Another round of controversy this past week over Angela Nagle’s Kill All Normies, this one centering around allegations of plagiarism that originally appeared in a Libcom post by Mike Harman. I’m not too interested in litigating that one, but there’s a sub-controversy here that has mostly flown under the radar: in the same post, Harman also claims that Nagle makes “use of a gender list which describes itself as ‘poorly attested’ in order to criticize all actual non-binary gender identities”.

There are actually two allegations here – let’s examine both of them in turn, starting with the second.

2) Nagle criticizes “all actual non-binary gender identities”

This claim – by far, the most serious of the two – is surprisingly easy to dismiss, since nothing like it actually appears in the text. For all of his block-quoting, Harman cannot provide a single example of Nagle criticizing “all actual non-binary gender identities”; in fact, he doesn’t even try. He quotes from the gender list Nagle pulls from Tumblr, and he quotes part of Nagle’s “introduction to this list” – and that’s it. Neither will anyone who cares to consult the passage in question (p.70-72 in KAN) find anything like criticism of all actual non-binary gender identities on their own; it simply isn’t there.

But perhaps Nagle implies something about all non-binary genders, which we can somehow intuit from the text by reading between the lines or whatever? I suppose one could try to make that argument – but remarkably, Harman doesn’t even do that! Here are the rest of his remarks, in full, about this allegation:

• “Nagle’s poorly sourced book on the online culture wars includes a copy and pasted definition of a fascist ideology and misrepresents non-binary genders.“

• “But Nagle uses the list to ridicule the discussion of trans and non-binary issues as a whole, much like the 4chan users that pasted the list uncited themselves.”

That’s it. No textual evidence that Nagle is criticizing gender non-conformity, and not even any conjecture to bring us to that conclusion; just the allegation itself, repeated three times.

1) Nagle makes “use of a gender list which describes itself as ‘poorly attested'”

The previous allegation, as noted, only accounts for about three sentences of Harman’s article. The other twelve paragraphs, however, make a plausible and reasonably substantiated case that some of the genders Nagle lists as “directly from Tumblr” originated

from the MOGAI archive, a now defunct Tumblr blog…The important thing to note here is that MOGAI was happy to list completely hypothetical genders…that no-one, not the editors of the blog nor the people submitting them, claimed to identify with at all…It is quite possible that 4chan users submitted entries to the blog in order to mock them later.

It seems entirely possible that the etymology Harman puts together here is solid – but what I can’t figure out is why he thinks this discredits Nagle. Doesn’t it discredit what-the-heck-gender-am-i.tumblr.com, which includes most of these dubious genders – even as it claims to screen out “troll-created” genders, including them only “as long as there is one person who genuinely believes this is their gender”? Doesn’t it discredit the “Gender Master List” at genderfluidsupport.tumblr.com? Doesn’t it discredit Dara Hoffman-Fox’s You and Your Gender: A Guide To Discovery, which recommends that list uncritically?

To put it another way: why does Harman think that Nagle compiled her list by looking for the origin of these terms? She is conducting a language survey, not an etymology; the point of interest lies with how words like “cadensgender” are commonly used, not with where they originally came from. There is therefore no reason to assume that she must have pulled her information from the MOGAI archive (or the non-binary wiki) – and even if she had consulted them, this would do nothing to discredit her argument, since these terms are used quite earnestly elsewhere.

So much for Harman’s accusations. Nothing about the gender list’s etymology discredits Nagle’s argument; the claim that she consulted MOGAI and/or the non-binary wiki is neither proven nor damaging even if true (and it just so happens to be false); there is zero criticism in this passage of “all actual non-binary gender identities”; and Harman does not even make any effort to establish that there is.

Stranger still, by the end of the post, Harman agrees with Nagle. In fact, he signs on to language that is far more combative and personal: approvingly, he links to a post which accuses Tumblr users of “giving out genders and sexualities that make no fucking sense,” genders that are “completely made-up shit” and “bullshit”, invented by folks who, “in an attempt to fit in, will do anything to convince themselves (and the world) that they are not cis”. Nagle, meanwhile, limits her editorializing on musigenders and chaosgenders to adjectives like “absurd” and “geeky”.

In Harman’s discussion of the gender list, then, we find no credible critique of Nagle’s methodology or scholarship; no substantive disagreement with her basic claim that Tumblr folks say some wild things about gender; and not even any consistent tone objections, since there are belligerent and extremely personal comments about Tumblr gender politics that he’s happy to endorse. There are, I think, some sound objections to be voiced about Nagle’s broader argument in Kill All Normies, but what exactly is Harman complaining about here? I have some guesses – but as a lesson in what fair criticism looks like, I’ll keep them to myself.