The Crass Ramblings of M Gessen

More Post-Election Fog

I can well understand why Jamie Reed, whistleblower from the pediatric gender industry, was so enraged by M Gessen’s Op-Ed in today’s New York Times. It contains so much faulty reasoning and disinformation – and at times sheer nastiness – as to seem calculated to produce that response.

Let’s go through the whole wretched text. It starts off:

“In the wake of an election in which Donald Trump stoked fear about trans people – as in the much-discussed ad that warned “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you”—Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.”

Before anyone gets hot under the collar I wish to make the standard disclaimer: No, I do not support Donald Trump. He is a despicable narcissist and I would never have voted for him. So. Got that out of the way.

First – it is possible that Trump stoked fear about trans people; but certainly not in that ad, which proved so effective. The ad was about priorities and policies. Not only about the obscure reference to surgeries for detainees, but the entire focus on genderist activism – from the trashing of Title IX protections to the attacks on women’s sport and the harmful gender-related drugs and surgeries promoted by Admiral Levine, Assistant Secretary for Health in the Biden Administration. These are not just the wrong priorities, the electorate – including many lifelong Democrats – decided. They are bad policies. And they don’t help the average working-class voter at all.

Democrats tried to concoct something to counter the “they/them” ad, but it didn’t work. The reason it didn’t work was not because there are no smart Democrats who can think up snappy slogans to improve the messaging. In a recent interview, Nancy Pelosi mused: “Maybe we could have got our messaging better.” But it was not about the messaging. Neither she nor Gessen can get themselves to see that the policies themselves were wrong.

Then, Gessen says that Harris’s near-silence on “transgender” issues was a retreat. How so? She didn’t disavow or even criticize the unpopular policies. When asked explicitly what she would do differently from Biden she couldn’t think of anything. That was a great opportunity to put some distance between herself and Biden on the wrong turnings he had taken. But no.

Gessen then goes on to say something so mind-bogglingly stupid that I reeled – and immediately recalled her throwaway remark in an interview about the “fun” she was having on testosterone, having “transitioned” at age fifty.

She declares in all seriousness: “trans rights are reproductive rights.”

So I looked up – forgive me – the impact of testosterone on cognitive function. (But there I come up against the same US medical establishment that tells us there are 72 genders and that some children are born with a eunuch gender identity, so I’m none the wiser.)

This crass assertion is followed by a whole lot of rigmarole about the unjustifiable arguments advanced against rendering teenagers infertile. She observes in some perplexity that “infertility seems to inhabit its own special category of cultural anxiety.” Why yes it does, M. We tend to think it’s a bad thing to sterilize people. We get pretty anxious about it – quite irate, in fact. I hardly need to detail all the scandals that have erupted over diverse sections of the population who have been sterilized at various times. Gessen even dares to cite “eugenic thinking” as her mind wanders to former ages in which trans people were “considered mentally ill and unfit to have children.” So that is bad, but sterilizing them is ... not bad, because ... No, M, you’ve lost me.

The worst thing here, as Jamie Reed points out, is Gessen’s contempt for the brave detransitioners Chloe Cole and Keira Bell, of whose deep concerns that their “transition” may have made them infertile she says airily: “It may or it may not have.” The lack of empathy is breathtaking.

She wanders off into the terrain of women with children (like herself) occasionally envying the childless, and the childless possibly envying her “sprawling family.” She has the audacity to comment: “In neither case is the feeling of regret – if it can even be called that – significant or even long-lasting.” She evidently knows nothing of the searing pain of many women who are unable to have children. Neither knows nor cares.

Her mangled logic then leads her to state that those seeking to protect children from being made infertile are just like those who don’t want trans people to conceive: “In both cases the objective is to control the means of reproduction.”

She then delves into the subject – God help us – of the totally reprehensible surgeries that were once routinely performed on babies with certain Disorders of Sexual Development (she predictably says “intersex”, because she links it to non-conformity to the “gender binary”). DSDs, of course, have nothing whatsoever to do with what she calls “trans rights” – and what I prefer to call “gender identity dogma.”

Then we get the obligatory thing about Christian nations wanting “white heterosexual cisgender people to have as many babies as possible.” Oh, and she throws Putin’s Russia in for good measure. There is a lot about Putin’s Russia. Things are bad in Putin’s Russia. Yes, they are.

Towards the end of this disjointed rant, after a nod to Trump’s insinuations about “Mexican criminals supposedly bringing disease into our country,” Gessen muses: “On the right, all fears are connected.”

In the mind of M Gessen, as she leaps from well-trodden stone to well-trodden stone, all bad things are connected and they are all on the right. Which makes it all the stranger – given that the right is full of every imaginable bad thing – that she ends on this enigmatic note:

“It’s entirely possible that Harris’s evasions on the issue of trans rights helped cost her the trust of voters, and by extension the election. But the price Americans will likely pay if we are abandoned by the Democratic Party as a small and unpopular constituency may be much higher.”

What? Why? Abandoned how? Is it a threat? Reader, we cannot tell.

The entire Op-Ed is callous, incoherent, and self-indulgent. Am I allowed to wonder about the testosterone?