A write up of Contrapoints twitter Wank
It's kind of weird to post a long response to twitter wank here, where no one may have the slightest clue as to what I'm talking about, but I needed a long form space.
So, my thoughts on a controversy that burst forth on twitter that was ostensibly about pronouns, and actually about a lot of other things.
I’m writing up this personal retrospective on the most recent Contrapoints controversy, even though it’s old news, because I’m still seeing people misrepresent what happened and why people reacted as they did. And now Natalie is back on twitter, so it feels mildly more timely.
The problem with this particular brouhaha is it was about roughly half a dozen things and ping ponged all over the place. It’s been most firmly cast as being about pronouns and binary trans people versus non-binary people.
Natalie Wynn AKA Contrapoints is a Youtuber, who makes videos on a variety of left of center topics, such as climate change, recognizing the alt-right, and trans issues. She started transitioning about two years ago.
Natalie has long been a center of controversy. I really don’t believe she intentionally courts it (which I think is part of the issue; she never seems to expect it when it comes). She makes a point of trying to reach an audience that hasn’t already been converted, a kind of targeting program for centrist or even right wing straight cis dudes. Anecdotal evidence suggests some success here, though I don’t have any actual data.
But trying to talk to dude bros on their terms can mean making other people bristle. Natalie released a video called “Are Traps Gay.” The intended point of the video is that trans women are women and can be empirically understood to be so, but a lot of trans women felt that using a slur like trap was inherently damaging, and that even allowing the question was wrong and harmful.
Another, twitter this time, controversy was when the trans women community was embroiled in the conversation about “trans attracted” men. Whether “trans attracted” was a thing, whether or not the concept made trans women an “other,” a separate category of sexual attraction, rather than just women, and what exactly made a man a chaser. I don’t have much specific to say about the incident. It was an intra-community discussion among trans women, and I stayed out. Natalie said a few things, fairly measured, about not wanting to shame men for being attracted to trans women, and liking the idea of men who would be attracted to every part of her. She may have made other comments as well--as I said, I didn’t get involved. I think a lot of the attention her comments received was a result of her large platform, and simply the fact that so many people saw her tweets. (More on this later.)
Something that amuses me is that during the above debate, at least one person accused people of canceling Contra, which, given later events, is a reminder of the emptiness of “canceling.” The above was in August 2018, folks, and Natalie did not disappear of the face of the earth.
But the incident that really set this most recent wank in motion was her video, “The Aesthetic.” “The Aesthetic” put forth a theory of gender than centered and prioritized performance of gender over identity, and put the power of gender into the hands of people who see us. What makes us our gender? How we’re read.
The ugly implications of this are immediately obvious. When one Contra character, Tabby, asks another, Justine, whether this makes newly out trans women fake women, the question is sidestepped, but not before hinting at the unpleasant answer. “Isn’t that kind of what it felt like?” She goes further, offering this statement on gender. “You can’t be a woman without performing womanhood. Without action, and without social recognition, the identity is meaningless.” She compares non-out trans people to trolls who identify as attack helicopters. “Unless you’re living womanhood, the identity is literally that meaningless.” Another quote, “You have to work to get there [to womanhood], and ultimately, society has to let you.”
Now, to be fair, this is all from “Justine,” a character in the video, who is representing one side of the argument. The other character is Tabby, who argues for a concept of gender that focuses on internal identity. But it’s Justine who gets the majority of the dialogue. It’s Justine who browbeats Tabby into performing Justine’s notion of proper womanhood. It’s Justine who is presented as speaking hard truths, that Tabby won’t admit.
The video caused a lot of anger, notably among the non-binary community. We weren’t mentioned in the video, but the video’s conception of gender is wildly exclusionary of us. Non-binary people are virtually never read as our correct gender, and society rarely “let’s us” be our gender. The understanding of gender presented in the video casts us as eternal fantasists, our gender no more real than an attack helicopter troll.
It wasn’t super great!
