Public service announcement: If you’re near NYC, I highly recommend this play, The Ally, which is entirely about viewpoint diversity and what happens when our bubbles are burst. If you go, please write to me and tell me your thoughts.
Recent scenarios I’ve heard about or witnessed:
A 13-year-old boy sits in front of his computer in an upper middle-class Northeastern neighborhood, trying to discern his gender identity. Maybe he is a girl, he tells his parents, who learn from friends and the school and the youth gender clinic that if they don’t affirm him—her?—he is at risk of homelessness and suicide. Their now-daughter, they realize with fright, is among the most vulnerable people in the world.
At a music club in downtown Manhattan, waitrons of indiscernible natal sex serve patrons $25 cheeseburgers. Some of the older music-goers can’t tell if their servers are gay, feminine, long-haired boys or girls who took testosterone—but pretty much everybody else there seems used to being surrounded by people living in a liminal sex-gender space. Hormones are like tattoos to this cohort of young people, who may identify as trans or not, who may have experienced gender dysphoria or not, who are in theater and music and who live far beyond the silly old gender binary. This is all completely normal, and the normal of the older folks is just gross and outdated and dumb. This is a cohort unstudied in any research, uncatalogued, unknown to many of the people fighting in the youth gender culture war.
At a bipartisan gathering, a conservative evangelical Christian approaches an old school lefty and says, “Please listen to us: We want pluralism. We just want room for our beliefs, our way of life, our morals. We don’t want you to stamp us out.” But they would consider the waitrons of indiscernible sex immoral and abnormal, and they consider the rumination of the 13-year-old boy to be the pathway toward that disadvantageous future.
All of these people need more information. They need to know one another. They need to get out of their bubbles.
The idea that your child will become homeless because of how he identifies is a complete misinterpretation of the research on the importance of family acceptance; kids became homeless because their parents kicked them out. And getting kicked out by your parents is bad for your mental health (I speak from experience). There is no direct causation between identifying as trans and having your life immediately go down the tubes. I know many sane, healthy, happy adults who have transitioned—many without familial acceptance. But in fact, you can support and accept your child without affirming their gender identity—information that almost no liberal parent has access to because of, well, their own information bubble.
When I heard about the boy in front of his computer, I thought about two things:
· A friend who works in the NICU has been witnessing babies born addicted to fentanyl, as the opioid crisis continues to rage. Many of these kids have birth defects, such as cleft palates and small heads, and will live out their days in the foster care system. What if the 13-year-old volunteered in a NICU (when he’s old enough)? Might he shed some of the pain that is likely exacerbated by ruminating? Might he feel more gratitude for his well-functioning body?
· I took an Uber with a man originally from Sudan. He told me the story of escape from his resource-rich and war-torn country. His village was burned by one of many warring militias. He traveled through five countries and made it to America. We were driving through what looked to me like a bombed-out neighborhood, and I said, “And then you arrived in this,” assuming he’d say, Yeah, America is screwed up. But he said, “America is the greatest country in the world!” Free to say what you want without being killed by militias. Free to go where you want, in relative safety. He had managed to save enough for a van, which he filled with goods bought at wholesale and which he sold on the street all over the USA. He spoke of the kindness he’d received in so many states he’d gone to: Mississippi, Nebraska, Louisiana, Ohio. “What’s your favorite of all the places you’ve been to?” I asked him. New York City, he said. Sometimes an Uber driver can remind you of the great fortune of your life.
I spent most of my life suffering in some way due to gender—mostly due to not living up to beauty standards, which caused me so much shame that it was hard to be physically intimate with people. What I didn’t do was work with people who had it way the hell worse than I did. I did not volunteer with drug-addicted newborns or volunteer to help migrants who have nothing but the hope for a better life that they arrived here with. I’m certain that getting out of the sadness and despair would have helped me. I’m certain that getting kids away from ruminating about their own gender would help many of them.
Meanwhile, many of the conservatives I’ve spoken with are discovering the feelings lefties used to experience: the resistance to a singular, repressive code about how to live and think and feel. But they don’t seem to realize that they have imposed their narrow moral code onto the country whenever they could, the same way fundamentalist lefties are now doing. They’re not saying, “Maybe we should take another tack. Never mind banning abortion. Let’s aim for a peaceful and pluralistic society.” They should take some field trips to the blue dots where people have digested a belief system anathema to their own, and try to understand that nobody likes being forced to bow before truths they don’t hold.
When I met the evangelical Christian, I thought: she really needs to come to New York and visit the post-gender generation, and see how their world makes sense to them. Acknowledge their humanity and that they are, in essence, living in a subculture within the country. It doesn’t mean that conservatives’ critiques wouldn’t hold up, but that they would see the people whose lives and bodies they’re trying to effect as fully human.
Those waitrons of indeterminable sex should hang out with some conservatives—and, heck, some heterodox liberals—and realize that many are not hateful, but rather scared. They’re scared for their kids, and what they’re being taught about gender, and the emphasis on family abolition, and the connection between gender and medicine. Hormones are not tattoos. Outside of the NYC theater scene bubble, and for most of the planet, sex is binary and gender is a system of stereotypes attached to sex, not a mystical internal feeling. How they’ve altered their bodies in ways that essentially mimic intersex conditions doesn’t change the reality of sex. They don’t have the right to impose their subjective reality onto others, and if people push back, it doesn’t mean they’re bigots. In the words of Nina Paley: Sex is real. People are weird.
We once thought the internet would bring us together. Instead, we each live in our own bubbles, and rarely leave them. I’ve been engaged in bubble tourism for three years now, and it’s amazing. I can’t recommend it enough.
The biggest problem for me is that I can no longer stand the confines of my own bubble. Because many people see bipartisanship as treason, my bubble tourism isn’t seen as something to laud by my fellow residents. It makes them think I’ve gone rogue, or conservative, or crazier. (Many already thought I was nuts.) They think “viewpoint diversity” is code for conservatism, or some sneaky way to eradicate liberalism.
It’s not. It’s the way to eradicate illiberalism. It’s about understanding complex issues from multiple perspectives to make a better world.
Please visit a new bubble. And when you do—or if you have recently—please tell us how it went.
PS: The Mill Institute has a wonderful Viewpoint Diversity Challenge for teachers related to Israel and Palestine.
Such a great post, Lisa. We’ve talked so you know my story of growing up in Deep South conservatism and moving to San Francisco - from one bubble to another. It’s not just the internet that led to these bubbles, it’s the way we have structured our society in the U.S., how we’ve built our cities, how our government functions. We’re able to isolate ourselves in our homes and cars and not move our bodies and eat fake food, it’s no wonder we’ve lost our sense of physical reality. I’m so curious to see how our moving to Europe will affect our daughter. Having to live closer to others, share a building with neighbors, take public transit, ride a bike and walk. Better yet, evidence based healthcare!! She will have a constant awareness of how you move about impacts others. And lots of examples of people going about their day from all levels of society. I’m sure it won’t be easy but I’m more then ready for the experiment.
When I look across the landscape I see kids struggling to make themselves unique, working on their brands, crossing the sea of adolescence alone but accompanied by a film crew. With the advent of the iPhone they no longer have the solace of companionship but instead the ersatz community of their phones. Then you take your Beyonces and Taylor Swifts who have elevated the self to impossible heights. All of it adds up to the child alone in front of a screen desperate to find themselves in a sea of selves, unaware of the struggles of others.