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In the wake of the Supreme Court's decision that states are allowed to separate sports by sex, not gender identity, many a Democrat cried foul. "We have already seen the harms of these categorical bans on all girls," according to a press release from Congressional Equality Caucus Chair Rep. Mark Takano, "and this ruling will continue those harms in all of the states that have enacted these categorical bans."

At first, it seemed like either Democrats reacted this way, or that they kept mum.

But that’s not true. We’ve seen a few defectors—largely centrist Reps from rural areas, and people of color—who’ve made the case that these battles over gender-identity-based policies aren’t as simple as left versus right and good versus bad.

Take, for instance, the mild assertions of Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez:

MGP, who was one of the 8 Dems who voted against allowing schools to withhold students’ gender identities from their parents, suggested we shouldn’t “rush to moralize” on the issue. She’s actually not alone. This not-all-that-admonishing article in an “LGBTQ” publication notes that Pete Buttigieg has spoken, on NPR no less, about parents’ concerns about their girls playing with and against boys (or “boys,” as they write), and has questioned “some of the past orthodoxies in my party.”

It is a huge risk for Democrats to speak this way, to inject even the tiniest bit of nuance (or reality) into their language, and many retreat after facing the wrath of the very loud and very online minority of extremists. Just look at Seth Moulton, who famously said the very obvious—he wouldn’t want his daughters playing against boys—and then voted the opposite of his conscience. Yes, he catered to the mob, but he was also trying to keep his job. He’s a politician.

Whenever a politician moves toward reality, toward sanity, toward truth, toward fairness, let’s welcome them. Let’s stand at the bottom of the off-ramp with a gift basket and show them that there’s love and support—and numbers!—when they reject the party orthodoxy.

There’s an opportunity with Ohio Democratic gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton, who dared to say, “I do not support boys playing in girls sports. This is already settled law in Ohio, and as governor I will enforce and uphold the law.”

“Progressives” took offense, and an uproar ensued, including from a group ironically called “Ohioans Against Extremism,” who somehow don’t realize that policies allowing people to declare their own sex are actually quite extreme.

We are living in a world in which it requires courage and bravery to state the obviously true, so I think it’s important to support those who do—to write to them, donate to their campaigns, campaign for them, and show them that there’s a soft landing for them should they be rejected by the extremist wings of their own party, who claim to be anti-extremist.

Months ago, I wrote a piece about what I think Democrats need to be able to say when asked simple questions like “What is a woman?” It was turned down by the NYT, but I was heartened to see Thomas Edsall’s piece offering similar advice this week. I think his suggestions are great, though perhaps I’d tweak a bit:

There are two sexes: men and women.

A man can claim an identify as a woman, and the same in reverse for a woman. They have every right to do so. Their claim should be respected and They should be protected from any form of discrimination in housing and employment for their choice, as the Supreme Court’s Bostock decision allows.

Their claim does not, however, alter their biological sex.

Consequently, it is legitimate in areas such as sports where a transgender person male identifying as a woman or girl would have a competitive advantage over non-trans people to bar such participation. Similarly, a claim to a sexual gender identity does not give a trans woman the right to incarceration in a woman’s prison.

Finally, the debate over gender affirming surgery and hormone treatments is fraught with contradictory assertions. For now, because there are credible scientific claims of irreversible harms, such treatments for those under 18 should be barred pending comprehensive follow-up with those already treated further study.

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If you read the Edsall article, and see the edits various advocacy group members offered him, you’ll see how hard it is to make or take his suggestions. That’s not just because speaking the truth causes backlash among those who disagree, but because it sometimes inspires vitriol from those who do, and are furious that it took a politician so long to do it.

As an example from across the pond, see the reaction to UK Labour Health Secretary James Murray.

When asked if he thinks a woman can have a penis, he says, “No, I don’t.” He’s thinking about the issues differently, and “I wouldn’t now say that, for instance, trans women are women.” Sex and gender, he says, are different.

