The non-cancellation of ContraPoints.
The blurby bit
‘Cancel culture’ and politics of vulnerability in queer/trans online spaces
This talk will explore how notions of ‘cancel culture’ circulate online in relation to issues of sexual and gender diversity, and how conflicts around ‘cancelation’ speak to broader cultural-affective tendencies, theorised through politics of vulnerability, paranoid reading, and platform drama.
Trans-inclusivity Seminar Series
From the Eventbrite listing
This talk is part of a multi-month series that started from 14th February continuing until June 2024 with a variety of talks given by leading academics and current researchers in trans-inclusive research and study. It is no coincidence that the series started during LGBT+ history month – as the Institute of Education (IOE), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, looks to celebrate trans-inclusivity with UCL’s own academics along with our invited external speakers. Each event will be advertised in good time but separately when practical arrangements have been fully made for each. There will be enough time for participants – within and outside the university to sign up to the in-person event – or the livestream which will be available for each public speaking event. The Trans-inclusivity Seminar Series has been funded by UCL’s LEIG (LGBTQ+ Equality Implementation Group).
Introduction
This is the second of the IOE’s ‘Trans-inclusivity Seminar Series’ that we have attended, the other being ‘I Was a Queer Child and So Were You,’ which was exactly like it sounds. This talk, given by Dr Kata Kyrola (they/them), was far less batshit than Stockton Dean’s. Professor Martin Oliver, who told us he uses ‘he/him pronouns’, introduced the gender activist, sorry, academic, and described the seminar series as ‘just lovely’ with ‘such exciting ideas’. We’ll be the judges of that, thank you.
Arthur, a man with a beard but they/them pronouns, stood up to say that not everyone with a beard is ‘cis’, you know. Why some of them are even are non-binary, like himself- sorry-, themselves. Universities were ‘increasingly unsafe places to be’ and he was going to be speaking about this non-binary oppression on next week’s panel. So he was basically giving us a heads-up on that, or perhaps that should be a beards-up, since he -sorry-, they, were so eager to point out the powers of testosterone on the face.
Then Professor Oliver popped back up to tell us that a ‘range of toilet options’ were available, in case we couldn’t contain ourselves for the forty minute lecture (we think soporific sounds were more likely). If we had a special request, one of the facilitators would be able to lead us somewhere appropriate. Oo-er. The conversation should be kept ‘respectful and safe’ and especially considerate to queer, trans and gender-non-conforming participants. These same people might well find the topic of Dr Kyrola’s talk ‘distressing’. If it got too much please feel free to leave the room. Which led us to thinking: Why do they always say this when no one ever, ever, leaves the room?
On introducing the speaker, he described Dr Kata Kyrola as a media and cultural studies scholar and bigged-up her book which explored the links ‘between vulnerability and trigger warnings’. Kyrola is also a member of UCL’s LGBTQ+ Equality Steering Group and the IOE’s LGBT+ Advisory Group.
The talk
These people speak in such riddles, that it is really quite difficult sometimes to paraphrase what it is they’ve said. Basically Kyrola’s boils down to wah-wah-wah cancel culture isn’t real, something-something right wing media and there is a feedback loop which makes it all the more pernicious for the alphabet people, because sometimes members of the alphabet community cancel other members. Also known as The Left Eating Itself, and is as Old As Time itself.
Unfortunately, the example Kyrola pulled out of the bag was slightly less impressive than she had imagined, since in no way is it true.
The example
The trans-identified male known as Natalie Wynn, but better known as ContraPoints on YouTube, has in no way been cancelled. Currently his channel has 1.8M subscribers and his very long advert-populated video essays achieve anywhere between 3 to 9 million views. Interestingly his content is not prolific, unlike your standard vlogger, which suggests he is doing very nicely, thank you very much. The case that Kyrola referred to anyway, happened back in 2019 (five years ago at the time of writing), when for a brief ten second period Wynn lip synced to a clip of Buck Angel (a trans-identified female porn star) talking.
For comparison, Kevin Spacey faced allegations of sexual impropriety at the height of #MeToo in 2017, was cleared on all criminal charges, his main accuser revealed as a total fantasist and still has had zero acting jobs since. That’s cancellation.
[Natalie Wynn] was the subject of a cancellation campaign herself in 2019, when she became the target of a wave of harassment after her video Opulence, which attacks consumer culture and our obsession with wealth, used a voice-over from Buck Angel, a transsexual porn star who had in the past made statements considered offensive by some in the transgender and non-binary communities.
