Public Discourse

What the Surge in LGBTQ Self-Identity Means

We are now a year removed from the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade. In the flurry of protests that followed the late June 2022 decision, LGBTQ-identified persons and organizations paid a surprising amount of attention to the Court’s decision. The rainbow flag was a mainstay at Dobbs protests. Even a shallow dive into written backlash against the Court’s decision revealed that LGBT people were concerned about Dobbs at least as much as women in heterosexual relationships were, despite the latter’s lopsided contribution to actual abortion numbers. The most obvious reason for the former’s concern was Justice Clarence Thomas’s reference, in his concurring opinion, to reconsidering other “substantive due process precedents,” like those in the Obergefell and Lawrence v. Texas decisions.

But some share of the political angst no doubt comes from the fact that there has been a surge in LGBTQ self-identification among young adults who do not display homosexual behavior. That’s right. New Gallup data analyses put the LGBT figure among Zoomers (i.e., those born between 1997 and 2012) at 20 percent. Data from the General Social Survey—a workhorse biennial survey administered since 1972—reveal that the share of LGBTQ Americans under age 30 exploded from 4.8 percent in 2010 to 16.3 percent in 2021. No matter the data source, it’s clear that in 11 short years, LGBTQ identification among young Americans tripled. And yet under-30 non-heterosexual behavioral experience, while climbing, remains just over half that figure, at 8.6 percent (in 2021).

Sexual behavior once comprised the key distinction to homosexuality. Homosexuality, however, has given way to ideological and political self-identity. In light of this shift away from using behavior to self-identity in defining homosexuality, LGBTQ antagonism to the Dobbs decision starts to make more sense. In fact, we should have seen it coming. In a study published last year in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, my coauthor Brad Vermurlen and I found that the key predictor of adult attitudes about treating adolescent gender dysphoria with hormones or surgery—a topic you might not equate with abortion rights—was not age, political affiliation, education, sexual orientation, or religion. The best predictor was whether the respondent considered themselves pro-choice about abortion.

This surprised us. In hindsight, it shouldn’t have. Opinions about abortion and gender medicine tend to turn on basic differences in how people understand the human person, their own body, others’ bodies, and the very ends for which we exist. Sociologist James Davison Hunter mapped this out in his 1991 book Culture Wars. In what he described then as the “progressive” worldview, bodily autonomy is paramount. We determine who we are, and we should be free to do so through body modification and the control and redirection of bodily processes. In what Hunter called the “orthodox” worldview, on the other hand, bodily integrity trumps autonomy and self-determination. As the Heidelberg Catechism famously opens, we are not our own, but belong—body and soul—to our savior Jesus Christ. Bodies—systems, parts, organs, and processes—have natural purposes and ends toward which they are objectively ordered. They are to be received as a gift. The two are strikingly different perspectives about the self.

The prospect of motherhood can no doubt undermine one’s sense of self-rule over one’s own body. This is particularly the case if you understand your body as “belonging” to you, and that you rule over it by making choices for it. You can permanently alter it, be harmed by it, or be at odds with it. It’s not surprising that a pregnancy can scare people, because—in the progressive worldview—you have the right not to be pregnant, just like you have the right to self-identify as you wish. It’s a cousin to asserting you have the right to body modification in service to your own self-definition. (And why should being a minor prevent such rights?) Dobbs appears to undermine all this; its three dissenting justices claim that “‘there is a realm of personal liberty which the government may not enter’—especially relating to ‘bodily integrity’ and ‘family life.’”

As previous legally effective arguments about fixed, stable sexual orientations give way to malleable sexual and gender self-identities, it’s tempting to wonder whether we’re not simply speaking about different worldviews—as Hunter’s terminology maintained—but alternative religious systems. LGBTQ, after all, is a big-tent system that contains its own rituals, creedal commitments, forms of worship, sacred items and places, a liturgy, a calendar with holy days, appropriate confessions, salvation accounts, martyrs, moral codes, and magisterial representatives. Religious belonging commonly begins with self-identification. Just as not all Christians practice their faith, so too not all self-identified LGBTQ persons demonstrate behaviors long associated with the movement. And just as there are many moral questions that divide Christians, so too is this the case in the LGBTQ world. But the emotional depth of disagreement here suggests core religious belief systems are clashing.

Language and authority structures are no less pivotal in the LGBTQ world than they are in our own faith. British social theorist Anthony Giddens—a leading public intellectual in England and one of the more famous sociologists alive today—articulated the importance of sealing new ideas with new words in his 1992 book The Transformation of Intimacy: “Once there is a new terminology for understanding sexuality, ideas, concepts, and theories couched in these terms seep into social life itself, and help reorder it.” This is why Hunter described culture (in his book To Change the World) as the power of legitimate naming. With regularity we now find ourselves wrestling with our opponents over basic terms. But sometimes even new religious movements get ahead of themselves, bungling their systematic ontology. As one Wall Street Journal columnist noted recently,

Those protesting the (Dobbs) ruling have a particular challenge in that there is now some disagreement among themselves about what exactly they are advocating and for whom. The left has been engaged in a confusing internal debate about what a woman is.

Indeed, this may prove to be a bridge too far. The recent flare-up involving Bud Light and Target Corporation, and the mystifying battle over whether drag queens should read stories to other people’s children, suggest that many people of any and no faith are fed up with the proselytizing. There’s plenty of religious tolerance in libertarian America—including among Christians—but little interest in revolutionary ideas about “queering” the gender binary. Sexual difference is not a problem requiring a solution. The Human Rights Campaign, as close to “headquarters” as it gets, should have seen this coming. Instead, it declared an LGBTQ “state of emergency” in the United States, akin to a plea for religious tolerance. But when parents’ rights are openly undermined by their efforts, the HRC should not be surprised when people of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.

Christians have a distinctive anthropology of the human person and a better, happier long-term vision for human flourishing. Unfortunately, many of us are unable to articulate it. But the time for making explicit what we believe—the true, the good, and the beautiful—is now. While it remains to be seen how our post-Roe society will look and how the present cultural conflict will play out in courts, legislatures, and around kitchen tables, a few things are certain. Subtlety won’t cut it. Gradualism won’t do. Charity—courtesy, kindness, and love—is always in good form. But don’t think that being deferential or nice will evangelize effectively or preserve our longstanding vision of the human person and its design, purposes, and ends from its ideological challengers. To paraphrase one old saint’s remarks about laws concerning marriage and education, it is in these two areas that Christians must stand firm and fight with toughness and fairness, and—if I may add a category—good judgment. A world, and not simply one country, is at stake.

The Rumpus.net

Speaking to Men at Parties

“The thing you love most when you are thirteen is the thing you love forever,” Adi says. He has his leg crossed over his lap, hand on his knee in a scholarly position.

“You’re bound to it,” I add, leaning forward. “You can’t put it down.” I am drunk and twenty years old and my voice aches—I have been shouting for most of the night, but the music isn’t really that loud. I tilt my body toward the group to understand them, a hand around my ear in what feels like a theatrical gesture. The boy Adi and I are chatting with is soft-spoken mumbling-drunk, with dark eyes that scrunch up beautifully when he smiles. “Say again?” I repeat over and over. He stands up to grab a beer off the table between us, jeans slipping down his narrow hips, and Adi and I look at each other with our eyebrows raised. I giggle and he glares back—we are always passing sly glances back and forth like handwritten notes between school desks.

The boy’s name is Alan and he is disarmingly handsome, the kind of man I would have avoided in high school out of shame and fear. I am fascinated by beautiful men, their ease of movement, the carelessness of their limbs. I watch them and think of Margaret Atwood: “When I am lonely for boys it’s their bodies I miss…My love for them is visual: that is the part I would like to possess.” A desire that stems from a sense of possession; I would like to inhabit them, to take up space and know that everyone around me feels grateful. To be a beautiful white man and never know fear—how simple and glorious.

There are moments when the light passes just right over the high point of someone’s cheekbone and I imagine my whole life as it would have been in a different universe, tracing the events of this imaginary life from that spot on their face to my death. In another world, I fall in love with this boy who shares my taste in music and laughs generously at my less-than-clever drunken commentary. In another world, things are easier. In this world, we dance and sing Talking Heads to each other across the kitchen as we spin in circles: I guess that this must be the place. In another world, I do not go into the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror, watching my reflection careen across the glass. In another world, I do not make myself sick with want and worry at every turn.

Alan sits back down beside Adi and we talk about California. Whenever I meet someone who’s left California for New York, they can never shut up about being from California and how much they miss it, as if they hadn’t chosen to leave. Alan tells us that in California he met Paul McCartney once, and I clutch my hand to my collarbone in a mockery of a swoon because that is what I loved when I was thirteen, what I am bound to forever, the thing I cannot put down. There will always be a part of me that starts at the mention of The Beatles, that blip of recognition when you come across your own name in an unexpected place.

“I know this sounds corny,” he says, “but I swear to God he just made the whole room brighter.”

The enthusiasm in Alan’s voice strikes me. He tells me he saw Arctic Monkeys seven times in one year because he was in love with Alex Turner and again I am envious of him, this time because I never allowed myself to notice any women as a teenager. I instead fixated on male celebrities and characters, as if I could convince myself that I loved them the way I was supposed to love them. I want to know, suddenly, if he went to those concerts because he knew he wanted to see the lead singer, or if he had convinced himself it was because he just really liked their music. But I do not ask. Instead I stare at the mole on his right hip, made visible by his low-slung trousers. The mole is largish, about the size of a dime, and raised slightly. I try to imagine myself putting my mouth on it, on this bit of flesh which has so captured my attention, and am immediately repulsed.

This is where it always stops, the insurmountable stutter of my fantasies. This is the part I find difficult to explain even to myself, the way I can simultaneously want and so clearly not want. I picture the thoughts in my mind as a strip of film: reversed, softened, made grand by my drunkenness, mimicking how things are always beautiful onscreen. I can desire this boy as if from afar rather than with the blistering intensity I feel when a girl sits too close to me on a stranger’s bed at another party as she speaks to someone else, the air soft with smoke, my insides folding in on themselves. The universe is reduced to the point at which our hips are touching and I cringe at the clichés this meaningless contact inspires in me.

I think about Paul McCartney, his boyish features still apparent in old age: wide, down-turned eyes and full cheeks and always that charming smile. My favorite Beatle fluctuated between him and George, whose quiet demeanor intrigued me; I have always been inclined toward the fantasy of quiet men. I would watch videos of early performances for hours, unable to tear my eyes away from George’s legs, how dreadfully slender they were in his dark slacks as he stood off to the side of the stage. Ringo was about as attractive to me as a post (though darling) and John looked far too much like my father, so my desire, or what I thought was desire, had to be cast onto Paul and George. This was how I amused myself throughout most of my early adolescence: poring over photographs and watching footage from decades earlier of a half-dead, long-fractured band. Maybe The Beatles were easy to love because the group had already run its course—I could discover new information but nothing new would actually happen, and there was a comfort in this impassable distance. I cannot say that if, in another world, I would have been reduced to tears like all the girls in A Hard Day’s Night, wordlessly mouthing George-George-George as the crowd around me fell into hysterics, or if the illusion would have been ruined by seeing them in the flesh.

I think about the sightless stare of a Roman bust in a museum, terrifying and opalescent, made lovelier by the fact that I cannot touch it. In another world, I step past the line on the floor of the gallery and run my fingertips over the marble despite the docent’s protests. In another world, I tell Alan the truth: I will never be happy with what I have or what I am.

Says Alan of Alex Turner: “I don’t think I even realized who he was, the first time—he walked right past me, in those fucking Chelsea boots, and I was just so turned on,” and I laugh because it’s always those fucking Chelsea boots. The Beatles wore them, too.

I tell Alan that I’ve been in the same room as David Byrne, white-haired and gracious, those darkly intense eyes gentle with crow’s feet and laugh lines, and Alan concedes that this is indeed “very, very cool.” In high school, I would have recorded such a statement from a hot boy in my journal. Now it just seems obvious. It was a screening of a documentary about competitive color guard that David Byrne had produced, with a Q&A afterwards. My friend was a huge fan of Talking Heads and I came along because I was a huge fan of her; I barely paid attention to the the Q’s that David A’ed because I was swept up in the thrill of watching someone I love watch something she loves. Her sardonic voice was made sweet as she described her enjoyment of the evening, tucking herself into a red raincoat ill-suited to the frigid March weather. Now whenever I listen to Talking Heads’ bizarre, frenetic music, I think of her with a twinge in my chest not unlike heartburn. People sometimes ask me about her, mention her to me in passing: didn’t you know—? weren’t you—? I smile, tight-lipped, and nod. In another world, I tell Alan that I buy the shampoo she used because I miss the smell of her dark hair as it wafted toward me, head on my shoulder.

“Stop, don’t talk about it,” I say to Adi when he mentions her. “If I talk about it, I’ll cry.” I’ve been saying this for the past few months, begging friends to help me maintain the illusion that I wasn’t deeply hurt by her decision to return to Texas. The less we say about it the better.

