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1 month ago
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What is politics? The American horror author, comic book writer and trans activist Gretchen Felker-Martin offered a shockingly bloodthirsty definition in a 2022 interview to promote his novel Manhunt: “Politics is who you love and who you’re willing to kill. That’s really it.” (Felker-Martin is male, identifying as a woman.) So there was no hypocrisy involved when, following the assassination of Charlie Kirk last month, Felker-Martin made two celebratory Bluesky posts. “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch,” read one. “Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Kirk,” read another.
It’s fair to say that Kirk was not over-mourned in the liberal enclave of Bluesky. Elsewhere, though, he was very rapidly attaining a kind of MAGA sainthood — aided by the fact that his killer appeared to be motivated by animosity to Kirk’s anti-trans views. Anyone demurring from the public performance of mourning risked becoming a target of Right-wing rage. Within hours, Felker-Martin received a call from the comics publisher DC, cancelling the series Felker-Martin had been working on and terminating their relationship.
That made Felker-Martin one of the many Americans to have been fired or disciplined for being insufficiently respectful towards Kirk. High-profile examples include late-night host Jimmy Kimmel (whose show was temporarily pulled) and the columnist Karen Attiah (who was sacked by The Washington Post). More concerning are the rank-and-file Americans, from hospital workers to restaurant managers, who either lost their jobs or faced formal sanctions: over 145 by The New York Times’ count in late September, and presumably more since then.
In the words of historian Timothy Snyder, from his 2017 book On Tyranny, by cancelling Felker-Martin, DC was “obeying in advance”: intuiting what the powerful wanted, and delivering it. Other writers were quick to identify this as a sinister tendency. “It’s an absolute shame that DC fired Gretchen Felker-Martin for exercising free speech,” wrote the feminist author Roxane Gay on Bluesky. “Every writer here should be decrying this because we have to stand up for each other! This is ridiculous.”
People losing their livelihoods for real or perceived political transgressions, however, is not a new phenomenon. It has been going on for over a decade — it’s just that, until very recently, the vast majority of the victims were identified with Right-wing politics, and so long as that was true, it didn’t strike those of Gay’s persuasion as an issue. In one egregious 2020 case, a worker for the San Diego Gas & Electric company was fired for making a “white supremacist gesture”: he had made the “okay” sign, unaware that it had recently been co-opted by the alt-Right. In another instance, a senior figure in the American Civil Liberties Union — which literally has one job: upholding the First Amendment — favoured banning Abigail Shrier’s book Irreversible Harm, which describes the social contagion of trans identification among teenage girls.
But asked whether cancel culture existed in a 2021 interview, Gay replied robustly: “No, it does not. Cancel culture is this boogeyman that people have come up with to explain away bad behavior… I like to think of it as consequence culture, where when you make a mistake — and we all do, by the way — there should be consequences.” (It would be snide, but not inaccurate, to point out that Felker-Martin’s sacking is also an instance of consequence culture.) Another cancel culture unbeliever was Karen Attiah, who tweeted in 2022 that “‘Cancel culture’ anxiety is not about free speech. It’s about status anxiety.” Concerns about free speech, in other words, were really just concerns about who got to speak — a failure of the once-powerful to accept their new place in the hierarchy. The possibility that the hierarchy might change again and leave the Left on the losing side never apparently occurred.
The intellectual collapse of the liberal Left allowed the Right to monopolise the cause of free speech, even if that position was rarely taken in good faith. One of Donald Trump’s first executive orders in this presidency was titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship”; at the same time, federal websites were being cleansed of oldspeak terms such as “antiracist”, “trauma” and “hate speech”. This government-directed linguistic purge is more disturbing by far than the “soft” repression of Left-wing cancel culture, but it violates the same principle.
While leftist fury held the ascendance, “civility” was treated as a dirty word. “Tone policing” was a grievous sin. The space between politics and violence was intentionally narrowed. Anyone who held the correct beliefs could engage in the most vicious forms of speech with no consequences whatsoever. Like, for example, Felker-Martin. For as long as he has enjoyed a public profile, he has been vivid and explicit about exactly who he thought should be killed and how. But so long as those enemies were Terfs and so anathema to the US mainstream, Felker-Martin faced zero reputational cost for doing so.
In a statement to Wired magazine, DC’s editor in chief tried to present the firing as non-partisan, asserting that “the tone of Gretchen’s posts, not her personal views, was of concern for DC”. If that’s the case, I have to wonder whether DC had any awareness of Felker-Martin’s social media presence or literary output prior to Kirk’s death. Because, compared to much of Felker-Martin’s lurid and sexually inflected writing, “thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch” is extremely mild stuff. Take this 2019 tweet about the journalist Jesse Singal (a regular target of Felker-Martin’s), the tone of which apparently left DC unperturbed:
“Cis people, fix your hearts* or die.
*Bind Jesse Singal with strong rope and bring him to the quarry at the edge of town. Give him to us alive and unspoiled. Leave, and no matter the sounds you hear, do not look back.”
The motivation for this bizarre bondage scenario is that Singal has reported consistently and fairly on the failures of child gender medicine. That, according to Felker-Martin, amounts to “politely trying to incite genocide”, and this in turn justifies whatever sadistic fantasies Felker-Martin may have. It’s a rationale that invokes a pet idea of the Left’s called “stochastic terrorism”, which maintains that dehumanising language is a form of violence in itself. Like “cancel culture”, though, “stochastic terrorism” was politicised beyond usefulness: instances in which the Left itself could be dehumanising never figured in the analysis.
Usually, I would try to argue for a separation between an artist’s social media and their art. But in Felker-Martin’s case, it’s hard to make that distinction because his fiction is very much in the same genre of inventing justifications for violence, and then imagining that violence in pornographic detail. Manhunt is the story of two trans women surviving in the post-apocalyptic remains of society after a zombifying virus has ravaged anyone with sufficiently high testosterone: the protagonists are engaged in a constant hunt for DIY HRT in order to avoid succumbing themselves.
