For the last few days, a segment of Twitter has been abuzz over the fact that ContraPoints, a popular YouTuber, deleted her Twitter account — likely temporarily — over a controversy that has engulfed her and a subset of leftist social media. What happened? Is it important? Why should we care?

These questions and more are answered below, in a convenient Q&A format.

Okay, so who is ContraPoints?

ContraPoints is the online handle of Natalie Wynn, a philosophy Ph.D. dropout and trans woman whose career as a YouTuber has taken off in the last couple of years. Her YouTube channel is approaching 750,000 subscribers, and her new videos usually get well over a million views. She has almost 10,000 Patreon subscribers, which suggests she is making a lot of money off her work.

Why do people like her so much?

For a lot of reasons! For one thing, her videos are really well-done. They’re funny and visually pleasing, and often go in satisfyingly unexpected directions. I’m no cinematography expert, but many people think Wynn has permanently raised the aesthetic bar for political YouTube content.

Thematically, she also differs in important ways from the rest of left-wing YouTube (sometimes called BreadTube). This corner of the internet tends toward bubblegum content that mostly serves to tell viewers all their prior beliefs are correct. It’s often intellectually or ideologically masturbatory, even when the content is dressed up to look sophisticated (say, when it has lots of Foucault references).

Wynn, at her best at least, actually engages with the arguments she is disagreeing with, showing why they are wrong rather than simply pointing at them and laughing or screaming. She also allows that — hope you’re sitting down — certain issues are nuanced and might not have easy or obvious answers.

Her video “Why the Alt-Right is Wrong” is one of many good examples. At a time when a lot of people on the left are decrying the idea of debate or discourse, Wynn has shown a willingness and ability to simultaneously deliver both left-wing red meat — and there’s nothing wrong with that — and intelligent, thoughtful arguments likely to convince some people. I wrote a profile of her back in 2017. (Our full conversation is here if you want more of my opinion about why she’s so good at what she does. Or you can just watch her videos. Also, full disclosure that I’d feel weird not mentioning: She wrote a Twitter thread criticizing my work about a year ago that I responded to partially here.)

Why is she controversial?

A big part of why she has become so popular and has fans who aren’t as far left as she is (in my estimation) is that she will not always, completely, reliably take the pure lefty company line. But that means people on Twitter who are her fans, or who at least pretend to be, will harass her over exactly what accounts for so much of her appeal.

I ended up tangentially involved with this dynamic. A bunch of her putative fans were furious she had allowed me to interview her, because I had written an article about the closing of a gender-identity clinic they didn’t like (it is, quite literally, a long story). So they started haranguing her on Twitter. Around the same time, she also got harassed for agreeing to do a live event with Blaire White, another trans YouTuber, but one who is solidly politically conservative. Within the political spectrum of BreadTube, that’s like being double-Hitler. The event was canceled.

Since Wynn is now off Twitter, there’s nothing to link to, but at the time she tweeted pretty openly about how painful the harassment was and how it took a toll on her mental health.

I see. But that was a while ago. What’s the controversy about this time around?

It appears to be about two overlapping things, both involving nonbinary people — that is, people who don’t identify as male or female, and who tend to use “they”/“them” pronouns. The first is that Wynn expressed some degree of ambivalence about the practice of having people introduce themselves alongside their pronouns — i.e., “I’m Jesse, he/him.”

Some of the offending tweets:

So she’s basically saying that in normal spaces, people just call her “her” — they don’t make a big thing about it. But in “hyperwoke” spaces people are more uptight about it in a way that makes her uncomfortable.

One of the reasons for doing the pronoun introduction thing is that for some people, nonbinary people in particular, pronouns aren’t obvious — someone might look like society’s idea of a “he” or a “she” but prefer “they.” So what Wynn is saying is that there’s a tradeoff here, and that binary trans people like her (that is, those who identify as male or female) might not benefit from a system that does help people whose pronouns aren’t obvious from their gender presentation. (I should note that one Twitter user I trust detected some sarcasm in the final tweet above. But I think that in context, Wynn seemed to have been genuinely critiquing the norm of including preferred pronouns in introductions.)

Okay, so that was one thing. And what was the other thing?

This one’s even more complicated, especially if you don’t follow this stuff, but bear with me:

Again, Wynn is implying there are certain unacknowledged tradeoffs going on. By “old-school transsexual” she means someone who just wants to live as a man or a woman, and perhaps not have their pronouns be remarked upon or endlessly mentioned. She’s saying that younger trans people are more likely to be nonbinary, to be somewhere between “male” and “female,” to be in favor of listing pronouns, and so on.

This also connects to longstanding controversies within the trans and broader LGBT community. These controversies center on questions like whether people without gender dysphoria are trans in quite the same way, on accusations of trivialization or over-medicalization, and so on, all of which is beyond the scope of this Q&A. If you want to better understand this stuff, the fierce Tumblr war between “tucutes” and “truscum” is not a bad place to start. The important thing to recognize here is that Wynn is opining about issues that have long been sources of tension within the trans community.

So Wynn’s remarks about pronouns and nonbinary folks annoyed people?

