Anyone who’s walked through campus in the past two weeks is, thanks to several posters, at least vaguely familiar with “Are We All Fundamentalists?” a conference being held at the Tang from September 27 to 29 to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Salmagundi Magazine. There’s an impressive lineup: philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah of NYU, historian Orlando Patterson of Harvard, acclaimed novelist Claire Messud, and many more accomplished and esteemed professors, authors, journalists, and thinkers. Reading through the speaker list, however, my eyes were drawn to a seemingly much less illustrious name: Wesley Yang. Mr. Yang is a writer, columnist, and editor currently working for Tablet Magazine and Esquire. He is also an extreme, vicious, obsessive, and myopic anti-transgender extremist.
I am aware this is a serious accusation, so let us look at Yang's publications. Firstly, there is the matter of his essays. His Substack, Year Zero (history buffs will recognize this as a presumable reference to Pol Pot's genocidal rule in Cambodia, as Yang often writes about an overly fanatical left and seems to be drawing an equivalence), lays bare many of his personal views. Yang, who is not an expert or healthcare professional specializing in transgender health, medicine, or sociology, writes intensely transphobic screeds based entirely on “junk science.” In his most recent article, "What Did You Do During the Transgender Social Contagion?" Yang cites a tweet from user @FactApparatchik that asserts “trans madness is a stress test for civilization itself,” while asking readers to question if they “participate[d] in the propagation of corrupted science in support of this contagion." The rest of the article is written by Jenny Poyer Ackerman, an anti-transgender activist and notable proponent of "ROGD," or "Rapid-Onset Gender Dysphoria," a pseudoscientific hypothesis that claims that gender dysphoria is a social contagion brought about by peer influence. The ROGD hypothesis was borne from a 2018 study by Dr. Lisa Littman, the results of which have since been generally rejected by the scientific community. Ackerman goes on to lionize "gender-exploratory therapy," a code word for conversion therapy. Another of Yang’s articles, "The LGB and the T," opens with an extremely homophobic and transphobic meme, portraying a grotesque caricature of gender transition alongside a reference to the North American Man/Boy Love Association, or NAMBLA, a small pro-pedophile organization often falsely claimed by homophobes and transphobes to represent widespread LGBT+ opinion. Yang opens by writing that, "As an account of a temporal sequence, no one can deny that the LGBTQIA+ movement has followed exactly the trajectory depicted in the reactionary shitpost meme posted above."
Yang's Twitter reflects a more deep-seated transphobia, less concerned with appearing intellectual. A pinned tweet calls for its audience to be “normal” instead of “a covid hysteric… a gender cultist… a racial monomaniac… or a frenzied partisan.” He frequently retweets @libsoftiktok, an account that led a harassment campaign against medical professionals, including bomb threats directed at Boston Children's Hospital. In a recent tweet, posted on September 21, he stated that being transgender is "properly classified as a psychiatric disorder." I could go on, but it would only serve to further bloat this article with more of Yang’s transphobia.
One point I want to make very clear is that transphobia has been Yang’s primary output for the past several years. Wesley Yang is not an expert on an unrelated topic who happens to hold a few reactionary views. He is a professional transphobe. At the time of publishing this article (and likely as you’re reading it), Yang’s Twitter nigh-exclusively consists of transphobic rhetoric. In Year Zero, the first twelve articles are about transgender issues. Furthermore, for the past several years, transphobia, delivered in an increasingly degenerated and artless manner, has been all that Yang produces. He has not written an article for Tablet Magazine since 2019, and it would seem that he has abandoned the essay as a whole. The most recent essay (“Stunning and Brave New World) written exclusively by Yang on Year Zero dates back to February 2023. The subheading reads "How Gender is Lived Today, Part 1." There is no part two.
This was well over a full year ago, meaning that almost every student at Skidmore has written more essays in the past year than Wesley Yang. Indeed, Yang is no longer an essayist and can only generously still be described as a writer. His profession and new trade is complaining about transgender people on Twitter. He acts neither in the tradition of James Baldwin nor that of William F. Buckley. His intellectual output is his 80,927 tweets, all indistinguishable from those any faceless poster sends out. If this is what Wesley Yang wishes to do with his time, it is his right. I am not, however, of the opinion that Skidmore College has any obligation to grant him a platform where he is not challenged for his extremist views.
So, why was Mr. Yang invited? Well, Yang was at one time a highly respected essayist who did not publicly share these views. His 2008 essay on the Virginia Tech shooting, for example, achieved widespread acclaim. As confirmed by independent correspondence with Peg Boyers of Salmagundi Magazine, those who invited him were genuinely unaware of his current activities. Additionally, with the event merely a day away, it would be impossible to disinvite Yang at this stage. The ideal course of action, as I see it, would be for students to make their presence known at this event so that, in the spirit of Salmagundi, his views are challenged and counterbalanced.
Some may ask why I care or suspect “cancel culture” at work. My answer? I see this as a matter of our student body’s dignity. Wesley Yang is a man who holds transgender people in contempt. He views them as mentally deranged and pedophilic threats to Western civilization. As any student attending Skidmore will tell you, it is virtually impossible to go a day without seeing someone Yang would deem such a threat. To those who contend that taking action against Yang would be damaging to an environment of free speech and mutual respect, I would argue that to promote the view that a substantial number of our students are somehow the product of “bizarre experimental practices” in the magical-realist conception of society dreamed up by a Twitter addict is far more damaging to such an environment. While I do not blame any individual other than Mr. Yang himself, and as it is logistically impossible to remove him from the event, the fact remains that his presence ought to be challenged by the people he attacks and their allies.
The Skidmore Pride Alliance, representing many of the people Wesley Yang directly attacks, will protest his presence on September 27th at the 7:00 pm conference start. You can find more updates at @skidmore.pride.alliance on Instagram. Our work and this article are a matter of upholding the respect and dignity Skidmore affords to its students. Mr. Yang will speak at Skidmore; that much is set in stone. To protest his extremist and hateful views is, in my eyes, our duty as members of a community that includes a number of people targeted by Yang.