A few months after that, Knox's spouse came out as transgender as well. Knox reported to her readers that this realization, too, was "beautiful," and that she could not be more delighted to now be "gay married."
In blog posts, Knox described the whole family as "the happiest we've ever been," and wrote that "our world is so full of love and support that it leaves absolutely no room for hatred or ignorance to reside within it." Indeed, Knox made gender transition her professional focus, "studying research, interviewing experts, giving talks, writing articles" about trans issues. She authored a bestselling 2019 book about her experiences. In newspapers and magazines, she wrote articles under headlines like "The only way to respond to my transgender child's desperate plea was with love," "My daughter came out as trans, and it saved my marriage," and "My wife surprised her coworkers when she came out as trans." Knox gushed on CBC radio, took the stage at a Microsoft-sponsored event in Vancouver, and appeared on numerous television programs, always relentlessly promoting the same upbeat message of how trans-inclusiveness had brought joy to her household, over which there is now "a permanent rainbow... that unicorns like to prance around on."
Amanda Jetté Knox, right, photographed with her spouse.
If you aren't on Twitter, and you don't follow the obscure and sometimes ludicrous machinations of in-group Canadian artists and activists, you might be inclined to think that the mob that came after Knox was composed of religious bigots or alt-right transphobes. Perhaps even members of the Westboro Baptist Church or QAnon. But as some readers will know, that couldn't be farther from the truth. The trolls that targeted Knox were avowed trans activists, just like their target. Amanda Jetté Knox, author of Love Lives Here: A Story of Thriving in a Transgender Family, was excommunicated for being insufficiently supportive of trans people.
There is a predictable pattern in many extreme movements that's sometimes described as a "purity spiral," whereby yesterday's radicals are denounced by onetime fellow travelers as reactionaries. During the early years of the French revolutionary period, the liberal nobles who led the Patriotic Society of 1789 endorsed views that would have been rejected as unspeakably progressive just a few years earlier. But in due course, they were denounced by the Jacobins as stooges of the Ancien Régime and duly marched off to the guillotine. Shortly thereafter, those same Jacobins would be denounced by the Cordeliers, who themselves fell victim to even more radicalized political cults amid Robespierre's reign of terror. And while such grand historical allegories have their limits, you do see parallels in the rise of gender radicalism over the last few years. In the UK, for instance, a relentlessly trans-supportive doctor and avowed "cis-phobe" named Adrian Harrop was set upon by his one-time allies when he admitted the perfectly obvious fact that, as a gay man, he is attracted to biological males (a common-sense statement that put him at odds with the fashionable dogma, which no one's brain actually obeys, requiring us to be sexually attracted to others on the basis of their stated gender and not biological sex).
As far as the great gender revolution goes, Knox might be classified as one of those early Jacobins who was all in favour of running Louis XVI out of town, but respectfully balked at slaughtering his family. Her style of argumentation tends to be passive aggressive. In late 2019, for instance, when J.K. Rowling controversially reminded the world that human biology is still a thing, Knox tweeted that "It breaks my heart to see you post something indicating that discrimination against [my daughter] is perfectly fine behaviour." Based on my own experience, I can attest that Knox wasn't above riling up a mini-mob when it suited her interests. But she was never one of those rainbow Cordeliers who ran around rhapsodizing about "trans-exclusive" feminists being thrown into grease fires or menacing them with barbed-wire-covered baseball bats.
No, I won't be arguing here that the modern intra-progressive culture war over gender is a replay of the French Revolution. But historical movements great and small often follow predictable patterns. In their early energetic phase, they gather up the diverse energies and passions of different constituencies, all motivated by a sense of common purpose. Then, following early victories, the esprit de corps ebbs, and positions of power are taken up by overreaching zealots and profiteers who seek to purge other factions and entrench their own power and influence.
Something like this has been playing out in the field of gender politics, which was fuelled in the 2000s by a wide coalition of progressives who wanted to see transgender people get the rights and dignity they deserve. It was a laudable and largely successful campaign. But it overshot the mark in recent years, and some activists now are demanding that sexual dimorphism itself be rejected as a transphobic myth. Fortunately, this radicalism peaked in 2018 and early 2019, and is now slowly being rolled back through sensible government reforms, a more balanced editorial environment in the mass media, and a vigorous grass-roots pushback from feminists on university campuses and other civil spaces. Needless to say, the avant-garde scholars and activists who've made this their lives' calling aren't happy about these developments. And it is in this context that the mobbing of Knox may be usefully understood.