“He has a lot of outdated and grumpy opinions about trans topics,” Wynn conceded, “but to me he’s still some kind of legend.
‘The internet is about jealousy‘, Guardian interview with ContraPoints, 17 June 2021
It was a research topic that Kyrola had only just started working on, so her ideas weren’t fully formed, as evidenced by the poor example she had chosen and everything else she said. Kyrola said that she had witnessed many more cancellations in the alphabet- and feminist-community. Every incident was ‘heartbreaking’, so heartbreaking, in fact, that the only way to talk about it was through memes and ‘pitch black humour’ (sounds quite racist to us). She had also witnessed ‘pile ons’ and a ‘huge amount of transphobic, sexist, racist or anti-Palestine hate speech’ on social media. This could make you feel terrified and powerless and subject to out of control forces, ergo the phenomenon of contagion. This could have the effect of removing people from social media, Kyrola argued, and therefore could be construed as a form of cancellation (i.e. hearing opinions different to your own was so scary).
Stunning, but not brave, hypocrisy
However, Kyrola was very eager to make clear that she didn’t disapprove of cancellation per se, as she was very much for the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, which not only organises boycotts of Israeli export goods, but aims ‘to isolate Israel academically, culturally, economically and militarily’. She was also fine ditching academics who said things she found problematic. Failing to see the irony of her predicament, she argued that ‘my communities’ weren’t particularly ‘quarrelsome’. (For full context, the seminar was held shortly after Hamasgender activists had started to attack Baillie Gifford for funding book festivals. A week later Barclays Bank decided to pull funding from several UK music festivals, the kind that left wing loonies like congregating at, due to threats to staff and repeated vandalism.)
Online spaces were essential lifelines to the alphabet bag community and a refuge for ‘hope’ and ‘exploration’. Kyrola showed a slide with a quote from queer theorist, José Esteban Muñoz, on ‘queer world making’ and the ‘majoritarian public sphere’, which added nothing to her argument.
Unpacking cancel culture
Kyrola repeated that she was quite happy for those she didn’t agree with to be cancelled, as cancelling was no more than ‘calling out’ bad behaviour, which needed to be corrected, the #MeToo and Black Lives Matters movements being examples of necessary interventions. Right wingers and trans exclusionary feminists, utilised such cancellations to argue that freedom of speech were being attacked. The people subject to these so-called attacks were given public platforms to complain about the same, so it wasn’t really true they had been cancelled, Kyrola explained. No one even knew who these terfs were, she went onto complain, before they got cancelled. Kyrola quoted a couple of academics to pad out her argument, including the ridiculous phrase ‘citizen victims’. We felt sure she was going to come to the killer point soon …
Gender segregated toilets
Apropos of nothing, Kyrola talked about the bog situation explaining that terfs said that the very presence of trans women in the same space made cis women unsafe, when in fact it was trans women who regularly experienced physical and verbal harassment in bathrooms. Aside from the obvious awful Americanism, Kyrola failed to make clear which toilets ‘trans women’ experienced such foul behaviour in, and from whom? Yet another mystery.
Vulnerability, said Kyrola, could paradoxically become a claim to power and could even sometimes become a competition between disadvantaged groups about who had it worst. What an original insight!
Back to the piss poor example of ContraPoints
Despite claiming that such cancellations in the alphabet- and feminist-communities were constant, Kyrola was armed only with the piss poor example of ContraPoints. It does sounds as if Wynn had experienced a brief, albeit unpleasant, episode where blue-hair shrill bills shit-posted about him. The episode did not result in him being de-monetised by YouTube (as has recently happened with number of gender critical vloggers, like Matt Walsh), so I’m not sure Kyrola really understands what cancellation means.
Trans-identified twitter users apparently savagely attacked ContraPoints, so we went looking for the tweets. The condemnation we could see was mostly mild, some even complimentary, and not exactly huge amounts. Having said that, we are on the terfblocker so it may well be we can’t see the full extent. According to what we could view though, it was quite notable it appeared that no famous accounts had attacked Wynn/ContraPoints.
Kyrola said that Wynn had been called a traitor for having associated himself with Angel ‘who in turn had voiced views which can be identified as ‘truscum’ (in the lingo), or as a trans-medicalist’. Kyrola explained that the term referred to a belief that only those who experience gender dysphoria and want to medically transition are considered valid trans people (i.e. the mythic old school transsexual). Anyhoo, the quote that Wynn had lip synced to wasn’t even about the trans issue, it was Angel narrating the famous John Waters’ quote about good bad taste. Kyrola summarised this as ‘how really bad taste is actually good taste,’ misunderstanding entirely what Waters has repeated ad nauseum, that to understand good bad taste, one must know good taste is, a feat trans activists seem absolutely incapable of.
