Last week, I traveled with a small delegation of liberals to Washington DC for an event that never in my pre-Trump, pre-gender life would I have thought I’d be excited about: a one-day conference known as WelcomeFest—“the largest public gathering of centrists.”

“Welcome” encompasses three entities—a PAC, a party, and a think tank—that cater to the vast majority of Americans who fall somewhere between extreme left and extreme right. I went to find out what moderate Dems were thinking about gender issues, if they had talking points about boys in girls’ sports or youth gender medicine—and, if they didn’t, if I could offer them information that might serve as building blocks for an off-ramp.

I also went to see if I could practice a desperately needed skill: to gauge whether people are open to discussing this issue, or if they’d hardened into a singular narrative, especially the one that Republicans are using gender identity and trans kids as a wedge issue to gain power. (I’m not saying that might not also be true, but I am saying that Democrats handed them the wedge issue with a garnish on a silver platter.) As I was there as a citizen, not a reporter, I will not be identifying anyone I spoke with privately.

WelcomeFest took place on the first and basement floors of the Hamilton Hotel. Apparently there was some disruption from the far-left last year, because when I arrived—an hour early—the first people I encountered included a small blond woman directing a team of very large black men security guards—who made up the bulk of the conference’s racial diversity. “If a bunch of 18 year-olds with masks swarm, that’s a no,” she said. “Don’t let them in. Although they can still go and buy tickets.”

Before the programming started, I sat myself down in the main room next to a man who funds Democratic candidates in tight but winnable races with Republicans. He told me that nothing we care about—health care, affordability, national security—can be fixed until Trump is out.

“The problem is, there is one thing that is actually better with Trump,” I told him, introducing my raison d’être. Democrats have continued to allow boys in girls’ sports, have promoted a human rights rather than scientific framing of gender affirming care, and have been unwilling to listen to dissenting voices about gender identity from within their own party. Republicans have done the listening—and have taken action.

He assured me that nobody cared much about the issue, and ignored me when I pointed out that, per one poll, the third most-cited reason for not voting for Harris was that she was “focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class.” It was the most-cited reason for swing voters.

I suggested that any Democrat wanting to ensure a win needed to be able to answer the question “What is a woman” correctly—and easily. The funder waved this away as irrelevant, while a man sitting on my other side, who was running for Congress in a small southern city, said the answer to that question depended on who one’s constituents were.

I would have pointed out that that was like saying the shape of the earth depends on where you’re standing, but it was clear that these were not potential allies, and it was an opportunity to practice the skill I was trying to learn: letting go when engaging wasn’t worth it. They had already marked me as a zealot simply because I did care, and because I had a simple, clear answer to my own question: adult human female.

If my seatmates were disappointing, at least many of the conference speakers were inspiring. They noted how clearly Democrats can articulate what they are against: corruption, extremism, Donald Trump—the embodiment of the first two. Moderate Dems are the kinds avoiding terms like BIPOC or LatinX, who don’t have pronouns in their bios—all the signs and symbols and words the modern world requires to signal one’s tribe. In short: the not-woke, not the educated elite who craft the messaging, and increasingly, the policy of the party.

But speakers lamented that moderate Dems struggle to articulate who they are and what they’re for. The centrist wing has watered down messaging, rather than espousing clarity and strength. We should learn from the DSA, not because of their extremism but because they’re proposing solutions at the scale of the problems, and the passion and intelligibility of their messages.

What should we be for? They had plenty of good ideas. Energy, housing, good health care. Imagine what we could have done with the $100 billion for the unauthorized Iran War! We need to legislate around AI; 60% of teachers are using it, but only 18% have had any training on it; those responsible for making our kids globally competitive don’t have the skills to do so. We need to reach parents, concerned about the impact of AI on the economy and on their kids’ futures. Progressive education has largely failed us, despite the good intentions.

And: we need to stop being obsessed with issues most people don’t even understand, and speak for and to the average American. “If we take our messaging from NPR, which is in my opinion a subversive organization, we’re gonna lose elections,” James Carville said. Hallelujah!

The consensus was that Democrats aren’t good at projecting strength, which several pundits noted was our great weakness. If we want to overtake Trump, we have to put forward someone who exudes confidence and might, whom we’d trust with the greatest military force on the planet.

What they were saying without saying it was: Democrats need to man up. They need to project traditionally masculine traits—even the women. Decisiveness, stoicism, independence, leadership, assertiveness. They need to not cave when the mob comes to accuse them of wrongthink.

I nodded along enthusiastically, though I couldn’t yet identify any candidates who embodied these characteristics. One thing I did know: the average American can answer the question “What is a woman?” and it actually takes some strength to do so. This would have been a great segue to get into the gender issue, but almost nobody wanted to go there.

The exceptions were two Congressional candidates from the rural south, Jamie Ager and Bobby Pulido. Bobby said his hairdresser was trans, he knew and loved trans people, but we needed to divide sports by sex, not gender identity. “That’s not hating on LGBTQ,” he assured us. Jamie just said, no, he didn’t want boys in girls’ sports, as if it were obvious, as if it were a given for the Democratic party.

And yet, only two House Democrats, Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both from Texas, voted for a bill that would have prevented that scenario.

I was beginning to notice a pattern. The only real bite I got was from a DA and her team—all people of color—who represent a very blue city. This makes sense—black Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to say sex is determined by one’s body, not one’s identity. Of the eight Dems who voted for a bill requiring parental notification of gender identity changes at school, five are black or Hispanic. My compatriots at the conference, including one former NPR reporter from the area and a friend from Boston, had some success speaking to one of those black Dems—and emerged, I think, a little more optimistic than I did. I know politics is the slow boring, but I thought by now we’d get some fast boring.

Speakers pointed out that black women and college educated white women are the great deciders of elections, but on gender identity, they may be at odds. In one study, the majority of kids at gender clinics were white, even if the larger “gender diverse” population—those with gender identities unmatched to sex—was racially diverse. If we want to move to the middle, we need to follow black women there.

Or, as Mark Cuban said: “How can we win back the middle? By not being idiots.”

And yet, idiots we continue to be. At the same time that centrists were extolling the virtues of reaching the middle at WelcomeFest, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) was meeting down the street. The hearing, titled “Protecting Our Children: Exposing the Dangers of Irreversible Gender Transition Procedures on Minors,” was a chance for Democrats to showcase their ability to speak the plain truth.

Alas, Senator Bernie Sanders, ranking member of HELP, was no help at all in that department. He called the hearing “disappointing,” insisting that they were wasting time focusing on “an infinitesimal number of people,” rather than issues like childhood poverty and healthcare. Yes, of course, we should talk about those things. But Democrats were the ones who spent years talking about trans kids and institutionalizing gender identity; they just did it in a way that allowed no discussion or dissent. So yeah, now we gotta talk about it.

He accused Republicans of securing votes by “getting everybody to kind of hate this powerless minority.” Then he offered “the facts when we talk about transgender kids.”

According to two peer-reviewed studies published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, the largest medical association in America, not a single child in our country under the age of 12 has received a transgender surgery. Zero. A grand total of 85 transgender teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17 received a surgery to deal with their bodies and most of these procedures [were] chest related. In other words, boys who had breasts and they were concerned about that etc etc. Less than one-hundredth of 1% of teenagers in America received medications for gender dysphoria and none of these medications went to a child 12 years of age or younger. In other words, Mr. Chairman, we are using precious committee time dealing with an issue that impacts at most less than 100th of 1% of teenagers throughout America and zero kids under the age of 12.

Let’s be clear. The standard of care for transgender youth that my Republican colleagues are attacking today is supported by the American Medical Association, the largest professional association of doctors in our country, and the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest professional association of pediatricians in our country. What the medical and scientific community tells us is that gender affirming care is associated with a lower risk of depression, severe anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. Bottom line, gender affirming care for youth should be between a doctor, a patient, and their parents, not politicians and the federal government. Not only would banning gender affirming care do nothing to protect kids, it will make it harder for them to get the health care they need. And that would be a tragedy.

Whoo boy, that’s a lot to unpack. I’m not sure the source of Sanders’ numbers, but one thing I do know: it’s hard to get reliable statistics in the absence of long-term follow-up. According to one source, “Between 2017 and 2021, a minimum of 14,726 minors initiated hormone therapy after being diagnosed with gender dysphoria. This number doubled, increasing from 2,905 children in 2017 to 4,231 in 2021.” In Oregon alone, one in 250 girls took testosterone between 2016 and 2023; the state saw a 10-fold increase in girls and 14-fold in boys. Children as young as 8 have been cleared for blockers and hormones, and girls as young as 13 have undergone mastectomies. Medical associations represent their clinician members and have suffered through many a scandal. There is no solid evidence that transition ameliorates depression, anxiety, or suicidality. Banning it isn’t great, but when no medical groups will change course in the face of these realities, there aren’t a lot of other options.

Now, obviously, Sanders is the opposite of a centrist Democrat; he wasn’t even a member of the party until he ran for President. And a slightly more centrist Democrat, Tim Kaine, did manage to drum up some sympathy for detransitioner Chloe Cole, who told her own harrowing story at the hearing.

“Your story is tragic. It is a tragic story,” he said. “It is a classic case as you tell it of medical malpractice.” He called it “outrageous” that she was not “informed about consequences, having your parents told that if they did not consent to the surgery that you would likely commit suicide.” He seemed sure that she would win her lawsuit, though no one else is. Then he proceeded to read a letter from someone thrilled by transition, and compare the fight for trans rights to the fight against systemic racism, slavery and Jim Crow.

Some people who transition feel better after—even in the long-term. But we will never know if they would have felt better anyway. Many people who seek treatment for psychological distress get better eventually, because they’ve sought help at their lowest point; they tend to “regress to the mean.” We have no clear evidence of benefit, and a deep understanding of the risks. We need to make policy based on facts, not feelings. We need to be the grown-ups in the room. We need to man up.

But when it comes to gender, we can’t seem to do so, which is allowing some Republicans to accuse Democratic men—candidates and voters alike—of being too femme to govern, drawing on a resurgence of homophobia. An outlet called The Argument, meanwhile, pronounced centrists dead in the water, before they’ve even set out to swim.

The group ostensibly most poised to face trans issues head one—the moderates—have dismissed the issue, insisted it was a Republican wedge issue, or ignored it altogether. This is not a sustainable approach.

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Back at WelcomeFest, I suggested to one of the co-founders that, next year, they have a panel on gender. He cocked his head. “Which one?” he asked. I crinkled my nose in disbelief. “Oh, trans,” he said. But he didn’t agree to such a panel, or refuse one. He did what the rest of them did: he pretended it hadn’t come up.

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There’s nothing I like more than telling people what they’re doing wrong! Although really the question is: Can people and groups with different approaches help rather than hinder one another?

We talk about growing differences of opinion and strategy within the gender-critical movement, reconnecting with arts and culture, and hanging out with the Magnetic Fields.

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Atonement: The John Paulk Story is a new podcast about a gay man, sometimes a drag queen, who eventually became the poster boy for conversion therapy and the ex-gay movement. He married a woman who had been a lesbian, Anne Edward, with whom he had three sons, and went on to chair the far Christian right-funded Exodus International North America, which promoted coercive techniques to change homosexuality.

Spoiler alert: It didn’t work. But Paulk’s evangelizing was so effective that it helped create a cloud of false hope and resulting shame for thousands of gay people. Motivated to atone for the sin of homosexuality, Paulk is now on a quest to atone his for the sin of preaching conversion therapy.

It’s important to tell this story, in part because it can help us understand that sexuality—male sexuality in particular—isn’t particularly malleable.1 There are some gay people who choose not to act on their proclivities, which is fine if that’s your thing—plenty of people have sexual urges that they don’t wish to act on (and in some cases, should not). But the kind of shame-based conversion therapy Paulk preached—that’s what many states eventually outlawed, and rightly so.

One problem with this podcast is that it uses an overly broad definition of conversion therapy, one that has clouded the attempt to reform youth gender medicine, and has put advocates of safeguarding children in the extremely uncomfortable position of having to defend practices subsumed by the label of conversion therapy. Having a discussion about why someone might want to remove body parts, or otherwise radically alter their appearances via cross-sex hormones, is now a sin.

“Conversion therapy really refers to any of several dangerous and discredited practices that are aimed at changing a person's sexual orientation or gender identity,” Casey Pick, senior director of Law and Policy at the Trevor Project, says on the podcast. Pick is a male who transitioned and identifies as a female, who explains that conversion therapy was once disseminated through physical forms—“aversion therapies, drugs, electroshock therapy, even in some cases lobotomies decades ago.” Now, Pick says, we see “talk based forms of conversion therapy” such as “reparative therapy, sexual orientation or gender identity change efforts, and gender exploratory therapy.”

Cue record scratch.

The first thing to know about “gender exploratory therapy” is that it is not a separate approach. There is no specific protocol or series of questions that make up a practice; it’s not a distinct discipline like CBT or psychoanalysis. The term appears to have been coined by Greek psychologist Anastassis Spiliadis, formerly of the UK’s disgraced GIDS clinic, in a 2018 paper. He describes how “therapist(s) could actively acknowledge and respect the young person’s gender identity and subjective experiences (without attempting to alter these) and at the same time invite them into an exploratory therapeutic or ‘assessment’ process, in order to better understand the meaning-making of their gender(ed) and broader selves.”

In other words, there was an approach between blanket affirmation of one’s self-conception—the “would you like fries with that” affirmative approach—and the coercive “normalizing” therapies of days of yore. This approach hadn’t been codified in any way, and still isn’t. It’s a loose term that generally means “do some therapy and explore why you might want to transition or explore your feelings about gender and whatever else is going on.” Actually, it just means therapy, but nobody really has a clear definition.

Even some academics defending gender-affirming care—itself a difficult term to define—have admitted: “I was unable to find any definition of what ‘gender exploratory therapy’ entails.”

WPATH’s SOC-8 says: “Non-specific terms for gender-related care are avoided (e.g., gender-affirming model, gender exploratory model) as these terms do not represent unified practices.”

SOC-7 doesn’t use the term, but notes: “Before any physical interventions are considered for adolescents, extensive exploration of psychological, family, and social issues should be undertaken, as outlined above. The duration of this exploration may vary considerably depending on the complexity of the situation.”

And:

“Mental health professionals should screen for these and other mental health concerns and incorporate the identified concerns into the overall treatment plan. These concerns can be significant sources of distress and, if left untreated, can complicate the process of gender identity exploration and resolution of gender dysphoria. Addressing these concerns can greatly facilitate the resolution of gender dysphoria, possible changes in gender role, the making of informed decisions about medical interventions, and improvements in quality of life.”

In other words: get some therapy before you transition. Explore gender, and everything else.

