Thomas Chatterton Williams vs. transgender people

Thomas Chatterton Williams is an American writer and cultural critic. Williams was the writer behind the Harper’s letter signed by many key anti-transgender activists. Williams is an advisor to anti-trans group Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism, is a fellow of the anti-trans American Enterprise Institute, and has appeared at an event held by UnHerd.

Background

Thomas Chatterton Williams was born on March 26, 1981 in Newark, New Jersey to Clarence and Kathleen Williams. Williams grew up in Fanwood, New Jersey and graduated from Union Catholic Regional High School. Williams earned a bachelor’s degree from Georgetown University in 2003 and a master’s degree from New York University in 2008.

Williams authored the 2010 book Losing My Cool: How a Father’s Love and 15,000 Books Beat Hip-Hop Culture, a critical look at how Williams claims hip-hop had a negative influence in adolescence. In 2019, Williams released Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race.

In 2019, Williams was named a Fellow at New America. In 2023, Williams was named a visiting Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

Williams and spouse Valentine Faure have two children.

Anti-trans activism

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Andrea Long Chu deftly summarized Williams’ modus operandi as a critic of social justice in 2020:

Later that summer, Harper’s magazine published an open letter warning that the ongoing unrest was weakening liberal norms of tolerance and free thinking in favor of “ideological conformity.” The letter, whose high-profile signatories ranged from Noam Chomsky to J. K. Rowling, ruffled all of the intended feathers, even if its successful brandishing of elite influence in the pages of a prestigious magazine deflated its own claims of chilled speech. The open letter was spearheaded by the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, author of a memoir about “unlearning race” who liked to position himself as a centrist foil to Ta-Nehisi Coates, that bard of Black despair. Indeed, Williams was a Black dissenter in the mold of Albert Murray or Glenn Loury, the sort of anti-woke intellectual it would have been necessary to invent had he never managed to exist. (His first book, Losing My Cool, was about the deleterious effects of “hip-hop culture” on Black youth.) In the coming months, Williams would warn that a multiracial, college-educated social-justice movement had made George Floyd into a vessel for its endless litany of grievances. If Baldwin were alive today, he claimed, he would be forced to admit that the “criminal indifference” of white people 60 years ago (Baldwin’s phrase) has been replaced not by goodwill and human feeling but by the ruinous pursuit of an “ever more ineffable kind of social justice.”

Trans writer Gabrielle Bellot explicitly contextualizes the Harper’s Letter within anti-trans discourse:

The first time I read a thinkpiece in a major newspaper that asked whether or not trans women were really women, I felt like I was caught in a maelstrom. I had only recently come out as trans, a decision that had cost me any realistic chance of returning to the small, religiously conservative island I had grown up on, and the piece felt almost like a personal affront, though it was presented as a necessary inquiry. […] Soon, I became accustomed to such thinkpieces, which never seemed to truly grapple with what it must feel like to be transgender—pieces that failed, like simplistic novels, to put oneself in the shoes of someone wholly different. […] I found myself wishing that some of these anti-trans screeds, which were often defended as simply people “asking questions,” would take the time to truly imagine what it might be like to be someone so different from themselves, rather than treating people like me as clinical subjects to be unempathetically, dehumanizingly dissected in the name of free speech.

I find myself wondering similar things in the wake of the publication of a recent letter in Harper’s. The letter, which was signed by a variety of writers and critics that included Margaret Atwood, Jesse Singal, and JK Rowling, argues that we should be as free in our imaginations as we are in our discourse. However, the letter proclaims in despair, our minds and mouths alike are being shut, not by political conservatives, but by a cabal of the left that is tactically indistinguishable from the right.

Perhaps predictably, the letter never deigns to mentions queer people; indeed, a number of signatories on the letter have a history of specifically writing things that question, fearmonger about, or outright deny the authenticity of transgender people’s lives, from JK Rowling to Katie Herzog. This inescapably makes the letter feel peculiarly dissonant, at once advocating for intellectual freedom and yet being signed by people for whom that seemingly means the freedom to not simply question my right to exist, but to have such views published and fêted. […] Trans people are one of the implicit bêtes noires of the letter, for we are one of the very subjects some of the signatories would like the freedom to “explore” in debasing terms.

References

Smith Mychal Denzel (August 6, 2025). Thomas Chatterton Williams is impossible to disagree with. That’s not a good thing. Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2025/08/06/thomas-chatterton-williams-summer-our-discontent-review/

Chu, Andrea Long (August 5, 2025). Zero Tolerance: Five years after George Floyd, many liberals blame “wokeness” for stifling open debate. So why can’t they handle being disagreed with? Vulture https://www.vulture.com/article/post-george-floyd-protests-thomas-chatterton-williams-summer-of-our-discontent.html

Driver, Justin (August 3, 2025). How the George Floyd Protests Changed America, for Better and Worse. New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/03/books/review/summer-of-our-discontent-thomas-chatterton-williams.html

Anil, Pratinav (July 22, 2025). Summer of Our Discontent by Thomas Chatterton Williams review – the liberal who hates leftists. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/jul/22/summer-of-our-discontent-by-thomas-chatterton-williams-reivew-a-muddled-take-on-us-race-politics-and-class

Kelly, Jemima (October 1, 2021). Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘I never thought ideas were about signalling allegiance.’ Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/1bf6a540-0a7c-427f-9eea-b756acb81813

Spayeth, Ryu (July 29, 2020). Between Thomas Chatterton Williams and Me: On race, fatherhood, and the many uses of memoir. New Republic https://newrepublic.com/article/158644/thomas-chatterton-williams-identity-politics-debate

Chotiner, Isaac (July 22, 2020). Thomas Chatterton Williams on Race, Identity, and “Cancel Culture.” The New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/thomas-chatterton-williams-on-race-identity-and-cancel-culture

Topping, Alexandra (July 12, 2020). Harper’s free speech letter has ‘moved the needle’, says organiser. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2020/jul/12/harpers-free-speech-letter-moved-needle-organiser-thomas-chatterton-williams

Bellot, Gabrielle (July 8, 2020). Freedom Means Can Rather Than Should: What the Harper’s Open Letter Gets Wrong. Literary Hub https://lithub.com/freedom-means-can-rather-than-should-what-the-harpers-open-letter-gets-wrong/

Bernard, Emily (December 2019). Autobiography of an Ex-Black Man: Thomas Chatterton Williams loses his race. Harper’s https://harpers.org/archive/2019/12/self-portrait-in-black-and-white-thomas-chatterton-williams-review/