The interviewer, Camilla Tominey, isn’t having it. He’s a well-educated man, she says; how on earth could he have previously thought a woman could have a penis? Many in the pile-on concurred, accusing him of lying or grifting and calling for his firing or cancellation.

Well, millions of well-educated people came to believe that, or, if they didn’t, tamped down their skepticism. It wasn’t that hard for it to happen. We were in the era of “own voices” and “lived experience,” told that if we didn’t belong to a group then we couldn’t empathize with them, and we deferred. We learned that sex in fact could be at times more complicated than “men have penises and girls have vaginas,” as the media paid attention to intersex conditions.

Many of us have been counseled or pressured out of our instincts, because the most human instinct of all is to do whatever you need to do to belong. Maybe he was lying. Most likely, he was self-justifying.

Murray’s main sin, as I see it, was when he dodged Tominey’s question about whether he and others owe the gender-critical women, who raised their voices and paid dearly for it, an apology. Yes, he should have said, “We created conditions in which speaking basic truths became impossible, and my party was central to that. From now on, we need to look at how these issues affect all constituents, not just trans people.” Also, yeah, apologize! But politicians tend not to do that.

So how do we create better conditions now? Not by calling for this guy to be fired (though I very much understand why parents whose kids have been harmed would do so, and I exempt them from this request). Rather, we create better conditions by calling on him to work hard at making better policy, and ensuring he has our support when he does.

In 2022, Michael Shermer of Skeptic asked me to write an overview of the trans debate, and I’m so glad he did. It was the first time I started to see the full picture of how youth gender medicine started—and what had happened to it in America.

Earlier this year, I asked Shermer if he’d like an update, and he did. The article was published yesterday.

I’ve already gotten an interesting mix of feedback, though much of it suggests I’ve been too generous in my characterizations—too unwilling to, essentially, compare gender doctors to Josef Mengele. But the point of the article is not to inspire outrage. Rather, it is to help those who don’t yet understand what they’ve supported see it better. I am trying to craft off-ramps made of prose.

My hope is that this piece is shareable to those who are asking: “What the hell happened, and why are we battling over this?”

The full answer, of course, requires much more space than an article. More answers to come, in my book, out next year.

Comments are open if you have other answers to this question, or additions, criticisms, suggestions, etc.

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Depending on which media you consume, you may have learned yesterday that the Supreme Court upheld the rights of states to ban transgender girls and women—that is, males who identify as girls or women—from sports.

This is not true. They upheld the rights of states to maintain laws and policies that segregate sports by sex, not gender identity. That is, they allow for the understanding of Title IX in its pre-Obama incarnation.

Would that the media had explained those changes to Title IX, and the codified reinvention of the term sex. Had they done so, we’d be having a different, more nuanced conversation than the simplistic “Trump hates trans people” narrative that public liberals, and liberal organizations, assert, and the media echoes.

In 2010, Obama’s Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter—a nonbinding but strongly suggested policy related to bullying. It was part of a subtle shift in rejiggering sex-based harassment and sex discrimination into “gender-based” harassment and sex discrimination, which allowed for the following:

Title IX also prohibits sexual harassment and gender‐based harassment of all students, regardless of the actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity of the harasser or target.

Doing so allowed for gender identity to be understood as a facet of sex, thus a protected characteristic.

In May 2016, the Departments of Justice and Education co-released “Guidance to Help Schools Ensure the Civil Rights of Transgender Students.” Per their press release: “The guidance makes clear that both federal agencies treat a student’s gender identity as the student’s sex for purposes of enforcing Title IX.”

Gender identity was no longer a facet of sex, but a substitute for it. This didn’t happen through a legislative process, or because people’s hearts and minds had changed and regulations reflected that change. Rather, politicians had withdrawn “gender identity” as a protected characteristic in proposed anti-discrimination laws, assuming that Americans could handle protecting people from discrimination based on sexuality, but not based on this relatively obscure notion of a subjective sense of one’s sex.

They were right, of course, and advocacy groups like GLSEN and HRC found other pathways to get what they wanted: through meeting with Obama and Biden officials and sneaking changes into policies, thus strong-arming institutions into compliance, lest they risk federal funding.

