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How to Argue Transphobically That You’re Not Transphobic
Pamela Paul’s most recent NYT op-eds
When Pamela Paul, former editor of The New York Times Book Review, last year began her new gig as an opinion writer for the same newspaper, she immediately dedicated herself to transphobia. Classic nonsense: She says the existence of trans people means no one will be allowed to say “woman” (my breakdown, 12-min read) or “gay” (my breakdown, 15-min read), and people wouldn’t be trans if they had just listened to better children’s songs (my breakdown, 9-min read).
In the last three weeks, she’s penned another four op-eds. You may have heard people complaining about them. Here’s why readers are upset.
Op-ed #1 of 4 — Jan. 26, 2023
“The Long Shadow of ‘American Dirt’” (unpaywalled)
Paul discusses, in retrospect, the January 2020 launch of Jeanine Cummins’s novel American Dirt, published by Flatiron Books in a “seven-figure deal for its author,” which had been selected for Oprah’s Book Club and was eventually “translated into 37 languages.” Controversy immediately surrounded the book, and the book tour was canceled.
Paul says there were “threats of violence against both author and booksellers.” Everyone agrees violence is bad; anyway, that’s not the flashpoint of her op-ed. She’s arguing, rather, about what she characterizes as the current tendency of “self-censorship” following “a blistering online campaign…over who gets to write what,” which in this case supposedly led to “the publishing world [having] lost its confidence and ceded moral authority to the worst impulses of its detractors.”
She uses the op-ed to advertise that “Bernard Schweizer … is founding a small publishing company, Heresy Press, with his wife, Liang.” The press seems not to have any publications yet. On its website, it says it will never hire sensitivity readers. Its mission statement begins with a quote from — surprise — Pamela Paul. Another inspirational quote is from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Its advisory board is Meghan Daum, Christopher M. Finan, Rebecca N. Goldstein, Jonathan Haidt, David Javerbaum, Randall L. Kennedy, John McWhorter, James Morrow, Joyce Carol Oates, Lou Perez, Steven Pinker…
