Both Sides Now

An urgent proposal

Why are we fighting about drag queens?

On the one hand, sure, this form of entertainment was originally associated with adult gay sexuality, a salacious and audience-pleasing performance in underground bars and clubs, and maybe it’s not appropriate for kids. But RuPaul’s Drag Race has been on TV since 2009 and I’ve often seen it advertised in the subway. Plenty of children are exposed to images of men in wildly hyper-feminized costume. If you don’t like it, some might say, don’t take your kid to a show. (Though what happens when there are Drag Queen Story Hours in school and you have no say? And what if that drag queen turns out to be a child sex offender? I don’t know but please make suggestions in the comments.) The fact that DeSantis is pondering investigatng parents who take their kids to drag shows for child abuse reveals a) how terrifying and punitive some politicians can be and b) how we are focusing on the wrong things.

As many people know, I think the Democrats are just as terrifying—and I am one! Or maybe I was one. Like many of you, I am a zombie wandering the barren landscape of political homelessness in large part because of this issue. After all, let’s not forget all the parents investigated for not socially or medically affirming their kids, the gross misuse of the term child abuse.

Which brings me to my plea: Could each side stop escalating and instead come to the table so we can talk about what’s best for these gender dysphoric kids?

So far, the answer is no. As I wrote about on Year Zero, last week Biden issued an executive order to ban “conversion therapy,” an edict lefties could hardly disagree with because we’ve heard the “reparative therapy” stories, or know people who’ve suffered through the truly abusive process of trying to shame someone out of being gay.

The problem is, that approach doesn’t map so easily onto gender identity. Plenty of adult gay people experienced gender dysphoria when they were kids. Historically, the best treatment for it was time and puberty; the majority came out of their extreme discomfort by the end of it. If we can’t explore the source of gender dysphoria, and we affirm every child’s subjective sense of self rather than working through these feelings in therapy, how many [more] young people will we unnecessarily medicate? And does anyone on the left, or in the mainstream media, see the irony in banning “conversion therapy” while promoting access to chemical castration drugs that were once administered to gay people as punishment, sometimes during such conversion therapy sessions? We should all be frightened of the executive order. It is government overreach and it is not in the best interest of children, even if it uses language that makes it seem so.

Meanwhile, we learned through last week’s New York Times Magazine article (in which I was very disappointed, but that deserves a post of its own), that the World Professional Association of Transgender Health, or WPATH, is lowering its recommended ages for medical interventions like cross-sex hormones, double mastectomies and orchiectomies. And the language in the Standards of Care for adolescents has been changed from requiring “several years” of sustained gender dysphoria before medicalizing to dysphoria that is “marked and sustained over time”—a phrase which could be interpreted in a multitude of ways.

I understand how this makes sense for trans people who knew what they wanted at a young age, and still wanted it as adults, and were made to wait for it. But plenty of people had that same sense and grew out of it, even if it took several years. So if we are lowering the ages of intervention and banning assessment, we are ensuring an entire generation of overly-medicalized children, many with other mental health conditions, or who are autistic, or might have grown up to be gay, and snatching away any chance of naturally growing out of it. Also last week, FINA, the international swimming federation, announced it will require transgender women to compete in the category of their sex, not their gender identity, if they’ve gone through a male puberty. Only athletes who’ve begun pubertal suppression by age 12 can compete. I do want to find a solution to the sports issue, but this policy ends up turning up the pressure to transition.

But wait, there’s more. Each side politicizes the research. You’ll hear that there are studies that say puberty blockers are safe and effective and just a pause button and completely reversible and prevent suicide. (Then you’ll read a Jesse Singal piece that debunks those claims). Then you’ll read new research that puberty blockers actually increase suicidal ideation. (Then you’ll read Singal explain why that study is crap, too).

In the middle of the madness on both sides are kids and families feeling pressure from without and within, many of whom believe in transition-or-die. Political polarization has poisoned our ability to meaningfully help these children or speak rationally about gender.

For instance: Yesterday I ran into a neighbor very active in local politics, and he mentioned they are thinking of removing female district leader and male district leader from the ballot—categories once meant to ensure that women, so underrepresented in politics, are participating equally—because they don’t leave room for non-binary people. I explained that how you identify doesn’t change your sex; non-binary people are still male or female. My neighbor’s face curdled—he’d been taught that saying male and female are sexes, not identities, was an abomination. He truly looked frightened that I had stated a fact in front of him.

I also ran into someone I hadn’t seen for many years who told me of a relative who’d transitioned just before high school, in a not-so-woke fly-over state, and said the kid absolutely blossomed once released from girlhood and impending womanhood. I’ve heard many tales of euphoria soon after transition, and I’ve seen kids feel much better after social transition, bringing enormous short-term relief. I’ve also talked to many people who went through dysphoria without changing their identities or bodies and came out on the other side. And I’ve heard many tales of regret, people experiencing dysphoria unlike anything they’d experienced before they changed their bodies—they had created the scenario they were playing at before, and now, post-transition, really were trapped in the wrong body. It comes down to the issue, articulated by Heather Heying well, of the dangers of false positives versus false negatives.

All of this is why we need to deescalate. We need a bipartisan coalition to draft sane and humane policies that acknowledge the reality of gender diversity but push back against restrictive ideologically-driven rules that both deny reality and compel speech and impose beliefs on all of us. We need to listen. And then we need to talk.

Let me tell you, I put my money where my mouth is last night and went to an event at which Betsy DeVos spoke about wokeism in education (a bipartisan concern, whether the Left feels comfortable admitting it or not). My fears did not materialize and I, a lifelong lefty (until recently), did not catch on fire the minute I entered a Manhattan Institute event; in fact, the Manhattan Institute is turning out some really good work, but if you were reared in the liberal world you’d have to suspend your biases to consider it. Which is just what I did: I got over what I’d been told to think and feel by my side of the divide, and I considered. Was it uncomfortable to hear audience members rail about illegal immigration and how poor parents don’t care about school? Yes. That was gross. Was it a relief to hear DeVos explain how rolling back Obama’s Dear Colleague Title IX letter was central to restoring due process—a move Democrat and feminist Lara Bazelon supported in The New York Times? Yes, it was. There were people I disagreed with some of the time, and people I disagreed with all of the time, and people I overlapped with more than I would have expected.

Bipartisanship is uncomfortable. But we cannot grow without discomfort—that’s why we call them growing pains. And bipartisanship is also joyful. It is wonderful to be able to see the person you largely disagree with as human. It’s the only way toward a ceasefire.

When it comes to trans kids, or kids with gender dysphoria, or gender affirming care, the Right seems to have a slightly better handle on the science, though what they’re doing with it is cruel. And the Left seems to have lost its grip. I realize it’s incredibly unrealistic to imagine that each side can balance the other, but that is still my dream.