“After his executive order on sex, is Trump legally the first female president?”

The sophistry on display by these unhinged pseudo-liberals still surprises me.

They have beliefs from which they cannot be dissuaded, and they refuse to interpret information in a way that does not conform to their views. Two of their views are these: human sex is neither binary nor immutable, and the only “women’s” issue that Donald Trump cares about is abortion.

This approach to understanding the world is anti-scientific, and yet these are the people most likely to enjoin us all to #FollowTheScience. We are awash in irony.

The Executive Order in question defines women exactly as I and everyone else who understands basic biology and reality do:

Women are adult human females.

Adult and human are simple enough to define1. What, then, is a female?

My definition: Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes. Gametes are sex cells. In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes: female and male. Like “adult,” the term female applies across many species. Female is used to distinguish such individuals from males, who produce small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm, pollen).

The definition from Trump’s Executive Order:

“Female” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.

“Male” means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.

The language of “a person belonging, at conception” is used, I think, to point to the immutability of sex in humans.

The title of the Executive Order is Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.

This is precisely what the brilliantly written document sets out to do. Remarkably, it is also what the document succeeds in doing.

Share

And yet The Guardian makes the following incoherent argument:

Despite Trump’s decree that sex is “immutable”, the wording of his executive order left some room for interpretation. Indeed, some critics noted that because the undifferentiated genitalia that males and females share very early in fetal development are “phenotypically female”, you could argue he just made everyone legally female.

Nope. Wrong. So wrong. On at least two levels:

First: early in development, everything is undifferentiated. Decades ago, some researchers argued that early “undifferentiated” genitalia are phenotypically female, but they’re not. They may be just a bit more female-like than male-like, but are actually, again, simply undifferentiated2. Furthermore, at conception, there are no genitalia at all—nothing exists at that stage to be differentiated or not. Conception is when two cells come together—an egg, from the mother, who is definitionally female, and a sperm, from the father, who is definitionally male.

Second: Genitalia are not the same as gametes.

The Executive Order invokes “reproductive cells,” which are gametes. Gametes are also known by their specific instantiations in animals: eggs (large) and sperm (small). The Guardian responds by gnashing their teeth about genitalia.

Remember how we—that’s us scientifically informed and inclined people—used to think that baby girls were born already having all of the eggs that they would ever produce? Turns out that’s not true—girls do continue to produce eggs after they themselves are born. But it is true that, at birth, baby girls already have a huge number of eggs, one or more of which might in turn become that baby girl’s baby girl (or boy), many years hence.

Of course, at conception, the being in the process of being conceived has neither genitalia nor gametes. There is merely the developmental potential for gametes (and genitalia) of a particular sort. In most mammals (exceptions being found in duck-billed playtpi and echidnas), if the father’s sperm is X, the embryo is XX, and the embryo is female, and will go on to produce large gametes. If, in contrast, the father’s sperm is Y, the embryo is XY, and the embryo is male, and will go on to produce small gametes. The genotype (XX or XY) determines sex in mammals, but it does not define it. What sex you are is defined by the types of gametes that you produce (or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies).

Baby boys don’t produce eggs, any more than baby girls produce sperm.

Frankly, and I don’t usually take this approach, but I can’t believe this is that difficult for people. It’s just not that hard. Either everyone making these arguments is truly quite dim, or their motivated reasoning is making it impossible for them to follow through on the most basic logic.

Twisting themselves into pretzels to find flaw with Trump’s fantastic Executive Order on the reality of biological sex, ideologues forgot that all words beginning with g aren’t identical.

Genitalia ≠ gametes.

The Guardian piece continues:

“[Trump] just declared everyone a woman from conception, based on the language of the executive order,” Delaware representative Sarah McBride, the first openly transgender person elected to the US House of Representatives, told the Independent.”

Not true: Trump’s EO did not declare everyone “a woman from conception.”

True: Delaware elected an extraordinarily confused person to help make laws for the country. Thanks a lot Delaware.

More from The Guardian:

“Most scientists now reject the idea that sex is strictly binary.”

Bullshit.

They can keep playing their stupid, vapid, nonsense games—and it seems that they will—but if those of us on Team Reality keep pointing out how absurd and sad they are, ultimately, they will stop. I do believe this.

I also see that they will not go gentle into that good night.

Finally, the author of The Guardian piece makes the following argument:

I’ll tell you what is clear, though: Trump’s executive order has absolutely nothing to do with its stated intention of “defending women”. Rather, abortion-rights supporters are warning that its focus on sex being determined at “conception” seems to point to Trump’s embrace of “fetal personhood”: the idea that life begins at conception and that embryos and fetuses deserve full legal rights and protections.

This argument is impressive…impressive in being simultaneously utterly confident and completely unhinged. Inside this pseudo-liberal world view, Trump could not be working to defend women. That is impossible. Therefore this must be a cryptic attack on abortion rights.

They’re wrong, these people. I am not pretending to be a mind reader, and I don’t know what the future holds. But this Executive Order is fundamentally good for women. It never should have been necessary, but it is long overdue.

Subscribe now

Meanwhile, in the very same White House, nearly a hundred years prior, a raccoon arrived in time to be cooked for Thanksgiving dinner.

Instead, she was made into a pet and given free run of the place.

So writes Katherine Rundell in Vanishing Treasures, as excerpted by Harper’s Magazine in November 2024.

Rebecca, who would soon become the First Raccoon, had been sent to the White House in 1926 by a citizen of Mississippi, who perhaps thought that she would taste good with cranberry sauce. President Coolidge declined to eat her. Soon she would be wearing an embroidered collar and taking baths, which she particularly enjoyed when given a cake of soap with which to play.

“And so she lived a life of luxury until she did a thing many of her fellow Americans have dreamed of but very few have achieved: she bit the president of the United States.”

Everyone recovered, and later, Rueben, a potential male companion, was brought to her. Reuben promptly ran away. First Lady Grace Coolidge hypothesized that this was because Rebecca was “a little overbearing and dictatorial.”

And so Rebecca once again became the only First Raccoon.

Share

At the most obvious level, being able to control one’s reproduction is important, and has been part of all, or nearly all, human cultures. This inherently manifests differently in men and in women; to use one framing from evolutionary biology that holds up across nearly all species that reproduce sexually and have any kind of parental care: males tend to invest more pre-zygotically, females tend to invest more post-zygotically. In layman’s terms, that means that males tend to spend more time in courtship and wooing before egg and sperm ever meet, while females usually spend more time taking care of the nest and the babies afterwards. Humans are a unique case, because we tend towards monogamy, and so tend towards greater similarity in our behavior than do our ancestors. But differences do persist.

Women have been experiencing unwanted pregnancies for many thousands of years. Medical abortion is relatively new, but there have been herbalists for, again, many thousands of years, providing plants that can induce miscarriage to women in want or in need. Modern abortion can be considered an extension of that long history.

It is also true that in general, women are more concerned about social issues, while men are more concerned about economic issues. This tracks perfectly with well replicated research which finds that, on average, girls and women are more interested in people, boys and men are more interested in things. Social issues are about people; money is a thing.

That’s all relatively straightforward. Part of what is happening, though, is both an increasingly familiar story, and has nothing inherently to do with reproductive rights at all.

In the “Big Five” personality inventory, women, on average, are reliably higher than men on two of the five big traits: agreeableness and neuroticism. Here are clinical definitions of those two terms (edited for concision), from a paper addressing sex differences in personality3:

Agreeableness

Agreeableness comprises traits relating to altruism, such as empathy and kindness. Agreeableness involves the tendency toward cooperation, maintenance of social harmony, and consideration of the concerns of others (as opposed to exploitation or victimization of others). Women consistently score higher than men on Agreeableness and related measures, such as tender-mindedness.

Neuroticism

Neuroticism describes the tendency to experience negative emotion and related processes in response to perceived threat and punishment; these include anxiety, depression, anger, self-consciousness, and emotional lability. Women score higher than men on indices of anxiety and low self-esteem. The one facet of Neuroticism in which women do not always exhibit higher scores than men is Anger, or Angry Hostility.

So women have higher agreeableness and neuroticism than men, on average.

Part of what that means in real life is that women are more likely to be compassionate, root for the underdog, and have their fears used against them to get them to play along with a narrative or prescription that is being proposed. Thus, if a right appears to be being taken away from a group—even better if that group can be characterized as already oppressed or downtrodden—women are more likely to have a strong emotional reaction, and to rank that situation high on their list of concerns.

I think that many young women would claim—rightly or not—that they do not care about abortion rights as fiercely for themselves as for others, the others for whom those rights are being taken away. I suspect that a higher proportion of young women in blue states, where abortion will remain safe and legal (and hopefully rare), are energized about this topic, than are young women in red states, where abortions have indeed become more difficult to access. I suspect this, but do not have the data to back it up.

This fits with various other political magic tricks that have transpired over the last several years, most saliently in the Black Lives Matter movement which, while spearheaded by black people, was populated among the rank and file mostly with comfortably middle class white teenagers and young adults (some of whom, by my observation, had become homeless by choice, but that is another story entirely), and also mothers (gauging by who joined the daily protests in Portland in the Summer and early Fall of 2020, before those same protests reliably morphed into riots every evening). It was that army of white middle-class people who felt certain that they were fighting for black people, even when actual black people stood up and said—hey, quit it, I can speak for myself, and this cause that you are supporting is not what it appears.

Abortion rights isn’t that, exactly—abortion is what it appears, I think, although there is a lot of important nuance to be had in the details of when, in particular—but I do think that the trend of middle-class white people—specifically, women—without much experience of lives other than their own, wanting to become knights in shining armor for a perceived underclass that is not themselves, is part of what is happening here. That fact is obscured by the fact that young women are obviously the demographic most likely to seek abortions.

Aside: One sad irony is that some of the young women who are most energized by the threat to abortion rights, are also likely to be the young women who have already voluntarily sterilized themselves either by falling into the trans miasma and getting hooked on destructive cross sex hormones during puberty, or by actually just signing up for voluntary sterilizations, which I know some women in their 20s to have done. This, on the basis that they are “certain” that they will never want children.

Young women are being played by a party that is quite willing to lie to them to get them to do what it wants—to stoke their fears and get them so energized and focused that they cannot see anything else that is true. It’s Potemkin politics: women who are rageful at the loss of abortion rights may pay less attention to other facts. Facts like everything from fruit to houses is far more expensive than they were just four years ago, the Democrats have become the war party, and our health, schools and infrastructure are all failing.

While some may be constitutionally incapable of seeing the broader issues—that our First Amendment is our most precious asset as Americans, and that the Second is there to protect the First—everyone can tell that something is off. Our dollars are going less far. The cities are in distress, and so are the people in them. Politicians are not being straight with us. Nearly nobody is taking mRNA shots anymore, and yet we’re not talking about why.

Everyone has had some sort of an awakening. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance for the party that has been at the forefront of the chaos to put everyone back to sleep, or at least into a state of vaguely aroused confusion. This is accomplished in part with bread and circuses, but mostly, now, with fear and anger.

Stoke the anger of the voters, create fear where there was none, and many people will have no idea that they are being had.

Share

In those same weeks, I heard from constitutional scholars who, regardless of how you felt about its substance, told me that Roe was “bad law.” Bad law or not, it will never return, although we may again have federal protection for (some) abortion. I hope so.

Roe became law early in 1973, when I was not yet quite four years old. When I came of age in the 1980s, the goal that I heard most often and widely was for abortion to be safe, legal, and rare for Americans. Safe, legal, and rare. In the frenzy of the last five years, ten, twenty even, the pro-choice side has become increasingly…well, inhuman in how it has engaged the question. Celebrating abortions, using it is a regular form of birth control, allowing it extremely late in pregnancy…none of this is honorable or good.

The piece that follows was written six years ago. I would write a different piece today, and considered revising the original, but opted against. Ultimately, my positions have not changed, although how I might state some of them have, and I believe that I now have a deeper understanding of alternative views.

Nobody wants an abortion. No woman wants one, and no man who has thought about the issue wants any woman he cares about to be in a position in which she feels compelled to have one. Sometimes, though, in service of the greater good, abortions are necessary.

In the wake of the announcement of American Supreme Court Justice Kennedy’s imminent retirement, the issue of abortion once again became central in many newsfeeds. It is a topic perennially guaranteed to provoke outrage—all the more politically useful now that once hot-button topics like gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana have slid out of the maelstrom.

In Slate recently, William Saletan argued that “Most Americans are conflicted about abortion. They don’t like it, but they also don’t like the idea of banning it.” This argument is backed up by poll numbers, but the position itself is not, contrary to what Saletan suggests, a conflicted one. Believing abortion necessary, while not “liking” it, is internally consistent, and both nuanced and moral.

I have friends who have had abortions. Most people probably do, whether they know it or not. One of my friends escaped an abusive home, became addicted to heroin, and got pregnant very young, before aborting the fetus, getting her act together, and becoming a scientist. That part where she got her act together and became a scientist? Far less likely had she been a single teenage mother.

Rarely does the discussion of abortion include a consideration of the fate of zygotes absent intervention, or the fate of babies across human cultures. Let’s go there. 

Read more

Most frog mamas never even meet their babies. In a frenzied nighttime free-for-all, gametes are released—eggs from the female frogs, sperm from the males—and some of them come together to form new life. Those fertilized eggs which hatch into tadpoles before metamorphosing into frogs, though—they have to do it all on their own. Their mothers aren’t around to help.

Ants have mothers that they never see—although they know their sisters well. Vipers, while not totally absentee mothers, don’t have a particularly close relationship with their babies, and everyone wanders off to go their own way soon enough. Cuckoos trick mothers of entirely different species into raising their young for them.

Every animal on the planet has a mother. But most don’t have a relationship with her.1

Mammal mamas, though, we defend our children.

For well over one hundred million years, we have had the ability—and the obligation—to nourish our children from our own bodies. From this early truth has emerged another: among mammals, all mothers defend our children. We have an ancient, unbreachable bond. We mammals are—some more metaphorically than others—mama  bears.

This is true for polar bears and for black bears. Their color makes no difference.

It is even true for spectacled bears, who have a particular fondness for avocados. Their fondness for avocados does not get in the way of their mothering.

It is true for rabbits and for rats, for beavers and for bats.

It is true for dolphins. Even the pink ones.

The color of the mother doesn’t matter. Obviously.

And yet The New York Times has published a piece declaring that “mama bear” is a dog whistle to white conservatives, because, we are told, there has certainly never been a mama bear with brown skin. “No one who looks like [Kamala] Harris can be a mama bear….The power of [black mothers’] grief visibly threatens the power structures of white supremacy.”2

Come again?

The author of the New York Times op-ed further attests that there are “racial fears that nonwhite motherhood stokes in this nation’s soul.”

Such claims are false and weak, but they are also inflammatory. Oh, it’s a powerful brew. Such claims have no bearing on reality, yet will land on some people and enrage them and, upon seeing that rage, they will land on others as if the claims are true.

“If people are so upset by the idea that “mama bear” is a white thing, well, I guess it must be true. They wouldn’t be upset about it if it didn’t have a grain of truth, right?”

Wrong.

In my Open Letter last week, I addressed Van Badham, the woman who wrote an op-ed for The Guardian, by name. Why am I not doing the same this week—why have I not addressed this to Tressie McMillan Cottom, the author of the New York Times op-ed? Is it because I, apparently like all white Americans, nay, all white people everywhere and throughout time, am fundamentally fearful of and hateful towards black people?

Nah. It’s because Tressie McMillan Cottom, the person who makes fabulist claims about the racist underpinnings of the term “mama bear,” preemptively blocked me on twitter.

It’s almost as if she doesn’t want a conversation. Doesn’t want to hear what other people have to say. Isn’t interested in discovering where her model of the world might be overly simplistic, or just plain wrong.

Share

Why are we being told, over and over again, but without evidence, that we are a country filled with hatred? So many of us fall prey to suggestions that become hypnotic, when repeated endlessly, that of course we dislike those who look different from ourselves, of course we distrust our neighbors, of course we can never get along, as the pain is too deep, the rifts too ancient.

The telling and retelling and retelling serve to divide us. To fracture us, slicing through our psyches. We forget. Too easily, we forget.

We forget that actually, we care about one another. Yes, we notice each other’s differences. Sometimes we embrace those differences, and sometimes we don’t. Very often, we just don’t care. Our shared humanity is what matters.

And one of the things that makes us very, very human is the fact that we love our children so much that we will defend them with a focus that can be staggering to witness.

Here is some of what I said about Mama Bears back in October 2022:

Mothers have a special bond with, and a particular ferocity around protecting, their children. Mothers, like everyone, can be conned into thinking that the very wrong thing that they are doing is the very right thing. But once they discover that they’ve been duped, that their children are being hurt? Mama bears need to spring into action to right the wrong.

Mama bears, do not hesitate because you are concerned that you have already caused harm. Do not wait because you are embarrassed, or ashamed. Do not fail to act because you are afraid of what your child will think of you, or say to you. Your child may well distance herself from you now if you go against her wishes, and that will be hard. Do not focus on that hardship.

Instead, consider your child in one year, in five years, in ten, and in twenty. Consider the conversation that you will have with your child then, if you fail to intervene now.

Mama bears, stand up for your children against that which would do them harm.

Halting puberty harms children.

Putting teenagers on cross-sex hormones harms them.

Embracing misogynistic, regressive sex stereotypes harms children.

Cutting off the healthy breasts of girls and young women harms them.

Injecting children and teenagers with experimental treatments that are particularly risky for young people, to protect them against a disease for which they are at very low risk, harms them.

Encouraging your children to wear masks at home, or outside, harms them.

Encouraging fear in your children, rather than curiosity, harms them. Demanding acquiescent safety behaviors to protect from all that you can see, while leaving the children exposed to myriad more dangers that you cannot, harms them.

Presenting a simple world in which you focus on a single parameter—gender, a virus—harms your children. It is a deceit. Your children will come to understand that. And then what? What will you say to them then? Do right by them now.

What do you want for your children? Do you want them to be insightful and merciful, capable of generating wisdom, and kind to all who merit kindness? Do you want them to be curious and capable, generative and generous? I do. I want these things for my children, and I want them for all children.

All children.

Do not believe the divisive rhetoric that we are being fed by the mainstream media. We can be made to fight amongst ourselves. It keeps us narrowly focused, bitter, and fearful. That trick has been working for a very long time.

But we don’t need to take the bait. It’s better that we not.

Recognize the differences that you have with your neighbors—discuss them even—and also recognize that, in the final accounting, there is far more that we all have in common. That, too, warrants discussion.

Share

The sub-headline in the op-ed I’m responding to claims this:

The preferred model of femininity for the yelping far right is the homebound tradwife. Let them cry and keep boxing.

I am no more excited about the resurgence of trad-tropes than the author is—especially as the trend seems largely untethered from truly functional homemaking, and therefore comprises yet more exhibitionist oversharing rather than a return to real skill—but FFS. An invitation for a man to beat up women as a sign of women’s progress is about as regressive as it gets. And yet, here we are.

Share

Dear Ms. Badham,

I read with interest your recent opinion piece for The Guardian—the one titled “Girls, ignore the sexist rhetoric. Revel in everything that upsets the haters.”

Like you, I am a gen X woman. I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, lucky both in when I was born, but also in where and to whom, for I had no doors closed to me on account of my sex.

Like you, I despair when I see the resurgence of sexist tropes, all sparkly like knights in shining armor, here to save womanhood and return us to our rightful place on the domestic altar, spatulas and brooms close at hand. I thought that we had long since gotten past such regressive fantasies.

Like you, I would have women be proud of our educations, love our careers, and have families that are shaped by love and by choice. I am, I do, and I have.

And yet, despite those similarities in our experiences and worldviews, I think you’ve gotten just about everything wrong.

It is not the hard-earned successes of women that have caused a regressive backlash against us. No.

Having benefitted from our predecessors, who fought for the right to work outside the home, buy property, make legal decisions for ourselves, and receive equal pay for equal work, to name just a few past wins, many women seem to have forgotten how much we have won, and how equal the playing field has become. All too often now, the demands being made are for a decidedly unequal playing field, in which women get all the benefits, and pay none of the costs.

Demanding everything, while pretending that we have nothing, is neither a stable nor an honorable game. We should not be surprised that people are beginning to notice.

Too many women have gleefully taken power from men and wielded it as indiscriminately as men did when they had it. We are suffering an epidemic of toxic femininity.

Remember #MeToo? It had the potential to reveal to men—the vast majority of men who are good—that the vast majority of women have had run-ins with bad men. It won’t be obvious to good men, who presumably mostly have friends who are also good men, that the small minority of men who aren’t good manage to have a disproportionate impact on women. Most women have been on the receiving end of toxic male behavior, even though most men would never behave that way.

The good men deserve to know this, and they want to know this. But instead, #MeToo turned into a nasty, vengeful movement, in which obvious truths—like Matt Damon’s observation that an unwanted pat on the butt is not the same as rape—were met with outrage. Instead of being heralded as a good man who is aware of the different social realities that men and women live in, he was told to sit down and shut up. It was not, he was told, his turn to speak.

Past injustice is no excuse for injustice in the present, though. That response to Matt Damon, and others like him? That was women being bad to men. And the societal response was to celebrate the bad behavior of the women who scolded him. Of course people are angry.

I believe that much of what you are defending in your piece is part and parcel of what got us into the mess that we now find ourselves in.

Third wave feminism embraces “sex positivity”— in which everyone pretends that young women didn’t always have access to all the sex they wanted, while desire for lasting commitment or emotional depth is seen as a flaw. In short, women get the privilege of acting like men at their stupidest. How awesome for us all.

