On February 15, a number of past and current contributors to the New York Times signed an open letter denouncing what they see as the paper’s record of transphobia. You can read it here, and I agree with its general points. You can now sign, on a different site, if you’re not a contributor, and “20,000 media workers, subscribers, and readers of the New York Times” have apparently done so.
Today, February 16, the Times published an op-ed by Pamela Paul, “In Defense of J. K. Rowling,” and its title is self-explanatory. Rowling, to be clear, is a notorious transphobe (as Nathan J. Robinson points out, here) who thinks that trans women are natural sexual predators lurking behind their identity, and she mocks gender-inclusive language. That the Times would publish Paul’s piece the day after open letters about its publications on trans issues were also published is probably not entirely a coincidence: on the one hand, arguably, op-eds can sometimes take more than a couple of weeks to write and Paul may have been working on this for a while. On the other hand, it would not be surprising to learn that the newspaper pushed forward the publication date because it wanted to capitalise on the ongoing controversy.
Which is to say: all of this is caught in the logic of virality and I’m not sure much of it does anything for the many pressing problems facing women and the LGBTQ community (understanding that the two groups overlap significantly).
I didn’t sign the letter because I’m not a contributor, past or present. I do see the logic of publishing something heavily endorsed by people who actually write or have written for the paper, and how that might lend some political weight to the letter (although I also couldn’t help noticing that a number of people were signing on despite not actually having been contributors, using some twisted bits of logic that I won’t expand upon so as to not mock them publicly). As for the part where non-contributors could sign, it felt a bit, ah, servant-ish, a bit too Upstairs/Downstairs: “Well,” its presence seemed to say, “Now that the lords and ladies have repasted, you too may come in and feast upon their crumbs, but do make sure to be quiet as you chew the meat off the bones, and please only use your aprons to convey the viands to the dark ends of the kitchen—and on no account are you to touch the good china.”
I don’t mean to signal my pride as much as an eyeroll and what I could not but help sense was an over-eagerness on the part of many to not simply call for an appraisal of journalistic methods but to be seen to be doing so and to be seen as part of a community of people connected to the Times.
And in that sense, the New York Times has already won.
Many lifetimes ago, while in graduate school, I took a class with one of the most brilliant theorists of media. Email had only just come upon the scene and even then only on campuses, and social media wasn’t even a thought in any tech wizard’s head. The discussions in the class one night were about anti-war and anti-capitalist media events by activists, and the professor brought up the example of one such that he had witnessed (and here I’m quoting from memory): “It was a die-in to protest the war, and there were these masses of bodies lying on the ground and it was a dramatic and moving spectacle in front of a courthouse. But somehow the press got there late, when the die-in had already ended and people were up and milling about. The media wanted pictures, though, and asked the activists to, in essence, perform the die-in again. And they did, all of them re-enacting what they had done only a little while ago. And in that moment, the entire action became a failure or, at least, something else altogether. Because the point of it had been to insert a performance of mass death, suddenly, into the living public sphere. With the re-enactment for the media, it became a media spectacle.”
I doubt I’ve done his argument justice, but the point here—to expand his words to today’s context—is that the entire conversation about the Times’s coverage of trans issues is tied to the bright, shiny balloon of virality, not so much to actual change. Rowling needs to be famous on the internet because, really, what else do you live for when you’re a billionaire, not even sixty years old, and will never have a single financial worry till the day you die, if you die (the very rich have a tendency to freeze themselves for perpetuity)? The Times needs eyeballs, constantly, and with this confluence of publications, they’ve got all the ones they need and more. And hundreds of people signing on to a letter that establishes their link to the world’s most famous newspaper can continue to huff and puff about Rowlings’s transphobia and how they simply won’t stand for it.
I don’t doubt the sincerity of either group of signatories, but I’m also not clear on where all of this is going. In Chicago, where I live, the Howard Brown Health Center (HBHC) laid off about 16% of its workforce at the start of the year. HBHC is the only such place where under-or-uninsured LGBTQ people can get healthcare under one healthcare umbrella (I reported on its previous messiness for a long while and my work is in large part what caused it to overhaul itself at the time). But for various reasons too complicated to go into here, it has also become an insufficient conduit for such care and, without sufficient pushback (enabled by the dwindling of a vibrant gay press) it continues to treat the community it should serve as disposable. And this is in Chicago, a major city, so you can imagine what healthcare is like for LGBTQ people in areas where such resources are entirely unavailable.
It would be unfair to say that matters of transphobia in the Times have nothing to do with healthcare for trans and other LGBTQ people on the ground. But we have to ask, where are our energies going and towards what kind of change? Much of the furore around the letter and Rowling is online, and while I know that many of the signatories are in fact fighting for change on the ground as well, there’s a real danger that a Twitter-led phenomenon of public ire is effectively like a die-in that only seems real when captured on camera, its radical politics vanishing into the ether of a media spectacle. “Hate” and “transphobia” and “J.K Rowling” are all terms that capture the online imagination of a world still dominated by cis and hetero people who don’t seem to care about queer people, across our spectrum, unless we can give them our bodies and our emotions to consume.
What happens when our lives and our concerns can no longer be held aloft by the winds of virality?
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