Update: See below for addition in response to reader comment.
It just bothers me when they bring liberalism into all this.
My reading of Damon Linker is that he recognizes the real danger of the authoritarian right, and wants to help Democrats in good faith. Unfortunately, he ignores the old strategic aphorism about letting one’s opponents choose the terrain. In this case, the terrain is narrative, and Linker promulgates every assumption and depiction the authoritarian right has about trans people. Not cynically—he probably believes what he says; it’s just that these are rightwing ideas that cannot help liberals prevail against fascism.
The basic idea is that trans activists have gone too far. Normal people will never be able to sign onto the crazy ideas of the trans left, who believe that biology can be overcome by an act of will and that trans fanatics are teaching gay kids they’re really trans and that if they want to be like the cool kids they’ll transition.
One reason why I think Linker operates in good faith is because, to his credit, he defends the rights of adults to be transgender, up to and including medical operations. Yet this is immediately followed by the implication that we must protect teenagers from transitioning out of their impulsive, capricious, and rash decision-making. For Linker, there’s a mass trans hysteria—not the moral panic on the right, I mean—and the kids are at risk of catching trans by social contagion.
Linker thumps the table with a biological definition of woman—XX chromosomes! Vagina and ovaries and uterus, oh my! Capacity to menstruate and ovulate and become pregnant!—and rails against the trans activists for defying nature in favor of an anarchic world free of biological constraints, gendered expectations, and moral judgment of gender and sexuality.
This is … just a conservative shaking his cane at the liberal kids on his TV. This is unsurprising; Linker is a conservative and he buys into all the conservative framing of these issues, as I’ve argued. But he then makes the bizarre argument that the homosexuals are natural now. Like he just fell off the turnip truck yesterday. And because they’re normal now, gays and lesbians should feel threatened by the libertine trans ideology where just any old individual can be what they want to be. (Linker is the liberal, right?)
And women. You know, the real ones, with a vagina, a uterus, at least one ovary, two X chromosomes, less testosterone than the men with an X and a Y pair, the biological potential to lactate and menstruate and have miscarriages. Women should feel threatened by this sex and gender anarchy where no one’s life prospects are determined by their sexual biology.
Women and gays and lesbians should stand with the liberals (“rightly understood”) against trans ideology. Oh but also we should respect the rights and dignity of trans people and allow adult human females and adult human males to transition. Then the Democratic umbrella will be expansive enough to win against the authoritarian right.
I mentioned strategy above. The strategy of the right is, and has always been, to divide those groups lower on the social hierarchy in order to conquer them. Turn the white workers against the blacks. Turn the white women against the blacks. You know the drill. Maybe this time it will work.
Linker really wants to push back against Trump and the rise of the authoritarian right. I believe that. But he insists on fighting on the narrative terrain carefully selected by the authoritarian right.
Edited to add in response to a reader comment:
Teen decision-making isn’t great. But it’s also absurd on its face to think that there’s a social contagion, where kids are choosing to be trans because they want to be cool. The Onion gets this basically right. theonion.com/trans-teen-hatches-nefario…
Interestingly, the study Linker cites about detransition (from hormone use)—which includes the highest detransition rate I’ve seen—observes detransition is less likely for those who transition earlier. Reasons for detransition matter quite a lot. Studies that have tracked this talk about parental pressure and social ostracism as common reasons.
Linker is right that there’s no easy call to make between when to respect parental authority and when to intervene. But parents are often the problem on this issue, a source of danger. This is similar to the abortion issue, where there’s good reason to provide avenues around parents when a kid needs an abortion. That’s also a life-changing situation; would Linker counsel waiting until 18 before being able to make that choice? Also, there are medical reasons to prefer transitioning earlier versus later, reasons of effectiveness. My understanding is it makes a big difference which kind of puberty one undergoes.
This would all be easier of course if all parents were open-minded and supportive and there were no social stigma associated with being trans (or nonbinary or gay for that matter). But for Linker the anti-trans stigma is important, because being trans is not natural. He thus makes the real problems he identifies worse by promoting rightwing anti-trans narratives. Just as he makes the political problem worse by fostering division.
Disappointed slighyas I thought he was a little smarter than to fall for this BS.