Some confused versions of feminism want men and women to be not just equal, but the same. We’re not. And while I would not suggest that being a parent should be required in order to hold high office, it is a modern oddity that so many people who are deciding our fates do not have children of their own. Being a parent changes you—this is especially true for women. There is no love as fierce or as fearsome as that for one’s child. While women, on average, are more “agreeable” than men, more likely to affirm other’s choices and comply with the will of the majority, Mama bears are a force of nature. Mama bears find hidden reserves of power when their cubs are threatened.

Except when they don’t. Those same traits that make women, on average, more likely to be compassionate, to care for the weak and the powerless, to go into healing professions rather than destructive ones—those same traits that help Mama bears find hidden reserves of power when their cubs are threatened can be weaponized towards demonic ends.

Mothers are being convinced that the playful fantasies of their children warrant hormones and surgery. Mothers are being convinced that telling children no and resisting their tantrums is bad parenting. After women led the calls to defund the police across American cities in 2020, the resultant crime waves and accelerating urban decay should have come as no surprise to anyone. Many people could see the problems with the policies that were being proposed, mostly by women. And yet city councils and legislators enacted the policies throughout the land. Why? In part, because in today’s environment, telling women that their ideas are bad is a kind of hate crime.

The power grab and biological confusion of modern feminism doesn’t resemble the feminism that we genX-ers grew up with. It really doesn’t.

Subscribe now

And then there’s this: the amazing knots that you tie yourself into—you, along with so many other women—as you try to make real concerns about actual biology out to be exclusively the ravings of angry young basement-dwelling men.

Are there men who are spewing bile on the internet, enraged and hurt that no woman is interested in being with them? There are, to be sure. But there are also a large number of people, myself included, who are concerned about what happened in the Olympics because we care about women’s rights, about sport, and about reality. I happen to be a biologist, but it doesn’t take one to know what a woman is. I can attest that Imane Khelif, the Algerian athlete who took home gold in women’s boxing, is not a woman.

I am not part of what you call the “’let us tell you how women should look, act, reproduce, breathe and exist on this earth’ brigade”. In fact, here I laid out precisely what I understand to be possible for women. The answer is: nearly everything. Girls can aspire to be astronauts and mothers, chefs and CEOs, athletes and mathematicians, and the women they will become might well become any one (or more) of those things. Why? Because the one and only universal thing that girls do, when they grow up, is they become women.

You also suggest that those who complain about Imane Khelif’s conduct in the Olympics are doing so because Khelif refuses to “portray herself as an aspirational Sports Illustrated swimsuit model.” In this sad world that you are positing, the only reason for people to have concerns about the legitimacy of athletes who present themselves as women, is that they don’t satisfy male fantasies of womanhood.

That’s not it at all, of course. What I and many others are objecting to is that Imane Khelif is a man competing in the women’s category. Imane Khelif is XY,  and almost certainly has one of several well-understood Disorders of Sexual Development. This means that when Khelif was born, he appeared to be female, and lived as if a girl until puberty hit. But male puberty transformed his external appearance into that of a man, which is, in fact, what he now is. Just as girls become women, boys become men.

It can’t be an easy thing, to believe yourself to be a girl, and to have everyone around you believe that you are a girl, only to have adolescence reveal that everyone was wrong. But as much compassion as we might have for the younger Khelif, who no doubt went through a baffling and painful puberty, we owe the adult Khelif, a man who takes pleasure in beating up women, no compassion at all. Would that Khelif were not encouraged in his delusions by a world of people who have forgotten how to say no. There, again, is the misplaced compassion of women, being weaponized against our own selves.

Meanwhile, over in Olympic beach volleyball, we saw two different ways that women are objectified in the world: Would we have women covered like walking corpses so that no man might catch a scintillating glimpse of flesh, as the Egyptian women were dressed, or do we prefer the wedgie bikinis of the Spanish team, who seem to be preparing for future careers on OnlyFans?

Surely we can agree that both of these are failure modes. Neither is a win for women. And neither can be blamed on the “yelping far right” that you invoke as responsible for the trials and tribulations of modern women. Nope.

Share

You write:

Vote for a woman not because she’s a woman but because she’s the best at the job.

Amen!

But wait. Surely you can’t be speaking of Kamala Harris here. Perhaps it’s just my American bias to think that. But just in case you are: Back in the day, before Harris was chosen to be Biden’s VP, he vowed to choose a woman for Vice President. The immutable demographics of his future pick meant more to him than her skills. She wasn’t chosen because she was best, but because she was a woman.

Even so, we should still vote for who is best, even if our candidates were not chosen because they’re the best. I do not believe that anyone with a basic understanding of the English language, or with an interest in any policy that a president of the United States might affect—could believe that Harris could be best at that job. She has no stated positions, has accomplished nothing1, and can barely speak in coherent sentences.

What her ascendancy tells me about those who gave her the path to power, is that it doesn’t matter to them that she is incompetent, it just matters that she looks the part. You might have us vote for the person best for the job; they just want us to vote for a woman. Any woman. In fact, it is a reasonable read on the situation to suggest that the choice of this particular woman means that the powers that be—in this case, the Democratic National Committee—may actually believe that this is the best a woman can be.

They are wrong, of course. You know that. I know that. But the world is beginning to forget. Push enough incompetent people to the top because of their immutable characteristics, leaving analytically and creatively talented people in the dust, and you will find that some people start to pine for the old days. The days when those silly women would stay home and tend to the only work they are suited for.

Step aside, ladies, and let the men do the work of the world.

Subscribe now

Portland’s Pride Parade was in July this year because, while in the entire known universe all of June has been designated Pride Month, Pride Northwest, out of sheer politeness, and to “avoid overlapping with other significant cultural events in the Rose City,” moved their signature parade to July.

In fact, they moved the 10^th annual Portland Trans Pride March into July as well. And last year, the Pride Parade was in July, too. Funny that. Is this evidence of Pride Northwest being polite, or greedy—greedy for more attention, more bandwidth from the citizens of Portland, more money from their corporate sponsors?

I’m going with greedy. Needy, greedy, and shameless1.

Pride insists on its counter-cultural cred while being generic and predictable a majority of the time. The prevailing aesthetic at the parade was, of course, rainbow: rainbow backpacks and bags; shirts and skirts and pants; sneakers and belts and bows and hats. No item is too small for a rainbow. The parade itself was uninspired—no floats, precious little live music, and few elaborate costumes, except of course for the drag queens and the men who think they’re women and the men engaging in public kink (on which, more later). Mostly it was a bunch of corporations and community organizations signaling their allegiance to the cause. Behind the scenes, allegiance was shown with financial contributions. At the parade, allegiance constituted of people co-branded with rainbows and their corporate logos, walking; and trucks, co-branded with rainbows and their corporate logos, driving. Branded, rainbowed trucks, and branded, rainbowed people, sticking it to the establishment.

Who, precisely, is sticking it to the establishment by marching in the Parade?2

Banks and credit unions showed their pride—from Bank of America to U.S. Bank. Delta and Alaska Air were there, as were Marriott, Macy’s, and Daimler Truck. Safeway / Albertson’s brought a truck with a drag queen. Adidas was handing out discount cards to the employee store. Even the Department of Fish & Wildlife felt a need to represent—“Pride in the wild” said their banner, while their truck proclaimed “lamprey are older than dinosaurs!” True, but irrelevant to the theme of the day. That said, lamprey appear to be pentachromats3, able to see color in greater detail than we can, so they might have some aesthetic advice for the rainbow crowd.

The crowd seemed appreciative of all the corporate backing. I heard several attendees murmuring their approval. “Look, OnPoint Credit Union is here—that’s so great.” “Oh Doc Martens—awesome.” “Oh Nordstrom!”

From print shops to pet hospitals to general contractors, no sector of the economy seemed to be missing. Unions marched in the parade alongside utility companies, as well as the United States Postal Service. Representatives from Portland State University marched, as did Oregon Health Sciences University. As, for that matter, did many health care organizations—Kaiser Permanente, Providence, and Randall Children’s Hospital among them. A children’s hospital.

Speaking of which, KinderCare was also there. KinderCare offers daycare for children ages six weeks through kindergarten, as well as after-school care for the olders. I’ll give them this: They know their audience. There were many small children in attendance, standing on the parade route waving flags, being pushed in strollers through the crowd. They, too, were bedecked in rainbows.

Most of the corporate sponsors handed out swag: little flags, lollipops, bottles of bubbles. I went to Pride and all I got was a lousy keychain that says “Vote Love.” I don’t even know who made it, or who they want me to vote for. I suspect that my idea of “voting love,” and theirs, will be radically different.

Subscribe now

During the Summer of 2020, when madness was allowed to run wild in many American cities, and achieved fever pitch in Portland, many storefronts erected what I dubbed “don’t hurt me” walls. In an often fruitless effort to be spared the vandalism that erupted every night in some parts of the city, store owners would publicize their fealty to the cause. Black Lives Matter posters were nearly ubiquitous. More niche messaging included “amplify melanated voices” and “defund + demilitarize + dismantle police.”4

In his 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless, Václav Havel wrote of a fictional greengrocer who posts a flyer in his window that reads “Workers of the world, unite!”. Havel asks—"why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world?” Havel answers:

“I, the greengrocer, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”

Pride Northwest has effectively compelled a large fraction of the companies that do business in the city to ante up if they hope to be left in peace. Pride Northwest has turned the businesses of Portland into Havel’s hapless green grocer. They have created a Don’t Hurt Me parade.

In some ways, the parade seemed like Latin American Carnaval, but with little of the creativity or authenticity.5 There were surprises for the eyes around every corner, but it was pretty much all of a type. There was the guy in skivvies who thought he was a woman. Actually, there were several of those. There were people wearing Covid-era masks—because respiratory viruses are an existential threat to people outdoors, but cross-sex hormones and surgical mutilation for people too young to vote is a birthright. There was a guy wearing a peacock tail and skirt, another in royal purple regalia complete with crown, and several people in stripey knee socks.

Some people waved Palestinian flags, and one woman carried a “Dykes for Palestine” sign. “Queer Pagans Unite,” read another sign. Another: “If your reading this ur gay.”

The Portland Trans-Fem*s were there, carrying a banner directing interested parties to their Discord server.And a very earnest young man was handing out flyers for the Class Struggle Action Network, which, according to their literature, advocates for such things as “eliminating pay differentials based on category” and eradicating the “capitalist profit system.” They’re going to be about as successful as the men who think they can magically turn into women.

One thing I didn’t see at Pride were zombies. The zombies of Portland—and of many American cities now—are the walking dead, their eyes blank, their bodies twisted and hunched, eager for their next fix. Fentanyl leaves husks of people lying in the street, pants around their ankles; it leaves people hanging out the passenger side of rusty cars, crumpled at the curb; and it leaves the most functional of its victims vacant but ambulatory. There were no zombies at Pride. Pride takes its victims a different way entirely.

One of the entities in the parade was “Portland Pets & Handlers.” Listed cryptically in the official parade contingent lineup as PDX PAH, this group comprised doughy men in dog masks and tails, or dressed as other unspecified “pets,” prancing and holding their hands up and their wrists limp in weak imitation of paws. Some among the attendees were also wearing leather dog masks, or tails, or were even more suited up than that. One of the “handlers” wore a gauzy white skirt and held the reins of the “pet,” who was dressed scantily in leather and had a bit in his mouth, ‘cause that’s what pets like.

When the “Pets & Handlers” group came through, I was standing behind a couple of moms and their pre-school-aged children. One of the girls was asking to go—kids get antsy, after all—but her mother insisted they stay. “Look!” the mom pointed at the PAH group as it approached. The little girl seemed, by her body language, dubious. Then curious. Finally, riveted. Once the leather straps and bare skin and dog masks and reins and bits and tails were in front of her, she could not look away. Both mothers laughed, apparently delighted, as bondage-dressed middle-aged men gyrated feet from their daughters. It was, after all, a beautiful day, and they were out with their children, enjoying the view. What’s not to be delighted about?

The Portland Gay Men’s Choir was also at the parade. Their voices are beautiful. They, along with a smattering of parade attendees, looked like gay men from an earlier time. Fit and trim, mustachioed or clean-shaven, and uniformly good looking, these men also seemed to be under no illusion about who and what they were.

They were fabulous. They seemed to come from an era in which gay men and lesbians were striving for acceptance—to live their lives unaccosted, and have the same legal rights as heterosexual couples. In L.A. in the 1970s and 1980s, where and when I grew up, my mother had several artist friends who were gay. David and Richard were the ones who became most familiar in our home. In those days they couldn’t get married, but they were loyal to one another. Family lore suggests that before they came over to our house the first time, my little brother—inquisitive and socially fearless—had some questions about what it meant that two men were in love with one another, but he kept the questions to himself until they arrived. Maybe four years old, my brother marched up to David before he had even received his first drink and asked, in a clear and ringing voice,

“Do you have a penis?”

My mother was mortified, but our guests were not. David laughed.

“Yes young man, I do have a penis,” he answered my brother. And that was it. My brother had asked a simple question, and received a simple answer. There was nothing predatory in the answer, no desire to instruct a child in the ways of homosexuality, or indeed, in the ways of sexuality of any sort. If there had been, of course, my parents would never again have invited those guests into our home. Because protecting children is one of the crucial roles of parents.

Or at least, it used to be.

Share

Get 20% off for 1 year

“What’s the difference between a crossdresser and a transgender person?

“Two years.”

“I don’t get it,” Jamie said to Shannon, his wife at the time. And then he came to embody its truth.

Over the course of eighteen months, after well over a decade of marriage, Shannon Thrace found her once beloved life partner disappearing from her. Increasingly, he demanded that she cede everything that brought her joy. This was not because he wanted her unhappy, but because everything now revolved around his new identity, which changed constantly. Their evenings were spent with her consoling him as he cried. When she told him that he was just fine as he was, she was rebuffed. This was not the right answer—couldn’t she see that his life as a man had been a lie?

At first, he just wanted to cross-dress. “I am not trans,” he declared confidently. Months later, he was sad and hurt that strangers “mistook” him for a man.

“Don’t I look like a girl?” he asked Shannon, who was just as middle-aged as he was.

“A girl?” she wondered to herself.

Shannon Thrace has written an excruciating memoir of a marriage undone by gender ideology. She is honest, her thoughts by turns polished and raw, her writing exquisite. Her book is 18 Months: A Memoir of a Marriage Lost to Gender Identity. I recommend it most highly, and share an excerpt, below. Before I do that, though, I want to share some truths from another woman I know who lost her partner to gender identity.

Rachel^[1] is a bad-ass who spent much of her 20s working as the only woman on a team of men, on jobs that ranged from commercial fishing to arborist. She was far beyond competent, though, so was almost always treated with respect on jobs. She also knew, from a young age, that she was a lesbian. So while she had always had many male colleagues and friends, she had no sexual interest in any of them. At some point, she moved to Seattle from the Midwest, and there she met her partner. Kai and Rachel were together for over a decade before Kai began to transition. At first, Rachel was entirely supportive. She wasn’t sure she understood what underlay her partner’s newfound desire, but she loved Kai, and their bond was strong.

It didn’t take long for things to begin to unravel.

“I couldn’t tell if Kai’s increased aggression and ill temper was actually due to the T she was now taking, or if it was just an excuse. Either way, I wasn’t down for it,” Rachel told me. She continued, “I realized that I really am a lesbian. If you, my female partner of several years, are going to fashion yourself as a man, by taking testosterone and adopting tropes of masculinity, including dress and attitude, you shouldn’t be surprised if I’m not particularly attracted to you anymore.”

In the end, after much soul-searching, Rachel concluded, as if speaking directly to Kai, “You got so wrapped up in yourself and your new identity, that it’s time for me to move on.”

Their friends nearly universally sided with Kai. They asked Rachel how she could be so cold, leaving Kai in “his” time of greatest need. Kai began revisioning history to suit the story that fit her own fantasies, without regard for reality.

But Rachel was done. She’d done enough, and had enough. The aggression, the confusion, and most of all, the unending focus on Kai’s new gender identity, was too much. Their friends, whose loss Rachel mourned as well, bought into two narratives: first, that “trans” is the newest civil rights crusade, and that if you’re just a plain old lesbian, it’s time to take a back seat and let the truly oppressed take center stage. The second narrative that Rachel’s friends bought into was that the person claiming center stage at all times, while crying about being ignored and abused, is the real victim. And that person, that “real victim” is the only person worthy of being taken into account.

Both of those narratives are false. Feeding narcissists can be as dangerous as negotiating with terrorists. It perpetuates the behavior. It is not a kindness.

Share

Excerpt from 18 Months, with the consent of Shannon Thrace, the author:

“How do I look?” you ask, waltzing through the den. You rotate on one heel to show me a tight, ruffly skirt paired with an Easter-egg pink blouse and an immense, butterfly-emblazoned necklace.

“You look great,” I say, looking up from the box of books I’m unpacking.

Your shoulders drop. “Tell me the truth.” 

Apparently my face betrays insufficient enthusiasm. I’m not sure what to do about that; the outfit doesn’t appeal to me.

“What do you actually think?”

I’m growing tired of mincing my words. And telling you what you want to hear isn’t working, anyway. And I don’t like the way lies feel in my mouth.

So I give honesty another shot.

“I wouldn’t wear it,” I say. “But who cares? Wear what you want.”

You drop to the armchair amid the parts of an unassembled bookcase. I can tell you feel like a failure.

“Why wouldn’t you wear it?”

I take a deep breath. I’m not sure why my clothing preferences need to inform yours.

“It’s a bit precious. I’m not a fan of pink. That necklace is awfully large, and it’s a bit brassy. Why are you dressed up, anyway?”

“So it’s not to your taste,” you say, exasperated. “But that’s beside the point. Should I wear it?”

I’m confused. I don’t know what it means to evaluate your outfit without invoking my taste. Are you asking if others will be impressed? In a world where people expect you to dress like a man? They probably won’t. 

Are you asking if it’s flattering? It isn’t, though it’s no worse than your other choices. You choose outfits that compress and redistribute your body, now, instead of those that compliment it.

In truth, I don’t like this look on anyone. Those ladies at work who squeeze their butts into pencil skirts and their feet into stripper shoes—they look helpless and inept to me, always managing creeping hems and falling straps, the very opposite of cool and collected. I associate that look with a need to get ahead in a world controlled by yuppie men. Certainly I’ve played their game, wearing its uniform as a scuba diver wears a wetsuit. But I wouldn’t wear a wetsuit if I wasn’t near the water.

I shrug. I accept your presentation—isn’t that enough? Must I be called to the carpet for my innermost thoughts?

“Why can’t I get this right?” you ask, moving toward the mirror in the foyer. You look at yourself from the side, from the back, desperate to understand where you’ve fallen short.

But you are not made of ruffles and pink; a rejection of them is not a rejection of you. And I have earned my opinion. I learned at a young age that dressing sexy was my job. That in pants, I was too shapeless; without makeup, too blotchy and plain. I stopped shelling pistachios to preserve my manicure. I stopped climbing trees to wear heels. I learned to express my opinion less and smile more. Then, a little too late in adolescence, I realized that shit was holding me back. I needed to navigate the world with my hands and feet unfettered. I needed to experience and to grow. I started unlearning my socialization. And I am still unlearning it.

So these fabrics and pigments don’t hold the magic for me that they hold for you. They bore me, at best. At worst, they mean submission to the male gaze and life unlived. I don’t owe a reverence for femininity to conservative geezers who wish I’d “put in a little effort.” And I don’t owe it to you. 

But a more immediate problem plagues me. 

You saw through my polite fib. But my honest opinion crushed you. I’m out of options. How can I respond when both truth and lie are wrong? What words can I choose that will save us from this death spiral?

As I watch you slump in the chair, your lower jaw shoved forward, I realize something important. 

You don’t want me to tell you what I really think. 

But you don’t want a lie, either. 

You want a truth, but one that isn’t mine.

You believe your clothing, shored up by self-identification, transforms you. You want me to see this transformation. And you want me to be into it. Neither the truth nor a well-meaning compliment will suffice. What you want is for my perception itself to change. 

You want a different me.

Find 18 Months at amazon. It is an extraordinary and surprising book; this excerpt barely provides a taste. And consider subscribing to Shannon’s Substack, Speaking the Ineffable.

Share

Give a gift subscription

^[1] Names and identifying features have been changed.

The rad fems (and many others) say: Absolutely no. No way. A man—and clearly a creep, at that!—being celebrated in a space that already holds people with deep trauma from exactly this sort of cosplay? Reprehensible. This is damaging to those who are most at risk. Why are we encouraging this public display of fetish?

People in the other camp argue: Phil Illy knows that he is a man, and is in no way confused about this. He is honest and open, and not a creep at all. He has written a whole book about autogynephilia (AGP). We should be a big tent, welcoming of all, or at least, welcoming of those who are self-reflective, and who see the same reality that we do.

Which is it? Who is right?

The night before the conference began, many of us were in the vicinity of the hotel bar, and I saw a man walking around in a dress. I would later learn that this was Phil. I did a double-take. I asked the woman sitting next to me—am I seeing this correctly? She looked, nodded. Yep. I was unnerved. What did I not know? Did this person believe himself to be a woman, or not? Why did the answer to that question matter to me?

