Episode 47: Trans Kids

Hello, I'm Adrienne Dah.

And I'm Laura Donegan.

Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.

So, Adrienne, today we are talking about one of the smallest groups in the United States who are subject to one of the most outsized political campaigns.

That's right.

We are going to be talking today about trans kids.

Yeah.

So what do you know about trans kids?

I mean, what you say, I know that the amount of real estate that they appear to occupy in the conservative imagination and media ecosystem seems wildly disproportionate from their position in society and from their numbers.

And I get the impression that, as has never happened before in the history of LGBT rights and the contentious debates around them, people seem to be

they're talking about trans kids when they really want to govern what goes on with trans adults.

Right.

The kids are both subjects who have their own qualities that incite a lot of anger and rage in the right-wing imagination, and they are also this kind of like cipher or a prism through which other anxieties, really anxieties about grown-ups, get sort of put to the test or sublimated into perhaps a, on its face, more respectable anxiety or fear.

So I wanted to talk about trans kids today because I spent part of this week writing about and listening to oral arguments in a Supreme Court case called U.S.

versus Scrometti.

Have you heard anything about this?

I have, yes.

So what do you know about U.S.

versus Scrametti?

So it's a case out of Tennessee, and it's about a law in Tennessee.

banning, I believe, transition care for minors.

Is that correct?

Yeah.

So this is a law in Tennessee referred to helpfully as HB1.

Do not try and Google that because you will get a hundred different laws.

Tennessee HB1 was passed in 2023, and it outlaws basically all transition-related care for anybody under the age of 18, right?

And it bans the use of puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones or any kind of surgical intervention.

And we should say that while Scrametti is the case that worked its way to the Supreme Court, there are laws on the books that resemble HB1 in fully like half the states at this point, right?

Oh, we're going to get there, Adrian.

But yeah, this is one of many such trans health care bans.

HB1 is an interesting little nugget.

Like different states have taken a few different approaches to banning trans healthcare because, as you said, it is something that a lot of them are doing.

HB1 is really interesting because the drugs that are used in transition-related care, a puberty blocker for a minor, cross-sex hormones for a trans person of any age.

Like these are drugs that, much like mesoprostol, which is used in abortion medication, have a bunch of other different clinical uses.

So puberty blockers are routinely prescribed to kids who have what's called like early onset or precocious puberty, right?

Like if your

seven-year-old son has started to have his voice drop and is growing hair and is showing signs of puberty, you might want to delay that with a puberty blocker.

Usually the reason given actually is that puberty tends to arrest growth, right?

So it's actually usually about height.

And then you might want to, you know, buy your kid a couple more years of a, you know, pre-pubescent childhood body for various different health-related reasons and social reasons, you know?

Yeah.

There are similarly like decent reasons to give kids minors like hormones, right?

If you have a kid who's got a delayed puberty, you might treat that kid with a hormone therapy, right?

Also for height related reasons, for instance.

So there's like a lot of different uses for these drugs, right?

Tennessee didn't want to ban those clinical uses.

So Tennessee specifically wrote into its law that this is a ban on any kind of treatment that is inconsistent with the sex of the child, by which they mean like sex assigned at birth.

And in the legal parlance surrounding this case, people are referred to as their sex assigned at birth, like throughout their life, right?

Which is a sort of quirk of the legal system and not only a symptom of like the ignorance of the justices.

So inconsistent with their sex or that might cause them to disdain their sex, which is a very broad category, right?

Yeah.

So the bill, the text of the bill is itself pretty explicit

about its sex discrimination, right?

So like you can give a boy assigned male at birth a testosterone treatment, but you cannot give that same treatment in Tennessee to a child assigned female at birth, right?

And it's also very explicit about having an ideological agenda of gender conformity among children, right?

In fact, one of the lower court judges says, this is a bill about how we, the state of Tennessee, want boys to be boys and girls to be girls.

Yeah, yeah.

So the law is obviously discriminatory.

Am I going to get to a moment where I throw my mic across the room because one of the conservative justices makes the point that, oh, this can't be discriminatory because it can apply both to men and to women?

That would be one Brett Kavanaugh who made it.

Fuck him.

That is literally how they upheld.

That's literally, that was the argument in loving.

And that was the point that Katanji Brown Jackson made.

Oh, thank God.

