Queer historian Jules Gleeson recently conducted an interview with academic Judith Butler for the U.S. branch of The Guardian, a British daily newspaper. Gleeson noted a recent incident at a health spa in California where it was reported (falsely, it turned out) that a trans woman had exposed her genitalia to children. That such occurrences would become common as a result of social acceptance of transgender people is a common canard used by opponents to transgender rights, be they right-wing social conservatives or self-professed feminists who are hostile to letting trans women into their spaces (or even simply recognizing them as fellow women).
Indeed, in the aftermath of the spa furor, anti-trans feminists rallied alongside right-wing extremists like the Proud Boys. In the interview, Butler said feminists who oppose trans rights ignore “how culture and nature interact … in favor of a regressive and spurious form of biological essentialism.” She added this essentialism is “one of the dominant strains of fascism in our times.”
Shortly after the interview was published, a large portion of the interview including the above comments were removed from the Guardian US Web site without comment. In interviews Gleeson has since done, it has become apparent editors with the U.K. parent version of The Guardian had intervened to censor the article after a secret internal discussion. An update was posted to the edited interview indicating the basis for the deletion concerned the reference to the spa incident, which turned out to be a case of indecent exposure, with it unclear if a trans person ever even attended the spa that day.
This explanation, however, does not address the actual substance of the question, which is the apparent alliance between people claiming to be feminists with defenders of “traditional family values,” anti-abortion activists, and so on. Gleeson has even said she offered to revise the question to refer to other examples, such as the right-wing Heritage Foundation advocacy group (supporters of the Texas bill that now essentially prohibits abortion) hosting events featuring feminists extolling trans-exclusionary views.
The editorial staff of the Guardian US who commissioned the interview, however, reportedly said the issue was settled and out of their hands, adding credence to the belief the purge came from the British parent company. Eoin Higgins has since written an account verifying this, with unnamed sources employed by The Guardian stating that prominent editors are openly transphobic, especially Susanna Rustin, the newspaper’s lead writer on social affairs and a former editor of the Opinion and Review sections.
Rustin has written openly about her belief in biological essentialism and hostility to the concept of “gender identity.” But she has not been a singular transphobic voice at the U.K. Guardian: in March 2020 journalist Suzanne Moore authored an article where she said gender was a biological category and “not a feeling.” Later that month, a letter signed by 338 Guardian employees rebuked the “transphobic content” of the article as well as the newspaper’s history of publishing such material.
In 2004 the newspaper had published a piece by Julie Bindel entitled “Gender Benders, beware” in which she wrote: “I don’t have a problem with men disposing of their genitals, but it does not make them women.” In 2018 regular contributor Hadley Freeman condemned in her column “woke bros” for ignoring the “significant physical differences between male-born bodies and female-born ones.” In 2019, another Guardian columnist, Gaby Hinsliff, deplored of “a small minority of trans activists resorting to aggressive threats online and physical intimidation … in real life.” In 2020 Catherine Bennett dismissed the outrage expressed by transgender people online to children’s author J.K. Rowling’s transphobic comments as “misogynistic.” A common thread of all these transphobic articles is how advocates for transgender equality are silencing debate by instigating mobs of angry followers as part of an illegitimate and faddish movement, all of whom are lacking a credible stake in defining womanhood.
So, we have here the height of irony: an interview being censored by a cabal allegedly decrying censorship, when their views on gender identity and transgender rights are dominant at the major newspaper they work for. Non-Britons might not know that The Guardian is the only major center-left newspaper in the U.K., considered synonymous with the latte-sipping urban middle class that we in the United States associate with The New York Times. They also might not know that, unlike the U.S., transphobia is even more mainstream in the U.K. than it is here. Whether they mean it or not, many major institutions in the U.S. have adopted the rhetoric of endorsing equality for transgender people. While still marginalized, transgender people have also become more visible in U.S. society and popular culture. This is not the case in the U.K., where even people who openly identify as “liberal” or “on the left” do not believe transgender people to be valid.
A major part of the reason for this divergence is the lack of social and economic diversity in many aspects of British life. Around 94% of British journalists are white and over half come from elite private schools. Granted, in the U.S., a majority of newsroom employees (77%, to be specific) are also white, and certainly the Ivy League produce much of the staff at our own major newspapers. The difference lies in how our countries regard privilege. While it has never been true, the U.S. has long touted itself as an inherently meritocratic place, with no royalty or nobility. In the U.K., the class system persists, even if absolute monarchy does not. This does not just refer to the stratification between the wealthy and the working class, but also the colonial hierarchy inherited from the British Empire, where white Britons are considered more culturally “authentic” than Britons descended from migrants from former British colonies. Again, none of this is to deny the epidemic white supremacy and class inequality in the U.S., but whereas there has been a slow, incremental cultural revolution against these hateful, hurtful forms of discrimination, this simply has not taken place in Britain. If “wokeness” is greater awareness about inequality and its harms, then Britain is decidedly, proudly fast asleep.