This was hardly the end of Natalie’s career though. She kept releasing videos, including one about pronouns, that had her trying to clarify her position, but more important in my opinion was the video called “Transtrenders,” that dealt with non-binary identities. And I think it’s pretty good! There’s some discomfort watching it, though I don’t know if that’s discomfort I’m bringing to the viewing, based on Natalie’s history with non-binary identities, or if it’s discomfort Natalie is bringing to the presentation. Or both! But it’s positive on non-binary people, and includes a lot of examination and working through old ideas, including a reexamination of the performativity theory from “The Aesthetic.” The video really sits in the uncomfortable place where no theory really explains everything or offers a satisfactory whole. “Maybe we don’t need a theory. Maybe we don’t need to prove anything.”
Honestly, I kind of thought that was the end of “Natalie Wynn vs. non-binary people.” And I was pretty much willing to move on in my mind. Because I was a big Contrapoints fan, and even now, I haven’t necessarily sworn off her work. Because while Natalie drew a lot of controversy with what she said, that didn’t mean I always thought she was wrong. Sometimes, she would put to words the little nagging voice in the back of my mind that I wasn’t comfortable with. She got a lot of angry responses to “Are Traps Gay” but I had to admit that she was speaking something I’d already uncomfortably known. “Trans women are women” is a true statement, but it’s not really an argument.”Men who have sex with trans women aren’t gay because trans women are women” isn’t going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with the premise. And plenty of people don’t want to have an argument! There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I’m not here to debate you or defend my identity.” But I do understand why Natalie actually wanted to answer the question.
Another example is her video on Incels, which diverts slightly to talk about her experience with a 4chan subthread that focused on closeted trans people soaked in internalized transphobia essentially just being terrible to each other. And Natalie talked about seeking out the vicious hatred she would get there, over the endless wave of support that trans people give to each on spaces like twitter. Why? Because some trans spaces will insist that everyone is beautiful, will fall over giving endless praise to everyone. It becomes axiomatic. And some people love that, but some people, like Natalie find that it doesn’t feel real. And, honestly? I get that. Because I certainly don’t want to be shallowly told how good I look. I’m not gorgeous, and your lies demean us both. Now, it’s a little weird in Natalie’s case, because she is legitimately beautiful, but there you are.
Even when I’ve disagreed with Natalie, I’ve never wanted to ~cancel~ her. Usually I want to sit down with her and actually discuss the issue. I don’t want to shout at her, I want to present my case.
But all that’s just prologue. That’s just me setting the scene. Natalie doesn’t set out to stir up controversy, but she does, and she doesn’t have the best reputation among non-binary people.
So, that’s what happened before. Here’s what happened next.
Natalie posts a twitter thread about the tendency for cis people to only start talking about pronouns when she was in the room. She talked about cis people performing progressivism, but actually making her feel more exposed and invalidated. She also mentioned the way some cis people will use they/them pronouns for her, a way to sneak transphobia and misgendering through assumed sensitivity. This is an issue that’s well worth talking about. And there might have been a discussion about it, except that at the very end, she mentioned how pronoun circles and the like may make things better for non-binary and non-passing trans people, but they inconvenienced binary trans people like her, “and that’s super fucking hard for me.”
The comment section was rough. Some people insisted the last line indicated sarcasm, a reference to a recent video, but the rest of the thread was very much in earnest. The replies had people lobbing criticism, but also a whole bunch of people defending her, in fact insisting that no one could possibly be criticizing her in good faith.
It could have ended there. Natalie regularly says controversial things, as we’ve established. If she had left it there, I think her haters would have had one more piece of ammunition that they didn’t really need, since they hated her already, and her fans would have either decreed that she had done nothing wrong in the first place, or, in a case like mine, tamped down the bit of hurt and gotten past it.
But it didn’t end there. Natalie then posted a thread in which she talked about her discomfort with her celebrity and the size of her platform, complaining that she couldn’t just vent about her feelings without causing a storm. And that introduces something new into our discussion, the effects of celebrity, particularly online celebrity, and the responsibility or lack thereof about having a large platform.
Natalie has always been clear that she finds the size of her platform uncomfortable. She’s created this persona, and released all these videos, so you can’t say any of this is thrust upon her like someone with a random viral tweet, but she’s long been clear that she feels like she can’t be true to herself and put out her honest feelings because so many people are waiting to react. I can’t imagine what that would be like. On every single platform I’m on, I’m not merely a nobody, I’m a non-entity. But honestly? I think Natalie and those who think like this are missing the point. I am, as I just said, a non-entity. But do you think I post every though that enters my head? Do you think there are no hot takes I leave unsaid because I don’t want to deal with the fallout? Yes, the size of the reaction you get increases with more followers, but the task of not saying shit that will get you swarmed always exists. I think a lot of people have tried to make this out to be more about internet celebrity culture than it actually is.