We talk about how it would be nice to leave New York, but none of us stay away for very long. We all have our reasons. Mine is a sense of obligation to my younger self, the anxious, dirty-haired creature who collected postcards from Manhattan and watched The Beatles with a thumb-sucking compulsion and dreamt of someday ending up in a different body in a different place. She needs me to remain in this city, for at least a little longer, regardless of the people who come and go and the women I watch and want and the men I may or may not speak to at parties.

Most people have left the party by the time Adi and I declare mutiny and claim the aux cord for ourselves. Alan stretches as he makes room for me on the couch. His grey sweatshirt again rides up across his belly and I think about Saint Sebastian: his long, muscled torso, the agony and eroticism of his death as it is depicted in art. How I should like to be an arrow and glance off the flesh of some beautiful thing before falling, unbroken, to the ground. I think about Louise Bourgeois’ drawings of Saint Sebastienne as a martyred pregnant woman, the same sketch repeated over and over in a monotonous procession of bodies, smudged and headless: the grotesquerie of gestation. How awful is the practice of becoming alive.

Weeks later in Boston, my friend Laura and I discuss the dreams we’ve been having since we were little girls, nightmares in which we are pregnant despite never having had sex and everyone tells us we should be grateful to be so immaculate. But Laura is Jewish and I was never baptized and neither of us believe in anything beyond the miracle of blood and tubing that is the body itself. The nightmares persist as a reminder of what that body may be capable of, both within and without ourselves.

Hours past midnight, Adi and I walk to my apartment from the party. “Do you wish you were straight?” I ask him. He shrugs. I say, “I do, sometimes. I think it would be easier. Don’t you think it would be easier?” I hope he knows I mean easier just in the simple act of existence: would it be easier to be alive? Would I hate myself for something else if not this?

Adi doesn’t answer, but his gaze is warm behind his glasses, his jaw set in the near-pout he wears when he considers something seriously. He is a dear friend, one of the first I made at college, and one of the first people I heard utter the word “lesbian” with a gravity that implied strength and meaning rather than disdain. I lean into his shoulder and we stand like that, quiet, until Adi’s Lyft arrives.

A month and some weeks later, I stand in the living room of another apartment, once again speaking loudly over the music to an acquaintance. The theme of the party is blue, as in Maggie Nelson’s seventh book, as in Derek Jarman’s final film, as in Nina Simone’s debut album Hey, blue, there is a song for you. My acquaintance’s eyelids are a bright teal, in lovely contrast to her copper hair that falls into her face as she leans in to hear me. I feel a touch at the back of my neck and I turn around and it is Alan once again, tucking the tag back into the collar of my shirt. This is an urge I have to resist when I glimpse a misplaced tag or loose thread on a passing stranger, the same compulsion that makes me check the locks on the front door nightly before bed, a desire for security through control. Alan has not shied away from this impulse to put things in their proper place. His face, cast in cobalt, grins back at me when I turn.

Already I can feel the sense of infatuation ebbing away as I greet him, repeat my name, raise my arms around him in a clumsy approximation of an embrace. Names are important, and it bothers me on a primal level when people forget them. Alan is still handsome with his watery-drunk smile and half-lidded eyes. The man asleep, like the man in quietude, was another adolescent fixation of mine: a feral animal tranquilized to be observed more safely.

The apartment is so small and so full of bodies that we can hardly do more than shuffle in time with the music. While waiting for the bathroom, I get into an argument with a man about Kate Bush, and how would he understand the anguish conveyed in her warbling falsetto, anyway? I don’t know what’s good for me I don’t know what’s good for me.

I spend the next two years moving farther away from my body. I try to date casually and discover that I am perhaps incurably afraid of intimacy. I become catatonic in the presence of my own desire, though I spend a summer trying to convince myself that it’s the heat and humidity rather than the rush of blood in my ears that makes me nauseous every time someone tries to touch me. I sit across from a man on the subway and stare at the soft curve of his jaw as he tilts his chin downward; his dark eyes rove across the pages of a book whose title I can’t quite make out. In another world, it is the 1950s in the United States of America and I am engaged to this beautiful man whom I will never love and this is better, somehow. It’s a mid-century sitcom marriage where we sleep in separate beds and only ever kiss on the cheek. I am miserable, but it’s better than being miserable in reality because in this dream I have what feels like a justifiable reason to be miserable. My life is unfulfilled, uninspired. I see East of Eden at the cinema and masturbate to the thought of James Dean the same way I did as a teenager, silently rocking back and forth in a chair, disgusted by the idea of actually touching myself. In this world I never figure out that I’m a lesbian because I could barely figure that out in 2016 with contemporary resources. It’s easier anyway, following an assigned path, filling a prescription month after month at the pharmacy—doctor’s orders. In another world, my sadness has sharp contours, clear edges that I can press into my skin. It is not amorphous and it does not expand to fit every space I inhabit.

I try to describe some of this world to Laura in a taxi, drunk and newly twenty-two on the hottest night of last summer. “Do you ever wish that’s how it was?” Laura tells me she doesn’t—she’s tired, and she turns away from me to look out the window as we arrive at my apartment. “It’s almost light out,” I say to change the subject, waving a hand in the direction of the sky.

I am glad that I didn’t tell her the extent of my dreams, the tragic details that lull me to sleep. It is so perversely appealing to me, this fantasy of a loveless, sexless, meaningless existence in which I am freed from any expectations of self-possession or choice. In another world, no one asks me what I want to do with my life because they do not assume that I will ever do anything. I know this way of thinking is self-indulgent and wildly privileged, and that Laura’s reaction to my modest proposal was appropriate: a snort that went from surprised to scornful, a firm “No.” And yet I greet sleep that morning with dreams of pin curls and bathroom tiles scrubbed clean and never being touched by my beautiful imaginary husband, asleep beside me in his bed across the room.

Adi and I watch A Hard Day’s Night and he touches my arm when he notices I’m crying and we can pretend, briefly, that we knew each other when we were thirteen. Laura tells me that she is a lesbian, too, and this more than anything makes me feel like I may someday be able to overcome my shame because Laura is someone who did know me when we were thirteen. Through my love for her I may be able to forgive myself the trespass of being who I am. She tells me she sometimes still dreams of having children, but since realizing she is a lesbian she is no longer so afraid of the possibility.

I see David Byrne again and this time he sings. I wonder what it’s like for him to play those songs from another time when his band all lived together in the same room, cutting each other’s hair, muddling through waves new and old only to end up estranged forty years later—no talking, just head. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were dogged by other people’s hopes of a reunion from the day The Beatles broke up until that night at the Dakota, and I wonder if it bothered them to know that the best thing they ever did was be part of something beyond themselves. In another world, rooftops are only for concerts, never for leaping. In another world, I am not afraid of heights or the way my body moves through time and space, toward the ground or toward another body.

***
Rumpus original art by Lisa Marie Forde

Public Discourse

John the Baptist Was a Witness for Life and a Martyr for Marriage

It is June, and Pride has flooded the world. Pride is on display in the streets, in stores, in schools, and even at the White House. All of the great and the good (or at least the wealthy, famous, and powerful) are affirming the triumph of the sexual revolution, and some even applaud transgender toddlers and sadomasochism on parade. Affirmation is increasingly mandatory; the devotees of Pride are literally taking away lunch money from low-income children because their Christian school dissents from some aspects of the rainbow creed.

Christians should not be surprised when many of the rich and powerful mock God and scorn His people, and boast of indulging their every material desire and sexual whim. We have been warned about the world and its rulers. But this month also offers us encouragement to resist the depredations of the sexual revolution. June 24th is this weekend, and it is not only the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, but also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.

Before he was even born, John testified to the sanctity of all unborn human life. The sexual revolution requires abortion as a backstop against the consequences of the promiscuity it promotes, but John shows why the personhood of humans in utero cannot be denied without embracing grave heresy about Christ’s nature.

John’s ministry testifying to Jesus began before either was born. According to Luke’s account:

when Elizabeth heard the greeting of Mary, the baby leaped in her womb. And Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit, and she exclaimed with a loud cry, “Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting came to my ears, the baby in my womb leaped for joy.”

The unborn John’s recognition of the unborn Jesus was a miracle that demonstrates the value of human life in the womb in several ways. First, the passage shows that the fetal John the Baptist and the embryonic Jesus were human persons congruous with their adult selves, and that both were already participating in their divine missions.

Second, the recognition of Jesus as Lord early in Mary’s pregnancy testifies to His divinity even as He grew within Mary’s womb. This divinity at conception is why Christians honor Mary as the Theotokos, the God-bearer. This title is affirmed by Orthodox, Catholic, and Reformed Protestant teaching, and is attested to by many ancient sources, such as Ambrose of Milan’s great Advent hymn, “Veni Redemptor Gentium” (“Savior of the Nations, Come”), which in verses 3 and 4 declares both Jesus’ full divinity and full humanity in the womb.

Third, this episode demonstrates the full humanity of all unborn persons. To claim that the unborn are not fully human is necessarily to claim that Jesus was not fully human while in Mary’s womb. But the Bible insists that His humanity was like ours in every way but sin. Denying the full humanity of the unborn therefore requires either also denying the full divinity of the unborn Jesus (thereby rejecting the reason for the unborn John’s joy and the teaching of the ancient church) or asserting that Jesus’ full divinity was present without His full humanity. Either is an enormous heresy.

Just as the beginning of John’s life shows us the value of unborn human life, the end of John’s life shows us the importance of marriage. At the end of his life John sacrificed himself to bear witness to the inviolability of marriage. As recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, “Herod had seized John and bound him and put him in prison for the sake of Herodias, his brother Philip’s wife,” because John had been saying to him, “It is not lawful for you to have her.” John was then executed at the request of Herodias, after Herod promised a favor to her daughter.

John could have kept quiet on this matter, contenting himself with calls to repentance that did not single out the powerful by name. He could have said that Herod’s sexual conduct was not actually a serious sin worth worrying about, that God doesn’t really care about what people do in the bedroom. He could have chosen to recant in the hope of saving himself after he was imprisoned. But there is no indication that John wavered or doubted his declaration that Herod was wrong to take his brother’s wife for himself.

John took his stand for marriage and fidelity, and he held to this position to his death. And Jesus allowed this martyrdom. Jesus could have told John to ease up in condemning Herod’s sexual sin—that it was not that bad, or even not sinful at all. But Jesus did not do this. Rather, His teachings contain many hard words for us, including condemnations of the sins celebrated by Pride. Jesus calls us in the condition he finds us, but He also calls us to repent of our sins, including sexual ones.

The lurid details of John’s death highlight how sin grows when indulged. Herod did not really want to execute John, but he found himself so entangled by his sins of lust and pride that he felt compelled to add evil to evil by ordering John’s death. And so John the Baptist, the wilderness ascetic whom Jesus declared to be the greatest man born of woman, died as a martyr for marriage.

This is a reminder of how seriously Christianity takes marriage and sexuality. The union of husband and wife is both a symbol of Christ and the church, and the vocation that most of us are called to. Marriage is the basis of civilization and culture in this world, and a sign of our union with God in the world to come.

This should encourage us as we are beset by the celebrants of Pride. The Christian path is the way of Christ, which is almost always contrary to the habits and desires that prevail in our culture. This often means worldly suffering, rather than worldly celebration. But we know that the defense of life, marriage, and chastity is a service to God, and He will ensure that our labor is not in vain.

NYT - Education

Authors of ‘And Tango Makes Three’ Sue Over Florida Law Driving Book Bans

A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.

Public Discourse

A Step Forward in the Debate about Masculinity

Early in 2019, the men’s razor company Gillette raised eyebrows with a new commercial. The ad depicted stereotypically disordered male behavior—aggression, catcalling, and a “boys will be boys” indifference to both—and contrasted it with a new generation of men taking a stand against that patriarchal past: a father breaks up a fight between two boys, a young man cuts off another’s unwanted advances toward a female stranger.

Many on the right complained that Gillette drew a glib equivalence between masculinity and toxicity, and the commercial was admittedly both myopic and preachy. But the conservative dismissiveness of the ad largely settled into a defensive, abrasive machismo. The ad was simplistic, but its critics missed an opportunity to think through the meaning of masculinity, and about the importance of male—and especially paternal—role models.

Conversations about sex and gender are surely just as difficult now as in 2019. Any talk about masculinity can easily veer into the same sclerotic patterns of the Gillette hubbub: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and dumbs down its beliefs. Richard Reeves’s latest book, Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It, manages to avoid predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of the male malaise.

Reeves, a liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, bookends Of Boys and Men by presenting the educational, economic, and cultural challenges men face, and he proposes policy and social solutions for each. They’re all insightful and (unsurprisingly) subject to debate, especially, in my view, his discussion of fatherhood and marriage. But one of the most important lessons of the book—which Reeves introduces to reassure readers that they can care about both women’s equality and men’s struggles—is that “we can hold two thoughts in our head at once.” In that vein, we can disagree, even deeply, about some of Reeves’s premises or proposals, while also recognizing that Of Boys and Men models the sort of intellectual dexterity needed to tackle complicated matters in our polarized times.