The next night Phil approached my table, offered me a copy of his book, which I accepted, and we talked for a bit. I came away with some answers and intuitions: No, he does not think that he is actually a woman. And no, he does not seem like a creep. None of my hackles were raised. I detected no malice, no glint in the eye, no smirk, outer or inner, that he was having one over on all of us. Of course I could be wrong about these things, as anyone’s intuition can mislead them. One of the despicable truths about gender ideology is that women are being told to stop trusting the very intuitions that we have always relied on, when walking alone, when entering a bathroom or a locker room or a parking garage, when approached by a person we do not know. It is not bigoted to cross the street if you feel a tingle at the base of your skull as you see a man approaching you. It is smart. I have traveled far and wide, often exploring places alone that women are expected not to explore alone, and I have honed my intuition, although I am well aware that I can and do make mistakes. Nothing about Phil alarmed me.

Assuming that I am correct about Phil—that he is not a creep, and that his intention is not to force himself into women’s spaces—is that sufficient to land me in the camp of the big tenters?

It is not.

Share

Public Service Announcement:

Sex is binary. Male and female exist not as points on a continuum, but as discrete states. Males produce small, motile gametes (sperm, or pollen if you’re a plant which, if you are reading this, you are not). Females produce large, sessile gametes (eggs)2.

Gender, which in other organisms we call “sex role,” is not binary. Gender is downstream of sex, and does manifest on a continuum. Gender is the software of sex3. In humans, because we are more software than any other organism on the planet, gender is particularly flexible, both across and within individuals.

We are fated to be the sex that we are born as. We cannot change that.

We can change how we behave, though. Our gender, aka our sex role—that is something that we have considerable dominion over.

Illy’s book is long—nearly 600 pages, plus another nearly 100 pages of end matter—glossary and references, mostly. I have merely skimmed it.

In his book, Illy attempts a careful, scholarly investigation of the condition that he understands himself to have—again, autogynephilia (AGP). I respect him for this. And his hypothesis—that AGP is the underlying cause for a large percentage of the people we now see transitioning—seems plausible, at least for young men. He has taken heat from the trans community for holding this position. But an unstated premise of the book is that what goes on in people’s heads is inherently something that the external world must pay heed to. This I do not accept.

Illy discusses not just AGP, but what he sees as its match in the opposite sex, autoandrophilia (AAP). AAP is the state of being a straight woman who has turned the object of her attraction inwards, and so is attracted to the idea of being a man. This, I believe, is a false symmetry. Just as male and female homosexuality are not identical, and typically neither emerge from nor manifest in similar ways, so too should we not expect confusion about gender identity to manifest similarly between the sexes. We are, after all, different.

I am a straight woman who has never thought nor wished that I was a man, but who has been gender non-conforming in many ways throughout my life. Opening Illy’s book to his section on autoandrophilia, therefore, may have been setting myself up for disappointment.

On p127 of Auto-Heterosexual: Attracted to Being the Other Sex, Illy writes:

“Autoandrophilia enables people to experience mental shifts into a masculine headspace in response to stimuli that reinforce their sense of masculinity or manhood….Initially, autoandrophilic mental shifts tend to be short-lived. They often first arise through crossdressing, being “one of the guys,” or imagining being a boy—all of which may lead to feeling confident, strong, or self-assured.”

The first part of this sounds like psycho-babble to me. The latter part sounds regressive and misogynistic.

I feel confident, strong, and self-assured. In fact, I am confident, strong, and self-assured. Hearing that feeling that way means that I may be thinking of myself as a man is neither helpful nor empowering. It is the opposite.

Earlier in the book, we are told that men who “behave like women” (“behavioral autogynephilia”) can benefit women who share spaces with these men. One man who calls himself a transfem says: “I treat my wife very well, because I take care of almost all the housework.” He does the housework because he sees himself as behaving like a woman. We are further told that “as a child another transfem delighted in caring for her baby sister, which eased the burden on her mother” (p96). Again, childcare was enjoyable for this boy because by engaging in it he felt that he was behaving like a female.

So: if you are confident, strong, and self-assured, you are manifesting manhood. And if you engage in care-taking and domestic work, you are manifesting womanhood. Manly men don’t clean. Womanly women aren’t confident. Manly men don’t parent. Womanly women are weak.

This is bollocks. I rather thought that we were over such insipid and restrictive tropes. Clearly, I was wrong.

Subscribe now

Earlier yet in the book, Illy describes more ways that autogynephilia manifests, quoting a Hungarian physician from 130 years ago (pp 71-73).  The physician—a man—“feel[s] like a woman in a man’s form…feel[s] the penis as clitoris…the scrotum as labia majora.” Beyond the delusions that his body is not what it is, the physician had “a sensory shift which made her feel as though she had the senses and perceptions of a woman.” Already, I admit, I am on alert. Men and women are likely, on average, to have differences in sensory and perceptive capacities. But having perceptions that are more typical of one sex or the other does not make you that sex. Those perceptions just make you a bit—or a lot—outside of the norm for the sex that you are. “Outside of the norm” and “belonging to a different category” are not the same thing.

Again: sex is binary. But everything that we might attribute to gender, to sex role—how we think and behave, how we remember things and what we like to do, our abilities and our interests—none of this is binary. Men are, on average, taller than women, but short men aren’t women. Men are, on average, more interested in math than women, but female mathematicians aren’t men.

Listening in on the thoughts of this male doctor from the late 19^th century reveals how much of his delusion is based on cultural norms:

“Her stomach rebelled against every deviation from a ‘female diet.’…Her skin felt feminine; it had become sensitive to both hot and cold temperatures, as well as direct sunlight. She resented social norms that kept her from using sun parasols to protect her sensitive face skin and took to wearing gloves as much as possible, even while sleeping.”

I don’t have any reason to doubt that the physician felt the way that is being described, even if I don’t understand what some of it means. What I disagree with is the stereotyping of men and women, the normalization of mental confusion, and the religious conclusions thinly veiled as scientific ones. At Genspect and elsewhere, I have discussed some of the scientific findings that male and female brains are, in some regards, on average, different. This is true. It is replicable using modern scientific tools. And it is irritating to some people. Too bad, though: reality is not always what you want it to be.

However. Having autogynephilia, we are told on p69, “can feel like having a female soul.” This, in contrast to a scientific hypothesis, is an unfalsifiable claim. It is untestable, and reveals the religious nature of the belief. I am not opposed to religion. But I insist that your religious beliefs not infringe on my (secular) freedoms.

Name a thing, and it becomes real—this is the postmodernist thinking behind many modern arguments. Once the thing is made real by its name, it comes to seem ever more true. And voila, the slippery naturalistic fallacy is manifest: name X, point to the reality of X on the basis of its name, conflate X’s reality with its inexorability and its goodness, and in turn, force the acceptance of X.

There is plenty that is real that we need not accept, indeed, that we must not accept. Consider rape. Rape is an evolutionary strategy. Understanding its evolutionary origins will help us decrease its prevalence. We want to decrease its prevalence because it is deplorable. Similarly: slavery, genocide, and all of the rest of the totalitarian tendencies that spread through populations. These are evolved strategies that we can, in part, understand with an evolutionary toolkit. And as nobody but those inflicting such barbaric acts on others benefit from them, we should try to eradicate them. Understanding is not accepting. Sometimes, understanding is in service of the exact opposite.

Understanding fetishes like autogynephilia is, I would argue, just such a thing. By rejecting the fetish, we are not rejecting the human being who has it, but we are rejecting its public display. Again: understanding is not the same as accepting.

I will no doubt be accused of thinking that anything non-heterosexual or reproductive is a fetish. Will be accused of being “vanilla,” even. Here’s the thing: No. Humans have long since evolved into beings who have sex and engage in sexual behavior for non-reproductive purposes. Many of our closest relatives do as well (see bonobos). Just as food for us is about more than nutrition, so too is sex about more than reproduction. We are so social, so tightly bound to one another, that we have elaborate feasts that go on hours—days even—when we could have gotten the benefit of the calories and nutrients in a few minutes. So, too, do we have sex that extends far past the boundaries of what is necessary to make a baby. We play games, create fictional scenarios, engage in fantasy. This is not just evolutionary (which again, does not mean that it is good). In the case of our expansive sexual appetites and repertoires, though, they are not just evolutionary, but also, often, good for individual humans. But not always.

Not everything that has evolved is good. Nor does it follow that anything that people currently believe, no matter how much of a community they have found on-line, or how many university professors have written scholarly articles about the phenomenon, is either evolutionarily robust, or good. We live in an era of hyper-novelty. The rate of change that we ourselves have created has out-stripped even our capacious ability to keep up with it. And so, when assessing any bit of 21^st century behavior—or indeed, much of what emerged in the 20^th century—it is necessary to keep an eye on that truth: just because many people are doing it, does not mean that it is the right thing to be doing.

We are under no obligation to normalize such feelings. Indeed, we are obligated to do the opposite. We do not cheer for the self-mutilation of a sad girl, or for her attempts to starve herself. We do not celebrate confusion.

Normalizing fetishes and other rare mental states is bad for society, because it provides a template for the confused. The internet, we are told, has been a boon for people who did not know that anyone else in the world felt like they do. The internet helped gay children in fundamentalist communities, neurodiverse kids in small towns, artistic types born to families that favor money over creativity, to find their people. The flip side of this, which affects far more people, is that once niche identities become named and organized on-line, anyone can find them. And then, young people searching for meaning—or more often now, searching for identity, a weaker tea by far—come across something they did not know existed, and if any of it fits, they think: ah yes, this has been me all along.

It is our job as adults—as parents, as teachers, as health professionals, and just as responsible members of society—to protect the children. Providing them a menu of fetishes to choose from, to identify as, is not protecting them.

Share

In Me, She, He, They: Reality vs Identity in the 21^st Century, I wrote:

We are dealing with the interface between long standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time. That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions. No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions.

Genspect is doing necessary work, navigating perilous waters and welcoming diverse people and views. They expect adults to come to their own conclusions. Running a conference on non-fraught topics isn’t easy; literal gate-keeping on a topic so explosive has to be nearly impossible. I was honored to be a speaker at their conference, and see them, unflinchingly, as a force for good.

What of Phil Illy4, though? He was an attendee of the conference, is a man who understands what he is, is exploring it both in a scholarly fashion and a human one, and is also displaying the fetish for all.

Even if it is true that any particular man will not behave in a predatory way to women, the public display of fetish opens up doors to predators who would. We had a social contract that did a good job of keeping women safe. Public display of fetish begins to dismantle that contract.

The fact that Phil is not himself a creep thus does not render his behavior harmless. He is breaching a social contract by walking around in hyper-feminine garb, causing people’s brains to throw errors and—for women—to become hyper-vigilant about what it means and how to react. The indirect effects of a man—even a good man—walking around in stereotypically female dress, in an era when other men who do this expect to be allowed in to female only spaces, to be treated as if they are women—are negative. I suppose that this is too bad for Illy, and others like him, that they should be expected to curtail their behavior because of other bad actors. But it is far worse if he does not curtail his behavior in public, far worse for the 50% of the population who are now on high alert at all times, protecting ourselves and our children against the compulsions of a few.

Share

The next day, at a different venue, at a different show entirely, the only element missing is the black leather.

I went to both events as an anthropologist, stepping into parts of American culture with which I had no prior experience. While anthropologists never want to call attention to their otherness, it is generally impossible to conceal the fact that you are other when you drop in from what might as well be outer space. When I lived in Madagascar, where I was not anthropologist but biologist, I was the focus of endless attention. Children followed me, the bravest among them racing up to touch my skin and my hair, even the shy ones pointing and shouting “vazaha!” as I walked down the street. White person! It wasn’t cruel. It wasn’t dangerous. They just had never seen anything like me before. They wondered what I was, as it was obvious to them that I wasn’t the same as what they were.

On a Saturday night in Portland, Oregon this week, I went to Keller Auditorium for the “Werk the World” show put on by the juggernaut that is RuPaul’s Drag Race. Unlike an actual anthropologist, I had—intentionally—come entirely unprepared. I have never seen an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race. I barely know what it is—don’t really know the conceit, certainly don’t know the players, and most definitely do not know the culture that has bubbled up around it. I wanted to see the show without having heard anything in advance about what other people thought, and to see it as a stand-alone event.

The next day, I went to see Barbie, the movie.

The similarities were striking.

Share

Everything has become spectacle. Before showtime at the Keller auditorium, the music is intense, booming, distorted, at least this close to the stage, in the shadow of massive speakers. Beams of red light sweep over the crowd, and the giant screen has digital drag dystopia on endless repeat. Finally, the show starts: a short, high energy dance number with a dozen drag queens, people wearing personas that are known by a large fraction of the audience. These queens are famous. But they’re famous in the way of all reality TV stars—famous for being famous, and for some exaggerated aspect of their personalities.

The show is primarily a series of dance numbers, most with a single central drag queen, plus six accessory dancers, two women, and four men. The accessory dancers are excellent at what they do, and they work hard. Hopefully the gig pays well. Most modern dance doesn’t, I think, involve quite so much twerking and writhing and grabbing of crotches.

Whenever a new act comes on stage, the audience screams in ecstasy, like so many teenage girls. Some of the drag queens have moves, to be sure. A few of them are beautiful even, at least from this distance. Asia, our host for the evening, is among them.

But the audience screams especially hard for the obese drag queens. The obese drag queens have rolls of fat, and when they jiggle their fat suggestively, the audience roars its approval. When they grab their own crotches, they get more screams. When they make suggestive movements with their tongues, more screams. When one of them—improbably, and impressively—does the splits, the response is nearly ear-shattering. Other than that one move, though, the obese drag queens demonstrate little in the way of skill. And yet they are adored.

After intermission, two amateur drag queens are brought on-stage from the audience. They are going to lip sync—For Your Life! It’s a competition, which the audience will judge. The first queen is polished and immaculately put together, with tall black boots so elaborate that Asia comments on them approvingly. He’s a tall leggy Brazilian with long, perfectly straight blond hair, and lip syncs well to a song he didn’t know was coming. He also knows how to move. The second one does not have the moves, and mostly fails to lip sync at all while jiggling his bits. He is also obese, and what he has in addition to his fat is the presumption that people will love him. He is right. They do. The audience overwhelmingly gives him the win. Objectively, he wasn’t nearly as good as the first guy. But that presumes that I understand what the game is. Clearly, I do not.

The obese amateur drag queen does know the game, though, and plays it well. Or rather, he werks it. He does it so well that I know his name—“Karisma with a K”—but do not know the name of the more skillful queen who lost. The game, I guess, is about being something so loud, and so brash, that others will fall all over themselves to demonstrate their adoration of you. Loudness, and brashness, and simply not being as you’re expected to be, is now sufficient to earn adulation, if you choose to claim that ground. It’s a way of telling the system off, without having to have any clarity about what the system is, or why you’re angry at it in the first place.

Karisma-with-a-K earns a solid “you go girl!” vibe from the audience.

“You go girl” would seem to be a statement of female empowerment. I’m not convinced. It seems to me, at best, to be a celebration of that which is immutable, those things that you did not earn, and did nothing to change. At worst, it’s a celebration of poor choices, and unfortunate outcomes.

Subscribe now

In Barbieland, too, everything is spectacle. It’s a movie so pink, it caused a global shortage of pink paint. As with Werk the World, I am neither the intended audience, nor familiar with the universe from which the confection emerges. Once, when I was little, a well-intentioned family member who was unaware that I had no interest in dolls gave me a Barbie as a birthday present. She had loved her Barbies, and assumed that I would, too. I put the box politely aside and never saw the thing again.

That said, much of the movie is entertaining and fun. Not deep, and not dark, but then, it doesn’t pretend to be either. Problem is, it sneaks in a whole lot of wrong, and people accepting wrong things because pop culture sold it to them with popcorn and a coke, is part of how we got to the very dark place we are in today.

First drag was sold to us as some sort of postfeminist fetish, and now, so is Barbie.

Barbie, the movie, begins with a remake of the opening scene from Kubrick’s 1968 masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey. Instead of a monolith paving the way for apes to become conscious, space-traveling humans, we have Barbie as harbinger of a whole new world for girls. I thought that Barbie’s impossible measurements and laughably absurd list of achievements were demeaning to women, not aspirational, but the beginning of this movie would have me believe that I’ve got it wrong. Apparently, Barbie is the feminist icon we’ve all been waiting for.

Mid-film, the Kens take control of Barbieland, and convince most of the Barbies to do the Kens’ bidding. Margot Robbie’s appropriately gorgeous “Stereotypical Barbie” has her dreamhouse stolen, and turned into a “mojo dojo casa house,” a real bro palace. Understandably, she falls into a funk, which manifests as lying face down on the floor, a few of her golden locks slightly out of place. In answer to the question of why she is immune to the brainwashing that has turned the rest of the Barbies into Ken accessories, Stereotypical Barbie moans, “Either you’re brainwashed, or you’re weird and ugly. There is no in-between.”

Fantastic.

Subscribe now

While feminism is getting a face lift over in Barbieland, RuPaul’s Drag Race is playing at the boundary between drag and trans. These are men dressing as women, not men who think they are women, right? Right? Sometimes, it’s not particularly clear. Some of the RuPaul drag queens, my scant post-event googling revealed, have indeed come out as trans. The distinction is whether the caricature of womanhood that they are creating and displaying is one that they feel like taking off at the end of the day. Drag didn’t used to be confused about this.

But Barbie, the movie, seems perfectly happy to add to the confusion. In Barbieland,  “woman” is a costume to begin with.

Upon arriving at a meeting of Mattel executives, Stereotypical Barbie despairs at the lack of women in the C-Suite. “I’m a man with no power,” offers the intern in attendance. “Does that make me a woman?”

Well no, Aaron, it does not.

In both the drag and Barbie confections, the focus is on surface appearances and illusions—the clothes, the makeup, the hair. In Barbieland, many other things become fashion accessory as well—the house, the job, the man. And in both, womanhood itself is a costume, something to be taken on and off at will. One of the Barbies in the film is played by a transwoman, and so the farce is complete. “I got the role because I fit the role,” explains Hari Nef. “To be honest, I don’t look much different in the movie than the Barbies that I had when I was a kid.”

Barbie is an impossible fantasy, her phenotype obtainable only through a combination of obsessive focus on how you look, and plastic surgery. At least with drag, you don’t  need the surgery.

Costume changes are a large part of both shows, of course, not just between acts, but during acts. It’s magic meets fashion, trusting your eyes and watching them fail you, as again and again something new shows up underneath what you thought was the base layer. Humans as onions, the metaphor revealed through fashion.

In Werk the World, occasional big black conical breastplates are reminiscent of 1980s Madonna. The bouncing rolls of fat most definitely are not. Everything is sexual. Some of the sex is violent.

The misogyny is sometimes stark. The word cunt—always spelled out, rather than said as a word—is spat out several times. Why? Why does one drag queen ask another to “look at your C-U-N-T”? Is it disturbing just for the sake of being disturbing? Is this a dare?

When not telling someone else to look at the genitalia they patently do not have, the drag queens are all about bringing the attention back to themselves. Look at me while I do nothing of note. Look at me while I werk it. Look at me, look at me, look at me.

There are fantasy and Hollywood and Disney references throughout both of these concoctions. Oddly, The Matrix is invoked in both. On offer: red pill, to wake up, and have a challenging if difficult life, or blue pill, to retain comfort, and cluelessness?

Barbie, as we would expect, wants the blue pill: she wants her high-heeled feet back after they’ve gone flat on her, and for everything to go back to normal. But she doesn’t get what she wants, and she’s better for it. Red pill for the win.

Werk the World is constructed to reveal the hivemind of the audience, and time and again, the audience says it wants the red pill. They are certain that they would choose to wake up to reality, as ugly and uncomfortable as that might be. This may be the most surprising part of the night for me. Here is an audience so enmeshed in a fantasyscape that they are convinced not only that they are interested in being awake, and in choosing reality over short-term pleasures, but that they have already awoken to reality.

Share

Meanwhile in Barbieland, all is hopeless between the sexes. There is no shared life to be had here, no world in which men and women work together, play together, live together, or just be together, in any sort of equanimity. One sex must reign supreme.

In the beginning, there was Barbieland. Then the Kens took over and turned it into a Kendom, but the Barbies will get back what is theirs. Fair enough, but how they go about it is passed off as cheeky, or smart, or feminist, but it’s none of those things. It’s just mean-spirited and sad.

The Kens actually seem to care about the Barbies—every one of them is interested in a particular Barbie, willing to show that, despite endless rejections from the Barbies, who just want to have girls night every night, the Kens are good and loyal, if a bit dim.

The Kens are so out of touch with what the Barbies want, they think that playing the guitar for and singing to the woman of their dreams is in any way appealing.

Silly Kens.

After several hours of Ken playing guitar “at” Stereotypical Barbie, she pretends to be interested in a different Ken. Then another Barbie does the same thing to her Ken. And another. And another. “Play on their egos and petty jealousies,” explain the masterminds of this reverse coup. Those Kens are so easily played.

As if caring about a woman, and not wanting to see her with another man, is nothing more than clueless, callous masculinity. A sure sign of the patriarchy at work. After all, what woman has ever wanted a man who was loyal, talented, and in love with her?

There is a scene in Buñuel’s 1974 surrealist film, The Phantom of Liberty, in which nicely dressed people are arrayed around a table at what might be a dinner party, but for the fact that they are sitting on toilets. Their shared, social activity is excreting waste. When one of them feels hungry, he excuses himself and goes to a private room, locking the door behind him. There, he eats in private.

Why are our social norms what they are? Some of them, surely, are outdated. Some of them should be replaced. Some of them, however, are based in reality, and in a history so deep that changing them risks breaking other things that may not even seem connected.

