Helen Lewis is Cosplaying as a Moderate

In the Atlantic, Lewis mischaracterizes the positions and evidence of those who favor of trans rights, portraying anyone who disagrees with her as an activist.

by Evan Urquhart

The word activist appears six times in the most recent opinion piece by Helen Lewis for the Atlantic, praising the leader of the U. K.’s Labor party, Keir Starmer, for withdrawing support for trans people from their official platform. Four of the times Lewis uses the word activist are preceded by “queer” “LGBTQ” “transgender” and “trans” and all six refer to people who support transgender rights.

First, she complains that “queer activists” have been unfairly maligning her homeland of Great Britain as a bastion of transphobia and that “LGBTQ activists” are opposed to honest debate. Lewis then praises Starmer’s decision to view women’s rights and trans rights as being in opposition, which she believes will help him appeal to a wider group than the “activist base. This base includes a group of “Labor activists” who she says have vilified anti-trans feminists. Lewis says that Starmer has made a concession to “trans activists” by proposing a change in how a trans person can receive a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, and finally that in order to reach a compromise in the U. S. “Democrats need to meet with detransitioners, and Republicans need to meet transgender activists.”

Lewis also presents herself as a moderate and repeatedly positions her essay as a plea for more moderation in the debate over trans rights. But if Lewis is coming at this issue as a moderate, why does she call Labor’s proposal to allow trans people to receive a gender dysphoria diagnosis from their family doctor, (rather than keeping the current system with lists for a new appointment calculated at 35 years), a concession to trans activists? Surely it would be more accurate to call it an attempt to improve healthcare for trans people, who are practically speaking unable to access treatment for gender dysphoria in the overburdened NHS? If Lewis is coming at this issue as a moderate, why is it trans activists who she wants Republicans, rather than trans people? Why is there no activist descriptor appended to detransitioners who travel the country seeking to influence legislation, a group the New York Times reported consists of fewer than 10 people?

Is it moderate to present every single trans person as an activist while at the same time portraying individuals traveling the country to advocate for their preferred legislation as “people with personal experience of the issue” as Lewis does? It is not.

The repeated use of activist to suggest that trans people aren’t really, well, people, is only one example of the ways Lewis is attempting to mislead readers of the Atlantic by cosplaying as a moderate while advancing extreme anti-trans views. In one particularly egregious example, Lewis pretends that the medical establishment in the U. S. is unable to engage in a “proper evidence-based debate” citing a decision by the American Academy of Pediatrics that included a decision to undertake an evidence review.

screenshot from the Atlanitc

The proposed evidence-review by the American Academy of Pediatrics, which came alongside their unanimous decision to continue to support the current (evidence-based) treatment of gender dysphoria for youth, doesn’t fit Lewis’ narrative, so she pretends it doesn’t exist. That transgender people would, obviously, be the most invested of anyone in high quality medical care for gender dysphoria is the sort of inconvenient truth that only a bigot would miss. In Lewis’ world, there are no trans people seeking the best possible treatment, just activists to be opposed.

Lewis also spends quite a long time discussing trans people’s participation in sports, but in that area she chooses not to engage with the scientific evidence at all. That may be because comprehensive reviews of the evidence have failed to find any advantage for trans women who have undergone testosterone suppression for a long enough time. Instead, for this discussion Lewis falls back on public opinion polling, which she seems to consider an authority to be kowtowed to when the public agrees with her and a sign of incomplete knowledge when it does not.

Lewis also leaves out the decision of the Biden administration to make room for bans on trans athletes when fairness or safety can be shown to be at risk, a decision hailed as a nuanced compromise in no other outlet than the Atlantic earlier this year. Biden’s moderate position doesn’t support Lewis’ argument that Democrats are refusing to take moderate positions, so she leaves it out.

One question that is often left unasked in discussions of transgender people is what, exactly, moderate means. Is a moderate position whatever lies at the exact middle of the most extreme views on each side of the issue? It can’t be, because if that’s the case then merely by becoming more and more extreme one side can drag all the moderates to the extreme positions they themselves once held. Instead, most people would agree that a moderate position on trans rights is one that is fully informed by the scientific and medical evidence, treats transgender people in a humane way, and balances the rights of transgender people with any potential harms that accepting trans people as full members of society might bring. That means that, if the evidence supports gender-affirming care on a strictly medical level, support for gender-affirming care is moderate. If the evidence does not support trans women having any clear advantage in athletic competition, allowing full participation pending any change in the evidence would seem to be the most moderate stance. If the evidence fails to show any sign of harm to cis women by allowing trans women to be included in women’s spaces, then it is moderate for them to be so included. The moderate position would be to favor tolerance and inclusion unless there’s some compelling reason why you can’t.

Increasingly, in the U. S. and across the world, the compelling reason why tolerance and inclusion can’t be favored by moderates is that the political environment will not allow it. A drumbeat of misleading and incendiary rhetoric, including by Lewis and other members of the anti-trans pseudofeminist movement in the U. K. has made it so that moderate positions by the facts are being misunderstood as the extreme positions of activists. A call to follow the science on transgender inclusion in sports is cast as equally extreme as a demand to wipe transgender people out of public life. A belief that evidence for gender-affirming care shouldn’t be hold to a new evidentiary standard that is not imposed in other areas of medicine is called an extreme belief. But the beliefs of transgender people and those who support them have not become more extreme because the winds of the political discourse has changed, and may change more. Lewis and others like her may succeed in convincing people who consider themselves moderates that acceptance of trans people has gone too far and new restrictions on trans people’s freedom are necessary to correct course. That it is being called moderate, however, makes it no less reactionary, and no more evidence-based.