She then played the clip from the video that got Wynn ‘cancelled’. Very daring. Wynn hadn’t even flagged that it had been Buck Angel talking, yet had still received flak. For our money, the whole episode just sums up how wildly sensitive and stupid trans activists are.
We should also add, that we have watched a fair bit of ContraPoints and at no point does he talk anything but utter bollocks. It isn’t even good bad taste or bad bad taste, just verbal diarrhoea parading as intrigue.
Analysis
Kyrola then gave her analysis as to why this ‘cancellation’ of Wynn happened and claimed that it had spread to other influencers at the time, who Wynn was associated with. She failed to mention any names so we’re in the dark about who those people might be. It was interesting though to hear a trans activist claim that contagion is a real thing. Often cancelling was based in emotion and didn’t rely on who had better arguments. Hmm. So close.
The alphabet community were currently being ‘bullied and harassed’ by ‘politicians, trans exclusionary radical feminists, institutions, governments, platforms and people’. This was enraging and the rage had to go somewhere, thus the community was turning in on itself, as it was its only sounding board.
[T]he purpose of those who pointed out that Buck Angel is truscum, was surely to protect trans and non-binary people from feeling invalidated.
Dr Kata Kyrola
However, she did make a good point about social media possibly encouraging such cancellations via algorithms, as the associated pile ons must surely line their purses. It also meant individual actors involved in cancellations, also often profited from it. Kyrola claimed that there was money to be made from being demonetised by YouTube, so much so that people were even fabricating their own cancellation. We don’t see how this is possible frankly, if you’re demonetised by YouTube permanently, then you make zero pence, regardless of the number of hits. It is not a money-making expedition.
Turning the lens on academics
Kyrola paid lip service pretending to think about how academics should act in the face of cancellation. She’d already told us up front that she was Hamasgender and unforgiving if an academic she liked said something she disagreed with, so it was understandable her next topic was paranoia. So many academics were trained to understand the workings of power in minute detail, it was all too understandable that they saw machinations everywhere. However, this had now become so habitual it was clouding their view, poor things. Kyrola didn’t think it was possible to ‘disagree well’ with enemies but wanted to eschew completely the idea that the ‘communities’ she was linked to were in any way ‘constrictive’ or ‘obsessed with cancellation’. Can’t have it both ways, love.
Reflection
Firstly, who could disagree that Buck Angel wasn’t true scum? Angel openly sells her own sex product line to trans-identified females (see here her selling lube to women with testosterone-induced atrophied vaginas), refers to herself as ‘Transpa’, has (or had) an Only Fans account, demands her desired pronouns, rumours abound about her behaviour on the scene and there is also this:
It is also worth noting, despite the ‘truscum’ label, Angel is having a good war, her videos very much monetised on YouTube.
Further, on the issue of ‘truscum’, the only person we have known online who was regularly labelled as such, was the man known on Twitter as the InfamousT. His account went through several iterations, as he was repeatedly targeted by the fetishist men he criticised. His real name was Tarquin Sutherland and, as far as we’re concerned, Sutherland was labelled ‘truscum’, not because he nursed any beliefs about the sanctity of the trans experience (he didn’t), but because he was exposing what the Tavistock had done to him. This is what will really get you cancelled, advocating against medicalisation*. Ask any victim of this medical scandal who has spoken out.
* Andrew Gold’s podcast with Richie Herron being demonetized by YouTube on the day this blog was published.
I call T ‘him’ as that was who he was – a bloke – and that was how I know he’d like to be remembered. As Tarquin. As a man who was conned by the Tavistock crowd into thinking that he was a woman. A man who woke up in a private hospital in Wimbledon one afternoon without his penis. A man who was then pushed around by the rainbow crew who made money from him and tried to use him to perpetuate their trans ideology.
Goodbye, T, Country Squire Magazine, 25 April 2023
On the argument that Kyrola put forward, it was nothing more than a longwinded way of saying there should be a two tier approach to cancellation; still okay to do to people on the right, but not okay to do to your own side, who should be allowed a little bit of nuance, as long as they didn’t go too far. And this passes for serious intellectual discourse?
Post script
A few days before I published this piece, the new Labour government announced that it had stopped the implementation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 and may even be repealed.
https://x.com/akuareindorf/status/1816780742073975203
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