Is Dave Chappelle The Hero Trans People Need?

On Chappelle, protests, performative twitter threads, and the fight for Canada's overton window.

I ‘know of’ Dave Chappelle’s comedy more than I know it directly. I never really watched Chappelle’s show, and first heard his name associated with the ‘I’m Rick James!’ memes.

I heard about ‘Sticks and Stones’ and ‘The Closer’ mostly through the controversy it generated on Twitter, and was a little reticent given the reports of how horribly offensive the anti-trans content was. I was, however, desperate for new comedic content at the time. Having watched Anthony Jeselnik’s ‘Fire in The Maternity Ward’ for the 100th time, I decided to check out Chappelle’s latest work.

The Material

I’ve found both Sticks and The Closer funny at times, but not funny enough for a rewatch. The tone of both actually remind me of a portion of Anthony Jeselnik’s 2015 special Thoughts and Prayers, where the comedian takes a right turn onto topical street while still mostly staying in comedic character.

The problem is not so much Chappelle’s media. Closer felt like more of a podcast at times than a comedy special, and Sticks was actually fairly light on remarks about trans people. It is about a few elephants in the room that are largely ignored by what is gauged as acceptable progressive discourse.

In Sticks, Chapelle recounts how standards and practices asked him to not use a homophobic slur, and ponders why the same was not true for racial slurs. The issue of race is certainly more prominent than gender in 2021, and he also makes reference to this multiple times in Closer.

This issue, namely of weighing racism versus LGBTQ+ discrimination, is the biggest fault line in progressive discourse. It’s one that many seem hesitant to have discussions about. There are many, many signs that this fault line has finally cracked, and that the uproar over Chappelle’s special is just the latest Earthquake that may register substantially higher on the culture war Richter Scale than others.

Broadly, the unwritten rule of comedy that Chappelle has broken is that you shouldn’t ridicule the identities of groups you aren’t a part of. Does Chappelle’s material rise to the level of ridicule? I think largely in the era of speech being violence depending on who’s doing the defining, the answer is that it doesn’t matter.

Chappelle’s social commentary has always primarily been concerned with race and racism, something he mentions directly in Closer. I was particularly impressed with an analogy he painted in Sticks regarding the crack epidemic in Black communities and the opioid epidemic in White communities. He contrasts ‘Just Say No’ as official policy for the former versus the vast amounts of attention that’s currently paid to the opioid epidemic.

He was also somewhat prophetic in Sticks, observing that the LGBTQ+ community (not necessarily the ‘movement’) is not homogenous. There are many gay and lesbian individuals who are not fans of transgender people, and in particular transwomen. His entire car analogy had many elements of truth to it, so it really puzzled me as to why that bit in particular seemed to be one that the LGBTQ+ community took exception to. The likely answer is not actually the content, but the mere fact that it was used in a comedy routine.

I very much agree with Chappelle’s statement in Closer that many are ignoring what he’s actually saying. Take the comedic spin away, and Chappelle is saying truthful things about conflict within the LGBTQ+ community. He’s saying truthful things about the tendencies of many LGBTQ+ individuals taking on a marginalized identity until they need the benefits of white privilege, and sometimes rapidly oscillating between the two. He’s saying truthful things about some definitions and issues not being settled in society at large once we step out of our individual silos.

Chappelle references the recent controversy with DaBaby in Closer, and again paints the analogy that shooting someone in Walmart didn’t impact his career, but bigoted remarks did. This is where the oft-quoted ‘You can shoot and kill a black person in America, but you can’t hurt a gay person’s feelings’ line comes from.

Chappelle also goes for the jugular in Closer with questions like ‘Can a gay person be racist?’. He backs away a bit from the statement in immediately doing a Mike Pence joke, but this statement is really what underlies much of what discussion should be about. Given that topic has been made verboten in many circles, Chappelle’s avenue of comedy is one of the only remaining routes available to him (and others) to address the issue.

Chappelle makes reference to the somewhat less verboten topic of white feminism being shallow, making references to the #MeToo movement and American history. It’s ironic that this is referenced by a piece of media that is consider anti-trans, as a large amount of the response to Margaret Atwood’s endorsement of other anti-trans media is mentioning white feminism and how it often erases the contributions of women of colour.

The Issues

I do want to be clear on one thing: This is not some love letter to Chappelle, despite the title. There’s plenty of his material that is grossly offensive to trans people, Asian people, Jewish people, etc. The issue is not whether Chappelle has hateful material or truthful observations, but that in the era of context collapse, we must pick one or the other. So many pick the interpretation that is going to generate more reward via social media’s dopamine feedback mechanism.

