On compromising humanity
On April 9, author Andrew Sullivan published this piece, called “A Truce Proposal in the Trans Wars.” In it, he proposed a number of “compromises” on what he misleadingly frames as “the transgender issue.” His “truce” proposal fails from the get-go: this is not a “trans war;” it’s a war for women, for humanity, and for basic reality.
I have been thinking a lot about compromise and what it might look like in the context of the fight for the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls. The question I keep arriving at is this: “Why on earth should women be required to compromise when it comes to our own humanity?”
Although I lean far left ideologically, I generally consider myself a political pragmatist, and I understand the value of compromise. The importance of making strategic political compromises was brought home for me in the context of the crack-powder disparity debate in the U.S. in the early 2000s. Before 2010, under federal law, people convicted of possessing crack cocaine were given much longer sentences than people possessing powder cocaine. This was referred to as the 100:1 ratio because a person had to have possessed 100 times the amount of powder cocaine that a person possessing crack cocaine possessed in order to be given the same sentence. There was no scientific basis for the 100:1 ratio, and the ratio resulted in extreme and clearly unacceptable racial disparities in U.S. prisons.
The 2010 Fair Sentencing Act brought the ratio down to 18:1, and since then, a person has to have possessed 18 times the amount of powder cocaine that a person possessing crack cocaine possessed in order to be given the same sentence. The 18:1 ratio has no basis in science either, and nobody was particularly happy with it, but it passed in Congress and was signed into law by President Obama. It was a compromise.
I was speaking with the then Executive Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, who supported the compromise, about why she felt that it was justified. Her answer was twofold: (1) a lot of people would be helped by it; and (2) passage of the Act showed that lawmakers were at least willing to move the needle toward real change. That lesson stuck with me.
However, “compromise” looks like something very different when we are talking about the threats posed by “gender identity” to the rights, privacy, and safety of women and girls, and to humanity itself. I have to wonder why it is even a question.
Sullivan begins with the blatantly false and intellectually bankrupt premise that there is some subcategory of women (“transwomen”) who are male. What he steadfastly refuses to acknowledge is that even this much compromise means the erasure of women as a coherent category. It is baffling to me that he still refuses to acknowledge this, because he should know better. But the reason that he refuses to acknowledge it, I suspect, is that at the end of the day he simply sees himself as being in alignment with the men in this debate. That he so blithely dismisses the women who have challenged him suggests that I am not far off the mark.
The problem, as I see it, comes from the framing of this topic as a debate about the rights of one category of people versus the rights of another category of people, and Sullivan’s so-called “truce” proposal fails for that reason alone. “Trans” is simply not a coherent category of people; it is an aggressive mythology, fueled by the multi-million dollar donations of a handful of narcissistic billionaire men.
A compromise is “an agreement or a settlement of a dispute that is reached by each side making concessions.” That is not what’s going on here, because there is no legitimate dispute to settle. The only real dispute here is whether some male people are women, and that is not a legitimate dispute at all. Of course, if some male people are women, they should absolutely be permitted to enter spaces that are intended for women. But they aren’t, and we all know it.
There is also the matter of the pure science-denial going on throughout Sullivan’s supposed “truce.” It has been demonstrated again and again and again that what is at stake here is the integrity of our human sex-based bodies and of reality itself. Why is compromising reality even on the table?
Those of us who are interested in finding “compromise” here must ask ourselves: How much of our humanity are we willing to sacrifice? If our answer to that question is greater than zero, we have to acknowledge that we are simply willing to leave our humanity, and the very nature of reality, at the door. No thanks, Andrew. I won’t be compromising today.
