A Tale of Two Pictures

They tell an infinite number of words

I first saw a version of the picture on the left a couple of years ago, when my friend Grace sent it to a bunch of people on a text chain. My reaction was: YES. This is the message of Free to Be You and Me, repackaged with a hint of punk.

Until recently, I was inclined to lecture kids about gender norms, in the hopes of helping them figure out how to free themselves from the shame machine that pushes them to tamp down their non-stereotypical proclivities, or to buy things or change themselves to fit in. This image, I think, could be a helpful way to do that. (Although these days, I mostly want to protect kids from having to talk about gender at all; I’d prefer they run around in a park and then learn some math.)

I’d forgotten about this image until I found it in a queer bookstore in Charlottesville, VA, next to the one on the right: the “updated” version. Taken together, these images encapsulate the difference between the 70s gender movement—the tomboy heyday—and the trans rights movement that began in the noughties and really got rolling about a decade ago. It’s not about trying to make space for children who are a little bit different, or to help fortify those kids for a world that doesn’t understand them. It’s about revolution. It’s about good versus evil. It’s about radically reordering society. It’s about bigots and binaries and bosses, all bad. It’s about the oppressed, who are all good.

Have we created a world in which the children described in the image on the left can be liberated? Sometimes I think so. Other times I think we’ve gone backwards or sideways, telling them that the path to liberation is to identify as the sex that they’re not, and medicate themselves to approximate it, effects on their health or sexual function or fertility, be damned.

And the image on the right, well, it’s one illustration of the massive shift in the definition of gender, from a series of sex-based stereotypes to some innate, internal, immutable feeling—which is somehow also fluid. Everything and nothing, still and protean.

It’s also a great example of the flattening I mentioned the other day, the matrix of oppression that has us see every “left” issue as one continuous platform. Preserving drag queen story hour is not as important as preserving (or reclaiming) the right to abortion. Workplace harassment is illegal. Cops enforcing laws? That’s what they’re supposed to do, though I wonder what transphobic laws cops have enforced. Talking about gender in school? Up for debate, or at least it should be. We pay for public schools and it’s reasonable for parents to want a say in what gets taught there outside of academics.

Many of us feel that, as religious attendance declines, schools have become more like churches, teaching values that not all families share, and leaving the academics up to the families. And, like the image on the right, they portray objectors to those values as bigots. They teach the good of all kinds of diversity except viewpoint diversity.

But diversity initiatives simply do not work without viewpoint diversity. The severe and censorious extreme left wants to etch its values into stone, too, and into law, which they’ve done pretty successfully. (See Title IX.) There is so much overreach, and the chaos we’re seeing now feels to me like the last ferocious grab for any kind of political real estate before it all implodes. Andrea Long Chu making the craziest case for childhood transition. Title IX no longer protecting females. This phenomenon in the picture below, which I dashed off a few quick, under-formed sentences about, pissing off a lot of people:

The gender image up top on the left tackles one issue: how to liberate kids from gender stereotypes. Many detransitioners say it was a message they needed: permission to be masculine girls and feminine boys without anyone making meaning out of their differences. Amid all the chaos and culture wars, the real wars and the real issues, let’s not forget that some kids still need to be reminded that they can play with any toys they want, dress in any colors, participate in any activities, without having to change anything about themselves. They don’t need a revolution. They just need a tiny bit of wiggle room.