By David Futrelle
If you’ve been struck by the strange and creepy ideological convergence between so-called “gender-critical feminists” and the far right on the subject of trans people, you may not be altogether surprised to learn that notorious British anti-trans activist Posie Parker — definitely NOT to be confused with indie actress Parker Posey — recently appeared on the podcast of one Jean-Francois Gariepy, an outspoken white nationalist, crude misogynist, and accused sexual exploiter of young women.
It’s still a bit shocking though, as Gariepy — known as JF — is not just an at-right shitbag who has hosted such anti-luminaries as Richard Spencer and David Duke on his show; he’s an alt-right shitbag who has managed to make himself controversial amongst other alt-rightists not for his views but for his alleged treatment of women and teenage girls. Given the amount of misogyny that’s considered perfectly acceptable on the far-right, that’s quite an accomplishment.
As the Daily Beast has noted, JF has been “accused of luring and attempting to impregnate a developmentally disabled Hispanic teenager” whom counselors declared had “the social and mental maturity of a 10- or 11-year-old child.” He has also reputedly engaged in what the Beast described as “a pattern of bizarre and abusive behavior towards [other] women.”
Parker — real name Kellie-Jay Keen Minshull — told PinkNews that she didn’t know about any of this, saying that a cursory examination of JF’s YouTube channel uncovered “nothing [that] stood out as … unusual or problematic.”
Perhaps, but if she had bothered to Google his name, she would have found in the top results a RationalWiki profile detailing his toxic views and behavior, as well as the Daily Beast article quoted above, which appeared under the title “Alt-Right YouTuber Accused of Luring Autistic Teen in Pregnancy Plot.”
While she says she abhors white supremacy, she also told PinkNews that
I make it my business to avoid researching or policing the entire spectrum of someone’s views, I think the mutilation of healthy children’s bodies is too important, and so it’s not usual for me to do an FBI style background check. …
These days so many people are called Nazis and far right that the prophetic warning that we will no longer recognise the real ones is beginning to come true.
It’s really not that hard to tecognize that JF is one of “the real ones.”
Even after JF’s full odiousness was exposed, PinkNews goes on to report, many of Parker’s fans on Mumsnet — a British site aimed at mothers that has been taken over by transphobic ideologues — defended the interview.
“‘Far-right’ always gets thrown around as an insult,” one Mumsnet user said. “Where are the left on this issue? Throwing women and children under the bus is where.”
“If there’s anyone who can confidently debate with anti-feminist right wingers it’s Posie. It’s a really brave and interesting way to go,” one Mumsnet user wrote.
“Posie is bringing the truth about genderism to a wider audience,” another said, adding that “even if it might be an audience of people we don’t particularly like – presumably they still have the right to protect their kids.”
Given his alleged past behavior, one would think these commenters would be more worried about the possible danger that Jean-Francois Gariepy poses to their children.
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I take a tiny measure of pride that I complained and got at least a post (if not an entire account) removed from Tumblr for TERFy badness just last week. Watching how vile these people get pcompletey gives the game away; they don’t just refuse to accept the identity of people but actively want to hurt and abuse trans folk.
@Naglfar
AFAIK, Innuendo Studios is a one person operation, but I could be wrong. He’s definitely more forgiving, on that I agree. If anything, I think Natalie needs to come to terms with the fact that she’s not some bit player on YouTube, she’s a major figure and that brings a truckload of responsibility that she may not be ready to handle just yet. Platforming some enbie voices on her channel would certainly go a long way to smoothing things out.
Thank you for the clarification re Parker Posey! I know all faves are problematic but that would’ve been a shame.
If you pal around with nazi’s, you’re a nazi. If you pal around with truscum, you’re fucking truscum and can fuck right off. Especially if you have a huge platform that can cause a shit ton of damage to others.
@Katamount
I think the NB community is kind of done with her after each of these incidents. She’d have a hard time finding someone who is openly non-binary and willing to work with her after all this. At least, this NB wouldn’t.
The amount of Transphobia comming out of the woodwork is honestly very disheartening and exhausting at this point. I guess there is truth to the old saying; there is no rest for the wicked.
On another note: I want to extend my apologies to everyone for the post I made on October 15, especially to @Cyborgette and @Beyond Ocean; as my understandings on the subjects discussed in that comment threat, was inadvertently enabling messed up shit and on further reflection was information that I was presented that was likely presented to me as misinformation or at least not the whole story and I feel like a major dingus. That being said it doesn’t absolve me of what I posted and I apologize for it and will self correct effective immediately.
