Mike and Sarah have big feelings about an enduring debate. Digressions include “Carrie,” party planning etiquette and Whole Foods cafeterias. Sarah’s sound quality changes midway through because she moves from a McDonald’s parking lot to a Hardee’…
Originally posted on 9 June 2021 on the Community section of You’re Wrong About’s Patreon.
I really hate to post something like this, but I am… disappointed with the cancel culture episode. It is, in my view, mostly a good episode, but the repeated mentions of Natalie Wynn in a sympathetic light without mentioning what she was “cancelled” for is quite irresponsible.
Wynn repeatedly made statements in videos and on Twitter that were bigoted toward nonbinary and non-passing trans people. Some of these were apologized for before a couple months later she’d say the same kind of crap again. It finally came to a head in summer or fall of 2019 when she made a thread against the practice of asking for pronouns (in which she also said she felt like the last of the “old school transsexuals” despite her having come out in like 2017), got called out again, apologized, deactivated her Twitter for a short time before coming back and putting out a new video with a cameo from Buck Angel (who she shouted out on Twitter when announcing the video). Buck Angel is a trans man famous as a porn star and infamous as a transmedicalist or “truscum”, i.e. the view that transness is a Medical Condition™ and that anyone who doesn’t experience gender dysphoria (or experiences it in a way that isn’t True Dysphoria™) isn’t really trans. Quite a lot of nastiness and gatekeeping comes from transmeds including broad anti-nonbinary bigotry. This was the final straw for many people because no matter how many times Wynn apologizes, those apologies ring hollow when she goes right back to the same old shit. Then she made the “Cancellation” video a few months later, leading to quite a bit of dogpiling of people who criticized her thanks to screenshots included in the video (at least some of which didn’t @mention her and even had her blocked) and has made an even bigger name for herself than she ever would have gotten thanks to the cancellation narrative.
Now, I don’t expect cis people to know all of this without doing some digging, but considering this was first and foremost a trans intracommunity issue, I do think that cis allies have a responsibility to do that due diligence. Please, please be better about this in the future.