At one point, Knox openly pleaded with the de facto ringleader, an indigenous trans poet named Gwen Benaway, describing the stress she was enduring. Benaway, unmoved, responded that "mental health is very real, but the move to cis innocence... is disingenuous, absolutely cis privilege in action, and extreme cis fragility." (These discussions tend to be full of language like this.) Benaway, who reports struggling with her own "overwhelming depression," additionally accused Knox of abetting "transmisogyny/oppression" as a means to "silence and shame/critique trans folks," a tactic that Benaway described as "very cis"; and then complained that "every trans woman who publicly does this work" — i.e., the work of tweeting criticism at others — "ends up dead, socially isolated and endangered." Ironically, this was four days before a suicidal Knox ended up in an Ottawa-area emergency room.
Whether or not Knox had intended it, her sudden departure from Twitter had been a strategic masterstroke. Broadly speaking, suffering and victimhood tend to be the currency of the realm in these rarified social-justice subcultures. Benaway, who'd helped lead the campaign to block Meghan Murphy's speech at a Toronto public library location last year, now looked like she'd turned her bullhorn against a trans ally. It made all her melodramatic denunciations of "TERFs" seem hypocritical. And on May 19th, Benaway followed Knox into Twitter oblivion, deleting her account without ceremony or fanfare.
Indeed, to the extent that there was any ideological dimension at all, it could be argued that it was Knox, not Benaway, who had the stronger claim to doctrinal purity. The whole thrust of the modern trans-rights movement is that "trans women are women," full stop — a formulation that, if true, would make it completely irrelevant whether Knox were (as Benaway kept reminding everyone) merely a cis interloper in a trans activist subculture. And this signals a curiously regressive aspect of the leading progressive edge in the gender-studies field: Over time, the old (by which I mean, say, 2010) ideal of equality between trans and non-trans has given way to a more quasi-mystical philosophy that exalts gender identity as a spiritual force marking us from birth with a sort of ersatz divine grace.
By this conception, trans and non-binary individuals are elevated into a priestly class tasked with channeling and interpreting their inner mysticism for the benefit of the cis masses. (Something very similar has played out in the field of Indigenous reconciliation, with "settlers" therein cast as muggles. But I do digress.) And that role is severely compromised when a lowly cis muggle like Knox is permitted to walk among trans wizards.
Queer erasure and consumption of Indigenous bodies mimics its erasure and consumption of transsexual bodies. Our art forms and embodiments become Queer play. Our transgressions become their fantasy. Our gender variance becomes their answer to the persistent heteronormativity of Queer spaces. Yet actual trans bodies remain absent or regulated to the sidelines. Queer men don't date trannies. Real lesbians don't sleep with pre-op transsexuals because they don't want to lose their gold star. The relationship between settler colonialism and transphobia is rarely discussed, but ever present. If Queerness imagines a relationship to Indigenous bodies which is not rooted in our actual bodies, it also denies a relationship to transsexual bodies by actively erasing our presence.Most trans people I know are ordinary men and women who, like the rest of us, are just trying to get through life without getting food on their clothes or filing their taxes late. They don't lecture lesbians about their ideologically mandated need to get on board with the penis (or as poet Benaway puts it in her elegantly Yeatsian way, "suck my tranny dick"). Instead, they talk about subjects like baseball, computers, and dogs. But Canada's government-subsidized book publishers and academics find these topics dull, and tend to be far more dazzled by essays on the persistent heteronormativity of Queer spaces. So it should surprise no one that Benaway has won many awards, despite remaining a completely obscure figure among the Canadians who've flocked to buy Knox's book. Benaway also has been named a fellow in the Department of Transgender Studies at the University of Victoria (think Evergreen State College, but much harder to get to) and regularly gets interviewed by national networks anytime they need someone to bash around Meghan Murphy or some other muggle.
In short, denouncing the persistent heteronormativity of Queer spaces is what Benaway does for a living. It's how she puts food on the table. And so you can see why, for entirely practical reasons, she might be horrified by the idea that some cis mom from Ottawa would presume to write a book about being nice to trans people that ordinary people would actually understand and buy, and which contains nary a single chapter on the persistent heteronormativity of Queer spaces. Next thing you know, they'll be translating the Bible into German, French, and English.
As much as conservative culture critics love to tee off on the rise of gender ideology, it isn't really rising anymore. For the last year, it's been shrinking. And the fights we're more likely to see in this area will be less about deposing the Ancien Régime, and more about which gender Jacobin gets the spotlight on an ever-smaller stage.
Reader Comments
Why would anyone need a gender debate?
Remember when bestsellers had literary merit? (At least damn sure more than they do now, which also really shows just how successful has been the great dumbing down and reprogramming of the proles.)