Why Neil Gaiman Should Put Up or Shut Up About Transgender People

In which I commit Medium suicide

Having recently abandoned Twitter, I’ve been blissfully unaware of whatever world-ending, good vs evil battles have been going on there for a little while, but one came to my attention through an article. You know the kind — 90% lifted tweets with maybe eighty words of original content.

This article concerned the recent kerfuffle between gender-critical women and trans rights activists over what Sir Terry Pratchett would have thought. A lot of people weighed in — notably Sir Terry’s own daughter — but the tweet that caught my attention was that of Sir Terry’s longtime friend, collaborator, and a favourite author of mine, Neil Gaiman.

Mr Gaiman had this to say;

“Terry was wise and Terry was kind. Terry understood that people were complicated, contradictory and, always people, and that people can and do change. As [Terry Pratchett’s daughter] says, he would have had no time for this nonsense.”

Edit: Since this seems to confuse a lot of people who apparently read the exchange but still don’t seem to know what was said, Rhianna’s tweet said; “This is horrifying. My father would most definitely not be a GC if he was still alive.”

The first part of his tweet is entirely unobjectionable. I’ve never seen anyone say a bad thing about Pratchett, and nastiness is notoriously hard to hide when you’re at the top — especially these days. He also very clearly understood the complicated and contradictory nature of people, as shown over and over in his writing.

The bit I take issue with is the last two words of that quote (the tweet was a little longer) — “this nonsense”.

People are Complicated

Let’s set some ground rules. If anything I say contradicts your pro or anti-trans worldview, feel free to let me know why in the comments. I will read it all, but I won’t be engaging. I understand that people on both sides of these arguments have complete conviction in their stances, but there’s a lot of us who aren’t so certain. In any case, the purpose of this post is not to wade into those debates on either side.

Which I realise is often considered worse than picking a side these days.

The issues surrounding transgender people are complicated. If you try to research whether transwomen have an unfair physical advantage in sports, you can find plenty of evidence supporting both sides of the argument. Evidence presented by people with PhDs and littered with citations to papers that are nigh impossible for mere mortals like me to understand.

The concerns over transwomen being in female prisons do indeed seem to be overblown, given the very low number of instances of sexual assault perpetrated by a transwoman on women… but there are instances, and transwomen make up a minuscule percentage of the female prison population.

For someone like me, who does not have an idealogical team to bat for, the solutions to many of the conflicts are far from clear. This brings me to my problem with Gaiman’s dismissive statement.

It’s not nonsense.

I’ve seen many legitimate concerns raised by so-called gender critics. There may be very simple solutions to these concerns, but they invariably get dismissed as being entirely fictional problems invented by transphobes. The problem with this is that I don’t have a problem with transgender people, but I can see they are not fictional problems, which casts doubt over the credibility of people saying… well, saying it’s all “nonsense”.

What’s Gaiman’s Angle?

The question then becomes why is Gaiman, in the same tweet where he points out how Pratchett understood the complex and contradictory nature of humanity, dismissing the real and seemingly valid concerns of a large group of people as “nonsense”?

I’ve thought about this, and I can only come up with three possible reasons;

He Doesn’t Know

If Gaiman flat out didn’t know the issues being raised by gender critics— if he just thinks this is a matter of being “for or against” transgender people, then it would indeed be nonsense. Pratchett would never be “against” transgender people.

Unfortunately, women have been sexually abused by transgender women in female-only spaces. Transgender women have triumphed in female-only sports. When someone raises concerns about this kind of thing, it does nobody any favours to just dismiss it as nonsense.

He Doesn’t Care

I would like to think Gaiman is not your run of the mill celebrity who parrots things for the sake of good publicity. He doesn’t have a track record of doing that, he certainly doesn’t need to pander… but it could explain his statement.

It doesn’t take an expert in culture to see which way the wind is blowing — at least on Twitter. Gaiman was a close friend of Pratchett, is a public figure, and someone who has never been shy about saying things out loud.

Once it became a thing that people were talking about, Gaiman was always going to be asked about Pratchett’s stance on transgender people. He might have said that Pratchett would have supported them but the issues around transgender people can be “complicated, contradictory”, but that might have got him in trouble. And it’s not like Pratchett can contradict anything Gaiman says.

He Knows and Believes

Let’s say that Gaiman is fully aware of all the issues gender critics are raising and he genuinely believes that it is all nonsense (and that Pratchett would feel the same). He has to be smart enough to know that he’s doing more harm than good by being so dismissive.

Look at it like this, say we have a gender critic concerned that the growing trend of locking transwomen criminals up in female prisons will lead to more instances of sexual assault on women. Maybe there is a simple solution. Maybe there’s no solution, but the negatives of not putting transwomen in female prisons outweigh the potential for sexual assault.

Random people on Twitter rarely convince anyone of anything. And, in any case, trans rights activists on Twitter don’t seem interested in convincing people of anything when calling someone a transphobe will do. But, if someone like Gaiman has the answers to this “nonsense” and doesn’t take this opportunity to share them, he’s doing as much harm to transgender people as he is to gender critics because this war doesn’t seem to be going away, and essentially telling a large group of women that they’re being hysterical isn’t going to win them over.

Maybe he has the answers but he’s afraid to voice them. He is, after all, a straight white man who identifies with his birth sex. People aren’t often looking for us to weigh in on issues these days.

But if Gaiman isn’t willing to weigh in on the complicated issues that make up these debates, he should just keep out of it altogether.

That’s about as political as I’m ever likely to get on here. If you haven’t already blocked me, here’s something a little less hot button-y;