Firstly, the thorny issue of gender versus sex, the question of who gets to define what ‘woman’ means, and who must listen to them. The old paradigm of ‘you aren’t trans until you have bottom surgery’ has fallen away, thankfully, as a requirement for transitioning and Horomone Replacement Therapy (HRT) in many places. This is a very good thing, as requirements like presenting female for a year without the support of as much biology as we can currently offer is cruel.

If Stones was lightly prodding at sensitive issues, Closer directly confronts them. At one point, Chappelle directly asks ‘What is a woman?’ It’s a question that is perhaps designed to inflame, and it’s likely the fact that it is asked at all is where most of the outrage comes from. This is something that is often considered a settled question when in the minds of many, it is not.

One slice of that many is Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists. They have come up with virtuous sounding phrases like ‘sex-based rights’ that are mainly based on excluding transwomen from conversations about women’s rights. It’s a pretty clear example of ‘separate but equal’, and one that seems to be continually picking up traction since it’s not discussed at TERFy ‘conferences’.

On the other hand, biological women have largely been told by progressive discourse that in the big dictionary of society, the word ‘woman’ now includes transwomen. I think it does, as do many other trans people and allies, but many TERFs do not. Some with power and influence like JK Rowling also do not, and this power dynamic is what’s re-ignited things as of late. Another essential question is ‘who’, in terms of who gets to redefine terms in that big societal dictionary.

There’s material in Closer that’s graphic and grossly offensive to trans people. Is it damaging hate speech that will result in real-world harms? I would argue that on the basis of the material alone it is not, you will find far worse on Twitter or Clubhouse. It’s more the prominence of Chappelle and Netflix that is at issue, something which Chappelle has pointed to in his latest remarks.

What people who make statements like ‘Making fun of trans people is lazy comedy / not comedy’ are missing is that Chappelle isn’t performing only for comedic value, but to address the wider conversation that can’t currently be had in public by those without ‘fuck you’ money.

Some are going to be upset with me for framing trans identity as a ‘conversation’ with non trans people, but the facts as they exist in our current reality is that some people are ‘not there yet’, and they want to talk about it. The reality is also that cracks in trans acceptance at a larger level have been showing for a long time.

Trans Acceptance Is Not Linear

What Sticks and Closer have ignited has been smoldering for quite some time. JK Rowling has been one of the most public faces of trans rights pushback, but there have been others. It has reached a crescendo in the United Kingdom, and is starting to slowly build in Canada.

Canada has largely been viewed as a haven for trans people, with legal protections for gender expression enshrined in federal law and exceptionally good supports for transition in some provinces like British Columbia. But now, even in what many TERFs call ‘Tranada’, some disturbing signs are emerging.

A recent Toronto Star op-ed talks about you can’t use the word woman anymore, and a CTV W5 documentary focuses on the ‘alarming’ trend of youth being supported by the medical establishment. Margaret Atwood, writer of the dystopian ‘Handmaid’s Tale’, has expressed support for the Star article. It is quite clear that the Overton Window in Canada is slowly being pushed open for debating what the label of ‘woman’ means, who belongs in that category, and who gets to decide.

Dangerous is a word that many in the UK aka ‘TERF Island’ use to refer to the practice at giving people under the age of majority health care such as puberty blockers. In the movie ‘Inherit the Wind’, a dramatization of Clarence Darrow defending evolution being taught in public schools ends with a description of the slippery slope and ‘If you can do one, you can do the other’. The difference in the case of trans discourse is that it’s not escalation, but who is given the power to determine what’s acceptable and what isn’t. We already see this with emerging media practices in the the UK.

Many dismiss those concerned about the ‘slippery slope’ as alt-right pundits or something similar, which is really astonishing given there’s an example unfolding right now that is far from hypothetical when it comes to trans discourse in media. In the UK, which is probably the country with the most traction when it comes to trans pushback (likely due to JK Rowling’s efforts), pro-trans pieces of media are sometimes pulled or edited down due to TERF’s organizing campaigns to complain en-masse.

At the base level, there is little difference between pro-trans pieces being edited or dropped altogether in the UK and those who are calling for Chappelle’s material to be taken down. To be clear, this is not a demand of the Netflix employees protesting the platform promotion Chappelle and his content, but is absolutely being discussed in the public square as a consequence.

In those that are pro-cancel culture, there is often an implicit assumption that their worldviews will always be the dominant ones, therefore they can trust that establishments will always make the right call as to what ‘deserves’ a platform and what doesn’t.

Some who land more on the freedom of expression side, such as myself, realize that tidal shifts in what the wider culture accepts as discourse are inevitable. In other words, social progress is not linear. This is why freedom of expression is so important. And why discovering the perfect point of balance that stamps out as much legitimate hate speech as possible while preserving it is even more important.