But, you know, it still could have ended there. It could have ended. What does end is the part that I was actually there for. I experienced those first two threads in real time. But I can only be so Extremely Online, and I didn’t see this last thread when it actually happened, and I had to piece things together afterward. But what definitely happened was that Natalie posted a thread containing these tweets.
This is… this is not good. This paints all non-binary as self-centered kids, kicking up change and (and this is the worst part) making binary trans people unsafe just by existing openly.
One, not all non-binary people are gen Z. Natalie portraying herself as part of the old school is pretty funny, considering I’m older than her, and I’ve been out as non-binary for over 15 years. Natalie’s uncomfortably close to accusing us of being young people chasing trends, which she specifically argued against in her “Transtrenders” video.
But it’s the last tweet I can’t get over. She doesn’t explicitly blame non-binary people for increased right wing oppression, but it’s implied, and she certainly does literally state that we make things worse for binary trans people.
This is a horrible thing to say, not just because it’s not true, but, yes, partly because it’s not true. The thing is, it’s easier to to be binary trans that it ever has been. The barriers to transition have been drastically lowered. Obviously it depends on where you are, but self-identification is gaining more and more ground. The gatekeeping has decreased in intensity, particularly in the US, where Natalie and I are. Again, depending, you can get hormones just by walking into a clinic. We have more anti-discrimination laws than ever. We have openly trans celebrities normalizing trans people in pop culture. I’m not saying it’s all sugar and roses, but there’s a real difference. Stuff like the Real Life Test isn’t gone (boo!), but it’s less stringent. The existence of GLB trans people is acknowledged. Used to be a trans woman had to be (or claim to be) attracted to men to receive transition care, same with trans men and being attracted to women. You’re drastically less likely to hear about doctors encouraging people to leave their old lives completely behind so no one knows they ever lived any other way. Trans women won’t be told that they need to never admit to being trans, including lying to their (of course) husbands about why they can’t have children. Yeah, they’re paying attention to us, but that’s better than isolation and the terror of not being allowed transition because you don’t fit a strict stereotype.
Binary trans people like Natalie aren’t comfortable with gender being divorced from presentation because they want people to gender them correctly automatically. They want people to read “feminine presentation” and immediately assume “female pronouns. And that doesn’t make them bad people. I understand it completely. But a world that allows for ambiguities and doesn’t work on assumptions is better for them, even if it’s also sometimes uncomfortable. Because a world that allows for ambiguities allows you to move from one gender assignment to another more easily, and doesn’t restrict you by what it thinks you should be. (Honestly, we could have an important and interesting conversation about competing needs in queer spaces, but that’s not what happened.)
And it gives more space for people when they don’t pass. And while this controversy managed to be framed as entirely about non-binary people vs. Natalie, her initial tweet thread, referenced non-passing binary trans people right along with non-binary people. And “The Aesthetic’ didn’t actually mention non-binary people at all! Its focus was on insufficiently feminine trans women. See also the below tweet, which she wrote shortly before “The Aesthetic.”
Again, Natalie, you’re not a trans elder representing the old guard against new fangled thinking. I’m 32, and I came out as genderqueer (my word at the time) at 15. You’re a whippersnapper, Natalie, and you can’t school me. (The only good thing about my back getting worse, is that I now have an actual cane I can shake.)
But, for whatever reason, non-passing trans people weren’t the focus of what happened afterward. Non-binary people were.
As I’ve said, I wasn’t around for her tweet thread about how awful non-binary people are. I can imagine the response was pretty heated. The result was that she deleted her twitter. I don’t blame her for that. I’m sure it felt terrible to have so many people angry at you. The problem was immediately after, the narrative of “Contrapoints run of twitter by angry non-binary people” solidified. This sparked countless angry threads about the left eating itself, and trans people attacking each other. (Apparently, Natalie accusing non-binary people of causing increased oppression didn’t count as trans people attacking each other.) There was much chest pounding and hand wringing about cancel culture, because of course there was.
