Cancel Culture and the Transgender Issue

By Editor |

Thursday, August 13, 2020

(In an effort to clarify my thoughts on the transgender issue, I have written several articles on it [all posted on this blog].  Many of those articles say similar things.  My original article on the issue -- "The Whole Transgender Thing" -- may be the most interesting of all of the them because I was new to the issue and still exploring the ramifications.)

I am not a person who spends much time on social media.  I have several accounts, but I never use them.  Even on Facebook I only play the computer games.  The truth is, I don't understand the appeal of social media.  I don't get any sense of community from it.  I would much rather exchange emails with a pen pal or talk to someone on the phone.  Because I'm not on social media, the "cancel culture" thing crept up on me slowly.  I didn't even know it was happening until I took an unpopular position -- specifically, that transgender women are not real women (and similarly for transgender men).  The place where I experienced cancel culture wasn't on social media at all, but in the comments sections of news articles.  Stating my opinion (in normal, non-abusive language) caused people to call me a "hater" and a "bigot".  Frankly, I was gobsmacked.  Why would people hate me for stating something so obvious and true?

Since then I have learned that some people's careers have been ruined by cancel culture.  J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books (who agrees with me about transgender people), has had huge amounts of abuse heaped on her on social media, in addition to articles written by critics telling her that she should retire -- and all because she can tell the difference between reality and fantasy.  Even Daniel Radcliffe, the actor who portrayed Harry Potter in the movies, has criticized her (the ungrateful twerp).

Cancel culture is an odd thing, and the fact that it is so closely tied to the transgender issue is puzzling.  First, however, I should try to define it.  "Cancel culture" refers to people who are so certain of their opinions that they feel justified in heaping abusive criticism on anyone who disagrees with them.  Part of the purpose of this abusive criticism is to silence them -- i.e., "cancel" them.  In all cases, the "cancellers", as I call them, fancy themselves to be taking the moral high ground on the issue.  Invariably, the cancellers are liberals.  (I am a liberal too.)  Most of this abusive criticism is offered on the internet, usually on social media platforms, but it can occur anywhere.

Without realizing it, I have engaged in cancel culture.  When exchanging comments with someone who didn't believe that white policemen as a group have unconscious bias against blacks, I told him he was a bigot for not believing in something that is so obviously true.  I realize now that I shouldn't have called him that; I should have just pointed out that statistics confirm (and they do) that the police have unconscious bias, given that they stop, question, arrest and kill a much higher proportion of blacks than whites.  Since my position on that issue was correct, no one was harmed by that exchange, although I was uncivil.

The harm occurs when the cancellers are wrong, as they are on the transgender issue.  When transgender people came into the news some years ago, they were portrayed as sad individuals who were trapped in the wrong body, which is supposedly some kind of existential torture.  A great deal was said about how they are prone to suicide -- and everyone knows now (or should) that in lower-class neighborhoods they are frequently murdered.  Consequently, not feeling sympathy for transgender people is considered as heartless as not caring about the starving children of Yemen.

In order to make transgender people feel better about themselves, the idea was hatched that people have male or female brains, and that transgender people have brains that are the opposite of what their bodies say.  In this way, a transgender woman can point to her brain as the thing that explains who and what she is, and it will help her to feel greater legitimacy as a woman.  But then the transgender community took this a step further and said that because a trans woman has a female brain, that makes her an actual woman -- and that's where they started to part company with reality.  Even if a trans women has a female brain (a concept which is still in the theory stage), that doesn't justify ignoring the gender of the body as if the body didn’t exist.  Human beings are physical creatures, not disembodied spirits.  A real woman is a person with a female body, not a person with a male body and a female brain.

In short, the idea that a trans woman is a real woman is a social idea; it has nothing to do with biology.  Yet many transgender people are talking as if it is biologically true.  In the mean time, the purveyors of cancel culture still see transgender people as sad and pitiful and are as vicious as ever in promoting the idea that they are real men and women.  I find it interesting that all of this pretending is being done for no other reason than to make trans people feel better about themselves.

I believe that transgender people are not so delicate.  For a transgender woman to admit what she is -- a man with gender dysphoria -- isn't so horrible that she shouldn't be able to accept it or develop good self-esteem.  Indeed, transgender people are getting so much support these days that I think it is time to stop seeing them as victims.  All that a transgender person needs to do to make some money is to put a sad plea on Go Fund Me that he or she is being discriminated against, and the money will pour in.

There is a reason why people like me care about this issue.  First, the accepted norms and/or shared beliefs of a society should not be based on social pretenses.  They should be based on scientific facts.  Second, women in particular are disadvantaged by transgender women.  In many parts of the world, transgender women are being allowed to compete against real women in women's sports.  But transgender girls and women have physical advantages over real girls and women, and there are many examples of transgender girls and women dominating female sports.  This is unfair to real females.  Women are already an oppressed group within society (all societies), and the irony of women's sports being dominated by men behaving as women is inescapable.

