Emily St. JamesVerified account

Since this got buried in replies: I’m not trying to be weaselly. I believe, deeply, in restoration over retribution. Some acts do require retribution; this is not one of them.https://twitter.com/emilyvdw/status/1280587611040477190 …

I’m muting this so I can get anything else done today. Thanks for your support, your feedback, and your angry screeds. Love you all.

OK, I filed my piece. By far the most common (good faith) question I've gotten is why I read the letter as containing anti-trans dogwhistles. This tweet neatly expresses the way I read that letter as a trans woman. (continued)https://twitter.com/LLW902/status/1280547024014905346 …

I absolutely see why that does not read as particularly anti-trans to a cis person! It just seems like vague support of free speech and a vigorous exchange of ideas, right? Believe me, I get it! (continued)

I would wager that so many people who signed the letter just read that vagueness and were, like, "Sounds fine. I like free speech! Sign me up." For instance, here's a trans woman who did just that:https://twitter.com/JennyBoylan/status/1280646004136697863 …

I'm careful not to say that signing the letter is an anti-trans act is because I don't believe it is. In a vacuum, the letter seems totally fine! I wouldn't have signed it ("We need more debate" in 2020 usually has an understood "about trans issues"). I get why someone might.

But the many signatories to the letter include people who treat trans identities as an intellectual parlor game at best and as a dark and terrible cloud about to descend over modern society at worst. It is apparently impossible to grasp that we are who we say we are.

Within that context, the "shit, they're talking about me" feeling I got reading the letter became an ambulance siren once I read the list of people who signed it. Again: Not everybody who signed it is anti-trans. There are trans people there, and noted ally Margaret Atwood.

Anyway, I've received rampant misgendering, copious dead names, death threats, threats of assault, threats of other unspecified violence, and frequent accusations of being mentally ill today. It is worth remembering for whom cancel culture actually exists.

Believe me, there are a lot of people who wish I would be literally canceled. I found that out today. It's easy to forget some days, but it's always there, the low-level hum of being a trans person, a woman, a journalist in 2020 America.

Every trans person makes their own choice about how to function within a society built by cis people for cis people. I have a lot more options than most. If I need emergency therapy, I can get it. I have support structures, a wife, friends, a great job.

But the choice I've made is the belief that if I can just make the words work well enough, I can make everybody see who I am and, by extension, who all of my trans siblings are too. It's a delusion and a phantom. But I gotta keep trying.

Thank you for the words of support. Thank you for the good faith criticism. And thank you for the well-meaning questions. No thank you to all of you who threatened either me or my livelihood. I'm not a fan of it!

(People have asked what I want, and: Vox should not fire anybody, but it should hire Katelyn Burns, one of the few trans women in America who covers politics, full-time, rather than letting her contract lapse in August. Her perspective and voice is dearly needed right now.)