The social aspect of eating, and the private nature of waste excretion, are indeed social norms. But both of those norms are far older than humans. Humans have been folk epidemiologists for a very long time: We know that shitting together in public is a bad idea. We also know that breaking bread together connects us.

Similarly, humans have been folk biologists for a very long time: We know that humans come in two types, male and female. Extremely rare exceptions notwithstanding, absent this truth, there would be no humans. We can play with boundaries, test things, and discard some of the old ways, but men aren’t women, and they can’t become so. This matters because reality matters.

Similarly, it is difficult for men and women to work side by side, to make meaning in the world in shared spaces, and not have those spaces be inherently male, or inherently female. But it’s imperative that we figure this out. And when it works, it really, really works. A “feminist” vision that believes in winner-take-all—men have power, or women have power, but never both at the same time—is a sad vision that will not last.

Pushing social norms is standard human practice. But throwing everything into the blender and hitting liquefy, just because you can, is both juvenile and dangerous.

Late in the movie, Stereotypical Barbie has been schooled by the real world, but is nevertheless optimistic about her future. She says of herself, the fact that she is a gossamer-like creation that sprang from the minds of others, “I want to do the imagining. I don’t want to be the idea.” Do it then, Barbie! Work hard and figure out how you want to be in the world, what you want to do in the world, and achieve greatness! Carpe diem, explore the world, and find your passion!

Or, nah.

Maybe the film just doesn’t show us Barbie’s path to self-realization. Maybe. What it does show us in the end, what we see Barbie getting all aspirational and self-empowered over, is going to a gynecologist.

You go girl.

Share

We are a sexually dimorphic species, in which men are, on average, larger and stronger than women. More broadly, but also more to the point, we are a sexually reproducing species, with two and only two sexes. Each of us has been bathed in genetic, hormonal, and other developmental inputs that are particular to our sex, since before we were born. There is a lot of variation, of course: growing up with a bunch of brothers will affect a girl, for instance. And in other species of mammals, the sex of the siblings you are next to in utero affect how “masculinized” or “feminized” you end up being. But these experiences don’t change your sex. Humans, like all mammals, have two sexes, and we cannot change between them. No amount of fiddling with our biology can change that.

It is not, therefore, surprising, that a man who has moderate skills for a man, can beat a woman who has superior skills for a woman. A competition between the two is not fair, and he is being allowed to cheat. What is surprising is that anyone allowed him to compete against women in the first place.

We have separate men’s and women’s divisions in sport because until yesterday, everyone understood that men and women are different, and have different capacities and strengths. Different divisions by sex aren’t about how you feel; they’re about what you are: male or female.

Historically, most sport has been single sex. Specifically, most sport has been played by men and boys. In the United States, after Title IX was enacted in 1972, women’s sports proliferated, and greater female access to sport resulted in more girls and women playing.

Now we’ve got men coming into women’s sports and obliterating female athletes and female records, on the basis that they say that they feel like women. And all too many people are standing around pretending that this is okay.

Share

Here is Austin Killips, the man who beat a woman this week, talking about how proud of himself he is after the race. Apparently, he trained hard. Perhaps he did. That doesn’t make him a woman any more than do the earrings dangling from his ears.

In an article published in Cycling News in May of this year, Killips says that it is “incredibly painful to be othered.” Cyclist Hannah Arensman, who finished fourth behind Killips in the US Cyclocross Championship event in December 2022, presumably feels differently:

“I feel for young girls learning to compete and who are growing up in a day when they no longer have a fair chance at being the new record holders and champions in cycling.”

The article in Cycling News—which is sympathetic to men claiming to be women, but notably unsympathetic to actual women—continues: “Arensman confirmed her decision to retire in a Supreme Court filing in support of a West Virginia law that seeks to keep transgender student-athletes at all level of competition to play against those with the same gender assigned at birth, instead of the gender with which they identify.”

The linguistic mud of that sentence obscures its central claim, which is this: gender is assigned at birth. The claim is false. Nobody is assigned a gender at birth. More importantly: Sex is not assigned at birth, either. Sex is observed at birth. (And when prenatal testing has been done, sex can be observed before birth).

Given that sex is observed rather than assigned, it follows that allowing people to self-assign themselves into the opposite sex makes no sense at all.

Your sex does not depend on how you feel about yourself. How you feel about yourself is somewhat dependent on what sex you are, but the reverse is never true. It may be that you don’t really feel like the sex that you are, but those feelings do not change what sex you really are.

The race that Austin Killips “won” this week is a 131-mile bike race in North Carolina with almost 14,000 feet of vertical climb. Nearly half of it is off-road, and the route includes single track with sand, rocks, and water crossings. That’s a helluva contest. Despite being in the lead during some of the middle part of the race, Paige Onweller, who came in 2^nd to Killips, says “I just couldn’t match Austin in some of the single track. The power is just not comparable.”

Subscribe now

This is bad for women. For it to be good for women, you need to redefine what a woman is1, and that is—again—cheating. We have become a world that celebrates the cheat.

“Male” and “female” are concepts that exist outside of human existence and experience. We did not invent sex. We are in a lineage that, for at least 500 million years, has reproduced always and exclusively with two and only two sexes. Male and female are words that describe what sex you are. Gender is, roughly speaking, the software of sex—the behaviors and choices and preferences that are downstream of what sex you are. In other species, we call this “sex role.” So humans didn’t invent gender either, although we have stretched it far beyond what other organisms have.

Moose and manakins, for instance, have highly constrained behaviors that they engage in, depending on what sex they are. Their sex predicts their behavior with a high degree of accuracy. Humans have far greater freedom. You can’t tell what sex a person is on the basis that they are (metaphorically) locking antlers, or dancing, or singing. This is part of what makes us human.

Humans have obligate maternal care, so the fact that men can be the primary caregivers of children reveals that we have moved beyond some of the constraints of sex. And humans have sexual dimorphism, such that men are generally larger and stronger, so the fact that women can be firefighters, again reveals that we have moved beyond some of the constraints of sex. This does not mean that the supremely care-giving Dad or the female firefighter have changed sex. No human ever has, or can, change sex.

Cheaters will always exist. Austin Killips ought to be ashamed of himself, but hoping for him to correct his behavior, when he’s being lauded for behaving this way, is foolish. The thing to do with cheaters is not let them cheat. Call them out, and prevent them from doing it again. Instead, we are celebrating the cheats. And then we act surprised when more and more cheaters show up, and women’s sport becomes a thing of the past.

Share

But wait—what’s that noise? I hear another contender to the throne from nearby, singing. Singing. It’s Elliot. Of course it’s Elliot. The audacity. I go to the very edge of my property and strike up a song of my own. That should shut him up. But no. Elliot keeps right on singing, even swings into view with swagger and unearned confidence. I glare at him, look around my domain, as if to say: Have you seen all that is mine? Do you know who I am? How dare he.

Elliot keeps singing. Now he looks at me, and widens his stance a bit. What a dick. Dude does not honor the rules. Then he steps onto my property. So I attack him. Obviously. We go at it belly to belly for a while before I twist him and climb on to his back. I ride him around while he tries to dislodge me, and finally he throws me. Enraged, I chase him up a tree. He’s fast and strong, but this isn’t his tree, he doesn’t know it very well, and besides, I’m the boss around here. I chase him out on a branch and he loses his footing, hanging on by one arm for a second before plummeting to the ground. He begins to run away but I’m not done with him so I leap off the branch myself.

As I give chase on the ground, I notice Wanda, one of my children’s mothers, is watching from the sidelines. I just know she’s impressed. I pursue Elliot over hill and dale. We wrestle some more, and this goes on and on and on and on. I yell at him, but he yells right back. Until finally he doesn’t. He is cowed. He slinks back into the territory that is his, so near to and yet so very distinct from mine. I sit back, pleased with myself. Showed him.

Unbeknownst to me, while I was fighting with Elliot, Frank slunk back in, muttered some sweet words to Wanda, and got her into bed with him. What the actual hell. A top male has to be so vigilant around these parts.

Share

Nosy Mangabe lies in the northern reaches of the Bay of Antongil, off of northeastern Madagascar, in the Indian Ocean. Nosy Mangabe is a small green island, although in Malagasy, Nosy Mangabe means big blue island. I lived there over the course of two long field seasons in the mid to late ‘90s, studying the poison frogs there. I also spent time with lemurs and chameleons and leaf-tailed geckos, slept in a tent, showered in a waterfall, and ate mostly rice. The story above is an anthropomorphized account of one piece of what I learned there1. Here is just a little more:

Many of the frogs—Mantella laevigata2—are highly territorial, with males defending the limited resource that is water-filled bamboo wells. The wells are valuable because they act as defensible nurseries: during a successful courtship3, a female deposits an egg into a well, and the male with whom she is in courtship fertilizes it. The male, if he is the territorial owner of that well, attempts to defend it and the baby inside against intruders for the foreseeable future. Intruders include gigantic frogs of other species that like to use the wells for their own purposes, as well as craneflies whose larvae prove to be far more dangerous to the littleMantellas. And the female will return to the well after her egg hatches into being a tadpole—if her egg makes it that far—to feed her own unfertilized eggs to her child, for him to eat.

Because these wells are the key to the frogs’ reproductive success, and therefore to evolutionary success, any male who can successfully defend a good well4 is a successful male. Some males can pull this off, and more. They become like Duncan in the story above: holders of territories that include at least one, and sometimes several, good wells. The more wells in a territory, the vaster it is. Vast is a matter of scale, though, as these frogs are tiny, so even the largest territories comprise little more than a few square meters of forest floor. The Duncans of Mantella world are always vigilant, combative when pushed, and—I am told by both the Duncans and the females in their sway—extremely sexy.

A male who can defend a piece of real estate, but only one lacking the prize possession—a good well—is like our Elliot: a bit more sure of himself than is perhaps warranted, always testing boundaries, and often picking fights, most of which he will lose. And yet Elliot-strategy males do successfully defend territories, and they do it with care and tenacity. An Elliot’s territory tends to be adjacent to the territory of a Duncan, and along those borders there are frequent skirmishes. And the children of Elliots—which do exist, albeit in lower numbers than do the children of Duncans—tend to grow into successful young frogs. That is, if they can avoid the trials and tribulations of life in the jungle, like being eaten by a terrifyingly voracious insect larva, or—rather less of a risk—being squashed to death by the giant ass of another species of frog. Elliot-strategy males are also always looking for opportunity, roaming outside their territory frequently, but usually returning home no richer than when they left.

(A note on terms: Duncan-strategy and Elliot-strategy males have both territories and home ranges. Every mobile animal on the planet is said to have a home range, which includes all of the places they ever go. You have a home range, as does your dog, as does every baboon, cuttlefish, and dragonfly on the planet. A territory, in contrast, is that fraction of an individual’s home range that is actively defended against others of one’s kind (and sometimes, against others of other kinds). Not everyone defends some part of their space, however, so not everyone with a home range has a territory.)

So we have Duncan-strategy males, who defend resource rich territories. And we have Elliot-strategy males, who defend territories that do not contain limiting resources. And then there are the Frank-strategy males. For reasons that presumably vary, they don’t hold down territories at all. I suspect that they can’t hold down territories, but there is no way to know that for sure. What I know is that they don’t. But that doesn’t mean that they have given up on the reproductive game.

While the Duncans of Mantella world are yelling all the time (and the Elliots are doing so occasionally) about how great they are—singing, if you will; calling, more accurately; vocalizing, most technical of all—the Franks don’t make much noise. They skirt around the edges, waiting for opportunity. They wait for the Duncans to be defending their territories against someone else, their backs to be turned, or the Elliots to be off scouting new lands, leaving their territory undefended—and then the Franks come in and court any female who will have them. Sometimes—rarely, but sometimes—the Franks are successful in this endeavor, and a fertilized egg ends up laid in someone else’s well. And if the territory owner doesn’t recognize what has happened, he will end up raising a Frank’s child. It’s a win for Frank, even if the life he lives can look tenuous and unpleasant by comparison to that of his more successful compatriots.

Subscribe now

There is no exact analogy between the strategies of these male frogs and that of men. That’s not the point. The point is this: There are three distinct male strategies in male Mantella laevigata. I wasn’t expecting that when I first began observing them, trying to untangle their natural history and mating system from a blur of activity that no human had previously tried to untangle5. I wasn’t expecting it, but it’s what I found. Three distinct male strategies. Not three distinct sexes (or rather four, once we include females).

Many species have multiple morphs—that is, distinct forms that individuals within a sex might have. White-throated sparrows are one such example, in which both males and females can be either “tan” or “white,” which refers to the color of stripe on the crown of their heads. The color descriptions obscure the fact that the different morphs also differ in behavior. White males are more promiscuous and aggressive than their more monogamous tan counterparts. White females are, similarly, less nurturing than their tan counterparts. In these particular birds, the genetics behind their morphs renders matings between same-morphed pairs largely futile—there are almost no offspring from white-white or tan-tan couplings. Thus, white males prefer tan females, and vice versa; and tan males prefer white females, and vice versa6. (Although white males, being particularly promiscuous, might try to mate with an old shoe if it showed up. They are really not choosy.)

This remarkable (and remarkably well-studied) system in white-throated sparrows thus produces the unusual situation in which any given male can successfully mate with only a fraction of the available females. The same is true for females looking to mate—a sizeable fraction of males are just not going to work out. This is fascinating, and unusual, and remarkable, and lots of other adjectives I have not yet used, but what it is not is evidence that these birds have four sexes.

Might we say that they have four morphs, then? I suppose. But what is really going on is that there are two morphs, each of which manifests differently—although not entirely differently—in each of the two sexes. I prefer this admittedly less pithy description, because it highlights the relationship between two variables: sex and morph. Much of what has been written in the popular press about these birds has, instead, conflated morph (and strategy) with sex, and some people have thus come to the erroneous conclusion that these birds have four sexes7.

They do not.

Morph is itself a somewhat complicated term in these sparrows, as it refers not just to the distinct plumage that is caused by genetic differences, but also the distinctions in personality and behavior that are downstream of the same genetics.

Sex is a less complicated term, however. Sex refers to the type of gametes you produce8. In animals, the choices are two: eggs or sperm. If eggs, then female. If sperm, then male.

There is a lot downstream of the sex that you are—how you look, how you behave, what foods you like, what kinds of things interest you. You cannot change your sex, but you can change a lot of things that were impacted by your sex during development. And some of them change without your willing it. As you age, your tastes and desires will change. As you learn new things, or meet new people (or frogs, or birds, depending), you may find yourself drawn in new directions. Those new directions do not change your sex, though, even if those new directions have you interested in and doing things that are more usually associated with the opposite sex.

Ben Appel has written beautifully about his experiences growing up gay before he understood quite what it meant, in a piece titled Homophobia in Drag. After falling in love as an adult, and crusading for marriage equality, Appel came to understand what he was working towards9: “I wanted to help create a world in which feminine boys and butch girls could exist peacefully in society. A world in which gender-nonconforming people were accepted as natural variations of their own sex.”

I want that world, too. Indeed, I expected it. The world that I came of age into, in the 1980s, was becoming that world. I had all sorts of “boyish” interests and tendencies back then (still do), with my fast driving and rough-and-tumble play, my love of math and sport and adventure. But nobody ever told me that I must therefore be a boy. We were beyond such prejudices. Just as the distinct morphs in white-throated sparrows, and the distinct strategies in male Mantella laevigata, don’t make them unmale or unfemale, or some new sex entirely, so too do the less common behaviors of boys and girls, men and women, not magically turn them into the sex that they are not. We are a sexually reproducing species, with two and only two sexes. There are as many ways to be a man as there are men, and as many ways to be a woman as there are women. Be you, be awesome, and embrace reality.

Share

PostScript: With regard to the frogs, some readers may be wondering, what about the females? Surely they’re not all in lockstep, behaving exactly the same way? I agree—surely they’re not. But while males, even Frank-strategy males, have relatively small home ranges, females roam widely. I marked as many frogs as I could10, and I would then reliably see the males, day after day, usually within feet of where I had marked them. But the females would disappear for weeks. Then they’d show up again, sometimes two kilometers away in a different well-rich part of the forest, and hang out for a few days there, before disappearing again. Because females are roamers in this species, I know much less about the differences between individuals than I do about the males.

10

Marking small frogs for behavioral observations turns out to be an adventure unto itself. First, I tried giving them tiny, uniquely beaded waistbands, but the belts were either too loose, and fell off, or too tight, and impinged the movement of the frog. I thought about necklaces of the same construction, but frogs don’t really have necks. I did toe-clip the frogs—the somewhat barbaric practice of snipping the ends off a unique combination of fingers and toes—but you can’t see toe-clips at a distance, which makes it impractical for behavioral studies, and also? Their toes grew back! Ultimately, I landed on a solution that sounds more hard core than it was, although I will admit that sometimes, while I was sitting in the jungle on a folding stool with a small poison frog on one slightly blood-spattered knee, battery-operated tattoo gun in my dominant hand, ready to go, I did feel pretty cool. I never gave the frogs “Mom” tattoos. Instead, they got boring alphanumeric codes: A1, B2, etc. And by the end of the five-month field season in which I tattooed my frogs, the tats, too, were fading.

Share

A few years ago, I had a curious exchange with a friend’s young child. We were admiring his pet from a distance, and I asked him “Is your cat male or female?” He considered this for a moment, then replied, “I don’t know. Maybe both?”

“Can’t be.” I told him. “Cats aren’t like that.”

At which, with no hesitation, the young boy declared, “you’re a liar!”

It seems unlikely that a child of the 20^th century—or the 19^th, or 18^th—would have been convinced that a cat could be both male and female. There are occasional, very rare developmental mix-ups—on which, more below—but no mammal species makes a go of it by being a hermaphrodite1.  Even very casual observers of cats (and humans) easily conclude that there are two functional types, male and female, and that they do not show up in the same individual.

Some other animals do things differently, of course. Banana slugs are simultaneous hermaphrodites, meaning that single individuals have both male and female reproductive parts at the same time, like the child’s fictional cat. Many reef fish are sequential hermaphrodites, having the capacity to switch from one sex to the other, although there are limits, in terms of both direction and frequency. It is the rare fish, for instance, that can switch sex from male to female, while individuals in many species go the other direction—bluehead wrasse, for instance, start out female, and can become male later on. But mammals? Nope. We are not hermaphrodites.

Sex is real, and ubiquitous. Sex, in this usage, is shorthand for “sexual reproduction,” which is the raison d’etre for there being distinct sexes. In our lineage, sexual reproduction has an uninterrupted history of at least 500 million years; it may well be closer to two billion years2. Furthermore, sex is binary, at least among all plants and animals.

Sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. Sex, at its most fundamental, is about DNA from multiple individuals being brought together to create a zygote. But DNA isn’t sufficient for a new life—you also need cellular machinery like mitochondria and ribosomes.

Without this cellular machinery—the cytoplasm—no zygote will be formed. Cellular machinery is big, though, compared to DNA. Someone’s got to bring it if sex is going to work. So, some sex cells—gametes—are big because they contain the requisite cellular machinery. Those big gametes are eggs.

That’s one of the two large problems posed by reproducing sexually: from whence to source the cellular machinery. The other is how to find a partner. Trade-offs being what they are, big cells are slower than small cells. Eggs being big (for cells), they therefore also tend to be slow or entirely sessile. So, it falls to the other type of gamete to move around its environment, looking for eggs. This other type of gamete is largely devoid of cellular machinery. It’s called pollen in plants, sperm in animals. Eggs are large and cytoplasm rich and sessile; sperm are small and stripped down and fast. Two types of gametes; two sexes3.

In much of life on Earth, in nearly all plants and animals, and in absolutely all mammals, which includes humans, sex is real and ubiquitous. In his masterful compilation and analysis of the anthropological literature, Donald Brown writes that all cultures “have a sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic, even when it comprises three or four categories4. When there are three, one is a combination of the two basic sexes (e.g., a hermaphrodite5), or one is a crossover sex (e.g., a man acting as a woman). When there are four there are then two normal sexes and two crossover sexes.”

Brown’s “crossover sex” is now referred to as the umbrella term “trans.” Trans has emerged in many cultures, but it has never been common—not nearly so common as homosexuality, for instance. And Brown’s “hermaphrodites” have more recently been called intersex, who are now often referred to as having a Disorder of Sexual Development (DSD), although here we begin to run into problems. The distinction between people with DSDs and trans people is sometimes hard to parse, the boundaries between them sometimes fuzzy. Some people who actually have DSDs may never have them diagnosed, and may live as trans people, thus belonging in both categories. Both categories are indeed real, and—in contrast to sex itself—very, very rare.

In a few places, Western science has discovered a mechanism which explains a relatively high rate of unusual sexual presentation. In the village of Las Salinas in the Dominican Republic, for instance, some number of people are understood to be machihembras6 —intersex, in fact, but presenting as female through childhood until puberty transforms them into decidedly more male in appearance. The molecular explanation for this particular DSD is, in part, that mutations in the 5α-reductase type 2 gene (which is autosomal, not on a sex chromosome) affect the steroid 5α-reductase 2 isoenzyme, which in turn causes a dihydrotestosterone deficiency, which in turn inhibits development of male typical characteristics such as external genitalia7.

We should all be grateful for the scientists who are driven to discover molecular pathways like the one above, but for most of us, the human side of the story is more compelling. In Las Salinas, Felicita was a little girl who enjoyed going to birthday parties with her sister until, as she approached puberty, she came to prefer playing with boys. During adolescence, as her sister’s body became rounded and fuller, Felicita’s shoulders broadened, and she grew strong and tall. Like most children with 5α-reductase deficiency, she had looked like and been raised as a girl, until puberty revealed that for her, the truth was more complicated. Felicita was a machihembra8.

