Thread by @ContraPoints

Last year I received an email from Megan Phelps-Roper, estranged daughter of the Westboro Baptist Church. She asked if I'd give an interview for a podcast on J.K. Rowling, the world's foremost champion of backlash to trans rights. I agreed. This was a serious lapse in judgment.🧵

Here's what I was thinking at the time: Megan is a famous "reformed bigot"—she used to picket funerals holding a "God Hates F*gs" sign. She told me she had personally interviewed JKR and had confronted her with talking points from my video.

She'd spoken to JKR about me, and thought it seemed only right to speak to me about JKR. This is what was pitched to me. I took the bait and consented to a pretty miserable three-hour interrogation about my own transition, as well as the usual "concerns" about trans rights.

At the end of the interview, Megan asked if I had any advice about the project. I said that the one thing she definitely should not do is frame the conflict as a debate between two equally legitimate sides, "trans people versus transphobes—both have some good points!"

It's now clear that this is exactly what she's done, how she's conceptualized the project from the outset. Her stance seems to be that trans people and transphobes are equally dogmatic & combative; that if we could all just have a calm, civil conversation, empathy would prevail.

She thinks this way because of her experience leaving the WBC, aided by people on Twitter who kindly pushed back against her former hateful views. From this she's extrapolated an entire political worldview: the basic problem facing humanity is too much "polarization"—incivility.

The aggrieved gays, the mourning families of dead soldiers screaming back at her—you don't deradicalize a bigot that way. Instead (the argument goes) we should approach bigots with love and compassion. There's a truth here about rhetoric. But it's been disastrously misapplied.

The fundamental problem is that Megan only understands bigotry from the bigot's point of view. Her experience with the WBC has given her a heightened capacity to sympathize with bigots, and a diminished capacity to reckon with the harm done to bigotry's victims.

She needs above all else to believe that bigots are misunderstood & redeemable. So instead of committing to anti-bigotry post-Westboro, she's retreated to a spineless skepticism with no moral convictions beyond wondering, "Who's the REAL bigot here? I guess we'll never know."

This empty centrism cannot conceive of systemic power, of the legislative, institutional, and stochastic terror threats wielded against LGBT people. In assessing the "trans debate" it has no standard but civility by which to judge the merits of "both sides."

Megan does not seem to grasp that trans people are fighting for our lives, our right to exist in society. And that this fight is in no way equivalent to the rationalizations offered up by people who oppose trans rights, even when the former are angry and the latter composed.

She thinks "God Hates F*gs" is wrong because it's rude. But if God merely has a few reasonable concerns about f*gs, well then we'd better do a whole podcast exploring the intricate nuances of her point of view.

The podcast is titled "The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling," an obviously tendentious framing that presents JKR as the victim of an irrational hate mob. Tho the podcast isn't out, I've decided to speak up now because there's a 99.9% chance that this will help JKR & harm trans people

I don't want my involvement to lend any legitimacy to this. I regret my participation and would not have participated had I fully understood the nature of the project. I feel that I have been used, and I share the sentiments of other trans people who are speaking out against it.