My Full Interview With ContraPoints
Last week, New York Magazine’s Select All vertical published my profile of Natalie Parrott, the up-and-coming YouTuber better known as ContraPoints. As I explained in the piece — and if you’re unfamiliar with her work, what follows will likely make more sense if you read it first — Parrott’s channel, in addition to being extremely smart and entertaining, offers some important lessons about effectively fighting back against the far-right content that dominates certain segments of YouTube and other parts of the internet.
But we talked about a ton of other interesting stuff in our interview, too, from Nazi-punching to insular lefty language to the best ways to talk about gender dysphoria for cisgender audiences, so I figured I’d publish a transcript of our interview here, in Q&A form, with Parrott’s permission.
A few notes:
-This interview took place in early August, before the Charlottesville violence and murder, so that’s why that didn’t come up in the discussion of Nazi-punching and political violence.
-At the time I reached out to her for this piece, Parrott identified as genderqueer. She has since come out as a trans woman. So please keep that in mind when she talks about the privileges/perils of being “read” as male or female on YouTube, especially given that, as I noted in my profile, in followup correspondence with me she noted that she’s received a wave of harassment since coming out.
-I lied a tiny bit in the headline. This isn’t the full full transcript — I cut a few parts where things dragged a little, edited here and there for clarity and flow, and Nat asked me to make a couple very minor edits. But this transcript is a very faithful representation of our discussion, digressions and all.
-Unlike with the profile, I didn’t have the benefit of a copy editor. I did my best to clean up the transcript, but if you notice any errors — and I’m sure there are some — please hit me up on Twitter or via email.
With that out of the way…
You’ve got some good backstory about what led you to start your channel in your video “Why I Quit Academia,” but for folks who are new to your work, do you mind giving the quick version?
Sure. I dropped out of my PhD philosophy program at Northwestern in the summer of 2015, in my mid-20s. I kind of had the idea of writing fiction and so I was working on that for a year but without ever having very much success at it. At the same time, I was being a copyeditor, being an Uber driver, all this kind of stuff. When I was younger I had a very small YouTube channel where as early as 2009 or 2008 I had done these vlogs about atheism, which was the big thing. So I was kind of aware of how YouTube political discussion works.
About a year and a half ago I started getting these YouTube “recommended videos” because of my old atheism subscriptions. And I saw they all had titles like “Feminist is Cancer” and “Black Lives Matter is the Most Racist Organization in American History,” and so forth. I was like That’s interesting — what is going on with this? At the time, I had an adjunct philosophy teaching job, but at the end of the semester I was going to be out of work again. I was feeling disillusioned with the idea of writing fiction for a living, and I was looking at YouTube and seeing things really heat up again in terms of the popularity of talking about serious political or philosophical issues, and almost no one doing leftist content that engaged with the other side in any way. I was like, I bet I can do this, so I gave it a shot and it’s worked out better than I expected.
What was the left doing instead of engaging with the other side?
At the time there were a lot of think pieces being written about, Is This Other Thinkpiece About How Miley Cyrus is Racist Really Sexist? It seemed like the topics being focused on were somewhat frivolous. It seemed like there were a lot of words being written by people who were offended for the sake of showing that they could be offended by something. I don’t know. And on YouTube, what I saw was a lot of very young people making these not morally bad but somewhat fumbled vlogs about social justice, a lot of them coming from 19-year-olds saying things like All white people are racist! or whatever. And then these 35-year-old men would respond with their hundreds of thousands of followers and just be like Look at what this idiot is saying!, and then this gang of angry white dudes would come berate some transgender 17-year-old. I’m like, Is this rational? Is this any way to behave at all? I guess I kind of threw myself in as a different type of voice in the conversation.
In your video about quitting academia, you relate this one moment when you’re sitting in a seminar, and you realize that if an outsider heard the conversation, no one would have any idea what the fuck anyone was talking about — let alone be convinced by it. It definitely feels like a yearning for clearly and simply-stated debate drives a lot of what you do.
Exactly. So both the language and just the ideas themselves — these discussions about the intricate details of which kind of socialism is correct, and meanwhile in actual American politics the word socialism is completely forbidden. Ayn Rand is considered the national political philosopher, and there’s no way that any of this could ever be employed outside of the academic setting because it’s just so detached from the reality of current American politics.
I mean, that’s not necessarily bad: You’re allowed to have academic political theory where you work these things out without having to care about what’s feasible. I agree that there’s a place for that. But so many of these people have no interest whatsoever in what’s actually going on in the country they live in and how to actually talk to other humans about it. That just seemed to me like a completely pointless exercise. All these people working on the critical theory and studying Theodor Adorno and all these western Marxists. I’m not saying don’t study it, but I’m saying if you actually care about politics find a way to make this something more than a thing that privileged grad students discuss in a seminar.