Las Salinas is not the only place on Earth in which a DSD has come to be explained by scientists, a DSD which explains, in retrospect, the relatively high number of people in those communities who transition from female to male during puberty. Las Salinas is not unique, but it, like DSDs and transness more generally, is very rare.

Those individuals who can or will or have or might make eggs are female. Those individuals who can or will or have or might make sperm (or pollen) are male. This is a true binary, which DSDs make more difficult to parse, but DSDs are the extreme exception. They are, indeed, disorders9.

Sex is not assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth. A baby born with ambiguous genitalia or an undiagnosed DSD may be observed to be the sex that they are not, and that observation is therefore in error. Development is complicated, but the fact of anisogamy—two different types of gametes, not three or five or thirteen, but two, which come together to create a new life—is true.

Furthermore, development being complicated means that sometimes, some of the manifestations of your sex will be out of sync with your actual sex: hence the idea of being “born in the wrong body.” Again, sex is not, at its most fundamental, about chromosomes or hormones, about breasts or facial hair, about behavior or fashion. But if your sex chromosomes determined your sex accurately with regard to gamete type and primary sex characteristics, but ran into some hiccups as your brain was being formed, or as your secondary sex characteristics were developing, you might well feel—as some do—very much at odds with the body you are in. Of course, you might also feel that way during adolescence regardless. The vast majority of people who feel uncomfortable in their own bodies as those bodies transform from child to adult are not trans10.

Let me be clear: We are dealing with the interface between long standing products of evolution, subtle matters of humanity which have blurry borders, and a brave new world of technological modifications that has yet to stand any test of time. That leaves all of us, even those who are thoroughly versed in the facts and logic of sex and sexuality grappling with new and genuinely difficult questions. No one has yet worked out the solutions that best resolve all of the tensions.

Subscribe now

Sex is real and ubiquitous. Trans is real, but extremely rare. In the 21^st century WEIRD world (those countries that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)11 however, both of those points are increasingly taken as hostile to individual autonomy. To simultaneously observe that sex is real and everywhere, and that trans is real and rare, seems to guarantee running afoul of someone’s ideology. Some will insist that anybody who says they are trans is trans. Others that sex is an artifact, perhaps of the patriarchy, perhaps of society writ large. Lurking just below the surface is the belief that speech creates reality: claims of truth become the truth. You can be freed from the very concept of sex, just by believing that you are. Such emancipation!

As Libby Emmons so cogently points out12, modern instantiations of trans-genderism, like trans-humanism, imagines a split between body and mind. “Transgender practice,” writes Emmons, “is the ultimate biohack. The claim that one has been born into the ‘wrong’ body is a total rejection of mind-body unification, and a statement that mind and body can be so disparate that the body must be thoroughly altered to match the mind’s perception of how it ought to be.” There is something in this line of thinking that believes that if I want it hard enough, it will be so.

Share

To a degree, believing that you are the master of your own fate is empowering. It can open doors that might not even be recognized as doors had you not insisted on something that others find hard to believe. But sex isn’t like that.

We do not change underlying reality by thinking about it differently, nor does it fail to apply to us if we are unaware of it. Ignorance of the physical laws of the universe does not make them go away, unlike what you may have inferred from the Road Runner cartoons. Gravity is not the product of our minds—or of the minds of animated coyotes. Gravity is a product of the universe. Sex is not a product of our minds either. Rather, sex is the product of our entire evolved beings. We are fully embodied, and cannot be otherwise. There is no essence of the human experience that can be distilled, from brainwaves or neuron maps or genomics or anything else. We exist at the interface with the world in which we live, in which we have evolved for three and a half billion years.

This concept of a fundamental duality within each of us, between body and mind, in which they are independent of one another, both struggling for primacy—it’s wrong. And it’s reductionist. Somehow it manages to fall prey both to the postmodern notion of reality as a social construct, and to the reductionist model currently imposed on so many modern institutions, including much of science, medicine, and nutrition. Too often, those who apply reductionist thinking imagine that if you come upon a complex system, and succeed in naming some of the parts in that system and counting them, then you have come to know not just those parts, but in fact have mastery over the whole system. Viewing ourselves through a reductionist lens inhibits our ability to see ourselves, and others, as whole, complete beings. In doing this we fail ourselves—trans or not—by fooling ourselves into seeking solutions that serve only isolated facets of our being.

Reductionism is at odds with emergence, though. Complex systems are emergent: in complex systems, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Childhood is a time of exploration. It is a time to learn rules, to break rules, and to make new rules. Humans have the longest childhoods of any organism on the planet, and we are born with more potential than we will use13. Our potential fades with time—note for instance the ability to pick up a new language in childhood, and the increased difficulty when the same attempt is made even in young adulthood. So, childhood is a time of exploration and of practice, of assessing the world and testing boundaries. In childhood we come to understand what is real and what is not, what is changeable and what is not, and how different the world is from that in which our elders came of age. Adolescence, therefore, when children transform into adults, can be challenging and difficult under the best of circumstances.

The 21^st century WEIRD world has left many bereft of choice, lacking in passion or insight to contribute in a way that feels meaningful. Coming of age can be filled with angst, but this historical moment goes well beyond what is common. The blame for the widespread failure to find meaning in existence can be placed in several additional courts: Currently fashionable parenting styles “protect” children from risk and experience. Screens are replacing social engagement in real life. Schools are ever more broken, teaching compliance and obedience to the new orthodoxies, as they actively punish rigor and extrapolation, critical and independent thought14. Prescription drugs are being used widely to treat disengagement, hyperactivity, and anxiety—a “corrective”, in part, for the fact that some children resist underwhelming or toxic school experiences15. And falling economic prospects make things like owning your own home an ever more distant dream for most young people. Add to this the recognition among many that our economic and political systems are decohering. The rate of change is accelerating so fast that even the near future will not look anything like the past16. All of these contribute to the ever-greater number of people who arrive at the cusp of adulthood with the bodies of adults, but either the minds of children, or an overwhelming sense of futility, or both.

Enter into this minefield the expectation that everyone is their own brand, and should be, at all moments, declaring themselves as that brand. How to distinguish yourself, if you don’t know what you’re good at, can’t seem to care about anything, and wouldn’t know how to find out? If you have grown or are growing into the body of an adult but still have the mind of a child, and have emerged into a world seemingly bent on incoherence, what is there to do?

Some will lash out at the system; this is a time-honored response to feeling disenfranchised from the status quo, although its modern manifestations have a different character from those of the past. Others strive for what they already know, seeking comfortable lives in which past markers of success—a stable family, job, and home—are the totality of their goals. Those who would make their mark on the world - as scientists, or artists, explorers, or healers - are more adrift than ever, unless they choose one of two routes. They can join the establishment, get the appropriate degrees, get jobs with or appeal for funding from the appropriate entities, and become ever more beholden to those entities. They may well find their thoughts converging with what everyone else thinks. They’re not engaging in a craven embrace of orthodoxy; it’s simple survival. Or they can gamble on becoming “influencers,” many of whom are a caricature of the creative lifestyle, a kind of hedonistic embrace of all that is frivolous, fleeting, and decadent. Successful influencers make a “good living” doing this, but are they living a good life?

Subscribe now

Within the last decade, an additional route to social belonging, to feeling like you have a place in an incoherent, unforgiving, and uncaring world, has been to declare yourself trans.

Jazz Jennings “came out” as trans at five years old, was encouraged to transition by a family that has been described as “supportive” in some quarters, began doing media appearances at the age of 6, and catapulted into a life of fame in 2013, at the age of 11, when interviewed on 20/20 by Barbara Walters17. Jazz is hardly the only person who has found fame in being trans. But out of the limelight, many thousands of other young people are transitioning, often to the celebration of their immediate peers (and social media contacts), but to the consternation of their families18.

Over the last several years, the number of people declaring themselves trans has increased by a factor of twenty (see data from the U.K.19 and the Netherlands20, and find more at statsforgender.org21). Furthermore, historically, the very low number of trans people has been biased towards MtF (Male to Female): young men transitioning into transwomen. But that has recently reversed22. In one year alone in the U.S.—from 2016 to 2017—the percentage increase in FtM “gender confirmation” surgeries, in which young women are surgically modified into transmen—was 289%23. This is not subtle. And it is not organic. As with eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, social contagion is likely playing a powerful role, as evidenced in part by the rapidity with which trans identity spreads through female friend groups24.

One additional deeply unfortunate possibility, which might partially explain the rise in trans-identification, is that our hyper-novel world is indeed driving an increase in DSDs. For instance, atrazine, a widely used herbicide and known endocrine disrupter, is detectable in rainfall even in regions where it is not actively applied. Frogs that are exposed to atrazine in lab experiments, even in low doses, do not develop normally. Furthermore, exposure to other endocrine disrupters is known to have perplexing effects on amphibians, such that at some doses only females are produced, and at slightly different doses only males are produced. And in the wild, hermaphroditic frogs are more common in areas with atrazine use or contamination25.

Frogs may be more susceptible to environmental chemicals than are humans, in part because they breathe through their skin, easily taking in toxins through that massive organ. But imagining that we are immune to the effects of known endocrine disrupters is naïve at best. An increase in endocrine disrupters in the environment may be contributing to the uptick in declarations of transness among the young26.

Even if this is true, however—even if the chemicals that we are practically bathing in now have effects on people that are similar to the effects they are known to have on frogs—this is no justification for wilting in the face of declarations from children. We owe Jazz Jennings and the many thousands of less famous children futures that are as full of potential as possible.

Most of the young people who are now declaring themselves trans are not trans. But declaring yourself something you are not can help a person feel, if nothing else, very much alive, at least during that period of time when everyone around them is celebrating their bravery for “coming out” as something that they are not. It will be a fleeting high, and unsustainable, but as with the rush that comes with many illicit drugs, the costs are not easy to see in the moment.

Into this landscape arrive those who would defend the use of new pronouns in children in order to be “inclusive” or “kind.” We do not try to be inclusive or kind to an anorexic who insists that, at 5’8” and 82 pounds, she is fat. We do not try to be inclusive or kind to a schizophrenic who insists that he is working with the King of Siam to save the world from the lizard people.

Nor should we try to be inclusive or kind to a child who wakes up Tuesday and declares himself Spiderman, come Wednesday he’s a T. rex, and on Thursday he’s a princess. Given that we don’t embrace the child’s fantasy on Tuesday or Wednesday, what makes Thursday different? “Kind,” in this case, is a euphemism for: accede and cater to the fantasy. And this kindness is no kindness at all.

Children are in the act of figuring out what the world is. They check their experience against what the trusted adults say, a sibling’s interpretation against that of a friend, today’s experience against last week’s. Childhood is when we learn how to be, and discover what we can be. Free and wide-ranging exploration will include ideas that are out of this world. Adults should allow children their fantasies, within reason, but not allow them to believe that fantasies are real as they approach adulthood.

Affirming the delusions of a dangerously thin girl who thinks she’s fat is not kind. Affirming the delusions of a girl who believes that her interest in “boy stuff” makes her a boy is also not kind. We owe people who are stuck in a fantasyland of reality-denial a correction. We owe them compassion and truth. We don’t owe them a celebration of their confusion and naivete. In fact, such celebrations actually do harm.

We have all seen pronouns in profiles and email signatures. Most of us will have been asked to announce our pronouns in meetings or zoom calls or classrooms. We are told that this is simply about respect. I don’t buy it, and neither should you.

Share

Look At Me!

The newest kid on this block is “non-binary.” Announcing yourself as non-binary literally requires nothing on the part of the person “coming out”, but now they may well get accolades for doing so. Google “non-binary in Hollywood” and be regaled with assurances from the famous and almost famous that because they don’t entirely feel like a woman (or a man) all the time, they are therefore non-binary.

The concepts of “man” and “woman” are as ancient as humans. Remember the universality of “sex terminology that is fundamentally dualistic” in human cultures⁶. The fact that every human culture to ever exist correctly recognizes that there are two sexes, should not be surprising, given that—again—male and female go back several hundred million years in our lineage alone, perhaps two billion years.

Gender is the software of sex. Gender norms flow from the sexual binary, but they are far more fluid, their boundaries less rigid, their expressions infinite. Remember the sex-switching reef fish? Not only do they switch sex, they switch gender, too. Female bluehead wrasse produce eggs (sex) and are docile, neither defending territories nor approaching conspecifics (gender); once switched into males, however, the same individuals now produce sperm, and are both active and aggressive in inspecting both sites and individuals that come near them27.

Gender follows from sex, but it is far more labile. Gender is not a binary. Because of what sex is and how it manifests in humans, men have traditionally been more likely to have power—at least, overt, outward facing, society-level power. And women have been more likely to use covert means to achieve their goals, working behind the scenes, using social rather than physical means to diffuse tension28.

Is it possible to move beyond those gender norms now, in the WEIRD world? I believe that we can. But observe that the very manifestation of so much of trans-ideology hinges on those very gender norms. Here is the (devout Christian) mother of a boy describing how she “knew” that what she actually had was a daughter, “I tried so hard to force her into wearing clothes with camouflage and superhero patterns, and I even gave her a severe, flat-top haircut”29. But the child was having none of it. So instead of recognizing that this boy, at least for now, had little interest in traditional, stereotypical gender norms, the mother decided that her boy was in fact a girl. And here is Dr. Diane Ehrensaft, a clinical and developmental psychologist, explaining how you can tell if a preverbal child is transgender: “I have a colleague who is transgender. There is a video of him as a toddler – he was assigned female at birth – tearing barrettes out of then-her hair. And throwing them on the ground. And sobbing. That’s a gender message”30. A baby girl tears barrettes out of her hair, thus indicating that she is actually a baby boy. Well, that’s certainly one interpretation.

In Harper’s Magazine in 2020, Anne Fadiman31, Writer in Residence at Yale, argued in favor of the singular they for people who view themselves as outside of the binary. It may at first seem that we owe such people this much at least. No, we do not. What we owe people is resistance to foolishness. This foolishness is not the next civil rights battle. It’s a battle for fantasy over reality, for a fragmented and fractured human experience over an integrated one, for a reductionist understanding of ourselves over a holistic one. In Fadiman’s telling, one big rift between linguists is between the prescriptivists, who favor rules and standards (“this is how people should talk”) and descriptivists, who favor popular usage (“this is how people actually talk”). What fails to be included in this categorization scheme, of course, is whether language is accurately representing reality.

From my scientific perspective, it looks very much like this scheme—prescriptivists vs. descriptivists—is an incomplete solution set. At least one category is missing from the analysis. In all the discussion among linguists about pronoun usage in English, I have never seen an analysis that asks: “what is actually true?”

What is actually true is that we have two sexes. Gender is somewhat more complicated, but male and female, man and woman—these refer to biological realities that do not change no matter what we say about them.

One year after Fadiman’s piece, writer Michael Waters32 made a similar argument in The Atlantic Monthly: “Today’s gender-neutral English-language pronouns make space not just for two genders, but for many more, serving as a way for people who fall outside the binary of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ to describe themselves.”

And in the New York Times, linguist John McWhorter33, who has written brilliantly on adjacent topics, fell prey to the same incomplete logic in September of 2021. Arguing, again, on behalf of the singular “they,” he imagines that he understands the complaints: “Why does language have to change all the time, with all we have to think about?” This, I contend, is not the objection that most of us have. The next example that he gives is the shift, in English, from a preponderance of double, and even triple, negatives, in Shakespeare’s time, to a rejection of such usage. The difference, I hasten to point out, is that double and triple negatives are entirely a human construct, with effects on communication and clarity, but in no way reflecting underlying reality. Our pronouns, in distinct contrast, refer to a reality that we do not change simply because we change the way that we talk about it.

I have always called adults by the pronouns that they wish to be called by. Never in my experience as a college professor was I asked to use brand-new pronouns. I did have trans students, and their cross-sex pronoun preferences posed no problems in our classrooms. But children’s flights of fancy, their fantasies that could be their greatest strength as they imagine all of the ways to be human, should never be cemented into permanence. That risks turning their greatest strength into their greatest tragedy. The adults in their worlds are doing them a great disservice—which is putting it mildly.

One of the oddities of this moment, and of these ideologies, is that they simultaneously complexify what is simple (e.g., the binary of sex), and simplify what is complex. The former is surprising for its utter lack of connection to reality, both easily observable reality and deep historical reality. The latter—the simplification of the complex—is, unfortunately, such a banal instinct that it is very common through human history. We simplify the complexity of the world in order to feel in control, in order to feel like gods. Left to our most banal devices, we are, again, reductionists, seeking single answers with easy cures for complex problems.

Suffer from tonsilitis? Rip them out! Feeling anxious? Take a pill! Wishing for freedom from restrictive gender norms? Declare yourself a man! Or better yet: declare yourself non-binary!

Trans people are real but rare, but nonbinary people? This is just a fiction, a sign of a society that has forgotten to check its beliefs with reality, a society so wealthy, insulated, and comfortable that it has, too often, forgotten that reference to an objective reality is actually a necessary precursor to making things happen in the world. At the end of her essay in Harper’s, Fadiman argues that there are five reasons to use the singular they, “from most conservative to the most revolutionary.” The striking thing about this list, to me, is that the situation that Fadiman thinks is most conservative, likely to be accepted by a larger fraction of people than any other, is using they “only for nonbinary people.” This presumes that “nonbinary” is a real category. But just as a cat can’t be both male and female, or neither male nor female, the same is true for people. If you like, go ahead and throw gender norms out the window; but don’t conflate the norms of your culture with underlying biological reality, which is what the language, and our pronouns, are actually describing.

Subscribe now

As I was writing this essay, I saw a young woman wearing a sweatshirt that said “anti gender roles club.” Yes to that. Yes to freeing ourselves of the now unnecessary baggage that has been entrenched by social norms. Let us free ourselves from that part of our expectations that we can free ourselves from, without pretending that we, men and women, are the same.

But as I was writing this essay, I also saw a piece in Science magazine headlined “Why I came out as non-binary to my PhD lab”34. We are not told what kind of science the author is allegedly learning how to engage in. What we are told is that “I knew that if I wanted to survive graduate school, I needed to be open with my lab mates” about the use of “gender-neutral/non-binary pronouns.”

I’ll match that anecdote with one of my own: When I was in graduate school (as it happens, at the very same institution, but many years earlier), becoming a credentialed scientist, it never occurred to me that my peers or advisor needed to know the inner workings of my psychology in order for me to survive. Nor was it in fact the case. In fact, in order to do my research—which entailed, among other things, contending with aggressive lemurs and errant spice boats and cyclones, while living in a tent on a remote island off the coast of Madagascar—I needed to not succumb to my own psychology. I was in the field, and in grad school, to do science, not to engage in group therapy.

The “non-binary” category seems to be evidence of either deep mental confusion, or deep narcissism, or perhaps both. The author of the “Science Careers” piece continues that, in the six months since informing said lab mates, “The word ‘she’ has slipped out in conversations more times than I can count, and every time, it feels like a knife is being stabbed into my stomach.”

We all have preferences about what we want to be called. Perhaps a nickname from childhood has stuck around past its use-by date. Perhaps you prefer your middle name to your first. When I was a college professor, I was happy to have students call me by my first name, but a few preferred to use a title, in which case “Dr. Heying” was fine too. But occasionally a student would call me “Mrs. Heying.” As I told them—gently, privately—that wasn’t fine by me, because while it was true that I was married, my marital status had no bearing on my role as their professor, whereas my academic degree did. So I bristled slightly at being addressed as “Mrs.”, especially (but not only) in an academic setting, and I told the students why, but you know what I didn’t do? I didn’t harangue the students, nor did I dwell on a mistake that was clearly trivial. If being misgendered feels like “a knife is being stabbed into [your] stomach,” I’m pretty sure that you need to get out more.

Some “first-world problems” are real challenges which would nevertheless not rate on a list of complaints had the complainant want of food, shelter, or clean water to drink. Spending hours navigating an automated customer service system to get to a real person, or facing the newest round of software updates that have broken a once functional system—these are legitimate first world problems. Other first world problems, though? They are fabricated. Out of confusion. Or for attention. As the inimitable Douglas Murray observes35, he has yet to hear the distinction between coming out as non-binary and simply shouting “Look at me!”

Share

We need science, and we need scientists. One of the things that will get in the way of both things is allowing the institution of science to fall prey to ideology that patently makes no sense. When one of the two most influential science journals in the world publishes a self-indulgent piece on the visceral pain experienced by a “non-binary” grad student upon being misgendered, while truly important scientific issues remain uninvestigated or patently botched, it all seems a lost cause.

Add to this that medical schools are now falling down the rabbit hole as well: a professor apologizes for referring to pregnant women (because men can apparently get pregnant; or so tomorrow’s doctors are being taught); another one insists that biological sex is a “social construct;” while others get lambasted for referring to breastfeeding instead of “chestfeeding”36.

So too is the American Medical Association. In their guide to “Advancing Health Equity: A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts”37 jointly produced with the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), they argue that sex is assigned at birth; that transitioning between sexes is possible in humans; and that while “two-spirit” people (from the Ojibwe) have bodies that “simultaneously house a masculine spirit and a feminine spirit,” the “gender binary” is nonetheless “colonial.” Medicine and its practitioners are losing their collective grip on reality, and on science, and are failing the very people they purport to be trying to help.

