The Left Played Right Into This Twitter Transphobe’s Hands
On social media, “dunking” means intellectually devastating an opponent. The metaphor conjures an image of a basketball player mercilessly humbling a defender. But, as on the basketball court, dunking online can alternatively represent unproductive or counterproductive showboating—a display of short-sighted vanity by a player overly tempted to rouse the fans on their side of the bleachers.
Too often, this latter image more aptly captures the sort of dunks that my left-leaning fellow travelers post online. Take, for instance, the recent commotion surrounding Lavern Spicer, a Republican congressional candidate from Florida, on Twitter.
Earlier this month, Spicer published some now-notorious tweets claiming that pronouns don’t appear in the Bible or the U.S. Constitution, and that “Jesus Christ never introduced himself using pronouns.” Considering the truism that pronouns are a ubiquitous part of speech, this supposed linguistic slip presented many online liberals with an irresistible chance to trounce a conservative adversary.
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The ensuing dunk competition saw users demonstrate—through various ways and memes—that the Constitution's Preamble begins with “We” and that Jesus canonically identifies himself as “He,” while others went so far as to tally the pronouns in each text.
In a 2012 blog post, theologian and cultural critic Adam Kotsko offered a prescient critique of this liberal urge to point out the superficial hypocrisies and contradictions rife in conservatives’ stated rationales. Such a compulsion frequently manifests in smug quips like “Conservatives claim to be pro-life yet support such-and-such malignant policy,” or, as on Twitter last week, in “gotchas” that frame conservatives as illiterate or ill-acquainted with the Bible and Constitution.
Kotsko notes, however, that the “reasonable liberals” behind such put-downs misguidedly fixate on argumentative inconsistencies while failing to appreciate that conservative messaging is markedly coherent strategically—with the ultimate aim of “reinforc[ing] and, if necessary, reassert[ing] ‘traditional’ power structures.”
Something apparently lost on those who only saw in Spicer’s tweets an open route to the basket and opportunity to crowd-please is that she knows what a pronoun is. (If she didn’t learn this in grammar school, she surely did last year when she published the same Bible tweet verbatim and was profusely corrected).
As noted by the few who ably looked past Spicer’s apparent ignorance, her tweets square neatly within the right’s anti-transgender agenda. However logically incoherent, Spicer’s words serve to advance the idea that transgender and nonbinary people’s identities are unsanctioned by traditional texts, and thus illegitimate.
Haughty grammar policing missed this more dire point. Spicer’s pronoun debacle highlights a limitation in the dunk metaphor: someone who dunks on a political opponent is not necessarily on the offensive.
The superficial contradictions in Spicer’s tweets functioned as a Pavlovian bell for liberals who reflexively corrected her enticing semantic errors ad nauseam—and who will likely do the same the next time they’re trolled by the right. And so, for the left, dunking epitomizes a sort of short-termism, identified by the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher as “endemic in the age of Twitter,” which perpetuates the regrettable tendency for “reactionary political forces to be proactive, and for progressives to be reactive.”
But repeatedly partaking in “reactive battles” on conservatives’ terms is worse for the left than just a time-sucking waste of energy. On social media, where content-neutral algorithms are built to maximize user engagement and thus make attention a currency, even dismissive responses to our ideological opponents can counterintuitively boost their messages.
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The right cunningly capitalizes on this via outrage bait and trolling—Spicer’s momentary stint as the focal point of Twitter is a testament to this. And last week, after chumming the water with numerous inflammatory tweets, she managed to provoke a frenzy of engagement so covetable that other conservatives sought to siphon off her clout with their own copycat posts.
We on the left would be remiss to play into this. Whether the impulse to dunk on engagement bait like Spicer’s is a symptom of online attention-seeking, overblown faith that opponents can be vanquished by airing out their hypocrisy in the “Marketplace of Ideas,” or vast underestimations of the conservative social agenda, it is ultimately a misguided one.
A short-sighted preoccupation with dunking on the intellectual inconsistencies in conservative ideology misses the true scope and nature of the struggle before us, as the country undergoes a wave of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation. On top of that, it takes the bait of right-wing trolls, like Lavern Spicer, for whom the reins of power are far too within reach.
In other words: it’s worth thinking twice about dunking when there’s a game to win.
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