When Hate Comes to Your Town
Hate has once again come to Pittsburgh. Conservative student groups at the University of Pittsburgh sponsored three controversial speakers at the university in recent weeks, all of whom promote or support views on the rights and lives of trans folks that are toxic. The first, Cabot Phillips, a senior editor for far-right media outlet The Daily Wire, spoke on March 24. The second, former NCAA swimmer Riley Gaines, spoke at a “Save Women’s Sports” event on March 27, the first day of Pride Week at the university (the end of that week, March 31, was the Transgender Day of Visibility). Gaines has been railing against the inclusion of trans women in intercollegiate and professional women’s sports since University of Pennsylvania swimmer Lia Thomas tied her for fifth place in the 200 freestyle event at last year’s NCAA Women’s Championships. The third, far-right troll and Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles, participated in a “debate” on “transgenderism [sic] and womanhood” on April 18. Knowles infamously declared at last month’s CPAC circus that “transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely” “for the good of society.” Other student groups and community activists decried the university higher-ups’ decision to green-light these events. Multiple protests were held, including a large gathering the night of the Knowles event that “blocked off the area around the O’Hara Student Center” where the event was held “and jammed surrounding roadways, spurring a large law enforcement response.” A student-initiated petition on change.org collected over 10,000 signatures, mine among them. The higher-ups replied by hiding behind the first amendment and reaffirming their “deep commitment to and support of all Pitt community members including our trans, non-binary, and gender non-conforming community members.”
We’ve been here before. In late 2017, I wrote about an incident at Cleveland State University in which at least two fliers appeared in the campus’s Main Classroom building depicting the silhouette of a hanged man with a rainbow-colored heart and the title, “Follow Your Fellow Faggots.” Their appearance coincided with the opening of the university’s first LGBT center. The response of the CSU administration was similarly tepid. Notably, the school’s director of communications and media relations said two fliers were taken down “because proper posting procedure was not followed.” The use of passive voice here is telling: while the person(s) who posted the fliers hadn’t been identified at the time, the refusal to assign agency even in a general way, viz. “because those responsible did not follow proper posting procedure,” underscored at the grammatical level the administration’s abdication of duty. This abdication, I argued, played into the hands of the rising forces of intolerance loosed by MAGAism, for whom the elimination of limits on “free” speech was part of a larger ground-clearing operation meant to facilitate the establishment of a more autocratic form of rule in the U.S.
Five and half years later, the stakes in this battle over free speech where the trans community is concerned to have only escalated.
Hucksters of Hate
Of the three speakers who visited Pitt, only one, Gaines, has any real skin in the game where trans inclusion is concerned, though her beefs are mostly based in petty grievance.
Phillips does not appear to have been as vocal as the other two in his views on people like me. The millions his employer has spent promoting anti-trans programming, however, and his conservative Xian pedigree (he’s a graduate of Liberty University) and recent critique of “woke gender ideology” leave little doubt which way those views lean. Unlike Phillips, Knowles grew up in an affluent community in Westchester County, New York, attended Yale University, and briefly pursued an acting career after graduating. This background lumps him in with fellow Ivy League products Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, and Ron DeSantis as exemplars of the old truism that an elite upbringing and functioning brain are not always accompanied by sound principles or a good heart.
Knowles’ call for the eradication of “transgenderism” “for the good of society” amply bears this out. “Society,” it seems, does not, or rather should not include trans folks. He himself has insisted that he was targeting the thing he calls “transgenderism” as distinct from “transgender people.” Setting aside the fact that “transgenderism” is not a word that either trans folks themselves or the medical community use, how, it might reasonably be asked, do you separate a core part of someone’s identity from that person? A recent LA Times op-ed offered the analogy of “homosexuality”: how could you target it and meaningfully claim that you weren’t simultaneously attacking actual gay people? The only way to square Knowles’ distinction is to agree with him that
transgender people is [sic] not a real ontological category. It’s not a legitimate category of being. There are people who think that they’re the wrong sex, but they’re mistaken. They’re laboring under a delusion. And so we need to correct that delusion.