Once the issue was cast as being about bullying and cancel culture, the cis decided they needed to get involved. And every comment further entrenched the story that Natalie just wanted to express some feelings about pronouns and was attacked for it. No one was talking about the fact that she’d accused us of making her unsafe simply by existing. Maybe that would have interfered with people’s ability to tsk tsk about pile ons.
But maybe even worse than cis people loving an opportunity to cry about cancel culture was the response of so many binary people, who revealed a deep contempt for non-binary people that went way beyond anything I suspected. I heard it declared that every binary trans person thought the way Natalie did. A whole lot of blame and recrimination. And again and gain, people acting as if nasty non-binary people had persecuted Natalie because she hadn’t been PC enough talking about pronouns. It’s permanently injured my faith in my community.
A number of right wing assholes came out in support of Natalie, whether just because they like to fuck with the left, or because they find a high femme trans women more tolerable than a bunch of non-binary weirdos. Ian Miles Cheong was undoubtedly pure shit stirring troll. Probably the same with Christina Hoff Summers, though with her there might have been an element of “at least pretty trans women aren’t as bad as inbetweeners.” I heard that Jesse Singal also praised Natalie, and that was probably genuine, because very binary trans people with dysphoria who transitioned as adults shitting on young non-binary people is Singal’s wet dream. I don’t hold Natalie responsible for what a troll like Cheong does, but I do believe that any time Jesse Singal believes you’re on the right side of trans issue, you need to rethink immediately.
The Contrapoints twitter is back up. I figured it would be. No one fucking canceled Contrapoints. She has a Youtube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. She has an Instagram. She won’t be running the twitter account, which is probably for the best. Natalie has long made it clear that she’s never comfortably figured out how to use a platform like twitter with all the attention it brings. She’s needed better PR for ages.
But I’m sad and frustrated, because the apology, however sincere it is or isn’t, makes no mention of the nasty things said about non-binary people in that third thread. It makes it clear that this issue will now and always be remembered as being about pronouns and conflicting needs, and the vitriol flung at non-binary people will be forgotten. It will always be “Contrapoints vs. sensitive non-binary” people. And that’s hard for me to deal with.
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So, my thoughts on a controversy that burst forth on twitter that was ostensibly about pronouns, and actually about a lot of other things.
I’m writing up this personal retrospective on the most recent Contrapoints controversy, even though it’s old news, because I’m still seeing people misrepresent what happened and why people reacted as they did. And now Natalie is back on twitter, so it feels mildly more timely.
The problem with this particular brouhaha is it was about roughly half a dozen things and ping ponged all over the place. It’s been most firmly cast as being about pronouns and binary trans people versus non-binary people.
Natalie Wynn AKA Contrapoints is a Youtuber, who makes videos on a variety of left of center topics, such as climate change, recognizing the alt-right, and trans issues. She started transitioning about two years ago.
Natalie has long been a center of controversy. I really don’t believe she intentionally courts it (which I think is part of the issue; she never seems to expect it when it comes). She makes a point of trying to reach an audience that hasn’t already been converted, a kind of targeting program for centrist or even right wing straight cis dudes. Anecdotal evidence suggests some success here, though I don’t have any actual data.
But trying to talk to dude bros on their terms can mean making other people bristle. Natalie released a video called “Are Traps Gay.” The intended point of the video is that trans women are women and can be empirically understood to be so, but a lot of trans women felt that using a slur like trap was inherently damaging, and that even allowing the question was wrong and harmful.
Another, twitter this time, controversy was when the trans women community was embroiled in the conversation about “trans attracted” men. Whether “trans attracted” was a thing, whether or not the concept made trans women an “other,” a separate category of sexual attraction, rather than just women, and what exactly made a man a chaser. I don’t have much specific to say about the incident. It was an intra-community discussion among trans women, and I stayed out. Natalie said a few things, fairly measured, about not wanting to shame men for being attracted to trans women, and liking the idea of men who would be attracted to every part of her. She may have made other comments as well--as I said, I didn’t get involved. I think a lot of the attention her comments received was a result of her large platform, and simply the fact that so many people saw her tweets. (More on this later.)
Something that amuses me is that during the above debate, at least one person accused people of canceling Contra, which, given later events, is a reminder of the emptiness of “canceling.” The above was in August 2018, folks, and Natalie did not disappear of the face of the earth.