If transgender women gain the legal status of real women, then all kinds of ironic situations become possible.  For example, government or charitable benefits meant to support real women could be diverted to trans women.  Trans women will be given access to women's single-sex spaces, such as rest rooms, dormitories, locker rooms, changing rooms, shelters and prisons.  With many trans women not getting sex-change operations (and some of them not even taking hormones), that puts real women in the position of having to live with actual men, not to mention looking at men's genitals in locker rooms.  It creates an opening for predatory men to access women's private spaces where women could be assaulted.  (A few such assaults are known to have occurred.)  It also has an existential effect that needs to be recognized.  Including trans women in the definition of women dilutes what it means to be a woman.  A woman then becomes any person who proclaims herself to be female, and who looks feminine (if indeed looking feminine is even necessary, since at least one famous trans woman in Britain sports a beard).

Imagine a situation in which a corporation decides that it needs more women in management, and then proceeds to hire trans women for those positions.  Real women will not have been helped, and the unique perspective of women will not be represented in management.  That's a fairly absurd scenario, but it makes my point.

This article was not meant to be about the transgender issue, but about cancel culture, so let me tell you the ways in which I have been cancelled.

A transgender college student wrote to Amy Dickinson (an advice columnist) complaining that his parents and family would not treat him like a man or use his male name.  In his letter he proudly stated that he was "a man", meaning a real man.  I posted a comment on the column saying that he was not a real man, and then giving him advice on how to handle the situation in a more realistic way.  Half a day later, that comment, plus many comments that followed mine (in which the commenter had agreed with me) had been deleted by a moderator.

That happened on the Washington Post web site, which I see as one of the purveyors of cancel culture.  A couple months later the Post erased a half-dozen of my comments on an article about a transgender college student who was suing to join the girls' track team.

On Towleroad, a gay blog, my ability to post comments was blocked altogether because I left several well-reasoned comments explaining why trans people are not the sex they claim to be.  Apparently, telling trans people that they are not real men and women is so insulting to them that such opinions must be expunged as hate speech.  It is ironic to me that so many gays are taking up the cause of transgender people because there are very few similarities between the two groups.

On Medium.com, my post on a trans activist's article was removed, and then my IP address was blocked when I reposted it.

My comment on a Huffington Post article was blocked.  Like the comment on Towleroad, it was a well-reasoned comment that had nothing abusive in it.  Knowing that they would censored me in the future, I decided to close my Huffington account.

Most recently, I discovered that YouTube is censoring comments about transgender people, even on the pages that are critical of them.  YouTube uses computer algorithms to block comments, although sometimes it appears that articles are being deleted by moderators.  Whether they are doing this only on pages that have videos about transgender people, or all pages, I don't know.

Ultimately -- in December, 2020 -- YouTube deleted my account altogether, so now I can't leave any comments at all, although I'm able to watch the videos.

I'm sure that if I used social media, I would have people trying to shout me down there also.  I pre-emptively closed by Twitter account because I already knew they would censor me once I waded into the issue.  That's what cancel culture does -- it shouts down people and opinions the cancellers don't like.  It's a form of non-government censorship.  I see the cancellers as modern-day Brown Shirts.  That various businesses themselves have made themselves part of cancel culture is especially disturbing.

One of the ironies of all this cancelling is that trans people themselves know better than anyone else that they are not real men and women.  Many trans women still have their male genitals, so they are reminded that they are not actual women every time they go to the bathroom.  Trans women who have had sex-change operations are well aware that their new genitalia are non-functioning facsimiles, and that they can't menstruate or give birth.  If trans people themselves are reminded on a daily basis that they are not the real men and women they want to be, why must the rest of us go along with the fiction?

I am not suggesting that trans people should not have any rights, or should not be treated in the manner they wish to be treated.  In social and workplace situations, they should be treated as the gender they want to be.  But to allow trans women to participate in women's competitive sports, or to occupy women's shelters and dormitories, etc., means that we are choosing the rights of 1% of the population over the rights of 52% of the population (i.e., real women), and that makes no sense at all.

Cancel culture becomes most pernicious when it is practiced by news organizations/ publications which should be making an effort to be impartial.  This puts those publications in the position of stifling debate, which is unequivocally something that news organizations should support.  If my assertion in a comment that a trans woman is not a real woman, causes my comment to be deleted, though the assertion is true, then the entire debate about who and what transgender people are has been censored.  In one fell swoop, three things have been censored:  the debate, the truth, and the person who spoke the truth.  Is that really the position that The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, Medium.com and Towleroad want to put themselves in?

Cancel culture is on its way to being discredited.  People on the internet are getting tired of being scolded for expressing their honest opinions.  Transgender people themselves are headed for a backlash as they bring lawsuits to force their way into single-sex environments where they don't belong.  Their association with the cancellers will also harm them, since the cancellers do not have a democratic mindset.  Reality doesn't take a break for aggressive self-deluded people.