Scott Douglas Jacobsen: We’re here with Emeritus Professor Robert Jensen. We’re catching up a bit (after the end of Conatus News). I conducted many interviews, particularly through that outlet. I wanted to see what people have been doing.
Since then, you’ve been unique in many ways, not only for taking on a position that could be described as a Tillichian existentialist Christian atheist but also as a radical thinker.
On one hand, you’ve received much criticism within a traditional Christian theological framework. You’ve offered reasoned positions within the current discourse around trans ideology, radical feminism, and left-wing progressive politics, but that has also led to criticism. I commend you for your knack for adopting unique, well-considered positions.
However, these positions have consequences. I know you’ve lost friends and access to certain spaces. So, what’s going on there?
Jensen: Well, thank you. The easiest way to answer your question is to share a bit of my biography. I spent most of my twenties working as a journalist for newspapers across the country and had yet to develop a solid political ideology. Journalists are usually encouraged not to engage in that kind of analysis.
When I returned to graduate school at the age of 30 in 1988, I was, in a sense, a blank slate. The first significant political movement I encountered was the feminist critique of pornography. At the same time, I was becoming more generally radicalized, with critiques of capitalism, U.S. imperialism abroad, and white supremacy. It seemed to me that the feminist critique of pornography aligned with those perspectives.
This approach focused on not getting bogged down in individual-level analysis but looking at how systems and structures of power operate. That was a productive framework for me, and I’ve tried to apply it uniformly. Some of the conflicts I’ve encountered, which you referenced, stem from applying that framework consistently, as it creates tension with people on my side of the political spectrum.
The first major tension arose from the radical feminist critique of pornography, which viewed it not as an individual right but as part of a system. At that time—and still today—the liberal/left largely embraced pornography, and that’s where the first conflict arose for me.
I’ve been at odds with my friends since the beginning of my intellectual life, now more than 30 years ago. If you fast forward, once I got tenure—which in the U.S. university system means I had essentially lifetime employment—I loved teaching but I didn’t want to spend much time in the traditional scholarly world. So, I started writing for a more public audience, including the websites you mentioned. I also thought that, as someone with that job security, it was my job not to avoid conflict but to go toward conflict. Not just for the sake of being a gadfly or contrarian but because that keeps movements intellectually healthy, when they debate.
And so, that has led to a whole bunch of scrapes—sometimes with people on the right, sometimes on the left, and sometimes with everybody. After 9/11, I wrote critically about the U.S. presence in the Middle East and the larger Global South, and that got me in trouble with conservatives. As you mentioned, I started articulating the long-standing radical feminist critique of the ideology of the trans movement, and that got me in trouble with the left. How does a Christian theology that doesn’t assert a supernatural divine presence work? In other words, can you be a Christian without believing in God? Of course, there’s a long tradition of Christian atheism and Christian agnosticism, and I spent a few years exploring that. More recently, I’ve been writing critically about the depth of the multiple cascading ecological crises. There are no solutions to many of the problems we face if by solutions we mean keeping the current modern world going. That seems to annoy everybody because everyone has their preferred solution for how we will get out of that trap.
That’s a long-winded way of saying I had an extraordinary position. I had a job I loved, teaching college in an institution where they couldn’t fire me. I had the status of professor, which gives you credibility. I had been a journalist, so I knew how to write for a public audience. I didn’t plan any of this. It’s just how things unfolded as I tried to do things that were interesting to me and useful to the larger world.
Jacobsen: One part of that earlier response mentioned how you had these back-and-forths with friends over these scrapes. At the same time, you’ve lost friends and access to things. That’s a new transition in terms of your commentary. So yes, what is the distinction there, and why?
Jensen: Well, take the radical feminist critique of pornography, prostitution, and what I call the sexual-exploitation industries. I had a lot of left/liberal friends who didn’t like that critique. Still, it never led to a break, either personally or politically.
But when I started critiquing trans ideology—and I wrote that first article in 2014, a decade ago now—the reaction was different. It was still rooted in that same radical feminist critique as the anti-porn material. Still, something had changed around the trans issue. The liberal/left had embraced it as a red line. If you weren’t supportive of all trans political demands, you were somehow just a reactionary. When I first wrote about that, I was not surprised because I knew these tensions existed, but I guess I was disappointed that many of my colleagues, comrades, and friends back-pedaled from engagement.