And she was screaming about

the same tenor that you were.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Fuck that guy.

I knew it.

I mean,

as you were laying that out, I'm like, it seems really weird that like, how are conservatives going to talk their way out of like, this discriminatory bill is not, in fact, discriminatory?

Oh, wait, they're going to be like, well, it applies to everyone equally, you see?

Dude, I have to cover.

the Supreme Court for my job because I sinned in a past life and I'm being punished.

Sure.

So I had to, and now that I'm on the West Coast, those oral arguments are at 10 a.m.

East Coast time at DC time.

And they are live streamed.

The audio is live streamed.

Like there's no video because these people are narcissists and they think they're too good to have cameras in their courtroom but there is an audio live stream so i have to listen several times over the course of every supreme court term at seven in the fucking morning to some red state solicitor general get up there and say well you know the law in its majestic equality forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges like you would be shocked at how often that exact argument is made in a court.

Jesus Christ.

Yeah, I mean, I should say that you can tell that I'm a bit of a court watcher myself because like, oh, I can already, I can hear the classics coming out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, we will not formally know the rationale upon which they do so until this spring, but I would be shocked if they did not uphold this law.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This also featured one of the, in fact, the first transgender attorney to ever argue before the Supreme Courts.

Yes.

Case Strangio of the ACLU, very famous trans advocate, nice guy.

I've talked to him a few times because we have some friends in common.

Chase, if you're listening, come on in bed with a right.

That'd be amazing.

And he was an advocate in favor of some trans children and their families for the ACLU, as well as Elizabeth Prelogar, who was representing the Biden administration as the Solicitor General, because the Biden administration joined the ACLU in suing to try and get this law thrown out.

Yeah, Yeah, that's good.

But I wanted to talk about trans kids

because the bill,

like HB1, like these transgender bans, like they're all actually really new, right?

I mentioned HB1 only passed last year, you know, it's not been on the books for very long.

But in fact, there were no bans on transition-related care before April of 2021.

Whoa, okay.

Yeah, the first state to pass a ban on transition-related care for minors was Arkansas.

Good old Arkansas, very reliable that way.

First out of the gate, yeah.

And now 26 states have these bans on the books.

So basically once they were done with like bathroom bills and trans athlete bills, they were like, what else can we do?

Well, this is interesting, Adrian, because I think to understand the emergence of the trans child as a politicized subject, we actually do have to go back to bathroom bills.

We're going to get in our time machine and go back to a very different time.

So, Adrian, what do you remember about 2016?

It was a dark time.

There was an incipient fascist elected to the presidency who had multiple,

then still unsubstantiated, rape allegations against him.

It's a hard time to imagine today.

People just have to kind of trust us on this.

It was a very, very different time.

It was a dark time.

And in ways, it was also kind of a much more progressive time, right?

Because Donald Trump and his brand of, you know, revanchist identity politics, weaponized animus, that was still kind of not as mainstream, right?

And what was really mainstream in 2016 was a kind of like raw-raw liberal love is love appreciation for LGBT rights.

Absolutely.

And I mean, I remember that the bathroom bills, the first round of them, brought on huge advertiser boycotts and sports boycotts, huge political blowback, and really didn't go anywhere, including, I think Trump kind of came out not quite against them, but basically saying that it was not going to be a priority for him.

You know, this brings us exactly to where I wanted to be, which is North Carolina, right?

So in 2016, North Carolina passes HB2, which is its bathroom bill.

And it's one of the first of these, right?

It's one of the most ambitious anti-trans bills that had been passed at the time.

And it was a total ban on trans people using the appropriate public restroom, right?

And there was a lot of media attention on trans people as subjected to a public indignity, right?

There was a lot of comparisons to southern racial segregation and white and black restrooms.

And there were in that same campaign a few like high-profile examples of students in North Carolina public schools who are like, you can't make me go to the wrong restroom or hold it all day.

This is about my access to education, right?

This was a new politicization of the right to pee, you know, like what our friends at Lux Magazine call the right to pee, you know, this ability to be far from your home for long periods of time, which constitutes all of our working lives and our educational lives and our place in the public sphere, requires us to have access to public restrooms, right?

Otherwise, you're tethered to your home.

And the sort of stakes of a bathroom became really clear.

And, you know, in this pro-LGBT moment, remember, we're just like a year after Oberga fell, right?

