It’s Time for This Madness to End

I spoke on a panel about gender ideology in schools at a Community Education Council meeting. The situation is as bad as I had feared.

In March 2024, the Community Education Council for District 2—the largest school district in Manhattan—passed a resolution to review the NYC Department of Education’s 2019 Gender Guidelines, which had replaced the category of sex with “gender identity” in all areas, including school restrooms, locker rooms, and athletics.

“Resolution #248” authorized a review committee to “propose amendments, changes and additions” to the guidelines once “an inclusive, evidence-based process” had determined their impact on female athletes. The resolution specified that the review committee must include those who were excluded from the process in 2019, such as female athletes, parents, coaches, relevant medical professionals, and evolutionary biology experts.

On the day of the vote, eight voted in favor of the resolution and three voted against it. One member was absent.

After the resolution passed, backlash was swift. Trans activists and their allies began showing up in droves at school board meetings to protest. They shouted down council members, screamed obscenities, and, if anyone dared to speak favorably about the resolution, stood up, turned their backs to the council, and hummed loudly in unison. In May, eighteen New York Democrats, including Rep. Jerry Nadler, called on the council to rescind the “hateful, discriminatory, and actively harmful” resolution, alleging in their public letter that it could lead to an increase in suicide attempts among transgender youth.

And all of this because a school committee council had voted to merely conduct a review of the existing guidelines.

Maud Maron, one of the four council members who sponsored the legislation (and who is now challenging Alvin Bragg in the 2025 Manhattan District Attorney race), contacted me in December, inviting me to speak on a panel about this topic at an official council meeting. The other panelists would be my friends (and Informed Dissent cohosts), Cori Cohn (who also cohosts the Heterodorx podcast) and the journalist Lisa Selin Davis. We set the date for Monday, January 13.

In the days leading up to the event, Maud texted the three of us with details. She said that the audience might be hostile, adding that some parents had emailed the superintendent, demanding that the meeting be shut down for promoting “hate speech.”

Maud also alerted us to a list of instructions trans activists had posted online for fellow protesters. The list, titled “This Week’s Jazzy Tactics,” advised comrades to enter the room “with pizzazz,” “wear white and/or keffiyeh,” and, “during transphobic testimony,” “take care of ourselves and one another” with things like “headphones, fidgets, coloring books, bubbles, snacks, treats.”

Oh, and “Macarena.”

The meeting, live streamed on YouTube, was held in a school auditorium on the Lower East Side. In the end, only about 20 people showed up. I assume this is because the activists knew they’d be confronted with logic and reason, and, as we all know, even the slightest bit of scrutiny causes their entire house of cards to tumble down. Thus, I only got a small taste of the hostility that Maud, her fellow council members, and other people who care about women and girls and the wellbeing of gender-nonconforming kids have had to endure over the last year.

When Maud opened the meeting around 6:45, she asked each of the panelists to share a little bit about ourselves and why we agreed to come here.

Cori suggested that, before we begin, we should probably clarify what we mean by “gender ideology,” since it’s become such a loaded term. He proposed a definition. “I would say that gender ideology is the idea that we can self-identify our sex based on our internal insights instead of relying on material indicators of sex, like what gametes your body produces or what your genital configuration is. So, it’s the idea that you can substitute gender identity for sex.”

No one objected, so Cori continued with his story.

In the eighties, as a young kid, Cori was relentlessly bullied for being different. He prayed to be a girl, thinking that would solve a lot of his troubles. When he was 15, his parents took him to a psychologist, who suggested he was transexual. At 18, Cori socially transitioned and started cross-sex hormones, and at 19, he underwent vaginoplasty. The surgery left him sexually dysfunctional.

Around 2010, the radical trans movement really began to kick off. Whereas previously, a male had to medicalize with cross-sex hormones and undergo castration surgery to enter female spaces, now activists were demanding that any male, no matter his medical history or appearance, be able to claim a female identity. Even worse, policymakers and legislators were obliging them. This, Cori noticed, was seriously compromising women’s rights and privileges.

