In the latest instance of what is no longer news as much as it is a routine cycle, the New York Times opinion section published some transphobic bullshit over the long July 4 weekend. The piece in question comes from opinion columnist and former editor of the Times book review Pamela Paul, who also happens to have been married to fellow NYT op-ed grifter Bret Stephens.
The article is titled “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count,” which is an almost self-parodic invocation of the “both sides” fallacy to which the Times remains so devoted. Paul says that while the right’s hatred of women is no surprise, the “fringe left” has adopted a “perhaps unintentionally but effectively misogynist” agenda (with the “fringe left” being a thinly veiled allusion to the LGBTQ+ community). That “misogynist” agenda, naturally, is the demand that reproductive justice be understood as more than just the purview of cis women, since trans men and nonbinary people also sometimes get pregnant and need abortions.
“Previously a commonly understood term for half the world’s population, the word [women] had a specific meaning tied to genetics, biology, history, politics and culture,” Paul wrote. “No longer. In its place are unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and ‘bodies with vaginas.’”
Despite the fact that versions of this argument have appeared in the media many times in the past few years, including just a few weeks ago in the Times, the paper of record decided that the best time to once again declare that the trans activists are single handedly destroying the wombyn’s movement was, you guessed it, immediately after the fall of Roe v. Wade. In other words, Paul (along with every other TERF) thinks that requests for gender-neutral language when discussing abortion access are somehow an attack on cis womanhood itself.
Paul’s critique of clunky language like “menstruators” and “bodies with vaginas” is fair; as someone to whom both of those labels applied at one point, I find both terms cringeworthy and alienating, as do most other trans people. Even the Trans Journalists Association shuns such language in its style guide, advocating instead for general terms like “patients,” “people,” and “people seeking abortions.”
But pretending as though both the right and the left (and let’s be honest, the left absolutely has its own problems with transphobia) are equivalent in their efforts to “erase women” is a position that hyperfocuses on semantics while obscuring the real stakes of right-wing violence, especially on trans people who get pregnant. Like, yeah, the right wing just overturned your right to abortion and has threatened to recriminalize gay sex and contraceptives. But have you considered that the Pronoun Police are just as bad???
There is no all-powerful trans lobby that is busting into the ACLU headquarters and forcing them to type the words “pregnant people” at gunpoint. Shit is generally pretty bad for trans people, especially in the U.S. and U.K. Just the other day, the U.K. announced that it would only construct “male” and “female” bathrooms for government buildings moving forward, to accommodate cisgender women who felt that they were “losing privacy and being disadvantaged” by gender neutral toilets, a line that is also straight out of the TERF playbook. We have next to zero institutional power, and if it does exist, it’s rapidly being quashed by a mainstream media that keeps publishing arguments founded on the “both sides” fallacy, in tandem with lawmakers that keep adopting those talking points from the media.
As inane and redundant as Paul’s op-ed is, TERF views being platformed in the Times spells bad news for trans people. Just look to the U.K. One moment, you’re seeing a deluge of transphobia and TERF-driven arguments in the mainstream press. The next, gender-neutral bathrooms are gone from your government buildings. What comes next?
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