Robert Jensen wrote a book about talking about difficult topics. His publisher wouldn't include the chapter on transgenderism

Oh the irony.

Robert Jensen has worked in feminist movements since 1988. In one of his previous books, The End of Patriarchy, he argues “that a socially just society requires no less than a radical feminist overhaul of the dominant patriarchal structures.” His latest book, It’s Debatable, Talking Authentically About Tricky Topics, included a chapter on transgenderism in which he argues that “trans activists are pursuing a politics that is intellectually incoherent, anti-feminist, and at odds with an ecological worldview,” and that if liberals and leftists really want to oppose patriarchy, they should support radical feminism, the kind that centers the sex-based rights of women. The publisher asked him to drop that chapter because it conflicted with their support of the trans movement, thus perfectly illustrating the need for his book.

Jensen spent a decade working as a journalist before moving to academia at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught undergraduate and graduate courses in the School of Journalism and Media in law, ethics, and politics until he retired in 2018.

Drawing on decades of work around the “pathology of patriarchy,” pornography, and men’s violence, Jensen admits to being puzzled by how the trans movement has become a central feature for progressives who support women’s rights on other issues.

All of these things make him A Person Of Interest. So, while I may be straying from sports in talking with Jensen, his insights are directly relevant to women’s rights as a distinct biological class of human beings who are deserving of spaces, services, and sports based on their sex. Here’s our phone conversation, edited to make me look smarter for length.

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The Female Category: First, tell me about having the chapter entitled Defining Sex/Gender: Beyond Trans Ideology canceled from your book on how to talk authentically about difficult topics. Which is Beyond Irony. (That chapter is available for free on Jensen’s website, and I encourage you to read it, and then buy It’s Debatable.)

Robert Jensen: I’d like to back up a little to explain where that book comes from. I spent 10 years as a journalist, and then was a university professor for 26 years. I was tenured, and so I had guaranteed employment. Because of this protection and because of my background, I tended to write about difficult topics, like the feminist critique of pornography and men’s sexual exploitation of women. I thought folks like me should go toward controversy, not away. Because of what’s these days called cancel culture, it’s more difficult today to talk about tricky topics than five years ago,10 years ago, 20 years ago. In this book, I focused on three topics—racism, the ecological crises, and transgenderism. I shopped the book around to publishers I had worked with before and got a lot of rejections. Some editors didn’t respond at all, some told me the chapter on trans ideology was problematic, and some said they couldn’t figure out how to market it. I was on the verge of self-publishing when a colleague connected me to Interlink, and they signed the book. We went through the copy-editing process and it was all fine, but on a final reading they got back to me and said they really liked the book but couldn’t publish it with the trans chapter included. The publisher said it conflicted with the values of the press, that they were supportive of the trans movement and publishing that chapter would be detrimental to that movement. So, they laid out some options. They would publish the book without that chapter; I could rewrite that chapter so that it didn’t conflict with their values (which I knew would never work out); or I could self-publish. I offered a fourth option, that they publish the book with a note to readers in the book, where the chapter on transgenderism would have been, directing readers to my website where they could read the chapter for free. And, we hope, people will buy the book as well. And that’s what happened.

TFC: Actually, given that there are known instances of academic journals refusing to publish studies because the authors used transwoman, one word, instead of trans woman, two words, which they said signaled that the authors were transphobic, I’m surprised the publisher would have anything to do with you at all.

RJ: I’ve had that reaction to my writing in the past. I’ve been called a transphobe, I’ve been shouted down at talks I’ve given, I’ve had friends cut me out of community groups and refuse to work with me anymore. This all happens routinely to radical feminist critics. Some on the liberal/left reacted by immediately shutting me out, while some people have been willing to engage. In this case, the publisher liked the rest of the book and we had built a relationship, so they were willing to work with me. But a lot of progressive people are afraid of even raising questions about trans ideology. Several years ago, a progressive website published an article of mine on the subject, and within minutes after it was posted online—faster than anyone could have read the entire article—they got a complaint about it. I think the editor was afraid of potential backlash, and he and took it down. Maybe he just didn’t want to endure the complaints that likely would come.

I don’t always know why people make these kinds of choices. Some people are no doubt afraid of any public association—that if they publish my work, they risk being labeled as transphobes. There are people who agree personally but because of their public position, maybe with a nonprofit, worry about drawing the organization into the debate or bringing bad publicity to the organization. I try to be as charitable as possible about why people avoid the issue or shun critics of trans ideology. That said, I think it’s important for those who reject gender-identity theory (another term for the ideology of transgenderism), especially feminists, to speak up to whatever degree we can.

TFC: Recent PWHL draft pick Britta Curl liked a tweet by ICONS about Olympic hockey stars Jocelyn and Monique Lamoureux, all of them simply saying they support women’s sport for women and fairness for girls and women in sport. Curl was crucified by the online community, many of them women. She immediately posted a video apologizing to the LGBTQIA community and the BIPOC community for “hurt,” begging for grace and another chance. Yet you have said trans ideology is anti-feminist, incoherent, and at odds with an ecological worldview, much more critical than merely supporting women’s sports. What is the difference between your experience and Britta Curl’s?

