Sophie Lewis is a revolting dunce (2024)

It’s an election year, and spite of a near-constant barrage of catastrophizing about the imminent reemergence of fascism, the American left cannot stop themselves from providing ammunition to the right. To put it more bluntly, they somehow cannot grasp that conservatives would be less likely to believe paranoid conspiracies about liberals wanting to take their kids away if liberals would be less open in saying that they do, indeed, want to take people’s kids away.

What’s this? Has Ol’ Man Harlots finally lost his marbles and succumbed right wing disinformation? I’m afraid not. My conclusions have been drawn by Just Listening to left itself without receiving the slightest input from conservatives–in this case, an execrable piece by Sophie Lewis published by Tank Magazine. This essay is so extreme in its conclusions, so dishonest in its argumentation, that I challenge even the most ardent of lefties to read it all the way through and not see how it makes Ron Desantis-style conspiratorialism appear downright plausible.

I hesitate to paraphrase Lewis’ piece–doing so without the liberal use of direct citations could easily come across as me making stuff or otherwise reading it dishonestly. I strongly encourage you read through it yourself (here’s the link once again), but I will still include somewhat lengthy passages so as to confirm that this is an actual essay by a living, lauded writer, and not something I hallucinated after drinking a whole bottle of Benadryl.

Before we get to the essay’s primary assertions, it’s worth recapitulating Lewis’ foundational beliefs (in doing so, we’ll also get a sense of her profound dishonesty–although fully capturing as much would require a nearly book-length work. Angela Nagle has a digestible and effective piece here, and I have touched on in briefly about a year ago).

Lewis is one of the loudest and most repulsive advocates of the“Family Abolition” movement, which has earned her a manuscript published by Verso, bylines at Lit Hub and The London Review of Books, and a fawning personal profile at Vice. Family abolition is an ostensibly left-wing project that is pretty well defined by its name: its advocates believe that family structures (particularly heterosexual, two-parent families, but others are still problematic) are the driving force behind nearly all of the world’s problems, and that social progress cannot be achieved until we replace natal homes with weird poly communes.

Here’s Lewis:

We are seeking (in the immediate term) to make the private nuclear house- hold visible as an institution of the market and of the state: a structure held together by violence and coercion, both internal and external. As such, perhaps our most pressing challenge is linking ours and other present-day abolition- isms. In conjunction with police-, border- and prison-abolitionist movements, for example, a movement to deprivatise care must prioritise the undermining of the racist “family policing” system, colonial child-removal apparatuses, and the kinship violence of immigration officers. In conjunction with youth-led climate-justice campaigns trying to halt the desecration of humanity’s collective planetary household, those who aspire to the deprivatisation of care must articulate the centrality of youth liberation (child suffrage, gender autonomy, all-ages universal basic income, for example) to the future care-centric society that is now widely linked, in the popular imagination, to a “green transition”. Private households are both labour-intensive and ecocidal, after all. They are incubators of sexual and patriarchal violence. It is time to denaturalise them.

Families are unnatural, evil incubators of inequality and inequity, and also they cause direct harm to vulnerable folx. Why? Because it is the family–and only the family–that prevents kids from being “queer:”

Of course, the fact that child sexual abuse still now occurs overwhelmingly within cisheteropatriarchal family structures does not result in similar scrutiny on the family- form. In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged: this is what is referred to as a decent upbringing, a.k.a. the invisible transmission of the “right” kinds of re/productive desire, which many of us seem to sense is coming unstuck.

It’s easy to find yourself so overwhelmed by Lewis’ schizophrenic prose style that you gloss over the profound number of falsehoods in her claims. Let’s start just with that last passage, which can most charitably be understood as a midwit recapitulation of first wave feminism. Lewis is technically correct in that most domestic abuse occurs in“cisheteropatriarchal” (AKA“normal”) families, but this is for very much the same reason that most violent crime is intra-racial and most car accidents occur within a few miles of the driver’s home: the more common a context, the more frequently bad things happen within that context. On the whole, there are (probably) fewer abuse incidents in multi-parent trans polycule households than there are in regular households–but that’s just because there are far, far more regular households. The fact says nothing about the relative frequency of abuse, nor does it come close to establishing that there’s something inherent about being normal that makes domestic violence more likely.

