What Ammunition Do the Gender Wars Need?

Tell me how I can help

Lawrence Wright’s spectacular novel The Human Scale, about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, begins with the epigraph: “All fundamentalism is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation.”

The quote, from former Catholic nun Karen Armstrong, can help us understand America’s ongoing and escalating political violence. The idea of a “trans genocide”—supposedly wrought by banning youth gender medicine, or prioritizing sex over gender identity in law and policy—likely propelled many people into panic.

Now we seem to have slid into permanent panic. If the country veered toward Trump as a reaction to the censorious, cancel-culture-prone left, we’re currently faced with the right vowing to fire those who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s horrific murder, or to revoke visas from foreigners who did so. They can claim the left wants to annihilate them to justify their actions, just as the left did. (I admit it’s annoying to see these outraged articles in The New York Times. Where ya been the last ten years, as this was happening to those who used sex-based pronouns and lost their jobs?)

For the last five years or so, I’ve made two main arguments: 1) that we will need a kind of bipartisan Truth and Reconciliation Committee, to discover and reckon with what has happened; and 2) that the gender culture war is not actually a left/right issue. Making it seem that way keeps both sides convinced of their impending annihilation, and prevents us from understanding the full picture.

The sides used to be those who believed in gender identity, and those who didn’t. Now, in the aftermath of the assassinations of Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband, and of Charlie Kirk, I feel the sides are the radicalized and the reasonable. The radicalized, from both parties, have been pulling the strings for decades. Radicalism, fundamentalism—those are America’s real enemies.

In The Human Scale, Wright delves into the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin—killed not by a Palestinian activist, but by Israeli nationalist Yigal Amir. It was the specter of peace, the signing of the Oslo Accords, that propelled him to murder. Peace, whether in the Middle East or in the American culture wars, is a threat to power, and nothing is better for the extremist right than Kirk’s murder. Using that tragedy to curb free speech is a disgrace and a disservice to Kirk’s work.

I see a similar kind of radicalization among many in what I call the gender resistance. Former feminists now proclaim that there is, in fact, a right way to be a man or a woman, that Western gender roles are biological and universal, that the nuclear family—an extremely modern formation—is best for everyone. (I disagree—I think clans and communities are just as important. There is a sex-based division of labor throughout much of human history and all over the world—but those divisions aren’t always the same. I wrote about that in my last book.)

I see people who once argued compassionately using words like evil, or mutilation—terms that may cater to the already-convinced but only alienate the vast majority of liberals, who still believe that they support trans kids while conservatives want to annihilate them. These people speaking this way have their goals—to sell books or gain followers or get donors, or to shut the practice down in the short term, no matter the long-term implications of doing so by executive order and bans.

But my goal is to inform people enough that they feel free to dissent. I want them to see what I see—which still might not lead them to agree with me that the institutionalization and medicalization of gender identity is, above all else, a tragedy—one that could only have unfolded by camouflaging it in the cloak of left-versus-right.

So, how do I do that? For years, I had a simple goal of “diversifying the media narrative,” but I didn’t get far. It’s gotten a little better, but at this point, there is little more to report about the science itself. I can slap BREAKING across a Tweet when yet another study comes out, or another court decides a case. But the fundamentals of the story are out there:

• The Dutch protocol was designed for a very specific kind of patient, and involved long-term evaluation.

• That kind of patient was, by and large, same-sex attracted.

• The science behind these treatments turned out to be flimsy as dust.

• In America, we didn’t follow the protocol anyway, and it was applied to a very different kind of patient—mostly: teen girls who weren’t same-sex attracted, and with no history of gender issues, rather than mostly young boys who were same-sex attracted and had suffered from gender issues since early childhood.

• Originally, transition wasn’t allowed for those with severe mental health issues. In America, it became seen as a cure for those issues.

• We turned both social and medical transition into human rights, rather than psychological and medical interventions, so that someone objecting to them became, essentially, a proponent of human rights violations. It became a moral issue, rather than a scientific issue. Mixed into a polarized America, in the midst of left-led cancel culture, questioning became heresy.

• We had more detransitioners. But rather than learn from them, and amend practices, proponents of gender-affirming care politicized them. They were tools of the right wing rather than cautionary tales about what happens when we can’t openly question science, or let it evolve.

• We enacted laws and policies that forced not only the previously controversial act of social transition, but sometimes the hiding of it from parents.

• In the name of social justice and protecting kids, crazy things happened, including siccing CPS on non-affirming families.

• The limited long-term, decently-designed NIH-funded research suggested a frighteningly high suicide rate among affirmed youth. Yet the narrative persisted that it was life-saving, evidence-based care.

• No one on the left side of the aisle was willing to listen to concerns, questions, objections. Thus, the right took it on—with the help of some feminists, gay people, liberals, and even old-school transsexuals. Bans ensued—the only regulatory option when the medical, mental health, educational, media, and other industries refused to modify.

• Trump was reelected, which temporarily caused introspection within liberals and Democrats. He unleashed a series of executive orders that either scared many clinics and hospitals out of continuing the practice of youth gender medicine, or gave them the off-ramps they secretly searched for—or both. But because it came from Trump, and because of the language often used, the people I want to reach largely still saw the issue as left versus right.

So here we are. There are still many things we don’t know. We don’t know for sure how many people transitioned, in what way, or how they are doing. We don’t know the detransition rate, or the desistance rate. We can’t agree on what those words mean. We can’t quantify success or failure of the treatments because we don’t know what we’re measuring. We know from self-reports that some people are happy in the long term, and others absolutely devastated. We know that the State inappropriately wielded power over families because of an unscientific belief. We know that there are complex ethical issues that haven’t been discussed.

I still hope we will get the Truth and Reconciliation Committee someday, so all of this will be revealed. And I look forward to revising and then publishing my book which explains all this in great detail.

But in the meantime: How do I inform more people enough to dissent? If there’s not really much more to say about the science or the culture war at this time, what can I offer?

My plan right now is to focus on origin stories. I love hearing how people met and formed alliances, or how they became part of the resistance. I don’t have room for all of them in the book, and though I tried to pitch my favorite podcast producer on the idea of a podcast about this, that didn’t happen. So my plan for now is to work on some of those origin stories and share them here. Maybe learning how other people became aware that something went wrong will help others do so, too.

I’m open to suggestions about any of this. Tell me how I can be most useful. Tell me how I can help.

And in the meantime, if you read The Human Scale and want to discuss, let me know.