How Trans Activism Defeated Itself

On civil disobedience and Peru's new transgender law

A man who is a man, wrote Henry David Thoreau, has a bone in his back which you cannot pass your hand through. In other words, he stands up for his beliefs and is brave. But also, he stands straight in his beliefs and is decent. Put another way, how you choose to fight matters just as much as what you choose to fight.

This line about having a backbone comes from the greatest work of protest literature ever written—Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience.” In July 1846, Thoreau was jailed for refusing to pay six years of back taxes because he didn’t want to support slavery or the Mexican–American War. The next morning, his aunt bailed him out against his wishes, but that single night in Concord Jail changed the course of human history.

Thoreau went on to give a series of lectures that he later developed into his essay, arguing that good citizens have a moral duty to disobey unjust laws. He also said how you disobey matters as much as why. He was therefore appalled that while the United States preached freedom, it practiced slavery.

Not to make the same mistake himself, Thoreau argued that if you struggle for peace and justice then you must be peaceful and just in your struggle.

Mahatma Gandhi later credited Thoreau’s essay as being “the chief cause of the abolition of slavery in America” and described Thoreau himself as “one of the greatest and most moral men America has produced.” It was Thoreau who inspired Gandhi’s own brand of nonviolent resistance known as satyagraha and helped lead the people of India to liberation. It was Thoreau who influenced the nonviolence philosophy of Leo Tolstoy. It was also Thoreau that inspired Martin Luther King Jr., who in his autobiography described reading the essay multiple times and becoming fully committed to “the idea of refusing to cooperate with an evil system.” Indeed, to hear King tell it, the civil rights movement itself was the flowering of Thoreau’s philosophy:

The teachings of Thoreau came alive in our civil rights movement; indeed, they are more alive than ever before. Whether expressed in a sit-in at lunch counters, a freedom ride into Mississippi, a peaceful protest in Albany, Georgia, a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, these are outgrowths of Thoreau’s insistence that evil must be resisted and that no moral man can patiently adjust to injustice.

In April 1963, King was also jailed for civil disobedience, and that experience led him to write what is perhaps the second-greatest work of protest literature, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In this essay, King was responding to another open letter titled “A Call for Unity,” written just days before by eight white clergymen. Their letter has been maligned in the decades since as a racist tract that opposed the civil rights movement coming to their neck of the Alabama woods, but that’s not true. Yes, one of the signatories was Bishop Charles Carpenter, who in 2015, celebrated Jefferson Davis’ birthday by consecrating the mace of the University of the South to the memory of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But another signatory was Methodist bishop Nolan Bailey Harman, who spoke out against Governor George Wallace’s notorious attempts to stop black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama. Another signatory was the Jewish rabbi Milton Grafman. Another was the Baptist minister Earl Stallings, a civil rights activist whom King praised in his response letter for opening his church to black worshippers.

Nor did their letter oppose civil rights progress. Rather, it criticized the involvement of “outsiders,” a not-so-subtle reference to King, while urging activists to go through the courts rather than the streets. In a sense, they were arguing what Thoreau had argued. They wanted the methods to be as moral as the message. In his letter, King replied that the courts may never dispense justice, and so the people had to take “direct action.” And yes, he was an “outsider,” he admitted, famously adding that it should not matter because “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

His universal sense of compassion is inspiring. But above all, we celebrate and honor him for his enlightened methods, his Thoreauvian dedication to nonviolence, and Christ-like love of humanity. In the face of unspeakable injustice, he showed spine in both senses of the word. He stood up for his beliefs and stood tall in himself.

But it is easy to forget such simple truths. Pro-Palestine organizers, BLM protesters, and trans activists often cite the Haitian Revolution—in which black Haitian slaves rose up and slaughtered their masters—as evidence for why harsh methods are needed to overcome harsh oppression. But unlike Harvard University students in keffiyeh hanging out with friends in North Face tents, Haitians themselves were literally enslaved and brutalized, and still their response was not entirely justified.

No doubt, a proportional response would have been justified, but contrary to popular misconception, that is not the same as causing an amount of harm equal to what was inflicted upon you, which is a depraved interpretation of the phrase. Rather, a proportional response is one where you only do what is necessary to achieve your goal. In Haiti’s case, the slaughter of as many white masters as needed to free themselves.

But even after slavery was abolished and France withdrew, the ex-slave Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared all French people barbarians and ordered their total slaughter. Most Haitians outside the capital were content to be free, not to mention they were not psychopaths, so they had no interest in murdering their neighbors. Dessalines therefore traveled from town to town to ensure that his genocidal decree was carried out. Ultimately, they massacred almost every single white person in the country.

There was, of course, absolutely no need for this. The black people of Haiti already had their freedom. They ran the country now too. Any belligerent whites were either dead, fled to Europe, or could be individually picked off if they started trouble. Dessalines was now an emperor and could have chosen peace. But he chose genocidal vengeance and even ended up killing whites who had supported the revolution.

We see the same thing with Gaza and useful idiots in the West arguing that the oppressive circumstances of the Gazan people justify absolutely anything, never mind that before October 7, Gaza was home to fine dining restaurants, luxury hotels, and beach resorts that would make your mouth water. Still, even if we pretend that it was in fact an “open-air prison” or a concentration camp, this would only justify whatever means required to break free. Not even the Holocaust justifies killing all Germans.

People may scoff at arguments for respectability, but respectability and proportionality are not merely morally righteous, but practically necessary. Otherwise, you risk alienating everyone and losing everything. Consider trans activism.