‘”a developmentally disabled Hispanic teenager’ whom counselors declared had ‘the social and mental maturity of a 10- or 11-year-old child.”’
In other words, “a developmentally disabled Hispanic/Latinx teenager with the social and mental maturity of a teenager who is developmentally disabled to a comparable extent/in comparable areas.”
Disabled people really don’t need to be infantilized in order to convey how bad it is to abuse us. And that’s what “mental age” and similar phrasing does.
Sincerely,
Another developmentally disabled person
(And re: the Contrapoints thing, to be honest, she’s said and done exorsexist/anti-nonbinary stuff before, and the fact that she’s still on that bullshit is really telling.
And it wasn’t just the Buck Angel thing, it was also that she decided to vent on Twitter basically about how exhausting she finds it when people in leftist spaces go around and give their pronouns, and how the increased visibility of nonbinary people makes it harder for her to pass as a cis woman.
Look, if she wants to vent about that, fine, but she should consider adjusting her Twitter settings, or else using a less public forum for it, or else she might get some pushback for essentially blaming side effects of society’s cisnormativity and transmisogyny on another subset of the trans community, instead of on…the people who further cisnormative patterns in society?
She didn’t deserve to get piled onto, because basically nobody does (like, if everyone piled onto Richard Spencer until he deleted his twitter, I’d be okay with that).
But Contrapoints doesn’t care about nonbinary people, she’s made that very clear in both past and recent rhetoric, and it’s shitty. I’m tired of enbies getting thrown under the bus by the rest of the LGBT+ community (or so it feels like), if not leftists in general, for what basically amounts to respectability politics. We’re not an acceptable sacrifice for LGBT+ solidarity or leftist solidarity.)
@MK
I recall we discussed that a bit in this thread. I was rather annoyed then as well.
On some level I think this is a marketing strategy. Drum up drama and she gets more views. She wants a public forum so people see it.
As someone who is uncertain of my gender and I presently identify as non-binary, I feel the same way as you. I’m not publicly out because of the bias against non-binary people, and ContraPoints could be using her platform to make things better. She once identified as genderqueer, you’d think she’d have some level of support for people who don’t fit a binary. Instead, she’s actively promoting harmful ideologues, mocking NB people, and acting like she’s changed but not actually fixing the problem.
I’ve been thinking about the latest Contrapoints controversy for the last few days and still haven’t come to a solid conclusion on it, but I think I need to say something.
Up-front disclaimer: I am a mostly-closeted agender person, so I guess in a sense I’m nonbinary? But this isn’t an axis on which I consider myself marginalised, because I pass for cis male and therefore benefit from all the associated privilege. For that reason among others I don’t feel comfortable identifying as trans, but I’m fairly certain I’m not cis. (If I’ve described myself as cis or male here before, it’s because realising I’m agender has been a long process, and that is how society gendered me.)
I have felt increasingly uncomfortable with Natalie’s videos of late (I have intense anxiety about watching them, and find them exhausting to get through), and it took reflecting on this incident to make me realise why, even if it’s not directly connected. The short version is that a lot in the videos is performed to the cishet male gaze, and seems to rely on that causing the implied cishet male viewer some level of discomfort (and titillation) to drive home the arguments. I don’t like saying this, because I’ve learned a lot from her and think she does a good job making important concepts accessible to people who wouldn’t otherwise see them, but the impression I’ve been getting in a lot of segments (but not all!) is that the priority is the “look how daring and shocking I’m being” aesthetic rather than the actual message. I think I like a lot of what her videos actually advocate, and the production value and writing is very well-done and clever, but on balance I find it very hard to trust her, and a lot of things just feel “off” to me.
If shock value actually is the priority, then this latest incident doesn’t seem nearly so surprising. Disappointing, yes, but not shocking. (I saw someone on Twitter say something to the extent of “Natalie’s always been an edgelord, she just worked out what she could get away with being edgelordy about on the left” and… honestly, I can see it.) Although in fairness, in counter to this, he wasn’t prominent in the video and his name flashes up very briefly in the credits, so I’d be surprised if she wanted him to be the focus here (and I didn’t really find the rest of the video problematic); I can’t speak to intent, but it’s weird either way.