When Drs. Erica Anderson and Laura Edwards-Leeper published an op-ed in The Washington Post in 2021, decrying the dangerous excesses of the gender affirmation industry—while still arguing that some youth can and should transition safely—the subhed was: “Gender-exploratory therapy is a key step. Why aren’t therapists providing it?” They noted that doctors like Johanna Olson-Kennedy dismissed the need for therapy and assessment, because children knew who they were; she famously (or infamously) didn’t send diabetic kids to therapy before giving them insulin, she said, so why give them therapy before transition? “But comprehensive assessment and gender-exploratory therapy is the most critical part of the transition process,” Anderson and Edwards-Leeper wrote. Affirming instead of exploring was skipping that critical part.

Yet using a term to describe this process made it seem as if it existed separately from standard therapeutic practices, and allowed critics to lump it in to conversion therapy.

And that’s why a podcast about one of the most scandalous gay conversion therapy organizations, and its still-very-gay lead advocate, was misled into including it.

Atonement itself admits that conversion therapy is a “nebulous” term, and that “it’s not based in science, medicine, or fact.” They call it “pseudo psychology.”

Well, the same can be said of gender-affirming care. It’s rooted in the assumption that intervening with kids before puberty would help them “pass” as the opposite sex, and lead to fewer mental health problems in adults—since the adult population was plagued with them. The evidence that it works is generally so low-quality that we can’t determine whether it does, and the risks are so high that several European countries have scaled back on these interventions, to the point where they’re hardly ever done. In places where medicine was elevated above politics, and where partisanship didn’t interfere, reform was possible—precluding the need for atonement.

Here in the US, we’re not so lucky. We keep sinning and atoning, in an endless cycle, rather than evolving and reforming. I’m no stranger to this cycle. After I wrote an op-ed in 2017 for The New York Times, about people assuming my masculine daughter was trans, I was name-called and threatened—my first taste of cancellation—and went on a quest to understand what my fellow liberals thought I’d gotten wrong. I wrote an entire book accepting those critiques, because I had neither the support nor the data to push back on them, to realize that those proselytizing the affirmation-or-death narrative weren’t actually liberal. They were authoritarian.

What I was doing, to some extent, was atoning for my op-ed in writing that book, Tomboy. Now, I have to atone for how I wrote it, because I allowed my own voice to be altered by that of the “sensitivity readers” I hired at my own expense, to obscure what I felt to be the truth.

For some people, gender transition is a never-ending quest, because no one can actually change sex, you’re never done, you never arrive at the end point. Similarly, redemption remains always slightly out of reach, because there is no way to undo the past. We may find ourselves traveling to dark places to find it, growing ever more radical in the hopes of cleansing our souls, because it is still about us.

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As an example of this endless question see the 2020 “Letter of Apology to LGBTQ+ Communities” from the APA’s Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, known as Division 39. It promised to atone for “adopting theories that discriminate against, pathologize, and marginalize gay men, lesbians, bisexual, queer, asexual, intersex, transgender, gender expansive, and gender queer people, whether those individuals are clients, students, therapists, researchers, educators.”

Their listserv would henceforth be monitored, they wrote, so posts wouldn’t “pierce” the most vulnerable and marginalized among them, and members would “engage in examining one’s own privilege and standing up for the dignity of LGBTQ+ folks.” It prohibited “speech that is injurious to LGBTQ+ members.”

There is, of course, much to regret in psychology and medicine’s history—just as there is within any field, which starts off with one set of facts and assumptions and eventually, hopefully, ingests others and evolves. These fields have been guilty of racism, sexism, and homophobia, mostly because those worldviews were entirely acceptable when they began, and with whom they began. It was kosher within those circles to accuse women of hysteria or chemically castrate gays or unwittingly infect black men with syphilis and then use them as a control group, denying them medical care. Until it wasn’t—thanks to activism, whistleblowers, and cultural shifts.

Change is good. Evolution: necessary. But atonement—that’s a more troubling pursuit. Atonement is the search to clean’s one’s soul by way of repairing damage, but requires looking backward, and doesn’t always involve charting a new path forward.

Some in the gender rabbit hole arrived because of grief, which eventually curdled into vengeance—an understandable chemical reaction to the endless gaslighting of so-called liberal institutions, medical associations, and once-trusted professionals. But some of us are motivated by atonement—the stinging sensation that we were complicit in the institutionalization and sacralization of gender identity, and thus must now pursue not just a remedy but redemption.

But sometimes, pursuing redemption can get in the way of reform. Thus, in ten to twenty years—and that’s if we’re lucky—we’ll see another letter like that from the APA Division 39, apologizing for the era of gender affirmation, for the censorship, for the insistence on a singular, ideological approach, rather than an evidence-based one. Someday, those who advocated against gender-exploratory therapy may find themselves once again attempting to atone.

And someday, this recent podcast about atonement may need to do some atoning, too.

The Park Slope Food Co-op, founded in 1973, is the source of a lot of high-quality, twenty-percent-above-cost produce, as well as the butt of many jokes, due to its overzealous rule-making. The unofficial motto: Scratch a hippie, find a fascist.

No one may shop—or even enter the store—who isn’t a member. The aisles are so tiny that navigating them feels like being a rat in Universe 25. The Co-op offers parental leave, but only after members provide a photocopy of their child’s birth certificate. Since the pandemic, masking is required on Wednesdays and Thursdays, to make some shoppers feel safer—despite the revelation that no solid evidence supported mandatory masking. Everyone over 18 in a household must work a two-hour-and-forty-five minute shift, every four weeks. I joined some thirty years ago, but went on leave for a decade, returning only when my then-boyfriend suggested we sign up as a household, which was nearly as serious a commitment as marriage. Indeed, that boyfriend is now my husband.

The Co-op also has a great selection of products, decent prices, and real community; I run into someone I know every time I go. Most of its 17,000 members have some kind of love-hate relationship with it.

After last night, many of us are probably loving or hating it a little more.

The Co-op carries a handful made-in-Israel products, from tahini to hair mask, which has for years vexed members of the Boycott, Divest and Sanctions Movement—the push to cripple the state of Israel in the name of Palestinian liberation. Since the Hamas attacks on Israel on October 7th, 2023, whether to sell Dorot chopped garlic and Israeli persimmons has been tearing the Co-op apart, serving as a proxy war for tensions within the Left. One member publicly declared a “Jewish Supremacy” problem, echoing Nazi rhetoric, while others have decried the BDS gang’s anti-Semitism. In recent weeks, the Co-op has required extra security, with shouting matches, and sometimes shoving matches, erupting out front.

It all came to a head last night, when the normally sparsely-attended—and painfully boring—monthly General Meeting became a media-worthy event, in part because so many people who work in New York media are Co-op members. The kerfuffle centered on two agenda items: a proposal to nix the requirement of a 75% supermajority to pass a boycott, and another, assuming that the first one passed, to boycott Israeli goods. Since nearly 8,500 members registered—as opposed to just dozens at the average meeting—and due to security concerns, management had to make the meeting virtual.

It began, naturally, with a land acknowledgement. The Co-op sits on “the traditional territory of the Munsee, Canarsie, and Lenni Lenape peoples,” meeting chair Josef Szende’s told us. Next up: a run down of Co-op business—inclement weather has affected the stone-fruit harvest, a few notes on electronic shelf labels—which might have been designed to bore members into passivity. I compared it to the infamous DSA meeting, in which no work could be done because each person’s special needs had to be accommodated. My husband had another analogy. “It’s like being in temple,” he complained. “It’s so boring.”

Soon, though, we got to the nitty-gritty: the proposal to change the supermajority to a regular 51% majority, followed by some discussion of pros and cons. A member then suggested an amendment: to move from voting on the proposal at this meeting to voting via referendum—meaning: all members vote, rather than just the third that showed up for the virtual meeting. This seemed like the greatest chance for an actual democratic process, but after what felt like several years’ worth of technical difficulties, the amendment was voted down.

From that moment on, it was clear that the bulk of those who’d shown up to the meeting shared the BDS agenda, and were going to do anything in their power to maintain their advantage—even making sure that the almost two-thirds of members not represented at the meeting didn’t get a say. Likely they understood that, as with a primary election, only the most zealous would vote this way, making it easier to pass what felt to some of us like a radical political agenda. It was like watching Obama amend Title IX in real time, but with a backdrop of organic kale.

Soon after, the resolution passed to remove the necessary percentage for a boycott from 75% to 51.

Next up: a presentation by co-op members about why Israeli products should be boycotted. An elderly woman named Elise Barr—who identified herself as a Jew, and as member number 83—reminded us that the Co-op was not just a grocery store. We’d flexed our political muscle plenty of times before, boycotting products from Pinochet’s Chile, nixing Coca-Cola and grapes. Now, we had the power to “support Palestinian liberation.”

Despite the fact that the BDS team had declared the event to be “the most inclusive and democratic meeting that the Co-op has experienced in its entire history,” what they did next was the opposite: they moved to prevent any discussion and debate about their boycott proposal, and instead proceeded straight to the vote. One meeting organizer said that, in her fifteen years of these events, no one had ever moved to strike discussion from the agenda. But that apparently is the way of the inclusive, democratic BDS team, which also failed to note that some 80 % of the Co-op’s actual staff—a supermajority!—opposed their agenda. Their motion was seconded. None of us with questions or concerns got to say a word. I had my speech about how we needed to ban all American products because of the American Supremacy all ready to go, but alas.

The final tally was unsurprising. Out of nearly 6800 votes, 61% favored the boycott, 38% rejected it, and 1% abstained—which meant that 80 people suffered through a three-hour Zoom only to not weigh in.

Of course, the Co-op has no power to support Palestinian liberation. Cutting off the supply of tahini and Bamba—the main reason Israelis have such low percentages of peanut allergies—does nothing to change the material reality of Palestinians. It does nothing to advance peace in the Middle East. It’s merely symbolic.

What, then, does it symbolize? To many of us, the vote symbolizes the singling out of the sole Jewish state, treating it differently than any other nation doing horrible things. Products from India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi terrorizes Muslim citizens, still line the shelves. So do products from China, which persecutes Uyghurs. Nobody’s moving to nix the mung beans or organic forbidden black rice. It symbolizes how a radical minority can wield extraordinary power in institutions—even a grocery store in a once hippie-dippy and now tony neighborhood, disproportionately patronized by those who shape media narratives and adumbrate the boundaries of “social justice.” It symbolizes how the furthest left still dominate, and how liberal has ceded to radical.

The Co-op’s mission says that it opposes “discrimination in any form,” and strives “to make the Coop welcoming and accessible to all and to respect the opinions, needs and concerns of every member.” But last night’s meeting showed that it accepts discrimination against those with dissenting views, and doesn’t respect their opinions, needs, or concerns. Cooperating is not symbolically castrating a country whose politics you disagree with. It’s voting with your own dollars, by not buying those products while allowing those who want them to do so.

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I admit to being as ambivalent about Park Slope Food Co-op as I am about Israel: I see the need for their existence, but also that they’re riddled with problems. Some might call me an October 8^th Jew—someone who felt more connected to Judaism after the Hamas attacks. When people used to ask my grandfather if he was Jewish, he’d say: “Only when they come around for the camps next time.” Until October 7^th, I thought that was a joke.

Until last night, I thought Scratch a hippie, find a fascist was a joke, too.

Much has been written about how the film The Matrix was the Wachowski sisters’—née brothers—metaphor for transness. Supposedly, the “reality” we’re all living in is a construction, and the truth is experienceable only by way of ingesting the truth serum of red pills, which strip away blue pills’ blissful ignorance. That’s right: you achieve reality by taking a pill that changes the environment to match your mind.

I remember enjoying The Matrix heartily (albeit blissfully ignorant at the time of its coded subject matter, since apparently the atmosphere in my zip code was created by blue pills). But lately I’ve been thinking about the 2007 Ryan Gosling film Lars and the Real Girl—a movie that left me discomfited at the time.

Lars, an awkward loner immune to the reality of the sweet girl crushing on him, buys a “real girl”—a realistic sex doll, though we’re assured that he does not use the sex doll for sex. Instead, the purchase (likely of several thousand dollars) is attributed to some kind of psychotic break. The solution is for the entire town to participatesin his delusion, in hope that it will to help him find his way back to normalcy.

Lars’s lady friend is a disabled latex hottie of Brazilian descent, embraced by the townspeople who shepherd her to social events and school board meetings. I won’t spoil the ending for those of you who want to see it, but I’ll say this: participating in Lars’s delusion doesn’t make his mental illness worse. And it doesn’t lead to legislation elevating the rights of silicone-based bodies above human bodies. Rather, there is a temporary accommodation of abnormality as a mechanism to bring the man back to the world of normalcy.

That, of course, is not what happened with gender identity. Instead, we created a category, gender identity, and a series of rights and protections based around it that elevate it above sex. We asserted gender identity as a fact, rather than an idea, and legislated around it. Those with a gender identity unmatched to their sex were once considered abnormal. The twenty-first century battle to include them within the range of normal changed instead to an assault on the idea of normalcy itself. What we witnessed was not compassion, as Lars and the Real Girl depicted, but psychological anarchy.

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The be kind message, the call to compassion, laid the groundwork—not for participating in someone’s delusion to bring him back from it, but to make the delusion into reality. And many people fared worse after the institutionally-inforced compelled participation. Recalling this movie made me wonder what other cultural works helped lay the groundwork for this shift, helping to prepare us for participation we didn’t understand or consent to.

Are there other cultural artifacts you look back on now as a kind of grooming for accepting gender identity?

6:00 a.m. Up, coffee, kids, try not to descend into the depths of New York Times word games and instead make your way to the YMCA for Pilates class, which leans heavily toward the geriatric demographic. Normally, to offset the groans of grateful but straining exercisers, the teacher reads jokes:

Why do cows wear bells?
Because their horns don’t work!

Today, however, she reads a quote: Science is true whether you believe it or not.

Indeed, you think, flapping your arms during the Hundreds. Others whoop and holler in agreement, taking pleasure not just in the shared reality but in the shared certainty. Then she reads the name of the person who said it: Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Your arms flop to your side in defeat. You, a lover of astrophysics—whose only spiritual experience involves looking up at the stars and pondering how they might have died thousands of years ago, leaving behind this ghostly, long-traveled light—once admired him, as your fellow inhabitants of LiberalLand do. But then you saw him talking about sex and gender, and your faith in him fell away.

That sex in humans is binary and unchangeable is true whether deGrasse Tyson, or everyone else in Pilates class, believes it or not. But they have been twisted out of their common sense, subsumed by the need for ideological belonging. Having never really had a tribe, you can’t totally relate, though you understand that the other thing that’s true about humans is that we are herd animals. You get it, but being surrounded by their certainty, slathered in a layer of smugness, feels like trying to take a nap on a bed of cockroaches. The urge to cry out, to flee—it’s strong.