If “transgenderism” is a “delusion” that must be “corrected” (a euphemism that’s papering over a whole lotta lotta), then we ourselves needn’t be eradicated. Rather, who we know ourselves to be, persistently, insistently, and consistently from (usually) a very young age, should somehow be scrubbed from our brains and bodies. In short, a distinction without a difference.
Though it’s dressed up in the intro-to-philosophy term “ontological,” Knowles’ statement is breathtaking in its ignorance as well as its arrogance. And it’s an ignorance that is cynically willful. Knowles, who translated Machiavelli’s first stage comedy as a senior project at Yale, bloody well knows how to do some basic research into what being trans is about if he gave a rat’s hiney. But like his Harvard, Yale, and Princeton homies on the right, he has tasted power, and has recognized that continuing to wield it in the current climate requires not even the very modest intellectual rigor of undergraduate work, but instead the amoral, self-promoting shamelessness of the wannabe-mob boss with middle-school speech patterns who has become the clown face of American “conservatism.” The best possible spin that can be put on Knowles’ anti-trans grandstanding, I suppose, is to cast it as a bit of Machiavellian propaganda whose ends — narrowly, a trans-free America, and more broadly, MAGA control of the country — are perceived to justify its cynical means. But of at least equal importance, I strongly suspect, are the personal benefits he derives from this and the other hate that he peddles. Fanning the flames of grievance and grifting off them, truth be damned, is a seemingly ubiquitous practice among the MAGA power brokers, and young Knowles has built a career as a podcaster and in-demand speaker off it. As for trans folks, we are, to reappropriate the Gaines tweet above, merely the collateral damage of his ambition.
Grift and the Feckless Academy
It has been widely observed how long it took the mainstream media to catch up to the blitzkrieg of shit approach employed by the former guy and the crime syndicate that masqueraded as his administration. I remember how refreshing it was to hear prominent journalists start using the word “lie” in reference to TFG’s alt-reality dumps. One thing the Pitt administration’s handling of these spring speakers, in particular Knowles, points to is that the academy is still trying to catch up to MAGA world’s tactics. Kristin Kanthak, associate professor of political science and senate VP at Pitt, offered a refreshingly frank acknowledgement of this:
To be honest, we aren’t set up for this, right? Academia is based on the free exchange of ideas from people of goodwill…It leaves you vulnerable to people who aren’t of goodwill or people who want to exploit people who don’t know very much. And from my perspective, that’s where we are now.
(Fwiw her department’s “Commitment to Inclusivity” statement references “gender and sexual orientation,” but not gender identity.) Most university higher-ups chose to insist on the necessity of allowing the events to go forward since the sponsoring student groups had “follow[ed] University guidelines and the law,” while simultaneously assuring each other, and the university’s trans and nonbinary students, that they personally found the invited speakers’ views “appalling,” “hurtful,” etc., and that they and the university did indeed have a “deep,” “steadfast,” etc., commitment to diversity and inclusion. Some additionally declared themselves to be “heartened” by the pushback these speaking events (and their own decision to green-light them) had received. Senate president Robin Kear reportedly characterized the “debate” around the speakers as “another teaching moment,” and pointed approvingly to how members of the community were “responding by expressing their views, signing petitions, stating their values, planning counter-events and upholding the inclusion goals for all.” Provost Ann Cudd similarly gave two thumbs up to “a few academic areas” that had “proactively shared plans to engage in counter speech in response to the planned events. This,” she declared, “is the type of intellectual exchange and peaceful dissent that will serve us best.”
I would like to key on two words credited to the Kear and Cudd, respectively: “debate” and “us.”
First off, it bears repeating that under all the professions of support for marginalized peoples and diversity more generally, and all the highfalutin ideals about teaching moments, intellectual exchange, and peaceful dissent, the “debate” being protected centered on whether or not people like me exist — or should exist. The Knowles event, as noted, was explicit about this. The use of the word “debate” in this context needs to be seriously interrogated. The mere fact that people are making a lot of negative noise about us does not in and of itself mean that there’s a meaningful “intellectual exchange” to be had about our ontological status that belongs on a college campus.