Because, oh no, I got some bad news for you: Lesbian and trans couples have significantlyhigher rates of intimate partner violence than regular hetero couples. And the numbers are much, much worse for children. Kids who live in foster care or with adoptive parents are TWENTY EIGHT TIMES more likely to suffer physical or sexual abuse than kids who live with their natal parents. Not 28 percent more likely. 28 times. 2,800% percent. This figure is so staggering that its absence from Lewis’ analysis should be understood much more as an outright lie than as a careless omission.

So, okay, Lewis’ political project is to make it so way more kids get raped and abused. Cool. That fact alone–which, again, she never comes close to acknowledging–should be enough to invalidate her work to anyone who hasn’t been completely poisoned by indentitarianism. But, ohh, ohhh we’ve only barely breached the weirdness.

Contrary to the dominant narrative among Trans Rights Advocates, Lewis argues that social contagion doesexist and that it can influence a person’s gender identity and sexual orientation–only it just goes one way. Straight, non-trans people are obviously molded by repressive social structures. The pronoun folx, meanwhile, exist gloriously unaffected by the malignant influence of anything other than their internal gender identity, which is basically a soul and exists independent of everything else.

I hate to repeat myself, but this claim is so bizarre and self-contradictory it really must be stressed: Lewis believes that what most people consider the default status in regards to gender–the belief that you weren’t born in the wrong body and therefore do not require medicalization–is the result of a social construction. Literally, she says it’s due to“grooming.” While making this claim, she also states that believing oneself to require medicalization to achieve equanimity between your body and your innate gender identity is the actualdefault that would exist if there were no social pressures imploring children to believe otherwise.

In other words, children are indeedgroomed, only the groomers are inherently evil “cissexual” people, and their grooming ways are perpetuated by oppressive social structures (”In fact, the traditional practice of grooming kids into cisgenderism and heterosexuality is quasi-universally supported and encouraged”). This, Lewis contends, is why some people don’t react kindly when she and her rainbow pals in the publishing industry tell strangers they want to take their kids away: those strangers are themselves evil (cis, hetereo, and sometimes…. sometimes even white!), which means they are fragile and stupid and their response is a fascist reaction to social progress:

In light of this, today’s trans “groomer” panic begins to look like a reaction to, and appropriation of, #MeToo. Notice that within the framework of the 21st century’s save-our-children-ists, the existence of self-declaring trans children is a sign of sexual violation in and of itself: an outside corruption of cis girlhood, or a “forced feminisation” of boys, if you will.

These reactions–the very definition of fascism–are themselves only possible because of the evil existence of families:

If the patriarchal institutions of mum and dad – which manufactured us all! – are to survive, then private parents must retain control of the prerogative to inseminate the minds of kids with things like pronouns, proper nouns and other sexual spells. And none of us knows what deprivatising father-care or mothering-labour feels or looks like. Family abolition, as such, is hard (perhaps impossible, for now) to desire fully. But an inconvenient obstacle to the revanchist re-entrenchment of cissexualist right-reproduction exists, in the form of parents who affirm, support and care for transgender flourishing in kids. Regardless of the stubborn reality of trans parents, the task of anti-trans educators and propagandists is framed in terms of “parental rights”: how can politicians, along with suitably cissexist moms and dads, defend families, while also breaking them, in the quest to Make Kids Cis Again?

Now, you might assume that most people are heterosexual for the same reason that almost every other dimorphic animal species is predominately heterosexual: an innate drive to procreate, something that requires a male and female. You may likewise assume that the majority of people aren’t trans because transness by definition requires medicalization, the mechanisms of which were not available until quite recently, and that in the past the vast majority of butch girls and sissy boys would have simply been regarded as gender non-conforming (and then either ostracized or tolerated or praised, or some combination thereof, according to the particular contexts of the time and place in which they lived). Well, guess what buddy, that’s exactly what Hitler also thought. It turns out these default states are a social construct–the onlysocial construct that effects gender and sexuality–and that the only reason nearly everyone doesn’t have a septum piercing and mastectomy scars is because their horrible families forced them to not be their natural, immutable, Edenic selves (the identity markers and beliefs of whom just so happen to line up perfectly with the aesthetic preferences of Lewis and her cohort).

Once again, if you think I am misreading Lewis’ work or otherwise being unduly dismissive, I implore you to read it for yourself. If you approach it with an honest and open mind, rather than a predisposition to believe and support anything you imagine upsetting conservatives, you will find I have described her general worldview accurately, and without undue prejudice.