I didn’t know anything about Buck Angel prior to this incident. Now I do, and I’m appalled and disgusted. But there’s another wrinkle: normally when I see these Leftist youtubers having others do voiceover clips in their videos, it’s other Leftist youtubers from their circle, friends of theirs, etc. I might be wrong, but I imagined this was because these are people it’s convenient to work with or make this sort of request of (and a lot of the time I recognise the voices because they have shared audiences). Buck Angel very much isn’t that, or at least not obviously so; the implication is either (1) Natalie actually does work closely with him in that way to the point this wasn’t an unusual request, which is troubling and impugns her credibility, or (2) she wanted him specifically and went out of her way to get him, which is similarly disturbing. Neither of those reflects well on her judgment, and as ultimately that’s what’s in question here, I think the controversy is warranted. Does this make her as bad as him? No, I think obviously not. It’s wrong to make her out to be the worst person who ever lived over this, but I do think it’s true she at best made a mistake and I hope she reflects on it.
What also troubles me is the greater Leftist youtube community closing ranks around her, and framing the criticism (much of which I think is valid) as a hate mob and harassment. It is also troubling because one of the many offences committed by Buck Angel is cosying up to transphobes and perfoming “one of the good ones”, and when I say transphobes that includes the very person to whom the Donkey Kong stream was a response. It’s not a good look, and it makes that entire event (which was amazing and uplifting at the time) look a lot more opportunistic. I feel like I’m being gaslit by every last one of them.
In particular, Lindsay Ellis apparently decided to go with something that seems to paraphrase to “don’t judge a person based on the kind of content they create, you don’t know Natalie and I do”, which, um, what else the fuck is media criticism? Media has messages, and people create that media to convey them. As well as, as I said, implying that most of the criticism is harassment and linking it to bad-faith criticism and harassment they’ve previously experienced. What, I cannot stress enough, the fuck? The issue here isn’t necessarily what Natalie personally believes, but the views advocated by her work product, which by uncritically including a known transmedicalist/person who associates with transphobes, implicitly approves of such person.
I felt a bit better after seeing this response from Hbomberguy:
https://twitter.com/Hbomberguy/status/1185932084172541953
In addition to the (nuanced, complicated) take from Ian Danskin (Innuendo Studios); someone linked the first half here but I do think the second half is important:
https://curiouscat.me/InnuendoStudios/post/1004791830
So it seems like there is some genuine wrestling with what this means going forward, and the entire community isn’t wholly comfortable with it, which is something I guess. I think the most important takeaway here might be that there’s a responsibility for people who reach a certain level of popularity or prominence to be able to take criticism. We don’t want people to be afraid of making mistakes, but the knee-jerk defensiveness and wagon-circling is a problem; that’s exactly how you end up with toxic right-wing communities like the ones we’re supposed to be trying to fight. For fuck’s sake, that’s what the outcry againt Anita Sarkeesian was: “how dare you criticise our darlings! Criticism is an attack, criticism is against free speech!”. Seeing fans of Contrapoints using that same kind of rhetoric is very disturbing.
Do I think any of this is irredeemable? Not necessarily, but I do think there’s a lot of learning that needs to happen and might not, and I think reflexively making excuses is at best a mistake. Am I going to trust Natalie (and much of the rest of Breadtube) as much going forward? Not really, no. I don’t really know what the overall message of what I’m saying is, as I’m still trying to work it out. Calling for nuance in every scenario (“everything is grey!”) is just as toxic as making things obviously black and white, so I don’t want to be doing that either.
But at very least, I don’t blame anyone who’s done with her and wants to ignore her going forward; the problem is that she has a big enough fanbase and loud enough platform that she’s going to be hard to ignore…
@mcbender
Same! I thought I was the only one to have this problem, so it makes me feel better to know someone else feels the same way. I found the video on Blanchard’s typology (tearing it to shreds) to be relatively informative, but other than that her videos are just tedious and anxiety-provoking for me.
I was vaguely aware of him (I knew he was a trans male porn star and friends with Dan Savage (who is probably also truscum, in addition to his general transphobia and misogyny)) but was unaware of his reprehensible views until the incident.
I’m guessing it’s the latter. Either way, it doesn’t look good on her.
This is part of why I’m not really involved with politics on youtube. I try to avoid YT as much as possible for other reasons, but part of it is how communities become hypocritical quickly.
This is yet another example of hypocrisy, and more reasons for me not to watch either of them. If you don’t judge a person you haven’t met based on what they create, that doesn’t give you much to judge based on.
I’m not trusting Natalie and her friends either. The whole Breadtube scene is a bit of a circlejerk anyway.
You’re right. One of the factors exacerbating this is that she has an army of close to 1M stans who attack anyone critical of her (and have somewhat of a semi-ironic cult dynamic). I’ll do my best to ignore her, but it is hard.