By some miracle, you manage to say nothing, at least until after class when you walk up to the teacher and suggest that, while the quote may have seemed apolitical, it is in fact not, due to what deGrasse Tyson has said about sex and gender. You just came there to do exercise, you plead to her. You are shaking, which is embarrassing, but also revealing: no matter how long you’ve been doing this, how much you know, it’s terrifying to dissent from the institutional gender grand narrative.

Oh, I know, I know, I just forgot, she says, and you realize that she thinks the man of science said something transphobic—like, you know, that sex is binary and unchangeable—and that she now thinks she has soiled the purity of the Pilates class by evoking the sinner’s name. You hope she Googles the video and that the confusion she feels morphs into questioning.

You finally exit the room to a slew of people ping-ponging in ACLU t-shirts. It’s 8:52 a.m. and you’re exhausted.

Because you are tired of that aching, shaking, scared feeling, and tired of the sensation of being pushed down an elevator shaft every time you’re confronted with someone living in the solipsistic, self-satisfied certainty—which is actually resting on a falsehood—you’ve been trying a new tack. You aim to be curious about every person you pass on the street or in the subway or in a place of business, to remember that they each have a unique story that, if you can just stop seeing them as potential threats, you could be fascinated by. Every person who pours you coffee or takes your ticket or asks for money. You walk by a park and take in every individual on the benches, and you are overwhelmed by the beauty of diversity in your city, African immigrants, white punkish addicts in their amphetamine-leans, teens of every skin shade laughing hysterically, young lovers, old couples, gay people and straight people and, yes, transitioned people. They all live right here in this city with you. None are leaving whether one group dislikes the other—not even the addicts, though it would be nice to send them off somewhere for help.

You think of the “resistance,” as you call the strange coalition of those who don’t believe in gender identity and want to see it treated as a religious belief—one people are free to share but which cannot be imposed on others. Among them are those who say things like trans people don’t exist or no one should ever transition. They are free to believe that, too, but you live here, among those who believe in gender identity, who call themselves trans, and who have found the benefits of what they’ve done to themselves greater than the harms or risks. They believe that they have changed sex, or aren’t the sex they are, or have entered some new loop of a category. They haven’t, but saying they don’t exist is like saying Catholics or Jews don’t exist because there is no God. There are trans people the same where there are Muslims or Zoroastrians: because of what they believe.

The problem is that they don’t see themselves as believers. They see themselves as soothsayers.

You know that gender believers aren’t leaving, or shifting, and long for a world in which we don’t bother trying to eradicate those who disagree with us but instead create policies that are rooted in reality and still make room for belief.

Lunchtime. You have a meeting about a panel you’re trying to convene on Title IX. You want people to understand why and how it changed and what the implications were, and are. You keep writing to organizations to see if they’ll sponsor something. You want to hear from people who believe deeply that adding gender identity was necessary and helpful; from the scholars who understand the law’s history and evolution; from those who object to replacing sex with gender identity. You want people to have all the information so they can make informed opinions. You want to model a public conversation and debate.

One woman says she’s interested in such an event, but the problem is that it might make some trans women feel bad. The feeling of being tossed into a chasm, it happens so fast. You say that the feelings of one group aren’t more important than the other, and that thinking that way is partly how we got here, and that this is exactly why we need such an event.

This is why you do best typing into your computer. You are lacking in some basic Dale Carnegie skills.

In the afternoon, a pop into the school—the same school where the PTA scheduled you to give a talk about gender norms to the community, and then cancelled when a parent complained, never telling you what the complaint was. The school where the superintendent—whose wife works at a gender clinic—personally intervened to make sure you could never have any kind of platform or publicly address the larger New York City public school community.

Briefly, parents at the school formed a “queer families” group. You joined, and thanked them for including you—the parent of a lesbian—because it’s really important to be inclusive and that means including people who don’t believe in gender identity and are concerned about telling masculine girls and feminine boys that there’s something wrong with their bodies. The group either never met again or excluded you. Since you couldn’t beat them, you tried to join them, but they wouldn’t let you.

Today, they are reviewing the presentations seniors have crafted about their spring semester internships, and have invited any parents to attend (even you). One boy describes his absolutely wonderful experience at WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show—a media outlet you once held in high esteem, but which is so painfully biased that it is damaging listeners’ ability to understand certain culture war issues. You try explaining the problem to the boy, but he says they let callers in who disagree, they cover both sides, it’s nonpartisan, it’s not biased. Your attempt to give him a history lesson is inappropriate and ineffective. You were feeling better. Now you are feeling worse.

Later, there’s a school fundraiser, the kind where parents dress up and the booze is free to encourage binge spending. You don’t want to go. You’ve never felt welcome or included or safe, words school personnel use to mean: we purge people like you, who disagree. But you decide to join ‘em again because, fuck it, your kids have thrived there, some of the teachers are amazing, and a lot of the parents are cool.

There’s a lesbian couple at the auction that you’ve never seen before, one of whom has very short hair and is wearing clothes that are designed for and marketed to men, and has clearly had her breasts removed and sounds like she has probably taken some testosterone, and you get to chatting with them about the various items the school is auctioning off in the hopes of raising money. We bought the personal shopping experience last year and it was amazing, they tell you, and you wish you’d bid on it because nothing fits your perimenopausal body. But mostly you think how lovely it is that a couple like this can partake of concierge shopping at Nordstrom and feel welcome and included and safe, because they should.

On the one hand, anyone who transitions needs to be a fortified to exist in a culture that might not understand or like it. On the other, you have every right to your personal shopping experience if you paid for it.

The school personnel say wonderful things about your children, and you know that they do feel welcome and included and safe, and that’s great, though of course what you really want—for your kids, for all kids, for the families—is for them to feel fortified: strong enough to push back against ideological beliefs presented as facts.

You leave there happy that you went, hoping that if the couple ever finds out who you are, they’ll still be friendly anyway, because why can’t we have contradictory beliefs and still get a drink? Wouldn’t this be better than trying to destroy anyone who questions those beliefs?

Arriving home, you encounter an uncharacteristically chatty and snuggly 11^th grader, who listens to you—listens!—express these various thoughts about gender and inclusivity and queerness and says things that clearly show she feels strong enough to push back against ideological beliefs presented as facts.

And you think: This was a hard day and a good day. And you think: What a miracle. What a miracle, this child and her sister and our little life.

You go to sleep brimming with gratitude. For once, you sleep well.

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Texas AG Ken Paxton and Trump’s DOJ have announced the opening of the nation’s first detransition clinic.

Despite the fact that Trump’s list of benefits pales in comparison to his list of overall harms for, well, the entire world, this is a good thing, a necessary thing. However, as I wrote about for Unherd, I don’t see this move as stemming from deep concern about this vulnerable population; I see it as catering to the base.

After all, because of Texas’s other big gender moves, many trans-identified people have already left the state. Detransition care is needed in blue sanctuary cities and states, from New York to Seattle. Any place that offers transition services should offer services to those who detransition, too; mostly they ignore it as a possible outcome.

I don’t think this detransition clinic will create more understanding of the need for such care, especially since we have very little knowledge about what that care should be—and that’s mostly because of who created it and the rhetoric they employ. It’s very hard to give the thumbs up to the man waging wars without congressional approval and making gas $5 a gallon.

That said: what choice do we have?

Of course, I prefer that the industry self-regulate, rather than having state and federal government direct medical care. But few in the industry have been willing to do so. One exception is Dr. Scot Glasberg, past president of the ASPS, who unintentionally became a vector for detransition care. I suggest listening to/watching this interview I conducted with him—which, I admit, made me feel better about the work I do. Sometimes staying nuanced, sticking with the evidence, and connecting one human being to another can go a long way.

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But of course, that method yields too little and takes too long on its own. I hope this clinic will help lots of people, conduct research, keep good records, and contribute to the sparse evidence base about detransition.

Let us meet and discuss the podcast Atonement, about one man’s journey not only with conversion therapy, but as its biggest promoter, until… he wasn’t.

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Gender roles are alive and well in rural Pennsylvania. At least, they were alive and well at the two proms I witnessed last weekend—not because I attended them, but because my “courtyard-view” hotel room in Lancaster, where I was attending a girls’ regional volleyball tournament with my daughter, looked out onto them. There’s nothing like trying to get a good night’s sleep for a 5 a.m. wake-up while a hundred teens scream Justin Bieber lyrics ten feet away…while also paying an exorbitant amount for it.

If this sounds like complaining (or my pitch for a slight rebate from the management), rest assured, I enjoyed every minute of my trip to Regular America. That’s because I love to visit other cultures within my country, to find out what’s considered normal there. I live in a place where we often think of traditional Americana—of conformity—as morally deficient in some way. We look down on those who mindlessly replicate trends, like, say, wearing some variation of the same long gown, as was the case with every single prom-going girl I laid eyes on. (The boys, meanwhile, seemed to show a little more variety in their suits, or lack thereof.)

The vibe at the tournament was similar: not a single short-haired girl among the throngs, and ribbons commonly threaded into pony-tails. I am unclear how they spiked the ball, considering that many of them sported the new trend of extremely long, claw-shaped nails with a gel manicure.

I’m fascinated by this gender conformity and no longer judgmental about it—for two reasons. The first is that the research I did for Tomboy showed me that the tomboy project of the 1970s wasn’t just about promoting “masculinity” for girls—allowing them to be sporty and wear their hair short and such. It was about impugning femininity. But there are plenty of behaviors and traits beneath the banner of femininity that are necessary and good for both girls and boys: nurturing, communication, cooperation. I decided that decrying conformity for its own sake ran counter to the ultimate project of creating functional and thriving adults.

The second reason is that conforming was not an option for me. In the greed-is-good 1980s, conformity required money. You wouldn’t be caught dead in Kmart, and showing up to school in your off-brand CB jacket was worse than not having one. It was not cool to shop at Salvation Army, as my family often did. I couldn’t paint my nails like the other girls, because my fingers were fat and crooked and my nails short and oddly-shaped. Sometimes I’d sit on my hands to hide them, even though my favorite things to do—pottery, guitar-playing, drawing—relied on exposing them. I wasn’t nurturing or cooperative, and I didn’t look or act like many of the other girls, but I wanted to. Most of my adolescence (and a good part of my adulthood), I was on fire with shame and self-hatred. I left school half-way through my senior year. I never went to prom.

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Never would I have predicted back then that, in the 21st century, the worst thing a child could be—at least in LiberalLand—was normal. Cis, straight, white, and/or Christian equaled oppressor, which may be one reason why adolescent referrals to gender clinics tended to cluster among the wealthy and white, even if those with non-normative identities in the general population were more diverse. Anyone who veered slightly from traditional gender roles—which is to say, anyone who was not a living Barbie or G.I. Joe—was on the spectrum between male and female, instead of just a normal variation of a man or woman, boy or girl.

Gender roles evolved—in part to help us find mates and keep our kids alive—and were also shaped by culture. Though I firmly believe there is no one right way to be a boy or a girl, I do think there is virtue in understanding how normative sex-based behaviors came to be. In rejecting gender roles, it seems, many young people have forgotten how to be human, which involves some expression of both masculinity and femininity, and has no effect on one’s sex.

It’s okay to conform, to be normal, to try out the trends as part of adolescent identity exploration, to figure out what you like and what you don’t like and to develop a sense of self. And it’s also okay to be naturally repelled by those norms—to not have long hair and wear a strappy gown. (Also: the claw nails? Looking forward to the end of that trend.)

Admittedly, I have been very impressed with the teen girls I’ve interacted with. The girls at the volleyball tournament, even in their teeny-tiny short-shorts and tight shirts, were not afraid to be powerful. They pounded the floor and shouted Ace! when their teammates hit an unreturnable serve, or erupted into various chants depending on the play, whose lyrics I couldn’t discern. It was a little bit religious, but also sort of girl battle cry, and I’m here for it.

When I was their age, girls had to pretend we didn’t fart. My kids and their friends think farts are hilarious and let them rip in front of one another. (Yes, I am measuring progress by public flatulence.) There are very large girls filled with body confidence, sporting the same sexy outfits as the petite ones. (Yes, I am measuring progress by half-shirts for chubby girls.) I see girls of different sizes and races and abilities feeling empowered. I see them feel like they can conform, when in earlier eras they would have self-deselected from trying. And yes, I am measuring progress by more inclusion in normality because most of us need a sense of belonging in order to develop the strength to stray from it.

I also see the girls who haven’t found a place—and who think that because they haven’t, they’re not girls. I’m not talking about the naturally gender nonconforming kids, the super-masculine girls who, left alone, will likely (but not definitely) grow up to be gay. I’m talking about the girls who can’t find their way to conformity, but wish they could.

I would have been one of them. I was drowning in such corporeal shame that I absolutely would have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria, and had clung to nonbinary as a life vest. I would have medicated. And I highly doubt I would have been lucky enough to discover what ending up helping me more than any therapy or medical treatment: marriage and a family.

We need to allow wiggle room, for the full spectrum—not between Barbie and G.I. Joe, but between the strappy gown and the girl-in-the-suit, between those who pound the ground and shout Ace! and those who, like me, stand on the sideline, as scared of the group as I was—as I am—envious of it.

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This week, the Trump administration’s Education Department announced an investigation into Smith College, one of the storied Seven Sisters. Like its six siblings, Smith adopted a policy of admitting trans women and girls over the last decade, but the DOE argues that such a policy violates Title IX, the 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in educational settings that accept federal dollars.

How did such policies come about in the first place?

In 2009, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan met with a delegation from what was then called the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, or GLSEN. The topic: reducing the bullying of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender students. GLSEN’s National School Climate Survey that year reported hostile school environments, which ranged from kids using “gay” as an insult to the assault of students based on their sexual orientation or “gender expression.”

That is: those who didn’t conform to sex-based expectations were more likely to be beaten or taunted. School personnel weren’t doing much to intervene, despite GLSEN’s decade-long chronicling of the need for them to.

Duncan offered a chance for some educational climate change. On October 26, 2010, he issued a “Dear Colleague” letter—a non-binding but strongly urged public policy suggestion—that insisted Title IX prohibited “gender-based harassment,” or discrimination based on “the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the harasser or target.”

Gender identity-based harassment was now a form of sex discrimination, and schools that didn’t protect kids against it could lose federal funding. While The New York Times describes policies that arose from the recasting of Title IX as a way to “welcome transgender students,” in fact, they were forced to—if they wanted to maintain their budgets.

Still, for some students, that change felt like a triumph of inclusivity, especially for those with the deep sense that they are, or should have been, the opposite sex—or some other category in between. Many trans girls wouldn’t feel safe in a boys’ locker room. Most Gen Z and late Millennials have been raised to believe that their personal gender identity matters more than their objective sex category, so any pushback feels like bigotry or discrimination. Some are too young to remember the very recent past in which gender identity not only was absent from laws or policies, but wasn’t even on the minds of the vast majority of Americans, most of whom had never heard of transgender children. They’re too young to understand why Title IX was passed in the first place: to combat rampant discrimination against women in education.

