Transcript | Ep. 84: How to Get Canceled with Natalie Wynn
Cristen: Hey friends, this our last episode of the season, and we wanted to let y’all know there’s EXTRA UNLADYLIKE to keep on keepin’ y’all company over on our Patreon.
Caroline: Yeah, we’ve got bonus episodes over there on Cristen FINALLY watching Dirty Dancing, a two-part Love Is Blind recap, a deep dive on Flo Jo??!? And more, if ya can believe it
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Caroline: And don’t forget you can find our bonus Pep Talks Album — which would probably come in hand these days! — over on Stitcher Premium. Now let’s get to the episode!
[Stinger]
Natalie: it's kind of unprecedented that you would read 2,000 negative things written about yourself in a week. That's an unusual situation that not a lot of people have been through, I don't think.
[Theme music]
Caroline: Hey y’all, and welcome to Unladylike, where we find out what happens when women break the rules and get canceled. I’m Caroline.
Cristen: I’m Cristen. And that was Natalie Wynn. She’s the trans creator and host of the popular YouTube channel Contrapoints. Her videos debunk dicey political and social topics like gender identity, wealth and fascism. And the whole point of them is to offer thorough but accessible counterarguments — or CONTRAPOINTS, if you will — to the white nationalism, toxic masculinity and anti-feminism that thrives online.
Caroline: ContraPoints videos are great, and they’re why I originally wanted to have Natalie on the show. Like, the first one I watched is called “Gender Critical,” and in 33 minutes, she just effortlessly explains and dismantles transphobic arguments … all while sporting elaborate looks, moody lighting and endless wigs
[Youtube Contrapoints CLIP]
Natalie: My clothes, makeup, voice. None of this makes me a woman. No trans woman thinks that femininity and womanhood are the same. Rather, we’re using a cultural language of feminine signifiers to prompt others to see us for what we are. Sometimes I get the impression that my cis girlfriends dont really understand why I'm presenting in such a meticulously feminine way. Like they think I'm wearing ombre lips at 11 am because I'm playing some kind of clout game. Which I am. But also, if one person calls me sir, that's gonna ruin my day. So, I’m desperately throwing glitter spaghetti at the wall in hopes the light catches some glimmer of womanhood.
Cristen: Natalie’s videos are basically like watching your coolest, smartest friend defend her dissertation at a cocktail party…. they're packed with information and nuance but without all the academic speak.
Caroline: Yeah, and we hear from so many unladies asking for advice on how to deal with the misogynistic bros and alt-right uncles in their own lives, so I thought she’d be the perfect person to come on the show and offer some guidance. But then ..Natalie got canceled.
Cristen: It happened after a string of online infractions — like associating with other canceled people and firing off some ill-advised Twitter threads. The internet mobs came for her so hard that Natalie had to take a months-long mental health break from YouTube and has actually left Twitter altogether.
Caroline: But the anger wasn't from the folks you might expect to come for a transgender, feminist, progressive YouTuber. …
Cristen: So today, we’re definitely going to hear Natalie’s canceling story, but first she’s gonna break down why she started her YouTube channel, and her proven tactics for debunking toxic ideas.
Caroline: All to find out: What happens when you get canceled by your own community?
[Stinger]
Natalie: I've always kind of liked YouTube. I like the chaos of I don't even mostly watch politics. I watch a lot of makeup videos. I watch cooking videos. I watch videos of competitive eating. I just, you know,I like the kind of like the way that it's so D.I.Y. and the way that these personalities that would never make it. Not not any chance of making it in conventional media just got millions of followers on YouTube.
Cristen: Natalie has joked that she failed her way into YouTube stardom. After dabbling as a musician, dropping out of a philosophy PhD program, and attempting to make it as a fiction writer, Natalie pivoted to video.
Caroline: This was in 2015, soon after she'd moved to Baltimore, and the same year the city's Black Lives Matter movement rose up in response to police killing Freddie Gray. And online, Gamergate trolling and harassment was in full swing.
