The loss of the presidential election has left many people shell-shocked, and rather than focusing on the much more pressing question — what do we do now — a lot of people have chosen to focus on trying to find someone to blame.
I get it. We all want a simple villain. It's so much easier to try and hang this on someone, rather than look at what may well be a systemic issue with many root causes.
Of course, I have some contention here because, yes, transgender people are overmuch being blamed. In an election where the GOP spent massive amounts of money to demonize transgender people — and as Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris didn't once actually use the word "transgender" — it seems obvious to some, somehow, that transgender people are the ones at fault.
In the wake of all this soul-searching and victim blaming, the New York Times — a newspaper that has been critiqued for years over its strong anti-transgender slant — has jumped into the fray, letting us know that transgender people are simply too confrontational.
"To get on the wrong side of transgender activists is often to endure their unsparing criticism," said the author of this Times piece, reporter Jeremy W. Peters, before unveiling his two poster children of these attacks: British author JK Rowling and Democratic Massachusetts Congressmember Seth Moulton.
I am going against one of my own personal rules of not discussing Rowling in this column, given that she already gets plenty of notoriety for her anti-transgender stance. Many years ago, she wrote the "Harry Potter" fantasy book franchise that a lot of companies invested a lot of money into promoting. Right now, her stories are the subject of a high-cost reboot via HBO, and the attention on Rowling's rather loud and virulent anti-trans viewpoint has a bad habit of affecting the bottom line on such projects.
Knowing that Rowling is clearly not willing to tone things down on her end, of course, means that those of us directly affected by her transphobia — both in what she has said and in how much of her Potter money she has donated to anti-trans causes — should just be ashamed of being so harsh on her.
After all, according to Peters, Rowling is just "an author who disagrees with denying any relationship between sex and biology."
I think the bigger issue is that Rowling regularly misgenders transgender people, has denied that trans people were targeted in the Holocaust, and has described transgender journalist India Willoughby as someone "cosplaying a misogynistic male fantasy of what a woman is."
It is worth noting that as well as going after actual transgender people, Rowling has saved some of her strongest vitriol for non-trans athletes like Algerian Olympic boxer Imane Khelif, saying that she displays "the smirk of a male who's knows he's protected by a misogynist sporting establishment enjoying the distress of a woman he's just punched in the head."
As for Moulton, we need to circle back a bit. In the wake of the election, he was one of the first prominent Democrats who sought to hang the loss on transgender people. He feels that the Democratic Party spent "too much time trying not to offend anyone," and worried about his daughters "getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete."
He later doubled down on this, stating that the blowback he received simply reinforced his point. He has also gone on to claim that while he might not have used "the perfect words," he has yet to offer an apology for his comments.
The Times also made a rare editorial move to allow transgender people to speak in this article, albeit finding just two that could seemingly support their opinion.
One was Mara Keisling who, until a couple of years ago, was the head of the National Center for Transgender Equality. According to this article, she, too, feels transgender activists are too hard on Rowling, and she considers ceding ground on anti-trans sports bans.
I am couching my language a bit on what Keisling may have said due to the article's other trans participant, Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen. Heng-Lehtinen is the executive director of Advocates For Trans Equality, an organization born out of the ashes of NCTE. He said that he was quoted out of context in Peters' article.
"Yesterday, New York Times ran an article in which I was quoted as saying, 'We have to make it OK for someone to change their minds,' and 'We cannot vilify them for not being on our side. No one wants to join that team,'" reads the November 27 A4TE statement. "Because my quotes were taken out of context, I'd like to clarify what I meant. Those statements were regarding how to persuade everyday, undecided people in the public, not people who have already taken actions to oppose our equality."
I have to be honest here. By claiming that transgender people need to avoid being critical in a time where our very existence is very much on the line, citing a virulent, outspoken anti-trans bigot and a Democratic congressmember seeking to throw transgender people under the bus, and then mischaracterizing a transgender leader's stance to make it sound supportive, the Times continues to do a disservice to its readers, all while seemingly attempting to run an anti-transgender influence campaign.
Perhaps the Times, too, should consider its own part in how we've gotten to where we are today, because this one article — atop a large stack of similar missives from the Gray Lady — makes me deeply question its objectivity.
Gwen Smith notes that this isn't even the most recent anti-trans New York Times article. You'll find her at www.gwensmith.com
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