The SJW In America's Mind
The "Triggered SJW" trope lives in the minds of culture warriors and wide-eyed liberals alike. To them I say "touch grass!"
Yesterday, my dear friend and I went to buy some tequila from our town’s wine and spirits store. We have long known the owner by face and pleasantries, but after 4 years of exchange, we decided it was time to introduce ourselves. After we did so, she identified my friend in particular. “I know you! You know, I got confused with you and the other person who works on the corner. And then I got confused about the person across the street and then I realized that he —I mean, they! — look nothing like you!”
We smiled. Through friends, we had both already heard about the mix up. Our beloved wine store owner had confused my friend with the two other trans men our age in our town. We all thought it was funny. But our dear purveyor of wine and spirits looked unsettled.
“Oh, it happens, don't worry. We have similar hairstyles and clothes.” My friend laughed, alluding to, but not naming, the more obvious reason behind the mix up.
“Well thanks guys — oh dammit, my daughter told me not to say ‘guys,’ because you don’t know if they’re guys. She said to say ‘y’all,’ but that doesn’t flow for me.”
“Don’t worry, we both use he/him pronouns,” I responded.
She smiled. We smiled. Walked out and laughed.
The poor woman. That exchange for her was one of pure anxiety. Every linguistic turn was a mistake. From the mix up to the “guys,” she just couldn’t get it right, could she? But rather than feeling good about the fact that she is in her late 60s and is clearly trying with her whole spirit to be respectful and considerate, her experience was one of guilt, of fear. But what did she fear? To us, we are both relatively powerless, young, queer recent college graduates. But to her, it seemed that our potential impact could be far grander than what we conceive as our relatively meek positions.
I have talked to enough people across the ideological spectrum and seen enough strange online incidents (some that reflect the reality of certain queer folks, and many others that simply capture the tortured morals of online life) to know exactly what she feared. She feared we’d “cancel” her. That we would interpret her clumsiness as malice and never let her forget it. We’d spread word of her deeds to our friends who would never set foot in her store again.
Or maybe, she simply feared that she would hurt our feelings. And she worried that her flub would set us off on an emotional tailspin.
These reasons may reflect her real anxieties in regards to the feelings and actions of young queer people, but they also paint a picture I find honestly more offensive than her original momentary error. If you really think us that fragile, or that prone to hellfire, then, well, you sort of don’t respect us. Or rather, secretly (or not so secretly) resent us.
The thing is, I don’t particularly blame her for having this expectation about young queer people. The internet, and by proxy, the mainstream media, has been hocking the image of the triggered Social Justice Warrior (or the SJW) for over a decade now. And the conversation surrounding “Cancel Culture” and “The Trans Debate” has reached such a fever pitch that it feels like it’s almost common understanding that there is a malevolent force of Gen Z queer kids ready to arrest any doers of thought crime.
To so many people across the ideological spectrum, all queer and trans people are trigged ideological extremists. To them, we may as well be the crying, screaming activists featured in compilations of “triggered SJW’s being owned by FACTS and LOGIC” that went wildly viral circa 2016. These videos were so ubiquitous that even I, someone with explicitly queer and progressive politics, was recommended them ad nauseam during the time of the 2016 presidential election. And I think they have had a real role in constructing the image of the LGBT SJW monster that looms at America’s gendered conscious. It’s a stereotype that has made adult conversations about sexuality, gender and identity nearly impossible today.
The set-up for those videos were predictable. Someone, usually Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson or the “change my mind” guy Steven Crowder, would show up in a space, usually a lecture hall or in the case of Crowder, the middle of a college-campus with a sign that said “change my mind” about a deeply alienating issue. Then, one of these three Men would stand there resolute and engage in a “dialogue” with a liberal. Often, their interlocutors were non-binary or women, spanning the ages between 18 and 24. And they were always very passionate and upset about whatever deeply alienating statement or world view was being expressed.
The Men would respond coolly and calmly, highlight statistics and “facts,” and in their contrast with the very visibly distressed young person, would showcase that liberalism is nothing but an affective, emotionally driven and extremist ideology. These exchanges would always invariably end with the emotionally fraught young person decrying “You’re just racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic!” And the wise and sturdy Man would look to the camera with the silent acknowledgement, “Well, this is what they always say.”
These videos are obviously manufactured. Manufactured, not in the sense that they didn’t happen, but in the sense that these Men were goading a co-hort — young people, newly politicized, often of marginalized identity — on today’s most pressing, controversial issues and performing an inherently frustrating demeanor of cold disregard that they knew would produce that exact response. As a fellow leftist, progressive, queer person, etc. I often watched these videos with a frustrated sense of cringe. I wished that these young people could argue the points of “our side” with more nuance and clarity, and yet my instinctual feelings often shook right off when I realized that the whole premise of the video was a grift: it was an incitement to depict young queer leftists/liberals as no more than crying screaming scolds here to stop the fun and facts.
The videos were also manufactured for Youtube’s platform. The controversial topics “explored” in the compilations generated substantial engagement. And there were ample moments in these videos to inspire comments that guffawed at the illogic of the upset speakers. And because many of the videos’ long-run time, they gamed the YouTube algorithm by accruing substantial “watch times,” a metric that became central to YouTube’s recommendation algorithm. Further, the genre’s popularity was self-reinforcing. The more people watched, the more it was recommended.