Natalie: I think that kind of like watching that situation and the Black Lives Matter movement and also just the incredibly ignorant response from most people on the Internet that kind of sparked, I think, my early interest in trying to talk about these topics on YouTube, especially once I saw that a lot of the politics that was going on on YouTube was like, I mean, ignorant at best and like, boy, like, you know, sinister, like fascist propaganda at worst.
Cristen: No thanks to the power of algorithms, the more videos Natalie watched on Youtube about feminism. Racism, etc..the more crazy shit she saw, and the deeper she got into the radicalized rabbit holes of YouTube.
Natalie: My recommended videos feed on YouTube was suddenly full of these videos with titles like Feminism is Cancer. Black Lives Matter Is a Racist Terrorist Organization, you know. Like these are the talking points that were sort of growing on YouTube in 2015. I knew enough to know that was bad.
Caroline: Natalie decided to launch her own YouTube channel, Contrapoints, as a nuanced entertaining counter to all the right-wing propaganda she saw on the internet — and as a way to understand WHY these movements were bubbling up in the first place.
Cristen: Her first video was on incels (aka involuntary celibates), and it’s been watched more than 3 million times.
[Youtube Contrapoints CLIP]
Natalie: In this video I don’t want to mock incels or lectures or even sympathize with them. I just want to understand who they are and why they’re like this. To start with ...
Cristen: Over 35 minutes, Natalie deconstructs incel misogyny step-by step..grappling with their ideas, and even offering some empathy. And that’s the key to her videos, and a real part of her success.
Caroline: So in your videos, you confront a lot of toxic ideas around things like incels, for instance. So what is your goal, and how do you approach debunking these arguments?
Natalie: So while it is anthropological, I guess in some sense that is I'm making a video to inform like a general public about this unusual like online subculture. I'm also very aware that the people from that subculture are gonna watch the video. So I try to make a video that has like an escape hatch or like a life preserver and a rope thrown or whatever metaphor I want to use like that basically allows someone who's watching those videos as an incel to not feel like I'm simply just antagonizing them. But I'm also like me at least making the effort to understand where they're coming from. My natural inclination when I'm reading this stuff is to be like, oh, wow, this is like these people are horrible, impossible to get along with their incredibly misogynistic. But they're also it's really, really lonely and unhappy. And I can try to make a video that doesn't just caricature them, but because that's pointless to me. So I try to give people, you know, three dimensions when I'm when I'm describing them and when I'm describing these like toxic online subcultures.
Cristen: Do you get the kinds of comments along the lines of like, Oh, yeah. I mean, Natalie Wynn's pretty liberal, but she's not like all those other liberals. Like, I feel like that's a common trope among like, I don't know, in like conservative comment culture
Natalie: Oh, definitely. Like that's I mean not not like other liberals is definitely kind of I guess it's part of the brand. the one I hear the most actually is people say they don't feel judged by me. They don't feel like. So I got a comment from recently from one who's that like I was the only like transgender person, they could stand to watch because I didn't make “cis” feel like a dirty word. I don't know that know I would claim that about myself, but I'm glad they feel that way because that is exactly what I sort of go for I guess when I make the videos, I mean, I noticed early on that if you're going to talk about especially the social justice kinds of issues, people are so defensive about it. And if you're gonna get through to them, you have to make a lot of rhetorical concessions that might seem totally unreasonable. Like you just can't say the word transphobia most of the time. It just it just people hate it. People hate being accused of anything phobia. And so it just it just shuts their brains started, shuts, shuts their ears down. They stop listening to you. And same with like calling and calling people racist. You know, you can't do sexist, misogynist. You know, it's there's a there's it's certainly a time and a place for for for using these words. But it's not when you're trying to persuade a general audience, in my opinion, it just causes people to shut down.
