Arguably the most important tradition is Tradition 10: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the AA name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” The Washingtonians, a group of recovering alcoholics that preceded AA by about a century, disbanded due to infighting over its involvement in social reforms like prohibition, religion and slavery abolition. AA’s founders, William Wilson and Dr Robert Smith (Bill and Dr Bob), didn’t want AA to suffer the same fate. Best their organisation remain neutral, they thought, so as to be welcoming for alcoholics from every walk of life. For nearly 88 years, AA has never weighed in on foreign or domestic policies, nor has it endorsed political candidates or legislative proposals. And so desperate drunks of every race, colour and creed have kept on coming and — together — got sober.

It is up to every individual AA meeting to uphold the programme principles. (Tradition 4: “Each group should be autonomous except in matters affecting other groups or AA as a whole”). But where many struggle, I’ve found, over the 20 years I’ve been going to meetings, is with Tradition 10. In AA, alcoholics are free to share about anything they like, so long as it pertains to alcoholism; politics and the culture wars, they can leave at the door. And yet, a lot of recovering alcoholics can’t resist hot takes when they’ve been handed a mic. I noticed this particularly after Donald Trump was elected, and especially in New York City. Members started sharing about a fight they’d had that day with their idiotic, MAGA-hat-wearing uncle on Facebook — apparently unaware of newcomers, desperate to get sober, who might now feel unwelcome because they had voted for the wrong guy.

In 2020, violations of Tradition 10 reached a fever pitch. After George Floyd’s murder, institutions across the nation absorbed progressive ideals into their mission statements. I was finishing my last year of study at Columbia University. Having entered the university in 2017 as a self-described radical progressive planning a career in LGBT activism, I was graduating an exile. I had become disillusioned with, and spoken out against, my fellow progressives’ tactics: suppressing free speech, purity policing and reducing every individual to his or her skin colour, gender and sexual orientation. During my last semester, which was moved online due to the pandemic, I’d sign on to virtual AA meetings after class, and immediately be struck by how similar the two spaces had become. Pronouns lit up the screen. Whereas opening readings once consisted of the AA preamble, the 12 Steps and 12 traditions, and details about the meeting, now some groups chose to add a thinly veiled threat: “We will not tolerate racist, homophobic, sexist or transphobic rhetoric in this space.”

From my experience of post-Trump academia, I knew these proclamations wouldn’t so much prevent inappropriate speech as put everyone on high alert, encouraging an atmosphere of self-censorship. Recovering alcoholics carry a lot of guilt about the harm their drinking has caused others; they are often irrationally fearful of causing any more. If they feel like they’re traversing a mine field of potential triggers that could set off listeners in the room, they may be reluctant to admit shameful details about the past, which they want and need to get off their chests. Recovering alcoholics’ lives depend on their ability to share honestly, and to feel like they will be accepted by AA no matter their histories or their personal views. Increasingly, certain opinions — although you could never be totally sure which ones — were no longer worthy of respect in a democratic society. Meetings were not unlike my university classes, where the silence during discussions would extend for what felt like an eternity, as so many students stayed quiet rather than risk transgressing.

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But even silence could get alcoholics in trouble. In June 2020, Toby N. had been in the programme in New York for six years. He was raised in the Mormon church, but left it when he was 24 and came out as gay a couple of years later. On #BlackoutTuesday, when white people committed to posting nothing but a black square on Instagram for a full 24 hours, Toby decided not to partake. “I didn’t feel like it was going to do anything,” he said. Then he got a direct message from a friend — another gay man in AA — who asked: why hadn’t Toby posted anything about racial justice on social media? He accused Toby of inadequate allyship. (Toby had donated to Black Lives Matter.) In meetings, he would hear people whispering about other members’ “white privilege”.

Toby was generally in alignment with them about social justice issues, but he found the manner in which they spoke about them exceedingly “toxic”. But a line had been drawn in the sand, he told me: “You’re either with us, or you’re against us.” Exclusively attending meetings for gay alcoholics, Toby had previously found acceptance in AA, but now he felt like a stranger in the programme that had for years been like a second home. He decided to leave. The 12 steps worked for him, but the dogma and the groupthink, he felt he could do without. “It feels like I’m a man without a country,” he said. “I don’t have the gay community that I thought I did.”

