[Applause]
>> Hi, everyone.
Wow, it's like a live stream, except you're here. [Laughter]
It's scarier this way.
My name is Natalie Wynn.
I am a YouTuber.
I guess we don't really like that word because it's associated with people who film dead
bodies, but you know, sometimes you have to face the facts and I make my money on the
internet as a YouTuber, so that's what I am.
I'm the creator of a channel called ContraPoints and today, I will tell you a little bit about
that channel and about the circumstances that led me to make it and what it's done to me.
So, that's my channel.
You can see I cover a variety of safe, non-controversial topics. [Laughter]
Nazis, communism, sexual deviation, cults, that sort of thing.
And I have such a difficult time describing what this channel is.
If I'm in the back of an Uber and the driver asks me, what do you do?
I'm like, I make YouTube videos, and they're like, what's your channel about?
And I say makeup? [Laughter]
ContourPoints.
[Laughter] [Applause]
If I were to attempt to describe it, I would say that it's maybe about internet
culture, right?
The bad parts.
It's about just being alive in 2018.
It's kind of a long, theatrical response to fascism.
So let's look at a sample.
♪♪ [Mendelssohn, "A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Allegro di molto"] ♪
[shimmering noises]
Hail, mortals!
I come to thee from my fairy grove to bring thee tidings of great woe.
Western culture is being destroyed by cucks and by gender-bending, intoxication and sodomy,
you know, things that have never happened in Europe.
♪ [Mendelssohn, "A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture, Allegro di molto"] ♪♪
>> So, that's me as a fairy queen talking about Nazis.
How did that happen?
How did we end up in this situation where that was a necessary thing?
Well, it all starts with cucks. [Laughter]
The year was 2016 and Barack Obama was President of the United States, we were
about to elect our first woman president and things were kind of going okay.
But the internet was not okay.
I, at this moment, had just dropped out of a philosophy PhD program because the examined
life is actually not worth living. [Laughter]
I don't know, I was like an Uber driver, a piano teacher, a paralegal, and
just looking for what to do next.
Back in 2009, I had been kind of like an atheist YouTuber, or at least had kind of followed
that world.
So in my subscriptions box and my recommended videos box in 2016, it was suddenly a lot
of, like, "Why Feminism is Ruining the Planet," and "Black Lives Matter is Trash."
And I was like, hmm, interesting.
I thought I could use my skills from my education to kind of like maybe do a channel that would
counter some of these videos and respond to them.
That was the original idea for the ContraPoints channel.
Those were the points it was against.
That's what I did for the first year of the channel.
I made what seems, in retrospect, really reckless videos.
Being like, "Hello, Nazi 4chan, let's talk about how wrong you are!" [Laughter]
Which, you know, you don't just do that.
But, at the time, I was...
Well, I should explain.
So, I used to be, um, a little bit of a man. [Laughter]
I'm not proud of it, but these things happen. [Laughter]
We all make mistakes! [Applause]
And I guess I realized last year that I needed to transition.
It wasn't an option.
It was just what I had to do to live and be alive.
That was unfortunate for my YouTube career because I had watched for a long time the
way trans women, all women really, are treated on YouTube.
When I realized that me, as this person with this anti-4chan Nazi YouTube channel was now
going to have to become a trans woman, I was like oh, shit, I am very thoroughly fucked.
So my old persona, like, here I am.
This is me before I transitioned in the persona I had as some kind of cross-dressing leather
mommy Nazi Frank-N-Furter thing?
I was actually going to show you a clip of this, but I can't stand to watch my old videos
for even like ten seconds.
It's like agony to listen to my voice, so that's another thing.
I can't escape this.
Like, that's something that I haven't even really begun to think about for what it's
like to be trans on the internet is that once you're on the internet, that's there forever.
You are always stuck with this.
That's not the only bad thing though.
More generally speaking, it's not a good idea to be a woman.
I had been shielded in a lot of ways by this degenerate cross-dresser persona.
