Defending Dave Chappelle
As the father of a trans child I still support Dave in his right to question ideas others firmly hold ...
Spoiler alert / trigger warning: at the end of the day I am always going to side with free speech, even speech that some will find abhorrent. The freedom to express ideas is the engine that fuels science and, eliminating that is, in my considered opinion, the surest way to theocratic or authoritarian rule over humanity.
Unless you've been offline and not paying attention of late, you are probably aware that Dave Chappelle has been under fire from the transgender community. Since the release on Netflix earlier this month of “The Closer,” in which he declared himself to be a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist” (TERF), many in the community are up in arms—including some trans folks and their allies at Netflix.
They canceled JK Rowling — my God. Effectually, she said gender was fact, the trans community got mad as s–t, they started calling her a TERF … I’m Team TERF.
-Dave Chappelle in “The Closer”
Initially, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos defended Chappelle. However, Ted seemed to have forgotten about the perils of upsetting “the elect” and the impact on one’s continued employment. As Netflix employees staged a walkout last week, Sarandos quickly realized his error. Shortly after, Sarandos said he “screwed up” handling his workers’ complaints.
So, what’s going on here? Why is the trans community so pissed? Lastly, should they be? What’s going on?
What’s going on? Well, Dave is bucking a new cultural norm. Specifically, Dave is making a claim, one that was until recently considered pretty mainstream, that aspects of gender are indeed tied to sex (biology). This is upsetting because some in the trans community feel that this position is against science.
However, before we address the science with respect to gender, we need to acknowledge the very real issues that trans people face. Any way you look at it, trans people are among the most vulnerable population in our society:
Trans people experience intimate partner violence at a rate of almost 54 percent.
50 percent of trans people will experience sexual assault or abuse in their lifetimes. This number is even higher for Black trans people.
The rate of trans people who experience homelessness at least once in their lives is 30 percent.
Trans people of color are six times more likely to experience police brutality than white cisgender people.
Eight percent of trans people are kicked out of their homes after coming out as trans—and if that wasn't bad enough, 10 percent of trans people experience violence from a family member after coming out.
More than 66 percent of trans teens experienced major symptoms of depression within the two weeks prior to a survey, and more than 50 percent of trans teens seriously considered suicide in the last year.
In 2015, 30 percent of trans people reported experiencing workplace harassment, including sexual assault, physical harassment, or being fired for their gender expression.
This violence towards transgendered people is unacceptable. I have a trans daughter. I am sad to report that I worry a little less that she will be victimized by a romantic partner because she is also a lesbian and most of the violence against trans individuals is perpetrated by men.
I believe that every human has a right to pursue personal happiness. Unlike some, I happen to think trans is just a part of who a person is, it is how they happen to be wired. It makes sense to me that someone who feels trapped in the wrong body should have the freedom to set things right and have that change recognized by both society and by our legal institutions..
Now to the sticky wicket …
Asking people to accept an ideology is, and should be, much more difficult than accepting a person for who they are. What is this ideology I speak of and, how is it distinct from an actual trans person? Good questions.
The ideological part being advanced by a good number of what can best be described as “trans-activists” has to do with the demand that we abandon any and all distinctions between sex and gender. Essentially, Dave is in so much trouble because he is refusing to kowtow to this demand. He’s doubling down on his right to hold an opinion based on knowledge. For those opposing him, I suspect they might not really be listening to what he is saying.
In this latest special, Dave went out of his way to set up his critics. Chappelle declared his support for Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who has been condemned for comments deemed anti-trans. Knowing full well that her comments have led some people to call her a TERF, Dave is saying that if Rowling is a TERF, then he is proudly (also) on “Team TERF.”
So we’re clear, these are the comments that got Rowling into so much trouble:
What hit the media from his show as a result was:
In the show, Mr. Chappelle comments mockingly on transgender people and aligns himself with the author J.K. Rowling as “Team TERF,” an acronym for trans-exclusionary radical feminist, a term used for a group of people who argue that a transgender woman’s biological sex determines her gender and can’t be changed.
-NY Times
Aside: there is a raging debate in Academia about the status of the term TERF and whether it should be used in civilized discussions at all .
My sense is that what Dave is really saying is that he rejecting the claim, as Rowling did, that there are NO aspects of gender that are influenced by biology. The fact that there are some who wish to make the claim that that gender is a completely social construct doesn’t make Dave, Rowling, or even myself anti-trans or transphobic people worthy of defenestration via the Twitter Mob. This position is different than the prevailing sentiment held by many in the trans-activist community. In many respects, Dave has decided, much like John McWhorter, that reality must be defended and he is willing to do it using the vehicle available to him—his comedy.
A critique that is commonly leveled against Dave, as was done recently by Vox’s Internet Culture Reporter Aja Romano, is:
His comedy, which involves continually insisting, against science, that gender is always tied to biology, isn’t just reactionary semantics. It’s dangerous rhetoric that’s been shown in study after study can directly impact the levels of anti-trans violence and societal prejudice that trans people already face daily.