Cristen: I think that's such an interesting and really important point in terms of like making the rhetorical concessions. And it comes up a lot, even just in terms of like, you know, questions we get of like, should I call myself a feminist? Will that be too alienating? I mean, just even as like basic as that. Is it more valuable to make some rhetorical concessions if you are going to get through to a person vs. using the kinds of words that, will, to use a another term, trigger, trigger a lot of like hyper conservative or like red pill types?
Natalie: Well, it's always it's always a give and take, it's a question of I mean, you you lose something when you make the rhetorical concessions often. But for me, it's it's about I guess I try to sort of strategize when I'm writing a script like how I can make rhetorical concessions without making ideological concessions to each of my own views. I think for me, like part of why why I don't feel like I'm totally conceding everything I do. I don't feel like I'm giving up that much is that I kind of have a very sort of individualistic, humanistic approach to all of these topics where I am not sort of like describing like a sociologist a system, but I'm sort of engaging with it at the more human level. So I'm often just talking from my through my own perspective, from my own experience and that way that I feel like I'm being true to my own voice and my own ideas, but also not alienating everyone with all this like heavy, you know, sociology talk.
Caroline: Her approach has paid off. HUNDREDS of people have reached out to her privately or spoken publicly about how Contrapoints videos basically dismantled their alt-right ideas
Natalie: if you look at my like the subreddit about Contrapoints, it used to be this trope where you would regularly see people posting like I used to be alt right. I used to be red pilled, you know, that like I heard from hundreds and hundreds of people who had sort of been drawn into those movements, drawn into that kind of content, and then found my content at least somewhat helpful and their path to getting out of it.
Caroline: One of these people is Caleb Cain, whose experience of getting radicalized by an endless stream of alt-right YouTube videos was profiled in The New York Times. He said two things pulled him out of it: The 2019 white nationalist terrorist attack in New Zealand … and watching Natalie’s Contrapoints videos.
Cristen: Since launching Contrapoints in 2016, a lot has changed for Natalie too.
Natalie: When I first started this channel, like I had not transitioned, I was presenting as male, question mark. I guess, the persona that I had at the beginning. It was very much a persona that anticipated the harassment and anticipated the criticism. So for being a transvestite, for being. You know, though, as I would say, they would perceive me as gay. So I kind of just leaned into this idea of this ultimate degenerate beta cuck. I've been called a faggot probably 12,000 times. That - that sort of stuff didn't actually bother me as much because I was so ready for it in a way, you know. In a way it's gotten worse since I transitioned because I'm sort of being more honest about myself, about myself online instead of like loading up this pre satirized version of it. And so I would say that I in terms of harassment. You know, honestly, like right-wing harassment is not really a problem in my life anymore. Like, sure, it’s on 4chan. But I you know, just don't look at 4chan. Problem solved.
Cristen: But when harassment is coming from inside the house, suddenly the problem is you.
Caroline: When we come back, Natalie tells us how she got canceled.
Cristen: Don’t go away
[Midroll ad 1]
Natalie: When I was like living as a gender-questioning man, I wasn't really considered part of any community. I wasn't representing anyone. As a trans woman, I'm treated as a representative of a community that is very marginalized and that has very little representation. So that's I think that's the kind of essential context for why this happens.
Cristen: We’re back with YouTuber Natalie Wynn, and the “this” she’s referring to is getting canceled—or “super fucking canceled” as she put it. Things started snowballing back in 2017 ...
Caroline: And for her, the center of that snowball is her gender identity. In fact, Natalie’s first in a string of cancellations came about a month after she transitioned. She was interviewed for New York Magazine by this guy who’d garnered a transphobic reputation, which Natalie says she wasn’t fully aware of at the time
Natalie: The author was Jesse Singal, a journalist who has written a lot of articles about trans children, which I honestly don't agree with myself. I think that they don't help trans people. But he's kind of a treated like a supervillain on trans Twitter because it tends to be how Twitter essentializes. If we disagree with someone, they're literally Satan triple Hitler, you know. And so that was my first canceling.
Caroline: So if you are who you hang out with, and you hang out with a triple Hitler, it doesn’t matter if it’s just for an interview. Them’s the rules of getting canceled.