For many years, I also attended affinity AA groups for gay and lesbian alcoholics. In these meetings, we felt no need to use coded language when sharing: we could say “my boyfriend” or “girlfriend”, rather than “my other half” or “significant other”. We could be honest about our difficulties with various spiritual aspects of the programme (Step Three: A decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him): the only God many of us had ever understood was one who despised us. It may seem like affinity groups violate Tradition 10, since some of the topics discussed in these meetings are technically “outside issues”. However, they are always spoken about as they pertain to alcoholism. And because these meetings are clearly labelled in the directory, straight members who attend are aware that some of the issues discussed might not pertain to them.

Sometime over the past decade, gay and lesbian meetings became “LGBTQ” meetings. After “intersectionality” leapt from university campuses into the mainstream, these meetings became the most ideological of them all. Suddenly, a whole range of difficulties had to be acknowledged. “If you suffer from chronic fatigue and don’t feel like you can make it until the end of the meeting to share, please alert me and I will call on your early,” the host of one LGBTQ meeting in New York I attended read aloud. Then: “If you want to share but you have difficulty speaking, please write what you would like to share in the chat and I will read it aloud for you.” I still can’t fathom how any member in attendance could have interpreted these announcements as anything other than disturbingly infantilising: one of the key ingredients for sobriety is personal responsibility.

Perhaps most disconcertingly, the language of one of AA’s best-known readings changed. The preamble has always read: “Alcoholics Anonymous is a fellowship of men and women who share their experience, strength and hope with each other.” On the last day of the 71st General Service Conference for the US and Canada, held virtually in April 2021, a vote was held on whether to change the wording of the Preamble from “a fellowship of men and women” to “a fellowship of people”. The motion passed. Many members were shocked. Alcoholics Anonymous is famous for its stubborn resistance to change: the first 164 pages of the Big Book have barely been amended since they were written nearly a century ago. The literature has saved thousands, maybe millions, of lives. “Don’t fix what isn’t broken” is one of AA’s unofficial mottos. Why risk changing something that works?

Another member, Justin D., says that another reason changes should rarely occur is that they are hard to reverse. At an LGBTQ meeting he attends in Baltimore, which began as a meeting for gays and lesbians, a young woman joined the group and began demanding changes to the opening literature because people were being misgendered. She called for a directive stating that only gender-neutral language should be used when calling on members to share. Group members reluctantly acquiesced to the woman’s demands. Not long afterwards, she stopped attending. Now, if members wanted to return the readings to their original form, they would have to propose it to the group and initiate a vote — which could result in accusations that they are trying to reintroduce trans-exclusionary language.

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Elizabeth S. said that at a “queer-identified” meeting she attended, all of the opening readings were amended to include only gender-neutral language. However, she told me, one gender-specific pronoun had apparently managed to slip through the editing process. When the woman who read that particular announcement aloud arrived at the pronoun, Elizabeth said, she began to trip over her words and look nervously about the room, as if she was uncertain how to proceed.

Another member I spoke to, Bernadette R., remarked that for decades women have bristled at the male pronouns used in AA’s literature to describe God, or a Higher Power. “The female demographic is much bigger than the non-binary demographic. So why are they getting a space faster than women are?” She also mentioned her frustration with the new gender-neutral restrooms at the meeting she attends every week, which make many women feel uncomfortable. “Women deserve to feel safe,” she said.

And yet it has long been a principle in AA that it doesn’t matter who you are, what you believe, or what wrongs you’ve committed — AA says “You belong here.” The only requirement for membership is “a desire to stop drinking” (Tradition Three). Critical social justice ideology, which scoffs at the idea of redemption for those who may have transgressed, is inimical to AA’s core mission. If the programme doesn’t recommit to upholding Tradition 10, it could go the same way as the Washingtonians. In the meantime, many alcoholics with the “wrong politics” might choose not to join a group that could shun them for their problematic views. And, as it is said in AA, for a real alcoholic, “to drink is to die”.

Names have been changed to respect AA members’ anonymity. All agreed to participate in this article. 

I don’t often wonder why this happened to me. I have learnt not to, because asking why will consume you. But I sense that the alcoholic has a genetic predisposition, which is triggered, or not, in childhood. If it is triggered, they will find it almost impossible to stop drinking, and they will know agony. I know people who have died or are dying from alcoholism.