Do you think it’s fair to say that elements of the left get too steeped in that sort of language online? Your example was All white people are racist. It’s the kind of thing where it’s true in a sense, but it’s almost like you’re saying it more to throw up a flag to other people who speak the exact same language as you do. It it isn’t really anchored to a specific real-world argument or political claim.
Yeah. They’re basically terms where you say them and other people who are woke know what you’re talking about but no one else knows what you’re talking about. I think that’s true with rape culture too. To people who don’t know what that means they imagine what’s being asserted must be that we live in a culture where rape is sort of publicly celebrated and parents teach their children that it’s okay to rape. This seems so at odds with the reality that it just seems like insanity to them.
So what you have to do instead of just saying “We live in a rape culture” as if everyone knows what you’re talking about — no one knows what you’re talking about besides people already involved in social justice or feminism — you’ve got to explain what exactly that means and you’ve got to have examples and use normal language.
So many of these fights are, like, Person A says All white people are racist, Person B says, No they’re not, and it just devolves into a mess that doesn’t advance anyone’s understanding of anything or bring anyone any closer to justice. It’s just words. I get frustrated with that stuff.
YouTube is even harder because you have so many of these reactionary channels and talking about this stuff that often before you even reach a lot of the audience, before they even hear what you have to say, they have had many people who’ve put in their heads all these misconceptions about it. To inform people about these matters or make an argument, you have to not just start from a point of ignorance but a point of active misinformation.
Especially when you’re discussing something like transgender issues, which you do a lot. It’s difficult enough to discuss gender dysphoria or gender identity to cisgender people as it is, and a chunk of your audience has read about these issues on Breitbart, which has got to make it much harder.
They’re coming not just with ignorance of transgender issues but with this preconception that trans people are predators that want to invade women’s locker rooms, that trans people are deceivers who want to trick men into sleeping with them by calling them bigots. So you’re working uphill against these ideas.
So you start the channel, and your goal all along is to actually engage with bad or hateful ideas. How did you start to figure out what that would look like, both thematically and aesthetically?
Well, as far as the aesthetic of the thing I guess originally, a year and a half ago, I was influenced by the famous RedLetterMedia reviews of the Star Wars prequels, which are basically three 90-minute reviews of these movies that are very entertaining to watch. They’re very character-heavy and there’s a kind of narrative voice of this fictional character that’s doing the reviews that makes them funny. I don’t care at all about Star Wars, so I don’t really care about whether the prequels are bad or not, but these reviews are so funny that I used to watch them again and again. My thinking about my own channel was instead of it just being a really dry academic narrator, what if there are jokes, and what if I adopt a persona of this degenerate? Sort of incorporating the stereotypes that the far right is going to have about me, just embracing every one of them.
I guess what I found successful about that is a couple things. One is people like watching your videos if you’re being a good host, you’re entertaining them and you’re speaking to them in an amusing way that’s fun to listen to as opposed to preaching at them. No one likes being preached at. The other thing is if you kind of pre-satirize yourself you’ve already presented a caricature and extreme version of who you are, you’ve ripped the rug out from under the trolls because they have nothing… it’s not fun to call you a degenerate tranny if that’s how you’ve presented yourself from the get-go.
Isn’t this what Eminem did in 8 Mile? I think this is the 8 Mile Theory of YouTube Content.
Exactly.
So on the one hand it’s a bit of a self-caricature. But on the other, once you’ve done that pre-satirization, is there also some psychological dynamic where you’re like, Now I can be myself — I no longer have to worry about how people are going to view me?
Definitely. In some ways I miss this about my earlier videos. When I go back and watch them what strikes me is how much I did not give a shit what people thought. I was really free back then in terms of what I said and what I was wearing. Some of those videos I’m actually just drunk on camera. I don’t do that anymore. There’s booze in the video but I’m not actually drinking it. When I first started I was actually drinking it.
Do you remember a specific moment where you were like Holy shit, this is working — I could make something of a living off of this?
I was making a very feeble living off of it by last December or January, where it was just enough to pay rent and buy some food, but there was no single moment like that. It was just kind of gradually seeing that my Patreon support continued to increase at a faster pace and that increasing support allowed me to do more and to have higher production quality and make better videos, which in turn seemed to increase more interest in the channel.
I take it Patreon brings in way more money than anything you get from YouTube ad revenue at this point?
Yeah. I make almost nothing at all from YouTube ad revenue. It’s like $60 a month or something. It’s some beer money, but I’m more than $3,000 per video on Patreon [note: today, November 7th, this has risen to exactly $5,500 per video]. So Patreon is really the only reason this is a business at all. The YouTube ad revenue model just isn’t really working for people anymore partially because of recent advertisers being scared away by all the white nationalists.