RJ: Yes, I agree that the consequences for speaking out are very different for men and women. In Austin, I was shunned in a lot of left organizing spaces that I had been part of. Lots of friends/comrades stopped talking to me. I got a bit of abuse online, and a few times people tried to shout me down in public talks. But I was a tenured professor and my job was always secure. No one at the university ever asked me to apologize or hide. Women who speak out typically are treated more harshly. Jenny Lindsay has a wonderful book coming this fall from Polity, Hounded: Women, Harms and the Gender Wars, that documents this.

TFC: You write about lots of difficult topics– politics, capitalism, racism. Why is it so hard to have a discussion about transgenderism? It seems hard to agree to disagree–if you’re not all in, you’re a hater or a bigot.

RJ: That’s right—to many, you’re either inclusive and embrace the trans movement or you’re a hater. Often when I explain my position, people will say privately, I’ve been so afraid to even ask a question. In my experience, there has never been a movement like the trans movement that demands people accept claims that are contrary to basic science. For example, we debate whether nuclear power can be safely managed but no supporter of nuclear power pretends that a meltdown would be harmless. People can have different opinions on lots of issues but agree on basic science. But when the trans movement claims sex categories, male and female, are a social construction, they are rejecting the most basic biological realities. How did this happen and become so normal on the left? I think that for many progressive, supporting the trans movement give the appearance of being feminist and anti-patriarchal, even if it isn’t. I’ll say more about that, but I also think that the current ecological crises, and the harsh reality that so many avoid—that 8 billion people can’t continue to consume at the aggregate level we have been—produces a strange political landscape. This is speculation, but I wonder if the fear many people feel about those crises leads people to want to hold onto beliefs that give them a sense of control, even if it is an illusion of control. We may not be able to prevent ecological collapse, but we can grab on tightly to beliefs about ourselves, even if those beliefs aren’t based on any real evidence, which give us a sense of belonging. As I said, that’s just speculation about how people react to overwhelming threats.

TFC: You know, traditional religion is losing ground but many people say the trans movement is the new religion.

RJ: I would not categorize trans ideology as a religion. It’s hard to get through life without embracing some beliefs that are beyond logic or evidence, in the search for meaning. I personally try to minimize the number of extraordinary claims I believe, and the older I get, the more cautious I get about claiming certainty about anything. But it’s certainly true that cultish behavior is part of human history, and I think there is a cultish aspect to the trans movement, the demand that people believe and accept claims, even if they don’t understand what the claim really means. To assert that a trans woman is a woman, and demand that this never be challenged, is a way of saying logic and evidence aren’t important. Assertions like this can be dangerous.

The big question is, how did the trans movement gain such a position, and gain it relatively quickly? I don’t have a good answer for why the trans movement has gone so quickly from a idea on the margins to the center of progressive politics. My hypothesis, and this is more speculation, is that the left defines itself by opposition to systems of oppression—racism, imperialism, capitalism. That should include patriarchy, the term for systems of institutionalized male dominance. But fighting patriarchy is hard. We should remember that patriarchy is probably the oldest form of oppression, going back thousands of years. Patriarchal practices are woven into everyday life and sometimes can be almost invisible. That can make it very hard to challenge patriarchy, especially when asking men to give up power and the right to control women’s sexuality. One of patriarchy’s central tenets is that men have a right to sexual pleasure without concern for the well-being and social status of women. Many men, including men on the left, don’t want to give that up, something I learned working in the radical feminist movement against pornography.

So, leftist resistance to radical feminism is not new, but people on the left realize the need to reject the oppression of patriarchy. Along comes the trans movement, which claims to liberate people from the rigid gender norms of patriarchy. Trans ideology claims to reject biological essentialism, which is generally seen as a bad thing on the left. The trans movement offers progressive men the appearance of opposing the patriarchy. Trans ideology does challenge the idea that all men should be stereotypically masculine but it doesn’t actually challenge patriarchy.

TFC: To me, the trans movement is patriarchy on steroids. It’s the most oppressive thing a man can do—to say I am a woman and I deserve women’s rights. Why can’t many liberal women see that?

RJ: As a man working in feminism, my goal is to speak to other men, and I hesitate to speculate about women’s choices and motivations. That said, I can imagine that some women worry about being seen as “too radical” in feminist politics.

TFC: This is related. Progressives/liberals used to at least give lip service to being for women’s rights. As you write about, now that same group seems to give pornography a pass and actively support trans ideology, even though both things are objectively harmful to women. Did the left never really support women’s rights? Was it just convenient? Or if they did, what changed?