As Butler states, this widespread opposition in the U.K. to letting trans women into the social category of women is a product of culture and nature intersecting. Definitions set boundaries on what is or is not, who is or is not, and thus confer a degree of power. When trans-exclusionary feminists express opposition to transgender equality, their usual talking points—such as trans women invading women’s spaces to prey on women, or confused girls performing gender reassignment surgery because of a “trend” or “phase”—are not based on anything that has actually happened. They are smoke and mirrors meant to obscure the real motive: to protect what social capital bourgeois white women have gained by excluding those deemed “outsiders.” It is no coincidence that Rustin, Bindel, et al are white, cisgender, able-bodied women, the traditional focus of the feminist movement, which has historically ignored or erased the experiences of women who are ostracized due to race, sexual orientation, disability, and so on. “White feminism” (as feminists of color like Ruby Hamad and Rafia Zakaria have documented) has led to white women making major inroads, but typically at the expense of solidarity with other women. “Cis feminism” is even more insidious than “white feminism” because, while fortunately socially women of color are regarded as undeniably women, transgender women have not yet gained that widespread acceptance. They are still fighting for legitimacy and mainstream approval.
Of course, to protect their capital, feminist transphobes cannot simply confess to engaging in discrimination. Instead, they portray themselves as the underdog, the vulnerable, the victim. Since the above authors are women, any criticism they come in for their views must be based on a hatred of women (as Bennett argued in the case of Rowling). It does not matter that many of the people angry with Rowling were trans women; Bennett subtly denies their womanhood by dubbing them all women-haters.
In the above columns, there is usually fearmongering of an imminent thought police sending people to re-education camps. This echoes the “cancel culture” panic in the U.S. and the idea that any public figure will be “cancelled” if they say something offensive, like Kevin Hart losing a job hosting the Oscars for homophobic jokes he made in the past, or the widespread criticism of Rowling mentioned earlier. Critically, however, Kevin Hart is still one of the most in-demand comedians in the U.S.; Rowling has not lost her book deal and is still one of the ultra-wealthy; Mel Gibson still has a career in Hollywood after repeated racist tirades; Brett Kavanaugh still received a lifetime appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court despite accusations of sexual assault; and so on and on ad nauseum.
“Cancel culture” is a myth, as is the idea that trans activists are part of a vast network wielding immense influence and resources to “cancel” public figures. Actually, the columnists at The Guardian are far more influential in this respect, as the censoring of the Gleeson-Butler interview makes obvious. A fictional defaming and discounting of white bourgeois feminists, however, distracts from the very real, long-standing defaming and discounting of trans people, which proceeds as quietly as ever.
The real “danger” concerning the columnists above is not some Orwellian future but the social media platforms of the present. They make it possible to interact with celebrities, journalists, politicians, and so many other groups accustomed to not actually having to answer to the public. Their lives are not one iota less comfortable, not one jot more onerous because some anonymous troll is pouring vitriol in their feed, or even because a campus campaign stops them from receiving a generous payday lecturing at some college. While the general public enjoys heaping informal sanctions upon badly behaving public figures, once the moment has passed, their collective memory can be very short indeed. Does the average person today know Jerry Seinfeld once dated an 17-year-old when he was 39? Or that Justin Bieber once told racist jokes? It is doubtful many people even know who Woody Allen or Roman Polanski are, much less that their careers continued after sordid sexual misdeeds.
No, what the transphobic authors at The Guardian and elsewhere are really worried about is the leveling effect that social media offers and the way it amplifies ordinary people, or the people who really are on the margins, whose lives are truly threatened. While the transphobes fear some hypothetical trans-run dictatorship, trans people in the U.S. are dying at a very alarming rate, with 2021 set to become the deadliest one on record. Yet far more pages are published about “cancel culture” than about the ongoing carnage conducted against transgender people—and, sadly, far more people click on the former articles than the latter ones.
We cannot let transphobes control the narrative. We cannot permit them to succeed with creating thinly-veiled defenses for opposing trans rights and resisting greater diversity. Critically, we cannot let them weaponize identity politics. A feminism that does not include women of color or trans women is fundamentally pro-segregation and pro-discrimination. Right now, the transphobes have a powerful platform in the form of The Guardian, along with many others. But trans activists and their allies have online voices of their own, and they must use them to call out the hypocrisy and lies of anti-trans propaganda.
Bakunin Matata! 