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Robby Soave vs. transgender people

Robby Soave is an American writer and anti-transgender activist.

Background

Robert Emil “Robby” Soave, Jr. was born on August 8, 1988 in Detroit and grew up in wealthy St. Clair Shores in a Republican household. After graduating from private Catholic high school St. Joan of Arc, Soave attended University of Michigan, editing the editorial page of the student newspaper.

Soave married Caroline Elizabeth “Carrie” (Strasz) Soave (born 1989), a human resources executive at the US Department of the Interior. They are based in Washington, DC.

Anti-transgender activism

Soave covered Sabrina Rubin Erdeley’s fabrications in Rolling Stone and a 2019 Lincoln Memorial confrontation involving Covington Catholic high school students. Although Soave is known for covering media malpractice, Soave unquestioningly accepts Alice Dreger’s similar cover-up of the Danny Ryan fabrication because Soave and Dreger agree on trans issues. Soave is part of the media apparatus that allows anti-trans hoaxers like J. Michael Bailey and Dreger to operate with impunity. Soave declared “Dreger’s views are not remotely transphobic.”

Panic Attack (2019)

In a chapter titled LGB vs. T: Radical Trans Activism, Soave completely accepts anti-trans activists’ versions of various controversies, presenting Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Jean O’Leary, Germaine Greer, Kenneth Zucker, Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, J. MIchael Bailey, Rebecca Tuvel as cisgender people under siege, rather than as irresponsible and unethical public figures. According to Soave, these are the key controversies:

Relatedly, many of the issues most important to the trans community have to do with physical and mental health: hormone therapy, surgery, at what age teenagers should be able to make decisions without parental approval, and more. There are also the increasingly fraught subjects of public restrooms, high school locker rooms and sports teams, what box to check on government identification cards, and whether other people should be compelled to use a trans individual’s pronoun of choice.

Soave (2019)

Soave also misrepresents why protests against The Man Who Would Be Queen were a watershed moment in trans history. Soave doesn’t bother mentioning attacks on our children, including Bailey’s vulgar misuse of gender diverse children and the fabricated Danny Ryan case report that frames Bailey’s book.

Dreger has also written about controversies relating to transgenderism—in articles, and in her 2015 book, Galileo’s Middle Finger. The book suggests that progressives have often fought as energetically as conservatives when encountering scientific conclusions that clashed with their beliefs. One prominent example highlighted in the book was the trans activist response to the work of psychologist J. Michael Bailey, whom Dreger has defended.

The controversy is complicated, but the gist is this: Bailey had posited that some very effeminate gay men transition to women because this makes it easier for them to pursue sexual relationships with other men, and some other male-to-female transitions arise out of a sexual desire to have a female body, something called autogynephilia. These motivations wouldn’t make the trans women any less female, but some trans activists felt that such reasons would constitute a betrayal of the trans identity.

“The reason the trans activists first came after me was because they were trying to basically silence any discussion of autogynephilia,” Dreger told me. “They came after me in a way that played into the standard progressive narrative, which is anybody who questions or raises anything uncomfortable about trans identity is an enemy of trans people.”

Soave (2019)

In promoting and defending an on-air rant by anti-trans activist Bill Maher, Soave said on Rising:

We’re deciding that very invasive medical procedures for young children with no questions asked should be performed […] it does seem that the activists on transgender issues, from my interactions with them on social media, there’s an automatic affirmation of anyone who expresses any–even in very young kids–any discomfort at all about their sex or their gender, there’s a kind of “This is the answer for you and this is what you should do” that there’s no way it fits in even a majority of these cases.

I have yet to find– the activists on this issue don’t want to have conversations about it; in fact they scream at me that the questions I have about it are examples of legitimating violence against them or something, all the time. The most unfriendly and hostile shrieking illiberal voices in the entire progressive movement are people obsessed with this issue.

This is a legitimate public policy question because it involves kids, and it involves medical procedures that are… so the puberty blockers are to delay puberty so you get the surgeries later… we don’t know– there is some reporting on the puberty blockers are not entirely necessarily consequence-free. My friend Jesse Singal has done a lot of reporting on this, a lot of reporting that really, really, really ticked off the transgender activist community. Katie Herzog has done a lot of reporting on people who did transition, who had this procedure recommended to them based on their supposed discomfort in their own bodies only to later want to go back and it was not right for them. And you’re not supposed to even talk about those cases.

We’re talking about the broader social phenomenon, if there’s a contagion aspect […] I really reject this quasi-ideological notion that if you’re uncomfortable in your own skin or not happy with the way you look you must be born in the wrong [body].

Soave (2022)

References

Editors (May 30, 2023). Meet the new 1995 Society member: Robby Soave! America’s Future https://americasfuture.org/news/meet-the-new-1995-society-member-robby-soave/

Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave (May 24, 2022). Bill Maher Questions Transgender Ideology, Harming Children? Briahna & Robby Debate The Hill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4BHHVuHotSo

Soave, Robby (February 22, 2018). Wellesley College Activists Protested Author Alice Dreger for Being Transphobic, Even Though She’s Not. Reason https://reason.com/2018/02/22/wellesley-college-activists-protested-au/

Resources

Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)

X/Twitter (x.com)

Instagram (instagram.com)

Reason (reason.org)