You mentioned RedLetterMedia, but who are some of your other comedic influences?
I guess a big one is the turn of the millennium sitcom Strangers with Candy.
I loved that show.
I still watch it today. I watch it again and again. I’ve watched for a decade or so and I think it’s an incredibly funny show. I feel like I have to say this because I’m an SJW but it obviously has its problematic moments.
The fact that there’s a black character named Principal Blackman, for example.
Yeah. But Jerri Black played by Amy Sedaris, she’s basically a genderqueer character. They don’t use the word genderqueer but she pisses standing up, she’s kind of pansexual and morphs between male and female expression so she’s kind of an influence, that character. Other comedic influences, in terms of what I’ve watched a lot of, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Not a very exciting choice because everyone who was my age watches that. I listen to a lot of standup comics. I mean when I was younger I watched a lot of Louis CK. I don’t really watch him that much anymore but his show I think I’ve stolen some stuff from.
There are some weird moments from your channel that I could totally see being in a Louie episode.
Then also some of it that just comes from YouTubers. There’s a channel called HowToBasic, which I don’t know if you’re familiar with it but he does these videos that begin as if they’re going to be a how-to video, hot to make scented candles, how to bake chocolate chip cookies. They begin like an actual instructional video and degenerate into him smashing raw eggs onto the thing, turning the table over, and he’s rubbing mayonnaise into his naked thighs.
I can see the influence because an hour ago I was watching you try to jam a hot dog into an electrical outlet in one of your videos.
This is kind of a distinctively YouTube style of humor. These weird things with textures and objects and food. That comes from YouTube.
I feel like the quick asides and quick spooky cuts are also very much a YouTube thing, right?
Definitely. A lot of the style just comes from other YouTubers and things everyone does, the fast editing, cutting a sentence off before the end of the last word, The superimposition of a different clip, cutting into a clip from something else.
I’m really happy you mentioned Strangers with Candy because that’s just one of those shows that I’ve always been obsessed with and even friends of mine who I grew up watching The Simpsons with and have similar senses of humor as, I just feel like most of my friends don’t get it. It just really resonated for me.
People don’t know what it is that much anymore. People that are younger, they don’t know what it is and to me this is queer humor at its finest. It’s not as well-known but it should be.
It also allows you to honestly say you were into Stephen Colbert before he was huge, which is nice.
Oh, yeah. I think it’s Stephen Colbert’s the best performances in some ways.
Some of his scenes as Chuck Noblet are just incredible. So back when everyone was debating punching Nazis — it feels like it was years ago but I think it was just in January — there were aspects of that conversation online that got fairly annoying. It felt like on the left, no one could even conceive that there could possibly be any downside to certain norms against political violence changing. One of the things that I liked about your video “Punching Natsees” was that you really made a genuine effort to understand both sides. And it seemed like you were somewhat influenced by certain aspects of the online debate?
Yeah. The video was basically in some ways a reproduction of debates I actually had with people on Twitter and things.
I mean, is it just that on Twitter and a lot of online space it’s hard to fully lay out a complex argument? I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people aren’t thinking through things like this. Political violence is a big deal and countries that have bad political violence, it destroys everything.
It’s the end of life as you know it.
Am I being an old fogey in saying that online makes it harder for people to think this stuff through, or am I in a bubble, or what do you think’s going on here?
I was always hesitant about openly celebrating the Nazi-punching. I mean, it’s complicated. I’m still conflicted about it. I was conflicted at the time too. On the one hand, it’s so frustrating to see these horrible people saying horrible, racist things all the time and there just seems to be no consequences, and so the emotional moment of Spencer being clocked in the side of the head by someone in the midst of talking about Pepe is satisfying. It’s incredibly satisfying.
Viscerally.
Yeah. It’s viscerally satisfying and it’s especially satisfying to the people who are the most vulnerable. So I get why people celebrated it, but at the same time you have to think how the celebration looks to mainline white America who already, with or without justification, feel somewhat embattled, and there’s a lot of people who don’t see any difference between punching Richard Spencer and Richard Spencer punching black people or whatever. So you have to kind of worry about setting up a position where, when it comes to political violence against the left, people can say You’re the one who started it or You’re the one who advocated this to begin with.
What I found so interesting was that you pinned a comment under that video which seemed to acknowledge that some people might be off-put by the fact that it lacked a clear takeaway. So to clarify your own stance you explained how overall you “lean toward the bourgeois liberal side of this argument, though I understand there are some compelling arguments in favor of anti-fascist violence.” Do you find that people try to pressure you to have a stance on complicated issues where you’re genuinely conflicted, or are viewers usually okay with that sort of ambiguity?
