The Situation Is Not So Great
What the reaction to my Atlantic essay reveals about activists, parents, and the silence inside LGBT organizations.
On Tuesday The Atlantic published my essay, “In Defense of Effeminate Boys,” in which I argue that inherently gender nonconforming boys—a natural variation of the male sex—should be accepted as they are rather than pressured to conform to male stereotypes or “affirmed” as female and steered towards medicalization.
As I might’ve predicted, the reaction to the essay has been split. On Bluesky, it’s “absolute trash,” I’m a Nazi, and I should kill myself. Same goes for Threads. On X, the reaction is mostly positive, although in the past few months a lot of Bluesky people—“Bluescreamers,” someone called them—seem to have migrated back. These users have been very vocal in the comments. Facebook is pretty quiet. It’s like those guys can’t figure out what the hell to do with me.
Other than that, I’ve got many emails and DMs from strangers, thanking me and expressing how happy they are to see their views represented in a liberal news outlet. One of these messages came from an individual who for many years worked at prominent LGBT organizations. We chatted earlier today, and during our call he or she confirmed my suspicion, which is that many members of these organizations, even those in positions of authority, have similar views to me but have been cowed into silence by the radicals they work with. It was at once vindicating and enraging to learn this—vindicating because it confirmed my suspicions, and enraging because so many people I once respected had abdicated their responsibility to advocate for gay people. And we had come so far!1
The Atlantic reader comments have been the most interesting. As I understand it, Atlantic subscribers are largely old-school liberals and centrists, and therefore probably the most reachable on this issue. I certainly saw a lot of agreement and a willingness to engage with my ideas in good faith. Then there were comments like this:
“If the author wants to join the right, he should do so. If he wants to remain on the left, he will need to do some growing.”
Says a lot, doesn’t it?
This comment, which actually made me chuckle, got me wondering how prevalent this kind of sanctimony and thought-policing is on the right. I know it exists because I speak to conservatives who tell me it does. But how common is it on the right for people to suppress their dissenting opinions for fear of social consequences? And on what cultural issues specifically do they feel the most pressured to toe the party line?
Here are a few other things I’ve observed over the past two days. A lot—and I mean a lot—of males whose trans identities stem from something other than innate gender nonconformity (AGP, ASD, or what have you) are convinced that their experiences are no different from the experiences of gender nonconforming homosexuals.
Two, people’s brains really are as scrambled as I feared. So many of the counterarguments to my essay are utterly incoherent, as if we’re no longer even speaking the same language.
Three, one of the most dangerous and consequential ideas in modern history is the idea that we must “let the kids lead.” Of this I am now certain.
The reactions to my essay from liberal and progressive parents reveal just how firmly many of them have come to believe that every child possesses a kind of mystical gender identity. The parent’s moral duty, in this view, is simply to sit back and wait for the child to reveal it. Once that revelation comes, the child’s gender identity is said to supersede his or her sex, and the parent must do everything possible to make the child’s body “align” with that identity—even if it means preventing the child from sexually maturing into a healthy adult.
In doing so, many parents—like the leaders of LGBT organizations—have abdicated their most basic responsibility. Aside from protecting a child, a parent’s job is to help him or her make sense of the world. Increasingly, many have decided the child must instead define it.
Lastly, and I know I’m not the first person to make this observation, but for so many parents, there will be no coming back from this. Parents with trans kids are going to defend what they’ve allowed their kids to do—or, rather, what they’ve allowed other people to do to their kids—at all costs, like we saw this past week. Because what’s the alternative? How does anyone reckon with a mistake like that?
I feel deeply for these parents—I really do. The day their child said, “I’m trans,” they were presented with only two options. They could risk estrangement, something the online world will do everything it can to facilitate. Or they could affirm the child and follow them over the waterfall.
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I am absolutely going to write more about this in the near future, after this person and I have a chance to talk again. This individual is fearful to speak on the record. He or she fears the radical activists, who we both agree pose a real danger.
The Atlantic piece was excellent. Right on target. I'm so sick of the trans ideology police. Recently an ACLU agent on the street seeking members was gobsmacked when I said the ACLU is one of the worse homophobic and misogynist forces in America.
Lots of gay men and lesbians say this in private but are too afraid to say it in public for fear of being labelled right-wing. Labelling is a shaming tactic used by people when they run out of arguments. A few days ago, I was discussing illegal immigration with a friend's son and he could not answer my arguments so he suddenly said, "Are you a Trumper?" as if it is impossible to agree with some policies of a government and disagree with others.