A lot of ink has been spilled on topics like public discussion and deplatforming. I’ve discussed this a little before, but I would like to treat this topic a little more seriously than I did in Freeze Peach or Cancel Culture. Let’s open with a microcosm of the discussion.
Between r/neoliberal’s transgender problem, Trans Rights and Liberalism, What Trans Activists Want, Misreading Trans Studies, On Trans Athletes, The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and Desistance, and Introduction to Transgender Issues (And Me), I have written well over 14,000 words across three different platforms on various transgender issues. I wrote all these essays aiming to contribute to ongoing debates. In fact, I actually began Transliberalism with the hope of encouraging more thoughtful and detail-oriented discussions.
Over the past year, there has been a bunch of hand-wringing about transgender youth, primarily from conservatives. They didn’t seem to care a whole lot a few years ago, but just as their attempts to restrict transgender people’s bathroom access fell apart, they suddenly found a new wedge issue — and this time, they get to ask people to think of the children! My last article, Protect Trans Kids, came as a response to this. I think the consensus of the medical professionals who have been working with transgender youth are generally trustworthy; at the very least, that consensus is more reliable than legislatures. In a nutshell, Protect Trans Kids was an attempt to get people to calm down about transgender youth and let the experts do their thing.
This is why it was incredibly frustrating to be told that I shouldn’t be talking about transgender issues so much. I’ve been told this many times, but to apply it to Protect Trans Kids reaches absurdity. The entire point was that conservatives are making something that shouldn’t be an issue a big deal, and that we shouldn’t be having this discussion. And yet, I received several criticisms for even mentioning transgender issues. It seems to me that the ethos of this criticism was less “give a measured amount of attention to each political issue” and more “transgender people are not worth the trouble, and so if the people in power want to cause immense harm to them, then oh well.”
And so, I get fairly irritated when I hear calls for a public debate about the medical treatment of transgender youth. This is typically accompanied by a defense of the shoddy reporting of various people with no actual expertise in the field and a denigration of the actual experts. It comes to feel as though the only “public debate” that’s allowed is one where fear-mongering is placed on the same level as facts. The Economist and the High Court of the UK are not in any way, shape, or form adhering to the medical consensus that has developed over decades of studies on and clinical practice with transgender youth. If the New York Times tomorrow released a story about how vaccines cause autism, and their citations were a disgraced scientist, mommy blogs, and anonymous sources because “they were afraid of the push-back for sharing their views,” it would be rightly regarded as an absolute disgrace, and sharing it positively or neutrally would similarly be regarded as reprehensible. Yet misinformation is being given a powerful voice, while facts struggle to be heard.
This is an instantiation of the ongoing debates about deplatforming and the proliferation of views. These debates are muddled and vague due to a misguided focus on classical liberal values of freedom of speech and association. These values were forged different circumstances and, while still relevant, do not compose a large enough vocabulary to face our challenges today.
(As a side note, this is part of why I believe transgender issues are worth talking about: They frequently provide a clear example of numerous other problems. When done right, sexism, anti-scientific and anti-expert sentiment, poverty, social marginalization, and race issues all come into clear display when examining the problems transgender communities and the individuals in them face.)
The liberal values of freedom of speech and association were formulated under attempts by the government to dramatically limit those freedoms. The prototypical example is religion: Governments instituted a state religion, demanded people adhere to it, and punished them when they criticized it. Liberals decided that this was a very bad way of running things. While these are good values, government force is not typically the problem we are facing now. Instead, our problem looks a little more economic in nature.
When a paper has a massive readership, every word they print has a thousand times more impact than an internet comment. When a Twitter user with millions of followers talks politics, their views are way more influential than a Twitter user with hundreds of followers. When a news article is shared to a subreddit with a hundred thousand subscribers, it is seen by far more people than when it is shared to a subreddit with a hundred subscribers. And so on.
A company that controls attention will beat out a company that does not. A present issue is that being proficient in gaming the attention economy is not particularly linked to providing something that would be beneficial for society. As the past few years have demonstrated, misinformation is very good at keeping attention. Too often, misinformation easily spreads while the truth is given a far smaller audience.
In an ideal discourse, everyone is able to make their case before those who make the rules. Today, it is more like as if one person was allowed to make his case before 90% of the voters, while the refutation is only heard by 20%. This is a problem, and it is hard to think of a structural fix.
The next best thing after a structural fix is pushing for individual people and platforms to be ethical. Platforms should not neutrally or positively spread misinformation, and they should not allow their users to spread such misinformation. Platforms which do so should be criticized, and if necessary, should be ostracized insofar as they share falsehoods. If a doctor gives sound medical advice and awful relationship advice, he should be elevated when he speaks of health and given no platform for problems of the heart.
We really need to find a structural solution, though. In the public sphere, arguments should be considered based on their merits. Right now, many arguments aren’t even being adequately considered. We can’t live up to the ideals of democracy if we don’t fight against happenstance allowing one view to be heard widely and another to be suppressed.