Guardian journalist tries to get Margaret Atwood to say transphobic things. It backfires.

The Guardian published an interview with Canadian author Margaret Atwood on Saturday, where she was to talk about her new book, Burning Questions. The journalist, Hadley Freeman, wanted her to promote “gender critical” views instead. That did not end well.

As you will see, Atwood is not in any way against trans people or a supporter of the “gender critical” gospel of the sex binary transphobia:

“It has not been easy to tell where her feelings lie on this issue [on womanhood and trans-exclusionary radical feminists],” Freeman writes. “So I ask about a recent comment of hers, in which she said biological sex is not either/or — “Rejoice in nature’s infinite variety! “

See illustration of bell curve in the photo above.

“Everything in nature is on a bell curve . We have this two-box thinking [about gender] because it’s biblical, so wool over here, linen over there,” she [Atwood) says.

[Freeman:] If biological sex is not binary, how do people know who to make a handmaiden or who is given FGM?

“OK, let me say this again,” she says more sharply. “This is going to take a while to settle down, but XY and XX are not the only chromosomal combinations possible. Look it up, OK? This has been in flux for a very long time and in the Bible, a male wearing female clothes would be — “ and she makes a slicing gesture across her neck. “You want to do that? No.”

Gender-critical people would argue that those are different issues, I say.

“What is a gender-critical person?” she asks

It’s someone who believes that all living creatures are either male or female and that rare chromosomal variations don’t disprove that.

“I’m not going to argue about this. That’s not what my book is about and that’s not what we’re here to discuss,” she says.

You would think the journalist would take the hint, but no:

Freeman refers to one of Atwood’s essays, “Literature and the Environment”, where Atwood writes: “[People] are very ready to tell the writer what a bad person he or she is because he or she has not produced the sort of book or essay the preacher feels he or she ought to have produced.”

Freeman asks Atwood whether this contradicts her criticisms of J.K. Rowling’s essay being anti-trans.

“Open question. We’re not even sure what anti-trans is, and the trans community will take a while to sort this through. It is not true that there are no trans people, so then a lot of questions come into that, and we’re not going to get into those, although they seem to be your obsession of the day.”

[Freeman:] But Margaret, I say, you write so brilliantly about women’s rights. Of course women want to know what you think about this subject, given how much it pertains to women’s rights.

“I’m not informed enough,” she says briskly. “But there doesn’t seem to be much fuss about trans men. Why is that?” (…)

Here Atwood subtly refers to the misogynistic and sexist basis for the gender critical argument, not that Freeman captures that nuance.

A little later, Atwood mentions how dangerous it is for people to make generalisations about one another. The why did she use the sweeping term “terf” on Twitter, Freeman asks.

“I think you’re making too much of this!” she says, sounding thoroughly fed up now. The subject is closed; the interview moves on.

You may wonder why Freeman publishes the embarrassing rebuttals from Atwood in this way. Does she need to prove to her “gender critical” friends that she tried to get Atwood to attack trans people? Or does she think that Atwood’s humility in the face of the complexity of sex and gender undermines the reality of transgender lives. If that is the case, she has not understood what Atwood is saying.

Keep in mind that the Guardian is also the newspaper that in an interview censored the leading feminist philosopher Judith Butler’s criticism of TERFs.

Top photo: marekuliasz

Originally published at https://trans-express.lgbt.