by Robby Soave
If intersectionality ever absorbs transracial individuals as a properly recognized marginal category, perhaps the treatments of Dolezal and Tuvel will be revisited. For now, Dolezal is a pariah, and Tuvel stands accused of “enacting violence and perpetrating harm” against the transgender community.37
Kelly Oliver, a professor of philosophy at Vanderbilt University who defended Tuvel, was similarly accused of violence. “Some said that Tuvel’s article harmed them, and I was doing violence to them, even triggering PTSD, just by calling for an open discussion of, and debate over, the arguments in the article,” wrote Oliver.38
Tuvel had compared Dolezal’s situation to that of Caitlyn Jenner, and had discussed Bruce’s transition to Caitlyn. In doing so, she called attention to the fact that Caitlyn used to be known—to the entire world—as Bruce. Nora Berenstain, a philosophy professor at the University of Tennessee, accused Tuvel of the forbidden act of dead-naming a trans person. But of course, it isn’t wrong to acknowledge the basic fact that Caitlyn used to be called Bruce: everybody knows that, and Jenner is open about it.
Even so, several of Hypatia’s associate editors bowed to pressure and issued an unauthorized apology on behalf of the journal. “Clearly, the article should not have been published,” they wrote.
Tuvel eventually apologized for using Caitlyn’s birth name while remaining apoplectic that the trans community had reacted so unreasonably. “There are theoretical and philosophical questions that I raise that merit our reflection,” she wrote. “I deeply worry about the claim that the project itself is harmful to trans people and people of color.”39
An issue here is that intersectionality provides no basis for adjudicating claims of marginalization that might be in tension with one another. We know that marginalization stacks, and thus a disabled trans person of color is more marginalized than a disabled cis person of color (three matrixes of oppression versus two). But we cannot weigh one kind against another. The originators of intersectionality, of course, would not have foreseen this difficulty, because they concerned themselves primarily with sexism and racism. They had not considered the confusion that would result if their theory was extended to every possible grievance under the sun.
Molloy told me that she took issue with certain people equating wrongful pronoun usage and violence. “I think there are real issues with people saying words are violence, because violence is violence,” she said. “That’s something I see a lot: misgendering a trans person is violent, someone will say. I think it’s more accurate to say that misgendering a trans person is an asshole move that can put them in danger of violence.”
Stonewall Must Fall
In 2015, Colorado College’s Film and Media Studies Department attempted to screen the movie Stonewall, and invited a producer to participate in a discussion with students. The film, a coming-of-age story about a gay teenager set during the Stonewall riots in 1969, had been critically panned and accused of whitewashing the actual history of late-1960s gay liberation. If students had merely complained about the film, they would have been in good company.
But Colorado College activists claimed that the film was not merely awful. To the extent that it had failed to properly credit trans people for the role they played in gay liberation, they said, Stonewall had either committed or encouraged violence against them.
“The film is discursively violent,” a group of student activists affiliated with the campus’s LGBTQIA+ chapter wrote in an open letter.40 The students formed a new group, RAID (Radicals Against Institutional Damage), for the explicit purpose of boycotting the film and preventing it from being shown on campus.
A professor who supported screening the film told the student newspaper, the Catalyst, that even if the film was bad or if it was unfair to trans people, it was still worthwhile to have a discussion about it. The activists did not agree.
“Critical discussion is simply a way of engaging in respectability politics,” Amelia Eskani, a first-year student, countered. “I think Colorado College should cancel the screening because the safety and well-being of queer and trans students surpasses the importance of a critical discussion.”
Keep in mind that within the context of this debate, the thing supposedly undermining the safety and well-being of queer and trans students was a flawed but inarguably pro-gay historical documentary. One can imagine what the response from activists would have been had the film department attempted to show a movie with a socially conservative agenda.
It’s true, of course, that trans people played an important role in Stonewall, but it would be totally ahistorical to negate the role of cis gay people entirely. And yet that’s exactly what a subset of activists demand. A left-leaning political writer told an online magazine serving the gay community that he is often shouted down on social media by intersectionality-crazed activists who hate him for his “white privilege.”41 “People literally say that gay white men have done nothing for the movement for the last fifty years,” he said. “They’re not trying to make the movement intersectional; they’re trying to erase other participants who came before them.”
This man spoke to the magazine on condition of anonymity, and it’s easy to see why. The oppressed are the experts on their own struggle; for others to criticize their tactics—or acknowledge their uncompromising nature—is highly problematic. When the Guardian asked RuPaul, the world’s best-known drag queen and host of the queer-positive hit show RuPaul’s Drag Race, about the “militant earnestness of the trans movement,” Vox’s Caroline Framke suggested that there was something wrong with simply posing this question (Framke’s comment: “Yikes”).42
RuPaul, of course, has done more than most to affirm the dignity of gender-nonconforming people. His show—like drag shows more broadly—involves men dressing up in campy, over-the-top feminine outfits. The show has won four Emmys, and also a GLAAD Media Award for expanding “the mainstream understanding” of the LGBT community.43 Zillennial news site Mic hailed him as an icon in the gay community.44
But in 2018, RuPaul committed a sin of intersectionality: he told the Guardian that he probably would not let a trans woman participate in his show post-transition. His reasoning was that drag queens are men who dress up in stereotypically feminine garb, and it’s not quite the same thing when women do it.
