TAKE RESPONSIBILITY

When you type in #canceled into the search bar on Twitter, the last thing you want to see is your own name. Yet for Natalie Wynn, a philosophizing YouTuber who goes by the name Contrapoints, this was exactly what she saw in late October of 2019. Wynn was no stranger to targeted online harassment; after all, she's a transgender woman whose videos talk about everything from incels to white supremacists.

This time, however, it felt different. Those attacking her didn't seem to be misogynists or Nazis. Instead, they seemed more like her than unlike her; they were mostly progressive, LGBTQ+, and active on social media. Wynn provoked her fair share of Twitter arguments before, but she was confused. She hadn't said anything recently to anger the community, at least not to her knowledge. So why was she being canceled?

For those canceling her, the answer was simple. She had associated with Buck Angel.

“Cancel culture,” as it’s known became so popular, so deeply ingrained into the zeitgeist that it’s inescapable for anyone with an internet connection. Everyone from Former President Barack Obama to pop star Taylor Swift is talking about it, with the latter even recently releasing a documentary discussing her own cancelation. The term earned its own Wikipedia page under the name “call-out” culture, although the information is not particularly illuminating—the definition of “cancel culture” is widely debated and almost never agreed upon. Depending on who you ask, “canceling” someone may call to mind notes-app screenshots dotted with PR one-liners, powerful men being held accountable for their actions, or perhaps a combination of the two. Jeff Hauser, director of the Revolving Door Project, said of cancel culture that "there's a lot of effort to contort language and ideas to make rich and powerful groups be represented as victims."

Jeff Hauser, on the efficacy of cancel culture. Image courtesy of @jeffhauser on Twitter.

The mention of the name alone is enough to bring about a thousand think-pieces, with arguments over its validity, its victims, and even why it's so talked about to begin with. Cancel culture permeates celebrity culture, with apologies being issued as a matter of routine. Yet despite its reputation, cancel culture isn’t reserved for politicians and the Hollywood elite. Its power is just as easily harnessed against ordinary, run-of-the-mill people, such as the now-infamous Justine Sacco.

Sacco, whose life was upturned within hours after issuing a badly-worded tweet, is the poster-child for the efficacy of cancel culture. Swift and deadly, its power can mobilize millions in minutes, with the internet's unparalleled ability as an outrage-catalyst culling careers and reputations as a matter of routine. With Sacco, she lost her job, was shamed by her family, and even harassed at the airport by those eager to take her picture and upload it to the mob. It was death by thousands of almost instantaneous cuts.

Fortunately for Wynn, she never trended to the top of Twitter like Sacco did. But that didn't make her cancelation any less brutal. "I could barely get out of my bed for a month," she recounted in her video "Canceling." which she released in response to the backlash. She went on to describe the indescribable pain of what it felt like to be canceled: "I've been harassed by Nazis, I've been harassed by terfs, I've been stalked, I've been doxxed, I've been threatened, I've been sexually assaulted, and the pain of being canceled, of being totally trashed by other trans people online, has been more difficult for me to cope with than all the rest of it combined."

The cause of this suffering? In her video, "Opulence," Wynn had featured Buck Angel—a transgender porn star and activist—in a voice-over role for a John Waters quote she included. Through this, she was canceled because Angel himself had already been canceled. It was guilt by association.

"You can't cancel a tranpa," were the first words Buck Angel ever exchanged with me. It was a lazy Friday afternoon in quarantine that Buck and I then talked to each other, having been previously messaging on Instagram. He was energetic and amiable, ranting immediately about his anxieties on not being able to work out.

"I'm a gym guy and even though I have a home gym it's not the same, you know that," he told me casually, with the sort of confidence that made forget how I really didn't know that. He was also, right off the bat, brash and prideful. "I've got that tranny voice" he told me moments after we exchanged greetings, without even a hint of self-deprecation. To him, it was a statement of fact.

Angel, the self-described "tranpa," is often considered a pioneer in the transgender community. He was one of the first people to start hormone therapy to transition from a woman to a man, after years of being told he was just a "gay woman." Despite having supportive parents, Angel described a difficult adolescence to me, largely stemming from his gender dysphoria.

"I was suicidal and tried to commit suicide a couple of times" he said, matter-of-factly. "I was also an alcoholic and a drug addict. And I was always male." It wasn't until later, with the approval of his psychiatrist, that he began transitioning from female to male.