And yet. Consider this: A smart and capable young person approached me with this true story. A natal female who had transitioned to male, Ronny (a pseudonym) grew alarmed at having doors close as womanhood receded in the rear-view mirror. Realizing that “passing” as female was no longer possible, Ronny settled on non-binary as a result. Ronny does not seem confused to me. Ronny is not in denial of reality. Ronny does seem sad, and almost resigned. And Ronny arrived here, in part, because of a mainstream narrative that assures people that if they don’t fit regressive stereotypes of what it means to be male or female, if they are butch women or feminine men, or if they are attracted to members of their own sex, then they are actually a different sex than they’ve been told. Well, no. Ronny was manipulated and misled by a system, and is left with an array of bad choices. At this point, non-binary may well be the right choice for Ronny.

I grew up with Ms. Magazine, and Title IX, and Mary Tyler Moore throwing her hat into the air on a Minneapolis street, beamed into my living room every week without fail. Mary Tyler Moore’s hat throw was an expression of such unbridled freedom and possibility that it filled me, as a little girl, with joy every time that I saw it. I did not view it this way then—and it was apparently not the intention—but her joyous hat throw could be seen as an homage to the trope of the bride throwing her bouquet to the single women in attendance at her wedding. The single women fight to receive the bouquet in hopes that it would give them the luck they want, to land a man, to become the next woman on the altar.

Mary Tyler Moore’s exuberant hat throw was not a rejection of marriage; we do not need to throw out the old in order to embrace the new. Rather, it was a celebration of the additional opportunities afforded by a world that was opening up to the reality that women are just as varied as men, just as skilled and flawed, with just as much capacity for both passion and tragedy. Just as—but not the same as. Equal to under the law—but not identical to.

Sex is real and ubiquitous and fixed. DSDs are real and very rare. Transsexual people do not exist, but transgender people do. But feeling out of step with gender norms does not make you trans. Also, feeling out of step with gender norms is neither wicked, nor should it be noteworthy. Feeling out of step with gender norms certainly should not warrant the creation of fictional new categories, like non-binary, unless the point is to keep the rest of us on our toes.

To that little boy who would have us believe that his cat might be both male and female—and to the legions of people who would have us believe that their sex is a matter of choice—I say this: Your beliefs are not merely wrong, they are acutely disempowering. This marks a step backwards for all of us individuals who are gender non-conforming: the girls who like to play in the mud and with numbers, and the boys who like to save injured birds and discuss their feelings. It therefore marks a step backwards for society, because allowing all humans to find their skills and interests and passions, rather than constrain them to stereotypes, is fundamental.

Share

Framing female confidence and autonomy in terms of what is absent feels like a tremendous loss to me. It is often taken for granted that relationships between the sexes are, always have been, and always will be antagonistic. This needn’t be the case.

That said, we are different, men and women. I have considered our differences at some length, especially with regard to the ways that men and women compete (see Competition part I, Competition part II, and my invited journal article on the topic). The games that women play are often less explicit and less public than the ones that men play, but that doesn’t render them any less serious.

Many social organisms have simple linear dominance hierarchies1 which are differentiated by sex, but humans do not. Our social groups are too large, the rules of our interactions too varied by culture and time and circumstance. Those rules are sometimes explicit; more often—in both sexes—they are implicit, unspoken. And what rules there are tend to be pushed against by the young, and by others who reject tradition in hopes of a different future.

Share

I grew up in Los Angeles in the 1970s and ‘80s, where and when much of what American culture had to say about gender norms was changing rapidly. But there was still ample evidence of earlier, more restrictive times. Even as a child, I pushed mightily against the traditional gender norms that persisted. And I was lucky to have parents who didn’t mind. My mother enjoyed having me in fancy dresses far more than I enjoyed being in them, but she quickly abandoned any thoughts of me wanting to play with dolls or have tea parties. And my father, who before I came along assumed that throwing the ball around and building fences and doing math would be something to do with a son, was thrilled, so far as I could tell, to be doing those things with a daughter. Were my parents ahead of their time? To some degree, yes. But they were also riding the wave of modernity, embracing the freedoms of the moment. They saw that their daughter had both interest in and aptitude for traditionally male dominated activities, and why on earth would they put a stop to that?

Now we are moving backwards, embracing restrictive gender norms and using them as evidence that people are the sex that they are not. I am a woman, and a biologist, and I know, because of the latter, that we are part of a lineage that has had two and only two sexes for at least 500 million years (and it may be more like two billion years). I also know—again, as a biologist, specifically as an evolutionary biologist—that what we call “gender” in humans is what we call “sex role” in other species; that some other species do things very differently (pregnancy in male seahorses, anyone?), but this does not comprise evidence that humans can do the same; that no mammal can change sex; and that what makes you male or female, at the fundamental level, has nothing to do with how you feel, or what you look like, or your levels or ratios of sex hormones, or your chromosomes. Rather, what makes you male or female is your gametes—your sex cells. I see the sophists and their grade-school-level philosophy coming already, but here it is, again:

Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for rare developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes.

Males are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for rare developmental or genetic anomalies, produce small, mobile gametes. In animals, that’s sperm; in plants, it’s pollen.

Very occasionally, people feel so at odds with the sex that they are that it is important to them to present to the world as the opposite sex. Most of what is passing for “trans” now, however, is not that. It is a confusion, a muddle, a betrayal of reality and of reason and of humanity and of the very individuals who are being encouraged in their beliefs. It is the opposite of empowering.

I was a girl who liked to play ball and build things and do math, and I grew up to be a woman, because that’s what girls do. I insist on the reality of the binary nature of sex, and the inability of humans, as mammals, to change our sex. And I reject high-tech solutions like puberty blockers as solutions to “problems” that, for most people, are not persistent problems at all, but explorations in a journey of discovering who they are. Discovering yourself as you go through adolescence, seeking new ways to be, rejecting who you have thought yourself to be in the past, this is all normal and human. People both ancient and modern have gone through this—our long and winding childhoods are much of what make us human2. What we are doing now is entrenching a confusion: "ah, I believe this right now, and I am certain that I will believe this forever, and so I will employ technological fixes in order to fix this moment, this belief, in place, as the forever mode."

It won’t work, though. It almost never works.

Subscribe now

The complexity of human childhood is matched by the complexity of human social structure. All of that was a long-winded way of circling back to dominance hierarchies and whether humans have alpha males.

We don’t have alpha males (or alpha females) in the way that other primates do, or in the way that wolves, or elephants, or dolphins do. Even those other highly social, long-lived creatures, with their long childhoods and generational overlap, three generations often living together and learning from one another, are far simpler than us.

The groups that humans live in are so much larger, and the number of things that we do orders of magnitude vaster, that simple linear hierarchies can’t drive or organize our social systems. We don’t merely inhabit niches; we create new ones everywhere we go. Other organisms—like the beavers that I wrote about last week—modify their environments in ways that transform whole landscapes. But they always do so in more or less the same way. Humans are unique in having moved into new landscapes, and new kinds of landscapes, over and over again, and having invented new ways to solve problems in every domain.

In a small band of thirty or forty people, there may well be a leader, and we might call him—or very rarely her—the alpha. He is the boss when it comes to making decisions that affect the whole group. But even in that relatively simple scenario, he is not the most dominant in every domain. In fact, in such a group, if the group is to be maximally successful, we expect every individual to be best at something or somethings, and to have breadth, too, being very good (but not absolutely the best) at many other things that someone else in the group is master of.

If I am the best fire starter, and rope maker, and finder of salmon streams, and you are the best finder of kindling, and knot tyer, and fisher of salmon, which of us is alpha? We are both necessary. We are both dominant in some domains, and not in others, but both of our skills are necessary to do the emergent things that need doing.

This is one of the modern human predicaments. All of us should be and can be dominant in some domain, even if that domain is very small. Even if, with billions of human beings, aspiring to be the best may be far-fetched. Comparing your skills and behaviors not to others, but to your own self, is the route to mastery. And mastery of skills and self is ultimately what human dominance is about.

Share

Subscribe now

For more about how humans master our environments, while also being at considerable risk from the very hyper-novelty that we have ourselves created, consider A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century.

Hunter-Gatherer's Guide

Late on Saturday night, November 19th, a gunman went into Club Q outside of Colorado Springs and opened fire. He killed five people, and injured nineteen more. Club Q is described as an LGBTQ nightclub. Like too many incidents before it, this mass shooting appears to have been motivated by hate. Hatred of gay people (Pulse nightclub, Orlando, 2016). Hatred of Jews (Tree of Life synagogue, Pittsburgh, 2018). Hatred of black people (Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, 2015). Hatred of women (Polytechnique engineering school, Montréal, 1989; attempted: Ohio, 2021).

And on and on and on. Name a group, and somebody hates them.

We will never live in a world without hate, but we can and should do what we can to diminish it, to make it as small a driving force in our own minds, and in society, as is possible.

We can disagree without hatred. We can even personally choose not to associate with other people if we want, although doing so based on a demographic marker, rather than individual characteristics, is narrow-minded and bigoted. As an individual, you can choose to be a bigot. And I can choose not to engage you or your bigotry. I can also try to reveal to you why your bigotry serves nobody, not even you.

Share

However. The blue team machine lurched into high gear after the attack at Club Q.

It had already positioned itself just so. An August 2022 article in Advocate claimed that “There is a direct link between accounts like Chaya Raichik's LibsofTikTok and angry and potentially violent men showing up at drag queen story hours and Pride events.”1 The day after the attacks, the author of said article follows-up: “With the Club Q mass shooting in Colorado Springs, we see the results of months of demonizing drag queens & trans people.”

Michael Edison Hayden from the Southern Poverty Law Center2 declared this attack “inevitable.” “Inevitable,” it seems, if you follow his logic, because of those who would stop children from being mutilated by puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery; inevitable because of those who object to children being witness to drag shows:

Being vocal in the desire to protect children from harm is tantamount to encouraging brutal killings at a nightclub?

As many have said before me, gay and trans are not equivalent. Not remotely. There are those who think that “T” never should have been added to “LGB” at all, much less all of the additional letters and numbers and symbols that make a mockery of the whole thing.

Speaking of which, check out Canada’s Prime Minister on the recent atrocity:

2SLGBTQI+. Really, Justin? I admit, I had to look it up. What is he on about? Turns out, “2S” stands for “Two-Spirit,” which I’d seen pop up in the LGBTQ acronym before, but never before advanced to the beginning.

The concept of Two-Spirit—which is often defined as an individual being neither man nor woman—is claimed to have been named in fully two-thirds of the 250 indigenous languages of North America3. I don’t believe it4, but even if you do: the term “two-spirit” is acknowledged by its proponents to be a modern invention, coined in 1990 at a conference in Winnipeg (see also this, and this). And in part precisely because it’s a brand-new term, it can be used to mean just about anything. Everything from not conforming to traditional gender roles, to actually being neither male nor female, has been implicated when “two-spirit” is invoked. But these could hardly be more different.

I remember when being free to adopt habits and pursue passions generally associated with the opposite sex was called being modern. Being unbigoted. As a girl growing up in the 1970s and ‘80s, I associated it with feminism, and with egalitarianism. I competed in math tournaments because I loved math. I played sports because I loved sport. I learned how to build things with my hands because…well, because my Dad insisted that I do, but I came to love that, too.

I didn’t do those things because I was secretly a boy. I wasn’t trans or non-binary or two-spirit. I did those things because I was lucky enough to be born a girl with some “boyish” interests, in an era when that was fine.

In this era, however, being a non-girly girl is no longer fine. It’s trotted out as evidence that you’re not a girl. They call this progress?

Subscribe now

Letting children’s fancies decide whether they will receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones is child abuse, and normalizes child abuse.

Exposing children to sexualized content in the form of drag shows is child abuse, and normalizes child abuse.

Advertising fashion brands in which children hold teddy bears in bondage, and court documents about child porn appear in the background, is child abuse, and normalizes child abuse5.

Those of us saying these things are not the bad guys. We didn’t encourage a shooting at a night club. Saying that is reprehensible.

In fact, those of you who are encouraging the mutilation of children when they declare themselves something they are not, or who think it’s fun to take children to explicit drag shows, or who think it’s no big deal to put little girls in photo shoots holding teddy bears in bondage regalia—you’re the bad guys. You are. Think about it. Look at yourselves in the mirror, and maybe get back to us. There are a lot of us out here who—crazy as this may sound to you—want to reduce both hate crime, and the abuse of children. Join us.

Share

5

I recognize that this is an insane sentence, and very hard to parse if you don’t already know what I’m referring to. It is the very nature of this insanity to make the person reporting on it look insane. It is rather like having a sociopath in your life: as the target of a sociopath tries to describe to a caring third-party what is going on, the tendrils and tentacles, the crazy ins-and-outs of the gaslighting and reversals, often make the victim appear insane.

During his audience with the President, Mulvaney talked about “gender-affirming health care,” which includes puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgery. All of these medical interventions cause irreversible harm2, being both invasive and dangerous, especially to children and adolescents. But in a short video from Biden’s sit-down with Mulvaney, Biden pronounces that he doesn’t think that “any state or anybody has the right” to ban gender-affirming health care. Of banning such interventions, the president says, “I just think it’s wrong.”3

Share

Meanwhile, an advisory committee assembled by the CDC voted unanimously to add the Covid vaccines to the childhood vaccination schedule4.

It was just four months ago that the CDC began recommending Covid vaccines for children under five years old. CNN reported on this at the time, and quoted Rochelle Walensky, director of the CDC, who signed off on the decision: “Together, with science leading the charge, we have taken another important step forward in our nation’s fight against COVID-19.” The conclusion is foregone, the evidence for that conclusion notably absent, the word “science” doing all the heavy lifting that actual science should be doing. In the same article, we heard from POTUS: “For parents all over the country, this is a day of relief and celebration.”

As it turns out, POTUS was delivering talking points that were well out of line with reality. Two months later, in August of 2022, an op-ed in the New York Times bemoaned the “abysmal Covid vaccination rate for toddlers,” noting that only 5% of young children who could now get Covid shots had received them. While the Times attributed this to “misinformation and disinformation about the safety and efficacy” of these shots, the fact is that children and adolescents are at low risk from Covid5, and relatively high risk from the shots6, and many parents seem to intuit this.

If we believe the mainstream media on these issues, though, it would seem that in order to be a good parent, you must affirm, and you must comply. Good parents affirm their child’s gender identity, and encourage medical intervention. And good parents comply with the CDC’s guidelines, and again, encourage medical intervention.

In both cases, the opposite is true.

Subscribe now

All parents need to stand up and say no, but mothers in particular need to do so immediately.

Mothers are more likely than fathers to affirm and comply. This has to do, in part, with the well-known research finding in psychology that, on average, women are more likely than men to be “agreeable.” Agreeable is a term of art, but it means what you think it does: to be agreeable is to be “likeable, pleasant, and harmonious in relations with others”7. Agreeableness, thus, can be used against a person, if they can be convinced that others will be disappointed in them if they don’t go along with the crowd.

It is also true that women are more likely than men to prioritize the active avoidance of harm—that is, preferring safety to excitement and possible danger8. Gender ideology is actively harming children. So too are Covid vaccines. But ideologues are flipping the truth on its head, and using women’s tendency to avoid harm to get mothers to affirm and comply.

Parents are told that if they don’t affirm or comply, their child may die—from suicide, or from Covid. The message becomes personal and direct: You could have saved your child, but you didn’t. If the worst happens, how will you live with yourself?

See this for what it is: an attempt to scare you. They would convince you to embrace the very thing that is truly dangerous for your child, and convince you, too, that if you don’t, anything that happens to your child in the future is your fault.

Do not affirm. Do not comply. Your child’s health and welfare depend on it.

Mothers have a special bond with, and a particular ferocity around protecting, their children. Mothers, like everyone, can be conned into thinking that the very wrong thing that they are doing is the very right thing. But once they discover that they’ve been duped, that their children are being hurt? Mama bears need to spring into action to right the wrong.

Mama bears, do not hesitate because you are concerned that you have already caused harm. Do not wait because you are embarrassed, or ashamed. Do not fail to act because you are afraid of what your child will think of you, or say to you. Your child may well distance herself from you now if you go against her wishes, and that will be hard. Do not focus on that hardship.

Instead, consider your child in one year, in five years, in ten, and in twenty. Consider the conversation that you will have with your child then, if you fail to intervene now.

Mama bears, stand up for your children against that which would do them harm.

Halting puberty harms children.

Putting teenagers on cross-sex hormones harms them.

Embracing misogynistic, regressive sex stereotypes harms children.

Cutting off the healthy breasts of girls and young women harms them.

Injecting children and teenagers with experimental treatments that are particularly risky for young people, to protect them against a disease for which they are at very low risk, harms them.

Encouraging your children to wear masks at home, or outside, harms them.

Encouraging fear in your children, rather than curiosity, harms them. Demanding acquiescent safety behaviors to protect from all that you can see, while leaving the children exposed to myriad more dangers that you cannot, harms them.

Presenting a simple world in which you focus on a single parameter—gender, a virus—harms your children. It is a deceit. Your children will come to understand that. And then what? What will you say to them then? Do right by them now.

What do you want for your children? Do you want them to be insightful and merciful, capable of generating wisdom, and kind to all who merit kindness? Do you want them to be curious and capable, generative and generous? I do. I want these things for my children, and I want them for all children.

Mama bears, do not put your own standing in your social tribe above your rights and responsibilities as a parent. If your gut tells you that you are going along with something because it is uncomfortable to object, pay attention to your gut. Maybe your gut is wrong. But maybe it’s not. In some cases, you may decide that you want to follow the authorities’ advice, but do so having thought about what you are doing. Do so with an open mind. Your open mind may reveal to you how wrong the authorities can be, which will in turn allow you to protect your children from harms.

Be a mama bear. Be ferocious in protection of your children, and then, ferocious in protection of all children. Act out of love for your child, not fear of what will happen if you don’t follow the fashion, or the authorities. Do not affirm that which is dangerous. Do not comply with that which is dangerous. Do not let your agreeable nature put your own children in harm’s way.

Subscribe now

1

Here is a video from 2017, when Mulvaney was a handsome and talented young man who enjoyed singing on stage in his skivvies (at least when with the band The Skivvies). Below is a still from that video. And here is an admission that his current mode amounts to a rebranding.

There is another eight-year-old girl who likes to give tea parties for her stuffed animals. She likes to dance all the dances, often with other girls who like to do the same thing. She loves to read, and has no interest in trucks or trails. She will also grow up to be a woman. Because, again, that’s what girls do.

One of these girls may want to be an astronaut. The other, a chef. Or a mother. Or a lawyer. An actress. A racecar driver. Are all of these desires equally likely among girls? They are not. Girls are likely to want some things more than others. But guess what: the girls who aren’t girly are still girls. You can tell, in part, by the fact that they grow up to be women. Because that’s what girls do.

Sex isn’t assigned at birth. Sex is observed at birth.

Subscribe now

Sometimes, in fact, sex is observed before birth. Most commonly, this happens via ultrasound imaging of the fetus. Less commonly, it is possible to look at the karyotype—a visual representation of fetal chromosomes, organized roughly by size—which has been obtained through the usefully diagnostic but somewhat risky mid-pregnancy procedure known as amniocentesis.

All mammals have “Genetic Sex Determination,” which means that we have chromosomes dedicated to starting us down the path of maleness or femaleness. They are called sex chromosomes, in contrast to the autosomes which comprise most of our genetic makeup, and which do not vary predictably by sex. A tiny number of mammals—the echidnas, and the duck-billed platypus—have several pairs of sex chromosomes. The remaining several thousand of us mammals, however—everything from bats to koalas, kangaroos to whales—all the many thousands of other species of mammals have just one pair of sex chromosomes in each of our cells. Humans are mammals, so we have Genetic Sex Determination. Humans are neither echidnas nor duck-billed platypi, so we have just the one pair of sex chromosomes.

The number of chromosomes in each of our cells varies between species. Ocelots and margays have 18 pairs of chromosomes, for instance, while most other cats have 19 pairs1. Most of the great apes, including chimps, have 24 pairs of chromosomes, but humans have only 23. That is: humans have 22 pairs of autosomes, and at that 23rd position: one pair of sex chromosomes.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes in almost all of our cells. Gametes—sex cells—are a notable exception to this2, however, having only 23 chromosomes each, instead of 23 pairs. If you’re female, your gametes are called eggs; if you’re male, they’re called sperm. If successful (as the vast majority are not), an egg or a sperm will combine with a gamete of the other type and make a new life. As such, so as not to create a new life with double the chromosomes of their parents, gametes have half the chromosomal complement of somatic (body) cells: one copy of chromosome 1, one copy of chromosome 2, etc., all the way down to chromosome 23.

At chromosome 23, females have two nearly identical looking chromosomes, which we call XX. Males, in contrast, have two chromosomes at that 23rd position which are wildly different in size; this we call XY, the diminutive chromosome being the Y.

The gametes of female mammals, therefore—the eggs—all have Xs at that 23rd position. No matter what, a female mammal contributes one of her Xs to her offspring’s genetic make-up.

By comparison, the gametes of male mammals—the sperm—are variable at that 23rd position. For any given male, roughly half of his sperm will contain an X, which, if combined with an egg, will produce a daughter (XX). The other half of his sperm will contain a Y which, if combined with an egg, will produce a son (XY)3.

