Small signs of change in the US media

A gentle fisking of Jonathan Chait

Following the election, America's centre and centre-left media is taking baby steps towards a course correction on the transgender issue. It's great to see that American legacy media people are beginning to see the light, but they've got a long way to go.

Jonathan Chait has a new piece at The Atlantic that argues, refreshingly, that Democrats need to moderate their stance on trans. But Chait, a former columnist at The New Republic and New York, offers up an example of how the centre and centre-left media continue to struggle to understand this subject.

My big essay from last month was about how legacy journalists obstinately refuse to ask the most fundamental question about transgender — what exactly is it? — because doing so would force them to reckon with the trans movement's fundamental untenability. Legacy media journalists instead hide behind the safety of the familiar, treating “trans rights” as analagous to gay rights: framing it as, supposedly, a movement to liberate a subgroup of people who’ve been persecuted over an innate attribute that society has failed to accommodate. Trans is seen by the left as a convenient new social justice project to replace the smash hit of gay rights activism, which has won so many of its battles so decisively that it’s lost its lustre. Now that gays are mainstream, we’re no longer useful as a brave and noble cause to rally and unite the activist left behind.

But transgender makes much more sense when it’s understood not as an identity-politics or social-justice issue, but as a loose term to describe what began as a small group of adults with a rare psychiatric condition, which subsequently exploded into a fad and a subculture via social media.

Chait makes all the mistakes I pointed out in my essay. I wrote last month that, with respect to the trans issue, journalists “wave the question [what is trans?] away with various excuses, and they focus instead on a much simpler framing of the issue: does it make a few unhappy people seem a little happier if we pretend? It’s easier to rationalize away the enormous damage that’s done to people’s bodily health (and the damage they’re doing to the social fabric) by focusing on the supposed benefits to their mental health, at least as it seems in the short and medium term.”

This is almost exactly what Chait says: “The major questions about trans rights are: Do some people have the chance to live a happier and more fulfilling life in a different gender identity than the one to which they were born?…”

But Chait, what is a “gender identity”? If people are already more-or-less free to dress and act as femininely or masculinely as they please regardless of their sex, why do we need to build a whole new cultural concept to suppress all mention of some people’s sex? It seems rather obvious that “gender identity” is a fundamentally regressive way of conceptualizing the relationship between someone’s biological sex and his or her femininity or masculinity.

I also wrote about how the transgender subculture conflates itself with a medical condition: “the trans extremists have merged their subculture with a psychiatric medical diagnosis: to obtain a diagnosis of gender dysphoria is to gain ‘validation’ as ‘truly being’ transgender — it’s held as ‘proof’ that their mystical ‘gender identities’ are real.” Chait makes the same mistake, framing the problem with “trans kids” as merely “allowing adolescent and preadolescent children to medically transition without adequate diagnosis.” (Emphasis mine.)

There is no medical diagnosis for trans, just as there is no medical diagnosis for goth or emo. Transgender is a social construct — a subcultural identity group, but one that is unique in that it’s closely associated with the cultural practice of extreme body modification. Doctors try to shoehorn their patients’ quasi-religious demands for medical “sex changes” into a non-superstitious framework by looking narrowly at the patients’ self-reported, short-term mental health outcomes. The mental-health framing of “sex change” treatments might make some sense in some limited, tightly controlled adult circumstances, but this application does not scale well when it’s loosely applied to anyone who shows interest after being badgered with the sales pitch that they might be happier living “as the opposite sex.” And it certainly doesn’t apply to children. In any other context (such as the practice of FGM in Africa) we would (and we do) immediately recognize that medical procedures performed on children to satisfy cultural norms are inhumane — a violation of basic human rights.

Chait then decides that women’s bathrooms can be casually given away to men as a consolation prize for letting women keep their sports: “One can easily defend Lia Thomas’s right to be addressed as a woman and allowed access to women’s bathrooms without supporting her participation on a women’s college swim team.”

Jonathan, the only reason YOU find it so easy to give women's bathrooms away to horny, kinky men (and we know for a fact that Lia Thomas is just a crossdressing autogynephile who's heavily active in the online fetish scene) is because YOU'RE not a woman.

Chait has also fallen into the trap of failing to comprehend that the trans subculture, being a quasi-religion, has two groups of “experts” who weigh in on it. I wrote in my essay:

“With regard to medical treatment for minors, [journalists] report that there’s disagreement or confusion in the field, but in fact it’s not complicated at all. The field is neatly divided into two camps: the nonbelievers and the devout.”

…Before any reporter speaks to a gender “expert,” they must first assess the supposed expert’s ideological and theological position on sex and transgender identity. Journalists should directly ask their sources to disclose whether they believe in the facts of biology — that sex is material, binary, and unchangeable — or not. If an “expert” disputes these fundamental facts, you have your answer: they’re in the cult. To them, this is all ritual therapy: they’re initiating new members into the sect, not providing secular medicine, though they will vehemently deny the charge.

Chait uncritically cites Masha Gessen, Katelyn Burns, Brianna Wu, and Dr. Erica Anderson as experts on the transgender subculture without pointing out that each and every one of these people personally identifies as a member of the transgender tribe. As I said in my essay, this is like asking a bunch of Scientologists to weigh in on the merits of Dianetics and E-meters. What’s the point? You already know what they’re mandated to say, because their continued membership in their tribe depends on them carrying the party line. There are plenty of doctors who don’t eschew biological facts and who have expert-level knowledge of the medical treatment of psychological distress related to sex and gender expression. And there are plenty of feminist women who could weigh in on the topic of their spaces being given over to men, too. Chait apparently spoke to none of them. Probably because deep down, he already knows what they’re going to say, and it’s not going to be supportive of the trans-activist party line.

Chait finishes by saying, “I can’t claim to have compiled a morally or politically unassailable accounting of which compromises Democratic politicians should make. What is unassailable is the principle that compromise without complete surrender is, in fact, possible.”

On both of those counts, I agree. His take is certainly not unassailable in the details, but at least the principle behind it is: it’s time for the left to compromise and reassess.

And that includes the media class on the left or centre-left.

The American liberal media class needs to learn that trans rights as in workplace and housing protections for people who identify as transgender is one thing. But “trans rights” as in forcing all of society to pretend that the facts of biology are inapplicable to those who state that they don’t believe in them is another thing entirely: as I said in my essay, that’s akin to religious nationalism.

And there’s nothing progressive about that.