Some people I’d worked with politically—but weren’t particularly close friends with—just stopped communicating with me. We had worked on organizing projects before, and then they just stopped responding to emails and phone calls. Okay, you cut those folks loose. More disappointing was losing friends, people I knew personally, who didn’t necessarily stop talking to me immediately but refused to engage on the issue. They didn’t want to be seen with me in public, apparently fearing that associating with me publicly would lead some to assume they endorsed a critique of trans ideology as well.
Some of those relationships didn’t survive either, which is a shame. I’m not saying that political disagreements should never cause a break. For example, if someone I considered a friend became a raving pro-Trump racist misogynist in ways I hadn’t seen before, I doubt I would stay friends with them. It would not be easy to do.
So, I’m not saying that political ideas don’t or shouldn’t affect personal relationships. What was striking, however, is that people didn’t debate me. They should have told me why I was wrong. They just denounced me and left. Something else occurs when people refuse to engage with a well-intentioned and logical critique. It’s not just that they disagree with you; they’re afraid of something. That’s been my experience with the critique of trans ideology. It wasn’t simply disagreement leading to conversation, which is what usually happens. Instead, it led to denouncement and separation, which is never healthy—politically, intellectually, or personally.
Jacobsen: Politically, denunciation can sometimes function as currency, but the lack of conversation is my root issue. At the same time, the American First Amendment remains key for many people.
As you make nuanced distinctions in conversations or articles—for instance, on the critique of pornography—you do give credit to those who critique it from an entirely different frame, like conservatives critiquing it from a moral or transcendentalist perspective. They may view it through the lens of oppression and exploitation but from a moral standpoint. It’s a transcendentalist moral frame of mind in their critique of pornography.
But you come to the same conclusion: this seems wrong. The premises and arguments are different, but you acknowledge the validity of their conclusion in a way.
Jensen: Yes, if I can interrupt you, that’s a good example.
There are a variety of people we would consider conservative or religiously motivated who critique pornography. Some of them I have no intersection with because I would consider them reactionary—they are virulently anti-gay and anti-lesbian, for instance. It’s hard to work with people who don’t recognize the humanity of your friends and colleagues. On the other hand, the conservative anti-pornography movement has several people I consider allies, even though we fundamentally disagree on the nature of religion and conservative politics.
But I’ve interacted with them, as have some of my other feminist colleagues, in productive ways. For instance, if you look at the conservative anti-porn movement, it has embraced a lot of the ideas and language of the feminist movement. They discuss the importance of moral considerations and harm to women and children in ways that reflect feminist insights.
To give you an example, I spoke at one of those conferences. I gave what I thought was a fairly hard-hitting critique of patriarchy. Some men, especially the older men in the audience, were not excited about this. But I saw that some younger people, especially the younger women, were much more engaged. In that case, I was under no illusions about the political and intellectual differences, but engaging was important.
I default to engagement only if there’s something to be gained. I’m not sure I would go to a KKK rally to argue against white supremacy because, in that case, the engagement probably won’t lead to much. So, everyone makes political and intellectual decisions about when and where to spend energy. Like most things, there isn’t a hard and fast rule. Context and objectives determine how you proceed.
Jacobsen: And there has been a story in some distant news that I vaguely recall about an African American individual who befriended a member of the KKK. Over time, this person became an actual friend. I believe they even apologized and renounced their KKK association.
Jensen: Yes, and that has happened to many.
Jacobsen: So, it can happen, but is there a distinction between the 1990s style of disagreement and discourse, where people remained friends, versus the late 2010s and 2020s?
Jensen: Well, certainly, there’s been an intensification. Let’s take that period—the late eighties and early nineties. I started teaching at the University of Texas in 1992, and the buzzword was “culture wars.” In fact, at the University of Texas, there had been a big dispute over a freshman textbook that some deemed too politically correct. So, “culture wars” and “political correctness” were the terms of debate, and those debates could get heated.
Today, those terms—PC and culture wars—are still around, but now “cancel culture” and increasing polarization have taken over. In a way, it’s the same debate, just intensified. People’s anger and fear seem to have escalated.
Fear often motivates the quickness to anger when someone disagrees with you. Most of human beings’ more negative qualities are motivated by fear. That’s true from my self-reflection. When I behave badly, it’s usually out of fear. So, that is a problem.