The depiction of the SJW has been remarkably durable. Joe Rogan, the world’s most popular podcaster, and Dave Chapelle, the world’s most famous comedian, have devoted a truly wild amount of time and work on the question of trans people, along with the comedian’s supposed assault by online activists canceling them. I’m not here to talk about that; there’s been enough ink spilled. But I am here to say that implicit in their qualms is the sense that this community — queer, trans, young — is specifically hostile, powerful and reactive.
A recent tweet by Elon Musk made it clear the contours of the widely believed-in framing. Responding to a review by writer Matt Taibi of “What is A Woman,” an investigative piece of pseudo-documentary by conservative activist Matt Walsh, Musk tweeted the following:
What strikes me about this tweet are the words “we” and “told.” Who is the “we” here and who is doing the “telling?” The intonation of the “we,” as in the people, the masses, implies that there is a huge, powerful conspiracy of forces propagating trans ideology. To Musk, there is a BigTrans, like pharma, agro or oil, who is not just making a case, but is “telling” the “we” a coherent, describable ideology. This is not just a diverse community of all types of people who have come to their own gender/sexuality expression through a million unique ways, but a thought-army here and ready to cancel. I imagine, to Musk, that the LGBT community is one giant looming SJW from a cringe compilation, crying and reacting illogically to the calculated facts that he believes in.
Belief in the trans mob is spreading, and it’s even being taken up by the common-sense crowd that dominates The New York Times opinion section. In a perplexing, uncurious and oh-so-besieged opinion piece for The New York Times, writer Pamela Paul creates a million shadow warriors there to ruin her life for daring to speak about the existence of biological women.
It’s an entire piece predicated on the false sense that trans people are a unified front ready to ruin the lives of those that question them. She writes, “Women didn’t fight this long and this hard only to be told we couldn’t call ourselves women anymore. This isn’t just a semantic issue; it’s also a question of moral harm, an affront to our very sense of ourselves.”
But has Paul taken a moment to consider, for one moment, that basically no one is saying she can’t say “women?” Yes, there have been different words used to describe different people that can give birth, especially now in relation to the recent decision on Roe. But a brief moment of confusion towards the clunky phrase “birthing people,” and the fact that some organizations are using it to capture the real existence of those that do not identify as women who do give birth, does not mean that the word “women” has been outlawed according to Woke Dictum 2B. The question is, why does one utterance of “birthing person” inspire such dystopian visions by so many?
These visions of hellfire must be explained by the notion that the queer and trans community is, as Musk alludes to, a unified, powerful, extremist front. Echoing Musk’s complaints of “being told,” Paul evokes a similar coercion with her cry that the LGBT community is making it so women “can’t call themselves women.” When really what is happening, is some, and a few (yes powerful but not necessarily representative) orgs are merely using one word instead of another. But in Paul’s twisted logic, she reads a word that confuses her, and interprets it as an affront and demanded exclusion of another. They sat potato, but she hears “you can never say potawto.”
It just feels like everyone, even those that put their pride flag up in support come June, have some vile assumption of queer personhood. Because even beyond “free thinkers” like Musk and Rogan, or the brave centrists like Paul, there are many, many people, liberals with benevolent intention, who in their anxiety of offending trans and queer people reveal that they perceive the community as the snapping mouth of a viper on edge.
In an interesting piece for The Cut that I found largely relatable, writer Brock Coylar writes about their experience as a non-binary person in progressive spaces. What feels vital about the article is that it’s expressing a quiet feeling among many queers that people outside seem to often misinterpret; the pronoun conversation is not the end all be all for many. Speaking to other non-binary individuals, Coylar reports them as sharing the following sentiments:
It’s constantly straight people freezing up and stressing out. Like, “How do I be an ally?” There is nothing enjoyable, in other words, about being a small-talk roadblock. “I can’t relax because you can’t relax. It makes it not fun for me,” said Beau, talking about their experience with pronoun culture at work. Sam, another nonbinary person present for the conversation, told me they don’t always insist upon their pronouns in the office for exactly these reasons: “Although the people I work with are very nice, they’re also 45-year-old women who are gonna fuck up and make it super-awkward when they fuck up. ‘Oh my God. I didn’t mean that.’ ‘Oh my God. I’m so sorry.’ ‘Oh my God. Are you offended?’ I don’t want to deal with that.”
It may seem strange to complain about the anxiety of people who only wish to be considerate, but their anxiety reveals a presumption of combativeness. You would only be so flustered and upset if you expected your life to be ruined and the other person’s complete emotional stability to be unsettled by making a linguistic error.
To be clear, misgendering someone happens and it can be painful, awkward and deeply frustrating. But it almost always is a mistake that can be quickly moved on from with a “pardon” and correction. And if you did it in a hostile/intentional way then you are a boring, horrible person and obviously were going to get yelled at regardless. But almost all of my friends are queer and trans and no community is a monolith, but basically no one I know wants to engage in a heated linguistic dispute at their workplace or when, you know, buying bread or whatever. And yet, the overwhelming belief of resentful culture warriors and oh-so-good allies is that one wrong move will bring them to the LGBT Hague.
It’s unfortunate. And offensive. And the perception imbued by popular archetypes is making daily dialogue more and more difficult. It seems that those videos, of the triggered blue-haired SJWs, have invaded the minds of America. And thus, in the American imaginary, all queer and trans people, especially the young, are the people of cringe compilations. People may disagree on the politics of trans and queer existence, but it seems thinking that we suck is bi-partisan.
And . . . well, with friends like these!