Yeah, and some of them appear to be very annoyed. The conversation over anything trans-related is pretty fraught. And pronoun stuff, in general, is very painful for a lot of people to talk about. The sense I got, in looking at some of the tweets about Wynn, was that nonbinary people felt like she was throwing them under the bus or not taking them seriously or feeling their pain.

It probably didn’t help that she had been previously tagged as “problematic” for not always walking the straight and narrow online-leftist path, for sometimes being heterodox, interacting with “canceled” people, etc. Plus, remember that there is a subset of people on the left who already hate her for her prior transgressions, and who are thus likely to hop merrily aboard any new anti-ContraPoints bandwagon as soon as it appears.

So is this an example of the “cancel culture” I’ve been hearing so much about?

You know, a lot of people are saying it is, but I’m not so sure. Wynn appears to have self-canceled from Twitter because things were so unpleasant — and historically, when people delete their Twitter account, it’s often temporarily. I can definitely empathize, as being harassed by people on Twitter is terrible. But it feels like “cancel culture” should refer to situations in which people actually lose something tangible as a result of overbearing rules about who can say what. When the Dixie Chicks lost gigs and money for being against George W. Bush and the Iraq war, that seems like “cancel culture.” And there are plenty of other, more recent examples, including plenty stemming from left-wing outrage. This one? Not sure it qualifies.

So why should I care about this?

For one thing, it’s just engrossing internet drama, irresistible in that classic car-crash sense. It’s striking that a bunch of left-wing Twitter users are so aggressively going after someone who is (1) by any conceivable definition, very much “on their side” on the basic issues — and most of the in-the-weeds issues too — even if there’s disagreement here and there; and (2) undeniably has a big platform that has enabled her to help spread leftist and progressive ideals.

Yeah, that seems dumb. Why are they doing that?

Lefty subcultures, even more than other human groups, seem particularly susceptible to the narcissism of small differences. Monty Python captured this dynamic with the classic “Life of Brian” scene featuring fierce conflict between the “People’s Front of Judea” and the “Judean People’s Front.” But modern meme-sters have also made some good points about it. For example, when I first tweeted about this situation, a follower of mine sent along this meme from a ContraPoints Facebook group:

It’s a pretty good meme. But is there any broader lesson here or have I just read this whole thing to be told that “online leftist communities are vicious,” which was something I already knew?

Allow me to answer your question with another meme:

I don’t know where this meme came from, but I recirculate it whenever I can, because the idea it conveys is correct. While the average progressive person does not act in this way, a lot of progressive and leftist communities, online and off, are dominated by the sort of attitude expressed by Beardy over there on the left.

This doesn’t mean people should be allowed to be total jerks, of course, or that nasty or wrong-headed people should be granted endless free passes with regard to racism and sexism and transphobia and so on. But it means you need to give people some space to be less than perfect. And it means that the more aggressively you enforce ideological and linguistic purity, the more you are going to turn off neophytes, who will likely seek out community and political meaning elsewhere once turned away. Sometimes, that’ll be in dark places.

It should be taken as a bad sign that a subset of the online left has teed off on Wynn so vociferously and repeatedly — if she isn’t pure enough, who could possibly be?

That makes sense. You’re so smart, Jesse!

Hey, thanks! It means a lot coming from you.

One other point that I think gets overlooked sometimes: If you’re advocating for a position most people don’t agree with, you need to actually argue for it!

What do you mean?

Take the pronoun thing. In certain lefty spaces, it’s now de rigueur to introduce yourself with your pronouns. But in most places? No. Not even in progressive enclaves. I’ve never experienced this in real life, even as a Brooklyn journalist who hangs out in an unfortunate number of insufferably Brooklyn-journalist-friendly settings.

So if your goal is to explain to more people why everyone should state their pronouns on introduction to a new person, you need to actually introduce and advance that argument. The last thing you want to do is lash out at people who disagree. Because at the moment, you’re a small vanguard. Most people, by the nature of where things are at the moment, disagree with you! You’re not in a position to demand they bow before your own minority opinion.

Wynn was not the first person to express ambivalence about the pronouns thing from a progressive or lefty perspective. If, instead of engaging with these arguments, you freak out when you encounter them, that’s a clear recipe for groupthink and intellectual atrophy.

Any final points?

The Iron Law of Institutions explains a lot of why we so often see this sort of craziness. In short: when it comes to institutions or communities, people tend to act in a manner designed to maximize their status within that institution or community, not to maximize the probability of fulfilling the institution or community’s external goals.

So in this case, let’s say the external goal is to spread the practice of including pronouns in introductions. You’re not really advancing that goal by publicly freaking out at people who express ambivalence about it. But you might be able to broadcast to your peers just how morally upright, radical, and dedicated to the cause you are, how disgusted you are that there’s anyone in your midst who would disagree with the obvious truth of your position. Projecting that can bring with it a certain type of power. It’s a narrow, myopic power that harms your stated goals, but it’s power nonetheless.

And what do online leftists like more than the temporary sensation of power that doesn’t actually bring them anything in the long run?