The Real Problem with Andrea Long Chu’s Extremism on Trans Kids
The media rewards extreme opinions with attention. This needs to change.
Trans writer Andrea Long Chu’s recent controversial essay in New York Magazine, which literally called for everyone to ‘have access to sex-changing medical care, regardless of age, gender identity, social environment, or psychiatric history’, has predictably attracted a lot of attention, across a variety of media outlets and types. Needless to say, much of the attention has been of the outrage type, given the extreme premise of the essay. Besides the troubling idea that kids should be treated no differently than adults (which has serious implications well beyond the trans issue), and the outdated and scientifically inaccurate view that trans medical care constitutes a ‘sex-change’ (which many in the trans community would find offensive indeed), there are many other highly problematic and absolutely awful ideas presented in the essay that I will not be going into in detail.
Given that I think most people would strongly disagree with Chu’s position, I won’t even try to debunk or argue against it here. Plenty of other people have already done that, and I don’t think I need to embark on this pointless exercise too. Instead, what I want to draw attention to is the fact that there has been quite a lot of space taken up by this extreme opinion. Besides Chu, I don’t know of a single trans person who holds this position. While the trans activist establishment and I have disagreed on matters like language issues and the appropriate priorities of trans activism, I doubt that even the most radical activist would agree with Chu here. Therefore, the media has collectively given a whole lot of space to an opinion that, possibly, no other trans person out there shares. It might even have left some with the wrong impression that this extreme view is somehow representative of the trans community, which would no doubt bring us some totally undeserved backlash.
So the real question here is, why is the media giving attention to a single, very extreme opinion that is totally not representative of what the trans community think at all? Remember, there are many moderate, reasonable trans people out there who remain excluded from a lot of the trans discussion simply because the media (on both sides) would not give us any attention. For example, I have been trying to bring people together to discuss possible compromises that would both accommodate the needs of the trans community, and resolve the very real concerns that other stakeholders in society still have towards trans rights reforms.
Yet my work, and that of other trans people with similar views, remains severely hampered by the fact that the media keeps treating us as non-existent. Contrast this to the fact that an unrepresentative and unproductive opinion like Chu’s has just been allowed to take up valuable space that could otherwise have gone towards more productive discussion. This positively makes me angry. I am angry because the media would choose to get people riled up and polarized, when they could have featured more moderate voices that would bring people closer to the necessary compromises to get this issue resolved.
I think there are several reasons why the media keeps rewarding extreme positions, and sidelining moderate and productive discussions. The first reason is simply because extreme positions generate clickbait headlines. For example, ‘Freedom of Sex The moral case for letting trans kids change their bodies’ surely grabs attention, if just due to the outrage it generates. After all, outrage is good for clicks, subscriptions and revenue, even though it also leads to polarization, irrationality, and provides an opening for authoritarian politicians to gain power. I think the fact that the media is prioritizing their financial gain over society’s health simply shows that they are basically morally bankrupt nowadays.
The second important reason why extreme positions keep getting rewarded with attention is because of the strong influence of postmodern critical theory thinking in some progressive-leaning circles. This worldview leads to the false idea that everything in our status quo needs to be challenged and deconstructed, in order to reach some kind of magical ‘liberation’. Hence radical ideas are to be embraced, promoted and endlessly pondered over, simply because they challenge the status quo. The more radical, the better, because the more challenging it is to the status quo. And the very real harms the promotion of extreme ideas can cause is, of course, totally ignored. As I often say, the real world harms of postmodern critical theory is the reason why we need to push back on it, and provide a robust challenge to its basic premise in the marketplace of ideas.
Finally, anti-trans culture warriors also delight in promoting the most extreme voices out there, in order to paint the whole trans community, and our supporters, as totally delusional and dangerous. This, in turn, could be used to justify authoritarian anti-trans policies. In the past few years, there have been a staggering number of anti-trans bills introduced across America. And while the most intense debates remain around young people and schools, there have been some laws that deliberately target trans adults and make their lives more difficult, like banning Medicaid funding for trans health care and other unreasonable restrictions on trans health care for consenting adults, and bans on documentation changes that would greatly help trans people find jobs and live normal lives in mainstream society. All this, in turn, is fueled by a culture war campaign that encourages people to see trans people not as people, but as manifestations of an ‘ideology’. Michael Knowles’s infamous call to ban ‘transgenderism’ from public life last year demonstrates this point very well: Knowles sees ‘transgenderism’ as an ideology generally, and therefore something that right-wingers should aggressively fight. And views like this are often justified on equating trans people with extreme political views. This is the reason why anti-trans culture warriors only ever talk about the most extreme examples of trans activism. The existence of trans moderates defeats their case, so they have to pretend we don’t exist at all.
Originally published at https://taraella.substack.com.
TaraElla is a singer-songwriter and author, who is the author of the Moral Libertarian Manifesto and the Moral Libertarian book series, which argue that liberalism is still the most moral and effective value system for the West.
She is also the author of The Trans Case Against Queer Theory and The TaraElla Story (her autobiography).