This is a moment when people can feel really, really, like straight people can feel really like smug about not being homophobes, right?

There was this like kind of rainbowification that at the time I found so annoying and now I'm so nostalgic for.

But like a lot of straight people became really publicly outraged and there was tremendous national response to this bathroom bill.

So this hit North Carolina really hard.

The NCAA, the College Athletic Association, was going to have its tournaments in the state that year.

They pulled them out, right?

They're like, we're boycotting.

a lot of performers were like we will not perform in north carolina so like bruce springstein pulled out cirque de soleil pulled out not cirque de soleil

where will we get our whimsy and

and contortionism from

the tiny french contortionists are turning up their nose or no they're not french they're they're french canadian part of me

but you know then the really big one was that paypal which i do not think of as a particularly left-wing company but PayPal had planned to expand offices in North Carolina and bring about 400 jobs to the state.

And they pulled out.

So all in all, this was estimated by the AP to be about a $3.76 billion revenue loss for North Carolina.

And the governor who signed that bathroom bill, Republican Pat McCrory, was very soon thereafter out on his ass.

And in 2017, they repealed it, right?

They really scaled this back.

So this was a huge backlash to an attempt to politicize trans existence in public life and to roll back trans rights, right?

And it was like a pretty like framed as a very morally simplistic issue at the time, right?

Like this is about the, you know, forward expansion of the liberal civil rights project to a new identity group that has been marginalized, right?

We finally got the gay people, their marriage.

Now we're going to expand rights for trans people and we will resist the backlash.

There was like a ton of like pro-LGBT liberal energy at the moment.

So after this really kind of unmitigated defeat for like the anti-trans movement, there was a moment of like kind of licking their wounds and like trying to figure out what to do next, right?

And they found a sort of like next step.

like they found a wedge issue.

And this was a, this is according to Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, which is like a righty, right-wing social conservative think tank.

They said, okay, first of all, we need to find an issue that can begin a like re-radicalization against trans people.

And they kind of like played around with a few things.

Apparently, that one idea was to be like, oh, we should pass amendments to our civil rights laws to clarify that sex discrimination does not include gender identity discrimination, right?

Like that was was one idea.

That didn't really go anywhere.

There was one idea that is like, okay, we should pass laws saying that trans women can't be housed in domestic violence shelters, which is just like so sadistic and cruel that, like, I can't really even get my mind around it.

But, like, that didn't really go anywhere either, right?

Although it's interesting, right?

Like, prisons and women's shelters, right?

This was already building a bridge to the J.K.

Rowlings of the world.

This is something that Christian Wright and TERFs can sort of agree on.

Well, that was like, that was one idea.

I mean, the J.K.

Rowling wasn't a TERF yet back in 2017.

Like, but the idea was that people who had,

you know, broad socially liberal sympathies could get online with this, right?

And then

the one that they found that actually did it was women's sports.

Yeah.

So like, what do you know about the controversy over trans women and women's sports?

And this trans athlete issue does exclusively seem to be about women's sports.

That's right.

What I know about it is that when you you broadcast women's sports,

when you ask people to show up for them, no one shows up.

And yet, we have a nation of experts on women's sports who have for a long time deeply cared about women's sports at pick one, the collegiate, the high school, the middle school, the elementary school, the

intramural, whatever level.

Yeah, it's a fabricated issue.

There are an infinitesimally small number of trans kids looking to participate in competitive or intramural sports.

There is reliably some kind of ghoul to make them a huge issue once they do.

Apparently, this can be like people's grandparents.

There was a very funny Fox segment where it was someone's uncle, right?

It's like, my niece and or nephew has to compete with this person.

And it's like, I don't know, man, like at least do they have the dad here?

Like this feels, this feels slapdash even for you guys.

But yeah, there was the case in Utah, I guess, where the governor, the Republican, conservative Republican governor vetoed a bill saying he basically realized it applied to exactly one person in the entire state and thought this that's a little bit silly and then they overrode his veto so like you know not that that did any good yeah not one person one teenager yeah like one that's the other thing i want everybody to remember as we talk about this is like we are talking about kids yeah yeah we're specifically talking about the genitals of children from people who call us groomers and i'm like i don't know man like i don't tend to spend much time on that, but you're spending an awful lot of time trying to figure out what's between these kids' legs.

