As Trans Families Flee, Spare Some Sympathy for Wealthy Transphobes

An article by Emma Green for the New Yorker documents the drinking habits of wealthy, well-connected transphobes.

by Evan Urquhart

As families flee state-sponsored persecution due to seeking medical care for their struggling children, the New Yorker asks you to consider how harsh criticism feels to people who went to Harvard. This is explicitly the premise of “The Party is Cancelled” by Emma Green, about a New York socialite who hosts parties for the “cancelled” who she refers to as the Thought Criminals.

Of course, Green is far too polite to mention the situation trans youth, their families, and all transgender Americans currently find them in. That would be downright rude in the elite social circles of transphobic bigots or, apparently, in any article concerning them. The the dire real life situation facing trans people, the book bans, the bans on medical treatment, the harassment and threats shutting down clinics, the plans to flee their home states, the bathroom bans, the effort to eradicate trans people from public life takes place just out of view, while Green and her subjects party and commiserate over cancel culture at the Olive Tree Cafe in New York City.

To say that Green’s subjects are united solely by being transphobes is, perhaps, a slight exageration. One of the individuals Green quotes, Stephen Elliot, has been publicly accused of sexual harassment by multiple women (and, anonymously, of rape). Another subject wrote a student essay claiming Black students at Harvard were less qualified than their white counterparts, many of whom enter those hallowed halls due to family legacies (this woman no longer believes that, but feels her excessive guilt over the incident has harmed her greatly). There’s also a comic whose career is thriving after cruelly mocking a trans celebrity, a woman who founded an anti-trans activist group, and two people who detransitioned. Green further reports that, “At this particular gathering, gender was a focus of the conversation.”

Much of the aforementioned gender discussion (which was purely a coincidence of that particular evening, I’m sure) seems to have been dominated by Kim Jones, who “co-founded an organization called icons, the Independent Council on Women’s Sports,” in order to oppose trans women’s participation in sports. According to Green, Jones was still discussing the minutae of intersex bodies late into the evening when the party had dwindled to just a few stragglers. Jones is also described as using “sex-based” pronouns, which presumably means she uses they/them to refer to things like boats or cartoon characters.

screenshot from the New Yorker

Throughout the piece, though Green maintains her reportorial distance, multiple subjects are quoted sympathetically, talking about how difficult it’s been for them to feel unpopular or lose friendships, how hurt they are, and how unfair they feel the changing social norms around public speech have been to them. Whether it’s the pain of being a detranitioned woman who has gone “through great personal suffering and lived experience,” and finds that still somehow not everyone agrees with her, the pain of being a cisgender gay man who believes he’s being looked down on in the queer community, the pain of being a woman who wrote a racist student essay and is now thriving in her career but needed “therapeutic drug use, for her to arrive at a place of self-forgiveness and acceptance,” or the pain of being multiple-accused of sexually harassing behavior.

No, seriously. Get a load of this shit:

screenshot from the New Yorker

In a Twitter thread sharing her piece, Green describes the group she profiled as “being willing to make community with people who might say or do or think things you find intolerable,” but if the members of the Thought Criminals ever disagreed with one another, much found anything the others did intolerable, Green did not see fit to mention it in her reporting. As far as what she wrote down goes, the canceled seem to have all gotten along swimmingly. Most or all also seem to have been wealthy and/or well-connected, with mentions of Ivy-league degrees, professorships, law careers, and many other casually dropped demarcations of American elite-hood.

The thought of people struggling to survive while the entire apparatus of the state is coming down against them seems far away from both the gatherings of Thought Criminals and the reporting by Green for the New Yorker, but it is very real for transgender people in America. Every day ever harsher laws targeting the trans community seem to be passed, with Ron DeSantis just today signing into law the harshest slate of anti-trans legislation in the country, banning everything from medical treatment to books to pronouns for trans youth of school age, and even criminalizing adult trans people who use public restroooms. For Emily Green, her subjects, and the readers of the New Yorker, this is all abstract, an intellectual debate, that should be secondary to the real issues, which concern the comfort of wealthy people who feel entitled to be casually transphobic in public without social consequences.