I immediately hesitated at the idea of Leah Hampton’s recent essay in Guernica Magazine, “Lost in a (Mis)Gendered Appalachia.” There’s the title, of course, the simple contention that, in Hampton’s estimation, Appalachia has somehow been misgendered. And then, in the first paragraph, the author tells us that Tryon, North Carolina is “more genteel and diverse than the rest of the region.” That’s an arbitrary and subjective statement, at best, but the rest of Hampton’s rant might also be categorized as subjective. In the wake of J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, a best-selling book that has been turned into a film by Ron Howard, a cottage industry has sprung up among academics and authors: let’s try to destroy Vance and his book because his version of Appalachia is, well, just too damn conservative.

In 2018 historian named Elizabeth Catte wrote an entire book in response to Vance, What You’re Getting Wrong About Appalachia. Vance’s first sin, according to an essay Catte wrote for The Guardian early that year, seems to be that he was a venture capitalist—you can hardly read about Vance without those two words showing up. For her part, Leah Hampton calls Hillbilly Elegy a “low-key eugenics manifesto,” which, on its face, is rather funny: eugenics was always a pet project of the American left (Margaret Sanger, anyone?). And if one can be certain of anything with Hampton and Catte, it’s that they are far to the left on the American political spectrum. And that doggone J.D. Vance is a conservative, firmly on the right; the obvious conclusion is that he must be cancelled at all costs.

The stuff Vance wrote about—you know, his life, his perspective, his truth—doesn’t fit the leftist narrative, so Mr. Vance falls into the same category as, say, Donald Trump. Just like Orange Man Bad is a kind of manifesto, Hillbilly Elegy Man Bad is a worthwhile subheading for Hampton, Catte, and many others. That’s why it’s not surprising to see that Guernica published Hampton’s essay on the day before the Netflix release of Howard’s film.

Catte and Hampton are on a mission to show that Appalachia is Woke and radicalized, with pink hair dye, a healthy population of LBGTQ and POC, and, in Hampton’s words, “granny-witches…the sacred feminine,” and a “thriving and statistically outsized trans community.” Hooray for those trans folks in Appalachia, I suppose, but Hampton would have you believe that there’s a trans on every dirt road between Georgia and Upstate New York; he (or she) lives next to a Latino who hates Trump; and just up the holler a piece, there’s a Black Lives Matter rally under the big oak tree. See? Hampton seems to say, we are not white trash here in Appalachia! And please, don’t blame us for Trump, all y’all in the American media!

Hampton is a pronounced misandrist, though—if she doesn’t hate men, I’ll have to see some proof—and the anger that lives in every paragraph quickly dilutes her essay and her argument; there is no center for Hampton, no common ground she might find with men or Trump voters. And that’s where my problem begins: hate oozes from every paragraph of Hampton’s rant, and she’s unwilling to acknowledge anything positive about her neighbors who might lean right. It seems fitting that her first book (from Henry Holt) is called F*ckface. She’s angry about the “Truck Nutz ethos” and “gun-totin’ Bubbas.” Her feminist, coke-bottle-thick lens sees the world in a fiery rage because, “Indeed, to be American is in many ways to live in response to, or as an invocation of, backwoods swinging dicks.” One senses that, if she had the chance, Hampton would take a Bowie knife to every one of those dicks and hurl them into the forest of western North Carolina, where she lives.

Hampton wages an uproarious battle against Appalachian stereotypes, even as she utilizes them to make a point: “Tryon is still a town with shocking wealth disparity and de facto segregation, where rich white residents still live high on a hill…” Like Catte, Hampton is out to prove something when she talks about socialist and pro-union roots in the mountains. But dang it, she can’t stand the fact that there are folks up in the holler who buy into capitalist definitions! How dare they? And don’t forget about “unregulated corporations and himbo charlatans.” Like everyone else on the left, Hampton wants to throw out the baby with the bathwater. But at some point, you have to accept the idea that “evil” capitalists who mined and timbered gave Appalachia an economy. They brought jobs, houses, schools, and—dare I say it—pickup trucks. Expensive pickup trucks.