Like, that's weird.

It's just a weird thing for an adult to dwell on one way or the other.

So, Adrienne, not to be too much of a lesbian, but I do need to go back to something you said, because people actually do watch women's sports, actually.

It's true, I know.

But just not the people who freak out about them.

No, but that was becoming more true in the late 2010s, right?

So, what you get in this moment when the anti-trans, you know, organized right turns to women's sports is that you get this focus on excluding trans athletes from sports at around the same time that some major women's sports franchises are actually kind of taking off.

Like the U.S.

women's national team, which is a soccer team, started doing really well and it became clear that they were going to dominate on their way to the 2019 World Cup, which they eventually won.

It was a fantastic afternoon at the lesbian bar in Brooklyn when they did it.

I can only imagine.

And then, you know, the WNBA started gaining a lot of new fans and new revenues, right?

And their salaries started inching up a bit.

So this was a moment when people were starting to watch women's sports in newly engaged numbers, right?

So there's also like kind of a market coincidence that women's sports had become like newly salient, right?

And then the turn to women's sports allowed anti-trans bigots to do a couple of things, right?

Like one is that, like, as you mentioned, it allowed them to bring in constituencies that were maybe not already committed to a socially conservative policy agenda, right?

It seemed like a small ask.

And it also allowed them to focus on something that nominally wasn't as central to people's public participation as bathrooms were, right?

Like, there's really not much you can do if you're not allowed to go to the bathroom, right?

But there's a lot of life that doesn't involve being in an organized sports team, right?

So it was able to seem like, oh, this isn't an attack on these people's whole like right to be equal members of a community and of a polity, right?

This isn't about your working life or your education.

This is a choice.

This is about a sports team.

It's trivial, you know?

But at the same time, it really brought the focus

to trans people and really trans women's bodies, right?

About the difference in their embodiment.

It allowed a sort of essentializing rhetoric about male strength and female vulnerability, right?

Including in chess in a very, very funny moment involving Riley Gaines.

They tried to do it in chess.

Yeah.

At some point, a trans chess player beat a cis chess player and like these people lost their minds.

And then they all started with like brain pans and shit.

And you're like, oh, so you're saying that women are just dumber than men, naturally?

It was, yeah, it was a banner moment for the intrinsic sex differences crowd allegedly not being sexist.

I mean, these people tend to go mask off pretty quickly, right?

But like it allowed a sort of patriarchal defense of sex segregation on the grounds of protecting or defending women's access to public life, right?

Like women need a sex segregated space so that they can compete fairly was the line.

And it allowed to like spend a lot of time focusing on trans women's bodies, which like do have a capacity in like latently transphobic people as opposed to like committedly avowedly transphobic people to like elicit disgust, right?

It's something people don't understand.

And, you know, there's a lot of kind of unresolved science about like what hormone replacement therapies do to people's athletic capacity, right?

And it like allowed people who did not understand themselves as bigots to buy into a project about excluding trans people from public life as a matter of public policy.

This is something that we talked about a little bit in our Olympics episode.

So I know that today, basically, there are these people who are always pushing the women in sports or trans women in sports debate.

And I agree with you, it's never trans men in sports.

And basically they're like, oh, well, we're only asking questions.

We think there should be a policy.

And if you look at any athletic organization, there is a policy.

Absolutely.

There are real rules what you have to do if you're transitioning and you're participating in sports.

Was that the case back then already?

Or is this basically people kind of not reworking their talking points because, as you say, the issue just kind of connects.

It works pretty well for these latent transphobes.

Or was it even then true that basically like the

Women's Hockey Association fully knew what the rules were.

It's just people were like, there should be some rules.

A lot of these associations did create guidelines under political pressure because we are talking, Adrian, about such a vanishingly small number of people that for many of them, it had simply never come up before.

Right, right.

So, one thing to realize when we're talking about trans people is that we are talking about, according to Pew Research, maybe 1.6% of adults.

1.6%, which includes both transgender people who are like binary trans people who might have made medical

like efforts to transition, you know, changes to their bodies.

And it also includes non-binary people who may or may not have made such changes.

You know, it's like it includes a lot of people who don't all mean the same thing when they say trans.

This was a hilarious and incredibly uncomfortable conversation between Trace Strangio and Sam Alito yesterday morning in the scrimmatic oral argument.