Cristen: Then in late 2017, Natalie agreed to debate this conservative YouTuber and trans woman who’d done things like wear blackface and support alt-right positions. And similar to the canceling-by-association that happened after the magazine interview, Leftist Twitter called her out. They basically saw Natalie’s decision to debate this woman as legitimizing her ideas — even though Natalie’s intention was to share a progressive point of view with a conservative audience.
Caroline: After that cancellation, things were relatively quiet for a couple of years. But one day, Natalie fired off a hasty Twitter thread about how, sometimes, she just doesn’t want a roomful of cis women performatively stating their pronouns simply because she’s there. She was talking about how it can make her feel singled out and self-conscious, which … fair!
Cristen: But a tweetstorm-slash-yet-another-cancellation happened when folks interpreted that thread as Natalie criticizing the ENTIRE PRACTICE of stating your gender pronouns.
Caroline: Then a few months later, the big one hit. The straw that broke the cancel’s back.
Cristen: So last October, Natalie published a 49-minute-long video called Opulence, dissecting why society is so obsessed with wealth and power. And everything might’ve been fine had it not been for 10 seconds of voiceover ....
Caroline: Natalie cast trans activist and adult performer Buck Angel to read a John Waters quote. But Angel comes with some baggage ...
Natalie: He has a kind of freewheeling, unrestrained social media presence. And he said a lot of things that people find insensitive towards non-binary people or just kind of like old school, like transsexual takes on topics in general. But he's one of these people who trans Twitter has decided is like literally Satan out to destroy trans people, the bane of everything good. So that because I used his voice in a 48 many a minute video for 10 seconds, people basically said, oh, you platformed Buck Angel and that therefore I must endorse everything he's ever tweeted and therefore by association, I also hate non-binary people. And also this kind of compounded snowballed with the controversy over the pronouns tweet. And it just exploded.
Cristen: Natalie was used to getting harassed by anti-feminists and TERFs — which stands for trans-exclusionary radical feminists. But, these cancellations felt different. They were coming from folks inside her own community.
Natalie: When it comes from Nazis or TERFs or whatever, it's like, OK, well, obviously they hate me. Like, that's not no mystery there, you know? And so it's easier to kind of write it off. But what it comes from other people, you know, representing themselves as, you know, transgender people or representing themselves as, you know, leftists. It's it's, I think, much more painful. like, you know, to be - to be told by like other people representing themselves as activists that you hate trans people. That kind of stuff is sort of destroying your sort of moral sense of yourself. It actually is deep cuts deeper and it hurts more. And it just sort of leaves you, at the end of the day, paralyzed under the weight of this. You know, the fact that there's these hundreds of people who think that you're a horrible, horrible person along that, you know, and then exactly. That you're horrible to exactly the causes that you most believe in. So it's had a much more lasting and much more painful effect than any other kind of harassment has.
Caroline: But this kind of ingroup harassment isn’t new, and social media didn’t invent it. During the heyday of second-wave feminism in the 70s, activist and writer Jo Freeman identified a very similar-sounding phenomenon she called “trashing.” It was basically a form of “social exile within the women’s movement,” as Natalie puts it … and a way to keep women in line with the movement messaging.
Natalie: She says that it's psychologically harder on her than her up than her having to be raised in a sexist society. Because I guess there's a quotation where she says, you know, she never allowed anyone to judge her but herself, but because she needed feminism, she needed the women's movement. She's sort of made herself vulnerable to them. And when they said she was worthless, she believed it. And that's that's I think is exactly how this works. Right. That's why it hurts more when it comes from your comrades, because you sort of grant this group of people a kind of moral authority because you trust them or because you need them or because, you know, you sort of need the solidarity of this movement to get by through through whatever the social issue you're struggling through, wherever it whether it's patriarchy, sexism or or on my case, on transphobia.
Cristen: It also seems like there's an element of irredeemability to it. Like once canceled, always canceled.