I write from inside the programme of Alcoholics Anonymous [AA] of which I have been a member for more than 20 years. I am not supposed to tell you this. AA was established in 1935 in Acron, Ohio, before victimhood was coveted. To write about AA is to perjure it. It is a different place for everyone. No collection of alcoholics can ever be the same; and it is almost impossible to describe alcoholism to anyone who does not have it. Its potential constituency is vulnerable. They do not need my opinions. That is why you will never see an advert for AA.

AA’s 12-step programme is used by most rehabilitation centres and it has imitators in Narcotics Anonymous (NA), Overeaters Anonymous (OA) and more. It is, in recovery terms, the Establishment, and so it is inevitable that it would, eventually, be attacked for being the Establishment, even if it is an Establishment of former drunks.

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Holly Whitaker was briefly a member of AA. She has written a book called Quit Like a Woman, in which she writes her rage over many pages. She accuses AA of being a tool of the patriarchy, of oppressing women and minorities and of inventing a false condition — alcoholism — to subjugate its members into humility and compliance under God. If you are a woman, she says, you do not need to be made compliant, for you are already.

She has a suggestion though. People who drink too much — and she believes all alcohol is poison — should go to her recovery website which requires a fee, although you can, if you demonstrate vulnerability, apply for a kind of scholarship. (AA, meanwhile, is dependent on voluntary contributions.) It used to be called Hip Recovery — hip as in the fashionable, not as in the joint. It won’t be for everyone, as AA is. If you think first of branding, you will probably not make it to recovery. You are probably not that ill.

“I knew,” she writes, “I was supposed to start a revolution around alcohol, addiction and recovery.” She continues, “I discovered that I not only had to claw my way out of hell and construct my own system for recovery, but that also, perhaps, it was my duty to create something more so the women who come after me, women who are dying in broad daylight while we look the other way, might not have to face the same bullshit I had to endure.”

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If you don’t think you have alcoholism — you can’t have something you don’t believe exists — you can’t ask yourself why you have it. Whitaker seems to think that people drink too much because of the wider culture and this is probably true. But I don’t think alcoholism can be caused by a wider culture.

She is right that alcohol is dangerous for everyone, but she refuses to believe that alcoholics just drink differently.

She would probably say I write from a cult, but much of the dogma of AA flows above me, and I don’t believe in a lot of it. I have never been able to fit the retrieval of my sanity into a series of steps, but I am calm watching others do it. For me, the function of the dogma — the steps and the traditions — is to provide a framework for people who arrive insane and have to find something to do with themselves. I see AA as a self-help group, where I meet people I understand and love. That is AA, for me – love — which I believe is the only effective antidote to alcoholism. Whitaker found none of this and so established her own website, which is styled like a private members club — which is it — and for a fee. Tempest, it is now called, and that is apt, for she is angry.

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Although many of Whitaker’s opinions about AA are ludicrous, not all are. She has a diarist’s skill for leaping into cracks and winnowing them out.

For instance, she calls AA a male space. She is quick to name its founders white and male as if, while dying, they could also foretell, and cater to, the inclusivity of the future; this reads like opportunism. “It was created by the oppressing party for the oppressing party,” she writes, “for men who were sick from an overdeveloped sense of owning the world, from believing they were God”. That is not my experience of any alcoholic.

It is a male space; men have a tendency to take space for themselves. All men — all people — are capable of being oppressors, but I don’t find alcoholic men to be very functional oppressors. Rather, they are among the gentlest I know and if one group irritates me, I will find another.

The Big Book — the primary text of AA, full of stories and advice — is masculine in tone, and old-fashioned; there is a chapter called “To Wives”, as Whitaker complains. This bothers me when I think too hard about it, but it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as facing alcoholism alone. It should be amended, and I think that it will be. I have sometimes thought that AA does not provide, in its dogma, enough room for grief, but perhaps there is no time for that at first: you must get up and start again. In any case, grief cannot be stopped. Grief will out.

I do sympathise with Whitaker; she is allowed to hate AA. But to damn it, and alcoholics who may not consider going, with a polemic is cruel.

There are all-female AA meetings where she could discuss the patriarchy and I would listen. AA, I want to tell her, is like the world; you will always find someone to hate, and someone to love. AA does not seek to annihilate “the self” as she claims, but to liberate it. Whitaker can’t hear that, and I am sorry.