After a lot of reflection, Cori eventually concluded that, if we think there’s a need for sex-segregated spaces—and Cori believes there are many reasons why we need them, particularly for women and girls—then that separation must be based solely on sex. Further, by demanding that one take hormones, have surgery, and become infertile in order to access a space, the state is creating a mandate for people to surgically and medically modify themselves.

“That’s not fair,” he said. “So, the conclusion is that, one, these spaces have to be sex-segregated, and two, they have to be safe for all users. Boys who want to present in a feminine way, have long hair, take a feminine name—they have to be safe in male spaces. There cannot be any tolerance at all for any abuse of somebody based on their gender presentation. That has to be protected. But you cannot substitute gender identity for sex and at the same time have safe, single-sex spaces.”

Cori then passed the mic to Lisa.

Lisa’s kids attend District 2 schools. One of those kids is a masculine daughter. When her daughter was little, Lisa noticed people responding very oddly to her daughter’s gender-nonconformity. They would ask what her pronouns were, and if she was a “trans boy.” Lisa was mystified. Since when did it become unacceptable for girls to be tomboys? Why were people (liberal people) suggesting her daughter needed to identify as male in order to be herself?

In 2017, Lisa wrote an op-ed about this issue for The New York Times. Soon came the vitriol. People threatened to kidnap her daughter for not “affirming” her as trans. Before long, most of the news outlets to which Lisa had contributed for years deplatformed her.

Since then, not much has changed about Lisa’s perspective, other than that she’s collected a heck of a lot more information (she’s currently working on a book about what she’s learned). For her, the desistance literature was particularly enlightening. This consists of a series of studies on gender dysphoric young children, which all came to the same conclusion: if not socially transitioned, the bulk of the children desisted in their distress and grew up to be gay.

Lisa accepts that some people have a belief system she doesn’t share, and she recognizes their right to live according to that belief system. But she objects to the idea that we all must accept the idea of gender identity as fact, and she worries about the imposition of this idea on gender-nonconforming children.

“Education can’t be, ‘There is one way to think about this and if you don’t think this way, you’re a bad person,’” said Lisa. “It has to be, ‘There are a lot of ways to think about this, and let’s try to create an environment in which multiple viewpoints and understandings can be heard.”

In a normal world, a statement like that might draw at least a smattering of applause from an audience of supposedly liberal New Yorkers. But no one made a sound.

Then the mic came to me.

I started by speaking about my own gender-nonconformity in childhood—the lessons I was taught by my religious teachers about homosexuality, and being relentlessly bullied by my peers. I told the audience about how I coped, which was to “defeminize” myself in order to become what a boy is “supposed to be.” I spoke about my battles with anxiety, depression, drugs and alcohol, my eventual recovery, and my foray into activism.

“This was very grandiose of me,” I said, “but I wanted to create a world where there’s more space for gender-nonconforming boys and girls. Where little boys and little girls who are really different—yes, they might not be the norm, and the majority of young kids might act like your typical boys and girls—but there are going to be gender-nonconforming kids that are inherently that way. And rather than saying, ‘There’s something wrong with you,’ we protect them from the bullies. We safeguard them. We tell them, “Yes, you are different, and that’s perfectly OK.”

That vision, I found, was not very popular in the world of “LGBTQ” activism. Gender-nonconforming kids were not natural variations of their own sex. Instead, they were “trans” and therefore “born in the wrong bodies.” Thus, in order for feminine boys to behave the way they wanted—in order for them to openly like pink and wear dresses and grow their hair long—they needed to identify out of their sex category, and then medically and surgically modify their bodies to fit properly into society.

Soon, like Lisa, I became really hungry for knowledge about this issue. After I learned that youth transition began not so long ago, with the medicalization of a small cohort of young people, nearly all of whom were homosexual, I became really concerned. And then I started meeting gay people who had been harmed by these treatment protocols.

Maud asked me if, at age 12, I may have thought transition was an option if I had been exposed to the idea that I was perhaps born in the wrong body and actually a girl.