Natalie: Yeah no forgiveness.. It's one of the most sadistic elements of it, in my opinion, because I think that this is often really bad faith. Like the goal of canceling is often not criticizing a particular thing a person did. It's rather building a case, stacking up evidence of a person's essential badness. So that's one reason for the no forgiveness thing, is that they need to build a case that over to, you know, you're a bad person. And the way they do that is by collecting tweets from several years, usually, that sort of show what a horrible, horrible person you are, and that that means that, you know, tweets that you may have clarified or tweets that you may have had a more nuanced version of later on or tweets that you may have straight up apologized for. Well, they don't care because that's not the point that the point is not whether you've learned. The point is to demonstrate to as many people as possible that you are morally irredeemable.
Cristen: In January of 2020, after a three-month hiatus - Natalie decided to do what she does best - make a Youtube video. She published a feature-film-length Contrapoints video — by far her longest ever — addressing the whole ordeal. It’s called … “Canceling.”
[Contrapoints CLIP]
Natalie: OK, look. This video is about canceling, also known as cancel culture. Formerly known as call-out culture. And I know you kids know all about this, but before we dive in I have to explain the basics to my fellow boomers.. So listen up oldies.. [fade down]
Cristen: And these fellow boomers are gonna take a quick break. When we come back, Natalie reckons with the canceling she’s called for in the past.
Caroline: Don’t go away
[Midroll ad 2]
Cristen: We’re back with chronically canceled Youtuber Natalie Wynn.
Caroline: So how has your like really multifaceted situation changed how you have viewed calling out versus cancelation versus criticism?
Natalie: Oh, it's definitely changed my behavior online. I think that. I mean, there was a time I used to participate in these call outs on Twitter. You know, I can remember, you know, back in as late as like early 2018 like you know, some other YouTubers would say something that I thought was, you know, bigoted, dangerous, whatever. And I would just go in on them. I would do a whole Twitter thread about it. But I actually learned from doing that, that I need to stop doing that there is this case. It was this it was a lesbian YouTuber who said some transphobic stuff. And I did a Twitter thread basically saying, like this, this YouTuber’s a transphobe. Look what she said. And you know, what ended up happening is basically I riled up a hate mob. I got a bunch of people really angry over it. The YouTuber I was calling out got really defensive and lashed out at me. She learned nothing. She never improved. The people who saw the thread basically got angry and went and attacked her and went and harassed her. And I just felt so awful about it the next day, like I knew that I had done done nothing good. And I had just basically increased the amount of pain in the world for no reason. And that really made me think twice about about doing that again, because I realized that it's just not - not the right way to approach that kind of situation.
Cristen: Is there - is there any usefulness to kind of old school public shaming and calling out?
Natalie: I'm trying to think of a case where I genuinely think that public shaming is useful and I'm kind of struggling to come up with something. I mean, I think there's cases where it doesn't really do any harm and it feels good. So, there's certain people who are sort of obstinately bad and those people like it can be cathartic, I guess, to yell at them on Twitter. But I don't really think it helps. I don't have much faith in this. I mean OK. Here's I'm not sure this is exactly public shaming, but I do think that like the kind of like metoo-type call outs that actually can in certain situations be the only type of justice to be had. And I think that you know, Weinstein, for example, like when every other channel has failed, when you have like a powerful, you know, sexual abuser and you can't really you know, there's not really any way to get out that person or through conventional channels, social media shaming can be a way of getting back at the person or or protecting other people or exposing a predator. So in cases like that, I think, again, that the the point with that, of course, is not to change a person's mind. It's it's not even necessarily to shame a person, it is to punish and to protect further victims. So as a kind of vigilante justice, it can work in certain situations. But I think that as a kind of communication, it's always, always bad.
Caroline: Does canceling have an effect on like our bigger picture offline culture?
