So Here's How It's Gonna Be

If you’re in the significant majority of readers who never reads the comments, feel free to skip this post. In fact do me a favor and skip it.

I should have known better, and would have, had I not used a failed freelancing piece as a post. Last Friday I decided to repurpose a piece I had written for another publication as a subscriber-only post, one about a certain type of political strategy Democrats should use to win elections. The editor I was pitching wasn’t interested in it, so I reworked it and shared it here for you all. I didn’t think much about the difference in venues. Perhaps for that reason, I didn’t contemplate the fact that referencing trans political issues, and my straightforwardly progressive perspective on them, would inflame a section of the commenting corps here. Sadly, that is the one issue on which I can always expect a vocal minority of commenters to dominate the conversation, to egg each other on into more and more extreme terms, and to do so in a way that inevitably creates an unwelcoming atmosphere for some readers. As I said earlier, I’ve had enough.

Here’s the one paragraph in that piece that references trans politics.

But the choice between winning elections and defending minority groups is a false one. The question is not whether to defend trans people, for example; we have a profound moral and political duty to do so. The question is how best to defend them. And here I would say that normie politics represents the best route forward. A normie trans politics emphasizes equal rights and dignity rather than academic conceptions of gender identity. Rather than constantly getting bogged down in abstract questions about the gender binary, which can sound extremist, Democrats should emphasize the shared humanity of trans people, their fundamentally mundane status as ordinary people who simply want to live and work and flourish while embodying their true gender identities. That demand, that we all recognize the equal dignity of a vulnerable set of people who want only to live their full and unapologetic lives, is both more important and an easier sell than achieving a significant public change in the understanding of sex categories. And indeed, that’s what conservatives want to debate, those abstractions, rather than the simple reality of trans life. Look at conservative activist Matt Walsh and his recent film What is a Woman?, which fixates relentlessly on abstract definitional questions in the hopes that doing so will obscure the faces of the trans people who are asking us for safety and dignity.

This is, indeed, what I believe. It’s an argument that the best political strategy for protecting trans people and ensuring their equal rights and safety is to assert their shared humanity, and further that getting bogged down in abstract questions about gender identity plays into the hands of conservatives. Could be wrong. But it’s an argument about how best to serve trans people’s interests, a sincere one.

My first frustration is that, as has happened in the past, this one paragraph dominated discussion when it was only a single example in a piece arguing about much broader political questions. Proportionality matters. That paragraph amounts to about a tenth of the total words in the essay, and yet it generated a large majority of the comments. Along with previous such episodes, this can’t help but make trans readers feel like the commenting space is filled with obsessives. And for me personally, it’s just frustrating to write something about broad issues of political philosophy only to find that a particular illustrative example has eaten the conversation.

Second, there was a good deal of simple, straightforward transphobia in that thread, contrary to complaints. If you think I’m going to allow people to say things like “women’s prisons are an all-you-can-rape buffet for transwomen” in my space, you’re out of your goddamn mind. And what really bothers me is not just that people said such things but that nobody flagged any of it. Not one flag. Please feel free to email me and let me know if you used the flag function and it didn’t work; I doubt it, as it has worked in the past. I have told you repeatedly that my preference is for you to self-police. Perhaps that was asking too much.

There were of course also perceptive and respectful comments, about trans people or other elements of the essay, and it pains me that I have found it necessary to temporarily turn off comments for them too. I fully recognize that there are live debates in our political culture about transwomen participating in women’s sports, about the appropriate age for medical transition, and about traditionally (cisgender) women-only spaces like bathrooms. And my preference would be to allow for respectful, not-hateful arguments of that type to be permitted around here. But the issue (and it really is a dedicated minority) is that over and over again those legitimate political claims attract genuinely hateful comments, and this tendency has grown too obvious and frequent for me to ignore. This problem, it’s clear, requires a heavy hand.

So here’s the deal: I am not going to discuss trans issues in this space, and you in turn are not going to be wedging your fixation on trans issues into the conversation here. I will be relying on members of this community to flag comments or email me when this rule is broken. The reflexive “here’s why this is really about trans people” move people do around here is going to end, and I will use the tools available to me to make that happen. The first time you violate this rule you’ll be banned for 24 hours. The second time you’ll be banned for life. It’s terribly depressing to me that I have to simply declare that this newsletter will consider this issue off-limits, but my repeated attempts to keep the conversation open while maintaining a basic level of friendliness to people in a small and vulnerable minority have failed. So that topic is off-limits here. Rather than writing about it and then demanding that you not engage on that topic in a way that I don’t like, we will communally avoid it. This decision of mine is not subject to democratic review. My word here is law.

It’s simple to flag a comment for my review, just click the three dots under a comment and then click the Report comment button. Email me if you prefer.

Comments come in by the hundreds and at all hours of the day; I couldn’t moderate them all myself if I wanted to, and I don’t want to. I would like to pay someone to handle that task, but I would feel compelled by principle to pay at least $25/hour, and again this task is an all-day thing so I don’t know how that would work. We’re slowly saving up for a downpayment on a house, and I just can’t figure out a way that a paid moderator would work. So I’m going to be keeping more of an eye on comments myself for now, and I ask readers who feel that comments are off-topic and/or transphobic to be aggressive with flagging. The person you flag will never know that they were flagged, and certainly not by you, and of course flagging does not necessarily mean I will ban anybody. The stakes are low, so err on the side of flagging if it’s in your nature to do so, and I will ensure that this space remains welcoming.

The good news is that, if you’re a paying subscriber who finds this decision offensive, you have a practical means with which to voice your displeasure, by canceling your subscription. I think this is an underrated element of paid newsletters, that the readers have muscle. You can use your market power to demonstrate your displeasure with my decision here. I do ask that you not email me to cancel your subscription - it’s far easier for you to do so on your end than for me to dig around in the database and do it for you, and anyway you can spare me the theatrics. I will see the line go down if enough of you decide to quit. I’m unconcerned with who individually is unsubscribing. Here are instructions for how to do so.

Please note that some people have an issue where they still receive the Weekly Digests after unsubscribing, so you may want to go into your settings and manually disable those first. Click the settings menu in the upper righthand corner and you’ll see “Account Settings” in the dropdown. Then disable Weekly Digests before you unsubscribe.

Look, this is lose, lose, lose, lose for me. Critics of me and of Substack will have an absolute field day with the fact that I feel I have to do this (fuck you too Twitter), IDW and conservative types will go after me for censorship, it won’t be good for the newsletter’s growth, and it amounts to the kind of restriction on my writing that I’ve always fought hard against. But this is how it’s got to be. I could give you all a big explanation of how my newsletter’s comments are not an open forum or platform; I certainly would not like it if Substack or Twitter or YouTube banned people for the same things that I am prepared to ban people for. I could talk about balancing free expression with my refusal to let any particular group of people feel like they’re being targeted here. I could point out that you have many other spaces where you can share your thoughts. Ultimately, I think the rules I’ve laid out speak for themselves. No, my comments section cannot be a safe space, as no space can be. But I’m tired of the same nasty conversation dominating my community here.

I was lucky to be raised in an environment in which LGBTQ people were common, including trans people; I have trans friends from academia and my writing career; I have trans comrades from housing activism; I in fact have a close family member who’s trans. But even if these things were not the case, I would not tolerate the atmosphere of exclusion that I allowed to build in my comments section through neglect. So I’m fixing it. Comments will return tomorrow. Now you know the rules. You are permitted to be disappointed or to take your attention and money elsewhere. But this is how it’s gonna be.