What happened to Gary Francione?
I think Donald Trump’s presidency broke a lot of people’s brains. The prime example for me is Glenn Greenwald. Here was a leftist hero who has since become far more comfortable in the right-wing media ecosystem, palling around with the likes of Tucker Carlson. Matt Taibbi is another example.
Of course, the chaos and confusion of the Trump years impacted me too. A longtime atheist, I’ve become very interested in religion, a fact I still find somewhat embarrassing. I suppose it would be strange if this tumultuous period didn’t change one’s world view at all, but not all changes are equally positive or negative.
This phenomenon came to mind recently when I went to check in on the recent output of Gary Francione, an influential vegan author. I’ve always had my disagreements with him, but he played an important role in my political development, tempering the utilitarianism I picked up from Peter Singer with a more rights-based approach to the animal question.
So when I navigated to Francione’s Twitter feed, I was disappointed to see it filled with rank prejudice, portraying transgender people as a threat to women’s safety. Nominally, he seemed to be approaching the issue from what could be described as a Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist position, but in practice, he was amplifying the Daily Mail and other conservative publications and voices.
Look, I’m not trying to ‘cancel’ anyone, if that means public shaming and exclusion from society. I’ve committed a thousand cancellable offenses. I imagine most people have, if they’re honest with themselves. For this reason, I’m less concerned with punishing past misbehavior than preventing future misbehavior. I’d like Francione to step back and return to what he’s best at — advocating for animals.
I don’t pretend to be an expert on transgender politics. But here’s what I do know. Transgender people are a tiny portion of the population, who are currently the target of a vicious demonization campaign by the fascist right. They face shocking rates of violence and suicide. In this context, abstract debate about this or that point of ideology is basically impossible.
It’s this context which I implore Francione to consider. During the 2016 Democratic primary campaign, in which a centrist seemed to weaponize identity politics against a left-wing challenger, I found myself sympathetic to critiques of the same politics by the writer Freddie DeBoer. But after the election of Donald Trump, and the rise of an openly fascist right, those critiques lost their relevance for me.
Beyond this, I’d urge Francione to consider the proportion of his thinking that appears dedicated to transgender issues. If his Twitter feed is any indication, these have become an obsession for the writer, leaving animal rights and other progressive aims as an after thought. Why is that? As I’ve mentioned, transgender people are a tiny, already-demonized fraction of the population.
Even if everything Francione thinks about transgender people were true — which, to be clear, I don’t believe — surely there are more important things to focus on. To state the most obvious, given his past commitments, more than a trillion aquatic and land animals are killed every year for human consumption. I’d like Francione to weigh the possibility he has been inadvertently swept up in right-wing hysteria and come back to us.