It may seem, at times, that the left has lost its mind when it comes to transgenderism – either blindly supporting its agenda or dutifully keeping council. But there have been a handful of leftist critiques over the years of both the reality and politics of transgenderism. These have been mostly from old-school feminists like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys. In the past month, there have been two – an essay by Lionel Shriver in Prospect and an article in The Antioch Review by the gay writer Daniel Harris. The latter has caused the literary left to fly into a tizzy.
“While I fervently support TGs’ rights to transition,” Harris writes in the piece, “I believe that the whole phenomenon of switching one’s gender is a mass delusion.” It is impossible to change one’s gender, regardless of how many body parts one chops off. “Gender is not ‘assigned,'” he writes, and, therefore, cannot be “reassigned” by superficial plastic surgery. “It is revealed, first by the transducer of an ultrasound machine massaging a besmeared and distended belly and then by the obstetrician as he dangles the wailing infant by its feet… One can no more change one’s gender than one’s species,” pop psychology and postmodern theory be damned.
Moreover, transgenderism reinforces stereotypes about women and is strangely sexist, projecting a “clichéd image of a hyper-sexualized odalisque who exists solely for men’s delectation,” and in many cases leads to suicide. Forty-one percent of transgendered individuals attempt to take their own life. Harris wonders why is it that the “public almost universally disapproves of plastic surgery and laughs derisively at celebrities who present a face ‘different from the one they rode in on,’ as one commentator referred to their futile—and often ruinous—efforts to roll back the hands of time,” while praising Caitlyn Jenner:
What he finds particularly annoying, however, is the pushiness and heavy-handedness of transgender activists and their liberal enablers:
As you might imagine, the response was swift. On May 4th, a Google Docs petition denounced the piece as transphobic. The Antioch Review showed “a serious lack of judgment” in publishing the piece. It took exception to the article’s tone and the writer’s supposed “bigotry” and found “no redeeming aesthetic or political justification” in it. In fact, the article is “dangerous, specious, and complicit in the spectrum of violence that trans people face every day.” What the petition fails to identify is a single error of fact. Signatories include, at last count, 4,000 academics, writers, and librarians, the document claims.
Antioch College, which publishes The Antioch Review, first distanced itself from the piece on the morning of May 6, stating that it has “a long and proud history of unequivocal support and solidarity with members of the trans community” and that it “does not condone or always agree with the ideas and viewpoints expressed in the Review,” adding, however, that it had “confidence in the Review’s editor and editorial process.” By that evening, it had posted another statement, claiming that while it supported free speech, it was sorry for “the statements and positions espoused by Daniel Harris” that “are deeply offensive to transgender and gender non-conforming people and those who love and support them, including those in the Antioch community. Daniel Harris’s views are his own and in no way reflect the views of Antioch College.”
For his part, the editor of The Antioch Review, Bob Fogarty, threw Harris under the bus by suggesting that the piece was more literary than scholarly. Antioch isn’t “a scholarly academic journal,” he wrote, but a “long-standing literary magazine…that prints creative fiction, essays and poetry on a wide variety of topics.” The implication is that there are reasoning and factual errors in Harris’s piece. If so, Fogarty doesn’t identify any.
On May 9, Harris tried to reassure his critics that he’s a card-carrying liberal. “I am neither hateful nor transphobic. I am tolerant of all people, save Republicans,” he wrote to Inside Higher Education. But he also refused to take back anything he had written: “I regret that the discussion has been so uncivil, devolving into what seems to be a flame war. It is difficult to answer specific criticisms when they rarely amount to much more that I am transphobic and that my essay was an example of hate speech.”
In short, Daniel Harris writes an article in which he decries the irrationality of transgenderism and the enabling they demand by bullying, and within days, they were able to extract tacit condemnations from Antioch College and the editor of The Antioch Review, and a big petition signed by a horde of academics, writers and librarians calling for Harris to be drawn and quartered – all without citing a single error of fact or reason.
Maybe the left has lost its mind after all.