In other words, the fundamental nature of the debate about intellectual life and its politicized nature hasn’t changed, but everything is more intense. My working hypothesis, which can’t be proved, is that part of this is that even among people who deny climate change or aren’t worried about environmental issues, there’s a general understanding that things are falling apart for the modern human experiment. We are drawing down the planet’s ecological capital at a rate that can’t be sustained much longer. There’s a fear that this high-energy, high-technology lifestyle, which the affluent world has become accustomed to—and which many in the non-affluent world aspire to—can’t continue much longer. But it’s comfortable.
I don’t consider myself wealthy, and I see myself as a rather frugal person, but I own a car and have a house heated with natural gas that I rely on if it gets too cold for the wood stove. I live with a level of comfort that is extraordinary in historical terms. People often point out that middle-class individuals in the developed world today live better than the kings and princes of old. It’s hard to know how to let go of that level of comfort that the modern world provides to so many of us. People are afraid of it, whether they admit it or not, whether they even understand it or not.
There’s a terror about what’s ahead. Terrified people often give in to their worst instincts. I’m not preaching from on high—that’s true of me, you, the left, my feminist colleagues, and all of us. So, how to respond to that fear more productively is one of the crucial political questions.
Jacobsen: Many changes from social media have amplified some of that polarization.
Jensen: Yes.
Jacobsen: Also, most disagreements now are either professional or online insults. That is the nature of the discourse. Occasionally, there are physical incidents, like the knife attack on comedian Dave Chappelle while on stage. So, there can be instances like that, but generally, it’s emotional and verbal abuse, professional sabotage, and online insults. What are you noticing regarding how people’s careers are damaged or their emotional lives upset for some temporary period?
Jensen: Before we move on to that, I do think we shouldn’t underestimate the physical violence that happens as a result of all this. There are occasional news stories about the most egregious political debates leading to fights. I think a lot about the role and status of women. There’s a lot of what you could call everyday violence, harassment, and abuse that—especially in an increasingly misogynistic political environment—gets ramped up. It’s often invisible because it’s part of the background of everyday life, and that concerns me.
But you’re right that most of the news coverage focuses on people who are professionally censured or abused on social media. Much of this is discussed under the term “cancel culture.” Here, you see the breakdown of the analysis. The right makes a big deal out of cancel culture, claiming that anyone who makes an off-colour joke or said something racist 20 years ago is immediately cancelled. Of course, as far as I can tell, the right doesn’t care about the freedom to critique. They’re using it politically. The term we hear is “weaponizing” all of this. So, if you read right-wing media, cancel culture is about to destroy everything good about America.
Unfortunately, some on the left respond by saying cancel culture isn’t real or that the few examples don’t matter. Well, that’s not accurate. I’m no longer teaching, I’m not on a college campus anymore, but I have many friends who are. I saw the beginnings of this process before I retired. Many people on college campuses are muting themselves, avoiding participation in important intellectual debates out of fear of being cancelled.
The trans issue is the one I have the most experience with, but racial issues as well. So yes, cancel culture is real. It’s not destroying the American Republic like right-wing people say. Still, it’s also not trivial, as too many on the left claim.
Jacobsen: When assessing complex phenomena, how is social media exacerbating this?
Jensen: What should we do about the possibility of controlling social media? Should social media be subject to new restrictions and regulations from the government? How should social media companies police their sites? All of these are complex questions that don’t have easy answers. But we can’t pretend the underlying tensions don’t make those questions relevant.
Jacobsen: Now, who do you think is being impacted more? We’re not talking about cancel culture destroying the American Republic or saying it doesn’t exist. Still, it’s affecting people professionally—whether through speaking engagements or teaching positions. These are things you can catalogue to a decent degree. Is it affecting people on the left, in the center, or on the right more?
Jensen: Well, looking at this issue by issue is probably most useful. The cancel culture that the right makes the most noise about is when people accused of racism are cancelled.
For instance, a University of Pennsylvania law professor has been censured. If you look at her comments, they are pretty egregious. You can imagine that if you were a Black student in her class, it would feel like a hostile environment. And we do have a legal concept of a hostile climate, where through words, a professor cannot create an atmosphere in which students can’t access the education they’re there for.
All right, to make a simple analogy—and I don’t want to seem glib—but I’m from North Dakota. There aren’t that many people from North Dakota. Suppose I had a professor when I was a student who hated North Dakotans and always made jokes about how it’s surprising any North Dakotan ever got into college. In that case, I can imagine that wouldn’t feel good. I wouldn’t trust that professor’s ability to grade me fairly.
