AI List Explains Disagreements Between Feminism and Trans Activism
An unusual use for artificial intelligence.
Opinion, by Evan Urquhart
What happens when you have an AI write the listicles for your listicle website? You get a site full of terribly bland, boring, AI-written listicles.
Ah, but what happens when an AI writes your listicle on *checks notes* 21 Areas of Disagreement Between Transgender Activism and Feminism? You get an incongruously bland take on one of the most contentious political issues of the day with cheerful analogies about baked potatoes in the place of any specifics.
That’s right. Those maniacs at the AI factory really went and done done it.
The listicle in question comes to us from a website called Love Lists, which is just one of the scintillating offerings from a UK-based lets-call-it-a-media-company Back Edge Media. Er. We think, anyway.
Love Lists website includes a copyright listing Edge Media as the copyright holder, and its contact page lists hello@lovelistsuk.com as the contact email. Then a funny thing happens when you copy/paste the email address from their contact page: It shows up as hello@wealthyliving.com.
Wealthy Living says its parent company is WinkBuzz Ltd, which lists the same physical address as Back Edge Media, the parent company of Edge Media. Edge Media, Love Lists, and Wealthy Living all have someone called Sarah Griffin as their Managing Editor. There are probably more of these terrible websites, but we frankly don’t care enough to untangle this skein any further. It’s one of these low effort content mills, now on to the trans stuff.
What are the disagreements between feminism and trans activism? If you ask me, a human reporter, I would tell you that transgender studies in academia grew out of feminist studies, and mainstream feminism has always been strongly trans supporting. However, starting in the 1970s a splinter group of feminists developed a fringe strain of trans-excluding feminism. The Transsexual Empire, written in 1979 by a nun-turned-lesbian-feminist named Janice Raymond, is considered the formative text of this breakaway feminist splinter group.
What’s now billed as the “disagreements between feminism and trans activism” have some connection to this history of fringe 1970s inter-feminist academic politics, but the connection has grown more and more tenuous as the culture wars of the late 2010s and 2020s adopted some of the language of trans-excluding feminism as part of a reactionary movement against trans acceptance. This movement owes more to religious conservatism and generalized anxiety over gender than it does to feminist, but it relentlessly brands itself as feminist in the UK, because religiously motivated conservatism is very unpopular there.
But what does the Love Lists AI have to say on all this?
screenshot from lovelists.uk
Oh, Love Lists. I’m not mad. I’m just… disappointed.
While the example above (labeled as 5. Pronouns and Power) was chosen because the baked potato part is particularly funny, but all the list items are more or less like this. They gesture vaguely in the direction of something recognizable as part of the culture war over transgender existence, and that’s pretty much it.
Here’s another example, (labeled as 3. Sports: Fair Play or Foul?), that’s barely any clearer: “The starting gun fires, and the debate is off! Feminists worry about fairness and safety in women’s sports with transgender women competitors. Meanwhile, inclusion champions are doing stretching exercises, preparing for a marathon debate.”
Near the end of the listicle it gets even less polished. Here’s item 16 (Body Autonomy Battles): “From abortion rights to gender-affirming surgeries, the fight for control over one’s body is fierce. Feminists and transgender activists share common ground, but the devil’s in the details.”
What does this mean? Is there even any disagreement? Sounds a lot like the feminists and the transgender activists are both coming from a shared framework due to the historical closeness of their movements and academic disciplines.
Of course, as shallow and shoddy and stupid as this listicle is, that doesn’t stop it from being harmful. Love Lists is pushing the idea that there is a disagreement between feminism and transgender rights, which is a hotly contested matter that most feminists wouldn’t agree with. The people who have branded anti-trans activism as feminism would, and that’s why journalists should avoid writing articles that adopt their framing uncritically.
But just try telling that to a text-prediction algorithm.
Note: Assigned Media reached out to Love Lists to request comment, but did not receive a reply before publication. We will update this article with their comment in any is forthcoming.
Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media and an incoming member of the 2024-2025 Knight Science Journalism fellowship class at MIT.