Consider how the Knowles event was advertised. “What does it mean to be a man or a woman?,” the event notice read in part. “…Can you be born a man and actually become a woman? How deep of identity does womanhood or manhood live within us?” That final question literally doesn’t make sense as a sentence. More problematically, though, the question before it ignores the distinction between sex assigned at birth and gender identity, and thereby provides a grossly misrepresentative framing of the whole subject being “debated.” All of us are assigned a sex based on “a combination of anatomy, hormones, [and] chromosomes”. Most people accept their assignment, i.e., are cisgender; those of us who identify as trans or nonbinary do not.
As such, trans and nonbinary folks are not “born a man” (or a woman) and “become” something else later on. We are who we are, and like everyone else, we discover who we are over time. There’s a growing body of medical research that supports this, and a broad consensus about it in the medical community. And that’s in addition to the fact that evidence for the existence of gender incongruence in our species dates back millennia. We’ve always been here. Given young Knowles’ glib dismissal of us as a “real ontological category,” the event advert’s misrepresentation of the subject signaled pretty strongly that the sponsors of this “debate” weren’t that interested in presenting a good-faith, or at least an evidence-based, discussion about our existence.
There was a possible counter to this latter assertion when the event was originally announced: the other participant was Deirdre McCloskey, a distinguished professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago with 20 books and 400 articles to her credit who is trans. In the event, Dr. McCloskey withdrew shortly before the day of the “debate,” “claiming she did not know who Knowles was” when she accepted the invitation “and accus[ing] him of stirring up hatred.” To give the Pitt administration the benefit of the doubt, they okayed the event when McCloskey was on the bill, and her participation would obviously have lent the discussion some gravitas. In light of the topic of this particular event, though, she was a bad fit at best. In the first place, her areas of expertise are not medicine, but economics, history, English, and communications. In the second place, she’s my mom’s age, old enough to be Knowles’ grandmother. The reason her age matters is that the rapid advances not only in medicine, but also in our civil rights and in the language available to us to articulate our experience, have created a generation gap of sorts between older and younger trans folks. This gap is evident in the terminology McCloskey uses on her website to characterize her journey, viz. “gender change” and “Midwestern woman from Boston who was once a man.” To young folks, and to people like me who have come out more recently, these modes of expression are outdated and even inaccurate. The “debate” green-lit by the Pitt higher ups between young Knowles and an octogenarian trans woman whose views on transness were largely formed in an earlier period would thus have risked presenting a quite skewed picture of a not insignificant topic — whether or not we exist.
The Question Is: Which Is to Be Master?
Provost Cudd’s assertion that planned “counter speech” was “the type of intellectual exchange and peaceful dissent that will serve us best” raises a basic question: which “us”? Clearly, Pitt’s trans and nonbinary students were not best served by having these high-profile right-wing hate hucksters, in particular one who recently called for their eradication — excuse me, the eradication of their ism — visit their campus. By green-lighting his appearance, Cudd and the other Pitt higher-ups tacitly ranked who was worthy of inclusion in the life of the campus, and placed the rights of campus conservatives to promote misinformed hate above the safety and well-being of the uni’s trans and nonbinary community. Their actions if not their words assured the Pitt student body that the question of whether transness/trans people “must be eradicated from public life entirely” “for the good of society” deserved serious consideration.
To those who dismiss our proposed eradication as too extreme to gain broad acceptance, it’s worth noting that it comes out of a sustained right-wing campaign that has gained increasing traction in red states across the nation. This campaign’s long game, as many of us have noted, is nothing less than our genocide. The barrage of misinformation about us from far-right hatemongers like Knowles, the blitzkrieg of anti-trans legislation (500 bills at the national and state level thus far in 2023, by one tally), along with the escalating intimidation tactics employed by right-wing militias and the ongoing plague of anti-trans hate crimes (including murder): these are the different prongs of a well funded and largely coordinated effort to make it impossible for us to live our lives — the multiple fronts of a war of extermination.