That Nazi-punching video was the first video I did of a style that I now do regularly where you have a fictional dialogue. This is a very pompous way to put it but it’s kind of like a 21st-century Platonic dialogue where you’re exploring a philosophical topic by having different characters discuss it, and this is something I like to do for a few reasons.
I originally did it with the Nazi-punching video because I myself was not quite decided about it, so I wanted to give what I thought were two legitimate perspectives a space where I could explore both sides in the video. Then with this later video I did called “Debating the Alt-Right,” I used a different purpose to show basically how these debates can go horribly wrong and how the cunning of people like Richard Spencer can be used to make horrible ideas seem like reasonable ideas.
I guess people definitely want to know where you stand. There’s some part of people that wants to be preached at despite the fact that they don’t like it. They think it’s sort of cowardly if you abstain from saying what you think and I sort of see what they mean.
In “Debating the Alt-Right” you do a good job broadcasting some of your own ambivalence about debunking some of these ridiculous characters. What was that one guy… Golden Boy?
The Golden One.
You’re a quote-unquote “fan” of The Golden One, right?
Yes. I mean he is a monster. He shares memes of gender nonconforming people being guillotined. He thinks that refugees are cockroaches. He’s a bad person. He thinks there’s a Jewish conspiracy that controls the media, but his videos are nonetheless irresistible and I can’t stop watching them because he’s a Swedish bodybuilder with a pretense to being a kind of Viking god of some kind, and he speaks in a big, deep voice, with this beautiful Swedish accent and talks about how the Jews and the gay agenda are undermining Western civilization while presenting his oiled-up naked torso to the camera and flexing his pecs. If he didn’t exist I’d have to invent him.
He definitely fits into this category of internet horror we’re you’re like, I acknowledge that this is in some dark way brilliant even as I don’t condone a second of its content.
Exactly.
What I liked about “Debating the Alt-Right” was I came away unsure, exactly, how to interpret the failure of the “reasonable liberal” who goes onto your fictional talk show and unexpectedly finds himself debating an actual Nazi, all while the ostensibly centrist, not-taking-sides host reprimands him to remain civil and let the Nazi spread Holocaust denial. I could see the ContraPoints argument that he shouldn’t back down, that he should accept an invitation to debate to point out how asinine Holocaust denial is, but then I could also see the ContraPoints argument that you’re putting yourself in a really shitty position by debating with a Holocaust denier.
It’s dangerous. It’s a risk to enter into these debates. Kind of what I was thinking of, I had just done a debate on a channel called Roaming Millennial. It’s kind of a conservative channel, but she had given Richard Spencer a very softball interview. I mean her audience is somewhat alt-right-sympathetic to begin with, and to see her smiling and nodding at Richard Spencer I kind of went crazy on Twitter, saying, What are you doing? This is unconscionable to give him this kind of platform. She actually had me on her channel and we talked about it, and she actually believes what she says about free speech and that she’s willing to talk to me when I criticize her.
In general, I do think having a debate is good. But when you have very disingenuous opponents and when they are rhetorically skilled, to show up to that debate is potentially to lose a debate to a Nazi, which is very bad, so it’s something I’m afraid of.
It’s also all rendered trickier by the whole infusion of 4chan culture and mega-irony where people say things like My Holocaust meme is just a joke! Why are you so upset about it?
What I tried to show in that video is when you are sincere and you care you’re sort of at a disadvantage against someone who is willing to say whatever. They can kind of make you a chump.
Online culture has a way of chewing up and spitting out earnestness. But more generally, doing these debates as your profile gets larger and larger has to be a bit weird and nerve-wracking, I would imagine. When you debate someone like the conservative transgender YouTube personality Blaire White, who has a big audience and knows how to present herself in a polished way, you’re suddenly giving up all the control you usually have over your channel and what the end result is going to look like.
Exactly. Yeah. And I’m still figuring out how to prepare for that. I mean that debate with Blaire was the first big one I did and I think it was basically a disaster. When you go into a debate on someone else’s platform, the goal is to present yourself and your ideas in a way that the audience will find sympathetic. This tends to work best if the debate is friendly and civil. But the main topic of the Blaire debate was her terrible treatment of other trans people online. So from the start I was in a position where I looked emotional, moralizing, accusatory. Blaire’s fans don’t like that, and of course there’s no chance of getting someone to see the faults in their own behavior when you’re throwing accusations at them in front of a live audience. They just double down. So that debate was doomed from the beginning.
