About

ContraPoints (real name Natalie Wynn) is an American YouTube personality and director who specializes in comedic and educational videos about gender, race, politics, philosophy, and social justice.

Background.

Wynn launched ContraPoints in 2008, featuring videos about atheism, but later shifted her content to responding to arguments of right-wing YouTubers, a user community that has greatly expanded on the website in the late 2010s. Formerly a philosophy graduate student and instructor at Northwestern University, Wynn uses philosophy, sociology, and personal experience in her videos to explain, and often critique, common alt-right, classical liberal, and conservative talking points. Additionally, other videos on the channel relate to her experience as a trans person. ContraPoints videos often have a combative and humorous tone, containing dark or surreal humor, sarcasm, and sexuality.

Online History

One of her most popular videos in her one on incels, which as of November 28, 2018, has over 1 million views. This got her interviewed by The New Yorker.^[1]

On September 12th, 2017, Carl Benjamin had a discussion with her on fascism and other related topics on The Thinkery Podcast. She was also interviewed on the podcast Chapo Trap House, which was released on November 18, 2018.

Pronoun Twitter Controversy

On August 31st, Natalie Wynn tweeted, "I guess it's good for people who use they/them only and want only gender neutral language. But it comes at the minor expense of semi-passable transes like me and that's super fucking hard for us." The tweet has since been deleted but it caused some controversy with many Twitter users either agreeing/supporting her or disagreeing with her. On September 4th, Twitter user @queer_kara^[2] posted several of Natalie Wynn's previous tweets and later pointed out that using "the word transsexual," "being upset about non binary people making it harder to assimilate" and not "apologizing to non binary people for previous tweets" is not great (shown below, left). Other Twitter users supported her. On September 5th, Twitter user @CHSommers^[3] tweeted, "Natalie Wynn is a brilliant, left-of-center Youtuber, as well as a lovely, girly trans woman. Like many feminine transwomen, she doesn’t like gender-neutral language. She dared to say so.Now she has been targeted for cancellation by the trans-Taliban #contrapoints" (shown below, right). The tweet garnered over 1,000 likes in a day. Natalie Wynn has since deleted her Twitter account.

Various Examples

External References