Say more about that.

I didn't catch this.

I think actually Sam Alito was maybe trying to humiliate the trans attorney by making him explain gender fluidity.

But you know, this notion that like not everybody means the same thing when they say trans, so it's actually kind of a hard population to measure, but it is a just vanishingly small number of people.

And particularly when we're talking about kids, it's about 2% of high school students in the U.S., most of whom have not made medical changes to their embodiment.

This is just people who are identifying as transgender, who, you know, in most cases, these kids have not undergone surgery, right?

So it's a teeny, weeny minority of kids who are already different and vulnerable in the stigmatized way, right?

Who are already being singled out to not even be allowed to play on their volleyball team anymore.

Just lovely.

Because a Republican needs to hit those fundraising figures, you know?

And I mean, a lot of this is not even about transness.

It's about gender non-conformity, right?

It's about people who optically don't look right.

There are, you know, right, and huge quotation marks here.

People can't see that.

I always forget this is an audio-only podcast.

But

what I mean is like a lot of cases where these athletes, you know, middle schoolers, high schoolers, get humiliated by spectators challenging their gender.

In some way, it doesn't matter whether you're trans or cis in that moment, but it is important to note that like what these transvestigators do, which is really what this is all about, is do kind of a visual pat down on how you conform to gender, right?

I don't watch women's sports because I don't watch any sports, to be quite honest, but I would say one thing, having gone to school with a lot of wonderful women athletes, they're not always the most gender-conforming, right?

They're not the daintiest flowers, I would say.

They are definitely, they could break my jaw.

Yeah, let's be explicit, Adrian.

What we're talking about here is a social movement backed increasingly by the force of law and encouraged by a right-wing media ecosystem in traditional channels and online that is seeking out and bullying tomboys, masculine little girls, and butch women, right?

This is, in many cases, a way in which cisgender women who are gender non-conforming, who may or may not be lesbians, who are more masculine, are bullied and subjected to public speculation about their genitals

because they are not sufficiently feminine for these people.

And, you know, there is this kind of assumption, oh, some of this is because this is so new.

And we should say, our friend Jules Gil Peterson wrote this wonderful book about the history of the transgender child, where Jules points out that, like, no, this has been around for a long, long time.

The novelty is in some way a smokescreen in order to just revisit things that, if they weren't about gender, but about sexuality, would be absolutely recognizable as the most rank ass homophobia, right?

And the idea that like a woman has her femininity questioned, right?

Like, which lesbian hasn't that happened to, basically, right?

Or, you know, which gay guy hasn't been asked, so who among you's the woman, right?

Like, we're all familiar with this.

We recognize that you're running the same fucking play.

It's just shocking to me that the New York Times somehow isn't able to catch on to the fact that it's the same three-card fucking Monty, right?

Yeah, may I take you to the lovely In-N-Out bathroom line in Bakersfield, California, where me and my wife were on our road trip last week, like getting shit from somebody's creepy Christian aunt who didn't want us in line with the bath.

Yeah, I mean, this happened.

This does happen.

It happens regularly.

Jesus.

So this is a like

series of bills that are able to get a lot of traction, right?

By 2021, 10 states have laws on the books that ban trans women and girls from participating in any kind of women's sports, right?

And that was a real change.

That was a wedge issue that a activist bigoted group deliberately found.

They pulled it, they tested it, they focus grouped it, and they found this one, right?

It brings the focus back to their bodies.

It allows people who want to think of themselves as nice, enlightened liberals to get on this train.

And it seems like a small ask that can be righteously justified, right?

And that allows an opening for reconsideration of both bathroom bans, which now exist in 14 states without any similar boycotts, and then

for these outright bans on trans medical care for minors.

So those passed in 26 states.

26 states.

Jesus.

Just in three years, right?

That's between 2021 and 2024.

More than half the states have them.

About 40% of trans youth live in states in which those laws are on the books.

God, Pamela, Paul must be so proud.

Well, that is a good point, right?

Because for this political, this legislative and political transformation to happen, there had to be a cultural transformation, right?

Those love is love straight liberals had to be given social permission for transphobia.

And to look at how that happened, Adrian, I am about to send you a link in the chat.

Nice.

Oh, in a shocking twist,

it is to theatlantic.com.

Oh, I remember this one.