But what may seem like a minor semantic shift actually paved the way for one of the most divisive cultural issues of our time. Instilling gender identity as a protected characteristic affected far more than the tiny population it was meant to shield; it affected all women. It ultimately meant that girls’ and women’s sports teams had to include males based entirely on their self-conception—because no matter how we alter appearances or bodies, sex itself doesn’t change. It meant that males could and did use women’s locker rooms and bathrooms. Any spaces or groups once segregated by sex were compelled to divide by identity, and that meant females changing in front of males, or competing against them, and having no legal recourse to challenge the rules—and no social space to do so, either, without being accused of unkindness or bigotry.

Gender identity wasn’t a facet of sex; it was a replacement for it.

The rewording of Title IX didn’t come through democratic channels, decided by voters or their elected representatives. There was no concerted effort to educate the public about the cultural and legal implications of what, to the untrained ear, seemed like a few altered syllables. So while the Trump administration’s investigation feels to some like yet another blow to human dignity by the hard-hearted Trump team, hell-bent on stripping away these recently-won civil rights, it’s also true that the investigation provides us with an opportunity to better understand those impacts and craft a policy that protects the privacy and dignity of natal girls and women, and trans girls and women.

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This issue is an albatross around the neck of the Democratic Party, whose “moderate” candidates still can’t summon simple responses to questions like “What is a woman?” or “Should a male compete against a female in sports?” without sputtering. The vast majority of Americans don’t believe sports should be divided by gender identity; that is, they support the original wording and intention of Title IX. Liberals like me believe that people should be free to live their best lives, and not be discriminated against in housing or employment—but that one individual’s rights should not overpower the rights of all others, and that women’s rights matter, too. The issue may read as niche, but it’s actually deeply important to many people, who want to know that their elected officials are straight-shooters.

It’s okay for the government to launch Title IX investigations. Indeed, when tweaks to the law, born out of anti-bullying work, led to many girls and women feeling bullied, we must. The important thing is that we engage with whatever such investigations uncover, and finally have the conversation about the conflict between sex and gender identity.

Ken Jennings, current host and former champion of Jeopardy!, arguably knows more about almost any subject than, well, almost any other human being. One subject he does not know a lot about, though, is youth gender medicine. Nor does he seem to understand that lived experience is not higher in value or relevance than evidence—at least when it comes to this subject.

His misunderstandings were tidily captured in a post on Bluesky:

To break this down: Jack Turban is a psychiatrist who began publishing research on gender dysphoric youth while still in his residency—research that he claimed showed that, say, offering puberty blockers to youth reduced mental health issues later, including suicidality. Thus, he concluded, puberty blocking treatment should “be made available for transgender adolescents who want it.”

By 2024, nonpartisan bodies in several countries, including Finland, Sweden, and England, had found that Turban’s studies, and many others, were so methodologically flawed that one could draw no conclusions about the potential benefits of any gender-affirming treatments, from social transition to penectomy. In fact, the more evidence excavated over the last decade, the less clear it became what’s being treated; how to tell if the treatments worked; and what to do if they didn’t. We have no solid definition of gender identity, let alone what it means to affirm it. It does seem that affirming a gender identity, or facilitating gender identity, increases the possibility of intensifying gender dysphoria later, or of an identity persisting that might otherwise have faded. But do we know for sure?

We do not.

Just because there’s no solid evidence of benefit and clearer evidence of harm doesn’t mean that affirming clinicians (or parents) are abusers. So, yes, when Texas AG Ken Paxton recently declared affirmation to be abuse, Turban weighed in, insisting that Paxton had it wrong.

As I’ve noted before, sterilizing children is considered abuse by Texas lawmakers, thus one could credibly accuse those who sterilize children in the name of identity—as opposed to, say, avoid dying of cancer—of abuse. But there seem to be only small numbers of those having reproductive organs removed, or going straight from blockers to hormones without passing through endogenous puberty, who are thus sterilized via transition. Thus, Paxton was probably catching a lot of garden variety affirmers in his lasso.

Anyway, Jesse Singal, OG gender science journalist, who’s done some of the most important reporting on the Turban-style weak research, weighed in, to poke at Turban for continuing to insist that all major medical associations put out the same messaging.

Then Erin Reed, a male who transitioned and identifies as a woman—and who has a very popular Substack that has been elevated as credible by other news organizations, like The Nation—weighed in, accusing Singal of cozying up to Paxton, which apparently caught Jennings’ eye.

For a guy who assumes the role of Nicest Fella On Any Soundstage, Jennings’ remarks oozed with smarm. He assumed Singal’s upset stemmed from experts disagreeing with him, and that because they were experts, they were right.

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That appeal to authority is flawed—it’s the evidence that matters, not the person talking about it. But it was Jennings’ self-righteous certainty that reminded me just how far we have to go in getting normie liberals to understand what that evidence says, and that the experts are so financially and emotionally invested in presenting the flawed research they’ve generated as flawless that, actually, they’re not trustworthy to present the evidence. To Jennings, it is completely obvious that Singal is wrong because he has come to a different conclusion than Jack Turban and Erin Reed.

And that’s how it is for most libs out there. Obvious. Obvious that it’s a left/right issue. That if any Republicans champion it, it can’t be right—factually or morally. That gender identity is real and unchallengeable and that trans kids have always existed and are in grave danger of suicide if not affirmed and that it is the kind thing to do to participate in their affirmation.

What else could the explanation be??

Well, the answer to that question is what I’ve been writing up for the last couple of years. But while I’m waiting for feedback on it, I welcome your attempts to answer it yourself. Why else would all those experts with degrees be disagreeing with Jesse Singal? And how do we get people like Jennings to see that he not only has the answer wrong, he has the question wrong, too?

PS: Enjoy these track changes from ChatGPT.

For a long time, I was in a Facebook group called Mama Bears, for “moms of LGBTQ+ kids” who want to “make the world a kinder, safer, more loving place for all LGBTQ+ people to live.” I consider myself pretty supportive of that mission, even though I don’t really get what the Q or the + stand for.

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On April 26th, at the annual Pediatric Academic Societies’ meeting, a psychologist, a bioethicist, a plastic surgeon, and a psychiatrist spoke on a panel called “A Scientific Dialogue on the Care of Transgender and Gender Diverse Youth.”

That the session went forth is some cause for, well, if not celebration then relief, since there was a concerted effort to make sure no such dialogue took place, both before and during it.

Critics of having a dialogue about what is arguably the most important medical and psychological decision a human being can make during his or her lifetime asserted that, essentially, the speakers were morally tainted. They were associated with groups that the Southern Poverty Law Center labeled hateful (as if critics of gender medicine are on par with the KKK). Or they had worked on a project for the Trump Administration. Or they had blown the whistle on dangerous practices leading to reforms that conflicted with their visions. Or they had conducted research whose outcomes they didn’t like.

But aside from the objection to what amounts to catching intellectual cooties, what was the actual problem with these people talking?

The biggest fear seemed to be that pediatricians would have to hear a point of view that they’d already determined they didn’t agree with, and that meant that they’d have to withstand the discomfort of having their beliefs challenged rather than affirmed. One clinician told a trans activist publication that “Platforming a one-sided perspective that is not based in medical society guidelines or in the preponderance of the scientific evidence misleads pediatricians, who are attending these talks in good faith that what they hear will be free from bias and rooted in science and good patient care.”

Now, one could argue with this statement in all kinds of ways. Since the speakers’ remarks weren’t pre-published, the assumption of one-sidedness was speculation. Based in medical society guidelines? Well, okay, technically—but panelists Anna Hutchinson and Riittakerttu Kaltiala both reflect the guidelines of their countries, England and Finland respectively. Also, who says that you can’t ever question anything about a guideline at a medical conference? Isn’t that that the ideal setting in which to do just that? And the preponderance of evidence has been deemed low-quality, meaning no one can predict anything from the conclusions, so many American guidelines are actually not in alignment with the evidence.

As for bias—the problem is you don’t want to hear people with difference biases because you only want to exist within the snowglobe of your own biases? Okay, that’s fine if you’re in a cult or in eighth grade—but not if you’re a doctor, whom people trust with their lives. “I’m biased against anyone who doesn’t share my biases” is not a good slogan for those in the helping professions.

There was a lot of figurative noise before the panel, and it was interrupted by some literal noise. Two disrupters, who were apparently not conference-goers, burst into the panel and screamed “You’re a hate group, motherfuckers” and shouted “Fuck you” repeatedly, among other choice words. The conference organizers had dissuaded panelists from bringing their own security, and what security they had in the room didn’t actually protect the panelists. Nor did they help re-establish the peace, and norms, after the incident. At the end of the session, rather than apologizing to the panelists, PAS apologized to the audience for not widening the range of perspectives in it. (For the record, I think it would be fantastic if all of these conferences had panels with different perspectives on this topic. But they have to start by ensuring that the panelists are physically safe.)

Despite these problems, the show did go on, and I think that’s really important to acknowledge. PAS stood its ground and didn’t back down. If the bulk of American medical associations aren’t willing to evolve in the face of evidence (which should scare us all), the least they can do is not cave to the loudest and most extreme voices, and allow panelists to speak.

Other medical groups weren’t so brave, and had to send out statements that were the equivalent of “don’t worry, we didn’t catch the intellectual cooties and are still in the hands-over-ears bunker with the rest of you who definitely don’t want to learn anything new.” The conference was the Pediatric Academic Society, not the Pediatric Endocrine Society, but the PES sent this out anyway.

Here, by contrast, is some version of what I think groups could send out when faced with pushback against viewpoint diversity and knowledge expansion:

“We recognize that some people objected to the scheduling of this presentation. As clinicians, though, we always put science and ethics first, especially in a relatively new area of medicine with a weak evidence base. We should be willing to evolve in the face of new evidence and unafraid to reevaluate existing evidence. That is what good scientists and good clinicians do. That is good medicine. We respect every attendees’ right to avoid panels that they aren’t interested in or find irrelevant. However, if you are interested and it is relevant to you, we suggest that you attend the workshop, listen, and ask questions—and propose a panel of your own if you find the answers unsatisfactory. As professionals, we do our best work when we put politics and personal opinions aside. We serve our clients and our colleagues best by modeling robust scientific debate.”

Imagine that there was a presentation on diabetes research, and conference-goers didn’t like the attitudes or beliefs or work of the panelists, who had an important perspective on insulin that, yeah, okay, was different from the guidelines or the American Diabetes Association (which many believe is corrupt, by the way). What would be the harm of hearing it, of attending and asking questions and pushing back or, heaven forfend, being open to and interested in it, even if you were skeptical?

The only potential harm is that you will change your beliefs. That you will have to admit you were wrong. That you will have to face an unbearable well of doubt and discomfort. But if you did, you’d emerge stronger and better able to perform your job. (Why have I switched to the second person? Maybe because I desperately want to preach to the unconverted.)

We can see the destructiveness of clinging to certain beliefs in the panel disrupter’s behavior. He had been convinced that a discussion about best practices for treating gender dysphoria was so dangerous to him, because the modern concept of gender identity relies on the affirmation and participation of all other human beings. The most important thing anyone treating gender identity, or anyone who believes they have a gender identity, needs to do is interrogate that concept.

Doctors, psychologists, and therapists with blinders on and fingers in their ears cannot perform their jobs well, if they’re fending off information instead of absorbing it. When they disrupt instead of listen and push back, they endanger the very clients they want to help. We all want medical care that is “free from bias and rooted in science and good patient care.” Having clinicians who listen to competing perspectives, and are willing to evolve with the evidence, is the best way to get it.

—Lisa

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LTE to WaPo March 26, 2026, no response:

To the editor:

Re the Post’s March 26 article “Transgender women athletes banned from female Olympic events by new IOC policy”:The Post’s coverage of this important news item is misleading at best, and inaccurate at worst.

The headline is close to accurate (though I wish the Post would use the simple and straightforward word “men”), but it is followed by this subheading: “​​Transgender women athletes are now excluded from the Olympics after the IOC agreed to a new eligibility policy It aligns with U.S. President Donald Trump’s executive order on women’s sports ahead of the 2028 Los Angeles Games.” This strongly suggests that male athletes who call themselves “transgender” are being excluded from the Olympics entirely, which is not true.

The policy that the IOC announced on Thursday morning simply states that athletes will be required to undergo a simple and non-invasive sex test in order to compete, and that only female athletes will be permitted to compete in the women’s category. Male athletes will be eligible to compete in the men’s category. That’s it.

In a survey of female athletes at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, 82% said that sex testing should be continued and 94% said they were not made anxious by the procedure. Female athletes want sex testing.

This is a very sensible move on the IOC’s part to protect the integrity of female sports. The Washington Post would do well not to mislead readers about it.

Kara Dansky

LTE to NYT March 24, 2026, no response:

To the Editor,

Thomas B. Edsall’s March 24 opinion piece, “Why Are So Many Democratic Politicians So Far Out of Touch?,” is a welcome contribution to the discussion about why elected Democrats are out of touch with the majority of voters on the “trans issue.”

There has been very good reporting on this phenomenon, including in the Times. That reporting demonstrated that the vast majority of voters (including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents) think that male athletes (including “transgender women”) do not belong in women’s sports.

When voters are asked clear questions, using precise language about specific scenarios, even stronger majorities understand that sex is real and matters. Polling commissioned by the group Women’s Declaration International USA in the fall of 2023 shows that:

• 4 out of 5 voters understand the word “women” means adult humans who are biologically female.

• 88% say a female 12-year-old attending a sleep-away summer camp for boys and girls, who has been signed up by her parents for a girls’ cabin, should be assigned bunkmates who are female only.

• 87% say an elderly or disabled female client of a home health agency who requests only women home health aides help her with showering should be sent female aides only.

This issue truly is not complicated.

Kara Dansky

Lifelong Democrat

Former President, Women’s Declaration International USA

To WaPo March 18, 2026, rejected; to Newsweek March 22, 2026, rejected; eventually published by The Hill on March 31

“Gender Identity” Renders Women’s Rights Unspeakable: The era of “swinging dicks” litigation

“It is truly a testament to where we are as a society today that it must be said in the context of federal civil rights litigation that women don’t have penises.”

I wrote those words in an amicus (friend-of-the-court) brief filed by the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) in the matter of Olympus Spa v. Armstrong.

In his March 12 dissent to a decision in the case, Judge Lawrence VanDyke of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit put it more colorfully: “This case is about swinging dicks,” he wrote. The language caused an uproar, and rightly so.

But Judge VanDyke isn’t wrong.

Olympus Spa is a traditional Korean-style spa near Seattle, Washington. It is open to women and girls aged thirteen and over, who visit to soak in herb-infused baths, lie on sand in warm rooms, and eat Korean food. Nudity is expected and, under certain circumstances, required.