Men Falling Behind

Reeves begins his book by pointing out how boys are falling behind in the classroom. He surveys data showing they are 14 percentage points less likely than girls to be ready to start school at age 5, as well as 6 percentage points less likely to graduate high school on time. Look ahead at college, and young men are 15 percentage points less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s. Women are narrowing gaps between themselves and their male classmates in typically male-dominant subjects (such as STEM), while stereotypically female subjects like nursing and teaching remain so.

Men are also being outdone in the job market. Worries about the wage gap—which Reeves handles with careful nuance—or about a C-suite glass ceiling have some legitimacy, but overemphasizing them paints an incomplete picture. The lack of female representation among Fortune 500 CEOs tells us that a small—albeit influential—proportion of men are doing very well. But by the same token, the people struggling the most economically are more likely to be men. An astounding one-third of men with only a high school diploma (approximately 5 million men) are out of the labor force.

To address these labor market problems, Reeves draws from the women-in-STEM push and calls for similar efforts for men in health care, education, administration, and literacy—or as he calls it, HEAL. In the same way that Melinda Gates pledged $1 billion to promote women in STEM, Reeves proposes an equal “men can HEAL” push. He envisions a combination of government and philanthropic funds for training and scholarships, and for marketing these often well-paying careers. Child care administrators and occupational therapists, two examples Reeves cites, respectively earned on average $70,000 and $72,000 in 2019.

One of the most discussed policy proposals in the book deals with educational gaps, which Reeves wants to address largely by “redshirting boys,” or delaying their start in kindergarten by a year. It’s not that young boys are less able than their female counterparts, but rather that they cognitively develop at a different pace, about two years slower than girls. For Reeves, giving boys the “gift” of an extra year before starting school “recognizes natural sex differences, especially the fact that boys are at a developmental disadvantage to girls at critical points in their schooling.”

Reeves’s reasoning reflects an important aspect of his approach: he acknowledges the importance of biology, and thinks that understanding biological factors should moderate a tendency, frequently seen on today’s left, to confuse equality with sameness. After examining data on men’s and women’s different career interests and outcomes, for example, Reeves concludes that we should at the very least consider that biology and “informed personal agency” play some role in occupational choices. He rejects attributing all gender gaps to sexism, or expecting perfect 50–50 representation in all fields.

People of different political stripes can debate the scope and specifics of both the HEAL movement and redshirting boys, among other proposals in Of Boys and Men, but Reeves leaves the possibility of fruitful deliberation very much open. He helpfully frames his discussion of education and jobs so that potential disagreements will be about means, rather than  fundamental ends.

But the same can’t be said about the third aspect of the male malaise Reeves identifies: the cultural status of fatherhood.

Fatherhood without Marriage?

Reeves recognizes a sense of aimlessness has taken hold of many men’s most personal relationships: between men and women, and between fathers and children. But he primarily wants to address the latter problem, and to do so by envisioning fatherhood as an independent institution, considered separately from marriage. We should address and improve relationships between fathers and children first, irrespective of whether fathers are married to their kids’ mothers. Our safety net should expect more than mere economic support from fathers—particularly among noncustodial parents—and reward them for involvement in their kids’ lives. In a nutshell, our culture and policy should reconcile themselves with the reality that we live in “a world where mothers don’t need men, but children still need their dads.”

Why doesn’t Reeves concurrently advance a marital renewal? For one thing, he regards the traditional model of marriage as too rigidly predicated on the expectation of a male breadwinner, and by extension on the economic dependence of women. From it flows a notion of fatherhood that may have encouraged family formation in the past, but that is now “unfit for a world of gender equality.” The decline of marriage poses problems, but it’s largely indicative of positive gains in autonomy for women, in his view.

Reeves emphasizes that many unmarried, nonresidential fathers are very involved in their kids’ lives. Black fathers, for example—44 percent of whom are nonresidential—are more likely than white nonresidential fathers to help around the house, take kids to activities, and be generally present, according to one study he cites. Reeves argues that our cultural expectations of fatherhood “urgently need an update, to become more focused on direct relationships with children” (emphasis added). Since about 40 percent of births in the United States take place outside of marriage, he concludes that insisting on a model that assumes an indissoluble link between fatherhood and marriage is just anachronistic.

But Reeves doesn’t fully reckon with the gravity of divorcing fatherhood from marriage. Chapter 12 of Of Boys and Men, which Reeves dedicates to his independent fatherhood proposal, advances particular policies to support “direct” fatherhood unmediated by marriage, from paid parental leave to child support reforms, to encouraging father-friendly jobs. But he spends surprisingly little time directly arguing against the empirical and philosophical case for fatherhood within marriage as distinctly positive.

For example, Reeves writes that “there is no residency requirement for good fatherhood. The relationship is what matters.” Fair enough. But which model—fatherhood within marriage or nonresidential fatherhood—tends to facilitate more of the positive interactions needed to build healthy relationships between fathers and children? In general, the one where more of those interactions can potentially take place. A study by Penn State sociologist Paul Amato suggested this, reporting that from 1976 to 2002, 29 percent of nonresident fathers had no contact with their kids in the previous year, while only 31 percent had weekly contact.

In fact, contact with their biological father plays a positive role in advancing the two other major concerns Reeves has for boys: work and education. A 2022 report from the Institute for Family Studies found that “[y]oung men who grew up with their biological father are more than twice as likely to graduate college by their late 20s, compared to those raised in families without their biological father (35% vs. 14%).” According to the Census Bureau, approximately 62 percent of children lived with their biological parents in 2019, and 59 percent lived with married biological parents. In other words, growing up with a biological father is deeply intertwined with growing up with a married father—there are very few cohabitating biological or single biological fathers.

Beyond social science, there’s also a conceptual issue at the heart of Reeves’s proposal. It’s undeniable that many working mothers don’t need men in the same way past generations did—if what we mean by “need” is economic support. But it’s also very clear that mothers do need men. Without men, well, they wouldn’t be mothers (and vice versa) for the very simple yet profound fact that the sexes need each other in order to fulfill their biological end. This is more than a semantic trick—it’s a recognition that mutual dependence is at the heart of our biology. At the risk of putting too fine a point on it, men and women could not exist without each other—and that realization should caution us against overemphasizing independence.

Moreover, shouldn’t fatherhood also entail modeling what lasting commitment to a spouse looks like? Reeves is right to stress that fatherhood should mean more than just economic support, but he misses the fact that prospects for decoupling marriage from fatherhood are similarly discouraging in this regard. In a study by the late Princeton sociologist Sara McLanahan, 80 percent of unmarried parents were in a romantic relationship (with each other) at time of the birth of their child. But here’s how McLanahan summarized her five-year follow-up with them:

Despite their “high hopes,” most unmarried parents were unable to maintain stable unions. Only 15 percent of all our unmarried couples were married at the time of the five-year interview, and only a third were still romantically involved (Recall that over 80 percent of parents were romantically involved at birth.) Among couples who were cohabitating at birth, the picture was somewhat better: after five years, 26 percent were married to each other and another 26 percent were living together.

In divorcing fatherhood from marriage so hastily, Reeves misses an opportunity to consider why reimagining marriage is a key aspect of reinvigorating fatherhood as well. It’s the biggest drawback of Of Boys and Men.

Nevertheless, Reeves’s proposal has clearly opened a door to fruitful further debate. His case for direct fatherhood should temper a traditionalist reflex to assume that nonresidence is equivalent to abandonment—there are clearly many nontraditional, not-married, or separated fathers who embody dedication to their children. But if engaged fatherhood is so empirically and conceptually intertwined with marriage, then we would lose key aspects of both by separating them. We shouldn’t idealize marriage or how it affects fatherhood, but we shouldn’t hastily decouple marriage and fatherhood either.

Successfully reimagining marriage and fatherhood will probably even entail letting go of some of the overly rigid gender roles that Reeves criticizes in Of Boys and Men: more female breadwinners and paternal homemakers, as well as various policies and workplace arrangements to support the parent–child bond are all likely to be a part of the future of the family. But so should giving boys and men not just the tools to excel at school and work, but the habits and vocabulary to strive toward commitment, dedication, and love in the most personal dimensions of their lives.

Improving the Debate

Of Boys and Men is a book about men, written by a man, claiming that our culture doesn’t take men’s problems seriously. In the wrong hands, it would have been the latest entry in a seemingly incessant culture war, a callback to the silliness of the Gillette controversy. Yet it has been a resounding mainstream success. In matters of gender and sex, some might believe it’s impossible for there to be any interest in men’s issues across the ideological spectrum. The success of Of Boys and Men suggests that’s not the case.

Of Boys and Men has a point of view, but Reeves doesn’t close off the possibility of exchange or criticism by making a caricature of his opponents. This is the sort of book that not only exposes an often ignored issue, but elevates the quality of our conversations about it, even amid disagreement. That is perhaps its most impressive feat.

Public Discourse

Realists Unite! New Documentary on Gender-Affirming Care Presents “Pro-Reality” Position in Response to Trans Ideology

The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.

The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.

Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.

Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.

How has the response been to the film thus far?

Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.

JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.

How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?

VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.

JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?

VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.

JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.

What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?

VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”

Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.

The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.

I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.

JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?

VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).

JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.

Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.

But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.

Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?

As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.

How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?

VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.

But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.

This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.

JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.

You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?

VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!

And ask commonsense humanistic questions:

– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?

JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!

NYT - Education

Bills DeSantis Signed Target Trans Rights, Abortion and Education in Florida

Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.

NYT - Education

A Small NY University Fired Employees For Using Their Pronouns in Emails

After Houghton University fired two employees for listing their pronouns in emails, some alumni have protested the decision as un-Christian.

Edge Effects

Young, Queer Farmers Are Here to Change U.S. Agriculture

Today's queer youth are more interested in farming than ever. Eliza Pessereau surveyed members of the Queer Farmer Listserv to understand their challenges and motivations for going "back to the land."

The post Young, Queer Farmers Are Here to Change U.S. Agriculture appeared first on Edge Effects.

NYT - Education

Yeshiva University’s Ban on L.G.B.T.Q. Club Leads to Scrutiny of Funding

Yeshiva University has said it is a religious institution, not an educational institution. But that raises questions about whether it can receive public funds designated for schools.

Public Discourse

Why States Must Define Sex Precisely

Until recently, no precise legal definition of sex—and especially the terms “male” and “female”—was needed because no one contested it. Unfortunately, because of gender ideology’s growing influence on our laws and institutions, states no longer have this luxury. Gender activists are now working to redefine sex in federal laws and regulations, such as Title IX, to include “gender identity.” If this succeeds, it will subvert all preexisting legal references to sex, contrary to their original intent.

Some state legislators are proposing to define sex by tying it to biology, but in an artfully vague or general way, in order to distinguish it from “gender.” Here’s a common formulation that appears in bills dealing with pediatric gender medicine:

“Biological sex” means the biological indication of male and female in the context of reproductive potential or capacity, such as sex chromosomes, naturally occurring sex hormones, gonads, and nonambiguous internal and external genitalia present at birth, without regard to an individual’s psychological, chosen, or subjective experience or gender.

“Gender” means the psychological, behavioral, social, and cultural aspects of being male or female.

It’s not clear why the term is being defined as “biological sex” rather than “sex” simply.  After all, the purpose of the definition is to tie sex to biology, so the qualifier “biological” is redundant. More to the point, this definition provides no explanation of the difference between males and females. As a result, it’s not likely to do much good in cases where that difference is at issue.

Recognizing this problem, some states have begun to propose legislation to define these terms in state law. Montana is currently debating one such law, SB 458 (2023). To see why this needs to be done, we must understand what gender ideology is and the confusion that it creates.

What Is Gender Ideology?

Gender ideology’s intellectual pedigree is complex. For our purposes, however, we can focus on its orthodox formulation in school curricula, popular culture, and medicine. In this form, it displaces the sexual binary of male and female—which describes all mammals including humans—with two subjective notions: First, an internal sense of gender called “gender identity” that is distinct from, and can even be in discord with, the body; and second, mere “sex assigned at birth.”

Hence, its most ardent champions do not refer to a person’s sex when defining their terms. The Ontario Human Rights Commission is representative. “Gender identity,” the commission explains, “is each person’s internal and individual experience of gender. It is a person’s sense of being a woman, a man, both, neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.” Note that the same word appears in both the definition and the word being defined. That circularity is a philosophical necessity because gender ideology detaches gender identity from biological sex.

This way of speaking and thinking is the essence of gender ideology.

Efforts to redefine terms such as sex to comport with the lexicon of gender ideology threaten many important social goods. To preserve these goods, states need to anchor their legal definitions of sex, and related terms such as “male” and “female,” in the solid ground of biological facts.

A Campaign of Confusion

The main way gender ideologues have confused the public is by falsely claiming that disorders of sexual development, often mislabeled “intersex” conditions, prove that there are more than two sexes—or that the sexes are somehow fluid or mere endpoints on a spectrum.

Such disorders occur in 0.018 percent of the population. In some such cases, however, newborns have ambiguous genitalia. This makes the task of determining sex more complex.