In general, there are a few things I try to do to prepare for these sorts of debates. One has to do with simply picking the right people to debate. The point of a debate is not to convince the person I’m talking to, it’s to convince people watching. So before you even start the debate you want to think about whether the people watching it are persuadable. For instance, I think a stupid thing about debating Blaire White is that a lot of her audience are the people who are there to see her being mean to people. There are a few channels like that on YouTube, kind of bullying channels. I don’t want their audience. I don’t want them to know who I am. So I turn down debates on some mean-spirited channels because I’m not doing that. Your audience doesn’t care about ideas. I don’t want to talk to them.
Laci Green is a big one that I did recently that I had mixed feeling about. I kind of broke the picket line, as it were, to debate Laci, because most trans people on YouTube won’t give her the time of day basically because of just kind of naïve stuff that she’s said and perpetuated on Twitter, mostly. And also the other person in the debate was Megan Murphy who is a very outspoken TERF who doesn’t show any sign of politeness to trans people.
Let me ask you about this because I’ve actually made a conscious effort to try to not talk much about the Laci thing on Twitter. It seems really bad.
Smart.
I usually don’t have such discretion. So Laci Green, I’m sure she has said offensive things. I’m also sure, if you look at the broad span of American attitudes on sex and transgender people and gender dysphoria, she’s not particularly far out there. There are so many people with worse and more ignorant views, people who actually want to harm or exclude trans people. It just seems to me like one of the debates within the online social-justice community is which opinions are going to be viewed as so offensive we can’t even debate these people. It sounds like because you went on her show you agree that she’s not at that point where she just shouldn’t be engaged with at all.
Yes. I mean the reason that people are so against Laci is that there’s an element of treason. Laci was thought to know better. She was actually personal friends with several trans activists on YouTube. To have Laci position herself as a sex educator, she positions herself as a trans ally. There’s a sense that she should know better than to be saying the things that she’s saying and to be going on about regressive leftists and ranting on about SJWs on Twitter. She knows what that means and she knows how an audience will receive it and she’s doing it anyway, so people just feel incredibly betrayed by it. If she had not been positioned as an ally to begin with I doubt anyone would have cared so much.
There’s something more almost personal going on here, in other words.
Definitely. I agree there’s a more general problem. I also caused a huge amount of trouble for myself and several other people on Twitter during VidCon [a gathering for folks who work in online video] when I stupidly tweeted a picture of me and a few other left YouTubers having lunch with these people, ArmouredSkeptic and Shoe0nHead, who are kind of anti-SJW YouTubers. This caused an incredible amount of trouble. I mean, I understand the reason people are so emotional about this is that, as ridiculous as it sounds, especially if you look back to GamerGate and that era, there are people whose lives have been significantly negatively affected by the followers of these people and by the nature of online discourse around hating feminists and hating trans activism.
But the problem is, your average American is going to look at a YouTuber like this and see someone who believes the same thing as them. So if you say that these people are so far gone you can’t even talk to them you’re now not talking to 95 percent of the country and it’s like… I’m so looking forward to the time, when it comes, that we don’t have to talk to people who believe these things anymore, but I’m sorry, that time is at least a couple decades away. When it comes to issues like nonbinary genders and so on no one even knows what that is. Bigotry hasn’t even gotten off the ground yet. The work is ahead. The hard work is ahead of us and part of that has to be being able to communicate effectively.
Yes, it’s going to suck and it means being polite to people who are disrespectful to you and who don’t understand you and have bigoted, stupid misconceptions. Yes, it’s all of that but we’re the ones who are complaining about being a marginalized group, and we are, and that’s what being a marginalized group is like. It sucks. Why should we expect it to not suck?
The other thing I’ve noticed, and I don’t want to veer into snowflake-accusation territory here, but I do think in a lot of these social-justice online communities there’s a certain almost moral panic, there’s this idea that if you even brush up against someone online who’s offensive or has a bad opinion it could ruin everything. Now, there are very real instances of awful harassment. I covered GamerGate. No one can really understand the shit Zoe Quinn went through. But the average person on Twitter, if they interact with an anti-feminist, is not going to have to get FBI protection. There’s something going on where people are just too afraid. I know I’m not supposed to say that, but it just feels that way sometimes.
You think people are too afraid to engage?
Too afraid to engage and also just some of the discourse about online harassment and what will happen if you’re quote-tweeted by an anti-feminist. I don’t know. Maybe I inhabit a middle space where I think there’s a lot of shitty harassment but I also think people use that as an excuse not to have any conversation about anything. Maybe I’m being uncharitable here.
I think that’s true to a certain extent. It’s hard because especially when you’re dealing with the debate, reactionary YouTubers are YouTubers who came up during GamerGate. That’s how they got famous, so I see why Zoe Quinn might not trust me if I’m having friendly conversations with these people, for example. I get it because as you say, look what she went through. She can’t trust anyone who would even be friendly with these people. I get that. But on the other hand, that’s three years behind us and where do we go from here? A lot of these people are not evil. They’re kind of oblivious to the harm they’ve caused a lot of the time. So I would never tell someone to make themselves vulnerable or they have to open themselves up to harassment just for the sake of doing the debate. I also think that for those of us who are willing to take that risk or have the privilege that we can sort of afford to take that risk, let us do it. Some good can come of it.