The determination of what sex a baby is is usually based on an easy observation at birth, but this isn’t always the case. Intersex people exist, as do people with yet more subtle ambiguities in their phenotypes. The conclusion being imposed on us, far less by trans people than by Trans Rights Activists (TRAs), is that any exceptions to normal function, any fuzziness at categorical borders, proves that we’ve got it all wrong, and that reality is a social construct. It’s not, though. While laws are indeed social constructs, and lawmakers can clearly be captured by ideology, ideological capture does not change the underlying reality. Sex is observed at birth, by looking at primary sex characteristics, or sex can be observed before birth, by looking at primary sex characteristics in utero, or by looking at a karyotype.

Share

All of that is less fundamental than this, however:

Females are individuals who do or did or will or would, but for developmental or genetic anomalies, produce eggs. Eggs are large, sessile gametes. Gametes are sex cells. In plants and animals, and most other sexually reproducing organisms, there are two sexes: female and male. Like “adult,” the term female applies across many species. Female is used to distinguish such people from males, who produce small, mobile gametes (e.g. sperm, pollen)4.

A woman is an adult human female. Girls become women. Girls do not become boys or men any more than they become fairy princesses or dinosaurs. Fantasize all you want—that is the stuff of childhood, and childhood is the stuff of humanity. But do not confuse fantasy with reality, else you may make decisions based on fantasy that will haunt you for the rest of your life. And do not expect the adults who are paying attention to pretend that your fantasy is real life.

Many adults have either abdicated their responsibility, or are actively in on the game, the game being: hurt the children. Those of us who can see this for what it is, though, who know that providing puberty blockers and sex hormones to children and teenagers is dangerous and immoral, and cutting off their healthy tissue is even farther beyond the pale—we need to speak. We need to put aside what differences we may have.

In some circles, we are all painted with a MAGA brush. It’s a quick route to discrediting a person or position, at least among those who are unthinkingly on the trans train. And yet there are many among us, myself included, who are lifelong liberals5. Not only aren’t all of us who recognize that biology is real “MAGA Republicans,” we’re not even all Republicans. Imagine that. Some of us are, and some of us aren’t. And yet we’re all human.

We may not agree on reproductive rights, or climate change, or the second amendment—although I often find that the divide between us isn’t as vast as we’ve been led to believe. But disagreement is fine. It’s good, even. We don’t want to be a clone army, all in lockstep, all believing exactly the same things, living exactly the same lives. We see reality—girls become women, and boys become men—and we are adamant that reality not be hidden from view. And when we find that we actually share core values—values like protect the children from harm—we stand together.

The Corrective Lens

• Explicitly aim to be an adult. Do this, in part, by regularly asking yourself the questions that we posed at the beginning of the chapter (“Am I taking responsibility for my own actions? Am I being close-minded?…”), and by minimizing the effects of economic markets on your daily life.

• Become aware of the constant flow of information telling you what to think, how to feel, how to act. Do not let it into your mind. Do not let it steer you. Your internal reward structure needs to be independent and ungameable. That independence, in turn, should allow you to collaborate well with others who are similarly independent. Be wary of those who may well be nice, but who are captured.

Read more

The local people, being fond of their lives and their lifestyles, their farms and their families, fought back, but to little avail. The local men, mostly, were slaughtered. So too were the children. Many of the women were raped. Some of the invading men stayed in the new land, and some went back to the lands and families that they had left behind. Children born of rape in the new landscape; children born of love—or at least not rape—in the old. Two different sets of women, mothers to all of the children. One set of men, who fathered children in both places.

Or perhaps these men who came flying across the vast plains on horseback came from a land which held little for them to return to. Perhaps, indeed, that land had a tradition of extreme polygyny1, in which a very few, very powerful men, controlled and monopolized the majority of women, leaving most men without reproductive options.

Stories like this have occurred throughout human history. Stories like this are one reason that many have arrived at the surprising conclusion that, population-wide, humans have more female than male ancestors. Many men fail to reproduce. They are slaughtered in war—either set on a mission to invade a foreign land, or fight in place when an army arrives on their doorstep. But for those men who do reproduce, they will have noticed that it doesn’t take much for a man to make a baby. A baby will be far more likely to grow into a skilled and wonderful human being if her father does stick around, and actually provide parenting to the child, but at minimum, the requirements of a man to produce a baby is rather easy. Enjoyable too, it would seem.

At the population level, we have sex ratios that are roughly equal at birth—one male baby is born for every one female baby born—but the ratio starts skewing fairly quickly, and leave human populations with an excess of females by old age. Until yesterday, evolutionarily speaking, pretty much all women would bear children, whereas many men would not, and not by choice. While most people alive now live in cultures that nominally adhere to expectations of monogamy—pair bonds between two individuals, both of whom are involved in the raising of offspring—the relative prevalence of polygamy in times past has meant that, while most women have borne children, many men have not.

This, then, is the basis for the idea that we have many more female than male ancestors. It is a much-repeated conclusion, which is true in one way, and false in another, depending on what you are accounting for—populations, or individuals. Confusion about when it is true and when it is false is why it is invoked nearly every time I say the following:

Every human being has an equal number of male and female ancestors.

How can both things be true? If more women than men have reproduced throughout history—and humans therefore have more female than male ancestors—how can it be true that any given individual human has an equal number of both female and male ancestors?

Consider this:

How many genetic mothers do you have?

Do you have the number in your head, fixed? Perhaps you want to write it down, to make sure you don’t cheat?

Good. Next question:

How many genetic fathers do you have?

Write that down too, on a piece of paper. Keep your numbers hidden for now.

Okay, now, on the count of three, we’re all going to show our pieces of paper. All of them, all at once. One, two, three, now turn them over….

That’s a whole lot of ones I’m seeing. Everyone seems to have had just the one genetic mother, and the one genetic father. You know why? Because that is the way that sexual reproduction works. One egg from a mother, plus one sperm from a father, produces one (or occasionally two) zygotes. It’s never two eggs that combine to make a zygote, nor is it ever two sperm. Neither happen. You have one genetic mother, and one genetic father, regardless of how mixed and modern your family may be. The roles that we play in each other’s lives are far more expansive than are the roles of the original genetic contributions to our existences.

Share

Going back at least 500 million years, and likely well over a billion, we have had one long, uninterrupted line of sexual reproducing ancestors in which, with every single successful reproductive event, one mom, plus one dad, made a baby (or babies).

Therefore you’ve got an equal number of female ancestors as male ancestors2.

How does that square with the idea that, at the population level, more females than males have left their genetic mark?

The difficult part of this to grok, for those who aren’t accustomed to it, is simultaneously holding in your head the idea of the individual, and the population.

Most humans walk around thinking about individuals: what do individuals do, how do they make decisions, what is their impact on the world? Evolutionary biologists such as myself think about individuals, but we also think in terms of populations. Common parlance generally doesn’t distinguish between the two, however, and the widespread, oft-repeated conclusion that “we have more female than male ancestors” is taken to be about individuals, because that’s what most people think about, but it is actually about populations.

Both of these statements are true:

• Individual humans have an equal number of female and male ancestors.

• Human populations have more females than males in their lineage.

Imagine a population of 10,000 people in which extreme polygyny is the norm, which has an even sex ratio—half are men, and half are women. Of the 5,000 men, only 1,000 reproduce—they monopolize the reproductive activities of all 5,000 of the women. Each of the men who is mated has, on average, five wives. Whereas each of the 4,000 men who is not mated, has on average zero wives. And all 5,000 of the women are mated. On average, they each have one husband, and none of them has more than one husband. There is no variance in the number of husbands that women have in this hypothetical, extreme polygynous system.

Reducing the numbers to an absurdity—polygyny likely wouldn’t persist under these conditions—imagine a strongly polygynous population of 10 people: five men, five women. Using the same made-up but plausible ratios above: only one of those five men gets to mate, and he gets to mate with all five of the women. The other four men leave no descendants—no genetic trace at all in future generations. Future generations have, as their founding heritage, five mothers, and one father. But every single individual in those future generations has one mother, and one father. No individual has five mothers and one father, even though the population had that ratio of parents at its founding.

You have one genetic mother, and one genetic father, as has every human being throughout all of time; therefore you yourself have the same number of male as female ancestors. At the population level, though, more women than men have reproduced, and so more ancient women than men are represented in our modern genetics. Both things are true.

Share

People are fascinated by sex and by ancestry, so this particular topic has traction. But the more important message here is that there is clarity to be gained by becoming well versed in thinking on both the individual and population levels, in being able to hold both entities in your head at the same time. You are both an individual, and you belong to several populations, including but not limited to your family, and your town, and your country. The tension between these distinct ways of understanding ourselves is real, but both are useful and true. Consider what other phenomena you might try to understand more holistically, with both an individual lens and a population-level one. Chances are that this will allow you to see into other people’s heads with more clarity, and have more compassion for places where you disagree.

Be good to one another, and happy solstice to all.

Subscribe now

Abigail, of course, literally wrote the (or at least a, but it seems that it is likely the) book on the topic that we explore in the exchange to follow: Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. I highly recommend this book. I also highly recommend Abigail’s Substack, The Truth Fairy. I am grateful and proud to be standing next to her in this cultural moment.

Some more of my writings on sex and gender can be found here.

Share

Letter 1

By Abigail Shrier

August 7, 2020

Dear Heather,

In July of 2019, I interviewed a prominent Canadian plastic surgeon who removes healthy breasts for a living. For a little more than 8 thousand Canadian clams, he and a growing number of surgeons perform “top surgery” on girls sixteen and up who claim to have gender dysphoria—severe discomfort in one’s biological sex. No outside diagnosis by a mental health professional need be made. 

In the course of writing my book, Irreversible Damage, I heard the rationale for providing these surgeries so often, it came to feel humdrum: Though “Mary” might look like a girl down to the last cell of her body, in an important if ineffable sense, she was somehow really a man. Removing such a girl’s breasts are, from this perspective, like removing any other unwanted and unnecessary appendage—an extra finger on her left hand. 

But wait a minute—I pressed the top surgeon. He also offered this service to teens who claim they are “non-binary”—that is, declare a gender identity neither male nor female. How did he know that a non-binary person had no breasts? How could he be sure that a non-binary person had a nose? 

“You know, I long ago stopped trying to totally understand this,” he said. Even doctors who perform these surgeries don’t claim to comprehend what they’re doing. 

There are many reasons to believe we are in the midst of a transgender “craze”— a mass enthusiasm that captivates a population so that matters more essential to its welfare fall neglected, to borrow Lionel Penrose’s use of the term. There are the alarming statistics, indicative of an epidemic: For a century, gender dysphoria has been understood to begin in early childhood (ages 2 to 4) and afflict males almost exclusively. In the last decade, apparently out of nowhere, gender dysphoria’s predominant demographic has shifted from young boys to teen girls. (The rise in girls presenting at gender clinics in the UK has been estimated at 4,400%).

All across the West, adolescent girls are suddenly identifying as “trans” with friends, clamoring for hormones and surgeries. Teen girls who are struggling with anxiety and depression but who had no childhood history of gender dysphoria at all. Under the guidance of numberless trans social media influencers, with the encouragement of peers, clusters of girls are transforming themselves from desperately unpopular to the toast of the virtual town.

In my book, I offer several explanations of how this particular social contagion came to befall teen girls. And one of the many flags I plant is this, garnered from academic psychologist Jean Twenge:  Teen girls today spend a whole lot less time with each other in person (an hour less per day) than those of prior generations. That’s less time hanging out in each other’s rooms, combing the details of their lives for hidden grandeur; less time savoring gossip and telling secrets; less time caught in the current of breathless laughter, half-shrieking the lyrics of a song.

I wonder whether, as an evolutionary biologist, you agree with the significance of this loss? Do people need to spend time with each other in person—young girls, perhaps especially? Are there evolutionary reasons for female closeness? Women often say they couldn’t have survived without their girlfriends. Is this merely the Sauvignon Blanc talking or does this give voice to some truth?

And then there’s social media—wretched and omnipresent, haunting and hurting our adolescent girls. The girls who fall for the trans craze are typically the same high-anxiety and depressive teen girls so tortured by social media. Competition for status among teen girls has always been fierce, but never so zero-sum, so winner-take-all as when a girl can win not only the hearts of the fifteen most popular kids in your class—but millions of teens—granting their likes, as if casting votes, for Prom Queen of the World.

What does status competition typically look like among adolescent female primates? What if that competition were suddenly to intensify? What types of behaviors would we expect to see? A Queen Bee surrounded by infertile females? Competition so fierce and frightening that many would flee the reproduction game entirely?

Academic psychologist Amanda Rose has told me that the reason adolescent girls are particularly susceptible to peer contagions—to sharing and spreading their own pain—has to do with their modes of friendship. Teen girls like to rehash, again and again, the source and nature of their friends’ pain. They are even willing even to suspend reality to meet their friends where they are.

I think back to my own teen years with a mixture of longing and fondness, very much despite my present-day knowledge that they amounted to a kind of torture. If a boy dumped my best friend, I hated him with a fiery pique, no less severe than if I had been the one dumped.

And then there was the friend of mine, talking herself into anorexia. After one bite of food, she would say, “Oh, my God, I feel so full. Don’t you feel full?” And I could see the answer teleprompted by her eyes:  “Me too! I feel disgusting.” Only I didn’t feel that. I was starving. 

Why do young women do this? Can it be adaptive? It all seems so irrational from the vantage of womanhood. 

If you forced me back in time and tried to shake sense into my teenage self, I wouldn’t have listened. Adolescent girlhood has a logic of its own: Pain is ubiquitous and demands to be shared; ice cream should never be eaten alone. 

Those ridiculous years feel, still, like the making of me. A live wire of agony ran through them. Every novel encounter broke the skin. And yet, you couldn’t pry those misspent hours or hapless friendships from the foolish chambers of my heart. 

Be well,

Abigail 

Letter 2

By Heather Heying

August 13, 2020

Dear Abigail,

Thank you for your opening letter, and for uncovering so many avenues for exploration.

Allow me to start 500 million years ago. Our ancestors have been reproducing sexually, with two sexes, for at least that long. Male and female have been real biological categories since then. There are often external indicators—genitals, plumage, song—but the thing that is most fundamental is the type of gametes an individual produces (or did or will or might produce). Females have eggs, which are relatively immobile and large, due to being filled with all of the cellular stuff of life. Males, meanwhile, have sperm (or pollen), which tends to be mobile, and tiny, stripped of almost everything needed for life—except DNA.

All of the other indicators of sex are less fundamental. But with so many systems in play, sometimes they are in disagreement. When your gametes and chromosomes, anatomy and physiology all say that you are female, but your brain is certain that you are male, we call this gender dysphoria (although we should call it “sex dysphoria”). This is what underlies (true) trans. Trans is real, and trans is rare.

Gender is the behavioral manifestation of sex, and some of our gender norms are here to stay. Women, with our wombs and breasts, will always be the ones to gestate and lactate, and this ancient truth set in motion a whole lot about our behavior—we are more likely than men to focus on connection, and on home. But some of our gender norms are wildly flexible, and we should also embrace that truth.

“Trans” used to mean “transsexual,” and suggested a deep and abiding disconnect between some of the manifestations of sex. Now we are led to believe that “trans” stands for “transgendered,” as if a mismatch between your actual sex and your gender should require some fix with hormones or surgery. I wonder when this happened, and what the history of that change is? Certainly it confuses the issue. In the ‘70s and ‘80s, when I was growing up, while ignoring gender norms as a boy was still difficult, it was actually rather easy to ignore gender norms if you were a girl—to be gender non-conforming. Tomboys were cool, in many people’s eyes; I know because I was one.

The crucial distinction between gender-nonconformity and gender dysphoria is that girls who are attracted to more male-typical activities—sports and math and building things, for instance—are not pining to be boys. I never wanted to be a boy. I was pleased to be a girl who was allowed to think about and do things that would have been prohibited to me in earlier times. That was progress.

What we are seeing now is the opposite. 

What has happened to girlhood? We have created a perfect storm, and you have put your finger on one key piece. Many girls have been helicopter-parented away from risk, all serendipity stripped from their lives. Too many are drugged—legally—when they experience the kinds of mental distress, like anxiety, that girls are more likely to succumb to. And they have lived much of their lives behind screens, one effect of which is as you say: time spent interacting through screens is, all too often, time not spent interacting in person. In other primate species, female friends bond simply by being together, sitting close, and grooming one another. Our girls have grown into adult bodies with far less of that than their predecessors had, and with little ability to regulate or understand their own moods or thoughts. Of course they are susceptible to suggestion. Of course social contagion is a particular risk.

You ask about competition between adolescent female primates. Decades ago, some of my earliest research was on a mirror-image concept: that of friendship between female primates. Loosely speaking, friendship is a close alliance that does not require frequent reassessment. Friends have long-term emotional attachments, and behave selflessly towards one another, at least sometimes. Ecological constraints (Is there enough food? Are you willing to share?), the presence or absence of males, and willingness to reciprocate for kindness or aid, all affect how attractive females find others as would-be friends.

And crucially, would-be friends also assess rank. High rank can be the difference between eating, or not; mating, or not; surviving, or not. And while rank is largely inherited, by rules particular to both species and situation, aspects of rank can also be contagious. To some degree, you can catch high rank—or low—from your friends.

Anyone who has been a girl knows that girls are no less competitive than boys, they just do it differently. Status among females is not established or maintained with displays of brute strength or raw power. Status among females is managed in more subtle ways.

Having or knowing the latest song, the most sought after invitation, or the newest fashion, can be the difference between rising in the hierarchy, or falling. Status begets status, and following trendlines so as not to be late to the party is one way to rise.

Add to this heady brew a new choice on the menu, one that masquerades as a celebration of civil rights, and confers immediate status, and voilà: teenage girls are falling all over themselves to be trans.

I will leave you with this: newly published research finds that “transgender and gender-diverse” individuals have high rates of autism, and other psychiatric diagnoses. 

Given this, shouldn’t we consider the rapid rise of “gender dysphoria” in young women as a symptom, rather than as its own syndrome? Why do we chastise teenage girls when they cut themselves, but celebrate them when they find a doctor to do it for them? When a teenage girl cuts herself, or starves herself, we try to help the human being. We do not sanctify the behavior. Why are we now celebrating a symptom?

Fondly,

Heather

Share

Letter 3

By Abigail Shrier

August 20, 2020

Dear Heather:

When parents call me about a teen daughter who suddenly identified as “trans,” they tell a strikingly similar story: A precocious, highly anxious and sometimes depressive girl with no childhood history of gender dysphoria hits puberty. She never perfectly fit in with other girls. But now, at 11 or 12 or 13, her social struggles intensify. 

She tunnels into social media where she discovers trans influencers. At school, she takes cover in a Gay-Straight Alliance club and learns that if she does not feel perfectly feminine, she may be “pansexual” or “non-binary” or “trans.” Armed with this explanation, she has an announcement to make: She’s done being “Kate”; she’ll be answering to “Kent” now. 

Most of these parents who call me—semi-weekly, for the past year—are politically progressive. They supported gay rights long before gay marriage was legal and have never voted Republican. They are members of GenX, believers in psychotherapy, remarkably devoted parents and even their daughter’s “best friend.” 

They wouldn’t think of contradicting their daughter’s announcement, though it seems to contravene much of what they know: No girl feels perfectly feminine during adolescence. Their daughter has never even kissed another adolescent—how can she insist she’s “pansexual”? Pretending she’s somehow no longer a girl feels dishonest. 

But they humor her. They adopt her new name and pronouns—or simply avoid using her name entirely. (“Hey, kiddo, feeling up for school today?”)  She insists on a boy’s haircut and they pay for it, bite their tongues when she wears a binder (breast-compression undergarment) to school. They drive her to the Pride parade and rent her a tux for prom.

Now, the story takes an extraordinary turn.  Rather than calming her anxiety, all this indulgence seems to exacerbate it. Why?

In my book, I suggest one reason: Perhaps what these adolescents really want is not agreement but opposition. Parents who embrace their 14-year old’s announcement of being “pansexual” are inadvertently coopting her rebellion. What she wanted was to individuate. Her loving parents sabotage this attempt with the poison kiss of approval.

That explanation, while useful, never fully satisfied me. Many of these adolescent girls are highly agreeable. Some are reluctant to be out of mom’s presence. They may yearn for individuation, but many don’t exactly want a fight. They’re suffering panic attacks, afraid to go to school. Many are barely getting through the day.

Then one night, after my book had gone to press, I found a mislaid copy of the May 2020 Atlantic buried under an embarrassing heap on my nightstand. I began to read Kate Julian’s “The Anxious Child,” and I had to sit down (literally).  

Julian interviewed academic psychologists who successfully treated anxiety disorders in children and young adults by changing parent behavior. “The everyday efforts we make to prevent kids’ distress—minimizing things that worry or scare them, assisting them with difficult tasks rather than letting them struggle—may not help them manage it in the long term,” she writes. In fact, psychologists have been able to effectively treat anxiety disorders “by reducing parental accommodation”—stopping “those things a parent does to alleviate a child’s anxious feelings.”

 Asking your kid’s teacher not to call on her in class because it makes her nervous or letting your anxious teen skip school may exacerbate the very anxiety each is meant to allay.

Here, at last, was another explanation for why parents who indulged their teens’ gender journeys frequently found their daughters’ distress increasing. Anxiety is nearly universal among suddenly-trans identifying teen girls. By accommodating their daughters’ demands, some of the parents may have been making their daughters’ anxiety worse.

You ask: “Why do we chastise teenage girls when they cut themselves, but celebrate them when they find a doctor to do it for them? When a teenage girl cuts herself, or starves herself, we try to help the human being. Why are we now celebrating a symptom?” We might also ask: Why are we accommodating this distress rather than treating it?