Nevertheless, appealing to these disorders to justify gender ideology is an intentional diversion. First, none of these conditions produces other sexes or “genders.” Second, gender ideology provides no new insights into these disorders. Third, people who identify as transgender or nonbinary rarely have one of these disorders. And fourth, no such disorders correspond to the growing list of “gender identities.”

Defining Sex Imprecisely

Unfortunately, some who seek to defend the reality of sex—that is, the sexual binary—offer hasty and imprecise definitions, which can serve to discredit their efforts.

A bill might claim, for instance, that all humans are either male or female and have either XX or XY chromosomes—corresponding to females (XX) and males (XY). But, as noted above, there are rare chromosomal disorders where this doesn’t hold. If the wording of the law fails to account for people with these disorders, it provides a target for critics to torpedo the legislation.

The same sort of problem arises with some common ways of defining the two sexes. One might say, for instance, that “a woman can have babies; a man can’t.” That’s true—but it’s not a definition of “man” or “woman.” After all, some women have had hysterectomies, or have gone through menopause. Do they not count as women? Of course they do. So much the worse for the definition.

Now, everyone intuits that the difference between men and women has something to do with the ability to have babies. And there are ways to state the intuition precisely. For instance, to speak in the argot of “set theory,” you can say that the set of people who can have babies is a proper subset of the set of women. The set of all men, in contrast, contains no subset that can have babies.

And if you remember high school biology, you know that XX and XY chromosomes have something to do with sex. But biology is complex, and definitions are hard to get just right. Set theory or chromosomes might help us understand the difference between males and females, but as a matter of law these definitions are not precise enough. Vague legal definitions create openings for gender ideology to gain a toehold.

Defining Sex Precisely

Here’s the good news: there are several ways to define sex precisely. It just takes some work. Any good definition will capture the central concept of biological sex—the orientation of male and female bodies for reproduction. It will also refer to what happens under normal development while accounting for disorders. Finally, it will accommodate the fact that organisms have and do different things at different stages of development.

For instance, a female human embryo does not menstruate or get pregnant—nor does a woman who has passed through menopause. A male embryo very early in development does not (yet) have a penis or testes.

The definitions provided in Montana’s SB 458, for instance, account for both disorders and development. A human male is, minimally, a member of the human species who, under normal development, produces relatively small, mobile gametes—sperm—at some point in his life cycle, and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete. A human female is, minimally, a member of the human species who, under normal development, produces relatively large, relatively immobile gametes—ova—at some point in her life cycle, and has a reproductive and endocrine system oriented around the production of that gamete.

The phrase “under normal development” does a great deal of work in these definitions. We grasp the existence of distinct animal taxa (species, genera, families, classes, etc.) intuitively. “Human” refers to our species (Homo sapiens). We also distinguish abnormal from normal development without much effort.

For instance, we know that humans are bipeds—that they naturally have two legs. But if a child is born without one or both legs, do we conclude that the newborn isn’t human, is a member of another species, or is “interspecies”? Of course not. We recognize that the child suffers from some sort of disorder—some disruption in development involving, say, chromosomes or an event in utero. Note that we’re engaged in counterfactual reasoning. We infer that the newborn would have had two legs except for some event or abnormality that prevented this from happening.

We can learn to reason this way over time if we encounter enough organisms to discern the basic pattern, or if we study biology. For most adults, this way of thinking is common sense, or what philosopher Michael Polanyi called “tacit knowledge.” That is, we understand the basic contours of sex and how it works in the world, even if we have a hard time explaining the chain of reasoning and definitions involved.

Normal vs. Abnormal Development

Some might claim that the distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” is prejudicial, or that it represents an incursion of sectarian philosophy into science. This is false. One might view these categories, say, in terms of natures conceived along Aristotelian lines. Others may understand the distinction statistically, in terms of sexual selection, through a combination of these views, or in some other way. But whatever one’s philosophical or theoretical framework, it’s impossible to get very far in describing biological reality without relying on the distinction between normal and abnormal. This is true whether one is a rancher with only a high-school education, a physician with an MD, or a developmental biologist with a PhD.

Is it special pleading to appeal to what is “normal” for disorders of sexual development? Not at all. It’s how we understand function and development in all organisms—including sex. We know from observation, analysis, and well-confirmed theory that humans are mammals (class: Mammalia), and that sex in mammals is binary. That means there are two and only two types of gametes and corresponding body structures. One of each gamete is needed for reproduction.

Moreover, under normal development in all placental mammals, including humans, a male has XY chromosomes, and he will develop and at some point have testes, a prostate, and a penis. A female, under normal development, has XX chromosomes, and she will develop and at some point have a uterus, ovaries, a cervix, and a vagina. Barring a disorder or disruption, a female can carry, give birth to, and nurse offspring at some point during her life cycle. A male cannot. Males and females also differ in the prevalence of hormones such as testosterone and estrogen, respectively, and develop distinct secondary anatomical differences under the influence of these hormones, especially during puberty.

This is why, in almost all cases, the presence of such features is sufficient to conclude that a newborn is either male or female. Sex in almost all cases is easily observed, not “assigned.” But what about the rare exceptions? What happens if a newborn lacks some secondary sex characteristic—such as a penis—or has ambiguous genitalia, or is found (using much more recent techniques) to have a chromosomal anomaly?

As mentioned above, we would not, and should not, conclude that the child is not a human, or has no sex, or is some third sex. In most cases, we can with a bit more investigation determine that the child is male or female, and so would have the usual features of that sex except for a disorder that disrupted normal development.

Even if we could not determine the sex of an individual, we would treat this as an epistemic limit. We would not, or at least should not, treat such a person as a member of a third sex, or of no sex. And even if one were inclined to do that in such rare cases, this would do nothing to establish the many exotic claims and implications of gender ideology. For instance, it would provide no basis for the claim that a developmentally normal male could be a female simply by identifying as one. A transgender or nonbinary gender identity is not the same thing as various disorders of sexual development. In fact, we understand such disorders by reference to normal sexual development.

In sum, current efforts to redefine sex to include “gender identity” would dissolve sex as a stable legal category and create legal chaos. In response, public institutions must shore up their defenses. One key way to do that is by defining sex—including male and female—precisely in law.

Longreads

Of Innocence and Experience

In a provocative essay, scholar and author Sophie Lewis, best known for her 2022 book in support of “family abolition,” makes the case for how society can not only protect trans children, but also learn from them. This is a call for a more expansive, generous, utopian way of thinking about the potential of youth:

The fear I inspired on the parent’s face riding the subway was what distressed me most about the incident in New York. Later that day, when I recounted the anecdote on Facebook, an acquaintance commented – unfunnily, I felt – that I was a “social menace”. A threat to our children, et cetera. Ha, ha. But what was the truth of the joke? What had I threatened exactly? A decade after the event, “The Traffic in Children,” an essay published in Parapraxis magazine in November 2022, provides an answer. According to its author, Max Fox, the “primal scene” of the current political panic about transness is:

a hypothetical question from a hypothetical child, brought about by the image of gender nonconformity: a child asks about a person’s gender, rather than reading it as a natural or obvious fact.

In other words, by asking “are you a girl or a boy?” (in my case non-hypothetically), the child reveals their ability to read, question and interpret — rather than simply register factually — the symbolisation of sexual difference in this world. This denaturalises the “automatic” gender matrix that transphobes ultimately need to believe children inhabit. It introduces the discomfiting reality that young people don’t just learn gender but help make it, along with the rest of us; that they possess gender identities of their own, and sexualities to boot. It invites people who struggle to digest these realities to cast about and blame deviant adults: talkative non-binary people on trains, for instance, or drag queens taking over “story hour” in municipal libraries.

Longreads

Inside the Secret Working Group That Helped Push Anti-Trans Laws Across the Country

Every day, anti-trans rhetoric is spreading and becoming more virulent. Conservative forces in statehouses across America are pushing bills that would strip trans people of rights, including access to vital medical care. In some places, these laws have already passed. This is all part of a concerted, coordinated effort, as Madison Pauly’s reporting shows. Pauly gained access to a trove of emails exchanged by a group of anti-trans advocates who workshop legislative bills, public messaging, and other aspects of their crusade:

They brainstormed responses to the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide — an assertion that is backed up by research. Peer-reviewed studies have repeatedly found that trans and nonbinary youth with access to gender-affirming care are significantly less like to seriously consider suicide than those who did not receive such care. A larger analysis, using online survey data from over 11,000 trans and nonbinary youth, found using gender-affirming hormonal therapy was associated with lower rates of both depression and suicidality. Yet one team member called the argument that gender-affirming care reduces suicide “abusive”; another argued it was a way for doctors to coerce parents to consent to gender-affirming care for their child. 

Van Mol, the doctor, suggested Deutsch reply to the suicide prevention argument with a rebuttal published on a defunct anti-trans blog: “Why weren’t the 1950s a total blood bath for suicides if non-affirmation of everything is the fast train to offing one’s self?” Van Mol asked, paraphrasing the blog post. 

Another doctor in the working group, California endocrinologist Michael Laidlaw, had gained attention for his writing against gender-affirming care after parents at a charter school in his region raised complaints that they hadn’t been notified before kindergarteners were read a children’s book, I Am Jazz, about trans teenager Jazz Jennings. Last fall, when the state of Florida called on Laidlaw as an expert witness in a lawsuit over its anti-trans Medicaid policy, a federal judge concluded that he was “far off from the accepted view” on how to treat gender dysphoria, in part because Laidlaw had said he would refuse to use patients’ preferred pronouns. In his South Dakota testimony, Laidlaw compared gender-affirming care to Nazi experimentation and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. In emails to Deutsch and the group, he railed against doctors who prescribe puberty blockers — which are used to delay unwanted physical changes in gender-diverse kids and give them more time to explore whether or how to transition — accusing them of “willfully harming” children, even if kids and their parents consent to treatment. “The physician is the criminal in these scenarios and must be prosecuted by the law,” he argued.

The Rumpus.net

From the Archives: The Sunday Rumpus Essay: Bad Blood

This essay was originally published at The Rumpus on April 30, 2017.

Sophomore year of college, on my school’s monthly blood drive day, I was seduced by a sign outside of a Big Red Bus that decreed, “You can be a hero! Donate blood and save three lives today!” The sign was written with hot pink dry eraser marker in cheery, swirly letters as if advertising today’s lunch special: Destiny. Of course. I have always known that I’m destined for greatness—a triumph so epic you could hear my name drifting in the winds if you simply stood still and tuned your ears to history: Edgar Gomez is a hero. Or maybe: Edgar Gomez, the hero. Whichever is easier on the winds.

I had skipped breakfast that morning and wondered if they were offering anything more substantial. On the back, in case being a hero three times over wasn’t enough of a draw, the sign continued: “Free small pizza and movie ticket with every donation.” A small price to pay to save three lives.

Giddy at the arrival of my big break, I climbed aboard the bloodmobile, vibrating with the knowledge that this was finally my chance to prove to everyone what has been so obvious to me my whole life. I had been waiting for a sign for so long, and here it was at last, so satisfyingly literal. Inside, I was promptly greeted by the check-in nurse in the customary heroic way.

“We don’t have time for you,” she said, shifting her eyes to the packed bench where a queue of students sat waiting to be harvested. I stared at her blankly, my mouth struggling to find the words that would communicate to her how vital it was that I be allowed in, that this wasn’t just about donating blood, that this was larger than the both of us, her rejection could very well likely forever alter the fabric of history and space and time.

“I have time,” I said.

“Okay,” she shrugged. “You can wait if you want.” At that, she turned and disappeared behind a thin screen door. Another nurse motioned to a rack on the wall stacked with clipboards.

“Fill out one of those,” she said, gesturing with a Ziploc bag stuffed with a foam rubber ducky. “Try to be as honest as possible. Oh, and fill the boxes out completely,” she added as an afterthought. “The machine doesn’t recognize partially filled out boxes.”

On a nearby donor bed, a pale woman nodded off with her hand raised like she was asking a question in her sleep, a dark purple spot bleeding through the gauze where the needle had punctured her skin.

*

To give blood in the United States today is like joining an elite, profoundly uncool, hyper-exclusive club. If you are under seventeen years old, depending on the state, you must have your parents’ permission. There are cruel limitations as to where and when you may have travelled. For example, you may not have spent more than five years at the Sorbonne in Paris getting your doctorate degree about French movies about trains. You may not have had a tattoo done within the past twelve months, even of a really tough looking anchor on your chest. You must weigh a minimum of 110 lbs. As per American Red Cross eligibility requirements, there is no upper weight limit for donors “as long as your weight is not higher than the weight limit of the donor bed/lounge you are using.” To give blood, you must be able to fit on a donor bed. Add to the reasons you might be denied at a blood donor center: the summer you spent in Ireland in 1993 looking for Bono, the lip piercing you got after your last break up two months ago because you desperately needed change, the pill you took this morning.

I scanned through my donor questionnaire, making sure to answer each question as honestly as possible.

“Feeling healthy and well today?” There was no box for “Sometimes I feel like I died 400 years ago and every now and then my right arm has a strange spasm which makes me suspect that I may be a demon who took over some poor kid’s body and he’s desperately trying to get out one limb at a time,” so I shaded in the box for “Yes.”

