Gender and Sexuality

• Called trans people who criticized ContraPoints “subhuman.”[3.1],[3.2],[3.3]
  • (The first link is clipped out of context. The second link is of Vaush himself adding context, which is that rather than dehumanizing all trans people, Vaush was only dehumanizing trans people who think Buck Angel’s attack helicopter jokes are transphobic.)
  • “If you’re not an idiot, you’ll agree with me on this. If you have any fucking experience with online LGBT or leftist discourse, you know it’s cancerous as fuck. You understand this. People are hyper-fragile. There’s a ton- a ton of mental illness.”
  • “You can’t convert these people. They’re not reasonable. They have to be excised from the left.”
  • “These people are less than human to me. I have no respect for these people.”
  • “You don’t need to be a psychologist to see that a large portion of the broader fucking woketard, cancel culture idpol left is predicated on shared mental illness. This is particularly prominent in the trans community. If you disagree with me on this, you’re wrong. I know it sounds yikesy. It happens anyways.”
  • “Most of the time when a wildly irrational lefty comes in to make bad faith arguments against me, it’s a trans person. That is a fact.”
  • “If all of these dumbfucks recognize that I despise them and think they’re every bit as detrimental to the left as Nazis are, I am doing good. I want these people to know that they’re my enemy. I fucking hate them. I really do despise them. […] Every time some dumbfuck trans girl on Twitter who’s acting out mental illness, whining, calling people like me transphobic because I disagree with them, they’re hurting the left.”
  • “These people are ill. These people are a cancer. They’re subhuman.”
  • “A lot of the people who are trying to cancel ContraPoints are fucking dejected, worthless, mentally ill, basement dweller, fucking queer people who have absolutely nothing to offer the world apart from their bitter scorn so they lash out at people more successful to them and they put all the time in the world into it because the only validation they get is out of performatively cancelling people with more social capital. When I see 30-tweet threads about how horrible ContraPoints is, it is impossible to imagine this person is anything other than a dejected removed sucking off of the back of society like a leech. It’s impossible for me to think about anything else. I know this is fundamentally reactionary thinking, but still, I can’t think of anything else.”
  • Context:
    • ContraPoints received both criticism and harassment for having Buck Angel (who is anti-nonbinary and transmedicalist) voice a line in a video. Afterwards, she had a Patreon-only stream where she tacitly defended Buck Angel.[3.4] She was speaking impromptu to a private audience, so it should not be judged too harshly, but she misrepresented both Buck and his critics to make Buck look better. She also did not mention the various things Buck has done,[3.5] including spreading disproven[3.6] transphobic conspiracy theories.[3.7][3.8] Vaush responded to the stream with “Everything she says is correct. Absolutely everything.”[3.9]
    • In a later video, “Canceling,” ContraPoints states, contrary to the evidence: “I don’t think Buck’s ever actually said that non-binary people aren’t valid, but I personally don’t like that he seems like he wants to distance himself from them. And that’s my disagreement with Buck. It’s not that he invalidates non-binary identities, because I don’t really see him doing that. And if he was doing that, I would have seen it, because for the last two months a lot of people have been doing nothing but sending me problematic Buck Angel tweets.”[3.10],[3.11]
  • In response to criticism:
    • Despite his fans’ denial, Vaush has repeatedly reaffirmed the statements above. He only retracted the phrase “subhuman” for being bad optics, not because he believed it was wrong.[3.12]
    • “Wait are they tankies or are they wokescolds?”[3.13]
      • Vaush called anarchists “tankie” for thinking that Marx, Engels, and Lenin would not vote for Biden, yet he does not understand why critics think his usage of the term “tankie” is imprecise. “Why do Marxists keep pretending - Marxist-Leninists or whatever - why do MLs keep pretending that every time I say ‘tankie’ I mean ‘ML’? Why does that keep happening? I don’t know how many times I’ve said this really, really clearly: that there’s a difference between the two and I’ve explained the difference many - maybe even hundreds of times by this point.”[3.14]
    • “I said that group of people, the people cancelling ContraPoints religiously, were subhuman.”[3.15]
    • This also happened in the past when he was criticized for transphobia in a now-privated video. “To everyone saying I said “I apologize BUT” / You know what? Yeah, I think internal problems with leftie cancel culture are a thousand times more damaging to the movement and to the safety, frankly, of trans people and other marginalized groups.”[3.16]
• “Pride should be a cool, queer-friendly block party you can attend to meet with organizers and get cute shirts. Everyone should be able to attend. It should be safe and uncontroversial.”[3.17] This assimilationist argument centers the reaction of queerphobes. Moreover, this is a reversal from his opinion a year ago, when he said “Seen some people saying Pride Parades are dangerous because they’re inappropriate for children. You can see more skin at European beaches. Cry harder”[3.18] Vaush reversed his opinion in defense of his friend shoe0nhead, who said that drag is inherently sexual and should be kept away from children.[3.19] shoe0nhead made the common conservative argument that queerness is inherently sexual, which plays into the trope of queer people inherently being sexual predators. U.S. conservatives made the same argument in the recent past when then villainized Drag Queen Story Hour, where drag queens read books to children at libraries.
  • A counterargument: [3.20]
  • “Your kink isn’t a discriminated identity! […] ‘Shit like this keeps people in the closet’? Yea, no shit. And if I were an in-the-closet fucking queer teenager and I saw the behavior of some of these, I’ll say yea, removed, who unironically think that Pride should be about them and their fucking erection, absolutely disgusting and I would feel ostracized from the community. I stand with the real queers, okay?”[3.21],[3.22]
  • “‘Weren’t some old Prides a bit [kinky]?’ Yea, but we’re trying to make Pride more accessible now.”[3.23]
  • “Just why, why do you have to have this? Why are kinksters obsessed with infiltrating this space? It’s really weird to me. Why? You don’t need it. It’s not yours. Stop. Please.”[3.24] This is ahistorical. From “Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano: “The words ‘transgender’ and ‘queer’ came into vogue during [the early 1990s] as umbrella terms: ‘Queer’ attempted to accommodate lesbians and gays as well as the growing bisexual and transgender movements; and ‘transgender’ was used to promote a coalition of distinct groups (including crossdressers, transsexuals, butch women, femme men, drag performers, intersex people, etc.) that previously believed they had little in common with one another. These alliances were not based on a presumed shared biology or set of beliefs, but on the fact that these different groups faced similar forms of discrimination. In fact, the notion that transgender people ‘transgress binary gender norms’ came about to create a cause for its varied constituents to unite behind, not as a litmus test or a criteria for them to meet.”