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Katha Pollitt vs. transgender people

Katha Pollitt is an American writer and anti-transgender activist. Pollitt writes the column “Subject to Debate” for The Nation.

Pollitt ran a trans-exclusionary journalism listserv and criticized those who felt Jesse Singal should be removed from the list.

Pollitt was one of the signers of the 2020 Harper’s Letter, signed by a disproportionate number of anti-trans activists,

Background

Katha Pollitt was born on October 14, 1949 in Brooklyn Heights, New York. Pollitt earned a bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College in 1972 and a master’s degree from Columbia University in 1975.

In 1987, Pollitt married Randy Cohen, author of the New York Times Magazine column “The Ethicist.” They had one child and later divorced. In 2006, Pollitt married political theorist Steven Lukes.

Anti-trans activism

Pollitt’s sympathies lie with the “gender critical” movement of second-wave feminism.

Pollitt subscribes to the “female erasure” belief which claims that inclusive and value-neutral language about biology and reproduction is “erasing” women. In a 2015 piece about the shift to inclusive language in the abortion rights movement, Pollitt argued, “Once you start talking about “people,” not “women,” you lose what abortion means historically, symbolically and socially.” Pollitt added:

I’m going to argue here that removing “women” from the language of abortion is a mistake. We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people. But we can do that without rendering invisible half of humanity and 99.999 percent of those who get pregnant. 

Here, Pollitt repeats the anti-trans data artifact promoted by Kenneth Zucker and others that claimed only 1 in 100,000 people are trans men. There are more than 1,000 times more transmasculine people than that deliberate undercount.

Also in 2015, Pollitt expressed concern about anti-trans activists like Germaine Greer and Julie Bindel being disinvited from college speaking engagements:

Why can’t feminists, like other people, be valued for what they get right—for the questions they raise and the productive lines of thought they open up—rather than declared personae non gratae for what they get wrong? It’s hard to find an intellectually curious, energetic writer or scholar or activist or human being who hasn’t said or written something very, very mistaken. But you can still learn from them—if only how better to argue against them. And if that’s too upsetting, you can always stay home.

Trans-exclusionary journalism listserv

Starting around 2010, Pollitt ran a listserv for prominent journalists and academics (nicknamed c-list) that was deliberately trans-exclusive. It was described as an “off-the-record discussion forum for left-of-center journalists, authors, academics and wonks.”

Following the publication of When a Child Says She’s Trans by listserv member Jesse Singal in The Atlantic, journalist Harron Walker was provided listserv messages and reported on how these prominent journalists discussed trans topics in private.

There are a number of threads about trans stuff, and they read like a greatest hits of the past decade of trans-related cultural anxieties: whether Chelsea Manning would pose a threat in a women’s prison; Janet Mock’s contentious 2014 interview with Piers Morgan and the “Twitter mob” she inspired; Elinor Burkett’s New York Times piece about Caitlyn Jenner and womanhood; comparisons between Caitlyn Jenner and Rachel Dolezal; erasure of the word “vagina”; saying “pregnant people” vs. “pregnant women”; and a number of Jesse Singal’s articles over the past few years.

None of these discussions brought trans voices to the table because the group has never had any out trans members, at least as far as I can tell. “I really wish we had some trans people on this list, it’s a real void we have,” posted an award-winning investigative journalist in a thread about Singal temporarily leaving Twitter last December. “I’m not interested in sharing this list or any other space with someone who is going to insist on nullifying and erasing my existence and experience as female,” a prominent futurist in progressive news media wrote back. The exchange demonstrates two different means of excluding trans people from the discussion: passive exclusion (empty calls for inclusion that don’t lead to action) and active exclusion (we must keep them out). At the time of this exchange, the listserv had existed for nearly a decade. If the group’s members really wanted to bring trans people to the table, they could have done so at any point. The fact that they never did suggests that the group’s members—400 prominent, influential figures in academia, media, and publishing—would rather keep trans people at a safe, anthropological remove where they can talk about trans people without speaking to trans people directly. A less generous reading of this exclusion would say that they don’t see us as potential intellectual equals and, thus, don’t read our work.

On January 13, 2019, Pollitt accidentally copied journalist David M. Perry on an email defending Jesse Singal’s inclusion on the list and Parker Molloy’s exclusion. On January 16, 2019. Perry posted on Twitter: “So Katha Pollit accidentally included me on an email advocating for continuing to exclude major trans writers from her journalism listserv. Her bigotry against transwomen is not a surprise. The issue, though, is one of ingroups. She sent it to MAJOR journalists.” Perry included screenshots:

Katha Pollitt
Sun, Jan 13, 11:14 AM (3 days ago)
to Micah, Frances, Hilary, Jamelle, Citizen, New, Luke, me

David Perry (@David_Perry), who writes for Pacific Standard, is ferociously attacking Jesse for his piece in The Atlantic about trans kids. (IIRC Jesse suggested that sometimes kids are pushed into hormones and surgery too quickly.) Perry calls on everyone to ostracise him and alludes to c-list.