Though the changes occurred after periods of public comment, there was no public education to explain to people what these changes might unleash, and that they allowed for anyone who identified as a girl to not only play on girls’ teams but use their facilities. The changes lead to a radical change in how society is organized, pushed through beneath the veil of progressivism and anti-bullying. Thus, anyone who objected was regressive and a bully.

Few in the liberal sphere talked about the effects such a radical reimagining of sex would have on the women and girls that Title IX was designed to uplift and support. And their voices are still shockingly absent from liberal media coverage. NPR, as usual, ignored women’s experiences entirely. Ironically, the commentator they chose came from The 19th, an outlet named for the 100-year-old amendment allowing women to vote. She explains that the girls who brought the lawsuits—meaning, the males who identify as girls—are heartbroken by the ruling, but there’s nothing about the experience of natal girls and women, or about the assumption that gender identity is a reasonable marker of societal division.

If you read the ruling, you’ll see a lot of compassion from the judges, regardless of their political leanings. But you’ll also see the issue at the heart of the battle.

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One of the best book edit suggestions I received was to include a section on what I’d like to see going forward. For years, I’ve been talking up a Gender Reconciliation Commission—a bipartisan, multidisciplinary group that would manage to secure records from gender clinics; listen to a multitude of different and conflicting constituents; and try to piece together what happened and what should happen now. Kind of a like the 9/11 Commission. (If this ever happens, please let me be on it!)

Writing up my best-case scenario injected into my writing (and my mind) some optimism and hope, which has been in short supply on my end. That’s not because there hasn’t been some progress in exposing the lack of evidence to support youth gender medicine, or because we haven’t made some progress in law and policy. Rather, it’s because we’ve had to sacrifice national security and America’s standing in the world just to budge on gender identity. And because, instead of modifying, some parts of the Democratic party are going full-DSA radical, which is the opposite of where I wanted them to head: toward Normieland.

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While Supreme Court decisions will outlast this administration, the Executive Orders might expire with the next one. And because the deinstitutionalization of gender identity, and shutting down of pediatric clinics, happened during Trump’s reign, many liberals and lefties cannot absorb the reality that those changes are positive. There is more to be done long-term: in schools, psychology, medicine, the law, and our culture generally. There is work to do to repair families that have been torn apart by the unofficial rules of gender-affirming care, which insist on each person pledging fealty to the idea of gender identity in order to stay connected. There is work to be done to reopen minds, to make liberals liberal again.

I’m going to begin a series of discussions with different stakeholders about “What now?” I’ve got a few lined up, but I want to know from readers which voices you’d like to hear.

Please leave suggestions and requests in the comments, as well as anything else you’d like me to investigate and share. Comments are open.

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Just the Facts with Gerald Posner

The Hostile Takeover: Mamdani’s Purge of the New York Democratic Party

A Just the Facts dispatch based on election calls in three key NY Congressional races…

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a month ago · 41 likes · 25 comments · Gerald Posner

In my own district, Mamdani’s choice for Congress—the mayoral candidate he cross-endorsed during the race and then jilted in his own administration—Brad Lander, won by a landslide, by pitting Democrat against Democrat and Jew against Jew. Mamdani’s hostility toward anyone who supports the state of Israel—the major democracy in the Middle East, albeit one behaving very badly (as is its frenemy, the United States)—has normalized his supporters mimicking his rhetoric.

Voila:

When I met Lander at a fundraiser, and tried—admittedly, with very little tact—to get him to listen to me about gender, he told me not to vote for him. So I didn’t. But once again I find myself at odds with my own party, which is now home to as many extremists as the Republican party is.

I say this as someone who leans socialist. I want universal healthcare. I believe that there is no such thing as a free market, and as long as we’re tilting it, we should tilt it toward the neediest. But the Democratic Socialists of America don’t seem particularly interested in democracy, and they certainly don’t seem interested in the reality about the field of gender-affirming care. They have downsized the big tent into a tiny yurt perched on the edge of a chasm—if you dare to step outside, down you’ll fall.