Do you want to describe for me what you're seeing?

Maybe the image.

So I see a stylized color picture of a young person who presents as ambiguous, I would say.

Short hair,

very intense 2016 block black eyebrows.

Yeah, and one of those studs over the nose.

What's that called?

The bridge of their nose has a piercing, and then there's also a septum piercing, a heavily pierced and clearly a teenager, right?

This is somebody who is maybe at the outside 20 years old.

Yeah, and it's a infamous article by Jesse Single.

When children say they're trans.

Didn't the cover actually say your child says they're trans or something like that?

Let's Google it.

I feel like it's even worse on the cover.

Yeah, your child says she's trans.

She wants hormones and surgery.

She's 13.

Bum, bum, bum.

This is the summer 2018 issue of The Atlantic.

This gender ambiguous young person with their blurry picture and their artificially colored hair is huge.

This massive font about this person's gender expression.

And then in the tiniest print in the upper right-hand corner, Adrian, what does that say?

We're not prepared for the next pandemic.

Not as big a deal for the Atlantic in 2018.

Brian Young, who very much called it early and repeatedly.

Yeah.

Shout out to Ed.

So The Atlantic has its priorities, and they are talking about trans children.

So what do you know about this article?

Because I read it recently.

It's been a while.

It's been a while.

I mean, I remember just wallowing in ambiguity.

This is basically just asking questions the article.

Is that right?

Am I remembering that correctly?

Yeah.

So it is a article that poses itself as exposing a liberal excess

and poses that excess as being a regrettably noticed phenomenon by somebody who shares a commitment to trans rights, right?

Right, right.

This is, you, reader of the Atlantic, you're a good liberal.

You believe in trans rights, but this is going too far.

I remember the central story basically suggests what you get from a lot of these liberal transphobes, frankly.

It basically says this person's gender dysphoria is the output of preexisting mental illness.

We should treat the pre-existing mental illness and not indulge it, right?

Is that the idea?

So the premise of the single article from 2018 is that very young children with very new and ambiguous gender dysphoria or gender discontent are being rushed into irreversible medical changes, right?

Yeah, I'll take stuff that didn't happen for 500, Alex.

It's amazing because he cannot find an example of this actually happening.

He goes to a lot of families, including, you know, his central example is of a 13-year-old girl who expressed a transgender identity to her parents, socially transitioned in several ways, expressed an interest in getting hormones, and in fact, then did not,

and started identifying as a cis girl again, and was not rushed into hormones or surgery, was greeted with seemingly a degree of acceptance and sympathy from her parents and her social world, had a period of identity exploration that did indeed turn out to be a phase and was fine, right?

So there's a lot of examples of this where Singal goes, I think we can all agree that things need to move slowly and we need to be really cautious.

And then he indeed produces a like 8,000 word article full of examples of exactly that happening, you know?

Like

he like he interviews this one clinician in Oakland who he positions at first as being like this gung-ho maximalist who wants to inject testosterone into every seventh grader, right?

And then he sits down with her and she's like, no, I mean, we spend a lot of time talking to them.

Like, it's not for everybody.

There's a lot of different like regimens of treatment or of like identity categories that people wind up in.

And so we spend a lot of time working with each individual patient.

And he's like, this is so crazy that even she, this wild radical, can see, you know, it's like, no, it's like, there's just, nobody is going around doing the thing that you claim they're doing.

Yeah.

Nobody is going to like your, you know, your kids' peewee soccer team and injecting all the little girls with tea.

Like it is not happening.

Well, presumably right before their rainbow parties, they do.

But I mean, Michael Hobbes does such a great job talking about sort of also the weird work that the idea of rapidity does in all these discourses, right?

This is also the rapid onset gender dysphoria kind of discourse, right?

Where like the rapidity,

for people who haven't delved into it, the studies that find this are surveys of parents and often parents that hang out on transphobic forums, frankly.

So the output of rapidity is actually parental non-acceptance, right?

That they sort of can't hear their children until that child is fairly sure about what's wrong and what they need.

And then they're, whoa, out of nowhere, she suddenly says she's a boy, right?

And it's like, no, like the rapidity comes from your resistance, this idea that things are happening too quickly, that our children are changing because of social contagion, that they are rushed into transition, that they are rushed into social transition.

Where it's like, what?