"When I transitioned, there was no one else like me in Los Angeles," he recalled. "I was the first for my hormone doctor, I was the first for my chest surgery, I didn't have any guidance whatsoever." Following his transition, he sought out and connected with other trans males who were starting to come out, forming a small but tight-knit community. He described how difficult it was to even find other trans men back then, without platforms like Twitter or online forums that exist today. Instead, he depended on Yahoo and AOL groups, finding both friends and lovers over personals.

"We always supported each other; we always came out for each other. We were all just so about helping each other," he said, a hint of melancholy in his voice. "It was a whole different world."

Nowadays, Angel describes a vastly different community. "I do think, on some level, there's an ideology now, an agenda" he said, "which I find scary for a person such as myself, who went through a lot of pain and anguish to get where I am now." That fear stems from what he sees as an ideological split. Angel considers himself as a "transsexual," with his gender identity stemming from a diagnosable mental illness. He believes that as a transsexual, he suffers from gender dysphoria—which can only be alleviated when you want to pursue and undergo medical intervention, such as hormones and surgery. To him, this gender dysphoria is a key aspect of being transsexual, a contentious belief within the transgender community of today.

Buck Angel, in his own words. Image courtesy of @buckangel on Instagram

"Being transgender is an identity choice, while being a transsexual like me is not a choice," Angel said, echoing the sentiment at the core of the controversy—self-determination.

To many in the transgender community, their identity is not a choice. They also feel no need to transition, or perhaps identify as non-binary. To Angel, he believes this identity is valid, but it doesn't make them necessarily transsexual. "We have two different ideas of what it means to be a trans person," he said, "and that's where cancel culture comes in." On Twitter, many take to calling him a "transmedicalist," a person who believes being transgender is contingent on transitioning. The term itself carries a negative connotation, often used in a derogatory fashion. Many consider his views to be damaging, discriminatory, or even hateful—and have even called him transphobic.

"Can you believe that?" he asked me, laughing. "It's ridiculous."

"These people are so upset and mean and angry and coming after me, and I thought 'Wow, these people are shutting down voices in our community,'" Angel said. Though others may come after him for being discriminatory, he says he doesn't believe other people's identities are invalid. Instead, it's that his own identity is being invalidated, which he must then defend—not just for himself, but for the other people who think like him.

"I have a lot of young people who look up to me, who follow me, and who call me tranpa," he said. Yet despite this, the people attacking him are largely on the younger side, showing a prominent generational gap which Angel acknowledges himself. "I'm 57, I've been around for a long time, and some of the things I think may be called old-fashioned."

Certainly, an ideological difference exists between Angel and the younger generation causing conflict. But it might not be just differences in opinion leading to the Twitter attacks on Angel.

Political scientist and feminist, Jo Freeman, says canceling—or "trashing" as she refers to it—is a phenomenon particularly exclusive to the younger generation.

"People between the ages of 15 to 25 gets an urge to fight, probably something in our evolutionary genetic history," Freeman said to me as we chatted one day. "We now know that the judgement center in the brain matures in the mid-20s, so I think there's a correlation between those."

Freeman, once a prominent figure in the women's liberation movement from the 1980s, had been canceled herself in her community. She even wrote an article on it, titled "TRASHING: The Dark Side of Sisterhood," which described trashing as "a vicious act of character assassination which amounts to psychological rape." Wynn liked this description so much she included it in her "canceling" video, saying that "[Freeman] describes it better than I ever could."

Jo Freeman, on the generation gap within "trashing." Image courtesy of the Wilson Center.

As Freeman experienced it, she was excluded from meetings and mail-listings, shut out of discussions, and often ignored. At a certain point she even questioned whether she really existed, confessing to her roommate that "I was a figment of my own imagination." It was this thought that eventually led to her departure from the movement. It became too much to bear.

One thing she realizes now that she didn't back then was that age was a huge component of the "trashing."

"It was obvious that trashing took place in the younger branch of the movement," she said. "For most people, it falls away," she said, before catching herself; "but for a small minority it doesn't."

Lindsay Ellis, a friend of Wynn and fellow YouTuber, agrees. "Fuck them kids" she laughed to me after I told her what Freeman had said.

The "kids" Ellis referred to are the ones who had canceled Natalie Wynn and Buck Angel, before directing their wrath at Ellis herself. Over the years, Ellis has built up a sizable subscriber base on YouTube and Patreon, consistently being one of the top earners on the latter. She's also close friends with Natalie Wynn. Due to her association, she was swept up when Wynn was canceled and demanded to apologize, despite having no involvement in the video that got Wynn canceled in the first place.