There are many whose viewpoints I disagree with, whose behaviour I find offensive. I often receive criticism for just publishing posts on Substack because it’s where people like Graham Linehan call home. It is platforms like Substack who have a high commitment to freedom of expression that are attractive to me, mostly because the things worth writing about are those that often draw the most ire.

People are also often puzzled as to why as a trans person I’m so devoted to free speech, given the proliferation of trans hate across social media and elsewhere. I have definitely adjusted a previous sense of free speech absolutism a bit after transitioning and experiencing quite a few things for the first time, but I’ve not wavered on that core principle.

I’d prefer to never see another word uttered by Graham Linehan or his ilk anywhere, however: Entrusting humans to either properly enforce a rule that would see him banished, or for society at large to always maintain increasing support for trans people is too risky a bet to make.

Netflix Employees Revolt

Closer was not well received by LGBTQ+ Netflix employees, to say the least. Several articles have covered what happened at the company according to many, and I won’t retread that material here.

Speculating on internal Netflix matters is kind of pointless, and I think it’s really a distraction from the core issues that Closer has raised. For example, regarding a suspended then reinstated employee attending an executive meeting without permission: This is something that would warrant discipline, and is also a great excuse for retaliatory action against an employee who is painting the company in a bad light. Netflix reinstating the engineer seems to point to the latter, and it’s probably best to take all information coming from behind closed doors with a grain of salt, and to remember each participant will likely tell their story in the way that benefits them most.

Much of what employees at Netflix are demanding is reasonable along the lines of promoting LGBTQ+ voices that have previously been unheard. Chappelle is not hurting for ways to be heard, and Netflix should not be resistant to increasing trans representation. A troubling demand that has been asserted by some on social media (and to be clear is not in the ‘official’ list of demands) is that a message should be appended to Closer pointing people to Disclosure, a documentary about trans representation in Hollywood.

Some US states are now passing educational regulations that require teachers to present ‘opposing viewpoints’, leading to such insanity like teachers being told they have to teach an opposing viewpoint to the holocaust (likely by bewildered administrators who are trying their best to interpret idiotic laws). There’s fundamentally no difference between these two situations.

A Twitter thread by one of the Netflix employees covered in media went viral, and being quite candid despite drawing attention to how many trans people are murdered, it reads as quite performative. The second tweet repeats one of Chappelle’s comments in the special almost verbatim, which is quite odd. Some other points read as though they were written by someone who hasn’t seen either Sticks or Closer.

The part that irked me the most about it was a statement about which kind of trans people are getting killed. I’m a fairly privileged trans person in both identity and situation, and yet I was almost murdered last year in trans-friendly Vancouver, British Columbia. It’s also odd to me that the suicide of a trans person associated with Chappelle wasn’t mentioned whatsoever.

Mentioned in Closer as one of Chapelle’s friends, Daphne Dorman is a transwoman who sadly took her own life in 2019. In all the performative tweets about the harm that Chappelle’s words are going to cause, Dorman is scarcely mentioned. There’s not any definitive link between the social media pile-on Dorman received and her suicide, but some pundits erasing her as an inconvenient and problematic transwoman is rather stomach turning. It reduces each of us down to a bullet point list of our held opinions, and removes the nuance that is so desperately needed now.

The concept of real-world harms relating to trans discourse is far from imagined, but Chappelle is far down on the list of what worries me. Saying that Sticks and Closer promote TERF ideology is a bit of a stretch for me, given the apparent empathy Chappelle demonstrates (moreso in Closer).

Closer ends somewhat poignantly, with Chappelle mentioning that he’s planning to support Daphne’s daughter when she comes of age and would like to deliver the cheque himself. He states that his message to her will be ‘I knew your father, and he was a wonderful woman’, and goes on to talk about how empathy isn’t gay or Black, and that it has to go both ways. Out of all the moments in the special, this is probably where the social commentary hits its high point.

The Protest

The Netflix protests have come and gone, and they were certainly something. At one point, a counter-protester with a ‘Chappelle is funny’ sign has the sign broken, and once they are only holding pieces of wood a protester accuses them of bringing weapons. If you wanted a good example of protests as nothing more than Live-Action Role Playing (LARPing), these protests would have been a perfect example.

We’ll never be able to say for sure what the impact of the walkout was internally, but as far as those who watched and commented I think they barely registered mostly due to some of the more captionable moments such as the above. The same can not be said, though, for some ancient social media posts by the walkout organizer.

It’s ironic that news has recently come up of some fairly ancient tweets made by the organizer of the Netflix protest, given one of Chapelle’s early jokes in Sticks recounts how one of cancel culture’s go-to strategies is to unearth past problematic media and use it to ‘take away everything someone has’.