Natalie: Well, I think that culturally, we're so online that it's almost hard trying to to discuss offline culture as if as if that's something that exists totally in total separation. I mean, I think that it does have real cultural effects. I think that, you know, especially if first if I sort of generalize my personal experience, I find I become much more cautious. I'm much afraid to have opinions. I am, you know, very wary about what I - what I say online. And I think that does affect discourse if - if people are kind of living with this fear of - of cancelation. If - if - if making a minor mistake has severe consequences for use socially, then I think that that is something that's going to change people's behavior. And I think it's going to ultimately lead us to a sort of more cautious, more repressed, in some ways more conservative society.
Cristen: What is your advice for navigating, wanting to express ourselves and call stuff out, but also being good and healthy citizens and like elevating discourse rather than just like, you know, contributing to the dumpster fire?
Natalie: Well, I guess my first piece of advice and this issue applies whether you're being canceled or whether you're calling someone out is stop and think before posting. What is the function of my tweeting, what I'm about to tweet? What is this going to what effect is this going to produce what am I hoping to achieve here? And so I think that, you know, slowing down the pace or deliberately slowing down your own pace of posting on Twitter, like make sure that you're not reacting. Make sure that you're not posting reflexively, but that you actually have taken a moment to consider not just what you think and how you feel, but what you're hoping to accomplish with a tweet. And I think just to avoid posting in the heat of the moment already is a huge help, and it tends to produce more thoughtful, considered content.
Caroline: Well, Natalie, is there anything about your specific experience or about canceling that we haven't maybe touched on that you want our listeners to know?
Natalie: I guess I would certainly say as a kind of qualifying warning that, you know, I know some people tend to listen to me talk about canceling or some people use my video about canceling as a way of shutting down any criticism of anyone whatsoever. Well, that's not what I'm saying. Like, obviously, we still need to be able to criticize people, especially politicians and especially people in power. Yes, it's totally fair to criticize those people and to stay skeptical about people. I guess what what I just want to emphasize is that, you know, make sure that you're constantly checking whether you are criticizing people in power or whether you are trashing and exiling and whether you're getting caught up in what I think is probably the kind of exuberance, almost of attacking a person. So it's I would say keep an eye on the motivations and keep an eye on the tone of the group that you're in. That's how you distinguish between canceling and criticism, because while it’s important to be aware of canceling when it's happening and to see that it's not just criticism, that's actually is terribly toxic thing. It's equally important to keep criticism alive and to notice and to not make sure that we're not just throwing out criticism along with canceling.
Caroline: Natalie, are Cristen and I are gonna be canceled because we're interviewing you?
Natalie: Probably. I'm so sorry.
Caroline: That's OK, we really wanted to talk to you. We'll take it.
Cristen: Worth it.
Caroline: Worth it.
Cristen: OK unladies … what are your thoughts on canceling? Have you ever been canceled? Have you ever canceled anyone? Tell us your thoughts! You can email us at hello@unladylike.co, find us on social @unladylikemedia or join our private facebook group and jump into the thread for this episode.
Caroline: Visit unladylike.co to find this episode’s sources and transcript. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter to get a weekly dose of desperately needed actually good news and upgrade your work-from-home uniform with an Unladylike sweatshirt!
Cristen: To watch Natalie Wynn’s video, just head over to her YouTube channel, Contrapoints. It’s a treasure trove of content.
Caroline: Nora Ritchie is the producer of Unladylike. Abigail Keel is our senior producer. Gianna Palmer is our story editor. Shruti Marathe transcribes our tape. Our music is by Flamingo Shadow, Amit May Cohen and Sarah Tudzin. Mixing is by Andi Kristins. Sound design and additional music is by Casey Holford. Executive producers are Chris Bannon, Daisy Rosario and Unladylike Media.
Cristen: This podcast was created by your hosts, Cristen Conger
Caroline: And Caroline Ervin of Unladylike Media.
Cristen: Make sure you’re subscribed to Unladylike. Find us in stitcher, spotify, apple podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Caroline: And remember, got a problem?
Cristen: Get unladylike.