So in other words, as someone who is self-abnegating and has a sense of humor about things, you can sort of draw some of the enemy fire and maybe something good will come out of it.
Yeah. Exactly.
Do you deal with a lot of serious threats and harassment, or is it mostly people on Twitter calling you a tranny or whatever?
It comes in waves. Honestly, on a daily basis I get much less of it than a lot of other people.
Why do you think that is?
Well, there’s a lot of causes that we could talk about. Basically, the more proximate cause is that big YouTube channels that tend to have a very bullying audience like Blaire White or Bearing or any of these big channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers who like to harass people, they tend not to make videos targeting me so they don’t send their audiences over to me. There are a few reasons for that. One is that my videos are intentionally designed to be difficult to make response videos to. There’s the self-abnegating thing where I’ve kind of already built in the critique of myself, so it’s not fun for them to go on top of it. What’s fun, to them, is a somewhat preachy and earnest person misspeaking slightly. Then the vultures swoop in.
There was that poor girl from UMass who got upset at a Milo talk. A 20-year-old gets upset about something — this is not a rare occurrence for a 20-year-old — and suddenly she is the focus of the entire alt-right’s rage.
They prey on vulnerability. So one thing I’m careful about is projecting a kind of confidence. That’s self-abnegating, but self-abnegation often is bullshit. It’s a secret self-congratulation in a way, sometimes — making fun of yourself can be kind of a power move because it’s showing that you’re resilient enough to withstand it. I also think I don’t deal with a huge amount of harassment in part because I’m educated and older and at least for most of my career people have basically perceived me as a man. That is, I hope, changing soon. I’m beginning to transition. I’ve been publicly genderqueer for months but most people frankly don’t take the label genderqueer very seriously.
They process you as male.
They process me as a man wearing women’s clothes. So with that, I mean there’s disadvantages to that but there’s also some male privilege that I had and still have. Not that that’s a perfect shield either because some of their targets are men. Steve Shives has been the recipient of a lot of it. So it’s part privilege and part strategy on my part that I think has enabled me to dodge the worst of this.
How do you make your videos intentionally hard to respond to?
I keep them tightly scripted. I’m not uploading stuff that I haven’t carefully controlled how each phrase is woven, which makes them hard to misinterpret. I don’t do improvised vlogs. I have background music, which makes it hard to engage in one of the stylistic methods for making response videos, which is to cut up the original video and then intersperse commentary over it. That’s harder to do if there’s background music because the flow of the response video is wrong. Lots of cutaway jokes, fast editing, all these things make it more difficult. They like an earnest person. This is their favorite victim: an earnest person sitting in their bedroom talking in an uninterrupted and pretty off-the-cuff way to the webcam. This is perfect for them because they can pause it every five seconds, add some snarky bit of commentary and start playing it again.
That’s carrion for the vultures.
Exactly. So I don’t do that type of video. That’s not the only reason I don’t do that type of video. My style is not just, like, porcupine spikes. It’s also because I find it more entertaining to watch videos like the ones that I make because I enjoy making them more.
You’re saying it’s not entertaining to hear a 20-year-old male feminist talk about how they just discovered feminism for 45 minutes straight.
That’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.
There’s a heartbreaking element, though, because some of the younger vloggers who haven’t been through any of the bruising aspects of adulthood yet, they’re sort of naïve. Do you think they don’t understand what they could be exposing themselves to by putting themselves out there with all these assholes around?
I think some of them don’t but a lot of them do. I mean a lot of them are still doing this after more than a year of harassment. I agree there’s a heartbreaking element to it and I have seen a lot of small channels show up and then just vanish the minute that the vultures come in. I think some people are just brave — I think Riley Dennis is in this category. She knows how people are going to react to her videos and she continues to make these very earnest vlogs talking about her own opinions and experiences. I am maybe not that brave and in some ways maybe my videos are a little cowardly in the sense that I’m always hiding behind… in some ways I’m borrowing the playbook of the alt right. I’m using irony as a shield. I’m using jokes and memes.
But I would imagine off-camera you’re sort of wired to relate to other people in an irony-infused way. Your persona has to reflect your personality.
That’s true too. Some of it is just a genuine expression of my personality. I’m not really the type of person who is going to make heartfelt 20-minute vlogs. That’s just not really who I am.
Your video on your genderqueer identity felt like a really important moment for you. Did you find the process of creating that video and watching the impact it had sort of helped you along on your — I know this terminology is kind of lame — “gender journey”?
