatever led to draw lines in the sand.
Second, and this may not be exactly analogous to cancel culture but it contributes to it... The real danger here is self-righteousness. And it's dangerous because it leads to situations like this where someone decides that X is right or the truth or the way things have to be, and all that's left to do is use whatever force you have available to make the world conform. There's no longer doubt, questioning, even communication or attempts to convert (like you explain). There's mere force. Self-righteousness makes you disengage from the rest of the world as a participant and sets you apart as a judge. I'm sure you could come up with all kinds of wonderful psychological explanations for why certain people in certain circumstances feel that they need that attitude toward the world, but from everyone else's perspective, that person ceases to be a person and becomes a walking, talking force. You can only ally with or oppose them. But you can't engage them, can't have a relationship with them as an equal because they've removed themselves from any sort of vulnerability or recognition that they are one-among-others. They're just a tool of whatever idea or attitude has them in their grip.
I love your point that in situations like this, the only person actually doing harm to someone else is the person demanding that others conform to whatever decision they've made. That's why it's particularly upsetting to see it used so often on the side of ideas that, I would hope, are intended to decrease the harm and suffering in the world. But political/moral identities in our culture often seem stand in as substitutes for other more concrete kinds of solidarity and community and relationships, but when the most concrete outcome of your "opinions and stances" is that you drive away people in your life, what the hell's the point? A room that only contains people who've passed your purity test may be a pretty lonely place.
(Plus, there's a slippery slope version of this: if you're willing to cut people off from your life as not even worth engaging and trying to convince, what's to prevent you from deciding that maybe it'd be better if you don't share the same public spaces, the same institutional benefits, the same rights, etc. McCarthyism isn't a far fetched comparison.)