I feel like actually maintaining the line between speech and aggressive action is the thing that’s missing.
When people beat me up or sexually assault me for my lifestyle and it’s excused away by authority figures as boys being boys it becomes a question of physical and psychological safety.
With no guarantee that the line between speech and action will be honored and aggressively enforced then speech becomes an important prelude to violence. Maybe I’m just being paranoid hyper vigilant but it’s the most salient event of my life and moving to a community where professional norms are effectively a gag rule against certain types of speech are also a significant shield against violence.
Also the fear and anxiety created by the speech in the wake of that violence makes the distinction really quite thin feeling. I understand it’s unworkable to make people responsible for how safe I feel but conditions where people speak a certain way are exactly the same as where they punch you or sexually assault you. Conceptually I get the value of free speech but it’s hard to see it when it usually means give up any red flags to abuse in the workplace and public.
I feel like it's not a separate conversation at all. I feel like my question of how much free speech I want in a society operates in direct relationship to will I be physically safe and receive reciprocal treatment if I say something.
In a world where you feel like you can be yourself and you'll be protected from retribution then free speech is very appealing. But that's not really the world I've ever known. Perhaps I'm being hyper vigilant bordering on paranoia but it's the only world I know is one where there's a really high chance of violence unless you're among a known to be safe audience.
John Stuart Mill (and Mary Wollstoncraft) laid out what an advanced society and culture would look like a very long time ago, theie political and societal analyses still havent been notably improved upon to my mind, and the most reasonable of their entreaties seem to be the hardest for people to grasp. True social liberalism recognizes that the flourishing of the transdendent collective is the aim but can only be done by empowering the immanence of the individual. Its really just about us all working out how to get along, despite wanting different things, but with the hard to stomach requirement that we be willing to die for our and others right to be righteous
I've always been pro-First Amendment, and my position really solidified thirty years ago in the old IRC chat group #holysmoke, a small group of atheists and skeptics who came together to challenge religious thought and dogma. I also followed them on BBS's which I was on back in the day.
They championed allowing *all* bad ideas apart from those that *clearly were detrimental* to others. The difference was, "Hitler had the right idea," which was offensive but legal; "We should kill all the Jews today," was illegal. Instead of banning the first idea, they championed holding those views up to the light and examining them critically. I tell you, those were heady days back then. That was also around the time that the concept that 'hate speech' might need to be banned, championed by many on the left. Critics warned then that it was a slippery slope and they were right; now 'hate speech' is what the left calls, "Any expression I find repugnant even though normal people wouldn't and for which I have no logical or rational response because I can't think critically."
Canada, where I live now, and at a time when I had no clue that I would one day become a Canadian citizen, had free speech problems even back then. It led the United States (for change) in free speech abrogation, unfortunately. My then-partner was on a free speech listserv and he would pass on stories I might think were interesting (I was taking adult ed classes at the time and didn't have time for it myself. Also it was all men engaged in, from what I could tell, intellectual dick-slinging). Some of the stories came from Canada, free speech fights he thought I'd find interesting. And it's gotten much, much worse since then.
Thank you for this article explaining that free speech is the only way to ensure the ability to debate ideas, which, in turn, is the best way to expose morally harmful ones.
I wonder if in some future writing you might address the idea of censorship. As a woman and a grandmother to a granddaughter, I am concerned about the pervasiveness and availability of violent and extreme pornography online. While I have no hard evidence to connect this extreme pornography to increasing violence against women and girls IRL, my “common sense” understanding tells me that the two are likely to be connected. In my ideal world, pornography that normalises eg choking and sexual assault would not exist because I believe it harms women and girls and, from a moral perspective, if not so much a physical harm harm perspective, I believe it affects men and boys adversely too. Indeed I see it as a danger to society as a whole because of its dehumanising effect.
However, freedom of expression, the twin of freedom of speech, presumably requires that extreme online pornography should not be censored. While I have become close to a free speech absolutist in recent years (woke made me do it!) I do find it difficult to reconcile the problem of the harms created by extreme pornography with my belief in free speech/expression. I’d love to hear your views on this dilemma. (Perhaps you’ve already written about it?)
Freedom of speech is also a benefit for individuals.
To be able to confront ideas that you find threatening or uncomfortable, while standing upright and being able to respond without losing your head...that's empowering! That's possessing moral character and fortitude.