Yes, I think so. For me, this is the full story. I’ve been crossdressing for years and I’ve always preferred looking at myself that way, which is one of the reasons I decided to always be cross-dressing on YouTube. If I was going to have to look at myself all the time I was at least going to see myself the way I wanted to see myself. Part of it was just I was old and hadn’t really hung out in these queer cultures where this terminology is used. I was kind of talking to younger people about this and realized what I was doing was not really just crossdressing.
Now, of course, I’m on the threshold of taking it farther. I’m about to start hormones and things, but when I made that video it was great to have other people react to it in a way that made me feel the things I was feeling. This is YouTube at its best, when you have people from all over the world having feelings in private or thoughts in private that they feel are only them and then you express them in public and it turns out that hundreds of thousands of people who also feel this way.
I think this is a lot of what drove YouTube atheism as a thing back in 2009. There was something called a “blasphemy challenge” in 2007 where what you would do was — it was a very teenage, edgy, atheist thing — make this video where you would renounce belief in God and gods. I think part of what people liked about it was there were all these people from small towns all over the U.S. and Europe who were the only atheists where they lived, but on YouTube or on the internet they formed an online community. The same has happened now with people who don’t really fit their gender assigned at birth, all these people who would be very isolated without the internet find themselves part of a group online.
And then of course the sinister side of it is that many people who feel that actually America ought to be just for white people, those people can also all find each other. This is kind of the effect of connecting many people who are not geographically connected but are now sort of ideologically connected.
So that genderqueer video, I had an overwhelmingly good experience with that video. There weren’t any major negative responses. I mean some smaller channels made responses I haven’t even watched where they attempt to explain why I’m delusional or whatever it is they say. It’s kind of an overwhelmingly positive response.
I do think gender identity is one of these categories online where in some places there’s a sense you’re not even allowed to ask about it or be curious about what X or Y means. You’re told to just accept things at face value. The reason I liked the video is you explained what it means to experience the kind of dysphoria you experienced in a very specific way, which it seems like can only be a good thing if the goal is to genuinely improve public understanding and bolster the civil rights of trans and gender nonconforming people.
I mean, I agree. Again, I understand it’s exhausting if you constantly have to explain yourself to everyone so I understand why people don’t want to, but on the other hand, the reality of the situation is we can’t just expect that everyone already knows this stuff. They don’t, and especially when you’re making a YouTube video. So making a YouTube video for me is very different than interacting with someone live. I’m willing to engage with almost anything in a YouTube video. I think there’s no question too rude for me to answer in a YouTube video in a sense. So I want to know and I want people to know what I’m experiencing. That helps me, so I want their curiosity to be sated and then I don’t have to explain it to them in person because they can just watch my video.
That’s also the reason I just did this this gender dysphoria video:
I think a lot of times the way we talk about gender identity or gender dysphoria is either in abstract medical and psychiatric terms or it’s in social justice, activist terms, and both of those ways have a way of making it seem like a very abstract notion that people don’t really… you’re never going to understand what it is. I feel like you have to play this jargon game just because they say that it’s important and you don’t really understand why. Well, if you can connect the jargon to something more concrete, to something more individual, an individual person’s experience of it then it suddenly acquires a reality that it didn’t have when it was just a bunch of activist jargon.
And you argued in one of your videos that a common way of explaining all this, “Born in the wrong body,” isn’t actually accurate when it comes to a lot of trans people.
I mean, some people legitimately do have that experience so I’m not trying to say that those people aren’t being honest. I’m saying I think there’s a parallel to the way gay and lesbian activists have presented homosexuality. Homosexuality is presented as being a thing that you’re stuck with: I always knew I was gay. There’s nothing that can be done to change it. The only way I can be happy is to have homosexual relationships. This is politically useful when you’re up against people who are assuming that homosexuality is bad and that it’s a choice, and therefore no one should be allowed to do it. So you say I don’t have a choice. But you’re sort of granting the assumption that it’s bad, but we should be arguing that it’s not bad.
I think with trans people it’s much easier to explain to someone I was born a woman in a man’s body. I finally want the body that I’ve always truly had in my brain. That concept tends to bat away questions and it also removes any aspect of agency. It makes being trans into something like being black: How can you fault me for this? This is just how I was born. In fact, for a lot of people, including me, it’s more complicated than that. When I was a prepubescent child I never really had experiences of gender dysphoria. This is not something that started until adolescence. I think I sort of am a little confused by people who have gender dysphoria at age 6 because how much of a difference is there between a 6-year-old boy and a 6-year-old girl? I mean there is a social aspect — you’re being socialized as a boy or girl, I can see that. But in terms of the body thing, so much of the gender dysphoria is about the sex of your body, but to have that before puberty… I’m not saying it doesn’t exist. I’m just saying it’s not my experience at all and I find it hard to imagine.