In 2020, a man sought access to the spa. He was denied because the spa is only for women and teenaged girls.

This should have been straightforward. Most Americans of both sexes understand that it’s sometimes appropriate to have single-sex spaces. However, we are living in an era in which society (and sometimes, the law) allows for people to “identify as” the opposite sex.

This is the era of “trans,” or “gender identity.”

After the man was denied access, he filed a complaint against the spa before the Washington State Human Rights Commission (WSHRC). Claiming that the spa’s female-only policy violated his rights under Washington state law., he argued essentially as follows:

• State law prohibits public places from discriminating against people on the basis of their sexual orientation.

• State law defines the phrase “sexual orientation” to include “gender identity.”

• He identifies as a woman.

• Therefore, the spa discriminated against him on the basis of his sexual orientation.

He won. The WSHRC agreed that state law gave him a right to access the spa because he identifies as a woman.

On appeal, the Ninth Circuit agreed that Washington state law requires a female-only spa to accommodate a man who identifies as a woman.

Judge VanDyke disagrees.

The majority–and some commentators–were outraged at the language in his dissent. Slate called it “crass and indecent.” The lead judge in the majority called it “vulgar barroom talk.” A concurring judge said: “We are better than this.”

They are not wrong.

Judge VanDyke should never have had to come out swinging, as it were, on behalf of the women and girls who did not consent to sharing a nude space with males. He said as much:

You may think that swinging dicks shouldn’t appear in a judicial opinion. You’re not wrong.

However, he used the phrase very deliberately, and for good reason.

This is literally a case about whether a man, with male genitalia, should be able to access what is intended to be a female-only space in which women and girls as young as thirteen are naked. It is a clear example of the real-world harms to female citizens when the words “women” and “girls” are redefined to include males.

Judge VanDyke’s dissent echoes arguments in WDI USA’s brief before the court: that women have fought hard for centuries for our rights, that we have largely succeeded in winning those rights in the law, and that all of that goes away when men are permitted to “identify as women.”

Judge VanDyke chose his startling words carefully in order to make an important point. He said:

[A]s much as you might understandably be shocked and displeased to merely encounter that phrase in this opinion, I hope we all can agree that it is far more jarring for the unsuspecting and exposed women at Olympus Spa—some as young as thirteen—to be visually assaulted by the real thing.

He’s right. If the man in question hadn’t claimed a female “gender identity,” the majority of the Ninth Circuit would presumably have agreed that Washington’s criminal statutes against flashing and voyeurism applied. But because he invoked the shibboleth “I identify as a woman,” the rights of the spa’s female patrons seem to have evaporated.

Judges and pundits alike are more interested in language-policing those who speak out against sex crimes than in preventing those crimes against women in the first place.

This case may end up before the U.S. Supreme Court. If it does, the Supreme Court should say, unambiguously, that it is wrong for state law to force unconsenting women and girls to see penises. It should affirm, once and for all, that women are female and men are male.

It should not have come to this, but this is where we are. Let the era of “swinging dicks” litigation come to an end.

To Newsweek Feb. 16, 2026, no response:

Hillary Clinton: Women’s Rights Champion Turned Traitor

Presidents’ Day was February 16. Hillary Clinton, the woman who in 2016 nearly became the first female President of the United States, spent the weekend pandering to a man who calls himself a woman.

As a feminist and a lifelong Democrat, I voted enthusiastically for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primary and general elections.

She had, after all, championed the Family and Medical leave Act, worked to increase funding for child care, helped start the National Campaign to End Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, campaigned for access to emergency contraception, voted in favor of abortion, and co-sponsored the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act (about fair pay for women).

Based on her record I, like many of her supporters, was confident that at a fundamental level Hillary Clinton both understood women’s rights and was committed to protecting and advancing them.

That’s why I was so disappointed to watch her platform a man during Saturday’s Fundamental Rights for Women panel at the Munich Security Conference.

As moderator, Clinton introduced U.S. Representative Sarah (born Timothy) McBride as the very first speaker. She described him as “someone who’s been involved in this work for a long time, in trying to explain, and truly bring people together, around issues of gender.”

To make matters worse, Clinton pretended that McBride is a woman. She described McBride as a “US Congresswoman from the state of Delaware.” She continued (speaking to McBride), “As a gender rights champion, and also the first openly transgender member of the United States Congress, you’ve been on the front lines of this fight.”

When Clinton described McBride as someone who’s “been involved in this work for a long time,” what did she mean by “this work?”

As a former national press secretary for the Human Rights Campaign (a leading organization in the push to prioritize self-declared “gender identity” over the material reality of sex in law, policy, and culture), and a close family friend of former President Joe Biden, whose administration did more than any other to advance the goals of the gender identity movement, McBride has certainly been involved in the work of making it possible for men to “identify as” women, over the objections of actual women.

McBride has, however, never done a thing to protect the fundamental rights of women. Quite the opposite, in fact, because McBride works to ensure women have no right to exclude men who call themselves women (“transgender women”) from female-only spaces, sports, or opportunities.

Clinton’s fulsome praise of McBride in Munich was not her first betrayal of the female sex. While in 1995, Clinton famously stood on a UN stage in Beijing and declared that “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all,” it appears that “once and for all” really only meant until the early 2010s.

That was when the entire Democratic Party establishment decided that some men are women if they say so, if they mimic the stereotypes associated with femininity, and/or if they take hormones and have surgeries to make them more closely resemble women (i.e., “are trangender women”).

An early adopter of the new Democratic orthodoxy, in 2010, then-Secretary of State Clinton relaxed the rules for changing sex markers on passports so that surgery was no longer required.

It has not always been clear what, exactly, Hillary thinks about all of this. In 2019, she gave an interview with her daughter Chelsea. The interviewer asked them both if someone with a beard and penis can ever be a woman, Chelsea offered an enthusiastic “Ye-ess. Yes.” Hillary, however, looked “uneasy.”

When asked about sports, Chelsea stated that “she supports children being able to play on sports teams that match their gender identity.” Hillary was more cautious: “I think you’ve got to be sensitive to how difficult this is,” Hillary said. “There are women who’d say, ‘You know what, you’ve never had the kind of life experiences that I’ve had. So I respect who you are, but don’t tell me you’re the same as me.’ I hear that conversation all the time.” Hillary said that men should “absolutely” not be in women’s bathrooms and Chelsea glared at her.

Two days later, she posted on Facebook to say that “Trans rights are human rights.” She continued, “Let me be clear: transgender people deserve nothing short of full equality.”

Clinton’s capitulation on “gender” probably eased her relationship with her adult daughter, and with other Democratic elites, but at what cost?

People often use the word “gender” as a euphemism for sex, but this is dangerous. People like McBride have capitalized on the general public’s acceptance of the use of “gender” to mean sex in order to fight for men’s rights to be legally and socially recognized as women.

There was a spot on that panel in Munich that was meant for a woman. And Hillary Clinton gave it to a man who calls himself a woman.

In 1995, Secretary Clinton promised us that human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, “once and for all.” Now she has completely abandoned us. As a traitor to her sex class, she should be ashamed.

Democratic contenders in 2028 should draw a lesson from the woman who was never President: speak the truth, even when pressured to lie. In doing so, you will protect your legacy—and you might just get yourself elected.

To WSJ January 5, 2026, no response:

In 2020, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit challenging Idaho’s House Bill 500, which limits women’s and girls’ sports to biologically female athletes. Five years and much litigation later, Little v. Hecox is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. Yet, ahead of oral arguments scheduled for January 13, the ACLU has asked the Court to declare its own suit moot. Why?

On the surface, Hecox and the similar West Virginia v. B.P.J., which justices will hear on the same day, present a narrow question: May states, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, maintain single-sex sports?

In both cases, U.S. appellate courts have ruled that laws excluding males from women’s and girls’ sports violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. In the West Virginia case, an appellate court also ruled that the state’s law violates Title IX (which prohibits sex discrimination in education). A Supreme Court decision is expected next summer.

While the current Court seems unlikely to take up former President Biden’s position that the transgender movement is “the civil rights issue of our time,” the scope of its rulings in these cases could vary widely.

As the ACLU’s Gillian Branstetter wrote in September, “What we don’t know–and won’t know until that ruling is handed down—is whether that ruling will be narrowly tailored to the context of athletics or implicate a broad range of rights for transgender people.”

In other words, will the Court issue a few limited protections for female athletes, or will it finally address the elephantess in the (court)room? Does the class “women and girls” mean female people? Or does it mean people of either sex who say they are female?

In seeking to have Hecox declared moot, the ACLU may hope to avoid a definitive answer to that question from the conservative-majority Court.

It is not only conservatives who resist redefining the words “women” and “girls” to include males. A 2023 survey conducted by SurveyUSA on behalf of Women’s Declaration International USA (a feminist organization of which I am a past president) found that four out of five American voters, including two thirds of Democrats, understand that women are “adult humans who are female.”

The Supreme Court has already decided that women as a sex class deserve protection under the Equal Protection Clause. In 1971, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg argued that women are people for equal protection purposes, and the Court agreed. The case was Reed v. Reed, and it concerned an Idaho law that explicitly elevated males over females in the administration of probate estates. The Court rightfully ruled that this was unfair to women. A long line of jurisprudence followed, culminating in the landmark 1996 case U.S. v. Virginia, in which the Court (led by Justice Ginsburg) ruled that the Virginia Military Institute could not exclude women.

How long can the Court delay facing the issue head-on?

In 2020, Justice Samuel Alito issued a dissent to the Court’s Bostock v. Clayton County decision, in which a 6-3 majority ruled that employers may not discriminate on the basis of “transgender status.” The decision did not define “transgender status,” leaving muddled the question of whether, under the law, some males are women if they call themselves “transgender.”

He warned: “Although the Court does not want to think about the consequences of its decision, we will not be able to avoid those issues for long. The entire Federal Judiciary will be mired for years in disputes about the reach of the Court’s reasoning.”

His warning was prescient. In case after case, the federal courts are being asked to consider who qualifies for accommodations and protections designated for women and girls.

During the summer of 2024, after the Biden Administration announced that it was redefining the word “sex” to include the concept of “gender identity” in regulations pertaining to Title IX, the federal judiciary had to grapple with over twenty lawsuits about what words like “sex” and “women” mean. Outside the Title IX context, federal courts have faced the question of whether female-only spas and sororities are permitted to exclude men (“transgender women”).

Last year, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the matter of United States v. Skrmetti, which concerned state laws banning the administration of “puberty blockers” and other hormones to children. While advocates hoped to make the case that the phrase “transgender people” constitutes a sufficiently coherent category of people to be considered what is known in the law as a “quasi-suspect classification,” they faced skepticism from several justices.

Justice Alito questioned ACLU lawyer Chase Strangio as to whether “transgender status” is immutable. Strangio acknowledged that it is not “immutable,” but maintained that it is a “distinguishing characteristic.”

Justice Amy Coney Barrett challenged the U.S. Solicitor General on the question of whether “transgender people” have historically lacked political power. This matters in part because one of the reasons the Court initially extended equal protection to women was that women had historically been excluded from civic institutions like the franchise and juries.

Six members of the Court ruled earlier this year that laws such as the one at issue in Skrmetti are constitutional. Significantly, Justices Alito, Barrett, and Thomas published concurring opinions stating they would have ruled explicitly that the phrase “transgender status” is not a “quasi-suspect class.”

However, the Court did not go far enough in Skrmetti, and it failed to clarify the ambiguity left by Bostock. Unless the Court rules unambiguously that “transgender” is not a “quasi-suspect class,” and that women and girls exist as a coherent sex class, courts and lawyers will be left (again) to grapple with these matters.

In the sports cases currently pending before the Supreme Court, the Court has two options: it can uphold Justice Ginsburg’s important legacy by ruling that women and girls—and only women and girls—belong to the female sex class, or it can, once again, leave the matter for another day.

I am friendly with the folks at TFP and a few days after Charlie Kirk was killed, I pitched the idea of publishing my interview. TFP said they passed my message on to Bari, and nothing ever came of it.

The TERF Report

My 2022 interview with Charlie Kirk

September 13, 2025…

Listen now

9 months ago · 3694 likes · 16 comments · Kara Dansky

To spiked August 24, 2025, responded and rejected

Fighting for Women’s Sex-Based Rights is Not “MAGA”

It’s feminist

August 24, 2025

As readers surely know, in April of this year, the group For Women Scotland (FWS) won a stunning legal victory before the U.K. Supreme Court, when the Court ruled that the words “woman,” “man,” and “sex” refer to biology with respect to the U.K.’s Equality Act.

Now, Dr. Rebecca Don Kennedy, the head of Scotland’s Equality Network, is calling FWS “MAGA” in an article published by the Scottish outlet The Herald. As a U.S. Democratic feminist who has never voted for Donald Trump, this makes me quite cross.

According to The Herald:

The issue quickly moved from the fringes to the centre to Scottish and UK politics. At first, Kennedy wondered: “Where was it coming from? Down south? America?”

She adds: “I think now we know that it’s coming from concerted MAGA rhetoric.”

…

Kennedy believes the culture war around trans people “tracks” on to the timing of the first Trump presidency.

If Kennedy had done her research, she would know that American leftist feminists have been fighting for women’s sex-based rights for decades, long before an odious man named Donald Trump ascended to the Oval Office.

She would know that an American leftist radical feminist lesbian named Lisa Vogel founded the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival (MWMF or MichFest) in 1976, and that it had to fight to protect its female-only policy when a bunch of men calling themselves women started inserting themselves into it in 1991. She would know that a different American radical feminist leftist lesbian named Janice Raymond published a book titled The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male in 1979, and republished it in 1994 with an Introduction warning us of the emergence of the word “transgender.” None of that had anything to do with Donald Trump, who, according to investigative journalist Wayne Barrett, spent the 1970s running his father’s New York real estate company and discriminating against black people.

If she had done her research, Kennedy would know that the American radical feminist group Women’s Liberation Front (WoLF) was founded in 2013 to fight for women’s sex-based rights, free from men who call themselves women (I served on its board from 2016 to 2020). She would also know that the global feminist group Women’s Declaration International (WDI) launched in 2019 in New York and that the American chapter (WDI USA) was formed in 2020 (I served as the president and member of the board of directors of the U.S. chapter from 2021 to 2024).

Kennedy goes further and suggests that fighting for women’s sex-based rights is akin to opposing abortion, and that it’s only men who fight sex-denialism in the law. She said, “Many of the men attacking trans rights would strip abortion rights from women in a heartbeat. The ultimate objective is quashing women’s rights. Once we allow trans women to be scapegoated it’s a slippery slope.”

Kennedy is right that many American men would love to strip women of the right to terminate a pregnancy. That is one reason I have never voted for Donald Trump (I have voted Republican once in my life, in a 1990s mayoral race, where the Republican was openly pro-abortion rights and I believed the Democratic candidate to be corrupt). But to compare the fight for sex-based rights to the American right-wing obsession with stripping women of abortion rights is ludicrous. American leftist radical feminists support abortion rights.