But anyone who’s not in lockstep with Hampton must be reminded that not all straight men are interested in extracting stuff from the land—not interested in pickup trucks and work boots and rifles. Goshdarnit, men in Appalachia read Wendell Berry poems and play folk music and run organic farms. They meditate and learn crafts! Meanwhile, the guy who hunts and works in the mines and goes to church—he’s been “constructed” by the GOP to justify the same ideology that J.D. Vance glorifies in Hillbilly Elegy, what Hampton calls the “bootstrap ideology.” Shame on the GOP, and shame on Vance for succeeding! And that brings us back to hate. Hampton writes, “No good can come from seeking common ground with the misguided dudebros of Appalachia.” No, we should focus on the “non-binary folkways.”

But all along, Hampton comes off as disingenuous. She says she’s confronted with “the white male experience” of Appalachia on a daily basis. She’s constantly bumping into people with kayaks and Harleys who ask her about the “real” Appalachia: moonshine and banjo lessons. Her neighbors are “flag-waving dipshits” who “vote and behave abominably.” But is she really approached, daily, by people seeking some mythological version of Appalachia? And though she claims to “know Tryon well,” and that her family has populated the North Carolina mountains for seven generations, Hampton freely admits that she had never visited the childhood home of Nina Simone in Tryon—not until this August. By then, it seemed necessary for Hampton to see Simone’s house, so she could use Simone’s mountain heritage as a basis for her article: mountain folk are artsy and radicalized! Just look at Nina Simone! She didn’t play a banjo! And she was Black!

Leah Hampton wants us to believe that extractive industries in Appalachia are a kind of insanity—that’s her word. The wrong version of Appalachia is capitalism and white supremacy on steroids, a “narrow, hyper-masculine view.” And her poor nieces, supposedly, can’t find “reproductive health care” in western North Carolina. Unless we read “reproductive health care” as abortion, or as a Planned Parenthood outpost, can we believe that the female members of Hampton’s family can’t find a doctor?

I wonder at the world of Leah Hampton. While she says Appalachia ends somewhere in West Virginia, I view myself as a product of Appalachia—the coal mining towns of the Allegheny Mountains in Western Pennsylvania. It’s just that my version of Appalachia doesn’t look like Hampton’s. And neither does J. D. Vance’s. So, what? The other, more important thing that strikes me is that my Appalachia isn’t so mean-spirited as Hampton’s.

Northern Cambria County was all (or mostly) white when I grew up there. My dad was a miner, and my grandfathers, too. It’s strange, though: my dad might have called himself prejudiced, perhaps a byproduct of where and how he grew up. And yet, he left me with an important message when he died in 2012, something he’d taught me all through my life: I’m no better than anyone else, and I should treat everyone the way that I’d like to be treated.

Sometime in the late ’70s, my older brother brought home a black friend. I remember that day, not because it was an anomaly, but because it held a certain truth about my dad: his door was open to everyone. Just as he would for any white visitor, Leo Stanek grabbed the whiskey and a couple of shot glasses. There was a guest in our kitchen, and we had to do this right.

It’s strange to read essays by Hampton and Catte, voices for the tolerant left. Hampton makes it clear in her essay for Guernica: her door is open, but only to the people who agree with her worldview. If that’s Hampton’s version of Appalachia, maybe I need to opt out—turn in my Appalachian membership card. My version is a lot friendlier and much more tolerant—I prefer my dad’s example. And I’m okay with the things that are familiar to me, the pickup trucks, the coal mines—and the women who hunt and shoot high-powered rifles, the women who like to blast a clay pigeon out of the sky, the women who will gut a deer this December.

Thanks to Hampton’s objections, I’ll purposely sit down to watch Hillbilly Elegy this weekend. Afterward, I’ll take a ride in a pickup truck. Maybe I’ll shoot my 12-gauge, just for the hell of it. Something tells me it’s going to be fun. And maybe I’ll get a little extra satisfaction knowing that some people just don’t like the way I live.

Gerard Stanek writes and teaches in North Carolina.