Increasingly, it seems, this is the status quo. The Dems aren’t going to moderate any more than the Republicans are going to oust the madman running the country.

Next week, I begin the revisions of my book, which is the story of how we got to this precarious place. But when I started, I had assumed that we’d be in a better spot by now. We aren’t. I have tried with all my might to break through in any way I could imagine, but instead, I’m watching my city fund gender medicine, my daughter compete against and with boys, and my fellow blue bubble residents remain largely in the dark about this issue.

I have responded to this reality by crawling inside a never-ending supply of dark chocolate and chips and watching a lot of shitty television. It looks a lot like depression, and has resulted in needing a new wardrobe of elastic waistband pants. I’m out of ideas other than, starting next week, returning to my manuscript to make it spectacular, and imagining people reading it down the line when, in theory, things have settled some in this country. That may never happen.

In the meantime, I am dreaming of living in a more reasonable country. Which one? I have no idea. Irish accents are my favorite, and I like how straightforward the people are. In what country should we create Heterodox Island?

Comments are open for suggestions, commiseration, repudiation, or whatever you want to say.

In Bob Ostertag’s seminal 2016 book Sex Science Self, he describes Harry Benjamin, the endocrinologist most responsible for promoting cross-sex hormone treatments for what was once called gender identity disorder and is now called gender dysphoria. “Benjamin began his career as a self-described ‘disciple’ of Eugen Steinach, an Austrian doctor who became rich and famous claiming that he could rejuvenate aging men by performing vasectomies on them,” Ostertag writes. Benjamin went on to found the Life Extension Institute in New York City, “for performing Steinach’s bogus rejuvenation surgeries.” Since “he continued to champion those procedures long after everyone else had rejected them,” Benjamin “became something of a medical laughingstock.”

Benjamin—friend of the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld, who had coined the term transvestite—had found a powerful supply, in the form of hormones, and was constantly trying to drum up demand. That demand finally came after the media debut of Christine Jorgensen, the ex-GI who became a “Blonde Beauty,” in the words of The Daily News.

It was from Ostertag’s book, which I read in 2017, that I learned that what is now called the World Professional Association for Transgender Health—an official-sounding name that evokes science and expertise—was first called the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association (HBIGDA). That is, the group that bills itself as the premier creator of standards of care to treat this condition—or to affirm gender identity, as has become the goal—was named for, essentially, a snake oil salesman.

It’s this group that the Federal Trade Commission, along with Alaska, Iowa, Nebraska and Texas, is suing, as they announced yesterday. The group’s recommendations for treating trans kids, or kids with gender dysphoria, “misled parents and children about the medical consensus and medical necessity, as well as the safety and effectiveness, of such services, in violation of the FTC Act,” per a press release.

The New York Times positions the suit as an example of the FTC’s rejecting “the agency’s traditional independence from the White House, taking actions that wade into culture war issues while testing the boundaries of the commission’s legal authority.” That is, they see it as the FTC doing Trump’s bidding on niche issues.

While that certainly seems to be the case in other areas of government, the FTC has plenty of standing when it claims that WPATH misled parents and children. Those families whose children are socially or medically transitioning, or considering it—they’re the ones, above all others, who need to understand the merits of this suit.

HBIGDA rebranded as WPATH in 2006, and the next year installed as its first president a transgender man named Stephen Whittle, rather than a clinician. Whatever pretense of science they’d carried over the years was discarded in favor of activism. In 2010, they called for the “de-psychopathologisation of gender variance worldwide.” They wanted “disorder” removed from the diagnosis, but still wanted an entry in the DSM, so that a billing code for insurance would remain.

At the time, there wasn’t much research, especially on youth. The two famous Dutch studies that eventually created a surge in the gender medicine industry weren’t published until 2011 and 2014, respectively, though pediatric gender clinics were starting to trickle open anyway. WPATH put out their 7th “Standards of Care” (SOC-7) in 2011, with 11 pages about adolescents. The document acknowledged what’s known as the “desistance literature”—a body of long-term studies that suggest most cases of childhood-onset gender dysphoria resolve by the end of puberty, and the bulk of the kids grow up to be gay. “Boys in these studies were more likely to identify as gay in adulthood than as transgender,” the authors wrote.