WoLF’s mission is to “restore, protect, and advance the rights of women and girls using legal argument, policy advocacy, and public education.” Among other objectives, it “defends women’s bodily sovereignty and unapologetically supports abortion on demand.” When Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, I published a piece on the WDI USA blog titled, “How the Supreme Court Got it Wrong in Dobbs.” It stated, “The U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International (WDI USA) stands categorically and unapologetically in support of women’s and girls’ right to terminate a pregnancy at will, on demand, and without apology.”

The day after the 2024 U.S. presidential election, I launched the Democratic Women’s Declaration (DWD). I am ideologically left of the Democratic party, but I have been a registered Democrat since 1990 (except for a few years in the early 2000s, when I was registered Green). I care about women and girls as a sex class. Article IV of the DWD states:

Only women are capable of becoming pregnant. Women must have access to medical care with respect to pregnancy, including during the prenatal, perinatal, and postnatal periods. Accordingly, all areas of law, policy, and practice should ensure that the full reproductive rights of women and girls, including access to comprehensive reproductive services including abortion, are upheld.

The DWD was inspired by the global Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, the Labour Women’s Declaration, and the Green Women’s Declaration.

In more recent years, other U.S. groups have popped up, including Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender (DIAG), which opposes reckless medical interventions that ignore developmental science, supports the rights of women and girls to single-sex spaces and sports, believes there’s no wrong way to be a boy or girl, and is committed to open dialogue and free speech. There’s also the LGB Courage Coalition, a “lesbian and gay advocacy group committed to promoting evidence-based medical care, ending the medicalization of gender nonconformity, safeguarding homosexual rights, and building a pathway back for LGB individuals who have undergone medicalization.” The LGB Alliance also has a U.S. chapter. Some individuals in these groups may vote Republican, but none of the groups can fairly be accused of being “MAGA.”

WDI USA and WoLF are nonpartisan American feminist organizations. The DWD is a feminist document, inspired by leftists in the U.K. To impose the label of “MAGA” onto FWS ignores decades of American feminist organizing and fighting for the right of women and girls to exist as a sex class distinct from men (and for abortion rights).

This has nothing to do with Donald Trump. This has everything to do with women. To paint FWS as “MAGA” is inaccurate at best (and insulting to women at worst). Rebecca Don Kennedy should know better. She probably does.

To Spectator, June 23, 2025, no response:

U.S. v. Skrmetti: A Transatlantic Return to Reality

In the matter of U.S. v. Skrmetti, the U.S. Supreme Court last week upheld Tennessee’s ban on the use of puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones intended to disguise the sex of minors. The decision strikes a major blow against the human rights abuse that is pediatric “gender medicine.”

But its full implications are even broader. Although the U.S. Court did not go as far as the U.K. Supreme Court did in April when it found that the words ‘woman,’ ‘man,’ and ‘sex’ refer to biology, the Skrmetti decision confirmed what broad majorities of Americans have known all along: that sex is real, in the law and otherwise.

In this case, the state of Tennessee enacted a law that protects minors from harmful drugs such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. It is well established that such drugs cause long-term harm such as sterility, disease, and the inability to develop sexual function as an adult.

And yet, a group of minors and their parents, represented by the A.C.L.U. (where I worked from 2012 to 2014), sued the state, demanding access to these harmful drugs. They argued that the Tennessee law violates their right to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

They won at the district court level, but lost when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rightly ruled that the phrase “transgender people” is not a coherent category of people under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court majority did not address that aspect of the lower court’s ruling, though Justices Barrett and Alito agreed with the Sixth Circuit on it.

Progressives frame Skrmetti—and the entire conflict over “gender identity”—as but one front in their larger war on Trump and the G.O.P. “I didn’t pick this fight around trans rights,” said Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director. “The right-wing conservatives of the MAGA G.O.P. have made this one of their cause célèbre issues…”

In response to the Court’s decision, Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer took to X to decry “Republicans’ cruel crusade against trans kids.” His fellow Democratic Senator Ed Markey declared, “Today, hate won. The far-right justices of the Supreme Court endorsed hate and discrimination by delivering a win for Republicans who have relentlessly and cruelly attacked transgender Americans for years.”

Elected Democrats, progressive activists, and even most news outlets tend to credit the political right with all opposition to so-called “gender identity” (or “trans”).

But this narrative simply isn’t true, either in the U.K. or in the U.S.

The founders of For Women Scotland, who brought the case that led to the U.K. legal victory for sex over “gender identity,” are left-leaning liberals who found themselves politically homeless as the gender lobby marched through the parties and institutions of the left, steamrolling women’s sex-based rights along the way. The “lesbian interveners” who bolstered the feminist case likewise hail mostly from the political left.

The same is true of grassroots advocates for the material reality of sex in the U.S. In the Skrmetti case, not only did left-leaning lesbians, gay men, feminists and Democrats rally outside the Supreme Court in support of the state of Tennessee, but the feminist group Women’s Declaration International USA filed a friend of the court brief, urging the Supreme Court to reach the result it issued last week. (I represented WDI USA on the brief).

WDI USA’s brief argued that the word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people. It said that children have an international human right to grow into adulthood. It maintained that sex is grounded in material reality, whereas “gender” is grounded in regressive stereotypes. Further, it asked the Court to rule that the Tennessee law is not sex discrimination.

I am pleased to see that the Supreme Court agrees.

Chief Justice Roberts concluded the majority opinion by saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”

Justice Alito mostly agrees, but says that he is “uneasy” with the Court’s analysis as to whether the Tennessee law “discriminates against transgender people” and that he “would reject the plaintiffs’ argument for a different reason: because neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.’”

He continues: “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class. And transgender individuals have not been subjected to a history of discrimination that is comparable to past discrimination against the groups we have classified as suspect or ‘quasi-suspect.’”

Like Justice Alito, I am disappointed that the majority did not clearly rule that “transgender” is not a protected category for equal protection purposes. As WDI USA argued in its brief, using the ACLU’s own tortured definition of “transgender,” the U.S. Supreme Court “ought not want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.”

Dissenting, Justice Sotomayor said, “In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition ‘identify with’ an identity ‘inconsistent’ with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.” Somehow, Justice Sotomayor manages to know what “sex” means, but fails to see its relevance in the realm of medical treatment. It’s an assertion we might have expected from Justice Brown-Jackson, famously “not a biologist.” (Surprising no one, Brown-Jackson joins Sotomayor’s dissent, which the latter issued “in sadness.”)

How have the feminists who supported Tennessee in Skrmetti found themselves siding with the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court, in opposition to three of the four female Justices?

It’s not because they are secret conspirators with the right. It is because sex—not self-declared “identity”—is the basis for all genuine feminist advocacy.

For lesbians and gay men to fight discrimination against their same-sex attraction, the law must recognize the material reality of sex. For women and girls to fight discrimination against their female sex, the law must recognize that female is a material fact, not a feeling.

Sex is real and immutable; it’s not complicated. It is a fact of human existence so fundamental that it even got Justice Samuel Alito to agree with radical feminists. If American progressives are serious about defeating Trump and the G.O.P., they should look across the Atlantic for a preview of how the battle between sex (reality) and “gender identity” (fantasy) must inevitably end.

Labour has started to come around; what next, U.S. Democrats?

To WSJ June 18, 2025, no response:

U.S. v. Skrmetti: A victory for feminists and reality

The U.S. Supreme Court has decided the matter of U.S. v. Skrmetti, and it confirmed what broad majorities of Americans have known all along: that sex is real, in the law and otherwise.

In this case, the state of Tennessee enacted a law that protects minors from harmful drugs such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. It is well established that such drugs cause long-term harm such as sterility, disease, and the inability to develop sexual function as an adult.

And yet, a group of minors and their parents, represented by the ACLU (where I worked from 2012 to 2014), sued the state, demanding access to these harmful drugs. They argued that the Tennessee law violates their right to equal protection of the law under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.

They won at the district court level, but lost when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit rightly ruled that the phrase “transgender people” is not a coherent category of people under the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment.

In the coming days, progressive commentators will shake their heads and lament that this decision was made by the Court’s conservative majority. The political right is often credited with all opposition to so-called “gender identity” (or “trans”).

But this narrative simply isn’t true.

In the Skrmetti case, not only did left-leaning lesbians, gay men, feminists and Democrats rally outside the Supreme Court in support of the state of Tennessee, but the feminist group Women’s Declaration International USA filed a friend of the court brief, urging the Supreme Court to reach the result it issued today. (I represented WDI USA on the brief).

WDI USA’s brief argued that the word “transgender” is a linguistic sleight of hand that has no coherent meaning, is not an immutable trait, and does not describe a politically powerless group of people. It said that children have an international human right to grow into adulthood. It maintained that sex is grounded in material reality, whereas “gender” is grounded in regressive stereotypes. Further, it asked the Court to rule that the Tennessee law is not sex discrimination.

I am pleased to see that the Supreme Court agrees.

Chief Justice Roberts concluded the majority opinion by saying, “This case carries with it the weight of fierce scientific and policy debates about the safety, efficacy, and propriety of medical treatments in an evolving field. The voices in these debates raise sincere concerns; the implications for all are profound. The Equal Protection Clause does not resolve these disagreements.”

Justice Alito mostly agrees, but says that he is “uneasy” with the Court’s analysis as to whether the Tennessee law “discriminates against transgender people” and that he “would reject the plaintiffs’ argument for a different reason: because neither transgender status nor gender identity should be treated as a suspect or ‘quasi-suspect’ class.’”

He continued: “Transgender status is not ‘immutable,’ and as a result, persons can and do move into and out of the class. Members of the class differ widely among themselves, and it is often difficult for others to determine whether a person is a member of the class. And transgender individuals have not been subjected to a history of discrimination that is comparable to past discrimination against the groups we have classified as suspect or ‘quasi-suspect.’”

Like Justice Alito, I am disappointed that the majority did not clearly rule that “transgender” is not a protected category for equal protection purposes. As WDI USA argued in its brief, using the ACLU’s own tortured definition of “transgender,” “this Court ought not want to be the Court that establishes such a classification for a group of people that, at least according to the ACLU, includes part-time cross-dressers.”

Dissenting, Justice Sotomayor said, “In addition to discriminating against transgender adolescents, who by definition ‘identify with’ an identity ‘inconsistent’ with their sex, that law conditions the availability of medications on a patient’s sex.” Somehow, even Justice Sotomayor manages to know what “sex” means. And yet, she dissents “in sadness.”

Meanwhile, feminists on both sides of the Atlantic are celebrating. In April, grassroots group For Women Scotland secured a major victory when the U.K. Supreme Court made it clear that the words “sex,” “woman,” and “man” are defined biologically in that nation’s law.

Like their U.S. grassroots feminist counterparts, the founders of For Women Scotland are left-leaning liberals who found themselves politically homeless as the gender lobby marched through the parties and institutions of the left, steamrolling women’s sex-based rights along the way.

As a lifelong Democrat (except for a few years as a member of the Green party), I sympathize. Every day, I hear from rank-and-file Democrats and leftists who are angry at party leadership for throwing women and girls under the bus. They are also angry at the party for (as they see it) handing easy wins to President Trump and conservatives each time elected Democrats take the side of “gender identity” over sex.

How have the feminists who supported Tennessee in Skrmetti found themselves on the same side as the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court?

It’s not because they are secret conspirators with the right. It is because sex—not self-declared “identity”—is the grounds for all of their advocacy as civil rights classes.

For lesbians and gay men to fight discrimination against their same-sex attraction, the law must recognize the material reality of sex. For women and girls to fight discrimination against their female sex, the law must recognize that female is a material fact, not a feeling.

Sex is real and immutable; it’s not complicated. It is a fact of human existence so fundamental that it even got Justice Samuel Alito to agree with radical feminists. What will it take for the liberal justices and elected Democrats to come around?

To Boston Globe, and later to The Free Press, no response from either, April 2025:

Boston Marathon’s Policy on Sex and Gender Should Be Scrapped

A man will compete in the female category at next week’s Boston Marathon. According to the website hecheated.org, Riya Young Suising, born Robert Chien Hwa Young, has competed in the female category in races more than 330 times, including at least eight Boston Marathons, and placed on the podium for his age group more than 130 times. His presence in the female category in Boston this year will unfairly impact all female competitors, including former world record-holder, Paula Radcliffe.

Not only does Boston allow men into its female category, it also has a “non-binary” category, predictably dominated by men. The qualifying times for the “non-binary” category are the same as the women’s times, meaning men who claim to be “non-binary” can ‘earn’ a coveted Boston Qualifier despite running up to 30 minutes slower than men who don’t claim a special identity. So men get three categories for fair competition, while women get none. Young only secured a place by lying about his sex, as he failed to run the men’s qualifying time for his age group.

Far from being unique, Young is part of a trend, or rather a tidal wave, of men and boys (often called “transgender women and girls”) competing in women’s and girls’ sports.

An August 2024 report by Reem Alsalem, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on violence against women and girls, stated that as of last March, over 600 female athletes in more than 400 competitions have lost more than 890 medals in 29 different sports to males.

The website shewon.org, dedicated to “archiving the achievements of female athletes displaced by males in women’s sporting events and other types of competitions expressly for women,” states that more than 1500 female athletes in more than 900 competitions have lost more than 2100 medals in 44 different sports to males.

A January 2025 poll conducted by the New York Times and Ipsos indicated that 79 percent of American voters, including 67 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Independents, don’t think men should be in women’s sports.

In February, President Trump signed Executive Order 14201, “Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports.” Since the EO, the U.S. Department of Education is pursuing at least six state-wide Title IX investigations in addition to dozens of investigations into individual universities and school districts.

Simply put: There are two immutable sexes, male and female. We play sports with bodies, not “identities.” A man can never be a woman, regardless of cross-sex hormones and surgeries, regardless of falsified documents. Everyone knows this.

How did we get here? Janice Raymond is a radical feminist lesbian and professor emerita of women’s studies and medical ethics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, having served on its faculty since 1978. In 1979 she published a groundbreaking book, The Transsexual Empire, in which she explained how allowing men to call themselves women harms women and girls as a sex class. In 1994, she published a reprint of the book, warning readers of the emergence of a new device: the word “transgender.” When she retired in 2002, the Boston Globe included her among several “marquee talents.”

Article 7 of the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights states that women have the right to participate in sports and physical education designated for women only: “To ensure fairness and safety for women and girls, the entry of boys and men who claim to have female ‘gender identities’ into teams, competitions, facilities, or changing rooms, inter alia, set aside for women and girls should be prohibited as a form of sex discrimination.”

If you agree that no man or boy should compete in women’s sports, please contact the individuals and groups below, all of whom are committed to protecting the sex-based rights of women and girls, including exclusion of men and boys from athletic competitions designated exclusively for female athletes.