But the incident that really set this most recent wank in motion was her video, “The Aesthetic.” “The Aesthetic” put forth a theory of gender than centered and prioritized performance of gender over identity, and put the power of gender into the hands of people who see us. What makes us our gender? How we’re read.
The ugly implications of this are immediately obvious. When one Contra character, Tabby, asks another, Justine, whether this makes newly out trans women fake women, the question is sidestepped, but not before hinting at the unpleasant answer. “Isn’t that kind of what it felt like?” She goes further, offering this statement on gender. “You can’t be a woman without performing womanhood. Without action, and without social recognition, the identity is meaningless.” She compares non-out trans people to trolls who identify as attack helicopters. “Unless you’re living womanhood, the identity is literally that meaningless.” Another quote, “You have to work to get there [to womanhood], and ultimately, society has to let you.”
Now, to be fair, this is all from “Justine,” a character in the video, who is representing one side of the argument. The other character is Tabby, who argues for a concept of gender that focuses on internal identity. But it’s Justine who gets the majority of the dialogue. It’s Justine who browbeats Tabby into performing Justine’s notion of proper womanhood. It’s Justine who is presented as speaking hard truths, that Tabby won’t admit.
The video caused a lot of anger, notably among the non-binary community. We weren’t mentioned in the video, but the video’s conception of gender is wildly exclusionary of us. Non-binary people are virtually never read as our correct gender, and society rarely “let’s us” be our gender. The understanding of gender presented in the video casts us as eternal fantasists, our gender no more real than an attack helicopter troll.
It wasn’t super great!
This was hardly the end of Natalie’s career though. She kept releasing videos, including one about pronouns, that had her trying to clarify her position, but more important in my opinion was the video called “Transtrenders,” that dealt with non-binary identities. And I think it’s pretty good! There’s some discomfort watching it, though I don’t know if that’s discomfort I’m bringing to the viewing, based on Natalie’s history with non-binary identities, or if it’s discomfort Natalie is bringing to the presentation. Or both! But it’s positive on non-binary people, and includes a lot of examination and working through old ideas, including a reexamination of the performativity theory from “The Aesthetic.” The video really sits in the uncomfortable place where no theory really explains everything or offers a satisfactory whole. “Maybe we don’t need a theory. Maybe we don’t need to prove anything.”
Honestly, I kind of thought that was the end of “Natalie Wynn vs. non-binary people.” And I was pretty much willing to move on in my mind. Because I was a big Contrapoints fan, and even now, I haven’t necessarily sworn off her work. Because while Natalie drew a lot of controversy with what she said, that didn’t mean I always thought she was wrong. Sometimes, she would put to words the little nagging voice in the back of my mind that I wasn’t comfortable with. She got a lot of angry responses to “Are Traps Gay” but I had to admit that she was speaking something I’d already uncomfortably known. “Trans women are women” is a true statement, but it’s not really an argument.”Men who have sex with trans women aren’t gay because trans women are women” isn’t going to convince anyone who doesn’t already agree with the premise. And plenty of people don’t want to have an argument! There’s nothing wrong with saying, “I’m not here to debate you or defend my identity.” But I do understand why Natalie actually wanted to answer the question.
Another example is her video on Incels, which diverts slightly to talk about her experience with a 4chan subthread that focused on closeted trans people soaked in internalized transphobia essentially just being terrible to each other. And Natalie talked about seeking out the vicious hatred she would get there, over the endless wave of support that trans people give to each on spaces like twitter. Why? Because some trans spaces will insist that everyone is beautiful, will fall over giving endless praise to everyone. It becomes axiomatic. And some people love that, but some people, like Natalie find that it doesn’t feel real. And, honestly? I get that. Because I certainly don’t want to be shallowly told how good I look. I’m not gorgeous, and your lies demean us both. Now, it’s a little weird in Natalie’s case, because she is legitimately beautiful, but there you are.
Even when I’ve disagreed with Natalie, I’ve never wanted to ~cancel~ her. Usually I want to sit down with her and actually discuss the issue. I don’t want to shout at her, I want to present my case.