It was grotesque, I knew it was grotesque, I didn't really identify with.
Sure, I'd get harassed and people would come after me, but what are they going to do?
They're going to call me a degenerate and a cuck.
None of that even scratched the surface of my emotional well-being.
But when I started transitioning, if you want to ruin a trans woman's day, that's really
easy.
It made things harder.
People were harder on me.
About a month after I came out, I was fully doxed.
Address, every old picture of me before I transitioned, my full name, my full deadname,
everything because that's what they do.
Things got harder.
It was difficult suddenly to have to be very publicly transitioning, it's an awkward thing
to do, to try to do a gender transition with a camera on you, because it's a second adolescence.
It is.
You don't want to do your first adolescence, or any adolescence on camera.
It's very unpleasant.
But I knew that was going to happen.
I'm one of the few people who's doing this online that can say at least I knew what I
was getting into it, because I had read about Gamergate.
I knew what was going to happen, so I was ready for it.
I also had a sense when I was being harassed by transphobes that I was right and they were
wrong, because they were on the wrong side of history.
A feeling of self-righteousness will carry you through a lot of shit.
What I didn't expect and what in some ways became the more difficult problem is that
I had a platform, and I was transitioning, and so people saw me as a representative of
trans people.
Which is really unfair, because this happened like two months after I came out, people were
already thinking of me like this.
It's unfair to me, it's unfair to the trans community, but it's just the situation because
trans people aren't well represented in media anywhere, so me having the platform such as
it is, being a d-list YouTube transsexual, it caused a level of expectation of me that
was more or less impossible to meet.
Trans people, it's a very diverse group of people.
We don't agree on basics.
We don't agree on what gender is, we don't agree on what it means to be trans, we don't
agree on what transition is supposed to look like.
Being one person supposed to represent a whole group of people is not good.
It's an impossible task.
It led to a series of problems that plagued most of 2017 for me.
People thought I was supposed to be transsexual Gandhi and at the same time, a lot of people
on the left, because again there wasn't a lot of leftist YouTube back then, they also
wanted me to be gay Lenin or lead the revolution or whatever, and I was not up to that.
If people thought I was doing things the wrong way, they would feel that I had betrayed them.
I made three big mistakes career-wise in 2017.
The first one was at VidCon, the YouTube conference in Anaheim, took a picture with some centrists. [Laughter]
And worse than that, I was smiling in the picture.
The way this works is if you are standing next to someone, and someone takes a picture,
and if you are smiling and that picture goes on the internet, nothing you say can convince
people that you're not best friends with that person.
I've seen this happen to friends, other activists, politicians.
You smile in a picture, you're best friends.
So that's what happened.
People thought I was basically, you know, best friends with these counter-revolutionary
bourgeois revisionists.
The second mistake I made — they're all really the same mistake — was I accepted
an interview in New York magazine with a journalist who is widely regarded as transphobic.
The third mistake was I agreed last November to do a debate with the right-wing trans YouTuber,
Blaire White.
And that was kind of three strikes and I was out.
And leftist Twitter was fully against me at that point.
That hurt much more than any amount of 4chan or transphobia harassment, because it's not
just that I couldn't take criticism.
I'm open to criticism, but it's that people were accusing me of essentially being a profiteering
careerist who was throwing all trans people under the bus just to advance my career by
making these decisions.
It was so hurtful to me that I just couldn't function for a long time and to this day,
I'm very reluctant to accept interviews, very reluctant to agree to do events just because
I'm afraid of it happening again.
And I've really had to change the way I act online knowing that I'm going to have to deal
with that.
One of the ways I've decided to deal with it is not tweeting.
Twitter is bad.
And you shouldn't do it. [Applause]
Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. [Laughter]
Yeah, you're reluctant to say what I'm about to say because you don't want it
to be taken by reactionaries and run with, but there are a lot of people who use Twitter
and Twitter callouts aggressively.
That is, they don't want you to change, they don't want to make the world better, they
want to bring you down.