Join us to save women’s sports!

Mara Yamauchi, Two-time Olympian and member, Advisory Group, Sex Matters

Elizabeth Chesak, Women’s Declaration International USA

Kara Dansky, Democratic Women’s Declaration

Martina Navratilova

Jenny Poyer Ackerman, Democrats for an Informed Approach to Gender

Jennifer Sey, XX-XY Athletics

Kim Jones and Marshi Smith, Independent Council on Women’s Sports

Sharon Byrne, Women’s Liberation Front

Janice Raymond, Professor Emeria, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Riley Gaines, 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer

Selina Soule, women’s sports advocate

Linda Blade, International Consortium on Female Sport

Emily Kaht, Marathon runner

To The Free Press, July 2024, no response (later published in The Washington Examiner):

An Open Letter to Vice President Kamala Harris

Dear Madam Vice President,

I am writing to ask you to consider the leftist radical feminist critique of “gender identity” (or “trans”) as you continue on your likely path to securing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination at the Democratic National Convention next month.

I am a lifelong Democrat. I registered as a Democrat in 1990 and the only time I have not been a Democrat was a brief period in the mid-2000s when I was a registered member of the Green Party; I re-registered as a Democrat in order to vote in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary election. I am also the president of the US chapter of Women’s Declaration International, which works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout U.S. law, policy, and practice (my term as president expires at the end of this month). We are predominantly leftist radical feminists. We are a nonpartisan organization that is not aligned with any political party; in this piece, I am speaking solely in my personal capacity.

My life-long progressive credentials can not fairly be questioned. So it is from that standpoint I say with a not small dose of bitterness that the Democratic Party has completely abandoned women and girls. It has done so at the altar of the nebulous, sexist, regressive, authoritarian, homophobic concept of “gender identity.” I know that you know this; all the Democrats in positions of power know it. This is why I wrote the book The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. A copy of that book is making its way to your office as I write. I hope you will find a minute or two of time to at least take a peek at it before the DNC.

You and I have met on three occasions: at an event sponsored by the Stanford University Black Students’ Association when you were the District Attorney of San Francisco and I was the executive director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center at Stanford Law School; in an elevator at an event about the plight of incarcerated women that was taking place at a journalism museum in Washington, D.C. when you were a senator from California; and at a fundraiser for your 2020 presidential campaign. All three encounters were very brief, and you would have no reason to remember meeting me at any of them.

I have followed your career over the years.

I was in the audience during the 2017 symposium “Women Unshackled: Policy Solutions to Address the Growth of Female Incarceration” when you were a U.S. senator. I remember listening to you speak movingly about the plight of incarcerated women. You talked about the Dignity for Incarcerated Women Act, which would mandate that female inmates receive free menstrual products, outlaw shackling and solitary confinement for pregnant women, and provide that the location of a mother’s children would factor into her placement in the federal prison system. After the event, you told reporters that many of these solutions were “pretty obvious.” You argued that “this is something that should not be thought of as even bipartisan—this should be a nonpartisan issue.” I agree with you completely. Neither should the dignity of women and girls or the material reality of sex be partisan issues.

I was also in the audience during the 2012 Women in the World conference at Lincoln Center in New York City, where you appeared on a panel with your sister, Maya. At the time, you were the Attorney General of California and Maya was the Vice President for Democracy, Rights and Justice at the Ford Foundation. I distinctly recall you and Maya discussing the importance of teenage girls having access to menstrual products in schools and juvenile detention facilities. For a moment, you appeared to be uncomfortable discussing the topic, but then you settled in and said something along the lines of, “Oh, it’s okay, we’re all women here, right?” Indeed.

I know you know that women are exclusively female and that there are no male women. I especially appreciated your questioning of then Judge Kavanaugh during his 2018 confirmation hearing, emphasizing the differences between male and female bodies when it comes to laws that regulate the provision of healthcare.

I worked with Maya during Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential run. I was part of a team, led by Maya, to help Clinton craft her positions and policies on criminal justice topics. Maya and I met once in person at Clinton’s Brooklyn, New York campaign headquarters and corresponded frequently by email and phone. In May 2019, I wrote her an email message, laying out the entire Democratic progressive case against enshrining “gender identity” in the law including, especially, the argument that including “trans” along with the sexual orientations “lesbian, gay, and bisexual,” is homophobic and regressive. I explained that “gender identity” erases women and girls. I sent her a written version of testimony that lesbian radical feminist Democrat Julia Beck had read to the House Judiciary Committee the previous month, explaining the threats that “gender identity” poses to the human rights of women and girls. I asked her to share the contents of my message with you. She did not respond. When I learned that she had joined the board of directors of the Arcus Foundation (one of the largest funders of “trans” and “queer” causes) in 2017, I understood why.

Democrats like me have been trying to explain all of this to Democratic Party leadership for years. Every day, I hear from rank-and-file Democrats (and, importantly, former Democrats) about how disgusted they are with the Party’s complete abandonment of women and girls (including lesbians) as a sex class at the altar of “trans.” We have been begging you to change course. We have been ignored.

A tiny handful of Democrats have broken ranks with Party dogma and voted to protect the sex-based rights of women and girls (and to protect children from harmful hormones and surgeries that block puberty and cause long-term problems including loss of bone density, loss of sexual and reproductive function, and premature death). I wrote about them in my book, The Reckoning, in a chapter called “The Democrat Defectors.” I commended them. I celebrated when Senator Jon Ossoff (D-GA) voted against the judicial nomination of Magistrate Judge Sarah Netburn to a seat on the District Court for the Southern District of New York. Judge Netburn had authorized the placement of a male prisoner who had been convicted of multiple counts of rape and child sexual abuse in a women’s prison. But there are too few of these Democrats.

In late 2019, as the 2020 presidential election was heating up, comedian Bill Maher did a segment called “Nowhere Else to Go.” In it, he mocked all the Democratic presidential candidates, including you, admonishing them to “stop being weird.” He called you the “Rosa Parks of pronouns” because you had announced your “preferred pronouns” during a town hall earlier that year. He mocked Elizabeth Warren for supporting the use of taxpayer dollars to fund “sex changes” for “transgender prisoners.” He also made fun of candidate Julian Castro’s support for abortion rights for “transgender women.” Maher criticized this, saying, “They can’t get pregnant! They don’t have a uterus (unless they’re in prison and Elizabeth Warren buys them one)!”

The Democratic presidential ticket prevailed in 2020 for two reasons, in my view: (1) a clear majority of Americans wanted Donald Trump to go; and (2) many Americans foresaw the overturning of Roe v. Wade and wanted Democrats in place at the highest levels to protect abortion rights (which I firmly support). I’m not at all sure the same will be true this time. I cannot tell you the number of people who have told me that they plan to vote for Donald Trump this year because of this issue. Trump made it that much harder for you by saying clearly during the RNC in Milwaukee earlier this month that he’s committed to getting men out of women’s sports—a position that is popular with the vast majority of American voters. The Democratic Party, yourself included, handed him that talking point.

It’s not too late. You can still do the right thing. You can stand up at the DNC and say that a woman is an adult human female and a lesbian is a female homosexual. You can say that sex is real and sometimes matters. You can say right out loud that sex is immutable and no man is ever a woman—even if he claims to be one, even if he adopts the traditional stereotypes of femininity, and even if he has his penis surgically removed. You can apologize to American women for that utterly embarrassing letter you sent to Dylan Mulvaney (on White House stationery, no less) celebrating his supposed “365 days of girlhood.”

You profess to care about American women and girls; it’s time to walk the talk. Many of us will be watching and hoping you do the right thing.

LTE to Washington Post Sept. 3, 2025, no response:

To the Editor:

Regarding “TV writer Graham Linehan’s arrest over transgender posts sparks free speech outcry in the UK,” thanks to The Washington Post for reporting on this important story. It’s not just sparking free speech outcry in the UK; the outcry is happening in the US too.

Unlike the UK, the US has a First Amendment, and Americans are unlikely to be arrested for our X posts that stand up for women and girls as a sex class, at least not while on US soil. But that does not mean we aren’t vulnerable.

I am a lifelong Democrat and a feminist. I understand that women and girls exist as a sex class. I use my time and energy to make sure that our rights as women and girls (female human beings) are protected. That means excluding men (“transgender women”) from women’s sports and spaces. I will not apologize for this.

I am the former president of the group Women’s Declaration International USA, which works to advance the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights throughout US law, policy, and practice. I have also published two books on the topic of protecting women and girls as a sex class. I publish a newsletter on Substack called The TERF Report. I also launched the Democratic Women’s Declaration the day after the 2024 US presidential election.

This issue is not going to go away, and elected Democrats need to address it head-on.

I have been invited to speak at the Battle of Ideas in London in October. This is an annual conference that addresses a variety of topics, and welcomes all viewpoints. It’s a free speech zone. I’m scheduled to land at Heathrow on the morning of October 10. Will the Met Police arrest me too? I look forward to finding out.

In solidarity with Graham,

Kara Dansky

To The Washington Post, January 2025, no response (eventually published in spiked):

https://www.spiked-online.com/2025/01/05/whats-at-stake-in-the-trans-us-supreme-court-case/

To the NYT, January 3, 2025, no response:

To the editor: Mr. Carville is both misguided and short-sighted

On January 2, the Times published an essay by Democratic strategist James Carville titled, “I was Wrong About the 2024 Election. Here’s Why.” His conclusion? “It was, it is, and it will always be the economy, stupid.”

Carville is right that the economy played a role in persuading a majority of the electorate to cast votes for Trump. But what Carville and the vast majority of other prominent Democrats steadfastly refuse to acknowledge is that countless rank-and-file Democrats have had it with the party’s full-throated embrace of “gender identity” or “trans.”

I am a leftist radical feminist. I hear from rank-and-file Democrats every day who tell me that they voted for Donald Trump and/or that they have left the party completely over this issue. And we know from a post-election survey by Blueprint that concerns over “trans” were more important than concerns over the economy.

In 2023, I published a book called The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, warning the Democrats that this was coming. I published an open letter to VP Harris in August, asking her to say at the 2024 DNC that a woman is an adult human female. Nothing is going to change until the Democrats get the memo: Voters, including many rank-and-file Democrats, have had it with the sexist, homophobic, reality-denying, authoritarian “trans” movement.

To the NYT Dec. 5, 2025:

To the editor:

Thanks for Ross Douthat’s December 4 opinion piece and interview with Chase Strangio from the ACLU, “The Shifting Politics of Transgender Rights.”

It’s very interesting to learn that Strangio is now interested in discussion and compromise. For over a decade, Strangio has been insisting that “trans women are women and trans men are men,” without showing even a hint of willingness to engage in either discussion or compromise. About one book critical of the transgender movement (Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage) Strangio tweeted “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.”

What has changed since that tweet?

The ACLU represents a male athlete in the matter of Little v. Hecox, a case before the Supreme Court. It is scheduled for oral arguments on January 13, and expected to be decided next summer. Hecox is a male athlete (a “trans woman”) who challenged Idaho’s 2020 law protecting female-only sports in educational institutions in the state. After five long years of litigation, the ACLU has attempted to withdraw the original 2020 complaint and asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the entire matter.

Could it be that Strangio is now open to discussion and compromise because Strangio knows that the ACLU stands little chance of prevailing before the Supreme Court?

It’s clear from the interview that Strangio knows that the general public is no longer going along with the lie that a person’s sex can be changed. I have been fighting for the sex-based rights of women and girls for more than ten years. I would be happy to talk at any time.

To The Atlantic March 29, 2024, no response:

Subject line: Pitch: A Riposte to Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender?

Dear Ms. Kim, et al.,

As a radical feminist, lifelong Democrat, and the author of the 2023 book, The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls, I am one of the women often called a TERF: “trans-exclusionary radical feminist,” as Katha Pollitt explained in her recent review for The Atlantic of Judith Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender? I think your audience would be interested in my response to Butler’s claims that those who oppose “gender identity” are embracing “fascism.”

Pollitt asks whether “in 10 or 20 years, the present moment might seem like a parenthesis in the long history of an overwhelmingly sexually dimorphic species.” I predict that it will.

For all Butler’s insistence that feminist objections to gender constitute a “phantasm,” the material reality of sex is and will remain salient in the lives and politics of human beings—especially women and girls, whether they consider themselves feminists or not.

But Democratic Party leadership must not be allowed to slink away quietly from the harms it has imposed on American women and girls in the name of “gender identity.”

I wrote The Reckoning because too many women have been raped in prison. Too many women have lost out on opportunities, competitions, and medals in sports. Too many children have been harmed medically and psychologically. The Democratic Party must be held accountable—not allowed to simultaneously impose the tenets of the new gender religion and also conceal them from the American electorate, with whom they are deeply unpopular.

A Washington Post article from yesterday suggests I am right to be concerned. It appears that the Biden Administration is trying to memory-hole its support for laws and policies that harm women and children by, in this instance, tabling its proposal to redefine sex to include “gender identity” under Title IX until after the November elections.

Women, including lesbians and black women, make up the most crucial segment of the Democratic Party base. As voters, they are in a bind: the Democratic Party is the only major party to embrace women’s critically-important reproductive autonomy rights. Yet to vote for Democrats is to endorse their platform that being a woman is not a material reality, but instead a subjective idea, informed by stereotypes, that anyone of either sex can claim.

How long can party leaders expect women to give up their own safety, privacy, and dignity—and that of their daughters—in the service of the unfalsifiable, pseudo-spiritual, even (thank you, Judith Butler) “phantasmatic” concept of “gender identity?”

Women all over the world are rejecting their left-of-center parties for refusing to represent their interests and for sacrificing women and children at the altar of “gender identity.” If the Democrats in power don’t change course, American Democratic women will, and should, vote accordingly.

If you would like to discuss the possibility of publishing a longer form of this analysis, please feel free to reach out.

To the Spectator, Jan. 26, 2024, no response

Dear Mr. Moore,

On January 24, New York NBC News affiliate Channel 4 published this headline: “Man posing as transgender woman raped female prisoner at Rikers, lawsuit says.”

To feminists who have for years raised the alarm about male prisoners in women’s facilities, the allegations echo a 2017 U.K. case, in which Karen White (born Stephen Wood), sexually assaulted two women at HMP New Hall.

Describing White, Prosecutor Christopher Dunn told the court, “She is allegedly a transgender female…The prosecution suggest the reason for the lack of commitment towards transitioning is so the defendant can use a transgender persona to put herself in contact with vulnerable persons she can then abuse.”

Former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon did essentially the same thing when she said that convicted rapist Adam Graham (Isla Bryson if you believe the pretense) was “almost certainly faking” it when he “claimed” to “be transgender.”

