Straddle Two Worlds, Piss All Over Yourself
Once heterodox, forever not liberal
Earlier in the spring, I dedicated much of my focus to my new book HOUSEWIFE, writing op-eds and recording podcasts about how mothers became America’s social safety net, trying to turn my attention away from the institutionalization of “gender identity.” I wondered if I would be accepted in my old liberal media circles. After all, once you step out of liberal land into the heterodox space, your old colleagues don’t know how to categorize you. The New York Times called Coleman Hughes a conservative. They accused Nellie Bowles of sneers and sarcasm, perhaps because hewing to woke orthodoxy requires surrendering your sense of humor, so they didn’t realize Bowles is funny!
I’m a thousand rungs lower on the book list than Hughes and Bowles, but trying to reenter the woke media world was still, well, weird and hard. I love talking about what I discovered researching this book, whether that’s why a disproportionate number of lobotomized people were housewives, or housewife porn, or the plight of a single father trying to establish himself as the primary parent in the eyes of his community. But every time I’ve spoken to someone in the liberal media, I’ve felt as if I were hiding something—even though I’m pretty clear in this book that I don’t toe the party line about all kinds of things, including tradwives. I learned a lot from tradwives! They helped my marriage!
While I was knocking on the door of my old life, politely requesting to be let back in, I pulled back a bit from the perennially breaking news of the gender world—all the news that’s not fit to print in the mainstream media I’ve been requesting space in for years. It gave me a bit of perspective into just how difficult it is to navigate that gender world, too. Around that same time, I started being digitally assaulted by gender-critical folks who accused me of all kinds of things I hadn’t said I supported— including men breastfeeding, and transitioning kids so that they can pass. They took my neutral explanations and twisted them into endorsements, and then attacked my character based on them.
My husband thought it was great that, as my book was launched, I was being attacked for being too trans-friendly. Better than the opposite if you’re trying to get attention from liberal media! But that didn’t stop the person who reviewed HOUSEWIFE for The Washington Post from noting—inaccurately and irrelevantly—that “some of the articles and op-eds she has published about gender dysphoria and transgender kids, have not earned her a lot of friends in the transgender community.”