There are two key problems with this attack. It makes a statement: “gender isn’t always tied to biology” and then it demands that no person be allowed to challenge that assertion. It attempts to portray the statement as beyond reproach because it has been determined to be “fact” by science. It suggests that anyone who challenges this claim is directly contributing to harming trans individuals because such claims promote prejudice and violence.
I think we all understand that in science, there is no final say. While most people don’t stop and take the time to appreciate how science works, it is fair to say that science as a giant error checking process. We don't so much know what is true as we know what hasn't yet been proven false. Human knowledge therefore is constituted of ideas which have been broadly subjected to error checking and have managed to stay intact. It doesn't mean new data won't emerge in the future to partially (or fully) require clarification. An easily accessible example would be Newtonian physics vs. special relativity vs. quantum mechanics.
So, what Dave Chappelle's critics are demanding, binding acceptance once and for all of their assertion that gender isn’t always tied to biology, is a very dangerous principle. They are seeking the right to not be hurt by the words of others. This principle threatens not only civil liberties, but as you can see from how science works, it threatens actual inquiry. That is to say, it threatens science itself.
Early in his 1993 book Kindly Inquisitors, Jonathan Rauch lays out five formulations of decision making principles (as he says, "not the only principles by any means, but the most important contenders right now") we might leverage to sort our true beliefs from false ones:
The Fundamentalist Principle: Those who know the truth should decide who is right.
The Simple Egalitarian Principle: All sincere persons’ beliefs have equal claims to respect.
The Radical Egalitarian Principle: Like the simple egalitarian principle, but the beliefs of persons in historically oppressed classes or groups get special consideration.
The Humanitarian Principle: Any of the above, but with the condition that the first priority be to cause no hurt.
The Liberal Principle: Checking of each by each through public criticism is the only legitimate way to decide who is right.
I happen to feel humanity tends to do best with number five, “The Liberal Principle.” What that means though, is that people’s feelings will get hurt. Millions and millions of ideas will be generated and only a few will survive the error checking process. The error checking process is not necessarily friendly or kind. Those ideas that do survive live intact under a Sword of Damocles, only one additional data point away from refutation, modification, or outright dismissal.
The idea that gender isn’t always tied to biology is, depending on your definitions, something that can feel true. Certainly when it comes to gender and sex, the steps taken by my daughter seem to have resolved whatever inner conflict existed between implementation (genitalia) and interface (feelings) and resulted in much happiness. I am generally not one to stand in the way of another’s pursuit of happiness.
With that in mind, the statement gender isn’t always tied to biology is imprecise enough to land in the partially false category. I don’t say this in some attempt to minimize the trans community. I say this in an attempt to bring us back to a reality based discussions. When we start by trying to ensure our statements are as accurate as possible we tend to move away from ideology and work our way closer to knowledge.
Reality: It does appear that Sex has an impact on Gender
A 2017 study entitled “Sex differences in children's toy preferences: A systematic review, meta-regression, and meta-analysis” reports that "gender differences in toy choice exist and appear to be the product of both innate and social forces." Further, "despite methodological variation in the choice and number of toys offered, context of testing, and age of child, the consistency in finding sex differences in children's preferences for toys typed to their own gender indicates the strength of this phenomenon and the likelihood that has a biological origin.".
In the meta-analysis section, the researchers reviewed 16 studies on the subject that collectively included some 1,600 children. They found that both biology and society affect boys’ and girls’ toy choices. The researchers found a huge effect size across geographical regions (1.03 for boys playing with boys’ toys more than girls, and 0.9 for girls playing with girls toys more than boys; in measuring Cohen’s d, anything above 0.8 is considered “large”).
According to Brenda Todd, one of the study co-authors, “The size of sex differences in children’s preferences for male-typed and female-typed toys did not appear to be smaller in studies conducted in more egalitarian countries.” The research shows that in countries rating extremely low on the Gender Inequality Index, such as Sweden, had similar differences in toy preferences to countries with far greater gender inequality, such as Hungary and the United States. In other words, contrary to the popular progressive belief as stated above, gender certainly has some socially constructed aspects, but you can't get completely away from the fact that it also has biological constructs.
So, how does someone who supports trans people, advocates for trans rights, and has supported his daughter through gender affirming surgery, make sense of such a claim that sex has no bearing on gender? Well, for starters, I simply state what I know hasn’t yet been falsified while remaining open to new information. Like Chappelle and Rowling, I’m not forced to accept an idea in which I think there might be error. What I do, and what I have always done, is accept and love my daughter for who she is.
In short, resist the ideological mess and focus on the person you love.
At the end of the day, Dave Chappelle is a pretty funny guy with some keen insights into the absurdity of the human condition. Not everyone will be able to laugh at themselves. And, the fact remains, not everything Dave says is funny but that is also not the point. The point is we must allow people to say things even when we don’t like them, lest the tables be turned on us one day …
P.S. What surprises me most about Dave's “The Closer” was the lack of outrage in the Jewish Community and supporters of Israel. His jokes were biting and on point there, and I was expecting more uproar from my thinner skinned members of the tribe …