Gender Fatigue

Maybe that's what will save us all

Photo by Oscar Keys on Unsplash

I have not been the same since I came back from the gender conferences in Ireland. I found the shuttling between the gender medicine echo chamber (EPATH) and the conference-of-the-wronged-and-ignored (Genspect) to be so infuriating and heartbreaking that I felt I had to step up my game and try harder to tell the truth about what’s happening to these kids and their families—and why. I never want to get radicalized. I never want to leave my classically liberal foundation. I don’t want to narrow my range of normal, which includes plenty of sexual and gender diversity. But I want to tell the truth. Or all the truths. Which I’m trying to do. It’s just that, in the words of so many Tiktoks: I’m so tired, y’all.

In fact, many of us who’ve been down here in the rabbit hole for a long time are experiencing the same thing: gender fatigue. The prevailing narrative is tiring on its own: “trans kids know themselves,” “they’ll kill themselves if they aren’t medicated,” “gender-affirming care is evidence-based and life-saving.” But when there are challenges, legal or cultural, the narrative gets reinforced instead of disrupted. One judge says “gender identity is real,” while another says that “the evidence showed that the prohibited medical care improves the mental health and well-being of patients.” Medical associations double down. Documentaries that tell the stories of those who’ve been hurt by the affirmative model get booted from theaters. Or New York Magazine publishes an entire guide to transgender families, reifying the misinterpretation of science.

So some of them—including me!—are tired from pushing back on that narrative, trying to use science to combat ideology. Some are tired from trying to protect their kids and the integrity of their families. Some are tired from hiding their views in order to maintain their careers or relationships. Some are tired of looking at what was once a beautiful rainbow flag and is now a visually displeasing vomitorium of mismatched colors, even if we support lots of different kinds of diversity.

And some are just tired of the whole damned subject. That, honestly, is where I see a little bit of hope.

While I’ve been interviewing lots of people related to social transition and desistance in the past few weeks, I’ve talked to several young people who said they could care less about gender—any of it. Pronouns? Just don’t care, about their own or anybody else’s. Gender identity? Whatevs. Do they want their gender dysphoric classmates to get help? Sure, yeah. But they’re quite skeptical that policing pronouns or protecting kids from “deadnaming” will do it. Yet they also know that many of the kids who’ve self-diagnosed with gender dysphoria are in real pain, even if gender likely isn’t the source of it.

Some of these tired-of-gender young people I’ve talked to are desisters. They identified as trans for a period and then stopped. For a while, they went hardcore gender-critical, railing against the ideology. And then, they got gender fatigue. They discovered that in fact there were other subjects in the world. Ukraine. The history of bread. How AI will ruin (or fix) everything. Something known as “the movies.” Also: grass. Some of them have been touching grass. Some have realized that poverty, income equality and climate change are the real threats, and that feeling you’re going to wither because someone used a word you don’t like—or feeling you’re going to wither because someone yelled at you for using the wrong word—is deeply indulgent. They feel bad for those caught up in the belief system, but understand it’s not their job to wrest them from it.

Others I heard about through friends and colleagues, kids who’d never flirted with trans identity themselves, were veering off in another direction, heading toward Andrew Tate-land, flirting with ideologies in reaction to “everything you say offends me” and “you are wrong because of your immutable characteristics.” I know that young, scolding gender ideologues think they’re creating a better world by educating, or shaming, those who don’t subscribe. But, hot tip, sometimes that behavior sends the un-indoctrinated off to stew, and sometimes to radicalize. Some may become actual haters, intolerant of gender nonconformity, of homosexuality. That’s certainly my fear, that the backlash to breaking the binary is to shove it down people’s throats.

Yet there could be another gender fatigue scenario about to unfold: Kids will just get so bored of it, it’ll all just be so uncool, that they’ll move on to the next cause. Hopefully, gay and gender nonconforming kids, and kids who identify as trans, won’t get trampled in the process—cast out, sent back to the closet, pressured to comply. Some of the kids I’ve talked to, who’ve been extremely gender nonconforming since early childhood, don’t care about pronouns or gender identity. They’re used to being different. I’d like to bottle that sentiment and pass it around.

Hopefully, young people will become less solipsistic, less insistent on imposing their subjective realities onto others. Or maybe it’s just that some of the kids who were raised to think in a particular way about gender will grow up and decide it doesn’t make a ton of sense, and choose not to steep their own kids in it.

For many reasons, I want liberals to be part of this shift. I don’t want to cede our progress on gay rights or women’s rights, to have everything come crashing down in the right-wing backlash against woke excess. If we’re not going to concede that we’re wrong, maybe we’ll just get too tired to continue defending drag queen story hour or teaching kids about thruples. Maybe we’ll get tired of defending things just because conservatives attack them. Maybe we’ll ask ourselves: Is this what we should be fighting for—the right to medicalize gender-diverse and distressed kids? Maybe we’ll realize that our energy is limited, and we should put it into reducing income inequality and strengthening families, not enacting policies that weaken them. Maybe fatigue will be the best thing that ever happened to the gender culture war: Not a cease fire, but a nap.