They bought a dress?

Is that the idea?

Like rapidity is the name of the game, but rapidity in each case is a deliberate distortion of what, by all accounts, is a extremely piecemeal step-by-step process for the very simple reason that these are developing young people where everything is a step-by-step process.

They change.

Their bodies are evolving.

Of course it's going to go slow.

No doctor in the world is like, I feel like we only have 70 good years here, so let's get snipping.

Also, a really interesting product of that focus and, you know, selective data drawing from the outraged or antagonized parent, which is that the transitioning child or the trans child is always pitted as being in opposition to their parents

in a way that's not really empirically true, right?

There's two visions of the trans child's family in the transphobic imagination, right?

There is one in which the trans child has been brainwashed by forces outside the home, really.

Usually it's implied or outright stated that this is the work of like nefarious homosexual adults, this child's life, you know.

Or homosexuals on Instagram, you know.

Yeah, or the influence of the internet, right?

Sometimes they talk about, oh, well, they had a friend who did it.

And I'm like, oh my God,

how awful.

Two kids who are going through the same thing hanging out?

Now I've heard everything.

Yeah.

So there's that like nefarious outside of the home influence, right?

In which the parent needs to recapture and insulate the child and needs to be defended in their right, their parental right, to insulate the child from other influences other than their own, right?

And then there is the other version in which the transphobic imagination paints the parents of trans children as in fact the instigators of the child's trans identity, right?

Like you soy latte drinking fag.

Like you wanted a trans child as an ornament.

Yeah.

Like as an ornament to your own vanity, right?

It's this interesting duality, right?

Like a lot of these bills, I believe, are framed as parental rights bills.

And then every time one of these passes, you get a profile of a family where the parents are like, fuck, are we going to have to move state?

Like, how do we do this?

Right.

Like, and it's like, clearly, it's not their parental rights that we're concerned with.

Like, the state of Tennessee is ready to fuck with their parental rights, right?

Like, they're like, oh, parents know their kids best, except for when the kid is trans, in which case they don't know their kid at all.

And it's just an ornament.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

This came up at oral arguments as well, right?

Because the Supreme Court did not grant cert on, but a challenge was brought to the Tennessee ban on parental rights due process grounds, right?

Because the Supreme Court has been, and many lower courts as well, have become increasingly sympathetic to parental rights claims when it comes to things like vaccination, right?

Or like the child's mask mandate at school, right?

Those are incidents in which a parent can make individual health care decisions for their child, right?

But this one,

the state law does not make any accordance for the parents' involvement, right?

It is a way in which parental rights become mooted when those rights are going to be exercised for a different cultural outcome.

Well, and we might say often enough when there appears to be such a bald contradiction in the way the court acts, I think it probably just means that we operate with a different idea of the family than they do, right?

It's parental authority as the doler out of death.

You get to decide whether your kid dies of typhus.

You don't get to decide that you don't want your kid to die of gender dysphoria, right?

As you say, that's fag shit.

You are an Old Testament God in your household, and if your child dies dies of whooping cough, it dies of whooping cough.

Might it thrive in ways that you never understand, but you are adult and person enough and nice enough to permit?

Oh no, that is you not doing your biblical part.

This brings us, I think, nicely to the work of Jack Halberstam, who has a really interesting piece on the trans child in his book, Becoming Trans, which also came out in 2018.

And now it's kind of dated, right?

Because it's from this moment in which LGBT acceptance, very much including like tea acceptance, was being sort of integrated into the liberal rights framework and into visions of the liberal family, right?

And like Halberstam writes in Becoming Trans that like the trans child and the trans child's integration into the family is a way, in one way, for like parents who are uncertain about their child's gender to try and transition their child to get like a definite answer, right?

And thereby to like mute or moot the subversive capacity of the child.

But I think there's another way of looking at the role of like affirmative, like loving parents of trans kids is that they are willing to sacrifice their right and the family's role in recreating and enforcing gender hierarchy within the family, right?

In order to allow their child to thrive as an individual, right?

It's a challenge to the family in a lot of ways.

It's like, oh, we're going to help our kid live in a like deviantly gendered embodiment.

Like that is not, that is not traditional mom and dad stuff.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I think what Jack is probably thinking about are shows like, what is that called?

I am Jazz.

Do you remember that show?

Oh, right.