“Have you taken anything with aspirin in it within the last twenty-four hours?” No. Demons don’t need medicine.

These requirements are not particularly stringent, yet still only an estimated 38 percent of the population is eligible to donate. Of that, less than ten percent actually do, and that is in part because to give blood in the United States today, you must answer the question: “From 1977 to the present, have you had sexual contact with another male, even once?”

I was wearing cut-off jean shorts, an extra small plain white tee that bordered dangerously with crop top territory, and dollar store glittery nail polish chipping at the edges. No, I decided, my pencil carefully outlining the box, thoroughly shading it in so the machine would have no trouble understanding. Not even once.

*

On paper, I know why gay men are not eligible to donate blood. The rationale for these regulations is straightforward. Aside from making sure we don’t find thumbs in our chicken nuggets, it is the responsibility of the Food and Drug Administration to minimize the threat of the public contracting through blood transfusions infectious diseases such as human deficiency viruses or hepatitis. Men who have sex with men are the population most heavily affected by HIV infection. Among the nearly 50,000 new cases of FDA reported by the Center for Disease Control in 2012, more than 30,000 were transmitted from male-to-male sexual contact. In order to keep as few contaminated donations from entering the national blood supply as possible, several safeguards have been set in place, from rigorously testing donations for everything from syphilis to West Nile Virus, and beginning with the initial donor screening process, which takes the form of a mini-physical and a questionnaire that is designed to weed out potential risks.

Despite the dozens of tests performed on each unit of donated blood—to establish blood type and test for infectious diseases—the FDA stresses that these tests are not foolproof. However, to put your potential exposure into perspective, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), “your risk of getting HIV from a blood transfusion is lower than your risk of getting killed by lightning. Only about one in two million donations might carry HIV and transmit HIV if given to a patient.” Though the source of these infections are not always linked to gay men, it is the policy of blood centers, under current FDA regulation, to place all gay men who admit on their questionnaire to having had sexual contact with other men within the past twelve months on a one-year deferral list, which is a way to soften the reality that gay men are simply not permitted to donate. While ostensibly this is an improvement on their previous ban on gay men, it’s still less “come back next Wednesday,” more, “we’ll call you when you decide to move to the Andes, shave your head, and take a vow of celibacy.”

Besides the FDA’s implicit verdict that two gay men in a monogamous relationship pose the same threat to the national blood supply as a heroin addict, or the propaganda ingrained in children at birth that only gay people contract HIV when, according to the Center for Disease Control, most new HIV diagnoses in women are attributed to heterosexual sex, not to mention the outright homophobic logic couched in the idea that the nation cannot trust gay men to know their own status, the FDA fails to account for one crucial fact: I am a hero. I am special. I am destined for greatness.

*

How my greatness will manifest itself is unknown to me, a mystery that has filled every moment with a sense of sweet, mouthwatering opportunity. Even as a kid I knew the world needed me. Whenever I was out in public, I would openly exhibit my karate skills, demonstrating perfect horse stance for the passersby outside of the mall JC Penney’s, waiting for my choice sensei to pluck me from obscurity and launch my career as the martial arts champion of the galaxy. In my fantasy, I told myself he had only planned to stop by Yankee Candle to shop for candles for his dojo, a quiet masculine scent like Motor Oil or Sports Tears, yet seeing me and my ability to stand with my legs splayed and bent at the knees, my arms akimbo, my fists locked tight at my waist for over fifteen minutes while my mom perused the clearance racks inside, he would instinctively know, like a mother penguin can pick out her chick in a colony of thousands, that we were lost kin.

“Is it really you?” he would ask, recognizing something ancient and powerful within me. Without waiting for my answer he would sweep me away to someplace majestic where he would rededicate his life to teaching me how to snap two by fours in half with my palm. Initially, my mother would be devastated by my disappearance, throwing herself completely into her job at Starbucks where she would make crude drawings of my face with the foam in her customer’s lattes, but over time she would grow to accept it, knowing deep down that I was out there being the hero the world needed of me.

As a teen, I would stalk the aisles at my local bookstore with my eyes opened as wide as I could hoping that something would irritate them and I would be reduced to tears. Sobbing, I would sink myself into the nearest seat with an intellectual looking book, something like The Diary of Malcom X, and squint my eyes, letting the tears roll down my cheeks, imagining that an agent would see how emotionally raw and unguarded I am and, unable to control himself, yell, “Look everyone! It’s the next Nick Jonas! I have to sign him immediately!” I would be plucked from my humdrum life and become an overnight celebrity and an ambassador for UNICEF, traveling around the globe teaching children the value of environmental sustainability through interpretive dance.

“Life on land is finite!” I would shout into the crowd of kids gathered around to watch one of my performances in a remote village in Nicaragua. “Return to the sea is inevitable!” My work done, I would hop into the back seat of my Hummer limo and speed away to my next humanitarian destination, listening as the chorus of applause trailed off in the distance.

*

My blood pressure was too high. Classic superhero—always overachieving.

“It needs to be below one hundred for you to be eligible to donate,” reported the nurse taking my vitals. She had her hand wrapped around my thumb, squeezing it in a python grip so that my blood dripped onto a glass slide.

“One hundred and seventeen,” she droned, holding my limp hand like a jaded psychic fed up with telling her clients how old they would grow to be. I imagined her tracing her sage fingers down my palm, stopping dramatically to investigate a fine line.

“Just as I suspected!” she would announce, pulling me in with an all-knowing squint. “You were really good at basketball in a past life!” Then, rolling her eyes to the back of her head in a state of supernatural bliss: “Oh, and you’re totally gay.”

“Wait a little while and we’ll test you again,” she interrupted, throwing a glass of ice water on my fantasy and forcing me back to reality. Five minutes later, she tested my other thumb, pricking my finger with a medical tool that resembled a mechanical pencil. She squeezed more of my blood onto a fresh slide. Now it was too low, meaning that my blood pressure is in a constant state of flux between extremes.

“You can go ahead and donate,” she concluded, then turned around to tune her radio dial until she landed on a breezy R&B station. She hovered there for a minute, mouthed along to a few words, and gave me a this-is-my–song look. Maybe my blood pressure would just even out.

*

According to the official American Red Cross website, the average process of giving blood, from arriving at your local Big Red Bus blood drive to stepping off with your complimentary cranberry juice cocktail and sugar cookie, takes approximately an hour and fifteen minutes. They also maintain that every two seconds, someone in the US needs blood, meaning that for the national blood supply to remain sustainable, in the amount of time it takes for one person to give blood, enough of the stuff must be collected nationwide to meet the demands of over one thousand people. The most alarming aspect of these figures? They get it. In a year, the American Red Cross and similar organizations collect 15.7 million donations in the US, over 700,000 more donations than needed. I imagine a nurse splayed out in a blood bank vault making blood snow angels with the amazing surplus of donations she collected that day, which is to say, they are very good at their jobs.

Why, then, are stories such as “The Nation Has a Major Blood Shortage” being relayed on major news outlets like ABC? One ominous headline from Wisconsin Public Radio’s website alerts: “Urgent Donations Encouraged As Nation Faces Looming Blood Shortage.” Another, from Georgia’s Albany Herald, reads: “American Red Cross facing possible emergency blood shortage.” These headlines stand in stark contrast to the Food and Drug Administration’s claims that “the blood supply in the US has been very stable.” So, which is it?

Technically, the FDA is not incorrect. The US blood supply is indeed stable. The catch: the blood supply is just about the only national resource that is, in fact, stable. With decreasing mortality rates, a rapidly growing population, and a rise in complex therapies such as cancer treatments and heart surgeries that require large amounts of blood, the public doesn’t need the blood supply to be stable, it needs it to flourish. This is because the national blood supply is constantly, literally, hemorrhaging. Not only are approximately 41,000 blood donations used every day, but donations are expiring. Red cell donations, for one, have a shelf life of forty-two days, so they must be perpetually collected for the supply to remain “stable,” which leaves the nation’s blood banks playing something like blood whack-a-mole. Every time they block one hole—the 41,000 donations needed each day, a new natural disaster that requires the acquisition and distribution of thousands of new donations—another emergency threatens to deplete their resources, which brings us to not-too-optimistic headlines like U-T San Diego’s “Local blood shortage worsens,” a close cousin of “Blood Good, Supply Bad.”

*

One by one, the donors in line in front of me were escorted to beds, plugged into blood sucking machines, and ejected back into the wild with a soft drink and their free loot. When it was finally my turn, I asked my nurse if I could have a juice.

“We have apple and orange,” she said, then, in a sudden, manic twist, added: “But we just got Pepsi and Mountain Dew!” She plugged me into her blood-bot and I lay back and drank my Pepsi in a napkin cozy, watching my blood travel through a silly straw into a bag on the floor as she explained the new donating procedure I had volunteered for.

“All we’re taking is your platelets,” she said.

I nodded in understanding. Of course. My platelets! Who needs those? I pictured a cabinet in my dining room full of fancy dishes, my platelets, withering away unused.

“The blood we extract today goes into this machine,” she continued. With her foot, she tapped what looked like a miniature crib on the floor rocking my blood back and forth, lulling it to sleep. “Once the machine is done separating your platelets, the rest of your blood will be returned back to you.”

I tried to hide my horror at this new revelation with my impression of an easygoing, I’m-not-freaking-out-at-all smile. Inside, I tried to process what she meant by your blood will be returned back to you. They were taking my blood out, sending it to a bag on the floor, then shoving it back in where it would touch all my important inside parts. This had to break the three-second rule.

Passing me my very own rubber ducky in a Ziploc bag, she instructed me to squeeze it every five seconds and left to help out other donors. Every few minutes she would come back, look at the bag that was slowly filling up with my blood, and ask, “ARE YOU OKAY?” as if she’d seen a spider crawl out of my veins, or just discovered that instead of blood, I was running on red Jello.

“I’m fine.”

Ten minutes would go by and again I would be pulled out of my phone’s trance by a shadow hovering over me.

“YOU STILL OKAY?”

“Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes, thank you.”

I thought she might call an ambulance, but then I remembered that I was already in one.

*

After the procedure, I called my best friend, Arthur, and we drove to the pizza place twenty minutes away to redeem my free voucher. Over cheese slices and Coke, we played “Would You Rather?” It was the middle of the day so we had the restaurant all to ourselves, him in his Christina Aguilera t-shirt and me picking at my nail polish. A vaguely Italian song chimed in through the speakers. Would you rather have spaghetti fingers or always look like you just came back from a long, grueling run? Would you rather only be able to bathe in soup or be Osmosis from Osmosis Jones? Arthur phoned his in: Would you rather be an octopus or a squid?

“If I choose squid, is someone hunting me?” I asked, attempting to add drama to his scenario.

“Why would someone be hunting you?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m a monster?”

He told me that when people are cremated, most of the ashes they give to the families belong to someone else. I told him that when I die, I want my ashes scattered over an ant-hill. I confessed that I lied on the questionnaire.

“It’s so weird that they make you choose,” he said. “You can either save someone’s life or you can check that you’ve had gay sex and let them die.”

“I kind of wish I was cool enough to tell them I’m gay,” I told him. “Like, as an act of revolt?”

I wondered what that might look like. Putting myself first.

A little boy named something devastatingly cute, a name only a kid can pull off: Max. As an adult, he will go by Maxwell, but for now, he’s just Max. He has a gap tooth and freckles, the kind of kid you can see on the cover of an off-brand box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch. He has a rare cancer, so rare his parents are considering an experimental treatment that requires huge amounts of blood. We share a blood type.

“Sorry Max,” activist me would say. “I can’t donate. I’m making a political statement.”

*

Back on campus, it was still too early for my night class, so I made my way to my favorite quiet spot on the third floor of the cafeteria to read. Usually I have no trouble lugging my body up three flights of stairs, but this time I felt nauseated, so I gave up my original plan and saddled myself into the nearest seat I could find. At the table next to mine, an athletic couple studied silently from a mess of books and papers laid out before them, the man pausing every few minutes to take a gulp from a Herculean gallon of water.

I looked down to the first floor where I could see hundreds of students dashing in and out, a few daring ones riding their skateboards right through the cafeteria, late to class again. Another hurried student stepped on a corner of the Pegasus insignia printed on the floor. University legend warns that stepping on the Pegasus ensures that you will never graduate from the school, which is why it’s usually partitioned off by velvet ropes. An icy shiver passed through me. Rubbing my hands for warmth, I noticed that they were a shade lighter than usual, and suddenly they shifted into a blur and I couldn’t discern what color they were at all. I stood up to go to the bathroom, hoping I could make it to a stall before throwing up.

Sometime later, I woke up on the floor crumpled up in a ball and blind. I could hear two girls exchanging feverish words next to me, but we were separated by a wall of black.

First one told the other: “He’s waking up.”

Then, to me: “You passed out. Are you okay?”

I closed my eyes, figuring it wouldn’t make much of a difference because I couldn’t see with them open anyway.

“Don’t go to sleep!” a voice ordered, shaking my arm back into existence.

