In the Event of Nuclear War, Please Do Not Misgender Me

Does gender still matter when the world falls apart?

Those of us who write about youth gender medicine are used to being told that we’re killing trans kids. This histrionic and false accusation stems, ironically, from our honest reporting about the suicide statistics, which activists and parents twist into: trans kids kill themselves if not given exactly what they want. (This rhetorical strategy is also known as emotional blackmail, and a form of emotional abuse.)

Ironically again, the next most leveled criticism is the opposite: we over-focus on a niche issue of little interest to anyone, and thus waste copious time and energy in a land abundant with bigger fish, awaiting their turn in the fryer. It’s a terrifying moment, edging us closer to nuclear war than we’ve been since the Cuban missile crisis, and you want to talk about pronouns?

One might say that taking the time to criticize someone for wasting time focusing on niche issues is a bigger waste of time, but let’s not waste time doing that! Instead, let me argue that gender is not a niche issue. Rather, it’s a litmus test for Democrats. No, I don’t want to talk about pronouns, per se. But I do want to talk about what we got wrong about gender, because I want to make it right—in the hopes of strengthening the Democratic party and moving away from the endless pendulum swinging between extremes.

Recall, if you will, this poll. Number three on reasons not to choose Kamala: “too focused on cultural issues like transgender issues, rather than helping the middle class.”

Those infamous and extremely effective “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you” ads weren’t about hating trans people; they were about disdain for the elites and their luxury beliefs and affluenza and rich people problems. Forgive those trying to feed their children or hang onto their homes for their lack of sympathy—or bounty of contempt—for those insisting that they’ll die if strangers don’t reflect back to them their internal sense of their gender as male/female/both/neither/other. If their response was backlash, whether in the form of electing Trump or experiencing insouciant schadenfreude at his slashing of Harvard’s funding, it was not surprising to me.

Those of us worried about the cost of housing, or college, or what jobs will exist when our children graduate from college that will allow them to pay for housing—because: AI—probably don’t want to focus much on these niche issues either. But we may also realize that we have to. We see the enormous fallout from the liberal investment over the last decade in radically changing our belief system to erase the sex binary and instill gender identity in law and policy. We see the broken chain of trust and declining levels of faith in science and medicine. We understand that we must provide a refuge not just for those disdainful of and terrified by Trump, but for those who continue to support him no matter how wasteful or hateful much of his actions may be. And I say that while acknowledging that, much to my surprise, Trump’s hard hammer on gender issues has been very effective, causing the notorious pediatric gender clinic at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles to shutter, among other previously unfathomable feats.

We cannot welcome people back into the fold unless we admit that, as Donald Trump’s executive order makes clear, there are two sexes, and that there are enormous problems with the institutionalization of gender identity. Is it hard for a liberal like me to admit that? Yes. Is it necessary? Yes. To recreate the big tent of yore—not the little tent that houses only the most “morally pure” social justice warriors—we must admit that our side erred on gender.

That’s something that The New York Times has quite suddenly decided to do. As their first Very Good Article on this issue pointed out last week, “allies in the L.G.B.T.Q. movement had overstated the medical case for pediatric gender-affirming care.”

That’s right: the evidence that blockers, hormones, and sex-trait surgeries were “life-saving,” “evidence-based” and/or “medically necessary” was never there. This article even dares to poke at the part of the story almost never told: the point of the treatments from the very beginning was to make gender nonconforming children into gender conforming adults. The point was passing. And now that gender-affirming care is about affirming gender identities ranging from genderfluid to demiboy, passing is no longer even on the table. How does one “pass” as genderqueer or nonbinary? How does one “pass” as one’s internal sense of neither boy nor girl?

The New York Times’ remarkable turn around—maybe it’s 90 degrees and not a 180, but it’s significant nonetheless—is a signal to Democrats everywhere that they can take the off-ramp provided by Donald Trump, because they don’t have to shoulder the blame for shuttering clinics or abandoning the teaching of gender identity as fact, rather than idea.

Will they drive down that ramp? I’m interested to find out, especially in New York City’s mayoral election, where the most popular candidate, Zohran Mamdani, has proposed allocating $65 million for LGBTQIA+ gender-affirming care. (One wonders what procedures the Asexual contingent requires.) Will New York City be part of the movement to reinvent the Democrats to appeal to a much larger sector of the population, and become the party that prizes truth and science over a sense of belonging? Or will we run back the greatest hits of Woke 101 with Zohran? (I realize this is reductive. But also, not that far off.)

Meanwhile, has the way Trump attended to “cultural issues like transgender issues” actually benefitted the middle class? Did stiffing Harvard put cash in their pockets? I doubt it. More than anything, it acted as a salve for what sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild calls the “stolen pride” of rural Trump voters—those living in communities with measles outbreaks, rejoicing at the defunding of science and dismantling of vaccine departments. They might be sicker, but they feel better!

The question is: how will we—the liberals, the Democrats—respond to those in the stolen pride crowd, and those liberals so disaffected that they were catapulted out of the blue bubble into the red one? Because purple is the only color I want to see. Donald Trump claiming he “totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities is on par with gender identity activists claiming “the science is settled” about gender-affirming care. Trump mandating the censorship of more than 350 words is the same as Biden mandating the inclusion of gender identity in school policies. I don’t want to replace the censoriousness and authorianness authoritarianism of the Left with the same on the Right.

And so, despite the very serious and terrifying global issues facing us at this moment, we must, still, reckon with gender.