“Posing.” “Use a transgender persona.” “Faking ‘being trans.’” In other words, the problem with the policies that incarcerated White, Graham, and the alleged Rikers rapist in women’s facilities wasn’t that these prisoners were male but that they weren’t sincere enough in their claims to be women.

Would their female victims have been less harmed if the perpetrators could be proven truly to believe that lady souls animate their bepenised bodies?

Rather than aiming to read the minds of convicted criminals—famed, as a class, for their honesty and integrity—-might it not be more effective for prison officials to assess inmate placement on the basis that in the United States, 93-97% of sexual offenders are male?

The “gender identity” faith insists that once a man utters the shibboleth, “I am a woman,” his sex ceases to matter under any circumstance.

Therefore any man who reminds the public of certain stark differences between the sexes must be disavowed. “Transwomen are women,” incant believers. Women as a class do not rape. Therefore no rapist is a true “transwoman.”

It’s a convenient sleight of hand, but a pitiful excuse for logic. Perhaps that’s because the real logic behind the pretense that some men claiming to be women are not really women and some men claiming to be women really are women is this: Men and boys are entitled to what they want, no matter the cost to women and girls.

Men pretending to be women are men. “Trans” is all a pretense. Can we all please just stop pretending?

The U.S. chapter of global feminist organization Women’s Declaration International is grateful to the Spectator for being one of the few publications in the anglosphere to publish feminist and other critiques of “gender identity” and its associated policies.

We hope that an opinion piece of 800-1,000 words by our president, Kara Dansky, will be a good fit for the Spectator’s audience both in the U.K. (a.k.a. “TERF Island”) and abroad.

Kara Dansky is a radical feminist and an attorney with an extensive background in criminal justice law and policy. She is the author of two books: The Abolition of Sex: How the “Transgender” Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls. She serves as president of the U.S. chapter of Women’s Declaration International.

Thank you for your consideration. We look forward to hearing from you.

Best wishes,

Megan Rose

Vice President, Women’s Declaration International USA

To the NYT Nov. 13, 2024, no response:

Will the Democrats finally start listening to the TERFs?

I’m glad to see some Democrats starting to pay attention to the fact that sex is real and that it matters.

On November 7, Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said, “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face. I have two little girls. I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.” Moulton is not backing down. On November 12, he told the Boston Herald, “I’m not going to refuse to have this debate, and I’m not going to apologize for bringing up the issue. This is the problem with Democrats: We’re more concerned about offending people than actually talking about issues, and that’s why a majority of Americans just think we’re out of touch.”

I’m glad to hear Democrats expressing these sentiments in support of female-only sports.

As we all know, the Democrats got trounced in this election cycle. And we know for a fact that this issue played a role in the 2024 presidential election. According to polling, “The results paint a clear picture: Democrats were punished for inflation, misalignment on immigration and cultural issues, and Biden.” The top two reasons not to vote for Harris were inflation and immigration. But the top third reason was “’Kamala Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class’ (+17).” The third was “the most frequent criticism among swing voters who broke for Trump (+28).”

The thing is, the Democrats were warned that this would happen. Specifically, they were warned by the TERFs–the leftist radical feminists who know what a woman is and aren’t afraid to say it. I’m a lifelong Democrat, staunch leftist, and radical feminist. I also know what a woman is, and that sex is real and that it matters. That makes me what is sometimes called a “TERF.” Gender identity activists coined the term as a slur for any “trans exclusionary radical feminist” who opposed their demands, but many women have reclaimed it in recent years. Some of us say it stands for “tired of explaining real facts” or “tired of explaining reality to fools.” All it really means is that we’re women of the left, feminists, who understand that sex is real and that it matters.

Two books served as warnings to the Democrats of what was in store for 2024: 2021’s The Abolition of Sex: How the ‘Transgender’ Agenda Harms Women and Girls, and 2023’s The Reckoning: How the Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls.

I wrote both books; I did my best to warn the Democrats. They didn’t listen.

The problem arose when the Democrats in power and the establishment left (by which I include traditionally progressive organizations like the ACLU, where I once worked) started telling everyone that some men are women if they say they “are transgender” or if they claim to have a “female gender identity.”

President Biden has been saying that “transgender discrimination” is the “civil rights issue of our time” since 2012. In 2015, Congressional Democrats introduced the so-called Equality Act, which would redefine the word sex to include the nebulous, sexist, homophobic concept of “gender identity” for all purposes under U.S. civil rights law, in both chambers of Congress. In 2016, President Obama issued a “Dear Colleague” letter to U.S. schools, instructing them to interpret the word sex to include “gender identity” for all Title IX purposes. At that time, few Americans had any idea what was going on, because no one with any real power was telling them.

Things have continued largely unabated on the political left ever since.

Groups like the ACLU continue to insist that some men are women, that they deserve to be housed in women’s prisons if they claim to be women, and that it’s perfectly fine to give children puberty blockers, opposite-sex hormones, and sometimes surgeries (all collectively and euphemistically referred to as “gender affirming care”) if the children think they are “born in the wrong body” (i.e., they “are transgender”).

I can already hear the objections: “Men aren’t being housed in women’s prisons!” “There are hardly any biological boys playing in girls’ sports!” “Kids are not getting gender surgeries!”

To these objections, I say: Men are being housed in women’s prisons, but most media outlets won’t tell you that (only relatively obscure feminist publications such as Reduxx will). There are hundreds of men and boys playing in sports intended for women and girls and even if there weren’t, how many is too many? And yes, thousands of children received “gender affirming care” in the form of either hormones or surgeries or both between 2019 and 2023 in the United States.

TERFs have known all of this for a long time. We’ve been sounding the alarm; no one listened. I hear from rank and file Democrats every day who tell me they have tried to explain the problem to their Democratic lawmakers, who ignored them.

So I published The Reckoning in November 2023 to tell the Democrats to knock it off, already. I told them that if they didn’t change course, they would bleed female voters. I warned them of what was coming. In August 2024, I published an open letter to Vice President Harris, practically begging her to say out loud at the Democratic National Convention that a woman is an adult human female. I didn’t expect her to, and she didn’t.

President Bill Clinton knew this was going to be a problem and warned the Democrats to knock it off. President Clinton, you were the first presidential candidate I voted for. If you would like to have a word with an OG TERF, let me know.

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Last week, WNYC—America’s most listened-to public radio station—spoke with lefty journalist Amy Goodman, the subject of the new documentary, “Steal This Story, Please!” I haven’t seen the movie, but I did listen to Goodman discuss her career, her show Democracy Now! (which airs on some NPR stations, among other outlets), and the state of journalism on the midday show All of It.

Many of the sentiments she espoused, I agreed with. “I personally think you’re waving the American flag when you express dissent,” she said. “I think dissent is what will save us.”

She used that language several more times.

I am an advocate for independent media. It is absolutely critical to be a sanctuary for dissent. I think dissent will save us. Independent media is the oxygen of a Democratic society. As we see these corporate newsrooms being devastated, the legacy media being sliced and diced, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, cutting a third of the newsroom, we have to support independent media brought to us by the listeners, the viewers, the readers who are really citizens, citizens of the world craving authentic voices. This is the kind of media that will save us.

Oddly, she doesn’t mention publications like this one, BROADview, which lives on the premier independent platform (and charges writers plenty for it), Substack. Or that many of us who made our living writing for the media retreated here because not only legacy media but the supposedly independent outlets, like Democracy Now!, wouldn’t allow dissent on the gender issue.

Here’s a sampling of Democracy Now! stories:

Each of these stories is carefully crafted to go deeper than traditional media, to push beyond the left/right framing and consult dissenting liberals to show us that, for instance, “banning trans women” actually means allowing men who identify as women to compete—as long as they do so in their sex, not their identity, category. No one is banned!

Oh wait, sorry, no, that’s what you get on Substack, not mainstream, liberal, or left media.

It pains me that many old school lefties are still unaware that they’re framing injustices against men as what could (and dare I say should) be framed as injustices against women; they do not realize that the sly switch from sex to gender identity upends many of their long-held cherished causes and beliefs.

What I have wanted in the five-plus years since I’ve been fully public with what I’ve learned—in the hopes that others would learn it, too—is to be allowed to dissent. I want those who see the issue differently to be considered, and not just labeled bigot or transphobe. It turned out that we in the dissenting camp also had science on our side, which should have shifted the entire framing of the conversation.

It didn’t.

After WNYC star journalist Brian Lehrer’s recent disastrous conversation with Michael Shermer, he pivoted slightly to acknowledge some dissent and concerns about the science of gender-affirming care. Or rather, he brought on someone to explain why we shouldn’t listen to the dissent or be concerned. Who? Mr. Jack Turban, the doctor whose own studies were deemed so low-quality that they couldn’t determine whether gender medical interventions will hurt or help young people.

Turban said on the program that “there are over 20 studies in this area. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, but they all point in the same direction that these kids are getting better with treatment.”

They don’t, though. That’s what it means to have weak evidence. They point in no direction. Lehrer failed to point out that it was Turban’s own incredibly weak evidence, based on anonymous surveys, that was rated weak.

Yesterday, Lehrer spoke with Frederick S. Barrett, director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research, about psychedelics, after Trump released an Executive Order to speed up research on them. (I will give Trump credit where it’s due: this seems like a good thing.) They talked about the effectiveness of the psychedelic ibogaine, which some people claim can be a silver bullet of sorts.

“Is that real science or is that podcaster chatter?” Lehrer asked.

Barrett admitted that the research is based on low-quality surveys and reviews, and that “none of this to date has been done within a controlled experimental context.” Why? It’s too risky. It has a known cardiotoxicity that can kill people.

I couldn’t help but think of the stories I’ve heard of young people committing suicide after transition—including the two in the rare long-term research we have in this country, who were simply excised from the data. We need to follow up with all medically transitioned young people because we may discover that they have the same high rate of suicidality and completed suicide as the adults did. It was the ineffectiveness of transition in adults that inspired the Dutch to intervene earlier. No one is finding out if it worked.

If dissent is what will save us, these media outlets need to allow dissident voices to raise these important points. Democracy, not hypocrisy, now.

My happiest two weeks in college occurred when my dog Taj came to live with me in my “mod”—the name for the group houses most students lived in at Hampshire College, after our first year in the dorms.1

With apologies to those who mistakenly believe their dogs were the best, it was Taj who was actually the greatest to ever walk the face of the earth. The perfect sized mutt at 40 pounds, with long russet hair, floppy ears, and a fluffy tail, Taj was both fiercely loyal and fiercely independent. Thus, he entertained himself while I was in my various classes during my second year, in 1990, and met me at the door of each building when I was done. When my dad and stepmom returned from vacation, they picked him up. It wasn’t long after that history’s greatest dog left us for good.

That my most contented moments relied on canine companionship illustrates just how lonely and lost I was at Hampshire, but also how great their pets-on-campus policy was—at least for those of us who didn’t abuse and/or abandon our pets, which ended up happening with such increasing frequency that the pets policy was abolished a year or so later. Some of Hampshire’s more revolutionary policies left us for good, too, as the revolution couldn’t quite be sustained.

The idea for Hampshire College came from the presidents of its neighboring schools: Amherst, Mount Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts Amherst. They wanted “to reexamine the assumptions and practices of liberal arts education.” Founded in 1965, the first class arrived in 1970.

Since then, Hampshire helped launch a lot of brilliant people who thrived in its alternative environment, from Ken Burns to John Krakauer, Lupita Nyong’O to Liev Schreiber. Forging partnerships between once-siloed disciplines; allowing students to design their own majors; narrative evaluations instead of grades; making us write papers or craft projects over and over until they were good, rather than just accepting a middling grade—those were all great things, and very unusual at the time.

But I’d gone there not because I was desperate for that alternative education—my public high school, three miles north, had allowed me to concentrate mostly on ceramics and pot-smoking for three-and-a-half years, after which I arranged to graduate, mid-senior year. Alternative was mainstream to me. I went to Hampshire because my mother worked there. It was free. She had become a college librarian so that her kids would someday be able to go to college without having to secure a full-ride merit scholarship, as she did (and which I couldn’t). I’ve been called a nepo baby because of that free tuition, but for most of my life, I had a single mom with a low-paying job, whose folk musician ex often failed to pay child support. She might not have chosen wisely in marriage, but the job was a shrewd move.

My discontent at Hampshire didn’t stem from a lack of cool people around me. In fact, maybe I was too surrounded by cool people—or just so many who were their high school’s most eccentric pupils that it rendered me, by comparison, awkwardly normal. Or maybe it was just that I was encased in constant shame about my body, as many young women are. I would have been unhappy anywhere.

So it was something of a relief when, whatever class I signed up for—The Psychology of Oppression, The Frankfurt School, the History of Sensationalism—it manifested into some version of Images of Women in the Media. Much of the curricular content served to explain my misery: magazines made me feel bad.

We were critiquing institutions and ideologies that themselves had sprouted from critiques of institutions and ideologies. The world was faulty and revolutions had failed and that’s why I felt so bad about my thighs and so few people wanted to date me. (It couldn’t be that I had an undiagnosed personality disorder, extremely low self-esteem, and a lot of unpressed childhood crap—if that’s not the making of a winning personals ad, I don’t know what is.)

Of course, I wasn’t aware that I was partaking of an ideology at an institution myself. We weren’t studying what our professors’ critiques were critiquing, the traditions against which they rebelled. We were studying their rebellions. I ended up getting a degree in, essentially, experimental feminist video and neo-Marxist theory, but I didn’t study the filmmaking behind Citizen Kane or take economics, as my professors had. The opening of Overton window was clear—and narrow.

Still, I had no reason to object or ask for other viewpoints. I liked a lot of my classes, and the worldview being constructed around me felt safe and familiar. The first week of school, a professor regaled us with the thrilling and horrifying tale of her back alley abortion, and I signed up for every pro-choice march I could. That week, too, a bunch of us took the free public bus over to UMass for a “Take Back the Night” rally. We planted ourselves in front of frats screaming: “We know who you are! We know what you’re doing to women!” I did not know who they were or exactly what they were doing to women, but I had been to a frat party at UMass in high school (which was a mile away) and the smell of 1990s’ UMass boy cologne will forever repel me. I accepted the message: all frats and all frat boys were bad.

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Atonement is a big theme—both in my life and in my upcoming book about the youth gender culture war—so I was very interested to listen to a podcast about conversion therapy with this title. I’m going to publish a piece about the podcast, and that theme, soon, but in the meantime I wanted to schedule next month’s paid subscriber hang. I hope that others will listen and we can talk about it—as we did with the movie club recently (which was so great). In the wake of the recent SCOTUS decision on conversion therapy, the story of John Paulk is especially important, which is why it’s worth taking the time to help people understand what this podcast got right and what it’s going to have to end up atoning for later.

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In honor of a BROADview supporter’s visit to NYC, I’ll be hosting a meetup for paid subscribers on 5/4 at 6PM near downtown Brooklyn. Register here (this is a Zoo…

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