  • @Lollardfish 19h 19 hours ago David M. Perry Retweeted Talia Lavin:
    • “Some of you are also just in super chic journalism Slack and email lists with this transphobic motherfucker. I judge you by the company you choose to keep. Parker Molloy complains that she hasn’t been invited into c-list because she is trans:”
  • @ParkerMolloy 18h 18 hours ago Replying to @Lollardfish
    • “People keep insisting that those mailing lists and Slack channels aren’t anti-trans and that they plan on inviting me into them, and yet…”
  • @ParkerMolloy 18h 18 hours ago Replying to @Lollardfish
    • “Yeah. I gave up messaging @JoshuaHol and @ryangrim about it (they didn’t run anything, but were a couple of the people I knew were in there that kept telling me that I’d be invited in). It just became clear that these groups wouldn’t ever invite me in.”

There’s much more on Twitter. I feel more strongly than ever that Parker does not belong on c-list. The original objection was that she wouldn’t keep list confidence, which seems ever more likely. And here she is calling for Jesse to be ousted from a list she doesn’t even belong to!

I also know I don’t need to say this but I will anyway that the idea of ousting Jesse from the list is insane.

Perry replied: “Why are you emailing me Katha?” Pollitt replied: “Oh dear, I didn’t mean to do that. I don’t know how your email got in that private list, and I hope you will just delete it.”

Criticism of Judith Butler

In a 2024 Atlantic piece about Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler, Pollitt wrote:

Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope. Unfortunately for Butler, many of the major figures in the movement are liberals and leftists, many are lesbians, and many, such as Joan Smith and Julie Bindel, have a long history of fighting misogyny and male violence.

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want. Butler seems to suggest that being trans is being your authentic self, but what is authenticity? In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

Anti-trans lawyer Alan Sokal approvingly cited “the devastating reviews of this book by Alex Byrne, Katha Pollitt, Umut Ozkırımlı, Abigail Favale and James Kirchick.”

References

Berlatsky, Noah (March 10, 2023). We Don’t Value Trans Voices — Even On Trans Issues. Mainstream media still doesn’t center trans voices on trans issues. Everything Is Horrible https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/we-dont-value-trans-voices-even-on

Walker, Harron (June 27, 2018). Private Messages Reveal the Cis Journalist Groupthink Behind Trans Media Narratives. Jezebel https://www.jezebel.com/private-messages-reveal-the-cis-journalist-groupthink-b-1827041764

Currah, Paisley (March 13, 2015). Disappearing Women. https://www.paisleycurrah.com/2015/03/13/disappearing-women

Selected writing by Pollitt

Pollitt, Katha (March 25, 2024). Not Everything Is About Gender: In a new book, Judith Butler tries to indict gender-critical feminists. The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2024/03/judith-butler-whos-afraid-of-gender/677874/

Pollitt, Katha (November 5, 2015). Feminism Needs More Thinkers Who Aren’t Right 100 Percent of the Time: Feminists like Germaine Greer should be valued for what they get right, rather than banned for what they get wrong. The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/feminism-needs-more-thinkers-who-arent-right-100-percent-of-the-time/

Pollitt, Katha (March 13, 2015). Who has abortions? We can, and should, support trans men and other gender-non-conforming people without erasing women from the fight for reproductive rights. The Nation https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/who-has-abortions/ original url https://www.thenation.com/article/who-has-abortions

Books

  • Pollitt, Katha (2014). Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights, Picador, ISBN 9780312620547
  • Pollitt, Katha (2009). The Mind-Body Problem: Poems. Random House, ISBN 1400063337
  • Pollitt, Katha (2007). Learning to Drive: And Other Life Stories. Random House, ISBN 1400063329
  • Pollitt, Katha (2006). Virginity or Death!: And Other Social and Political Issues of Our Time. Random House, ISBN 081297638X
  • Pollitt, Katha (2001). Subject to Debate: Sense and Dissents on Women, Politics, and Culture. Modern Library Paperbacks, ISBN 0679783431
  • Pollitt, Katha (1995). Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism. Vintage, ISBN 0679762787
  • Pollitt, Katha (1982). Antarctic Traveller: Poems. Knopf, ISBN 0394748956

Resources

Katha Pollitt (kathapollitt.com) [archive]

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

Blogspot (blogspot.com)

The Nation (thenation.com)

X/Twitter (x.com)