As for adolescents, “the persistence of gender dysphoria into adulthood appears to be much higher for adolescents,” they wrote. But this was an assumption. They admitted: “No formal prospective studies exist.”

By the time WPATH released its long-awaited eighth “Standards of Care for the Health of Transgender and Gender Diverse People” (SOC-8) in 2022—with 24 pages on adolescents and an entire chapter on children—some formal studies did exist, or were in the works (including one that would eventually reveal that two out of 315 young people took their own lives after gender-affirming care). By then, health care agencies in England, Sweden and Finland had conducted systematic reviews, to evaluate the quality of the studies that American medical associations, advocacy groups, and WPATH continued to claim as proving the safety, efficacy, and medical necessity of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries on secondary sex traits—the stuff of gender affirming care.

These reviews all came to the same conclusion: the quality of the evidence was very low. Even if the data seemed to show that kids fared better after these interventions, there was no way to tell if that was actually true, or, if it was, that the interventions caused the improvement.

Yet SOC-8 claimed that, due to a paucity of studies, “a systematic review regarding outcomes of treatment in adolescents is not possible.” Instead, WPATH offered a “short narrative review,” which observed that “the data consistently demonstrate improved or stable psychological functioning, body image, and treatment satisfaction.” That is, they summarized the positive conclusions of studies, without noting that they were of such poor quality that they shouldn’t be relied upon.

That wasn’t the most scandalous aspect of the new SOC.

The initial draft of SOC-8, released in December 2021, had included minimum age recommendations for interventions: fourteen for estrogen or testosterone (as opposed to sixteen in previous SOCs); fifteen for mastectomies (or “chest-masculinization surgery”); seventeen for vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty (lengthening the clitoris and threading through the urethra, to mimic a penis), and orchidectomy (removal of testicles); and eighteen for phalloplasty. This despite repeated claims that minors didn’t get gender-affirming surgeries.

When WPATH officially released the final guidelines, those age requirements remained. But a few hours later, they disappeared from the website. A notice appeared that they had been published in error. There were no longer any minimum ages for gender surgery. At the time, no one knew why.

Meanwhile, the draft chapter on ethics had been removed from the final, but a new chapter had been added on “eunuch gender identity.” “As with other gender diverse individuals, eunuchs may also seek castration to better align their bodies with their gender identity,” it read.

When a lawsuit against Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care made it to the Supreme Court as US v. Skrmetti, an Amicus brief filed in the case (with evidence, from a different case, Boe v. Marshall in Alabama) revealed what had happened.

WPATH had contracted Johns Hopkins’ Center for Evidence-Based Practice to conduct systematic reviews, and then pressured Hopkins employees to suppress them. SOC-8’s assertion that there wasn’t enough evidence for an SR appeared to be an outright lie—one that guided parents and patients in what would likely be the most important medical decision of their lives.

The brief also solved the mystery of the disappearing age minimums. HHS Assistant Secretary of Health, pediatrician Dr. Rachel Levine, a male who transitioned and identifies as a woman, had urged WPATH to remove the age limits—not because of evidence but because of politics. Levine worried they would “result in devastating legislation for trans care.” Age limits would add fuel to the bans’ fire. The AAP piled on, threatening “to oppose SOC-8 if WPATH did not remove the age minimums.”

WPATH leadership ultimately caved to please Levine and secure the AAP’s approval, “without being presented any new science,” as one author noted. These guidelines were crafted to respond to politics, not evidence—a key point that anyone considering transition needs to understand. WPATH president Dr. Marci Bowers insisted they all keep mum, submitting to a “centralized authority” to appear united, as opposed to appearing politicized. Bowers wrote: “it is a balancing act between what i feel to be true and what we need to say.”

