Since I have a continuing history of keeping up with IDW-ish podcasters on YouTube (Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, etc.) who occasionally do episodes on trans issues as well as a spotty history of clicking on videos with clips of Jordan Peterson, the algorithm recommends a lot of videos on "transgenderism" and "the trans debate" and so on to me. A noticeable and (to my thinking) really concerning aspect of the whole set of issues is how reliably anyone who expresses interest in debating or even critically discussing trans issues is, um, on one general side of them, and how little debating or critical discussion there seems to be available. I avoid clicking on videos with titles involving "transgenderism" or "transgender ideology" or "the trans debate" and other tribal buzzwords for a bunch of reasons, but I decided to make an exception the other day when I saw a video entitled "DEBATE: does transgender ideology threaten liberal values?" (a terribly-phrased question, like most debate questions are) because it appeared to be... an actual debate! With people on both sides showing up! (Though apparently not among the audience, which by the sound of it was entirely on the anti-trans side.)
So of course, as I should have fully expected, this debate only supported my conviction that the rhetoric of nearly everyone on all sides of this is just terrible. The only nuanced and halfway decent debater here was Peter Tatchell (on the trans rights side), and some of even his arguments were used to catch him in a bind later on (more on that later). The debate as a whole was generally a bit of a -- I can only use the term shitshow here -- with debaters (mainly Freda) interrupting each other, the (seemingly entirely anti-trans) audience heckling the trans-rights debaters, and the somewhat awkward and ineffectual moderator mostly failing to keep everyone in order. Well, what better could I have expected?
Marc Glendening (on the anti-trans-rights side) had less to say than everyone else and was basically just a robot trying to churn out dry legal summaries of the situation and spouting claims about free speech rights being taken away that I find extremely dubious as phrased by him (I don't know too much about what's going on in the UK, but if we took Marc's depictions of the situation at face value, they do not jibe with his teammate Helen's completely lack of inhibition in misgendering Freda in a video-recorded debate!).
Helen Joyce was the only person involved that I was familiar with from before, since many months ago I watched an episode of Coleman Hughes' podcast where he interviewed her, thought she had some reasonable points and liked her overall rational manner of arguing, but lost any sense of her credibility because of her completely unbending and extreme absolutism. YouTube had been recommending me videos with her ever since (I really hate how stubborn the algorithm is), and I had refused up until now to click on anything involving her again. In this debate I saw the same extremist tendencies and genuine TERFiness (up until fairly recently my exposure to TERF ideology was mostly indirect as something people on Tumblr criticized and I was beginning to wonder how much of it was actually out there in force and what it really looks like -- it seems to have plenty of force in the UK and Joyce is probably one of the gentler examples I suppose!) and also saw a rational and dignified approach which I admire but unfortunately didn't lead to actually good arguments. There is plenty of room for rebuttal to Helen's arguments from my perspective, and of course almost none of that material was ever rebutted by the other side, which again doesn't surprise me given how little (in my experience of watching/reading criticisms of, say, JKR's arguments) people on the trans rights side seem to actually directly address certain types of opposing arguments. I can't decide which bothers me more: Helen's repeated comments about how the rest of the debaters went through male puberty and therefore their male voices enabled them to talk over her (easily refuted, mainly in the case of the trans women sitting on the other side, and meanwhile neither of the men ever interrupted or talked over her, but nobody addressed this, and it places Helen across my personal "too borderline-misandristic for me to feel comfortable hanging around her" line), or her claim that those men who do insist on trespassing women-only spaces have proved that they are among the dangerous ones because they don't care about women's boundaries (a very dangerous mentality, and displaying exquisite lack of theory of mind, and again nobody tried to rebut it).
Freda Wallace is... a complete mess, and I think an embarrassment to her cause. She spoke a lot (while delusionally muttering that Helen wouldn't stop talking), and very little of what she had to say comprised actual argumentation but was more of a semi-incoherent jumble of points that often ended in punchlines that seemed to be deliberately phrased into ridiculous and bizarre statements perhaps crafted to be provocative and eliciting scorn from the audience. She frequently interrupted all three of the debaters generally with childish and semi-irrelevant ad hominems, even eventually visibly pissing off her own teammate Peter. Freda appears to be exactly the caricature of aggressive, loud, attention-seeking, obnoxious, shameless, hedonistic, fetishistic trans woman that J. K. Rowling types seem to imagine among trans activists. ("So, when I fuck men, with my female penis, in fetish clubs, it is my choice. It doesn't matter what you think. And those men support Sex Matters, because in public they will, but in private, they'll fuck me [ending in a smug grin]" is... I guess technically a way that someone can talk during a recorded public debate, but maybe shouldn't be recommended? I didn't notice until I read the comments later how a minute or two after that, her teammate Peter repeated tries to get her to stop interrupting, then gently grabs her arm as she lifts her glass of wine again saying, "No more drink.") If the trans-rights organization involved wanted to strengthen transphobia and transmisogyny in particular, they probably could not have chosen a better trans woman to put on their team. There's something to discuss here (although if I tried to develop where I speculatively want to go with this, I might quickly get myself into hot water) about how difficult it seems to be to get a member of the trans community to participate in an event like this, and how it requires the very thickest-skinned type of personality which unfortunately in this case also coincides with the most loud and shameless. (This is a very under-developed and perhaps sloppily-phrased point that I probably shouldn't be leaving in this post!)
As I said earlier, Peter Tatchell, along with many of his arguments, I actually liked; he seems like a pretty cool guy all around. He did get backed into a corner at one point through an audience member's question: he had repeatedly made the argument that excluding male-bodied people from women's shelters because men are more likely to be violent was choosing to treat an entire group based on a generalization and that he was against this on principle (compare to refusing to allow immigration from certain groups because some tiny minority of them is more likely to be dangerous, etc.), and he was asked whether he wasn't generalizing in the exact same way by being in favor of excluding cis men ("all men, as you identify who's a man") from women's spaces. At first Peter seems to misunderstand that the questioner is talking about cis men and be trying to duck the question, but eventually he is backed into acknowledging the question and taking the stance that "people who present as men" should be excluded from women's bathrooms but trans women shouldn't -- a position that sounds quite blatantly transphobic in more than one way by the lights of much of trans activism! Also, Peter's stern coldness in stopping Freda from interrupting him with disagreement during his point about transness showing in people's brains says all we really need to know about his opinion of his own teammate, and I do kind of feel bad for him for having been paired with her, which I imagine was not his choice.
I looked briefly through the comments section to see if there was any discussion of why the video (annoyingly) cuts off abruptly before the end of the event (which wound up mentioned only once that I could see). Never have I seen a sea of comments so 100% skewed in favor of one side of an issue and in one direction: how amazing Helen Joyce is (and with a heap of derogatory and sometimes extremely transmisogynistic comments about Freda Wallace -- they go further than Joyce did by naming her Fred, a few do call her Freda and use feminine pronouns, but in at least one instance someone's use of "her" was "corrected" in a one-word response by another commenter!). It makes me wonder what happens to create a section of hundreds of comments that are literally 100% on one side -- is there a sort of tipping point when one side becomes a strong enough majority that everyone on the other side is just afraid to comment, or gets downvoted to invisibility by the rating system? Either way, this debate strikes me as weak enough on the pro-trans side that trans right activists probably wouldn't want to advertise it on YouTube.
Anyway, very very discouraging for anyone who would like our public discourse on this set of issues to stop being more of a complete mess than the public discourse on pretty much every other contentious social issue has been.
