Digest 07/05/2022

Columnist Pamela Paul continues NYT transphobia tirade, struggles with difference between sex and gender.

COLUMNIST SEEKS ARGUMENT, COZIES UP WITH TERFS INSTEAD

Call it a case of the columnist struggling to find a worthwhile opinion: Former New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul’s latest column for the Times is copied directly from the British trans-exclusionary radical feminist (better known as TERF) playbook. Repeating TERF talking points, “The Far Right and Far Left Agree on One Thing: Women Don’t Count,” imagines a “far right” and a “far left” that equally disparage women. Paul’s editorializing on the subject, which fails to examine her own assumptions about sex and gender, serves only to create a mirage of enemies surrounding her at polar ends of the political spectrum. In reality, she’s the one on the offensive — and punching downward, too.

In her flimsy examination of the political landscape, Paul says the “far right” is to blame for sending the US back several decades. But in the process, she leaves out that the Republican Party is, at this point, a mainstream, far right political party that essentially controls all branches of government. Meanwhile, she argues that those on the “fringe left” — “academics, uber-progressives, transgender activists, civil liberties organizations and medical organizations,” according to Paul — maintain an “unintentionally but effectively misogynist agenda” when they acknowledge that not all people who can give birth are women, as if the right-wing attacks on abortion rights are comparable to medical professionals using language that detaches sex from gender. 

Paul’s complaints focus on some of the new ways to describe non-cis and non-hetero people. In particular, she takes issue with “unwieldy terms like ‘pregnant people,’ ‘menstruators’ and ‘bodies with vaginas,’” which she believes have replaced “women.” Clearly, she (and it appears, whoever edited the column) has decided the word “women” ultimately means “cis women,” which becomes clear when Paul notes that, “Women, of course, have been accommodating,” by allowing “transgender women into their organizations.” (Nevermind that this sentence positions cis women as gatekeepers.) But her attempts to both tolerate and critique trans-inclusive language lead to bizarre phrasings where her own misogyny reveals itself: “We can respect transgender women without castigating females who point out that biological women still constitute a category of their own.” According to Paul, seeking or providing affirmative medical care is akin to the erasure of women as a whole.

Twitter discourse has flared up from time to time over Paul’s columns, but warning signs that Paul would engage in performative centrist arguments were evident in private chats, New York media chatter, and even in the Times’ own announcement that she was joining the paper as a columnist. “She made clear to us that she has little patience for groupthink on the right or left but rather wants her column to help people question what has often become the received point of view,” three Opinion editors wrote in the announcement. Her first column, “The Limits of ‘Lived Experience’,” while not altogether wrong, was a strong indication she wasn’t going to use her platform to denounce bad-faith arguments, but to call out what she has deemed “bad faith.”

The problem with Paul’s column isn’t just that trans people are facing enough oppressive bullshit, but that readers who aren’t already steeped in the legacy media gossip channels have no idea how screeds like Paul’s clearly illuminate that the power structures in media are highly conservative — even though legacy media tries to position itself as being neutral, and is lumped in as “leftist mainstream media” by those on the American right-wing.

Moreover, it is impossible to be objective when writing opinion pieces, as the genre literally is a platform for writers to state theirs. They’ve long been popular forums for well-connected media types who want to vent their milquetoast but consequential views. With Paul’s column, it’s never clear whether her ideas are original (in which case, cringe), or whether she is already flailing, barely months into the job, and unable to conceive of an original thought (considering she’s undoubtedly being very well paid for the column, double cringe). Her complaints about her linguistic oppression only work when there exists an imagined silent majority, unable to express itself for fear of cancellation, for whom she elects herself as representative. But as her piece demonstrates, Paul’s imagined oppression pales in comparison to trans people’s material suffering across the world. 

Then there are the mounting questions about the legitimacy of the Book Review itself. Critic Kyle Paoletta’s April 2022 piece for The Nation pointed out what many writers have been wondering — is the Book Review boring? Even if it were, many (myself included) would still write for the publication. But the Book Review famously doesn’t accept pitches; all reviewers are tapped, and scarcity leads to prestige. Though Paul is just your garden-variety TERF, the review’s scarcity-to-prestige model is precisely why people listen to her and media figureheads like her.

Those who work at the Book Review also tend to go on to far larger-reaching jobs later on: Andrew LaVallee, went from being the Books desk’s deputy news and features editor to head of Arts & Leisure; Vanity Fair editor-in-chief Radhika Jones used to be the desk’s editorial director (and it was rumored at the start of her Vanity Fair tenure she was supposed to succeed David Remnick at The New Yorker). While most of the population (be it US, global, or Times-reading) doesn’t care about the Books section (sorry), those high up in media do, which means not only are their voices heard, but that they have played the game to somehow be palatable enough to hire.

Paul’s influence while editing the Book Review bled all through the New York publishing scene and — as the publishing world has only recently dispersed due to COVID — the US scene, too. Describing Paul in a tweet as a “boring writer [who] was once the most important person in all of book publishing,” Maris Kreizman, who hosts a weekly podcast with leading writers, added it “thrills me to see friends who didn’t get along with her absolutely thriving.” 

Literary agent Erik Hane noted on his account how many trans writers have been deliberately skipped for review. In a Substack post published last year, Chicago Tribune books columnist John Warner took issue with Paul’s decision to include an anti-trans book published in Britain by TERF Helen Joyce. What’s more, Joyce’s book wasn’t even being pushed in the US, which is usually a prerequisite for book-reviewing publications. Writer Rafia Zakaria (with whom I did a Study Hall talk last year) believes it was Paul who kiboshed a review on her latest book, “Against White Feminism,” because it took aim at upper-middle-class white women like Paul, although pretty much every other major outlet reviewed the essay collection. (The Book Review covered Zakaria’s first book.)

Publishers, for a long time, pushed the idea that only a certain kind of middle-class white woman reads. While an editor’s job is to choose what gets featured and what does not, Paul’s editorial choices only reinforced the status quo, not truly innovating the Book Review in any way.

In Britain, many media types who found themselves ascending through the Fleet Street set without nous have ended up as columnists: the Times’ Giles Coren had a famous journalist father; The Guardian’s Marina Hyde changed her last name because her father’s was too long (he’s a baronet); Alexandra Shulman helmed a whiter-than-the-paper-it’s-printed-on British Vogue until she was turfed out, where she became, um, a TERF columnist for the Mail on Sunday (the Sunday version of The Daily Mail they keep emphasizing operates as a separate entity). The tradition there is that columnists have to be entertaining in return for the stupidly big bucks they’re paid — though the real challenge is finding something interesting to say every week. Shunting Paul from the Book Review to Opinion looks like a similar play. Except that three months in, she’s resorted to parroting arguments that can’t hold a solid line of logic through a paragraph, let alone a piece, and she writes sentences with the flair of The Gray Lady — that is, none.