“You can identify as a woman and say you’re transitioning, but it changes once you start changing your body,” said RuPaul. “It takes on a different thing; it changes the whole concept of what we’re doing.” RuPaul further suggested that drag “loses its sense of danger and its sense of irony once it’s not men doing it.”
For this, he was widely denounced by the left. Framke wrote that he had dismissed “trans women, trans men, cis women, and nonbinary people [who] have contributed to the complex, beautifully weird world of drag.”
But RuPaul had made his position perfectly clear in an earlier interview with Vulture. “We [drag queens] mock identity,” he said. “They [trans people] take identity very seriously. So it’s the complete opposite ends of the scale.”45
I can’t think of a better way to encapsulate the differences between pre-intersectional and post-intersectional activism, as well as the divide between the older gay equality movement and the newer Zillennial LGBTQIA+ activism, for which identity is the prime source of meaning.
— SIX —
BERNIE WOULDA WON
THE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISTS OF AMERICA
On June 26, 2018, the mainstream media was treated to a genuine surprise: a candidate they had never heard of—twenty-eight-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—had defeated incumbent Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for New York’s Fourteenth Congressional District. This virtually unknown progressive young woman had taken on the fourth-most-powerful House Democrat—a living symbol of the party’s centrist, pro–Wall Street, pro-Israel leadership—and won.
Ocasio-Cortez had run on a staunchly left-of-center platform, which included Medicare for All, essentially a single-payer health care
system; free college tuition and the forgiveness of current student loan debt (Ocasio-Cortez, who was working as a bartender as recently as a year before her victory, has loan debt herself); the abolition of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; a federal jobs guarantee (which is bonkers); and a “New Green Deal” that would invest trillions of dollars in renewable energy.1 It’s a fairly radical platform—one that nobody, least of all Ocasio-Cortez, has any idea how to pay for—that seemed unlikely to attract moderate voters. But attracting moderate voters is not a goal for the Democratic Socialists of America, the contingent of the left with which Ocasio-Cortez identifies.
“The way that progressives win on an unapologetic message is by expanding the electorate,” she said, outlining her campaign strategy to Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman. “It’s not by rushing to the center. It’s not by … spending all of our energy winning over those who have other opinions.”2
The Democratic Socialists of America has existed since 1982, when several socialist groups merged to form one supergroup, but only recently have its ranks grown tremendously. Before the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, membership in the DSA—which claims the red rose of socialism as its icon and Twitter symbol—was believed to be about eight thousand. Thanks in part to the popularity of socialism-sympathetic Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, DSA membership is surging. As of August 2018, the organization claims nearly fifty thousand members and more than 180 local chapters. And the group increasingly consists of young people. In 2013, the median age of a DSA member was sixty-eight. Today, it’s thirty-three.
“I personally believe that socialism benefits more people than capitalism,” Alex Pellitteri, the eighteen-year-old cochair of the Young Democratic Socialists in New York City, told me. Characteristic of the activists of his generation is his excitement about the growing strength of his movement. “If we can talk to the right people about socialism and make them truly understand both socialism and capitalism, I think that’s when you win people over.”
Given the sudden demographic shift taking place among anti-capitalist activists, disagreements between the increasingly outnumbered, more doctrinaire Marxists and younger, intersectional socialists are inevitable. One that caught my attention was the experience of an ex-member, a lecturer at UMass Boston named Gary Zabel, who rejoined the group’s Boston chapter in March 2016. Upon rejoining, he found that most new members were recent college graduates—people with more privilege than the blue-collar laborers who have made up the backbone of socialist movements. Zabel frequently found himself in conflict with this younger crowd, whom he called “safe space socialists.”3
“In my nine months as a member of the new Boston DSA, I was unable to discover the names of more than 5 of the 15 members on the group’s steering committee,” he wrote. “When I pointed out that this was a violation of basic democratic norms, several people told me that the names were missing from the Local’s website because of fear of ‘doxing,’ i.e., online publication of personal data. When I replied that perhaps people who are afraid of making their names public should not be in the leadership of the Local, the response was outrage. Apparently my suggestion would make it impossible for the ‘vulnerable’—women, trans people, and people of color were mentioned—to hold leadership positions.”
Modern democratic socialists, of course, are ultimately just as beholden to intersectionality as other contingents of the left—though they are more likely to start fights with other factions, out of a belief that socialism is the central component of leftism—and thus the needs of the twice- and thrice-marginalized must often take precedence. (Recall from Chapter One the fury of the DSA’s Disability Working Group when it learned that the forthcoming Medicare for All campaign did not prominently feature disabled people.) Emotional safety is taken as seriously as physical safety; when Ocasio-Cortez was criticized in August 2018 for banning the press from one of her town hall events, she explained that this had been done so that residents of her district would “feel safe discussing sensitive issues in a threatening political time.”4 Mainstream media is considered mainstream for a reason: its reporters are generally moderate liberals. And moderate people are not viewed as friends.