By the same token, desiring to suppress viewpoints you disagree with because one find them personally "harmful" speaks to a personal weakness, not righteous victimhood.
“It is that no government, institution or social faction can be trusted with the power to decide which opinions may be expressed.”
This has always struck me as the simplest even-a-fifth-grader-can-understand-it explanation of why we need free speech.
So I always find it just …*weird* … that so many people, usually progressives, are still pushing for restrictions on categories of speech. Despite the fact that, well, in the US, Trump is the president and both houses of Congress are controlled by R’s, so whoever is in charge of deciding what speech will be prohibited will almost certainly not prohibit the speech that progressives want prohibited. And would probably prohibit a lot of speech that progressives don’t want prohibited.
So of course I’m frustrated that my response to these suggestions - “So you want to give the Trump administration the power to decide what speech is acceptable” - does not lead to immediate recantation and conversion.
The only logical explanation, I suppose, is that I am talking to fourth graders.
The question your argument leaves unaddressed is what happens when the prevailing moral orthodoxy is itself the mechanism of societal destruction, and when it has already colonized the very institutions that free speech depends on to function? The liberal framework you're describing does not protect the dissenters. It protects the ideology, under the banner of protecting speech. Liberal democratic institutions should protect my right to state uncomfortable truths yet this very same framework has provided the cultural scaffolding under which making them has been professionally and socially punished. The censorship apparatus that suppressed claims like "there are only two biological sexes," "not all white people are racist" shouldn't come as a surprise. It was the predictable output of an ideological formation that had captured institutions precisely because free speech protections allowed it to propagate unchallenged until it was entrenched. You say that, "having to continually defend freedom of speech gets in the way of the productive conversations that advance knowledge." Precisely. Waht is needed is the structural preconditions without which the principle of free speech cannot function. https://michaelronin.substack.com/p/the-knife-that-cuts-its-own-throat?r=kmned
I agree with everything here, but I wonder if there's an important lens that is missing (from here and the "free speech" conversation in general)?
What do you think about the role of "social consequences" to punish speech that society broadly finds socially unacceptable? IMO, overt, hateful, eliminationist bigotry is a violation of our 'universal moral taboos' and is not something we should tolerate within polite society, even if we protect everyone's legal rights to express this hatred. I believe such 'principled ostracism' was critical in marginalizing and defeating the KKK (that's why they had to wear hoods and hide their identities), and is the same playbook we must follow today, or we will see this hateful bigotry normalize and spiral us into violence and anarchy at unprecedented levels. And I believe this can be done in a principled way that doesn't violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
I recently wrote (https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-more-speech) about my criticism of "free speech culture" absolutism, as espoused by Greg Lukianoff and FIRE, as I believe it introduces a dangerous loophole when they say "we want all Nazis to reveal themselves" AND "any Nazis fired for their legal speech is cancel culture and thus bad", or "you shouldn't have to choose between having a job and an opinion." Those might be good taglines, but I believe they fail on principle, because it's unreasonable to argue that somebody should and would have a regular job if they spent their weekends openly calling for discrimination or violence against Jews, blacks, Asians, whites, men, Republicans, etc. My only ask to Greg and FIRE is to stop speaking so broadly, applying the same (correct) absolutism of "free speech laws" to "free speech culture".
I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you agree that there's a tremendous risk to society, and almost a guarantee of it coming to pass, if there are NO social consequences/incentives for people to NOT express such overt, hateful bigotry (AKA if nothing is "taboo")? Do you see our collective response to marginalizing the KKK as a reasonable playbook of principled ostracism we should pursue today? If you don't, I'd love to understand why.
I’ve just explained why in this piece and, I believe, to you before.
You won’t get everybody to collectively socially shame certain beliefs because people have different beliefs. They will be critical of the ones they disapprove of and think poorly of the people who express them and not want to be friends with them.
It is not that you can say “We should all collectively shame and not tolerate white supremacists” and get a consensus on this by magic. Nor will other people who think we should all collectively shame people for being gay or having interracial relationships.
If we lived in a reality where there were ‘universal moral taboos’ against racism, we wouldn’t need to make arguments about it. Clearly, you do. If I said, right now, “Yes, we should all socially disapprove of bad things” it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? If I wanted to get everybody on board, Id still need to make a case for why the bad thing is bad, why people should care about it being bad, why they should show this socially. If we got enough of a consensus on this to no longer to need to argue that, we’d not need to argue it. Like we no longer have to argue against child sacrifice as a practice.