But all that’s just prologue. That’s just me setting the scene. Natalie doesn’t set out to stir up controversy, but she does, and she doesn’t have the best reputation among non-binary people.
So, that’s what happened before. Here’s what happened next.
Natalie posts a twitter thread about the tendency for cis people to only start talking about pronouns when she was in the room. She talked about cis people performing progressivism, but actually making her feel more exposed and invalidated. She also mentioned the way some cis people will use they/them pronouns for her, a way to sneak transphobia and misgendering through assumed sensitivity. This is an issue that’s well worth talking about. And there might have been a discussion about it, except that at the very end, she mentioned how pronoun circles and the like may make things better for non-binary and non-passing trans people, but they inconvenienced binary trans people like her, “and that’s super fucking hard for me.”
The comment section was rough. Some people insisted the last line indicated sarcasm, a reference to a recent video, but the rest of the thread was very much in earnest. The replies had people lobbing criticism, but also a whole bunch of people defending her, in fact insisting that no one could possibly be criticizing her in good faith.
It could have ended there. Natalie regularly says controversial things, as we’ve established. If she had left it there, I think her haters would have had one more piece of ammunition that they didn’t really need, since they hated her already, and her fans would have either decreed that she had done nothing wrong in the first place, or, in a case like mine, tamped down the bit of hurt and gotten past it.
But it didn’t end there. Natalie then posted a thread in which she talked about her discomfort with her celebrity and the size of her platform, complaining that she couldn’t just vent about her feelings without causing a storm. And that introduces something new into our discussion, the effects of celebrity, particularly online celebrity, and the responsibility or lack thereof about having a large platform.
Natalie has always been clear that she finds the size of her platform uncomfortable. She’s created this persona, and released all these videos, so you can’t say any of this is thrust upon her like someone with a random viral tweet, but she’s long been clear that she feels like she can’t be true to herself and put out her honest feelings because so many people are waiting to react. I can’t imagine what that would be like. On every single platform I’m on, I’m not merely a nobody, I’m a non-entity. But honestly? I think Natalie and those who think like this are missing the point. I am, as I just said, a non-entity. But do you think I post every though that enters my head? Do you think there are no hot takes I leave unsaid because I don’t want to deal with the fallout? Yes, the size of the reaction you get increases with more followers, but the task of not saying shit that will get you swarmed always exists. I think a lot of people have tried to make this out to be more about internet celebrity culture than it actually is.
But, you know, it still could have ended there. It could have ended. What does end is the part that I was actually there for. I experienced those first two threads in real time. But I can only be so Extremely Online, and I didn’t see this last thread when it actually happened, and I had to piece things together afterward. But what definitely happened was that Natalie posted a thread containing these tweets.
This is… this is not good. This paints all non-binary as self-centered kids, kicking up change and (and this is the worst part) making binary trans people unsafe just by existing openly.
One, not all non-binary people are gen Z. Natalie portraying herself as part of the old school is pretty funny, considering I’m older than her, and I’ve been out as non-binary for over 15 years. Natalie’s uncomfortably close to accusing us of being young people chasing trends, which she specifically argued against in her “Transtrenders” video.
But it’s the last tweet I can’t get over. She doesn’t explicitly blame non-binary people for increased right wing oppression, but it’s implied, and she certainly does literally state that we make things worse for binary trans people.
This is a horrible thing to say, not just because it’s not true, but, yes, partly because it’s not true. The thing is, it’s easier to to be binary trans that it ever has been. The barriers to transition have been drastically lowered. Obviously it depends on where you are, but self-identification is gaining more and more ground. The gatekeeping has decreased in intensity, particularly in the US, where Natalie and I are. Again, depending, you can get hormones just by walking into a clinic. We have more anti-discrimination laws than ever. We have openly trans celebrities normalizing trans people in pop culture. I’m not saying it’s all sugar and roses, but there’s a real difference. Stuff like the Real Life Test isn’t gone (boo!), but it’s less stringent. The existence of GLB trans people is acknowledged. Used to be a trans woman had to be (or claim to be) attracted to men to receive transition care, same with trans men and being attracted to women. You’re drastically less likely to hear about doctors encouraging people to leave their old lives completely behind so no one knows they ever lived any other way. Trans women won’t be told that they need to never admit to being trans, including lying to their (of course) husbands about why they can’t have children. Yeah, they’re paying attention to us, but that’s better than isolation and the terror of not being allowed transition because you don’t fit a strict stereotype.