I said, “If the adults I trusted—the guidance counselors, teachers, whoever—had intervened and stopped the bullying and then told me, ‘This is not a spiritual malady. This is not something evil about you. This is a medical defect that can be fixed.’ My god, would I have thought, ‘Hallelujah, I’m saved. Sign me up.’ I would have finally fit in. I would have been allowed to express myself in the way that I wanted to—to be gender-nonconforming, so long as I identified as a girl. But that would mean that there would also be folks saying, ‘There’s a medical protocol that you follow.’”

So, there you have it. There’s our “hate speech.” Our “transphobic” screeds.

Pretty reasonable, right?

Apparently not. After that, things got spicy. Maud asked each of us to speculate about how we had gotten to a place where the only way to “protect kids”—something we all want—is to silence whoever disagrees with you.

Lisa took this one. She explained how our understanding of the concepts of “harm” and “safety” have changed over time. When anti-bullying measures were first developed in the 90s, they were a response to the extreme violence that gender-nonconforming kids endured. “How did we get from that to, ‘If you don’t use the pronoun I want, I’m in danger of suicide’?” Lisa said.

Which was a great segue into a very important point.

“The bottom line is,” continued Lisa, “as Chase Strangio admitted to the Supreme Court, the suicide statistics you’re hearing are not true. There are not increased suicides among unaffirmed trans youth. There is nothing in the history of this research that suggests that we need to only treat people in a specific way or they are in imminent risk of harm.”

A woman sitting near the back of the audience interjected. “Why would you not treat someone the way they want to be treated?!” she yelled. “It doesn’t make sense!”

“Well, we can talk about compelled speech,” said Lisa. “We did try to explain that there is a belief system around gender identity that we do not share. And I respect your right to believe in it, but I don’t. The curriculum requires us to bow to a belief system we don’t share, and it includes lessons that we have concerns about, as former gender-nonconforming children and as a parent of a gender-nonconforming child.”

“What curriculum are you referring to?” yelled an audience member.

“We’re gonna take questions,” Maud reminded the audience. In the meantime, she asked them not to shout out questions.

A woman in the audience became irate. “This was publicized as a parent-led discussion, and this is not….!”

Maud put her foot down, saying she would close the meeting down if people don’t follow the rules.

The woman continued yelling. “This was falsely advertised!”

“I’ve raised four kids and I know how to shut down temper tantrums,” said Maud. “You guys have five more seconds to stop interrupting me and then the meetings over.”

“Heads down! Heads down!” a man in the audience shouted. He put his head in his arms and leaned against the chair in front of him. This, apparently, is one of the “jazzy tactics” the activists use to signal their collective disapproval of whatever is being said. This time, though, none of the other audience members put their heads down.

By now, my heart was about to pound out of my chest. I just don’t fare all that well when adults are yelling at each other. Not to mention that Cori, Lisa, and I had just shared some really vulnerable stuff with a bunch of strangers, so to quickly be met with hostility was disorienting, to say the least.

“There are people in the audience who have been really respectful, and I want to acknowledge you,” said Maud. “Also, I’ve had 10 months of rude protesters at our general calendar meetings, so my fuse is a little shorter than it usually is.”

Two audience members yelled something I didn’t make out.

Soon after that, the question-and-answer portion officially began. The first person to speak was named August. She appeared to be a female who had masculinized with testosterone. August introduced herself as a trans person, a Trevor Project representative, a crisis counselor, and “someone whose life was saved by my community.” She said she was saddened that we would come there and “smear” kids “who were so vulnerable and so sad.” She accused Lisa of misquoting Chase Strangio (Lisa did not misquote Strangio), then said, “There are so many people who are dead. Who are dead!”

Finally, August got to her question. She asked Cori to define what a woman is.

“Can we talk about female, or do you want woman?” Cori said.

“You were like, ‘There needs to be women’s spaces,’” said August.

“I think I said ‘sex-segregated,’” Cori responded. “What do I mean by sex-segregated? It’s your biological plan. So, if your body was developed to produce eggs, you’re female.”

August proceeded to interject with an activist talking point so clichéd, any of us could have predicted it.