The fact that we do still need to oppose virulent racism indicates that there is not a consensus and you will be socially shamed for being racist in some social circles and for not being racist in others. All we can do now is make good arguments.
I’m only repeating what I have already said a million times and also just written in the piece you are responding to. I cannot set this out any more clearly.
I’m going to see you out now, though, because I am out of patience with you never seeming to hear me on this subject and also suggesting that I might just not have thought about the “But isn’t it good to socially shame bad ideas really?” argument. I have agreed that this is the way to legitimately defeat bad ideas but also that it’s quite clearly an organic process hundreds of times. As we increasingly recognise ideas to be bad collectively, we naturally lose respect and liking for people who express them and they become less popular because people want ti be respected by their peers. Your naive suggestion that we just start at the end somehow and have this consensus and do the shaming as some kind of activism is either a failure to recognise that to get a genuine consensus, you still have to make arguments and convince people and show bad ideas to be bad or a desire to impose values on others via illiberal activism.
I was needing very much to hear many of these things because lately I have felt very dispirited. I do believe that gender critical feminism morphed into a wing of MAGA because of exclusion from mainstream institutions. Those activists were welcomed with open arms by Fox News, right wing publications, and even Evangelical Christian podcasts. They justified their collaboration with such media because they felt silenced elsewhere and saw this as their only opportunity to get their point of view heard on a national level.
While I understand how it happened, I feel very judgey about them doing what I would never do: form an alliance with blatant racists and Christian nationalists because of an unrelated shared objective. I mean, maybe if we were in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, I would be willing to work with people like that in distributing food or medical help — but penises in locker rooms? That’s cause for abandoning or ignoring all other values? And people who never showed a bit of interest in the condition of our prisons (which are among the worst in the industrialized world) have been, for the last decade, single-mindedly focused on publicizing and opposing the presence of transwomen in women’s prisons — and they’re doing it in cooperation with groups seeking to criminalize abortion nationally and even repeal the 19th amendment which guarantees women the right to vote.
They have discredited themselves beyond repair, I think, and I wonder: what happens next? Transgender people have been stripped of a number of basic rights at the federal level — you probably heard about Caitlin Jenner’s renewed passport identifying her as male — and in red states there are scores of bills seeking to establish laws restricting their employment. There are even efforts to outlaw wearing clothing marketed to one’s non-natal sex. Many of these far right objectives are likely (but not guaranteed) to fail, and Democrats will almost certainly fully retake the government in the next two election cycles and reverse Trump’s executive orders.
It will be very difficult, then, to take a strong stand against retaliation and score-settling without appearing to support the substance of what these people have represented. So the early part of your piece seems especially pertinent, the part about how it’s natural to want to represent one’s own stand alongside the defense of the free speech of people one doesn’t really respect or like. But I have a hard time envisioning what that means, practically; I don’t know what the nuts and bolts are, how free discourse can be built when so much indifference and ill will have been shown.
I despise the Robin DiAngelo style of antiracism but we all saw what happened at Trump’s birthday event: as part of the country’s semiquincentennial, in front of the White House, in an event funded by taxpayer dollars, a shirtless MMA fighter bellowed into a microphone: “Michelle Obama is a man!” He was met with cheers and applause. (There are millions of American racists who are unable to get over their indignance that a black man was president of this country for 8 years.) If that’s not systemic racism, what is? And of course, hectoring privilege walks in schools and workplaces aren’t going to do anything to help, but I wonder what will? How are we going to avoid a reprise of all that 2018—2022 bullshit? It seems important to be thinking about this now. An article like this one has me doing that but I’m really just a nobody — I hope your ideas reach people who can actually do something.
Yeah, I have a piece on the go for Skeptic at the moment about this - why it is so important that we don’t backlash against backlashes but form a properly liberal left. Will enough people be convinced to do this? I am very worried that they won’t. I don’t know what to do, though, apart from try to help build a liberal left so that people will vote for it and not swing wildly back and forth.
We have a load of people calling themselves gender critical who are actually gender conservative and also hold views that are racist, sexist and homophobic too, but they mostly weren’t feminists to begin with. The genuine materialist leftist feminists who started the movement are still there and still standing by their principles.