"Apologize," she told me in disbelief. "Apologize for what? For being friends with Natalie?" Not only did Ellis refuse to apologize, but she refused to even engage with it at all. "I blocked them," she said simply. "You're getting mad, and spending hours and hours of your day being furious...at a YouTuber...for using a voiceover...of a trans guy...doing a John Waters impression," she recounted, drawing out every word as if even she couldn't swallow the ridiculousness of it all.

Lindsay Ellis on why communities hurt themselves with cancel culture. Image courtesy of @namebrandlindsay on Instagram.

Yet that's not to say she can't at all sympathize. "When you're a teenager, these things can seem like life and death, I get that," she said.

And in some cases, it is. In January of 2020, Wilson Gavin, a 21-year old Brisbane student, took his own life after being canceled online.

Gavin, president of the University of Queensland Liberal National Club, had led a protest against a Brisbane library event in which drag queens read books to children. A video of him and other protestors chanting "drag queens are not for kids" quickly circulated online. This drew immediate and widespread condemnation, even causing Liberal National politicians to state that the club has not been affiliated with the party for over a month.

Three days later, Gavin died by suicide. Social media quickly blew up over the news, but this time sparking the question: Did cancel culture kill Wilson Gavin?

It's impossible to say for sure. A conservative, Gavin identified as a gay male, even though he campaigned against the legalization of same-sex marriage in 2017. Studies suggest that LGBTQ+ youth are at a disproportionately higher risk for mental illness and suicide than their counterparts. Some blamed the Liberal National Party, saying that the homophobia within the party contributed to the tragedy.

Wilson Gavin, image courtesy of his family.

Regardless of whether or not his sexual identity was a factor in the tragedy, it is true that his death immediately followed a Twitter firestorm. And it wasn't the first time something like this happened.

About two years before Gavin's suicide, a porn star who went by August Ames had also taken her own life following an online firestorm. Ames, who was 23 years old at the time, had tweeted about her refusal to work with a male porn star who had previously done gay porn. The tweet drew sharp and immediate criticism, with one person telling her to either apologize or take a cyanide pill: two days later, she hanged herself.

Unlike Gavin, Ames' was not known to be part of the LGBTQ+ community. However, Ames described a troubled adolescence: she said a male family member molested her and she sought refuge in foster homes. According to Vice, she was "diagnosed as bipolar, and suffered from depressive episodes."

August Ames. Image courtesy of @msmaplefever on Instagram.

Meanwhile, the person who tweeted at Ames to take the cyanide pill—gay porn actor Jaxton Wheeler—was quickly canceled as well. Despite Ames having never actually seen the tweet, as she had already died when it was written, Wheeler was quickly blacklisted from the industry and attacked online.

"I had anticipated the blowback, but I thought it would subside...Some models had literally threatened to kick her ass, yet they were still invited to the awards...There was so much hypocrisy and bullshit." Wheeler said, in an interview with Sapiosexual.

Both Gavin and Ames' deaths had prompted a discussion on Twitter about the importance of mental health awareness, and the role of cancel culture in exacerbating these issues.

From those who have been canceled, their testimonials on the impact of it on their mental health are terrifying: months spent at home, unable to get out of bed, constantly googling their own name. It's the same story over and over again, whether it's Justine Sacco or Natalie Wynn.

In an interview with Rolling Stone, journalist Jon Ronson—who produced a podcast on August Ames—said, "August's entire life had become about that one tweet. That's clearly wrong...Twitter tends not to care about a wider context."

Despite all the toxic facets of cancel culture, I still wondered about the benefits it brings. Without it, how would we be able to hold people accountable? It's easier than ever for blatantly bigoted content to spread across the internet, with new platforms like Tik Tok blazing the path. And wasn't it cancel culture that brought down predators such as film producer Harvey Weinstein, the Hollywood behemoth accused and convicted of sexually assaulting several women?

"To say cancel culture took down Harvey Weinstein is to do a massive disservice to the journalists who worked long and hard to expose the truth," Ellis said to me.

"If there is a system that depends on people being good people and using it in good faith, that system will be abused," she said, "and call-out culture is no exception."

Ellis herself personally knows people who have abused it. Though she refused to name names, she told me about two people in her life who had lied about the people they had called out. "Sometimes, women lie."

Despite this, she emphasized that it's not her intention to demonize cancel culture.

"The broader trend is still don't believe victims, don't believe women. When you have people taking advantage of this new, left-leaning system..." she trailed off, audibly conflicted. "It's just a complicated thing. The truth is people in left leaning spaces are more vulnerable because they tend to get targeted and they're the ones that can get hurt."

To Ellis, an example came readily to mind.

"If you want to remove someone, like Natalie Wynn, from an online space...they succeeded."