The tweets by Ashlee Marie Preston are fairly horrific by current year standards, especially as directed towards Asian and other immigrant communities. There has already been the predictable mea-culpa, and it remains to be seen what the eventual fallout will be. I suspect it will be much like the fallout after Joy-Ann Reid’s past comments about LGBTQ+ were unearthed some time ago.

Which is to say, nothing. For those not aware, after Reid’s comments were unearthed, she initially attempted to blame people hacking her blog but afterwards accepted responsibility, and there were largely no consequences. Twitter punditry at the time endorsed this, with many stating that Reid was just too valuable to ‘The Resistance’ to have any real consequences visited upon her.

This is the perma-hypocrisy that we live in, and why culture war brainworms are so dangerous. It’s not about what you actually did, but both who you are and how valuable you are to the effort of your particular faction. Some will likely also justify Chapelle’s remarks about the marginalized (beyond trans people) by saying he’s a valuable voice in their faction of the culture war.

Regulating Comedy

Many have been quick to point out that the demands from Netflix employees do not include taking down either Sticks or Closer, but the inclusion of a demand for including communities and experts on the ‘potential harm’ of material that Netflix releases is actually more concerning to me.

In a prophetic bit of serious comedy, in 2015 Anthony Jeselnik made a few references to the joke police and trans people in his Thoughts and Prayers special. It’s likely that were Prayers to air today, he would receive some backlash. Jeselnik also states that getting upset about comedy is the dumbest thing you can do, and in the spirit of nuance I think it’s still not that simple. You can easily spout some legitimate hate speech and slap a comedy label on it.

That last sentence is basically our problem in regulating comedy specials. There are extremes which are easily discernable as unacceptable material, and there’s everything in the middle. Who will judge the middle? Trans people are not a monolith, so how are you going to select who gets to judge? What objective standards are you going to introduce? The answer that is often given is to embrace the heckler’s veto, which leaves only that inoffensive shade of beige as the only colour we’re allowed to paint with.

‘Punching down’ is something else Chappelle opines about, and while there’s plenty of nuance, it’s not necessary to discuss because this also works out to the heckler’s veto. Between the LGBTQ+ and Black communities, how are you going to judge what’s punching down and what isn’t? The easy answer is largely what the overton window abides now: Don’t talk about Trans people if you aren’t trans, don’t talk about Black people if you aren’t black, etc.

That answer prevents offense, and some would say it prevents harm. Something that non-trans people might not understand because they haven’t felt it is how much it can hurt to see current media invalidate core tenets of your identity. This is something that should rise to the level of content warning. Chappelle’s content obviously has to be taken as a whole, but I am very uncomfortable with the notion argued by some that Chappelle mentioning biological realities is hate speech.

Dave Chappelle : Hero or Villain?

There are people who will never be able to equate the words ‘transwomen’ and ‘women’. All the shaming, cancellations, and other societal pressure may get them to be very careful about what they say in public, but the cognition of those two words as separate remain. In my view, regarding this as a ‘dangerous’ or ‘violent’ thought that must be stamped out by all means is not the correct response either to Chappelle’s special in particular or regarding discourse in general.

Dave Chappelle is not heroic in the traditional sense to trans people: Some of his material is offensive, crass, and graphic. His shift from humour to commentary in both Sticks and Closer should be viewed skeptically as primarily self-serving. What he has accomplished is a sometimes clumsy, sometimes poignant performance that talks about divisions painfully obvious to many, but talked about by few in public.

You can tweet #transwomenarewomen until the heat death of the universe, if you don’t have empathy and grace for people who behave with respect and good faith, you will see the cracks that are currently running through the social fabric when it comes to trans pushback.

The vitriol around Closer is still somewhat baffling to me, but understandable if like most controversies people are just parroting their tribe rather than actually reviewing the material. In that way it reminds me of a lot of the censorship that happened in the UK decades ago, when censors and lobbyists proudly proclaimed they didn’t need to actually watch something; they knew it was awful and needed to be banned.

Chappelle is heroic in that for a few brief moments in Sticks and Closer, he shines a light on what is behind the wave of ideologues wanting to roll back trans rights. The articles about puberty blockers, about what words we can and can’t use, and the rest. Some progressive discourse now largely skips the ‘hearts and minds’ stage, leveraging social shaming and other techniques.

This has allowed for some major progress, you sometimes can’t even expect incremental changes from systems of power if you lead with asking nicely. It has been a factor in the growing resistance to transwomen being broadly accepted by society. In the opinion of this transwoman, Chappelle’s villany in repeating some old tired tropes that are often used to invalidate trans identity is outweighed by his heroism in acknowledging the elephants in the room that many others have draped throw rugs over a long time ago.