At least one reason seems to be that we’ve come to regard our racial, political and gender identities as the signal feature of any of us. We are living for the slogan, the team, the tribe to which we bind ourselves. Teachers, even scientists and doctors are activists now. And at least part of this sad reduction of humanity to hashtags and political-group identities has to do with the online audience to which we increasingly address ourselves. The more time we spend in this online world, the more we take up online identities that have no meaning in the real world—“agender” “two spirit”—the more our humanity seems to fade.

Consider another spiking diagnosis: erectile dysfunction. The last decade has seen a sharp rise in ED among young men. Experts connect this to online porn consumption. 

The desire for sexual coupling would seem to be one of the strongest, oldest, and most durable urges. For eons, we’ve been able to count on young men reliably to manifest this drive, if not always to control it. And yet, the virtual replica’s unequaled convenience, emotional safety, and infinite variety subverts and supplants normal sexual arousal. 

If a virtual life can suppress something as adaptive as sexual desire, how will our other, weaker inclinations fare? What will be left of the desire to connect, to learn, to accept challenge and grow up? 

Internet porn gives young men the facsimile of a sexual relationship just as social media offers young women the facsimile of female friendship. Both seem to be rendering humans less suited to each other—less able to absorb life’s pain and challenge and joy? Are we all becoming the anxious child, endlessly accommodated in our retreat from the in-person world, forfeiting our vitality and efficacy and courage?

Warmly,

Abigail

Letter 4

By Heather Heying

August 28, 2020

Dear Abigail,

In hopes that we might find places that we disagree, in this letter I will offer up a story, about a young person whom I will call Sam. (In my final letter to you, I will return to your insight that internet porn provides young men a facsimile of sexual relationship, much as social media provides young women a facsimile of female friendship.)

As you have written about so effectively, the steep increase in teenage girls identifying as trans suggests contagion. Many girls are likely suffering crises of identity which cannot be resolved by asking the world to view them as the sex to which they were not born.

Given this, hormonal and surgical intervention ought, I think, be delayed until adulthood. I prefer to protect the vast majority of girls who do not turn out to be trans, than to facilitate permanent bodily harm in order to help the tiny minority that is. And yet. Sam might have been helped by earlier intervention.

Sam was a student of mine, smart and self-aware, and so at odds with the female body born to him that he could not use words to speak of it to me. He trusted me though, and wanted me to understand. To preserve his privacy, I will not provide some of the details of his story that would break your heart. 

He could not say the words—"I am a genetic female, but I have felt male for so long that I must do everything that I can to be male,” although that is the reality that I came to understand. Sam and I went on several field trips together; I was responsible for his safety. We traveled places in which some would not look kindly on a person whose presentation did not match the sex on their official ID, so I needed to know some things that most people would not need to know. I did not know what sex Sam was, although he presented, more and more with each passing week, as male. Finally, because I knew we shared this language, I asked him, regarding his chromosomes—"are you XX, or XY?” He looked away, lowered his eyes, and whispered, “XX.”

In the field, Sam sometimes seemed too short of breath for someone so young and apparently healthy. I worried about him. Once, after Summer break, he emailed me to say that he wanted to pick up some papers at my office. When I wheeled my bike down the hall at the time we had arranged, he was already waiting. We had spent many hours talking in my office over the years, and I trusted him fully. After I unlocked the outer door, I encouraged him to go inside while I wrangled my bike through the narrow space.

When I turned back around, the door closed behind me, Sam was stripped to the waist, two fresh, fierce surgical wounds across his chest, stitches still in place. I caught my breath—this was decidedly new territory. He looked me square in the eyes. I looked between his eyes and his chest before saying, “you can put your shirt back on.” As he did so, I said, “this is why you’ve been having such trouble when it’s hot—you’ve been bound.” He nodded, looking away. “You haven’t been able to breathe.” I continued. Again he nodded. No words.

He wasn’t going to speak about it, this young man whom I could push intellectually more than I could many people of his age, who had such a command of the language. Of this he would not speak. He had been binding his breasts in order to present as a man, before finally having them removed. We never did speak of it, but now I knew.

This young man—and yes, I will not just call him a man, as he wished, but also understand him to be a man, even though he is XX—is the very rare case. He knows that. The other trans people whom I know, know this too.

In part because of Sam, I suspect those who insist on constant focus on their trans status of being dishonest. Probably some of them are truly extroverted and performative, and their pain is real, a manifestation of gender dysphoria. But many, I feel certain, are cosplaying, and insisting that the rest of us accede to their fantasy. Others, in the case of so many teenage girls, seem merely confused, perhaps hoping that someone—a parent, a counselor, a doctor—will step in and say: No.

These girls have been ill-treated by a society that encouraged their parents to helicopter them away from all risk and uncertainty, to encourage their every whim rather than resist and provide a force against which their daughters could push; to drug them out of anxiety or depression if they showed any signs of it; to allow them to seek affection through their screens rather than in person.

In further service of seeking places that we disagree, I will end with this: I believe that I have heard you say that parents who allow their children to transition are not guilty of child abuse. You have compassion for the parents, seeing—as do I—the strong societal winds that are blowing them in that direction. But parents are still responsible for the health of their children, and I do think it is child abuse. Keeping healthy teenagers from pharmaceutical and surgical intervention when they request it is, terrifyingly, difficult now. But it is necessary, and not to do so is an abdication of parental responsibility. Will your daughter hate you for doing so? Perhaps. I think she will also come to see your resistance as evidence of your love for her. Not only are we allowing children to undermine their own health and fertility, we are taking their childhoods from them, and thereby stealing their futures as well.

Fondly,

Heather

Share

Letter 5

By Abigail Shrier

September 4, 2020

Dear Heather,

Thank you for your wonderful letter and the delightful privilege of this whole exchange. Sam’s story has so much wrenching complexity. It’s a good reminder that, though we necessarily describe social phenomena and trends, our ultimate goal is the flourishing of the individual. No two lives are identical. 

Most of the parents who call me end up sobbing. For my book, I interviewed nearly five dozen parents of adolescents who suddenly trans-identified. But all told, I’ve spoken to—or exchanged messages with—dozens more. 

More than one conservative journalist has asked me why so many of the girls caught in this craze seem to come from politically progressive homes. Was it because the parents were divorced? No, in fact, most were not. Were the parents irresponsible—full of wacky liberal hedonism? Actually, they were some of the most devoted and proficient parents I have known. Was it because they failed to give their children religion? Or was it simply because “the Left ruins everything”—from single-sex university clubs to office Christmas parties and healthy adolescence? No, I didn’t think so.

The question of ‘why progressive parents’ always makes me a little uncomfortable both because it carries a troubling touch of schadenfreude—conservatives straining to pat themselves on the back—and because I sensed that it wouldn’t be true for long. A trend that begins with teens in progressive families won’t stop there. 

But it’s a worthy question—why progressives?—because, as with all puzzles, its solution has the potential to teach us something. And the answer I’ve landed on has nothing to do with the quality of the parenting nor exactly with the values of the home. True, many of the parents seemed to want to be their daughters’ best friend. They are members of GenX, as I am. We’ve all seen “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” more times than we can count. We may banish gluten from our pantries with prejudice, but when it comes to our teens’ behavior, we’ll do almost anything to avoid sounding like Principal Rooney. 

But conservative parents did possess one considerable advantage with regard to this craze: an ample head-start in realizing that the culture is arrayed against them.

For at least a generation, conservatives have served as the punchline for every sitcom joke (sometimes styled as ‘Christians,’ but you get the point). White male conservatives play the villains (or, minimally, dunces) in most movies. Educated people who have never read a single one of his opinions are nonetheless confident Justice Clarence Thomas is an imbecile, unworthy of our highest Court. Our best universities don’t want conservatives, neither as undergrads nor faculty. Jewish students are routinely harassed if they dare support Israel. Ordinary conservative political positions—even those that had been uncontroversial among liberals in the 1990s—are deemed per se proof of bigotry. 

Whether you or I embrace these positions is unimportant; conservatives have long been openly despised for them. It isn’t news to them that the professor or social worker might not share their vision of family or community. Conservatives have been painted by the culture as Principal Rooney for so long, they’ve long ago accepted the role; they've even have begun to like him. 

That our culture has now turned against all parents seems to have surprised liberals, who mistook their broad support for LGBTQ as an inoculation against the Left’s assault on their families. They never considered that a teacher kind enough to lead the high school Gay Straight Alliance club would encourage their daughters to lie to them. They’ve long supported Planned Parenthood as a national treasure; they never guessed it would, on a first visit, dispense testosterone to their troubled daughters. 

So, you ask, why don’t I blame the parents who’ve fallen for it? They acted on the advice of therapists who promised their children would be much happier as the opposite sex—as if such transformation were really possible. It is, at best, an asymptotic goal—a finish line that’s never actually reached.  

Teachers are only too happy to launch other people’s daughters a gender journey, all while hiding this from mom and dad. Therapists surreptitiously agree with a girl’s pronouncements, solidifying a new identity in her mind, repeatedly referring to her as “Aiden” or “Ethan”—despite having promised her parents they wouldn’t. For dispassionate advice, parents turned to doctors, who wafted politicized studies like burning sage, less medical than mystical.

Many of the parents who allowed their children to transition should have been more skeptical. They should have recognized some of the so-called gender doctors for what they are: ideologues in white coats. They should have asked whether permanent sexual dysfunction would be the result of a procession from puberty blockers to cross-sex hormones. They should have demanded to examine the basis of those suicide statistics. They should have known, in their bones, that no one else had their children’s best interest at heart. 

If these experts had had callused hands, MAGA hats, or gold crosses about their necks—these parents would have presumed an agenda and been wary. Instead, the rooms these experts occupy—like the institutional credentials that line their walls—are pristine. They are housed by our best hospitals. The floors are all waxed to high shine, their teeth neatly capped, their lapels happily affixed with a rainbow pin. 

They have the same training as the men and women who remove a cancerous lump. But the blight they seek to remediate is a girl’s healthy body itself. They answer not to Hippocrates, dead white male that he was, but to the capricious mandates of “social justice.” Curing disease is beneath them; they’re too busy changing the world. And so they are—one child at a time.

With appreciation,

Abigail

Letter 6

By Heather Heying

September 11, 2020

Dear Abigail,

What a fabulous way for you to wrap up our exchange. Your answer to why progressive families are more susceptible to gender ideology than conservatives are is remarkable: progressives are not accustomed to being targeted by cultural norms. I think that you are right. Being the majority voice in the media and in education has made liberals—progressives, if you will—weaker than we ought to be. We have lost our ability to engage with careful arguments from the other side, because we are unaccustomed to hearing them. That, in turn, has made it easier to dehumanize those who have different opinions from us. If you’ve never met a conservative, it’s easier to imagine they’re the devil than if you had; the same logic goes for black people and gay people, Hindus and Afghans. In all cases, familiarity, normal human interaction, creates enough common ground that we are revealed to each other as human—both flawed and passionate, by turns despondent and full of joy. 

I agree with your analysis. And I want to add another.

You elegantly evaded discussing personal politics in your analysis of progressive parents, so respectful and avoidant of finger pointing. I’m going to do the opposite, and point the finger at my own. I am a parent, and a progressive, but there is much in modern parenting that I have strong objections to. I arrive at my conclusions not through conservatism or religion, but through evolutionary biology.

One of the values that seems to be embraced by progressive parents is the idea that parenting is friendship. My children are older than yours by a few years, and as my boys become young men I see the beginnings of the friendships that we will have. But imagining all of parenthood as akin to friendship quickly decays into imagining that it is not yours to instruct, to correct, to punish. We don’t correct our friends, by and large, so we don’t correct our children, the logic seems to go. This is insane. 

It is also insane to imagine that children are as fully capable of making decisions that will have life-long consequences as adults are. Even adults are poor at this sort of thing, but childhood and adolescence are precisely when such learning is happening. Today’s neurobiological model suggests that the prefrontal cortex, which controls “executive functions” like planning, impulse control, and deciding between competing inputs, is still developing even during late adolescence. Humans have long childhoods so that they can learn how to be adults. Pretending, instead, that they already are adults is missing the point entirely.

You and I disagree, but barely I think, as to whether to call the parents who get sucked in and allow their children to transition, guilty of child abuse. I am just a little less sympathetic to their plight. Perhaps I have seen too many witless parents since I myself have been a parent, people so willing to “go along to get along.” It’s a female-typical attitude, one that is lovely for reconciliation and soothing hurt feelings, but when weaponized or employed in the wrong place, it can get people hurt.

When your 14—or 16, or 18—year old declares a staunch belief that now they know who they are and were always meant to be—agreeing with them is not good parenting. Facilitating them making irreversible changes is the opposite of good parenting. Humans have the longest childhoods on the planet. Childhood is when we explore, find, and yes, create our identity: who we are and who we will be. This only works, though, if the child can walk it back, and change their mind, and it helps tremendously if that child has a parent—better, two; better yet, a whole community of adults who dearly love that child—who are actually watching out for the child and their long-term interests, rather than being concerned about whether the young’un thinks her Mom is her bestie at the moment. The younger you are, the harder it is to think into the future, to plan, even to believe in the stretch of time before you. Children therefore have a legitimate excuse for their confusion. Parents do not have this excuse.

A teenager’s opinion that they have a condition for which there is no test, no evidence, and no proof, is just that: an opinion. Anyone who remembers being a teenager, or who has parented teenagers, knows how full of opinions teenagers are. We do not take every opinion of a teenager as if it is the Truth with a capital T. The drugs given to “transitioning” teenagers harm children. Hormones and surgery are, at best, only occasionally helpful in reducing mental health distress in trans-identifying people. But we live in an era when we must celebrate girls who declare themselves trans, and denigrate those who ask if we are actually doing the right thing. You, I know, are well aware of this bind.

Before I sign off for good, I want to return to a point from your second letter. You suggested that “Internet porn gives young men the facsimile of a sexual relationship just as social media offers young women the facsimile of female friendship.” As it happens, I just wrote about how porn commodifies sex, and flattens human sexuality, for Areo1. I argue, in part, that “One can be positive about sex—embracingly positive—without accepting that cheapening sex, rendering it available on demand and without emotional content, is positive for either individuals or for society.” Similarly, one can be positive about friendship, without accepting that relegating it to social media, which renders it two-dimensional, text-based, and devoid of most sensory input and feedback, is positive for either individuals or society.

I am honored to have had this conversation with you, and hope that it prompts more, not just between us, but between those reading our words.

Affectionately,

Heather

Read more of Abigail Shrier’s unflinching and exquisite writing here.

1

A topic also explored in A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, which you can find here, now in English, Spanish, and French (more languages coming soon).

Subscribe for free to Natural Selections and get a post in your inbox every Tuesday. Paying subscribers get perks like being able to comment on public posts.

Mia came to Portland several years ago to trim weed with some buddies. When the buddies left town, Mia found himself with neither work nor shelter. Mia is someone who apparently does not expect to do anything for himself. Mia, having lived on the streets for several years, is now, with other people who also identify as being in the LGBTQ+ community, being moved across the Willamette river to a new encampment. The encampment is being called a “village.” Two local schools objected to the location of the new “village”, in part due to the city’s refusal to “require felony background checks and implement a 1,000-foot no camping barrier around the village.” These objections were described as homophobic by a local politician.

In June of 2020, storefronts in Portland and other cities began to erect “don’t hurt me” walls—proclamations of support for BLM and defunding the police and all sorts of other propaganda (I first named and discussed this phenomenon on June 23, 2020, on DarkHorse). The purpose of such walls is to swear fealty to the cause, in the hopes that the store will not be vandalized. It’s a kind of preemptive protection racket, and it doesn’t always work.

“Don’t hurt me” walls aren’t as common now as they were during that mad Summer, but pledges of allegiance to the new orthodoxy, public displays of compliance, are happening in other ways. Were the schools who asked for background checks on their new homeless neighbors being homophobic? Uh, no. But perhaps in an attempt to demonstrate just how non-homophobic they are, one of the schools later offered “gift baskets” to the homeless. Point of order: just as you should not apologize for things of which you are not guilty, you should also not offer gifts to those who are taking advantage of you, or the system that you are functioning in. It is an attempt at appeasement that will not only not work, it will backfire.

But gift baskets were apparently offered, and Mia Winters asked for a space whip. What, pray tell, is a space whip? A space whip is “a cord filled with LED fiber-optic lights. The glow-in-the-dark accessory is popular at raves,” writes Willamette Week. “‘You whip it around like a flowtoy,’ Winters says.”

The article concludes, “No gift baskets have been delivered yet.”

Share

Viktor Frankl, in the 1984 postscript to his heart-breaking, necessary, now-and-always central to the human condition book, Man’s Search for Meaning, writes the following (also read aloud on DarkHorse episode 128):

People have enough to live by but nothing to live for; they have the means but no meaning. To be sure, some do not even have the means. In particular, I think of the mass of people who are today unemployed. Fifty years ago, I published a study devoted to a specific type of depression I had diagnosed in cases of young patients suffering from what I called ‘unemployment neurosis.’ And I could show that this neurosis really originated in a twofold erroneous identification: being jobless was equated with being useless, and being useless was equated with having a meaningless life. Consequently, whenever I succeeded in persuading the patients to volunteer in youth organizations, adult education, public libraries and the like—in other words, as soon as they could fill their abundant free time with some sort of unpaid but meaningful activity—their depression disappeared although their economic situation had not changed and their hunger was the same. The truth is that man does not live by welfare alone.

Mia is not starving. Mia does not, apparently, need blankets or shoes or a water bottle or a toothbrush. Mia has enough to live by, but nothing to live for. Mia does not appear to need anything. Mia, a person with no permanent home, upon being offered a “gift basket” by a local school, asks for a toy. Mia is a child. Children, even those who have been alive for thirty years, do not know that thirty-year-old humans are responsible for their own decisions, and responsible for finding their own shelter and their own work.

Why? Society has failed many like Mia. Portland certainly isn’t helping, making everything so very easy for Mia to continue living the life that Mia is living.

We are told that Mia and others are “unhoused.” I say that Mia is facultatively homeless. This looks like a series of choices, not a string of bad luck. Perhaps the series of choices is, in Mia’s case as in so many, compounded by mental illness, drug addiction, or a childhood that rendered this person very poor at understanding consequences. All of these things may be true, and none of them are reason to allow people to be facultatively homeless. Having an understanding for how someone arrived at a place should not be conflated with letting them do whatever they want now that they are there.

We are told that the term is now “LGBTQ+.” Is it now. Mia is part of this elite group—the LGBTQ+ group—by virtue of having declared himself non-binary. That’s all it takes—a declaration. The rest of us are on notice that the only correct response is to affirm the declaration. I guess that having long flowing hair and pearls and bright red lipstick and eye makeup contributes to the fantasy. But that’s what it is: a fantasy.

See my “I am a woman – and a biologist” essay, if you are confused on this front. If you remain unsure about what sex and gender are, what it looks like in other species, what the implications are for humans, any of it, also consider the following: the Sex and Gender chapter in A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, my essay “Protect Children: Do not allow them to transition”, and my forthcoming essay Me, She, He, They: Reality vs. Identity in the 21st Century, to be published in the anthology, Iconoclasts, just to start.

A few weeks ago, a piece was published in Sapiens titled Biological Science Rejects the Sex Binary, and That’s Good for Humanity.

• Point one: No it does not. Biological science does not reject the sex binary.

• Point two: If it did, that would not be good for humanity.

• Point three: The fact that a whole lot of pseudo-scientific publications seem to think that sex is not binary reveals the fact that humanity is in quite a lot of trouble. As Ricky Gervais says in his most recent stand-up special, nobody tweeted “Women don’t have penises” ten years ago, because it would have been an insane thing to say. It was too obvious. Everybody knew this. And here’s the thing: Everybody still knows this. Women don’t have penises. Men can’t get pregnant. Men and women are different, and even though many of the roles that we have historically been slotted into are archaic now, men and women are still different.

Oh and by the way, for those who are pretending to be confused on the issue, “chest-feeding” and “front-hole” and “uterus-haver” are misogynistic abominations on the language, and on our collective ability to be good to one another, too. No, they are not compassionate words to use in the newest civil rights battle. Rather, they are dehumanizing and objectifying phrases that are effectively erasing the hard-won rights of women.

In response to the confused piece in Sapiens, the excellent Helen Joyce asks “What is in it for these people?” It’s a very good question.

Two of the responses to Helen’s tweet get right to the point:

I believe that the chronological taxonomy that we are being told to accept is as follows:

Vagina-havers-who-don’t-like-to-iron are:

• 1930s – 1960s: Women, but nasty, bad women probably in need of drugs or therapy or discipline from their husbands.

• 1970s – yesterday: Women. Also, take your regressive expectations and stereotypes and shove them up your ass.

• Now: Trans-men, or non-binary, or genderqueer, or something something something, but definitely what we’re gonna do is honor and respect both tradwives and men more than the vast majority of women out there. Those who were assigned-female-at-birth should recognize their privilege, be quiet, and let those with greater victim status stand up and explain what a woman is. While the assigned-female-at-birth crowd is sitting nicely and quietly and not doing anything else with their time, they should probably get the rest of us some lunch. Go on now, honey. We’re hungry over here.

Similarly:

Yep. Again, the answer is woman. Until yesterday. Now though? I guess now the answer is someone—me, for instance—who is expected to get the rest of y’all some lunch.

You are going to be waiting for a very long time.

Subscribe now