I would argue that the problem with your perspective is that you don't believe in good or bad ideas; you believe in good or bad people. The fact that right-wing people agree with gender critical people infects the ideas of the gender-critical people, in your view. You don't consider the fact that perhaps, in this one regard, right-wing people are correct, gender-critical people are correct, and the majority of left-wing people are wrong.
As someone who taught critical thinking for a long time, the first thing I told my students was: who has an idea is irrelevant to the issue of that idea's truth or falsity. Nazis believed in making the trains run on time and had a well-developed sense of men's fashion. Are we going to say that, because Nazis believed in these things, they are wrong? Of course not. If you believe (as I do) that a) Gender ideology is incoherent and b) Capitalism has a ton of bad tradeoffs that need to be controlled for the sake of the health of society. It's not illogical for me to make a coalition with the right if they are the only ones with the power to reduce the effects of gender ideology on society, and make a coalition with the left to reduce the negative trade-offs of capitalism. That's just moral and political realism, because *everyone* is going to disagree with you on some things.
EDIT: Also, you could only argue that "gender critical feminism morphed into a wing of MAGA" if you found them making common cause with MAGA on other issues, not just making a coalition of convenience in order to push back on gender identitarian overreach. Generally, MAGAs are wrong about almost everything, and even when they are right, they are usually right for the wrong reasons (i.e., they actually mostly just don't like anyone who isn't a straight white man). However, if the difference between stopping the downstream negative effects of gender ideology (transed children, men in women's sports, prisons, and private spaces) and not is a coalition between Gender Criticals and MAGAs, isn't more good done in the world by building that coalition than not? What possible argument is there for not doing so, except that some people whose critical thinking skills aren't very well developed might be confused?
I feel like actually maintaining the line between speech and aggressive action is the thing that’s missing.
When people beat me up or sexually assault me for my lifestyle and it’s excused away by authority figures as boys being boys it becomes a question of physical and psychological safety.
With no guarantee that the line between speech and action will be honored and aggressively enforced then speech becomes an important prelude to violence. Maybe I’m just being paranoid hyper vigilant but it’s the most salient event of my life and moving to a community where professional norms are effectively a gag rule against certain types of speech are also a significant shield against violence.
Also the fear and anxiety created by the speech in the wake of that violence makes the distinction really quite thin feeling. I understand it’s unworkable to make people responsible for how safe I feel but conditions where people speak a certain way are exactly the same as where they punch you or sexually assault you. Conceptually I get the value of free speech but it’s hard to see it when it usually means give up any red flags to abuse in the workplace and public.
I feel like it's not a separate conversation at all. I feel like my question of how much free speech I want in a society operates in direct relationship to will I be physically safe and receive reciprocal treatment if I say something.
In a world where you feel like you can be yourself and you'll be protected from retribution then free speech is very appealing. But that's not really the world I've ever known. Perhaps I'm being hyper vigilant bordering on paranoia but it's the only world I know is one where there's a really high chance of violence unless you're among a known to be safe audience.
So many great points made here.
John Stuart Mill (and Mary Wollstoncraft) laid out what an advanced society and culture would look like a very long time ago, theie political and societal analyses still havent been notably improved upon to my mind, and the most reasonable of their entreaties seem to be the hardest for people to grasp. True social liberalism recognizes that the flourishing of the transdendent collective is the aim but can only be done by empowering the immanence of the individual. Its really just about us all working out how to get along, despite wanting different things, but with the hard to stomach requirement that we be willing to die for our and others right to be righteous
I've always been pro-First Amendment, and my position really solidified thirty years ago in the old IRC chat group #holysmoke, a small group of atheists and skeptics who came together to challenge religious thought and dogma. I also followed them on BBS's which I was on back in the day.
They championed allowing *all* bad ideas apart from those that *clearly were detrimental* to others. The difference was, "Hitler had the right idea," which was offensive but legal; "We should kill all the Jews today," was illegal. Instead of banning the first idea, they championed holding those views up to the light and examining them critically. I tell you, those were heady days back then. That was also around the time that the concept that 'hate speech' might need to be banned, championed by many on the left. Critics warned then that it was a slippery slope and they were right; now 'hate speech' is what the left calls, "Any expression I find repugnant even though normal people wouldn't and for which I have no logical or rational response because I can't think critically."
