"Monsters" pose no conflict for me
On Dave and Joanne
Hello friendly people. I turned in my nonfiction book yesterday, and now I am doing line edits on my literary novel (out May 28th), The Default World. It is good book, but I hate line edits with a passion. They are my least favorite sort of edit. Just feels so fiddly and pointless. The voice of the book is set, so why move words around? Still, there’s always something I’d like to do, and it’s good to have a last crack at cutting anything extraneous.
The nonfiction well came out well, I think. Rough, but well. I realised late in the game that I hadn’t addressed the thing people care most about these days: what happens if an author has hurt people in their personal life or has political opinions you find offensive? This was the subject of that recent book everyone has been discussing, Monsters (which I own, but haven’t read yet).
(TW: Screenshots of transphobic tweets below)1
I couldn’t care less about this question, to be honest. It seems like something for visual art, which has no overt moral content, or for tv/film, where the art is very collaborative. But in a novel the morality is right there, part of the essential content of the book. But if a person writes a novel, and the novel doesn’t contain anything that overtly offends you, then why do you care what their personal life is like? It seems absurd, and it does in fact lead to absurdities, like the case of Chaucer. When I was first learning about him, I was told he had raped a woman. Now we’ve learned he apparently didn’t rape anyone (or at least there’s no proof he did), and that the word raptus probably meant something different in this context. If we discover that James Baldwin murdered a man, does that change how we read Giovanni’s Room? What if we then discover he was innocent of the murder? It leads us into absurdities reminiscent of the famous Borges story, “Pierre Menard, author of the Quixote”, about a contemporary Frenchman who sets out to rewrite Don Quixote, word for word, in the original language, without ever having read it. Borges waxes lyrical about how Menard’s Quixote is infinitely richer than that of Cervantes, because Cervantes merely used the idiom of his time and place to write his stories, whereas Menard very intentionally wrote in an archaic style, in a different language, choosing each character and symbol very intentionally.
This is a profoundly uninteresting question to me, but I wrote about it anyway, as the penultimate chapter of the book, using two examples that are personal to me, and illustrative, I think, of this tension: Dave Chappelle and J.K. Rowling. The two are interesting because most of Dave Chappelle’s recent work is quite good, and it is inextricably entangled with his disgust for trans women. However Dave Chappelle puts that disgust into the work; he doesn’t engage in any significant anti-trans activism. J.K. Rowling’s main work, Harry Potter, is in the past, and it does not contain overt transphobia (i.e. if we didn’t know she was a transphobe, we never would’ve read any anti-trans meaning into Harry Potter). But she is now one of the world’s leading faces for anti-trans activism.
The rhetorical strategies Dave Chappelle uses in his specials are facinating, particularly his framing of this question as a struggle between white men’s feelings and black men’s safety, because his specials are aimed at white college-educated audiences, who largely are not overtly transphobic. He needs the complicity of his audience in order to succeed both artistically and commercially. Dave Chappelle honed these anti-trans jokes with a sort of mania: he bombed in comedy clubs for years, until he found versions of these jokes that would get laughs (if uncomfortable ones) from audiences of coastal college-educated folks. He is like a matador, always pulling back at precisely the right moment, releasing the audience’s tension. Like he’ll tell some transphobic jokes, and talk about the backlash against him, and then be like, “I got n____s in Harlem wearing high heels just to feel safe”. His more transphobic lines won’t be laugh lines, while his less transphobic lines will be laugh lines. It's a great performance, though rather baffling. It's like if Simone Biles committed intentional errors at the beginning of her routines. She would still be just as talented, and the routines would be just as impressive, but her scores would be lower. And yet we would have to seriously consider that perhaps there is some meaning to these errors, because it is inconceivable that someone could work as hard as she does and be as good as she is, and then just mess it up out of a whim or some kind of perversity. Similarly, Dave’s commitment to this material is so strong, and it's become so intertwined with his art, that it can't help but provoke wonder. His trans phobia is, at the very least, a fertile bigotry.
J.K. Rowling, on the other hand, is much less magisterial. Her best creative work is behind her, possibly ruined by her transphobic attitudes, and there is nothing beautiful or compelling in her rhetoric. She is like if Simone Biles was in ten years to become a holocaust denier. We would simply need to chalk it up to the natural perversity of human nature, and to admit that great athletes are unique in their skills, but not necessarily unique in their flaws.
Rhetorically, JK’s writing on trans issues is all dog-whistle. She pretends to respect trans people, but uses every possible opportunity to call us men, as in this tweet:
The overt meaning of this tweet is that trans rights are a movement by men to strip the rights of women. It doesn’t specify that the men in question are trans women, but if you know, as I do, that cisgendered women are much more likely to support trans rights (as numerous surveys have shown) than cis-gendered men are, then the only interpretation is that the men in question who are trying to redefine womanhood and lecture to women are…trans women.2
Or take this tweet;
Ostensibly it is merely an analogy: you feel safe in your house; would you invite strangers into it? But she specifies ‘strange men’, not ‘strange people’. Again there is an equation of trans women with intruders and rapists.
Or take this, about how most assaults occur in unisex toilets.
An assault by a teenage boy in a unisex toilet becomes a reason not to allow trans women into women’s toilets. It only works if you see absolutely no difference between trans women and cis-gendered men. Trans women need more, not less, protection from assault. All of her arguments against trans rights are, if you see trans women as having distinct vulnerabilities akin to those of cis-gendered women, actually arguments in favor of trans rights. This is something JKR will periodically accept, saying trans women should be segregated in our own institutions, but here she lambastes the exact place where we would theoretically be safest (the only place we could be safe), the gender-neutral bathroom. The rhetoric is simple eliminationism: she envisions a world without us.