Those kinds of concerns are real. But on the flip side, if freedom of speech and academic freedom are meaningful concepts, there has to be latitude for people—we might say—to be stupid. So, that’s a balance. You’re balancing the importance of freedom of speech against the real harm that happens when certain kinds of speech alienate others or make them afraid that they can’t be in a classroom. All of these concerns are real.
And so, when the right complains about cancel culture, it’s mostly or often about racial issues. On the other hand, my experience, as we’ve been pointing out, is with the trans movement, which has come after not only me but many others, especially feminists. I must say that the problems I’ve had are rather minimal compared to some of my female feminist colleagues. Gender is relevant here because women tend to receive more direct and threatening attacks. So, I’ve had people refuse to talk to me.
I have had speaking engagements cancelled once people found out I had written about this. If I were still teaching (I retired in 2018), I’m sure there would be students filing grievances against me. All that is unpleasant and annoying and generally creates a climate where people are afraid to speak. But I also know female feminist colleagues who have been physically attacked by trans activists or had their work life made so miserable that they quit rather than continue because the institution wouldn’t support them.
All right. Those are serious problems, not just for the affected individuals, but because they suppress important dialogue about a complex and troubling set of public policy issues. And I know I’m going on, but let me make another point. My critique of the trans movement is not that people don’t have the right to struggle with the sex-gender system in the way they want. It’s when public policy demands have anti-feminist implications. For instance, males who now identify as female or women—depending on the terms you want to use—are allowed to compete in athletics, which gives them an inherent advantage over the women competing. That will slowly erode the integrity of girls and women’s sports. Well, that’s a public policy question. It’s not just about how an individual feels; it’s about what we as a society are going to do to set rules for things like sports participation, locker rooms, scholarships, or any number of areas where we make distinctions between male and female for legitimate reasons related to women’s safety, women’s ability to compete, and rectifying long-standing inequalities that have disadvantaged women.
Jacobsen: And in public discourse, there’s been at least one organization or group of people on a website cataloging the number of awards in sports that would have gone to women but were instead awarded to a trans woman. Based on your knowledge of inherent differences, such as strength, what do people typically push back against when you present a nuanced and considered concern about some of these issues?
Jensen: Well, it’s funny when you say “presentation.” I don’t think I’ve ever given a public lecture specifically about the trans issue. The reason is that nobody wants the heat. I give lectures about other things where the issue may arise, or people will shout me down. But I’ve done most of that work in writing—two chapters in books over the last 10 years and several articles available online.
The most striking reaction to my writing—and I appreciate your observation that the writing is nuanced. I try to write, especially on controversial issues, in accurate ways, logically sound, and take into consideration the complexity—and I think that my writing on the trans issue does just that.
The most striking response to my writing on the trans issue has been almost total silence. There’s simply no engagement with it. Let me give you an example. I sent the current book, which includes a chapter critiquing trans ideology, to an environmental activist I know.
He replied, “Thank you for the book” and offered several complimentary remarks. So I wrote back and asked, “Do I have your permission to use those comments in publicity for the book?”
And he wrote back, “No, please don’t do that.” He said, “I probably disagree with you on the trans issue, but I haven’t read that chapter yet, and I don’t have time to read that chapter, so let’s not.” You could sense the fear in his email. Not only did he ask not to be associated with my critique of trans ideology, but he didn’t even want to read the critique. I’m speculating here, but his thinking was: “I don’t want to read the chapter, not because I’ll disagree with you, but because I might agree with you—and then I’d have to deal with that.”
I’ve had friends tell me they won’t read my work on trans issues. I don’t think it’s because they’re angry. If they read it and realized they agreed with me, they would have to choose how to present themselves publicly and respond to questions. Whatever one thinks about the trans issue, it’s not a good situation when people are so afraid of the responses that they refuse to even engage with the question. That can’t be good.
And I don’t just mean it can’t be good for those of us critiquing trans ideology. It can’t be good for trans people. This is part of what I argue in the chapter of my new book. For instance, there’s almost a complete ban in the public conversation on discussing where the experience of trans identity comes from in medical terms. What is the etiology of transgender identity? Well, there’s a surprising silence on that for various political reasons.
But how does it benefit people struggling with gender dysphoria if the root causes of gender dysphoria aren’t explored? I’ve never seen an example quite like the trans issue, where good-faith, well-intentioned engagement is shut down so completely under the argument that this helps people. I don’t see how it does at all.