RJ: I wouldn’t make a blanket assertion. People on the left have supported aspects of the feminist movement, such as abortion rights. But the left has never embraced radical feminism, never committed to challenging the sexual-exploitation industries (pornography, prostitution, strip bars, massage parlors). To support the trans movement, men don’t have to give up anything.

Why do progressive women support the trans movement? Again, my main job is to speak to men from a feminist perspective, and I don’t tell women what to think. I have no doubt that many people, women and men, who support the trans movement do so genuinely, perhaps believing it is the best way approach for people experiencing gender dysphoria. That kind of deeply felt commitment leads them to support trans inclusive policies, and it’s not my place to doubt their sincerity. But I can challenge their logic and evidence. For example, I don’t believe males who identify as women should compete against women, because the best evidence shows that men retain, on average, advantages over women even after hormone treatment. Without speculating about why others reject that position, I can argue that it’s important to retain the female character of female athletics.

TFC: I remember feminism of the 1960s and 1970s, in which there was an effort to broaden what it meant to be a woman or a man, that women could have a career and men could enjoy knitting. But a girl who liked sports wasn’t actually a boy.

RJ: Yes, those were the basic tenets of second-wave feminism, and I found those ideas liberating in my life. When I was a boy, I was short, skinny, and effeminate. I certainly didn’t look or act like “a real man.” The feminist perspective helped me understand that I could reject gender norms without rejecting biology. As I say, as often as possible, radical feminism is not a threat to men but a gift, helping us understand the ways patriarchy constrains men. But today, radical feminist critics of trans ideology are dismissed as being TERFs, trans exclusionary radical feminist, a term I reject. Radical feminists’ goal is not exclusion but expansion of understanding; they have for decades offered an alternative to transgenderism’s approach to the problem of patriarchy’s rigid gender norms. I don’t see how transgenderism can be liberating if you’re yoked to pharmaceuticals and the medical industry for the rest of your life. I think it’s very sad that second-wave feminism has been largely abandoned.

TFC: I want to pivot to sports. You define sex as binary and biological. But the International Olympic Committee based their trans inclusion policy on the mantra a trans woman is a woman, and the NCAA medical advisors defined sex as a spectrum that could be changed by altering any number of factors, like hormone level. If major sports organizations are using ideologically based ideas rather than objective science, even redefining foundational scientific truths, to make policy, how can women’s right to sex-based spaces and sports be preserved? In fact, if we can’t agree on basic foundational knowledge, like sex is binary and immutable, how can we exist as a society? [Insert expression of existential angst]

RJ: Sex is binary and immutable; that statement should be self-evident. Accusations of bigotry aimed at people who say such things do give an Alice in Wonderland feel to our world. It’s true, that words mean whatever we decide they mean collectively, but there are biological realities that can’t be changed by language. Saying, for example, that “sex is a spectrum” doesn’t make it so. Human reproduction requires small gamete (sperm) and large gamete (ova), male and female. There are no other options.

TFC: In the example in your book of a trans-identified boy in the girls’ locker room, his subjective feelings that he is a girl are prioritized over the girls’ feelings of discomfort and objective loss of privacy, and over the fact that some of them will likely have lived through sexual harassment or assault. Why is this obviously misogynistic feature of trans ideology embraced by progressives?

RJ: I think, in general, one feature of patriarchy (no matter what the particular configuration of a particular patriarchal political/religious system) is that men’s interests are routinely placed above women’s interests. In general, boys matter more than girls. The imposition of a male teenager, who identifies as a girl, on the girls in a locker room is one expression of that. Most progressives will say they are just being sensitive to the emotional needs of the trans-identified young male without even considering the emotional needs of the girls. There likely are several factors involved in this. First, sidelining the interests of girls and women is not unusual in discussions of political issues. Minimizing the various kinds of threats that men pose to girls and women also is routine. Added to that is the success of the trans movement of framing males who identify as girls and women as the most vulnerable/oppressed people in these situations. Add all that together, and it’s not surprising that journalists rarely include the concerns/comments of girls and women in these stories. But ignoring them is, of course, missing a key element of the story.

TFC: Between the rise of global religious fundamentalism, the rollback of Roe v Wade, and rise of transgenderism, some women say there hasn’t been a worse time to be a woman in their lifetime. Do you agree? Where do you see women’s rights going from here, in sports specifically? 

RJ: I wouldn’t agree. Many things have changed for the better. For example, when I was growing up in the 1960s, marital rape and date rape were not recognized as crimes. Legal remedies for sexual harassment didn’t exist. That’s changed, along with a deepening of awareness of how men’s violence affects women’s lives. Progressive social movements do not go in a straight line—maybe it’s always two steps forward, one step back. There is always a backlash to efforts to liberate us from oppressive social norms, and then we have to fight the backlash. I’m not smart enough to know how the debate over trans ideology will turn out. Still, I am heartened by recent events. When I first wrote about this in 2014, almost no one would engage. But feminists have created more space to debate. More and more people are speaking out. There is a growing feminist movement pushing back against the demands of the trans movement, and that’s a good thing.

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