That is pretty transphobic. Much more offensive than anything Dave Chappelle has said, and her effect on trans rights has been much worse. Compared to Dave Chappelle, her view of the world and of trans women is rather dark.
Yet the only work of hers that anyone cares about, the seven Harry Potter books, are largely untouched by this rhetoric. But should it effect our reading of them?
I can understand two possible arguments: the first is that her work encodes some implicit transphobia; the second is that buying her work supports her financially and thus enables her anti trans activism. The first argument is, to me, the weakest, because the only people who would avoid her work because of its transphobia are people who support trans rights! The harm JKR does is through her specific legislative / political agenda, which is actuating by her very specific desire for trans people to disappear from public life. Can a person really, through implicit, sub-surface transphobia, be converted away from a conscious desire for trans rights and into a conscious desire for trans elimination? It seems unlikely. To the extent that a person consciously chooses their political opinions, they can simply make a prior commitment (I will not change my views on trans rights after reading this) and then read the book anyway. That seems like a relatively simple commitment to make, and to say “But what if the book convinces them to break their commitment?” is to take a rather dark view of human reason—I do not think the scientific evidence in favor of automaticity (the idea that we can be unconsciously influenced by texts) is strong enough to mandate a prior restraint of what sorts of words we allow into our heads.
Moreover, if a text can have implicit transphobic meanings that cause a person to unconsciously support transphobic attitudes, then couldn’t an author who is consciously trans-affirming also have an unconscious transphobic side that unconsciously puts transphobic meanings into texts and then unconsciously influence people to be transphobes. And if the meanings are unconscious, and their influence is on the unconscious, then how can we ever know they are there (other than through empirical measurement). To draw out this sort of behaviorist interpretation really would mean subjecting every text to a sort of test for unconscious meaning before it could be published.
I also think that this holds books to a much higher standard than that to which we hold billboards, commercials, magazines, television shows, films, radio DJs, etc. Every thing we hear or see is a text, and isn’t it more likely that negative unconscious associations (about what constitutes real womanhood) would occur in fashion magazines or beauty TikToks? To not read one book, which you’ve highly scrutinized for potential transphobic meanings, while you unconsciously and mindlessly consume thousands of other messages—that is simply illogical.
Ultimately I think J.K. Rowling’s transphobia is so unhinged, so rooted in false ideas about who we are and what we are up to, that to be afraid of it is to give it too much credit. Such ideas can only convert a person through lack of scrutiny.
Dave Chappelle’s comedy is a much more interesting case, on the other hand, because it’s rooted in a visceral disgust for trans bodies that is, I think, shared even by many trans people. As such, it really does unlock something deep within us. But it works quite openly, by playing on that unconscious transphobia and bringing it to the surface, into our consciousness.
I don’t think his work serves the cause of trans liberation. Rather the opposite, in fact. But’s unquestionably art, and it does what art is supposed to do. Moreover, because it is rooted in the aesthetic, it retains some connection to reality that J.K. Rowling’s twitter lacks.
But I also think the opposite is true. Were J.K. Rowling to try and encode her transphobia in her art in any genuine way, the outcome would be more nuanced than her Twitter is. It would still be horrific, but her aesthetic sense wouldn’t allow her to get away with the absurdities of her current position.
The X factor here is her Robert Galbraith novels. I’ve tried to read them myself, and I found them singularly charmless—a symptom of her moral and aesthetic decline.
I think an interesting question is, if David Chappelle didn’t already have “credit” with me from his earlier work, would I be willing to read his transphobic specials generously? No, probably not. But the marketplace also imposes its own logic. Dave Chappelle’s current comedy comes precisely from that effort to reconcile his old audience with his desire to tell these transphobic jokes. I think if he hadn’t already possessed that old audience, his career would’ve taken a different turn. To be honest, I cannot imagine Dave Chappelle playing to the same rooms that go out to watch most right-wing comics. His aesthetic sense would be offended by their racism and crudity.
This is all rather idealistic of me, I suppose, but that’s how I view things. Which us to say, if the bigotry has infected the work, then to the extend they are a true artist, they will ennoble it, and if the bigotry hasn't infected the work, then who cares about it, they're no worse than any other bigot. This leads us to Plato’s famous dictum that poets would be banned from the Republic, because they're able to make falsehood seem attractive. Is Dave more dangerous because he is able to make falsehood seem attractive? I dunno, I don’t really think so. I think falsehood generally propagates itself through a direct appeal to the libido, to anger, to fear, to our activating emotions. I don't think beauty has the ability to inspire people in the same way as, say, violence or outrage does. And I think beauty inevitably complicates and undercuts overt political messages. Which is to say, out of all the transphobes in the world, Dave seems like one of the more introspective and more conflicted—beauty can sometimes join hands with hatred, but I'm not sure it can ever lead the way.
Oh, I suppose I left out the second part, which is the “voting with your feet” element of consumption. JKR holds out her high book sales as evidence that most people agree with her. I think that if there was a massive boycott, and it was tied to some concrete political program, then joining such a boycott could make sense—but in the absence of collective action, the individual decision on whether or not to buy something is politically meaningless.
Laugh all you want about trigger warnings, but I personally enjoy how in Substack I am not constantly barraged by retweets of transphobic material, so I thought having a TW would be nice.