Meghan Daum

The Outrage Antidote

Writer and recovering Twitter-holic Robyn Kanner on social media call-out culture and making a human connection

As recently as two years ago, Robyn Kanner was a lot of people’s worst nightmare on Twitter. A political progressive with a personal stake in trans activism — Kanner herself is a trans woman — she called out people for the slightest missteps outside the lines of social justice purity. She joined in on pile-ons of people whose supposed sins she didn’t even fully grasp at the time, for instance the journalist Katie Herzog, who Kanner called “trash” for writing an article about people who had once identified as transgender but later detransitioned.

In February of this year, Kanner was on the receiving end of the same kind of Twitter invective. Her crime: writing a New York Times op-ed expressing compassion for Ryan Morgan, a 17-year-old Wisconsin boy profiled in a much-maligned Esquire cover story about the difficulties of growing up white, male, middle-class, and conservative (his parents support President Trump) in the era of #MeToo, MAGA and and “toxic masculinity.” The magazine itself was criticized for the story but Morgan himself also became a target of online invective.