Binary trans people like Natalie aren’t comfortable with gender being divorced from presentation because they want people to gender them correctly automatically. They want people to read “feminine presentation” and immediately assume “female pronouns. And that doesn’t make them bad people. I understand it completely. But a world that allows for ambiguities and doesn’t work on assumptions is better for them, even if it’s also sometimes uncomfortable. Because a world that allows for ambiguities allows you to move from one gender assignment to another more easily, and doesn’t restrict you by what it thinks you should be. (Honestly, we could have an important and interesting conversation about competing needs in queer spaces, but that’s not what happened.)
And it gives more space for people when they don’t pass. And while this controversy managed to be framed as entirely about non-binary people vs. Natalie, her initial tweet thread, referenced non-passing binary trans people right along with non-binary people. And “The Aesthetic’ didn’t actually mention non-binary people at all! Its focus was on insufficiently feminine trans women. See also the below tweet, which she wrote shortly before “The Aesthetic.”
Again, Natalie, you’re not a trans elder representing the old guard against new fangled thinking. I’m 32, and I came out as genderqueer (my word at the time) at 15. You’re a whippersnapper, Natalie, and you can’t school me. (The only good thing about my back getting worse, is that I now have an actual cane I can shake.)
But, for whatever reason, non-passing trans people weren’t the focus of what happened afterward. Non-binary people were.
As I’ve said, I wasn’t around for her tweet thread about how awful non-binary people are. I can imagine the response was pretty heated. The result was that she deleted her twitter. I don’t blame her for that. I’m sure it felt terrible to have so many people angry at you. The problem was immediately after, the narrative of “Contrapoints run of twitter by angry non-binary people” solidified. This sparked countless angry threads about the left eating itself, and trans people attacking each other. (Apparently, Natalie accusing non-binary people of causing increased oppression didn’t count as trans people attacking each other.) There was much chest pounding and hand wringing about cancel culture, because of course there was.
Once the issue was cast as being about bullying and cancel culture, the cis decided they needed to get involved. And every comment further entrenched the story that Natalie just wanted to express some feelings about pronouns and was attacked for it. No one was talking about the fact that she’d accused us of making her unsafe simply by existing. Maybe that would have interfered with people’s ability to tsk tsk about pile ons.
But maybe even worse than cis people loving an opportunity to cry about cancel culture was the response of so many binary people, who revealed a deep contempt for non-binary people that went way beyond anything I suspected. I heard it declared that every binary trans person thought the way Natalie did. A whole lot of blame and recrimination. And again and gain, people acting as if nasty non-binary people had persecuted Natalie because she hadn’t been PC enough talking about pronouns. It’s permanently injured my faith in my community.
A number of right wing assholes came out in support of Natalie, whether just because they like to fuck with the left, or because they find a high femme trans women more tolerable than a bunch of non-binary weirdos. Ian Miles Cheong was undoubtedly pure shit stirring troll. Probably the same with Christina Hoff Summers, though with her there might have been an element of “at least pretty trans women aren’t as bad as inbetweeners.” I heard that Jesse Singal also praised Natalie, and that was probably genuine, because very binary trans people with dysphoria who transitioned as adults shitting on young non-binary people is Singal’s wet dream. I don’t hold Natalie responsible for what a troll like Cheong does, but I do believe that any time Jesse Singal believes you’re on the right side of trans issue, you need to rethink immediately.
The Contrapoints twitter is back up. I figured it would be. No one fucking canceled Contrapoints. She has a Youtube channel with hundreds of thousands of subscribers. She has an Instagram. She won’t be running the twitter account, which is probably for the best. Natalie has long made it clear that she’s never comfortably figured out how to use a platform like twitter with all the attention it brings. She’s needed better PR for ages.
But I’m sad and frustrated, because the apology, however sincere it is or isn’t, makes no mention of the nasty things said about non-binary people in that third thread. It makes it clear that this issue will now and always be remembered as being about pronouns and conflicting needs, and the vitriol flung at non-binary people will be forgotten. It will always be “Contrapoints vs. sensitive non-binary” people. And that’s hard for me to deal with.
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