On Reading the Atlantic While Trans
by Evan Urquhart
On Tuesday I read two pieces in the Atlantic.
One, by Helen Lewis, was the sort of thing I write about all the time for Assigned, a deceptive piece of propaganda pushing the idea that trans people’s existence is a thorny, complicated matter and can't possibly be as simple as just letting trans people live their lives in peace and not discriminating against us.
The second was something completely different. A heartbreaking, beautiful look at a writer and her family reconnecting with an intellectually disabled woman who was institutionalized for all her life. Jennifer Senior’s aunt Adele was diagnosed with microcephaly as a baby in the 1950s, and the family was convinced by doctors that the best and only realistic course was to send her away. Adele spent her childhood warehoused in a filthy, disease-ridden state facility where she and other disabled children were deprived of human contact, toys, and even proper clothes, and her adulthood heavily medicated in group homes and residential care. Senior weaves this history, and her horror and grief over it, with the story of how she and her mother reestablished a connection with Adele when she was in her 70s, living in the home of a caretaker who had come to love her as her own.
There’s so much richness in this second piece, and you should very much read it yourself if you haven’t already, but for me the most disquieting parts were the ones about that 1950s family and the culture they were in that led them to send a child into deprivation, abuse, and filth. Senior writes that her mother’s mother never stopped visiting Adele throughout her life, but she believed Adele was too intellectually disabled to speak or recognize her or understand what having a mother meant. This is juxtaposed with the adult Adele, who calls her caretaker mommy, can count to 12, and remembers the names of all her caretaker’s adult kids.
The abuse perpetrated on Adele had multiple causes, chief among them fear and hatred of difference, and also lies. Lies that convinced parents that intellectually disabled children were insensible, incapable of real learning or growth, and that what was being done to them wasn’t so bad because they couldn’t understand it and weren’t capable of more anyway. The lies made it easier for ordinary people to do the wrong things, such as turning their children over to abusive state institutions, and ignore the small voice inside them that said these things were wrong. Senior’s story lays bare the way that falsehoods are used to excuse and reinforce prejudice, and that ordinary people wind up enabling unspeakable harm as a result. What could be more important, or more timely, in 2023?
And then, the very next day, the very same magazine published the Helen Lewis piece.
Perhaps because I’d just read Senior’s story, when I read Lewis what stood out to me the most was the way Lewis continually uses the word “activist” to encourage the reader to deprive trans people of their full humanity. She used the word activist six times (I broke down all of them in my response on Assigned) and never for anyone other than supporters of trans rights. To Lewis, the handful of detransition activists who travel the country advocating for anti-trans laws are “people with personal experience of the issue” but trans people are… what? Activists. Not people. Something else. While Lewis says she isn’t advocating for the extreme anti-trans policies of Republicans, she is openly frustrated with the left for spending its energy on opposing those policies, and wants them to instead focus on the ways in which trans people are dangerous and different. She asks that people treat us as an issue to resolve rather than as human beings under an existential threat from the far right.
Lewis deploys half-truths about the European backlash against trans rights, links to cherry-picked discussions of discredited medical studies, ignores inconvenient facts that don’t fit her narrative, all the usual jazz. But the foundation of all of that is a dehumanization of trans people, a subtle insistence that pervades her whole essay (and all of her essays on the topic) that trans people aren’t people. Not really. Not like other people are. This is the exact dynamic that led to the creation of institutions for the intellectually disabled, and to those institutions being allowed to become the stuff of nightmares because people had been trained not to see the abuse of those inside them as the abuse of human beings.
There are a lot of trans people and allies of trans people who don’t read the Atlantic at all these days. Helen Lewis is a staff writer there (as is Jennifer Senior), and the editorial tone of the magazine is very much aligned with Lewis’ opposition to trans people’s equality. I don’t subscribe to the Atlantic myself, and I think boycotting them is on pretty sound footing. But I am balanced between hope and despair when I think about these two stories and what it means for them to coexist in the same place and time. We don’t have to go down the same paths over and over again. We can read stories that show us where mass dehumanization of a type of person leads. We can read stories that help us see the humanity and worth in everyone, even the most viciously maligned groups.
Helen Lewis wants everyone to stop worrying about Republican’s cartoonishly evil attacks on trans people’s humanity because it interferes with her own attempts to mount more moderate-sounding attacks. Jennifer Senior wants us to see a little further down the road, to where removing the humanity from a group of people leads.
