Jesse Singal, who has gained notoriety on the left for his frequent tweeting and writing on trans issues, says he just wants to talk. When readers get angry with him, which happens often, he sees them as curtailing a productive conversation that he has prompted in the spirit of a free and vigorous exchange of ideas. Earlier this month he took issue with the position that marginalized groups like trans people need not debate people who question their right to exist:

90% of the time "I will not debate someone who is arguing against my right to exist" is simply a false derailing tactic, but if someone DOES deny your right to exist, and is in a position of power and willing to debate you, how crazy would it be to NOT debate them?? — Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) April 13, 2019

Singal compared the experience of these groups to enslaved black people in the antebellum era.* “People who started out their lives as slaves became leading advocates for abolition,” he wrote. “Imagine if they had said ‘I refuse to debate with people who don’t see me as human.’” (When other Twitter users noted that black abolitionists like Frederick Douglass had taken precisely that position, he deleted his tweet.)



Singal’s error was a historical one. But the very premise of his argument—that debate is an axiomatic good—was in error as well. Debate is fruitful when the terms of the conversation are agreed upon by both parties. But if there were a neutral space online for this imagined debate about, say, trans children, its location would certainly not be Jesse Singal’s Twitter feed. There’s a reason that we have a saying about not dignifying an idea with a response.

Singal’s lamentations elicit a very particular weariness among trans readers. His logic is circular, and obsessive. In returning to the subject repeatedly, Singal seems intent on cracking some truth about the trans experience that is not accessible to him, as if provoked by that very inaccessibility. And this is the epistemological challenge that trans culture lays at cis culture’s doorstep: You must trust me to know my own identity. To extend full humanity to trans citizens means marking the limits of cis knowledge.

One of the reasons that trans skeptics get so riled by this demand is that it implies that their empathy and their intellect have borders. It also denies the universality of human experience, and undermines the notion of a pure discourse where only reason prevails. Ironically, nothing makes those borders starker than the Singals of this world patrolling the edges of a culture war, demanding that their opponents meet them at the fence for a healthy conversation.