But members of WPATH had already said plenty. The lead author of the child chapter, Dr. Amy Tishelman, had said at a WPATH conference: “We were thinking, and it was scary for me, about the potential uses of the chapter for legal and insurance contexts…What we didn’t want to do was create a chapter that would make it more likely that practitioners would be sued because they weren’t following exactly what we said.” In one video, Dr. Scott Leibowitz, an author of the adolescent chapter, insists the age limits were removed not because of pressure but to provide “individualized” care, which was also not true. Another provider told the audience that they should consider using the threat of Child Protective Services to push reluctant parents toward affirming.

The New York Times covered Levine’s pressure to remove age limits, but despite having access to the emails between WPATH and Hopkins about suppressing research, they chose not to cover them. They made no mention of The WPATH Files, a report by journalist Mia Hughes that exposed even more concerning internal communications by WPATH members, and which little of the media and medical establishment that extolled WPATH bothered to engage with.

Long after the scandal of WPATH suppressing evidence had been exposed, Oregon Democrats tried to enshrine WPATH’s SOC-8 as the “accepted standards of care,” and pass a law prohibiting health insurers from “denying or limiting coverage for medically necessary gender-affirming treatment that is prescribed in accordance” with it. Its name is now synonymous with these deceptive statements, which have led to the medicating of thousands of teenagers under false pretenses. WPATH and its defenders continued to champion this evidence long after other credible agencies around the world had rejected them, replicating what happened with WPATH’s founding father.

WPATH’s statement paints the FTC as “acting out of pure retaliation as part of the federal government's relentless and targeted campaign to undermine gender-affirming care.” Well, they do want to undermine it. But that’s because it’s worthy of undermining. Anyone transitioning, anyone parenting someone transitioning, should understand the science—and that WPATH is not a credible source of information about it.

It’s unclear how viable this suit is. Though the authors of WPATH’s SOC-8 profit from providing these treatments, WPATH itself isn’t selling anything more than membership. They claim this isn’t about commerce, but about free speech, and some pundits agree.

The stronger the lie, the more powerful the denial. WPATH “envisions a world wherein people of all gender identities and gender expressions have access to evidence-based health care, social services, justice, and equality,” they wrote in SOC-8. And yet, WPATH has stood in the way of providing evidence-based health care.

This morning at my exercise class, the teacher asked how competitive we were on a scale of 1 to 10. She read a definition that included enjoying competition, which immediately knocked my number down to 3. I want to succeed, but I don’t necessarily want to best others to do so. I don’t like watching sports because somebody has to lose. (That said: Knicks in five! Yes, I’m a convert.)

On my way home, I thought about how my ideal approach to solving the gender problem—because, boy, do we have one in this country—is not to shut people down but to open them up. I have never advocated not teaching gender identity (even though I think it’s entirely reasonable not to, and wish schools wouldn’t). Rather, I have advocated teaching the various theories of gender identity, to teach it as an idea—or, rather, a series of ideas that evolved over time and in response to patient populations and cultural expectations.

There truly has been medical fraud and medical harm in gender clinics. If you’re a Democrat or liberal, don’t let the fact that Trump’s DOJ and FTC are investigating it deter you from understanding this reality. The institutionalization of gender identity—and the censoring of debate around it—has wreaked havoc. Bans and laws to restrict it have been the only immediate mechanism available in the face of the gender industry’s—and Democrats’—unwillingness to reform. But the long-term solution is viewpoint diversity, open inquiry, depolarization, respectful disagreement, and the return of curiosity. If I had a religion, these would be its tenets.

That’s why, for many moons, I worked on a viewpoint diversity discussion guide about gender identity in its various cultural and institutional forms: pronouns, sports, disclosure policies, etc. I was originally hired for the project by a nonprofit, but the powers that be chose not to disseminate it. I decided to adapt it, make it my own, and give it away here when it’s done.

I’m looking for a few volunteers to look it over and give feedback, as well as to try it out. Maybe your church group or school debate club wants to give it a whirl. If you’re interested, please drop me a line with the subject “Gender Discussion Guide.”

If you have other resources to recommend in this pursuit, please leave them in the comments. This post is free and available to comment on by all (though, as always, paid subscriptions welcome and needed).

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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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