And now we have an obvious question: to what end is this social project aimed, other than a desire for more kids to get raped and beaten and to send most normal people running away from the left as if we were a superfund site? Here’s where Lewis turns the Schizo Scale up to 11. The result is simply that children will be“liberated” once they are freed from the presence of their parents and granted full legal agency from birth (the age of sexual consent isn’t mentioned specifically, but, uhh… I think you can infer what she wants out of this):

Unfortunately, it is only on the fringes of the left today that one hears any mention at all of child sovereignty, juvenile body-autonomy, or youth liberation – let alone calls to imagine abolishing the family for, and with, kids. In my experience, it has usually been in the skilful domains of anti-authoritarian or anti-state communist mutual-aid networks, social centres and grief circles, that problems of “adultism” and “adult supremacy” are taken seriously, rather than mocked (the same, by the way, goes for disability-liberation concerns). It is among anarchists that I have generally encountered conversations about trusting kids; believing kids about who they are; listening to them; supporting their self-organisation; and yes, learning both with and from them, practising, for instance, the arts of coexisting with others and their wants.

The segregation of the generations is both epistemic and material, as “kids’ libbers” in the late 1960s and early 1970s used to emphasise. Still today, children are not only the most disenfranchised, but also the poorest people in our societies. Their segregation, and also the omni-pervasive theory of education our institutions apply, whereby knowledge flows unidirectionally, downward, from “us” to “them”, stems from an “unspoken truth” that Lane-McKinley identifies: “while many children fear adults, many adults also fear children.” To conquer this fear, it may be necessary for leftists in the 21st century to first give up apologising for the production (and self-fashioning) of non-innocent young people, and practice vindicating it. Only then are we likely to move beyond the “defence” of trans childhoods, towards their celebration. In the final lines of her 2018 study Histories of the Transgender Child, scholar Jules Gill-Peterson writes: “If we adults really desire to learn to care for the many transgender children in our midst, we need to learn what it means to wish that there be trans children.” Let us, as a matter of urgency, set to training ourselves and each other in this wish.

As is typical of identitarian writing of all stripes, Lewis is pretty vague as the material specifics of her grand ideal. Same as conservatives, these people understand power purely in terms of the presence or absence of certain people in certain spaces: social justice, or Democracy, or Freedom, or whatever the goal may be–these are achieved by making sure the good people simply exist among one another, free from the contaminating presence of bad people. The material realities faced by those who enter into these vastly reimagined societies are of no concern, nor is there any reason to wonder about the beliefs and actions of the citizens of these utopias. If everyone is Pronoun Person, and kids are trained to be pronoun people from birth (only they’re totally not trained because only cishetero people are capable of that), victory shall simply manifest itself; equity shall have been achieved.

In her older works, Lewis did make some reference to the creation of anarcho-syndicalist-style“autonomous zones,” a concept adapted from the work of theorist Hakim Bay. You might have thought that the“CHAZ” that was built up in Seattle during the protests of 2020 was a spontaneous creation, but such efforts were actually fairly thoroughly theorized. And, well, if you were paying any attention to CHAZ as it unfolded, you’d understand why Lewis no longer leans on this concept: what was proposed a zone of“radical safety” and immediate equity quickly devolved into a sea of filth and unhinged violence, with CHAZ“security” managing to murder at least 2 black children in a span of a few weeks (and shoot at least one more). That, I’m afraid, is Lewis’ ideal world–even if she’s too much of a coward to articulate it, there’s no other way forward within her narrow, birdbrained worldview. And, even more sadly, that is what a lot of very stupid publishers are trying to establish as the brand of the post-Bernie left.

Maybe I’m being too harsh? Lefties love few things more than apologia for their dumbest ideas, and I’m sure we will encounter some version of“a true CHAZ has never been attempted.” Fine. But please ask yourself: what do you honestlybelieve will be result of handing everyone’s bodily autonomy and the very agency of children over to the people who presently dominate the left? What will happen when the people who already revel in ruining the lives of strangers over minor semantic indelicacies are given control of state violence, in the absence of an actual state? Will empowerment suddenly make these people less paranoid, more forgiving, less convinced that everyone who disagrees with them is a fascist who wants to kill them and therefore should be met with violent resistance? What gives you faith in these people to believe they are anything but who they have repeatedly, doggedly demonstrated themselves to be?