“So, it’s just if you have eggs,” August gibed. “So, people who are infertile…”

“No,” Cori said. Clearly, he too was expecting this exact response. “If your body’s development plan is to produce eggs, you’re female. If your body’s development plan is to produce sperm, you’re male.”

August called this “hypothetical.”

“It’s not hypothetical,” said Cori. “It’s observable. If you believe in science, then you know that there’s instruments that can be used to determine which body plan…” He paused, frustrated that he needed to explain the birds and the bees to an adult. Or maybe I was just projecting. “Even in the extremely odd case where the chromosomes are XY, that female development pattern is still female. So, we have these really weird corner cases…”

“Those people are intersex, they’re not really weird,” sniped August.

“I'm gonna ignore you for a minute,” said Cori, “because that's really rude to twist…”

“Well, you said ‘really weird.’”

“I didn't say individuals were weird.”

“Can you have a seat?” Maud asked August.

“I thought this was a dialogue,” August said.

So, Cori dialogued. “It's sort of dirty to say that a difference of sexual development is unusual or weird, and then for somebody to say you're saying the people are weird. No, it's an unusual condition. So, you are a woman if you are an adult and your body follows the female development, and you're a man, like I am, like some other people in the audience are. Some people are male but look more feminine, some people are female but look more masculine. But you're a man if you're an adult human male and you're a woman if you're an adult human female. There's nothing wrong with that, there's nothing shameful about that. And if you're like me, and you've done something unusual with your body so that you've modified your sex traits, your sex characteristics, you may have some of the outward appearances of the opposite sex, but that doesn't make me not a man and it wouldn't make somebody like Buck Angel not a woman.”

August returned to his seat.

Maud asked Lisa if she wanted to add anything to that. “Sure,” she said, adding how distracting it is to have to argue that a woman is an adult human female. She then spoke briefly about two very rare intersex conditions, which, when it came to sex-segregated spaces, would probably be the edge cases we need to consider.

“How does this show up in the curriculum?” came a question from the audience.

Lisa said, “On the first day of fourth grade, my daughter was asked to create an identity web and put whether she was cisgender, transgender, or nonbinary on it. So, there are lessons about gender identity, and they are, again, taught as fact. You can look up the New York City DoE regulations, they say exactly what you have to do. There’s a lot of compelled speech. I don’t know how that works with the First Amendment…”

“It doesn’t,” said Maud.

A man sitting in the front row spoke up. He introduced himself as a D2 parent and a father of two daughters, “one trans and one not.” He asked how he could keep his trans kid safe from experiencing gender dysphoria if everything is sex-segregated.

Cori thanked the man for coming and for sharing his story with us. He said he can imagine that, over the years, a lot of “good-hearted people” have given him “the worst possible advice at the worst possible time.” He told the father that a lot of doctors and therapists are not telling parents the real risks of these treatments. The surgeries aren’t great, and if his child was on puberty blockers, there’s a good chance he won’t be able to have a normal sex life. Earlier, Cori recounted for the audience an op-ed he had written for The Washington Post in 2022, in which he admitted that, as a result of his vaginoplasty at 19, he has never been able to orgasm with a partner.

“That’s crushing, actually,” said Cori. “Because in order to partner with people, a healthy sex life is really important.”

“I have made post-op girls cum, just for the record,” August shouted. “It’s not…”

“We’re gonna let them answer, please,” said Maud.

Cori continued. He advised the father to think about his child in the future, and that he will have to live for many years with the decisions that his parents made for him.

“I promise you they will come for answers,” said Cori. “They’ll say, ‘What was I really like? Was there anything else that I could have done, were there any other treatments?’ And you’ll be able to say, ‘No, the doctors didn’t give me any other options,’ because institutionally talk therapies and [cognitive-behavioral therapy] have been recategorized as conversion therapy.”

At some point, as Cori spoke, August stood up from his seat and walked to the front row. He had the father stand up so that he could give him a hug in front of everyone.

Next, it was a mother of a nonbinary child who has chronic health conditions. The mother is a volunteer facilitator for PFLAG. She called Cori arrogant for projecting his own experience onto everyone else’s. She said we’re facing “a tsunami of anti-LGBTQ policy coming our way.” She asked him if he supports Trump’s proposal of eliminating X gender makers for adults who identify as nonbinary.