Canada, where I live now, and at a time when I had no clue that I would one day become a Canadian citizen, had free speech problems even back then. It led the United States (for change) in free speech abrogation, unfortunately. My then-partner was on a free speech listserv and he would pass on stories I might think were interesting (I was taking adult ed classes at the time and didn't have time for it myself. Also it was all men engaged in, from what I could tell, intellectual dick-slinging). Some of the stories came from Canada, free speech fights he thought I'd find interesting. And it's gotten much, much worse since then.
Thank you for this article explaining that free speech is the only way to ensure the ability to debate ideas, which, in turn, is the best way to expose morally harmful ones.
I wonder if in some future writing you might address the idea of censorship. As a woman and a grandmother to a granddaughter, I am concerned about the pervasiveness and availability of violent and extreme pornography online. While I have no hard evidence to connect this extreme pornography to increasing violence against women and girls IRL, my “common sense” understanding tells me that the two are likely to be connected. In my ideal world, pornography that normalises eg choking and sexual assault would not exist because I believe it harms women and girls and, from a moral perspective, if not so much a physical harm harm perspective, I believe it affects men and boys adversely too. Indeed I see it as a danger to society as a whole because of its dehumanising effect.
However, freedom of expression, the twin of freedom of speech, presumably requires that extreme online pornography should not be censored. While I have become close to a free speech absolutist in recent years (woke made me do it!) I do find it difficult to reconcile the problem of the harms created by extreme pornography with my belief in free speech/expression. I’d love to hear your views on this dilemma. (Perhaps you’ve already written about it?)
Freedom of speech is also a benefit for individuals.
To be able to confront ideas that you find threatening or uncomfortable, while standing upright and being able to respond without losing your head...that's empowering! That's possessing moral character and fortitude.
By the same token, desiring to suppress viewpoints you disagree with because one find them personally "harmful" speaks to a personal weakness, not righteous victimhood.
“It is that no government, institution or social faction can be trusted with the power to decide which opinions may be expressed.”
This has always struck me as the simplest even-a-fifth-grader-can-understand-it explanation of why we need free speech.
So I always find it just …*weird* … that so many people, usually progressives, are still pushing for restrictions on categories of speech. Despite the fact that, well, in the US, Trump is the president and both houses of Congress are controlled by R’s, so whoever is in charge of deciding what speech will be prohibited will almost certainly not prohibit the speech that progressives want prohibited. And would probably prohibit a lot of speech that progressives don’t want prohibited.
So of course I’m frustrated that my response to these suggestions - “So you want to give the Trump administration the power to decide what speech is acceptable” - does not lead to immediate recantation and conversion.
The only logical explanation, I suppose, is that I am talking to fourth graders.
The question your argument leaves unaddressed is what happens when the prevailing moral orthodoxy is itself the mechanism of societal destruction, and when it has already colonized the very institutions that free speech depends on to function? The liberal framework you're describing does not protect the dissenters. It protects the ideology, under the banner of protecting speech. Liberal democratic institutions should protect my right to state uncomfortable truths yet this very same framework has provided the cultural scaffolding under which making them has been professionally and socially punished. The censorship apparatus that suppressed claims like "there are only two biological sexes," "not all white people are racist" shouldn't come as a surprise. It was the predictable output of an ideological formation that had captured institutions precisely because free speech protections allowed it to propagate unchallenged until it was entrenched. You say that, "having to continually defend freedom of speech gets in the way of the productive conversations that advance knowledge." Precisely. Waht is needed is the structural preconditions without which the principle of free speech cannot function. https://michaelronin.substack.com/p/the-knife-that-cuts-its-own-throat?r=kmned
Excellent piece Helen.
I agree with everything here, but I wonder if there's an important lens that is missing (from here and the "free speech" conversation in general)?
What do you think about the role of "social consequences" to punish speech that society broadly finds socially unacceptable? IMO, overt, hateful, eliminationist bigotry is a violation of our 'universal moral taboos' and is not something we should tolerate within polite society, even if we protect everyone's legal rights to express this hatred. I believe such 'principled ostracism' was critical in marginalizing and defeating the KKK (that's why they had to wear hoods and hide their identities), and is the same playbook we must follow today, or we will see this hateful bigotry normalize and spiral us into violence and anarchy at unprecedented levels. And I believe this can be done in a principled way that doesn't violate the 1A or succumb to the excesses of "cancel culture".
