Protesters described the event as anti-trans and the speakers as unqualified.

By Camila Van Order González, for the Community News Service

MIDDLEBURY — It was about 20 minutes in when a lone trumpet sounded through Middlebury College’s Wilson Hall Feb. 20.

“Hey, man, you’re not helping,” Gary Winslett, the political science professor who coordinated the evening’s controversial event, told the trumpeter from the stage. “You’re not helping your cause, bro.”

“It’s embarrassing for me, as a trans person, that you’re doing this,” said one of the speakers, Brianna Wu, executive director at the progressive RebellionPAC and former congressional candidate. “Can you please stop and let the adults have a discussion?”

For a few more minutes the trumpeter interrupted the event, blasting their horn — and a harmonica — until they were shuffled out. The moment encapsulated the energy on campus surrounding the event: a debate between Wu and Leor Sapir, a writer and fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, on medical gender transition for children and adolescents. 

Wu, a former video game developer, is known for her role 10 years ago as a target of Gamergate, a much-written-about controversy over media ethics that dovetailed with a harassment campaign against several women. These days, along with her political work, she regularly attends debates with online figures, many of whom identify as right-wing.

Sapir has written extensively about what he calls “gender medicine” and in an interview said his talks are frequently cancelled last minute. The college’s event page for the talk, sponsored by the Alexander Hamilton Forum, called Wu and Sapir “two highly respected commentators.”

The trumpeter was among many on and off campus who expressed disappointment about the debate. Protesters described the event as anti-trans and the speakers as unqualified to weigh in on medicine. Both Wu and Sapir question the ethics and effects of gender-affirming medicine for youth.

Along with protesters attending the event, reactions from the campus and broader community included a mass call-in urging to cancel, a simultaneous panel on campus involving health care professionals in firm disagreement with the speakers, a conga line outside McCullough Student Center and a dance party that played tracks from SOPHIE, Charli XCX and Nicky Da B. 

The poster invitation for the latter read: “Gender affirming care saves lives and that isn’t a question. However, we pose a new one: — TO DANCE OR NOT TO DANCE — Join us in a display of queer joy!!”

The hoopla from outside the hall seeped its way in. The crowd laughed at times during Sapir’s presentation, or when Wu offered to introduce Sapir to “super-hot trans women.” But it went quiet when Wu discussed her life before she came out at age 27.

“When I was so young, I felt something so intensely broken in me,” Wu said. “It was all I could ever think about. I would sit there and weep in my bedroom and pray that Jesus would let me wake up as a girl … It was puberty and having desperate crushes on the boys in my class but feeling horrified because the thought of them wanting me for a body I was ashamed of — it just made me want to die.”

The central question of the debate was: Exactly how much access should young people have to medical transition?

Wu’s position was that minors should have hormone treatment “gate-kept” from them until they’ve passed the early stages of puberty. 

“I had to go make actual girl friends in the real world and figure out how girls socialize with each other,” she said, arguing that removing barriers to gender-affirming care would “cheat trans people” out of those experiences.

Sapir expressed concern about physical and mental health side effects of gender transition, citing data associating osteoporosis and breast cancer with different types of hormone therapies. He bemoaned the difficulty in sifting apart “future transsexuals” from “proto-gay boys” and claimed that even if it was possible to do so, no clinician would.

“How do we know which boys are going to grow up to be adjusted gay adults,” asked Sapir as Wu chuckled, “and which boys are going to grow up to be people like you?”

“Thank you for asking,” Wu said.

She engaged with the students who protested her, even tried to give advice to the trumpeter. After the event, she beamed at people with questions for her.

“Are those your real eyelashes?” she asked a Community News Service reporter, before paying a compliment.

While she and the reporter chatted, Wu let a fan of hers borrow her phone to text another commentator.

Wu said she values discourse. 

“I just want to say, when we were driving up here in the car together,” she said at one point on stage, gesturing to herself and Sapir, “we agreed on a lot. We disagreed (too), as you clearly saw. I think if we can have real conversations about this, we can have better policies.”

Sapir took to social media after the debate in response to posts criticizing Middlebury students. He defended their right to disrupt the event, though he considered it “very childish.”

Last week’s event ended more quietly than a 2017 talk by Charles Murray, whose writings on race and intelligence have drawn far-reaching criticism and condemnation. 

Co-sponsored by the Middlebury political science department and held soon after President Donald Trump’s first inauguration, the event faced protests that became national news. 

Students successfully disrupted that talk, and it had to be relocated. After confrontations between students, faculty, Murray and campus police escalated to violence, more than 100 Middlebury professors signed a document condemning disruption of speakers and outlining their belief in free inquiry in education.

Winslett, the professor who organized the more recent event, was still a year away from joining the faculty when the episode with Murray played out. But he was motivated by the same sort of principles as the faculty members who signed the statement.

“The progressive orthodoxy on our campus is not really matched by what’s out there in society,” Winslett said. “So I wanted to give my students the ability to hear from other viewpoints.”

In the leadup to the event, Middlebury’s Department of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies released a statement on the Trump administration’s executive order to recognize two sexes, male and female. The department said it was reaffirming its “commitment to our core values of academic inquiry and community.” 

“Gender is a field of inquiry, one where questions are asked, evidence is weighed and power is analyzed,” the statement read. “It is not a place to debate the existence of minoritized groups. Instead, we should ask why it is possible to deny the existence of trans and non-binary people at this time.”