“One of our main enemies is the center,” Bhaskar Sunkara, a twenty-nine-year-old former DSA vice chair and founder of Jacobin, a much-lauded socialist magazine, told The Nation.5
At a November 2017 meeting of the Boston chapter, members voted to approve a code of conduct for the group. The code stated, “We are a socialist organization, so we expect members to be socialists or leftists interested in learning more about socialism.” That seems reasonable. Less reasonable was what came next: “We will take seriously actions grounded in white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, such as Blue Lives Matter and Pro-Life politics. This especially applies to active leaders in Boston DSA.”
Abortion is an issue that proves divisive for many political movements, and socialism is no different. The DSA supports what it describes as “reproductive justice” without exception. But the national group also defended Sanders when some on the left attacked him for campaigning on behalf of Heath Mello, a Democratic candidate for mayor of Omaha, Nebraska.6 Mello was a progressive on the issue closest to Sanders’s and socialists’ hearts—economic inequality—but a foe of abortion. To win in a socially conservative place such as Nebraska, however, Sanders wisely calculated that some concessions would be necessary.
In a similar vein, Zabel wondered if “the 60 percent of Latino immigrants who oppose abortion” would be welcome at meetings of the Boston chapter “as long as they don’t bomb any clinics.” The language of the code of conduct presupposed that prospective members would have to agree with the most extreme version of the pro-choice agenda in order to join the socialist movement.
This contention came in for some criticism online. “The brain genius social media interns in Boston DSA expect to organize the working class in their city by banning anyone who criticizes their late term abortion support,” one Seattle-area DSAer wrote on Twitter.7 He later wrote that he thought abortion should be permissible but not celebrated as a good thing in and of itself.
Furious denunciation followed. A Twitter user who identifies as a member of DSA Boston’s steering committee tore into the above comments, and even admitted to banning someone she described as a “pro-life Zionist” from the Boston DSA. Whether this person was Zabel I can’t say; he did not respond to a request for comment. But it would seem he was right to be suspicious of the Zillennials taking over the group. Another tweeted, in response to the controversy, “ABORTION ON DEMAND WITHOUT APOLOGY IS THE ONLY CORRECT SOCIALIST POSITION.”
Anti-Capitalists
To understand democratic socialism, it’s helpful to know something about socialism—and its popularity on college campuses with regard to the influence of the first sociologist, Karl Marx, on humanities and liberal arts. Socialism, of course, is an economic system characterized by public ownership of the means of production. Socialism comes in many flavors but tends to involve a government that is empowered to confiscate private property and run the factories for the ostensible good of the collective citizenry. Socialism is the opposite of capitalism, the economic system of most modern successful Western economies, which involves private property, trade, and autonomous individuals liberated from the heavy hand of government. Socialists think capitalism is exploitative and results in unacceptable inequalities; supporters of capitalism counter that their system tends to produce much greater prosperity overall, even if the wealth is not evenly divided.
Over the previous five chapters, we have studied the tree of Zillennial progressivism and its many branches: racial oppression, violence against women, the erasure of trans identities, and so on. Nurtured by intersectionality, these branches have grown strong. But the root of the tree is anti-capitalism. Indeed, for the older and more doctrinaire Marxist thinkers, the branches can seem like distractions.
As we discussed briefly in Chapter Two, Mar
xism refers to the theories of mid-nineteenth-century thinker Karl Marx, who believed that capitalism was only the most recent incarnation of a historical struggle between different classes. “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles,” wrote Marx in The Communist Manifesto in 1848. This struggle was going to sort itself out—in favor of a universal workers’ utopia—just as soon as capitalism was properly destroyed.
To really understand Marx, it’s necessary to go even further back. Marx drew inspiration from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a German philosopher who lived during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Hegel believed in something he called the Weltgeist, which is German for “world-spirit.” The world-spirit was constantly trying to better itself, to eliminate imperfections from its essence, and human history was the story of the world-spirit progressing toward the ideal.
Scott Alexander, the pseudonymous proprietor of the essential history blog Slate Star Codex, mockingly described Hegel’s view as naively utopian: “As it overcomes its various confusions and false dichotomies, it advances into forms that more completely incarnate the World-Spirit and then moves onto the next problem. Finally, it ends with the World-Spirit completely incarnated—possibly in the form of early 19th century Prussia—and everything is great forever.”8
Marx enthusiastically appropriated Hegel’s idea. Communism, in Marx’s view, was the perfect social system, in which everything would be awesome for everyone. It was also inevitable—the world-spirit took its time, but we would get there eventually. And it was final—once humankind had achieved a fully equal, classless, communist society, there would be nothing left to fix.