I recently wrote (https://whiterosemagazine.com/the-dangerous-myth-of-more-speech) about my criticism of "free speech culture" absolutism, as espoused by Greg Lukianoff and FIRE, as I believe it introduces a dangerous loophole when they say "we want all Nazis to reveal themselves" AND "any Nazis fired for their legal speech is cancel culture and thus bad", or "you shouldn't have to choose between having a job and an opinion." Those might be good taglines, but I believe they fail on principle, because it's unreasonable to argue that somebody should and would have a regular job if they spent their weekends openly calling for discrimination or violence against Jews, blacks, Asians, whites, men, Republicans, etc. My only ask to Greg and FIRE is to stop speaking so broadly, applying the same (correct) absolutism of "free speech laws" to "free speech culture".
I'd be very curious to hear your thoughts on this. Do you agree that there's a tremendous risk to society, and almost a guarantee of it coming to pass, if there are NO social consequences/incentives for people to NOT express such overt, hateful bigotry (AKA if nothing is "taboo")? Do you see our collective response to marginalizing the KKK as a reasonable playbook of principled ostracism we should pursue today? If you don't, I'd love to understand why.
I’ve just explained why in this piece and, I believe, to you before.
You won’t get everybody to collectively socially shame certain beliefs because people have different beliefs. They will be critical of the ones they disapprove of and think poorly of the people who express them and not want to be friends with them.
It is not that you can say “We should all collectively shame and not tolerate white supremacists” and get a consensus on this by magic. Nor will other people who think we should all collectively shame people for being gay or having interracial relationships.
If we lived in a reality where there were ‘universal moral taboos’ against racism, we wouldn’t need to make arguments about it. Clearly, you do. If I said, right now, “Yes, we should all socially disapprove of bad things” it wouldn’t make any difference, would it? If I wanted to get everybody on board, Id still need to make a case for why the bad thing is bad, why people should care about it being bad, why they should show this socially. If we got enough of a consensus on this to no longer to need to argue that, we’d not need to argue it. Like we no longer have to argue against child sacrifice as a practice.
The fact that we do still need to oppose virulent racism indicates that there is not a consensus and you will be socially shamed for being racist in some social circles and for not being racist in others. All we can do now is make good arguments.
I’m only repeating what I have already said a million times and also just written in the piece you are responding to. I cannot set this out any more clearly.
No, everybody serious thinks there is need for a lot of nuance. I’ve been writing with what I hope is nuance for 15 years on the subject and this is partly why I don’t want to go back to the basics in notes. Here is where I have addressed your specific employment related questions. https://www.hpluckrose.com/p/the-difference-between-incitement-66c?r=1nm3qt&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
Here is where I have addressed the broader issue in most fundamental detail. https://freethinker.co.uk/2024/05/the-marketplace-of-ideas-will-always-exist-the-only-choice-we-have-is-how-to-work-with-it/
I’m going to see you out now, though, because I am out of patience with you never seeming to hear me on this subject and also suggesting that I might just not have thought about the “But isn’t it good to socially shame bad ideas really?” argument. I have agreed that this is the way to legitimately defeat bad ideas but also that it’s quite clearly an organic process hundreds of times. As we increasingly recognise ideas to be bad collectively, we naturally lose respect and liking for people who express them and they become less popular because people want ti be respected by their peers. Your naive suggestion that we just start at the end somehow and have this consensus and do the shaming as some kind of activism is either a failure to recognise that to get a genuine consensus, you still have to make arguments and convince people and show bad ideas to be bad or a desire to impose values on others via illiberal activism.
I was needing very much to hear many of these things because lately I have felt very dispirited. I do believe that gender critical feminism morphed into a wing of MAGA because of exclusion from mainstream institutions. Those activists were welcomed with open arms by Fox News, right wing publications, and even Evangelical Christian podcasts. They justified their collaboration with such media because they felt silenced elsewhere and saw this as their only opportunity to get their point of view heard on a national level.
