The Wrong Questions
Andrew Sullivan and the New York Times provide a series of bad answers to the “trans question.”
Last week, I found myself on the phone, trying not to shout at a reporter from the New York Times.
The shouting was about Substack. I was one of several people who left the platform over its choice to pay, platform and protect transphobic writers. Unfortunately, my post about leaving Substack caught lots of traffic, and I was being treated as an “expert.” Being a trans “expert” in a conversation about transphobia is the closest any human being can get to Hell without hitting Glenn Greenwald on the way down.
There was the writer who wanted to know why I wasn’t able to share platforms with “people I don’t like,” and who ended the interview when I kept pulling the focus back to transphobia. There was the radio show that interviewed me and a trans woman, then ran quotes from neither of us, tapping a cis reporter — the same reporter who’d ended the interview with me — to read my post aloud on air and explain how unreasonable it was.
After a few of these, I’d decided not to do any more interviews. I only budged for this request because, well, it was the Times. I shouldn’t have.
It fell apart early on. Ben Smith, the reporter, told me by email that his only…