“You’re probably dehydrated,” someone speculated. A red-headed blob gradually came into focus.

“Can you bring me water?” I asked, feeling self-conscious.

Was I being too demanding?

I once heard on the radio that people regularly die choking alone in restaurants. Instead of asking anyone for help, they rush to the bathroom not wanting to bother anyone. They pretend they’re just having a run-of-the-mill teary-eyed, claw-at-your-neck coughing fit, and once inside they choke quietly by themselves.

People don’t want heroes. We want to be able to save ourselves. I closed my eyes again.

You’re not going to die in such a wimpy away, I told myself. If you’re going to die, it better be being hunted as a squid.

A third girl came up to me with water. I snatched it from her hands, but within seconds she took it back.

“Actually, if you’re dehydrated, you shouldn’t be drinking water,” she said.

I now saw that I was surrounded by a swarm of white girls. Maybe I was already dead, I thought, or in limbo: an infinite series of white girls bringing me water and taking it away.

“Are you sure?” I wanted to ask, gazing longingly at the cup of water in her hands, but I was too confused and out of it to reason with her. Instead I just curled back into my ball. Maybe she’s pre-med or something.

Soon, the paramedics arrived. They measured my blood pressure and told me I was dehydrated. They told me I needed water.

“Have you had any water?” one asked. I looked at the cup the girl brought me, still full on a table too far for me to reach.

“No.”

They plugged me into an IV. An Evil-Dead quantity of blood squirted out of my arm. The paramedic wiped it with a tissue.

“Why did you donate blood? For the movie tickets?” he asked straightaway, maybe not his first time doing this.

Partly. But don’t forget that I’m a selfless hero.

“Was it worth it?” he asked, not waiting for a response to his first questions.

I leaned my head against the wall and felt the cool liquid from the IV travel through my veins, a million microscopic glasses of ice water splashing along the insides of my limbs, gradually waking my body up.

“You have two options,” he went on. “You can go to the hospital or you can stay here and drink a lot of water.”

I am asked to monetize my life. I could probably survive if I stay, I calculated half-conscious. This wasn’t my first time fainting. A few months before, while staying at my mother’s house, I sliced my thumb trying to open a can of tuna. I woke up a few hours later in her bed. I had passed out. Not sure what to do, she had simply dragged my body to her bedroom and resumed cooking dinner.

“I’m really poor and have really bad insurance, so I think I’ll just stay here,” I said.

“You will almost definitely pass out again if you stay,” he countered, more stern.

Then why even give me the option? Is this some kind of fun game paramedics play: put the patient in a life or death situation, ask them to choose death, then force them to live anyway? Still, I thought I had a shot at making it on my own. There was a water fountain a few feet away. I was lucid. I said out loud, “I’m lucid,” figuring that anyone who can remember the word lucid must be it. Besides, if I couldn’t afford breakfast, I sure as hell didn’t have money for an emergency room.

“I think I’ll stay,” I repeated.

“We’re taking you to the hospital.”

*

In the ambulance, I discovered that my phone’s flashlight feature would not turn off. Thank God: I had broken my fall with my new cellphone I’d saved up for months for. I turned it around in my hands, not really sure what I was looking for. A hidden magical switch that would help me in exactly this kind of situation? I didn’t care about the phone. I was worried the battery would die and I wouldn’t be able to call anyone to pick me up from the hospital. I had twelve percent battery left. I called my mom. No answer. Eleven percent. Again. No answer. I called my brother and went straight to voicemail. Nine percent. I called Arthur. He’s coming.

Later, I will find out that after my call, he rushed out of bed and ran out of his parent’s house, frantic to see that I was okay. His mom was maneuvering into the driveway, coming home from work, and parked an inch from the driver’s seat of his car thinking it would be funny if she made it hard for him to get inside. Assuming he was overreacting over her innocent joke, she roared into her steering wheel laughing hysterically as he flailed his arms and shouted at her to cut it out. Meanwhile, I was in the back of an ambulance plugged into an IV with a computer printing out a series of zig-zag lines quantifying my life. I still think she’s funny.

I went back to trying to fix the light.

“You trying to take a selfie in an ambulance?” the new, younger paramedic riding with me asked, disapproval thick in his voice.

My eyes jumped from the tribal tattoo on his arm to the hurricane of wires coming out of mine. I didn’t answer, not wanting to explain myself to him.

“You got a girlfriend?”

Again, I looked down at my cut-offs and painted nails to what I thought was an obvious declaration of what type of boy I am.

“There’s lots of girls around here,” he continued.

I folded and told him that I didn’t have a girlfriend. Not really a lie. A part of me worried that if I told him I’m gay he would purposely mess something up. I was plugged into a lot of tubes and they all presented an opportunity for an “accident.”

“Is my water level thing better now?” I asked him.

“Your water level thing?”

“I don’t know what it’s called,” I said, “but the first paramedic told me I was dehydrated and needed water and he kept looking at a measurement I think might have been my blood pressure. I’m not sure though.”

“Are you pre-med?” he asked.

“No.”

“Thank God.”

“Well, how is it?” I asked, caring less and less about the possibility of an accident now.

“It’s fine.”

“What kind of tests will they do on me at the hospital?” I went on, running up the tab in my head.

“Are you anxious?” he asked.

“Only when I’m in an ambulance.”

*

It had been over an hour since I had fainted. Even so, the paramedics insisted that I be wheeled into the hospital on a gurney. A nurse behind the reception desk looked up at me.

“There’s my sixty-three,” she smiled.

“I’m your sixty-three,” I said back, then turned to the young paramedic. “What does that mean?”

“It means you’re her sixty-third patient today. You win a prize.”

“Like an Olive Garden gift card?” I asked, or free healthcare?

Her eyes flashed to my hands as I fumbled with my phone.

“Need a charger?” she asked.

“Yes! Please!”

“I’ll go get one for you,” she said, getting up from her station. She pushed through a set of double-doors and moved into the room next door. I never saw her again.

Classic hospital prank.

From there, I was wheeled into an emergency room about the size of a walk-in closet.

“Do I have to do these tests?” I asked my doctor. “I feel perfectly fine. There’s no way I

can afford this.”

“You look fine,” he said. “I’ll just give you another IV and you can go.”

My mind flashed back to the water fountain that was only a few feet away, the cup of water probably still on the table. Arthur arrived just as my doctor was about to go, his curly hair still matted down in the back from his nap. On his way out, the doctor warned me, “Watch out. The person you least want to see is on her way.” Minutes later, an Ursula-like woman entered the room pushing a laptop on a cart.

“Name?” she asked by way of introduction. Date of birth. Social Security number. Religion? At this, I felt myself losing my temper. Why did it matter what my religion was? In case you die, a voice whispered in my ear. The winds were betraying me. What do they do for agnostics? I wanted to ask. Throw their ashes on ant-hills?

“None.”

“Health insurance card?”

“How much is this going to cost?” I asked, digging through the several-month-old receipts and expired coupons stashed in my wallet.

“I can’t tell you,” she said. “You’ll get a bill in the mail.”

But I’m right here. Let’s skip the middle man.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Well, I can tell you your health insurance kicks in after $900. After $900, you pay ten percent.”

After $900? Ten percent of what?

“Don’t worry, though,” she said. “You’re on your mom’s insurance. She’ll pay for it!” I smiled politely, again doing my impression of someone who’s got it all under control. Of course, my mom will just hock one of the diamonds she bought with her glamorous, high-paying gig at Starbucks. No worries.

“It’s fine! I’ll just sell some more of my blood for money!” I yelled, but she was already out of the room.

Arthur, who has had cancer and been through the hospital bureaucracy before, explained: “Your health insurance only kicks in after the first $900. Anything before that, you have to pay.”

We waited ten minutes. Twenty. I could hear the nurses in the reception area talking about Game of Thrones. A main character had died, apparently. They were distraught. Thirty minutes. The monotonous beeps prompted by the wire connected to my finger started alternating their rhythm. Beep. Three seconds. Beep. Sometimes two consecutive beep, beeps—no intermission. I tore the wire off, feeling like a bad-ass action movie star, except twenty-two and puny. The same tired, limping woman walked back and forth down the hallway. There was a glitch in the Matrix.

“If you don’t go to the reception area and bring me a doctor, I’m going to get primal,” I told Arthur. He hurried out.

*

Driving out of the hospital, it was finally okay for me to be gay. Arthur blasted our best friend song on his CD player, B*Witched’s “Blame it on the Weatherman.” We listened to it when he was first diagnosed with cancer, now when I was released from the hospital, and years later driving by our old club, Pulse. Each time, we blamed it all on the weatherman, pleading at the top of our lungs for him to leave us alone. We stopped at a convenience store to pick up a bottle of water, my total coming out to a little over two dollars. I winced at the idea of paying for water. A week later, my bill would arrive notifying me that I owe $3,412.67 to the hospital for donating blood. A measly sum to a hero.

We talked about boys. I slowly came back to life describing Zac Efron on the cover of whatever magazine was in the checkout line, laughing in hindsight at the paramedic’s girlfriend comment.

“I asked the paramedics to let me stay,” I told Arthur, taking a massive swig from my water. “Even if it meant I would die.”

“Well, now neither of us can donate,” he told me.

“What do you mean?”

“In high school, on our blood drive day, I tried to donate,” he said. “But when the nurse handed me my questionnaire, I didn’t really know any better, so I marked that I wasn’t a virgin.”

He told me she informed him he would not be able to donate. When he asked why, she explained that it was because his blood wasn’t safe. The bus was packed with other high school students, jocks who agreed to be heroes so long as they could get out of fourth-period Biology.

“Everyone heard,” he said. “So I hid in a bathroom stall until the end of the blood drive so I wouldn’t have to go back to class.”

I watched as his grip on the steering wheel tensed, his knuckles white.
“Did you notice how all the guys that worked at that hospital were beautiful Aerie models?” I asked.

We played Would You Rather all the way to the university parking lot where he offered to drive behind me till I made it home. I accepted, letting him be the hero this time. I didn’t want to choke alone in the bathroom.

*

In the grand scheme of things, gay men donating blood might rank as a low-stakes issue, especially when compared to high publicity causes like marriage equality, the right to serve in the military, and LGBTQ bullying. After all, donating blood is inconvenient and time-consuming. Shouldn’t gay and bisexual men be grateful to have their hour and fifteen minutes spared? Why, that’s enough time to watch a couple episodes of Golden Girls and have a quick round of high-risk sex!

Amidst the controversy of whether gay men are too great a gamble to the nation’s blood supply, it’s the less overt threats that come with current discriminatory eligibility requirements that have largely gone ignored: that of supporting the false belief that heterosexual people who participate in high-risk behavior are at low risk for HIV infection, the danger that comes with reinforcing negative stereotypes about gay and bisexual people. When the American Red Cross cites that the two most common reasons people choose not to give blood are “never thought about it” and “I don’t like needles,” it suggests that gay and bisexual men are not interested in helping others and don’t particularly feel like being heroes, which is problematic, particularly when blood drives occur in workplaces, high schools, and colleges where donors may worry about the employment or social implications of not donating, all because needles hurt.

This battle isn’t Stonewall and the small victory that will come from gay men being eligible to donate blood will not drastically improve the lives of the LGBTQIA community. Yet, despite the near triviality of this issue, if anything, because of it, because lesbian and gay marriage is now a reality and because gay bullying is gradually becoming more of a taboo, it is the small battles that need to become a focus of the gay civil rights movement. It is the institutionalized homophobia, like that of a gay Iowa teenager who took his life and was not eligible to donate his eyeballs because his mother could not answer whether he was sexually active, that is the most insidious of all, because it hides under its apparent insignificance.

What’s most nefarious of all is that the FDA revising its policy on gay men to a one-year deferral as opposed to its previous lifetime ban is being heralded by many as a courageous move, as if the perception of equality is just as meaningful as equality itself.

***

Original art by Eva Azenaro-Acero, an artist, writer, and musician living in Chicago. Their work has appeared in Fanzine, Witchcraft Mag, The Parks Exhibition Center, and more. Find them on Instagram @birdlets or online at evaazenaroacero.squarespace.com.

Longreads

The Forgotten History of the World’s First Trans Clinic

There is a moral panic about transgender issues sweeping America. While it is raging most viciously in the Republican Party — see: the odious speeches at CPAC last week; Tennessee banning drag shows and gender-affirming health care for minors; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requesting information from public colleges about students who have sought hormone treatment and reassignment surgeries — the panic’s tentacles extend much further. There is no better moment, then, to read historian Brandy Schillace’s piece about the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking facility in interwar Germany that heralded a just, humane future for gay, trans, and non-binary individuals, until fascism arrived. Schillace is at work on a book about the institute, and you can also listen to her talk about it on a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered:

That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.

Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.

When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.

The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.

