I recently came across several videos of Hans Georg Moeller. Although I got the reference from a leftist source, and there were no early signs to deter me from engaging with his work, I reach the conclusion that his discourse is detrimental to trans activism and unsafe for trans people. Disclaimer: I am no expert in his work, and I watched a couple of his videos. So take what I say here with a grain of salt, if you want. But I think that activists and trans people should be aware that this is probably a problematic philosopher, exerting some influence in leftist transphobe spaces. And in doing so, following the links to his videos provided none of the usual warnings and red flags that are present when entering critter territory. I would rather have people be warned that this philosopher if not “gender-critical” (which I believe) is “gender-critical adjacent”, and this should inform whether you want to engage with his ideas or not (which I advise not).

My opinion is formed by the following clues:

• In his video on Contrapoints’ Pronouns he mostly refers to texts that are written by gender critical authors. He never cites a transfeminist scholar.
• He frames transness as a symptom of overinvestment to extremely online profiles, and he has written at least one paper about it (“From Identities to Profiles”).
• He engages the topic of “wokeism” as an extension of identity politics. This is not in itself damning in this particular case. But there are some deeper problems with it, which relate to broader trivialization of TERF shit in leftist intellectuals.

In discussing “wokeism” he seems to be iffy with established gender terminology, for instance he says “she has all of her identities on, she is cisgender, bisexual and all that”. You know what, “cisgender” is not an identity extravaganza, it is an established term to refer to people that are not trans, what MAGAts insist is “normal”.

On the other hand he is not quite restrained in inventing novel terminology about gender issues. Gender sincerity, gender authenticity, etc. Again, coming up with terms could be justified if he wants to add other layers of useful abstraction, but in this case I thought this is just obfuscating things that are already known and have simple, intuitive names already: Performativity, gender roles, gender identity, gender expression, gender non-conformity.

There should be no problem to these decades-old terms that are available in numerous sociological dictionaries and reference websites. The only problem is that chuds don’t want to hear those terms. And boy were there chuds in the comment section!

An easy objection here could be that Moeller does sth virtuous, by inventing this terminology he makes trans concepts more accessible to people that despise “gender ideology”. But is that so? If you translate his argument in the common tongue, he simply says that trans people internalize and perform gender roles, while utterly missing the point that cis people do too. And, at the same time, borderline perpetuating the myth that trans people reproduce stereotypes. All in all, his verbosity tells us nothing new or interesting, rather than providing entry points of legitimacy to more outspoken gender-critical voices, and giving the average chud the vague confidence that Contrapoints and Thorn have somehow been “debunked”.

This reactionary ideological function of Moellers’ flies under the radar of some trans-positive viewers all the same. Being referred by leftists, and unprimed by the usual walls of red flags that come with other anti-trans commentators, it is easy to tilt your head and listen closely, setting yourself up for an equally alienating, if not traumatic, experience. This friendly guy does not throw the typical dogwhistles people have developed knee-jerk reactions to. He does not purposefully misgender people (although he slips up, but well, true allies tend to not slip up), and he does not seem to make his whole personality about being a dick to trans people. He discusses hijras as a third gender to make his point of “gender sincerity” (ie hijras do not subvert gender roles).

It is easy then to not understand that you are exposed to a re-framing and subverting of trans advocates’ assumptions, and introduced to the idea that these assumptions might not be warranted at all. A trans woman in the comments even says “Good analysis, it is a pity he reaches a wrong conclusion.” Well perhaps it is not an accident. This has historically been an attack vector of transphobes, with payroll think-tank pseudo-intellectuals, who push the idea that “sex change is absurd and infeasible” in more palatable ways to less supremacists audiences. Well, one of the intended audiences are leftists.

But what is his conclusion? Here goes: People are extremely online and overinvest to their online profiles. Technology has reached a point where people seek body modifications to match their internet selfs. Trans people should invest less to bioengineering solutions (ie transition) and learn to be happy as gender-subversive cis individuals. (An opinion we immediately register as transphobic when it comes from right wing commentators). This is a gender critical position and a usual justification for conversion therapy and persecution of affirming one’s identity even by verbally using pronouns. So I don’t really care about how you reach your conclusion, if your conclusion is trans genocide, especially with all that is happening right now.

That is not to say that his conclusion is justified. Heck, it is not even “just” a logical leap from his previous arguments. Did he reach that conclusion with propositional calculus, or backwards inference? No, he reached it by renaming things arbitrarily and furnishing the novel terminology with established anti-trans authors and frameworks. Helen Pluckrose, James Lindsey, Kathleen Stock, Mary Harrington, and what have you. Ah, yes, Slavoj Zizek, whom he links in the video description as a good follow up. Well guess what, Zizek holds really bad positions on trans people. And guys like Zizek and Moelller made me think “ah that’s the ideological man-womb of way so many leftist transphobes”.

To sum up, Moeller: rejects the established terminology, ignores trans scholars and mainstream medical concepts about trans people, bisects Contrapoints and Abigail Thorn videos with self-styled verbal abstractions, responds to these abstractions with TERF references and assumptions, and reaches widely acknowledged as gender-critical conclusions, sprinkling some “trans is the edge case of hegemonic individuation” psychobabble to win over the leftists.

My quick response to the “individuation/identity politics” reactionary buzzwords is that when the system targets you for being homosexual and imprisons you, it is not an individual thing. When the system comes over to your continent to capture and enslave you, it is not an individual thing. And so on and so forth. You are targeted on the exact grounds of not being a white hetero cis male of Germanic origin. Moeller knows that (he says that his red hair do not constitute an “identity”) but chooses to ignore it, and portrays these group-based oppressions as irrelevant in modern discourse. This is the archetypal anti-woke position, that there is no institutional violence and oppression lingering on from patriarchy, slavery, segregation, colonialism, homosexual persecution. “Everybody is free and equal now, right? The tables even are turned over now, it is the minorities that oppress us, etc, etc”.

Despite Hans Georg Moeller can easily fly under the radar of a trans inclusive person as legitimate discourse, he relies upon transphobic sources and reaches typical transphobic conclusions with way less rigor than his verbiage advertises. On top of that, his other analyses, which I won’t discuss now, bear even more sad links to extremist reactionary discourse. For instance, his critique of German guilt-fetishism about the Holocaust, which he considers a driving force (beside identity politics) of “wokeism”, apparently resembles comments Musk made at the AfD rally (“Germans should stop feeling guilty about the past etc”).

Having looked around I nowhere find Moeller being listed as a problematic scholar, but my analysis of him so far has persuaded me that he is a Jordan Peterson of the left, and I would not like any trans person fall prey to his palatable enabling of harmful and alienating discourses.