“You’re so articulate, I appreciate the question,” Cori said. “PFLAG no longer stands for Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, right?”

The woman said no, it’s just the acronym.

Cori proceeded to answer her question. “If there’s a marker that’s supposed to list your sex, it should be male or female, and there’s no need at all for your gender marker to reflect your gender identity.”

Next came a question for me. A woman sitting in the back asked why I think there’s not a space for gender-nonconforming kids right now. She said she’s not understanding the debate.

I reiterated that I object to the reductive way that gender expression is talked about in schools, which I fear will lead gender-nonconforming children to think they might’ve been born in the wrong body simply because they behave more like the opposite sex. If, as a child, I had been asked which sex I “feel” like, I certainly would have said I “felt” like a girl. While I can acknowledge there are some people whose gender dysphoria will persist into adulthood, and that those adults might make decisions to modify their bodies in order to appear more like the opposite sex, I believe that every kid has a right to grow up with their bodies intact and healthy.

Lisa spoke next. She thanked the woman for her question and said she had one of her own. “Why are so many people here so hostile to incorporating our ideas?” She added that most of the questions have assumed that gender identity is a fact, while we see it as a kind of religious belief. She doesn’t believe that everyone has a separate gendered soul that can be “excavated and revealed.”

“It’s fine if you believe that,” she said. “What we are asking for people to consider is that some people don’t, and it doesn’t make them bigots.”

Lisa then mentioned a book often seen in schools, I Am Jazz, in which the protagonist says he has a girl’s brain in a boy’s body because he likes pink and mermaids, and that makes him transgender.

“Therefore, what many children learn, if they’re a boy who likes pink and mermaids, is that they’re in the wrong body,” said Lisa. “And it needs to be OK for us to raise our concerns about that.”

After that came a question from a woman wearing a mask, who identified herself as a “cis queer woman” with some kind of LGBTQ certificate from NYU. She said she’s gender-nonconforming because she has short hair and sometimes wears pants. She told Lisa that, actually yes, Lisa does have a gender identity.

When it appeared she was just going to keep rambling, Maud asked if she had a question.

“MAUD!” shouted the irate woman. “Can you actually show some respect for the people asking questions?!”

Maud gave the masked woman a few more chances. She continued to ramble, but never got to a question. Finally, she passed the mic to a very tall man wearing a blue cardigan. It was the same man who had ordered everyone to put their heads down.

The man stood up. Along with the blue cardigan, he wore a dress. His question was for Cori. “I’m a trans mom, I’m a transwoman,” he said. “I’ve got two kids, and I’m at the airport, and I’ve got ‘F’ on my passport. And I think, in the universe that you’re creating, that would not fly—excuse the pun. Then what happens? Like, what would happen to me and my family?”

“Well, depending on how you were presenting yourself…” Cori began to answer.

“I’m in a dress. I’m wearing a fucking dress.”

Maud asked him not to curse, since it was a school committee meeting.

“Oh, I can’t say ‘fuck?’ Fucking fuck fuck fuck,” he said.

Cori went on. “I use men’s spaces, and it’s OK. It’s a little uncomfortable. But you know what? Men just wanna pee.”

“What does that mean?” the man said.

“It means, if you use the men’s room, they’re not interested in what you’re doing, they’re just there to pee.”

“Are you calling her a man?” said August.

“I’m saying that, if you use the facility that accords to your sex, you don’t have to worry about the men that are in there mistreating you, because they’re just there to pee.”

“I think you are suggesting that I have to go to the men’s room,” the man said.

Cori replied, “You should use the sex space that’s accorded for your sex.”

Shortly thereafter, the man in the blue cardigan gathered his things and stomped out of the room. The mother of the nonbinary child with chronic health conditions followed him.

Finally, we made it to the last question. A person in the audience asked what kinds of policies we would propose to replace the existing ones.