An und für sich

Rebuilding the Closet

Gender and sexuality are a spectrum. In common discourse, we lose sight of what that means. Very Online approaches to gender and sexuality seem to say that gender and sexuality are a spectrum, but everyone is at a very specific and static spot on that spectrum. That fits with the more everyday discourse that was able to absorb the normalization of homosexuality on the condition that every individual clearly fits into one specific box. But that’s not how it is, and everyone probably understands that. Even among people who are exclusively heterosexual, there is a spectrum of how attracted they are to the opposite sex — how many partners they seek, how much monogamy is a struggle for them, how sexually motivated they are at all, etc. Enough people seem to be able to rest more or less content with monogamy that the whole thing basically “works,” but if we’re being honest, there are some people for whom it was never going to happen and who therefore never should have been expected to get married or have exclusive relationships.

Everything relating to sex and gender is like that. On the spectrum of same-sex desire, for instance, there are those for whom it’s a non-negotiable exclusive preference and others who could make a basically heterosexual lifestyle work, and a whole range in between. We see this from history — there are a lot of men, for instance, who were known to be primarily same-sex attracted but were able to hold together a marriage and have children. By the standards of the time, those marriages may have even been relatively happy! And on gender identity, there are people who absolutely need to transition or else their life will be constant suffering and others who can tolerate living in public as their assigned identity as long as they have some private release, and a whole range in between.

The political strategy of the “closet” was to require those people who exist in the more liminal spaces to hide, then relentlessly stigmatize and persecute the people for whom conformity was simply never going to be an option. The latter incentivizes the former — you’d only choose to live as homosexual or trans if the cost of denying it was worse than the social costs of acknowledging it. All but the youngest generations are familiar with this dynamic at first-hand. Every 80s kid, including myself, looks back and is horrified at the casual homophobia that was flung around the schoolyard in those tense days just before public acceptance of homosexuality gained critical mass. We were being groomed, from a very young age, to be homophobes. And the goal of that project was emphatically not to convert homosexuals or trans people, at least not among intelligent conservatives. The goal was to use the non-negotiable homosexuals and trans people to make sure that everyone who could stand to conform, would conform. Those who couldn’t conform and were never going to be able to conform were made into living sacrifices to normative heterosexuality.

That’s why the strategy of coming out of the closet was so powerful. The entire system depended on the idea that sexual minorities were freaks and monsters, and the majority could sustain that belief because so many people with those inclinations kept them secret. Once they stopped keeping it secret — often at great personal cost to the earliest generation of activists — the dynamic could no longer hold. Sexual minorities were not those strange scary outsiders. Everyone knew someone who belonged to a sexual minority, often intimately. The strategy was so powerful that it led to the legalization of gay marriage by a conservative Supreme Court — a move that would have been unthinkable in my childhood, but seemed obvious and long overdue when it finally happened.

Now the first generation of children is growing up for whom this new regime of gender and sexuality is normal. And what many — including myself — would now like to see is an inverse of the strategy of the closet. Instead of a default assumption of conformity unless the non-normative is totally irresistible, the approach should be to allow young people to experiment and see what really works for them. Hence young people should ideally be allowed to follow their curiosity and attraction before claiming a sexual orientation. More kids will wind up dating or even having some intimate contact with people of the same sex than wind up “being” homosexual in the long haul, and that’s okay and natural.

The same would apply to gender identity. In the past, only those who were in indisputable agony could pursue some kind of gender reassignment, and only at the cost of pathologizing themselves. Now, however, people who are uncomfortable with their gender identity — which, if we’re honest, includes almost everyone, at least at some times and to some degree — should be able to experiment, including living publicly as a member of the target gender (i.e., “socially transitioning”). The assumption is that more people are going to experiment than wind up adopting a gender identity other than the one assigned at birth, and especially more than wind up surgically transitioning. And that’s okay!

In contrast to the closet system, which aimed to churn out as many passable cisgendered heterosexuals as feasible, this system aims to make sure that no one whose life would have been enriched by non-normative gender or sexual practice is missed. The reality of evolution probably indicates that the majority of people will still remain other-gender attracted and have gender identities that correspond with that assigned at birth. But the number of people who wind up claiming non-normative identities will be larger than it was under conditions of systematic persecution and repression.

And the number of people who temporarily try out those other identities can be expected to balloon, given the realities of the teenage libido and the quotidian body-horror of going through puberty. More people are going to pursue that faint stirring of attraction to someone of the same sex when they don’t have to worry about being beaten up after school (including by that cute boy or girl) and more people are going to see if living as the opposite gender is the solution to their discomfort with their own body than they would in a situation where such a thing would have been simply unthinkable — both conditions that held during my lifetime (meaning during the lifetime of people who are raising young kids today).

All of that is happening now, at least in areas where policy enshrines some kind of openness to gender and sexual minorities. The fact that it is happening was predictable, and it is good. It opens up a situation where fewer people have to live lives of quiet despair for the sake of fulfilling an arbitrary role. It is the one way in which our children’s lives might be better than ours.

And so of course, a vocal minority of parents absolutely hate it. In response to this massive, positive social change, they are trying to reinstitute the closet. The strategies are the same as always — tarring all sexual minorities as pedophiles, equating all non-normative practices with the most extreme (e.g., acting as though social transitioning is tantamount to irreversible surgery), stripping gender and sexual minorities of basic political rights, etc., etc. The goal cannot be to eliminate homosexuality and trans experience — every intelligent person knows that’s impossible. The goal, rather, is to make the cost of expressing homosexual inclination or trans identity so high that the marginal few who could go either way find a way to make conformity work. In other words, a hard core of people who have no choice but to express homosexual inclination or trans identity will have to live thwarted, persecuted lives to marginally increase the odds that some bigot’s son or daughter will suck it up and settle into a “normal” marriage and produce a grandchild or two, so that the next generation can in turn suck it up and conform as well.

It’s an ugly political strategy that draws in ugly people and makes them uglier. People are going to die — whether by vigilante violence, or “gay panic” or “trans panic,” or suicide — because of this. And all to perpetuate a form of life that isn’t really making anyone happy at the end of the day. Why would people spend their lives and tarnish their souls for this? They claim it’s out of love, but I think it expresses a profound hatred of their own children, or at least of what their children might be or become apart from them. Perhaps it’s even a hatred of the part of themselves that wishes it could have had free range to experiment! It’s probably not helpful to speculate about that too much in individual cases, though. The larger reality is that the political strategy of the closet was a brutal, violent system, and a brutal, violent system produces brutalized, violated people who go on to be brutal and violent.

And it is by no means obvious that they will fail in their ambition to reinstitute the closet! The strategies are right there, familiar and ready to hand. For all but the youngest generation, they are a sad kind of muscle memory. All it takes is for the forces of repression to seem stronger and suddenly a lot of people will find a way to conform — as we can already see in the rank cowardice of most ostensibly “liberal” politicians and commentators on trans issues. Surely we are all old enough to know that progress is not automatic, that social justice does not depend on the date on the calendar, that every gain is reversible. The acceptance of minority gender and sexual identities was a contingent historical achievement, and allowing those gains to be reversed will have been a contingent historical failure — on the part of people who responded to irrational hatred with a pose of “reasonableness,” flinching in the face of a bully just as most of us did in the schoolyard.

NYT > Education

Pensacola Christian College Cancels Concert Over Gay Singer, Drawing Backlash

Public Discourse

Sex Work Is Scaling

When the economy went virtual during the coronavirus pandemic during 2020, so did sex. The combination of loneliness and financial anxiety created a boom for OnlyFans, the online platform where anyone can join to sell unique content (almost always sexual) to their “fans.” The Guardian reported that the number of OnlyFans users grew from 7.5 million users in November 2019 to a staggering 85 million in December 2020—which is an increase of more than 1000 percent.

But as the world has reopened, much of sex has stayed virtual. OnlyFans has continued to expand: TechJury, a software review company, reports that in 2023, “over 170 million users have registered an OnlyFans account, including 1.5 million creators.” This means that purchasable intimacy is scaling: never before has sex been more available for such low costs.

As the sex work industry grows, debates about it have intensified. Some proponents focus on decriminalizing sex work, arguing that it is a matter of life and death. Others focus on moral justifications, pointing to arguments about bodily autonomy, the extra income such work provides, and even the fulfilling nature of the work.

These defenses overlook intractable harms caused by a growing sex work market. Sex work takes advantage of underage women who easily bypass OnlyFans’ weakly enforced age restrictions, and low-income women desperate for quick cash. It also has a corrupting effect on human well-being and dignity, since it denies the fullest meaning and power of sex. And it impacts the broader culture, encouraging men and women to commodify one another.

The sex work industry’s barbarity is apparent in the ways it manages its clients. Last May, the New York Times magazine published a report by Ezra Marcus on the “The ‘E-Pimps’ of OnlyFans.” These e-pimps are exactly what they sound like: middlemen who serve as mediators between digital sex workers and their clients. E-pimps also manage communications between digital sex workers and their clients. They hire chatters, who are ghost writers for OnlyFans “creators.” Marcus writes: “These chatters work in shifts, responding to incoming messages and reaching out to new subscribers, trying to coax them into buying expensive pay-per-view videos.” He continues:

The subscribers presumably think they’re talking directly to the woman in the videos, and it is the job of the chatter to convincingly manifest that illusion. Their clientele—typically horny, lonely men—make it pretty easy. “Our best customers come to us not so much to buy content as they come to us to just feel a connection,” reads a post on Think Expansion’s website. This desire, the post explains, is a pimp’s bread and butter, “e-” or otherwise: “Hustling simps has been an art since the beginning of time!”

In other words, pimps and their chatters use male loneliness as an opportunity to coax as much money out of clients as possible. Perhaps some people applaud this as an example of the unfettered market working its magic. There’s a demand for companionship, people are willing to provide it at market price, and product delivery is streamlining.

But these market defenses too often ignore the real nature of demand, and the ways outside circumstances shape it. Our demands are not always on equal footing with one another: some things tempt us even though we know, ultimately, we don’t want them. Desires conflict with each other. Most of the men paying for digital sex would probably prefer freely chosen, genuine companionship rather than flirting with men in Europe, Africa, and Southeast Asia posing as beautiful women. But when counterfeit intimacy is just one click away, it creates a demand for something that men might not really want, but that is born of desperation or even addiction.

Digital sex work, like pornography, is probably reinforcing incel status and even turning men into incels. The sex recession has been widely documented at this point. In an April 2022 New Yorker essay, Zoe Heller cited some striking data: “In a study released in 2020, nearly one in three men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four reported no sexual activity in the past year.” Many users on OnlyFans are weary from the hardcore violence of porn, and have turned to OnlyFans for something that more closely resembles the intimacy of a relationship. It’s not hard to see how men might opt for these e-girlfriends and might shrink away from relationships with flesh and blood women who, like any human being, have needs, opinions, and imperfections.

Scaled sex work, therefore, manipulates and exploits men, and distorts the broader sexual environment. But what about the women who are sex workers? Is it harmful to them, or is it an edgy but ultimately fun way to make money? Is it a necessary revenue stream for women who would otherwise be bereft of economic opportunity?

For many sex workers, their experience is not as glamorous as the industry’s defenders suggest. In an unintentionally revealing conversation, Reason Magazine asked a sex worker and data science researcher named Aella to “explain the class differences in types of sex work.” Aella responds:

I did a survey of a bunch of escorts and found that the amount of bad things they encountered, like sexual assault … was pretty strongly correlated with their price range. Basically, the more money you charge, you’re pricing yourself out of more sketchy clientele. The people who are going to be paying you $1,000 an hour are not going to sexually assault you. They’re a lawyer or a doctor or a politician or someone who just doesn’t want to mess with that.

Educated, attractive, and interesting sex workers like Aella can get away with charging high prices and dodging “sketchy” stuff like rape. Those at the top of the sex work food chain avoid much of the violence and harm those at the bottom experience. As a significant body of research indicates, there are disturbing links between sex work, porn, and human trafficking.

Even for online sex workers who are not trafficked into the industry, some turn to digital sex work out of economic desperation. Again, this might seem like a defense of sex work: it offers income to those who need it. But on OnlyFans, only a small percentage of “creators” are making a good income. Another 2021 New York Times magazine report noted that “90 percent of creators take home less than $12,000 a year.” In other words, the vast majority of women are getting just a few hundred dollars here and there.

Yet even if all these women were making enough money selling digital sex to live comfortably, selling and buying sex is discordant with human well-being. Unlike other actions we perform with our bodies, the ramifications of sex are not confined to the activity itself. Someone can sell their labor mowing a lawn, but they probably won’t stay up for nights wondering if they did anything wrong or embarrassing while cutting the grass, desperately hoping that the lawn’s owner loves them, or anxious that a baby will emerge. Even when pregnancy isn’t a concern, sex stirs our inner lives. The clichés are true: sex can be like a drug because, when not tempered by self-restraint and social norms, desire for it can control the rest of one’s life. It’s something that’s too sacred and powerful to be bought and sold.