Indeed, the sponsors of the Knowles-McCloskey event foregrounded this long game in their advert for it. Though billed as “A Debate on Transgenderism and Womanhood,” the event bore the title, “Gender: Who Decides?”
If the event description grossly misrepresented the terms of trans existence, its title framed the “debate” about it in political rather than scientific terms. The question, that is, was to be settled based not on knowledge, but on power: not “what evidence is there for our existence?,” but “who should have the final say?” — which is to be master? On the one hand, framing it this way was a tacit acknowledgment that they can’t win on evidence-based grounds. But casting a patently political call for the eradication of a vulnerable minority as a “debate” about whether that group exists in the first place, and bringing to that “debate” a combination of outdated and simply fabricated “evidence,” was the essence of intellectual bad faith. The political focus of the event became more forthright still after McCloskey’s withdrawal, when its topic was changed to “should transgenderism be regulated by law?” (Unsurprisingly, the right-wing ism slur was retained.) McCloskey’s place was taken by “conservative-libertarian journalist” Brad Polumbo, who to his credit seems to have leaned into his libertarianism in pushing back against some of Knowles’ hate-fueled extremism. He reportedly characterized Knowles’ call for eradication, for example, as “totalitarian” and “remarkably short sighted,” and took him to task where the government’s role in the lives of trans adult citizens is concerned:
“Who are we to tell them how to live their lives?…I don’t want the government policing my wardrobe, my speech, what pronouns I use? I don’t want the government telling me what I can believe, what I can say, how I can live my life and if you don’t want that you have to respect that for transgender adults as well.”
Still, with the departure of Dr. McCloskey, the “transgenderism” “debate” morphed into a podcast-level back and forth between two right-wing cis white dudes, and lost whatever credible pretense it had to being a substantive exchange on trans rights and trans lives.
It is by failing to recognize, or in any case to take seriously, this genocidal long game that the higher-ups at Pitt profoundly failed their trans and nonbinary students. In staying the course where (misplaced) ideals of academic freedom are concerned, they chose to put their money on a different long game — liberalism will vanquish MAGA autocracy — and prioritized reclaiming GOP extremism for the mainstream at the expense of trans and nonbinary lives. We were, it seems, acceptable collateral damage in their eyes as well. That their decision to sacrifice us for this greater good was indeed a choice is clear if we imagine an alternative scenario: if Pitt’s conservative student group had invited one or more speakers to “debate” whether people of African descent are closer to chimpanzees than homo sapiens, how many milliseconds would it have taken the Pitt administration to unanimously shut them down? The basis for the different responses to this imagined scenario and young Knowles arguing for trans eradication is of course political. Both positions are equally reprehensible, and both have currency among the far right, but the community impacted by the former has more clout than we do, at least in more mainstream circles. The right thus sees its assault on us as the winning issue, which is to say the issue more susceptible to misinformation and fearmongering outside its ranks. And to its shame, the Pitt administration proved them right. The question is, which is to be master? It’s worth noting that Pitt senate president Kear effectively acknowledged the political basis of the uni’s decision when she observed, “I could easily imagine this entire issue being flipped 30 years ago. Someone could have invited a trans speaker and others would like to shut them down.” Historically accurate, no doubt, but otherwise an instance of false equivalence on steroids.
It’s long past time for institutions like the University of Pittsburgh, and governing bodies at the federal, state, and local levels not in the grip of GOP extremism, to stand up and rebuke the far right’s toxic idiocy about trans and nonbinary lives. We are not pedophiles and groomers, nor are we mentally ill or the dupes of some nefarious “gender ideology.” And we certainly should not be political pawns. We are fellow citizens of this country, fellow members of our species, fellow inhabitants of the planet — and a major political party wants us dead.