And, of course, when the nuanced, sensible critiques that we’re talking about are shut down, what voices critiquing trans ideology do you hear? Mostly from the right wing. And a lot of those critiques from the right are not subtle. They need to be more nuanced. Most of them are patriarchal in nature. They want to restore the primacy of traditional patriarchal norms.
Jacobsen: To be mindful of time, as you were getting started, you had a professorship, so you had certain protections and earned privileges that others, like students, don’t have. You worked your way up and proved your academic merit.
Jensen: Yes, exactly. And with that, I had certainly privileges that students and others don’t.
Jacobsen: So, if you have younger individuals, in their early twenties, who agree with the critiques you’re making, and they have trans friends and want to maintain the dignity and compassion of their trans friends and colleagues while taking into account sensible critiques, they, as you’re noting, are often expressing some fear. How do they express themselves honestly when living under the real or perceived threat of consequences?
Jensen: Absolutely, and that’s true not only of the trans issue. Let me tell you a quick story.
Remember, I quit teaching in 2018 before the most intense expressions of these political ideas circulated on campuses. But I was teaching a class that dealt with social justice issues, and there was only one Black student in a class of about 30 mostly White students. We were discussing issues of racism and white supremacy, and the Black student commented, and I could see the White students tensing up.
I saw an opportunity and said, “Let’s pause for a second.” I turned to the Black student and said, “I know you don’t want to speak for all Black people, but let me ask you about your reaction. Do White people ever say things so stupid you want to slap them upside the head?” She laughed and said, “Yes.”
Everyone chuckled a bit, and then I asked, “Does the fact that White people say stupid things mean you never want to talk to another White person again?” She said, “No, of course not.”
Then I turned to the White students and asked, “Are you ever afraid of saying something so stupid that someone might want to slap you upside the head?” You could see this sigh of relief, and they said, “Yes, we’re afraid of saying the wrong thing.”
I replied, “But are you willing to speak if that’s part of an honest engagement?” They said yes. So here we were, on the campus of one of the top universities in the country, and everyone was afraid. I asked, “How is that fear going to help us critique and understand white supremacy?”
The White kids started talking, and some other students of colour started talking. It was the most productive student conversation I’ve ever seen in a class in my teaching experience. It happened because I was willing to take the chance, knowing that I had privilege and power—and the students didn’t.
Well, I don’t tell that story to be self-aggrandizing. There were lots of opportunities I could have done better in doing that. But at that moment, I was so frustrated that I didn’t see any other option. Multiply that by a hundred or a thousand, and you can understand that the atmosphere on college campuses for students is incredibly tense.
Students feel that stress all the time. The only way to bust through it is for faculty to be the ones to take chances. Here, I’m going to be prejudiced, okay? Damn me if you must, but in my experience, university professors are among the most cowardly class of professionals I’ve ever met.
And it’s ironic because, especially for professors with tenure and job protection, they’re surprisingly unwilling to engage like this. That reminds us that group loyalty is a powerful motivator. Suppose you’re a left/liberal professor, and it’s assumed that you don’t say certain things among left/liberal professors. In that case, it doesn’t matter how much freedom of speech or academic freedom you have—you won’t say those things. Your need to be part of the group will outweigh what I would call the professional obligation to push forward and challenge people. People might ask, “Well, you were a professor. Are you saying you were cowardly?”
And here’s where individual differences matter. The best training I’ve had to be a somewhat iconoclastic professor was being a completely weird, nerdy, freaky kid who never fit in and never felt my identity was tied to group membership. That’s just an accident of history—that’s the kid I was.
So, I grew up knowing that being part of the group would not save me. And that served me well. I’ve never been so glad I was a freaky kid until I became a professor. I’m not saying that I have never felt a part of groups or that I have never stayed quiet to remain in a group. But the older I get, the less I care about that.
Jacobsen: Well, this has been an exciting catch-up, I’ll tell you that. There is no pattern yet.
Jensen: There almost certainly won’t be—or at least not one that’s observable.
Jacobsen: Again, thank you so much for your time. It was lovely catching up.
Jensen: Thanks, Scott.
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Robert Jensen, an Emeritus Professor in the School of Journalism and Media at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of It’s Debatable: Talking Authentically about Tricky Topics from Olive Branch Press. His previous book, co-written with Wes Jackson, was An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity. To subscribe to his mailing list, go to http://www.thirdcoastactivist.org/jensenupdates-info.html.