Below the paywall you’ll find my latest column in The Dispatch. This is one of the (many! uncountable!) benefits of being a premium subscriber to Singal-Minded — you get these columns about a day after they appear (also behind a paywall — sorry everything in the world is paywalled) on The Dispatch.
This column is a response to a conspiracy theory that bothers me. The conspiracy theory holds that the backlash to trans rights is the result of “out-of-state billionaires” (Graham Platner’s view) or center-left/“reactionary centrist” types, myself included, in outlets like The Atlantic or The New York Times (all of Bluesky’s view).
The basic idea is that voters have been bamboozled into thinking a “fake” issue is a “real” issue. There isn’t actually anything to talk about when it comes to the briefly, wildly successful progressive campaign to change how society views sex and gender identity, and to institute many of those changes into law and regulation (and despite the backlash, many of those codified changes remain).
I’d like to briefly mention the response to the article from Alejandra Caraballo, the trans activist and clinical instructor at Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. She has come up before in this newsletter and is generally not worth engaging with. It is to our collective benefit that she has sequestered herself on Bluesky, where she can do her thing all day far from society.
But I can’t resist responding to two bits from the lengthy skeetstorm she posted in response to my article (you won’t be able to read it unless you’re signed in — which, maybe for the best…).
First:
Singal frames trans advocacy as demanding “someone’s sex is what they say it is” with “no questions asked.” This is the caricature that the right spent those hundreds of millions constructing. He’s repeating the propaganda in a moderate voice to appeal to liberal’s prejudice. [next skeet]: Actual legal frameworks for gender recognition vary enormously and involve documentation, clinical engagement, and administrative processes. Singal collapses all of that into the most inflammatory possible framing and attributes it to a monolithic movement. It’s a strawman.
Specifically, I wrote that the trans backlash appears to be the result not of some broad, deep-seated animus toward trans people and a desire to see them removed from their homes or jobs (for example), but because the “specific arguments trans advocates and progressive politicians have chosen to embrace simply don’t appear to have worked at all,” emphasis in the original.
And that, I argue, is
largely because they center on a maximalist version of self-ID, or the notion that someone’s sex is what they say it is. Blue states have passed laws extending this logic to areas like locker rooms and prisons, and these are wildly unpopular positions for obvious reasons: Most people don’t think biological males should be able to enter female spaces with no questions asked.
It is undeniably — undeniably — the case that mainstream trans activism has pushed for no-questions-asked self-ID! I don’t understand how anyone could have the audacity to claim otherwise! It’s too bad the word gaslighting has been ruined by overuse because damn, is this close: An activist coalition pushes X, someone responds by noting that X is very unpopular and leads to some bad outcome, and one of the activists in question sputters “What? We weren’t pushing for X! What are you talking about! That’s the most inflammatory possible framing!”
Obviously, Caraballo is correct in saying that the “actual legal frameworks” vary, but that’s not due to a lack of effort on the part of activists, who have pushed for just about the simplest legal framework possible: Because this person says so. California itself is a great example: It used to have a system that provided prisons with the discretion to make individual decisions about where trans women should be housed. Then the ACLU and other activist groups pushed for a law that basically turns this into a matter of self-ID, with explicit “regardless of anatomy. . . based on the individual’s preference” language that makes it difficult to keep males out of women’s prisons.
This from Caraballo annoyed me a lot more:
Singal claims marriage equality imposed “nothing other than hurt feelings” on opponents. This is revisionism and ignores religious exemption litigation like Masterpiece Cakeshop. Opponents made the exact same tangible-harm arguments. Singal sanitizes that history to make the comparison work.
Here’s the passage Caraballo is quoting from: “With a very tiny number of exceptions, gay marriage did not, in fact, impose anything other than hurt feelings and offense on its opponents.”
Part of the reason to stay away from Bluesky is that it is filled to the brim with the most brazen, shameless liars. I can’t imagine a better example than this: I write a sentence in which I make a point, note the existence of exceptions to that point, and link to the most famous exception. Caraballo responds by claiming I didn’t address the exception, quoting from the sentence where I addressed the exception! What do you even do with a “public intellectual” who acts in this manner? Again: Thank God for Bluesky and its sequestration function.
Anyway, the column itself is below for premium subscribers. Hope you enjoy it.
Trans Issues Are No Conspiracy
The public pays attention to trans issues because trans activists wanted them to.
There’s been an undeniable backlash against the trans rights movement. In February, the liberal outlet The Argument reported on the results of a survey it had commissioned of 3,000 registered voters. The problem wasn’t just that the mainstream trans advocacy position was underwater on genuinely fraught issues like sports and youth gender medicine, but that even a seemingly settled issue—bathrooms—also now polled poorly for trans people.