The power of sex is apparent in the ways its ramifications extend beyond the two people who do it. This is no less true of paid sex: as the sex work industry grows and moves online, it encourages a transactional view of relationships in mainstream culture. To borrow an image that Unherd writer Mary Harrington has used, our attitudes about sex and sexual practices are part of a broader ecosystem. The mainstreaming of virtual sex work means that sex will become more and more commodified for everyone else. Thanks to the rise of “sexfluencers,” women who have no connection to sex work but have an online presence regularly get approached by men requesting sexual images. And “buying” sex with culturally approved gestures is a mainstay of dating culture: two or maybe three dinner dates is the standard price of going to bed with a Tinder match. Women in this environment must often choose between sleeping with a man they just met or being ghosted by him since he can easily find someone else who’s willing to put out. The more sex is for sale online, the more likely these trends will continue apace.

Some like sex advice columnist Dan Savage have argued that all relationships are transactional, even marriages; so sex work is actually not fundamentally different than any other sexual relationship. Yet the idea that all relationships are transactional and therefore morally equivalent relies on an overly hazy, expansive definition of “transaction.” It’s true that marriage is transactional insofar as it’s mutually beneficial and an exchange between two people. But what marriage exchanges is self-sacrifice and, if it’s working properly, it makes people grow in virtue. Exchanging sex for money, by contrast, gives the buyer a sense of ownership over the product (another’s body), and requires no sacrifice other than a dent in the wallet.

The more sex work scales, the easier it will be for men and women to see one another as commodities to be used and discarded—all the while dulling their natural longing for love and companionship. We should not only make every effort to remove sex work (digital or otherwise) from the market, but also to make it utterly unthinkable.

The Paris Review

Three Is a More Interesting Number than Two: A Conversation with Maggie Millner

Maggie Millner. Photograph by Sarah Wagner Miller.

It’s easy to feel happy for a friend who has suddenly, and seemingly irrevocably, fallen in love. It’s just as easy to wonder, privately, if they might, one day, fall out of it. Love stories, like rhymes, are initially generative. Both begin with the promise of infinite possibility: the couple—and the couplet—could go anywhere! But anywhere always winds up being somewhere, and that somewhere is very often a dead end. 

Couplets, Maggie Millner’s rhapsodic debut, is officially described as a novel in verse, but the poems that comprise it buck constantly against their generic container. Some are in prose, others are in rhyme and meter, and all are spoken by a young woman straddling two relationships and a shifting sense of self. Affair narratives are all about reversed chronologies: they end where love begins. But when the speaker leaves her long-term boyfriend for a first-time girlfriend, her timelines get all mixed up: she becomes a “conduit / between them: a conversation they conducted / with my mouth.” 

Couplets is preoccupied by triangulations. The speaker is intensely jealous of her new girlfriend’s other girlfriend, a novelist who every other weekend also has a “tryst” with a married hedge fund manager and his lover, who is a novelist, too. When he ejaculates into one of the novelists, the other pretends that she is a voyeur, peering in on her competitor, the hedge fund manager’s wife. Meanwhile, the protagonist, a poet, finds that her own love triangle produces shifting meaning. She and her lovers are bound together, but she can’t seem to harness them. “Our own story made no sense / to me and twisted up whenever I tried / writing it.” 

At the end of January, Maggie and I spoke over Zoom about the language that attends love and the desires that animate the life of any writer, who will always find herself, no matter the genre, struggling between the impulse to act and the compulsion to self-analyze.

INTERVIEWER

Was there a moment when it suddenly became clear to you that you were writing a book, as opposed to a series of poems?

 MILLNER

I hadnt imagined writing a single, book-length narrative poem. When we learn to write poems, we usually learn to write these very small, discrete lyric objects, and so I had always imagined that my first book would be a collection of things that I had foraged from various years of my life. But because I had two year-long fellowships, the ostensible goal of which were to write a book, I was able to be more ambitious. The momentum of this particular poetic form took hold, and I followed it until I had the bulk of a manuscript. Then I realized the prose sections also belonged in it—that the verse needed to be aerated. 

 INTERVIEWER

What was missing in the couplet form that the prose was able to provide?

 MILLNER

There’s a relentlessness to writing in rhyming couples that for the reader can be exhausting and claustrophobic. I was concerned about the lack of formal surprise. But also, life has formal qualities, and a relationship model is a formal question. The book was also very much about putting things in dialectical relation to each other, so I realized that there needed to be some other secondary mode or interlocutor. 

INTERVIEWER

The title of the book, Couplets, is a pun, but I also felt it to be a kind of joke, because the couples keep being interrupted by the intrusion of third parties: the speaker’s girlfriend’s girlfriend and the speaker’s ex. I wonder if you find this third necessary in matters of love—if the two depend on it. 

MILLNER

Three is a more interesting number than two. There’s a romance to the love triangle. There’s an inherent asymmetry, a more volatile set of relationships. Our desires are most manifest when we’re being pulled in two directions, when there are disparate, orthogonal, or even oppositional forces inside us. Those are the moments when complex self-knowledge happens. The times when you have to prioritize multiple, competing selves lead to personal transformation, I think. 

I was thinking of Aristophanes’ idea about the source of romantic love: that people were originally conjoined and then split in half, so we’re doomed to wander the earth until we find our missing counterpart, at which point we become complete. His myth actually makes a provision for gay couples, but it unfolds only within a strictly binary gender system, and only within the premise that there’s a single lasting partner for each of us. If you depart from the idea that the couple is the default, preordained arrangement, suddenly the constructed dimensions of relational structures start to open up. The book’s jacket copy says something about coming out: one woman’s coming-out, coming undone. But I do think those two things are discrete. The consummation of queer desire is a realization that anticipates a later realization, which is that relationships are not inherently meant to be durable.

INTERVIEWER

In Couplets, the only mention of coming out is immediately related to climaxing. Was it important to you to describe this supposedly outward and public-facing process as something very intimate?

 MILLNER

The speaker is in part resistant to that climactic, self-actualizing narrative because she is also very reluctant to renounce her previous relationship. If we code her as stepping into some presupposed fate, it turns her previous life into a pretext for this other, truer moment. The cultural incentives to read things that way are both very appealing and very abundant. But the reality is that she still feels real love for her ex, which doesn’t neatly coexist with the role that she is stepping into; the relationship with her ex has an integrity that this book wants to honor. I don’t feel that time is teleological and progressive: that we’re always heading somewhere, but we’re not there yet. I believe that everyone has many lives.  

 INTERVIEWER

Much of the story of these two couples takes place in a rapidly gentrifying Bedford-Stuyvesant, and the highly specific proper nouns that anchor your speaker to a sense of place and social milieu aren’t easy to square in verse. Eckhaus Latta, Saraghina: I find them to be rather ugly words. Why did you include them?

 MILLNER

Through this new relationship, the speaker is stepping into an identity, but she’s also stepping into a social class and milieu that is not entirely comfortable to her, where queerness is the opposite of marginal, and where being a person in an alternative relationship model is actually quite common. She is hyper-attentive to the signifiers that attend this world, which she too finds ugly (and alluring). On the one hand, she longs to be naturalized into it, but on the other, there is also this inevitable friction between the person she knows herself to be within the social contexts that she has occupied, and the world that these proper nouns stand in for. Part of why this isn’t a more triumphant coming out story has to do with the fact that queer life, within the circles she’s in, doesn’t attract public shame. On the contrary, there’s social cachet in stepping into that identity. Which is not to elide the homophobia and queerphobia that continue to dominate most spaces in this country, or the elders and activists who have made communities like this one possible. But for the speaker, there’s something disingenuous about claiming her queerness only as a socially marginal identity.

INTERVIEWER

Toward the very end of the book, the narrator declares that in verse, as opposed to in prose, there are “barely any characters at all.” What do you think about the differences between character as it can be constructed in prose versus poetry?

 MILLNER

As contemporary readers of poetry, we often assume that the lyric “I” is the writing self, which does seem to preclude characterization, because that “I” is seen as pointing to a nonfictional human figure. But we’re wrong when we make the assumption that the “I” and the self are coextensive, even in poems that seem totally autobiographical. I want to be taken seriously as a maker of artifice, and I’m interested in inviting my readers away from that assumption, while also maintaining a sense of intimate disclosure, which we typically associate with the lyric poem. 

 INTERVIEWER

The book is classified as “a novel in verse,” and your speaker is, for a period, intensely jealous of her girlfriend’s girlfriend, who is a novelist. Although she never says so outright, you get the sense that she fears the story this novelist will make of her love for the speaker’s girlfriend will be more compelling than the story the speaker can make in verse. Which makes me wonder, how do you feel about novels and novelists?

 MILLNER

There might be more references to novelists in the book than to poets, which is reflective of the speaker’s taste and of a desire to be maximally immersed in experiences of every aesthetic kind. Novels provide that exhaustive immersion. It’s not that poems don’t, but poetry is more condensed and demanding and doesn’t act on attention the way that novelistic prose acts on attention. There’s a passivity and submissiveness that the reader of a novel gets to enjoy. The reader of poetry is invited to focus on granular particulate dimensions language—it’s a less submissive experience, or at least a less passive one.

As a poet, I have an inner conflict around the desire to write a novel while being a poet. I feel pulled in two different directions: I have a strong affinity for narrative, characterization, and durational storytelling, but it’s very hard for me to imagine turning off the poetic apparatus. The speaker is entertaining the possibility of being otherwise, of existing in a slightly different shape. She wonders if her life might be radically different if she could find a form that better reflects what’s going on with her.

INTERVIEWER

The couple form is said to be infinitely transformative, and yet many experience it as a restriction. The same can be said of rhyme and meter. On the one hand, it produces infinite meaning; on the other, it can feel laden with rules. How do you feel about living and working within these two forms? 

MILLNER

A foundational belief that undergirds this book is that one way to feel free, to experience agency within the repressive systems that govern our lives, is to historicize and try to understand the material conditions through which they came to be. The idea that to write in free verse is an exercise in unmediated personal expression presupposes so many things about what that form does. The shift away from rhyme and meter is extremely recent relative to literary history; the phrase “free verse” is only a century and a half old. It’s also somewhat oxymoronic; to me, as soon as anything becomes compulsory—as soon as it’s presented as the only available option—it doesn’t make much sense to attach the adjective free to it. Contemporary poets are generally expected, with the consensus of the commercial and academic institutions, to write in ways that sound more like speech than like oldfangled verse forms. So the idea that writing in an inherited form is a deviation from the default is, ironically, a basically presentist idea. Still, if radical forms are those that stage a departure from the status quo, we live in a time when using rhyme and meter can actually qualify. I would argue that they can even take on a new political charge when used by people historically excluded from the institutions that propagated them.

I feel similarly vexed about relationship structures. I do feel there is something amazing and irreplicable about the experience of being in a couple. And I don’t think that experience is only a cultural production—there’s something genuinely special that can happen between two individuals. Moments of intimacy with one other person have been the most transformative, spiritual moments of my life. The speaker of Couplets is magnetized toward those experiences. They’re real, they’re important, and they’re beautiful—they’re what it’s all about. But through those experiences, she finds herself unwittingly signed up for a certain kind of partnership—caught in a default she didn’t necessarily choose.

INTERVIEWER

Do you feel as if the couplet is a flawed form that we have to reinvent, to the extent that reinvention is possible? Or do you believe that the couple is an ideal form that is tarnished by lived reality? 

MILLNER

I think the issue is not with the structure of the couple, but with the telos of any relationship being eternity—the idea that the couple is a form you only step into and never out of. There is something exalted about the experience that two individuals can have with each other. Suddenly, you’re not really an individual, which is the profundity that you experience in the presence of an other. I feel very attached to that. But this book is an experiment in thinking through the question, What if staying together wasn’t the tacit objective of every relationship? In Poetic Closure, Barbara Herrnstein Smith writes that the couplet is a unit that enacts closure. Every two lines, there’s resolution. And so there’s a propulsive momentum to the form, but it also pretends to arrive at closure over, and over, and over again. There’s an assumption that the couple is a closed container, but the couplet unravels that assumption through repetition.

INTERVIEWER

I was struck by how resistant your speaker is to the endings that might otherwise be imposed upon her; she leaves her boyfriend but feels herself conducting his mannerisms in her relationship with her girlfriend, so that the two meet in her. Why were you drawn to that choreography, which seems impossible for a book about couples, written in couplets?

MILLNER

On the one hand, we are all familiar with the story of falling in love—we all know how it can go. And at the same time, we don’t, as a culture, have many urtexts about voluntary breakups, because divorce only stopped being taboo, like, yesterday. The idea that a marriage is composed of two subjects who are equally entitled to an experience of self-actualization is not very old—even younger than free verse! If we look at our great foundational texts, especially within the Western canon, relationships end nonconsensually, either by death or by some other nonmutual event. 

There’s a reason that literature is still being written about the fundamental question of how to know when a relationship is over, even if you still have an attachment to that person. We don’t have cultural scripts for those questions, and the way they are legislated is still retrograde and dependent on conservative notions of the sanctity of the nuclear family. The speaker of my book is very much reckoning with the residues of historical expectations of what women owe men. There’s a great temptation on the part of women in hetero partnerships to feel an outsized sense of responsibility for their demise. 

Maya Binyam is a contributing editor of the Review.

NYT - Education

Inside the College Board’s Revised African American Studies Curriculum

An entire unit on “the origins, mission and global influence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the Movement for Black Lives” has been deleted from the 2022 framework.