While I understand how it happened, I feel very judgey about them doing what I would never do: form an alliance with blatant racists and Christian nationalists because of an unrelated shared objective. I mean, maybe if we were in the aftermath of a nuclear attack, I would be willing to work with people like that in distributing food or medical help — but penises in locker rooms? That’s cause for abandoning or ignoring all other values? And people who never showed a bit of interest in the condition of our prisons (which are among the worst in the industrialized world) have been, for the last decade, single-mindedly focused on publicizing and opposing the presence of transwomen in women’s prisons — and they’re doing it in cooperation with groups seeking to criminalize abortion nationally and even repeal the 19th amendment which guarantees women the right to vote.
They have discredited themselves beyond repair, I think, and I wonder: what happens next? Transgender people have been stripped of a number of basic rights at the federal level — you probably heard about Caitlin Jenner’s renewed passport identifying her as male — and in red states there are scores of bills seeking to establish laws restricting their employment. There are even efforts to outlaw wearing clothing marketed to one’s non-natal sex. Many of these far right objectives are likely (but not guaranteed) to fail, and Democrats will almost certainly fully retake the government in the next two election cycles and reverse Trump’s executive orders.
It will be very difficult, then, to take a strong stand against retaliation and score-settling without appearing to support the substance of what these people have represented. So the early part of your piece seems especially pertinent, the part about how it’s natural to want to represent one’s own stand alongside the defense of the free speech of people one doesn’t really respect or like. But I have a hard time envisioning what that means, practically; I don’t know what the nuts and bolts are, how free discourse can be built when so much indifference and ill will have been shown.
I despise the Robin DiAngelo style of antiracism but we all saw what happened at Trump’s birthday event: as part of the country’s semiquincentennial, in front of the White House, in an event funded by taxpayer dollars, a shirtless MMA fighter bellowed into a microphone: “Michelle Obama is a man!” He was met with cheers and applause. (There are millions of American racists who are unable to get over their indignance that a black man was president of this country for 8 years.) If that’s not systemic racism, what is? And of course, hectoring privilege walks in schools and workplaces aren’t going to do anything to help, but I wonder what will? How are we going to avoid a reprise of all that 2018—2022 bullshit? It seems important to be thinking about this now. An article like this one has me doing that but I’m really just a nobody — I hope your ideas reach people who can actually do something.
Yeah, I have a piece on the go for Skeptic at the moment about this - why it is so important that we don’t backlash against backlashes but form a properly liberal left. Will enough people be convinced to do this? I am very worried that they won’t. I don’t know what to do, though, apart from try to help build a liberal left so that people will vote for it and not swing wildly back and forth.
We have a load of people calling themselves gender critical who are actually gender conservative and also hold views that are racist, sexist and homophobic too, but they mostly weren’t feminists to begin with. The genuine materialist leftist feminists who started the movement are still there and still standing by their principles.
I would argue that the problem with your perspective is that you don't believe in good or bad ideas; you believe in good or bad people. The fact that right-wing people agree with gender critical people infects the ideas of the gender-critical people, in your view. You don't consider the fact that perhaps, in this one regard, right-wing people are correct, gender-critical people are correct, and the majority of left-wing people are wrong.
As someone who taught critical thinking for a long time, the first thing I told my students was: who has an idea is irrelevant to the issue of that idea's truth or falsity. Nazis believed in making the trains run on time and had a well-developed sense of men's fashion. Are we going to say that, because Nazis believed in these things, they are wrong? Of course not. If you believe (as I do) that a) Gender ideology is incoherent and b) Capitalism has a ton of bad tradeoffs that need to be controlled for the sake of the health of society. It's not illogical for me to make a coalition with the right if they are the only ones with the power to reduce the effects of gender ideology on society, and make a coalition with the left to reduce the negative trade-offs of capitalism. That's just moral and political realism, because *everyone* is going to disagree with you on some things.
EDIT: Also, you could only argue that "gender critical feminism morphed into a wing of MAGA" if you found them making common cause with MAGA on other issues, not just making a coalition of convenience in order to push back on gender identitarian overreach. Generally, MAGAs are wrong about almost everything, and even when they are right, they are usually right for the wrong reasons (i.e., they actually mostly just don't like anyone who isn't a straight white man). However, if the difference between stopping the downstream negative effects of gender ideology (transed children, men in women's sports, prisons, and private spaces) and not is a coalition between Gender Criticals and MAGAs, isn't more good done in the world by building that coalition than not? What possible argument is there for not doing so, except that some people whose critical thinking skills aren't very well developed might be confused?