If your physical dysphoria is centered specifically on your genitals rather than other sexed aspects of your body I guess in those cases you could understand how a kid might have it, right?
I could, and yet what I usually hear from the people talking about childhood dysphoria isn’t usually about genitals. That’s not usually what they emphasize. It’s about I liked wearing my mom’s clothes or I hated wearing dresses to church. That’s what I usually hear when people talk about childhood dysphoria. It’s not like I wanted a vagina or I wanted a penis. I’m sure there are people who felt that way as children but that’s not predominantly what I hear.
The conversation over childhood gender dysphoria is really tricky and I do think there are cases where if you’re a parent of a five-year-old it might genuinely be confusing separating out gender roles and expectations from physical dysphoria.
It’s extremely confusing, and there’s a reason why trans people get kind of on edge when you say things like Couldn’t this just be a tomboy phase? It’s because the word tomboy is used to imply that this is all just a phase. It maybe isn’t impossible that these tomboy teenagers turn out to be fem later but could that not be because of social pressure? I think many people are tomboys when they’re 13 or 14 but they’re not trans. There is a difference and it can take a while to figure out.
At this point, are you not sure where you’re going to end up in terms of your own gender identity, or do you think the most likely outcome is you’ll eventually identify as a trans woman?
At this point I basically know that I’m going to identify as a trans woman. The question is am I going to be a binary trans woman or am I going to be a genderqueer trans woman? (I know this is a high level of snowflakery and that most people are not following the arcane taxonomy here.) Basically, I mean the reason I say I’m going to end up being a trans woman is I know there’s things that I want to do to my body that basically gives me what I think as the experience of a trans woman — taking hormones and probably doing voice training, electrolysis on my face, all these kinds of things. I could get to the end of that all and still be like I’m nonbinary, I’m genderqueer and I just like this fem appearance, but I don’t know. I kind of hate the fact that I feel like people expect you to announce what you are and then you become it. I would rather become the thing and then name it.
What you’re saying is reminding me of a story I’m working on for which I’ve talked to a lot of clinicians who work with young trans and gender dysphoric and gender-nonconforming kids. What they tend to say is that all this emphasis on What are you? and What box do you fit in? can be pretty harmful, sometimes. Their goal, which sounds like your goal, is to get people to a place where they feel comfortable with themselves — not to emphasize identity labels.
I agree with that. The things that you’re supposed to be certain about and uncertain about are the opposite of things I feel certain and uncertain about. I feel like in order to be considered trans the way the definition is usually presented, if you’re assigned male at birth you have to be like I know I’m a woman, whereas I know that I want hormones and then the language is less important to me than the reality.
Who the hell am I to say, but to me here’s where there are actually certain benefits to ‘medicalizing’ this a little bit because to me, the argument I have this condition, gender dysphoria, and if I take hormones I will feel much better is way harder to argue with than some of the more fuzzy, subjective identity arguments people make. Or am I missing something?
Yes. I would say… I mean a lot of trans people I talk to agree that having the medical diagnosis is important because it means that they have much more legitimate access to what they need to feel better, which is the hormone treatment. So they’re afraid of demedicalizing dysphoria because they’re afraid of losing that. But I think the reason for the emphasis on the identity thing has more to do with the social side of it, because if you have gender dysphoria it’s not just that you want hormones. It’s also that you want hormones and you want socially to live your life as a woman or a man if you’re assigned female at birth and you want the social recognition of that.
In other words, there’s a risk of putting too much emphasis on physical dysphoria versus the question of how you present to the world and how people see you.
Yeah. Because you also wouldn’t want it to be just that you’re taking hormones, Okay, you’re done. No, you’re not done, because you want people to call you by your new name and you want people to use your correct pronoun and you want to be able to live in the world as your gender because of all the social aspects of gender. It’s not just this physical thing. But it’s really complicated.
When are you actually starting hormones?
September.
Is it just excitement or is it tinged with fear?
It’s really just excitement at this point.
To what extent are you going to keep doing what you’re doing in terms of making videos or are you going to talk about the process?
I think for the most part I’m going to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m imagining sort of incorporating a discussion of transition into the videos here and there, but I can also imagine doing a straight-up video. This will probably be farther down the line and there’s more to talk about but a video that straight up talks about my experience transitioning, but I think there’s already a lot of YouTube channels of people who are just documenting through weekly vlogs their transition and I don’t think I need to add to that because I think those channels already exist. I like them. I’m glad they’re there but I think I have a different thing to offer. [Note: Parrott has since posted some “update streams” talking about this stuff.]