“Anyone who held the correct beliefs could engage in the most vicious forms of speech with no consequences whatsoever.”
But while the rabid men are dangerous, the true antagonists are the members of a Terf militia, who are dedicated to rounding up and executing any surviving trans women. And it’s when describing the Terfs’ deaths that Felker-Martin is most obviously excited. Imminent violence against women goes hand-in-hand with arousal in Manhunt. When the two protagonists first encounter the militia and are preparing for a confrontation, Felker-Martin writes of one: “Her cock was hard, tenting the front of her stupid cargo shorts.”
In the moral schema of Manhunt, women deserve punishment for holding disobliging beliefs about trans women, even when those beliefs are an accurate reflection of what the trans women understand about themselves. The Terf militia leader inveighs against “Men who take sexual pleasure in stealing our bodies. In wearing our skin,” and this is presented as one of the many misdeeds for which she will ultimately pay with her humiliating death. But given one of the trans woman protagonists elsewhere recalls a teenage crush on a girl with “a body she’d wanted more to hollow out and crawl inside than fuck”, is the militia leader actually wrong?
In one especially unpleasant scene, Felker-Martin imagines the militia leader executing a defector from her ranks by disemboweling her and extracting her uterus, holding it up for the watching crowd with the words: “No life without a womb.” The purpose of this scene is to demonstrate the endless depravity of what, in the book, are referred to contemptuously as “menopausal white ladies” or “sneering middle-class white women”. It vindicates the trans characters’ decision to “kill them all and piss on their corpses”.
The ultimate “sneering middle-class white lady”, from Felker-Martin’s perspective, is J.K. Rowling, and Manhunt acquired a burst of notoriety from one specific scene in which Rowling’s death is narrated. Within the world of the book, Rowling attempted to ride out the infection “at her castle in Scotland with a bunch of her rich girlfriends”. The “girl-power retreat”, however, rapidly goes south: one of the friends has PCOS (meaning she has higher than usual testosterone), which leads to her contracting the virus and starting a rampage that leads to the castle burning, killing all inside, Rowling included.
In response to outrage at this, Felker-Martin presented himself as a victim of misrepresentation. This is dishonest. The narrative takes pleasure in imagining Rowling’s death — the character who tells the story is “grinning evilly” — and the entire scenario is constructed as a Dante-esque punishment. Within Manhunt, Rowling is destroyed by her privilege, and by her apparently deluded belief in binary human sex. It is sadistic and disturbing, and almost none of the reviews noted this. Manhunt instead received supportive notices from NPR (“brilliantly imagined”), New York Magazine (“full of… messy, beautiful humanity”) and The New Yorker (“tender”).
The fact that Felker-Martin is obnoxious, misogynistic and crass doesn’t mean he deserved to lose his job over a bad tweet. But, realistically, he only had that job because this is the kind of person and the kind of art — obnoxious, misogynist and crass — that the liberal culture of the last five years chose to celebrate. Manhunt is not a good novel: it lurches from scene to scene with little explanation of how you got there, and the characters are so loosely drawn that they blur into each other. This is not even James Herbert, and yet it was lauded by critics as though it were George Eliot. Felker-Martin could only have achieved cultural prominence in a milieu that prized rightthink above artistic quality.
Liking Manhunt was a test of allegiance to the cause. The more violence you could stomach, the more you were overcoming your unconscious transphobia; and (for female readers) the more you could find pleasure in the degradation of women, the more you proved that you weren’t a part of the despicable “cisterhood” who apparently deserved this degradation. His pattern of sexualised harassment against individuals such as Singal was ignored because, as a trans woman, Felker-Martin could claim the perverse privilege of the most oppressed.
Not content with fictionally destroying female writers, Felker-Martin also sought to trash their reputations. He was especially savage about Sandra Newman’s novel The Men, which like Manhunt was published in 2022, and described a world in which every person with a Y chromosome — trans women included — had mysteriously disappeared. This “repellent premise”, according to Felker-Martin, was “fundamentally transmisogynistic” (even though it is not very different from Felker-Martin’s own book, albeit with less scenes of misogynistic butchery). That charge fed into a broader denunciation of Newman’s novel. The Men was bombed with one-star ratings on Goodreads even before it was out; an author who defended Newman’s novel was punished by having her own book removed from consideration for an LGBT literary prize.
I wonder whether this is what Roxane Gay would class as “consequence culture”. There was no call for solidarity with Newman like the one Gay would later make for Felker-Martin: no declaration that “every writer” should “stand up for each other”. Newman was deemed on the wrong side of history, and so she was allowed to sink. The recent rediscovery of free speech is difficult to swallow from people who have spent the last 10 years or so either airily downplaying the threat from their own, or actively making it worse.
Felker-Martin did not agree with Kirk about very much, but they did share an essentially martial vision of the world. Kirk saw himself as a soldier for God, while for Felker-Martin, every disagreement is a war: “I have fuck-all time for a consensus.” This belief, that the only worthy way of life involves bloodletting, has been incubated on both sides of the American divide. Now, under Trump, the Right has the opportunity to crush its enemies, and it is doing so with relish, using techniques that the Left has refined. If this is how the Left rediscovers free speech as a universal principle, it’s been an expensive lesson, but a necessary one.
But a healthy culture needs other values too: it needs moral and aesthetic judgements that do not split along party lines. It needs to be able to say who is, and is not, a good person. It needs to be able to say what is, and is not, good art. Felker-Martin is the free-speech martyr that the Left of the last decade deserves: unpleasant, unsympathetic and almost impossible to defend.