Cori answered, “Sex should be treated as sex, and what we consider ‘gender’ should be protected as gender expression. Boys should be able to wear female-coded clothes, females should be able to wear masculine clothes, they should be able to adopt nicknames, they should be safe in school always and not targeted for violence or bullying because of their gender expression. If all of the energy that went into gender identity instead went into just how we express ourselves, I think that would be the best way to help these kids.”

I concurred. I said that there are males and females and rare intersex cases, and that people can express themselves however they want. I said that the way gender is currently being talked about in schools might actually be priming gender-nonconforming children to become gender dysphoric as they grow up. If a young boy says he “feels like a girl,” and all of the adults in his life affirm him as one, then, as his body matures, reality will betray what everyone has been telling him. He’ll become dysphoric, and medicalizing will seem like the most viable option.

After me, Lisa made a plug for viewpoint diversity when it comes to creating policy. She said we need to hear people who have been helped by existing policies, but we also need to hear from people who have been harmed.

“We cannot make good policy if we do not acknowledge the cost,” she said.

And with that, the meeting was adjourned.

Later that night, Maud realized she left behind some of the recording equipment. She emailed the school principal about it, and also thanked him for allowing us to use the space for our meeting. He responded by saying that his mother, who once represented the KKK when she worked for the ACLU, taught him that “suppressing hate speech is counterproductive, making martyrs of bigots.” He hadn’t watched the program, but he thinks he would have vehemently disagreed with a lot of it.

Maud responded, “You would likely learn a lot from, be impressed by, and find yourself agreeing with the panelists last night. Defending the 1st A and viewpoint diversity, as your mom did, is at its most robust when you do more than just begrudgingly allow speech but when you actually listen to other points of views. And here those points of view included multiple D2 parents.”

She pasted a link to the live stream and thanked him again.

To the principle’s credit, he followed up with Maud after he watched the video. He thanked her for suggesting he watch it and was glad he did. He said he still disagreed with a lot of what was said, particularly the underlying assumption that schools are pushing a particular ideology. He wondered whether the “fear mongering and scapegoating of trans people during the election made people pay attention and think there is a crisis.”

Isn’t that always the way?

These people are bigots.

OK, they’re not necessarily bigots, but they’re overreacting. This stuff isn’t happening. Besides, it’s probably all because of Trump.

Eventually, down the road:

OK, this stuff is happening.

And finally:

It’s good that it’s happening…. Bigot!

As of now, Resolution #248 is dead in its tracks. The former schools chancellor, David Banks, who retired in December after having his house raided as part of the federal corruption investigation into Mayor Eric Adams’s administration, said last year, “We will not be entertaining changes to that [2019 gender] guidance.” To my knowledge, the new chancellor, Melissa Aviles-Ramos, has not commented on the resolution.

Regardless, it’s now very clear how deeply gender identity ideology has embedded itself within our schools and communities. As a result, we no longer speak the same language. Maud, Lisa, Cori, and I acknowledge the material reality of sex. We’re run-of-the-mill liberals who believe in things like free speech and viewpoint diversity. But not these folks.

In his final email to Maud, the principal did mention that he doesn’t see a lot of this occurring in his school. And that very well might be true, since his school has a lot of low-income and immigrant students, which are not the primary demographics in which gender ideology metastasizes. I only hope it stays true.

But what we all must realize is that this is occurring in schools. Widely occurring. Right now, in the most advanced nation in the world, kids are being taught that sex isn’t real. They’re being taught that they can choose their sex, and that that choice rests upon the most regressive ideas of what it means to be a boy and what it means to be a girl. Girls are being taught to simply accept the presence of boys in their sports and private spaces. They’re being told that it’s their problem and that they might be in trouble if they object to a boy who claims to be a girl coming into their locker room.

Right now, in America.

Perhaps that’s okay for some people. But I’m worried about the consequences of an entire generation being taught a pseudoscience. And I don’t think it’s wise for kids to be told to disregard their personal boundaries.

And I know I’m not alone. A New York Times poll has revealed that the majority of Americans disapprove of trans-identified males in women’s sports and do not believe that gender-distressed minors should have access to puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones.

The majority of Republicans and Democrats.

We must end it now.