This is something that we on the leftist internet really need to figure out how to deal with.
because it's not just if you say something problematic now, you're in trouble.
I think it's justifiable to call someone out when they say something wrong, but when something
you said in 2010 gets brought up to drag you down, what good does that do?
And the terror of this happening starts to consume you.
I know it's not just me.
Everyone I know who does this is terrified that something from their past is going to
be dug up or they're going to misspeak slightly and that will lead to a week of harassment.
This is not social justice activism.
It is harassment.
[Applause]
Thank you.
It's hard to convince people of this, because of course, you need to be able to hold people
accountable, right?
You need to be able to criticize people, you need to be able to call someone out for saying
something that's problematic, but it's so often done in a way where it's just not constructive.
In fact, the only reason I'm standing here is that when I started on YouTube, I was nobody.
No one knew who I was, no one knew what my opinions were in 2009.
If people knew my opinions in 2009, it would have been hard for me to start because my
opinions weren't always super good.
How many of the people in this room — how many of you were really, really woke about
trans people in 2008? [Laughter]
Right?
We have to be able to make room for people to change.
For me, I think about this in two ways.
One is a moral evolution.
My moral world has expanded as I've learned things.
But there's also the gender transition, and being trapped by this old version of myself
that's always hanging around next to me and I can never escape it.
I've dealt with that basically by creating more of a distinction between my public life
and my private life, because I need to make it so I don't feel so attacked when these
things happen.
Because it's going to happen.
As you see in the video, I use a very strong persona, a kind of fictional character I play
on the internet, and that makes it easier to cope with criticism because I feel that
it's not Natalie being criticized, it's ContraPoints and that's easier to put up with.
The other thing that I do and this is really become what makes me YouTube channel possible,
at this point, is working with fiction.
So, you know, my colleague Lindsay Ellis talked about authenticity on YouTube and how it's
something that's very desirable.
People want to see what they feel is a real person, but there's more than one way to be
authentic.
You don't have to be a diarist, you can also be a novelist, metaphorically speaking.
It's possible to express yourself through lying, or you can be yourself by becoming
someone else.
This is a technique that I've used on my channel, to discuss extremely controversial issues,
where just literally sitting in my bedroom looking at the camera and saying what my opinion
is would be a bad idea.
This is my TVTropes page.
It has a list of characters that I've created.
There is Abigail Cockbane, who is like the anti trans-radical feminist.
There's Lady Foppington, who's this 18th century aristocrat phrenologist who shows up every
time we need to talk about skulls, which is a lot. [Laughter]
There's Freya, who's a Nazi.
There's Tiffany Tumbles, who's a trans woman who hates herself, which is like, what's *that*
like? [Laughter]
Here is a screenshot from my upcoming video.
This is my character Tabby, who is an antifascist catgirl.
That's kind of where I'm at with this channel.
I do dialogues.
It's a way to explore ideas without necessarily fully committing to them, which sounds cowardly
but there's a precedent.
To go back to philosophy, all of Plato's philosophy is written in dialogue format between fictional
characters and it kind of works, I think, if we're talking about politics.
I also like the theatrical aspect of it too, because politics is basically theater, especially
now.
A reality TV star is the president of this country, so responding to theater with more
theater actually makes sense.
I think it works better than just being some nerd in your room talking about the means
of production.
No one wants to listen to that.
Sorry! [Laughter]
You need to look at fascism as a pageant, and you have to bring your own
pageant if you are going to work in the media world.
It's also a way of protecting yourself from the kind of vicious leftist in-fighting.
If you can present yourself as a more abstract figure, a more abstract author, creating these
characters than you can ease some of the burden of being held directly accountable for every
opinion you express.
So that's what's been working for me.
I don't presume to tell anyone else how it works, but this is the best thing I've come
up with in terms of how to survive in 2018 as a trans woman talking about fascism on the
internet.
If you have a better idea, let me know.
Thanks.
[Applause]