With the young influencer.

Yeah.

I think that aired on TLC in like 2014, 2015, I want to say.

And there was this kind of early trans children in the public eye were very frequently hyper-gender conforming.

Right.

And that is something that back then I think people tended to remark on.

And that, in fact, I think sometimes TERFs still refer back to when they're like, well, trans people, like, they live this extremely stereotypical version of femininity.

It's like they're picturing something like that, right?

Kim Petras or someone like that, right?

I was like, well,

these are reality stars.

I didn't know Kim Petras was trans.

That's cool.

Trans pop star.

Yeah.

Amazing.

That's the thing, right?

Like these phenomena, these experiences have been with us.

What all this, the single, the Pamela Paul shit, what it all draws on is like, doesn't this all feel so new?

Doesn't this all feel so unusual?

Like, and this is exactly the kind of shit people wrote in the 70s and 80s about gay people.

It's like, doesn't it seem like everyone's gay right now?

And it's like, well,

because they couldn't be fucking open about it.

But like, also, it's not that new.

right?

Like Liberace was on TV.

It's not that new.

There's also something about the child and the trans child's challenge to the conception of childhood, right?

Like the trans child

exposes the unnaturalness of gender, right?

Because there's variance in this like pre-social subject, right?

Or supposedly pre-social subject.

So that like makes the notion that kids are naturally themselves instead of what we make them like kind of difficult to swallow, I think.

Yeah, I think that's right.

At the same time, in some way, I'm often interested in why sexual desire, why what came to be called sexual orientation became the first vector of liberation, right?

This is a question that Yvkosovsky Sedgwick raised already in the 80s and 90s.

Like if you're picturing a gay kid, that kid has sexual desires.

The idea that your kid might have sexual desires is a freaky thought, right?

Like as a parent.

The thought that they might feel like they're a different gender, like that feels much more childlike in some ways.

It's interesting that that's become sort of the flashpoint in some way, right?

I think it's more fundamental, right it's very easy to be a gender conforming gay person i do that all the time right she says as she flicks her hair

i do have short hair it's true

but you know like it's pretty easy to be a gender conforming gay person you know nobody is having sex or even sexual desire all the time um or maybe somebody is but they're very tired you know yeah steve it is like athletics a part of your life that you can, you can make it not anybody's problem, right?

Your embodiment, your identity, that is a precondition of knowing you, right?

Yeah.

And it throws this hierarchy, this, this taxonomy of people into doubt, right?

And when it's children, that's not just a challenge to gender and our conceptions of it.

It's also our challenge to like, what is childhood?

What is identity?

What is like agency or free will?

Like these these are all questions that get brought up by the trans child in a way, even more so than with trans adults.

Yeah.

My conclusion is that I think we should leave trans kids alone.

I think they're going through enough.

They don't need this.

They are about to come in for worse treatment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And maybe we'll say, in case there are listeners, which I sincerely doubt, that think that transphobes make some good points and that, you know,

maybe we're being unfair, thinking this is all a right-wing culture war and think like, oh, you guys think everything's a right-wing culture war.

They're not going to stop at trans kids.

They're going to get to trans adults.

And if you don't care about trans kids or trans adults, they're also going to come for the lesbians, gay, and bisexual people in your lives.

Like this is, as Maura is pointing out, this is a nodal point.

This is the avenue that they chose after they had to give equal rights to LGBT people on some questions.

This is the battle they picked after they lost the battle on gay marriage, right?

Exactly.

And, you know, I will say in oral arguments yesterday, it became clear that this is not just about trans kids.

This is, you know, it came up several times that the same logic would apply to a ban on health care for trans adults, right?

But really what they're doing is they're kind of pulling a loose thread on the sweater that is the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment, right?

This is the beginning of the unraveling of sex discrimination protections in federal law under the 14th Amendment, which was was the big legal project in the second half of the 20th century of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Pauli Murray, right?

Um, they are going to allow a whole slew of sex-based discriminatory laws under the model of this one, right?

So, if you like what you have right now, which is the constitutional freedom protected by the 14th Amendment, to not have to abide by sex role stereotyping as enforced by law, then you need to be on the side of trans kids because uh, they're really after you.

They're really after you.

And that trans softball player is just in the way.

Yeah.

I worry this one wasn't as happy as our latest, but I do think like on a good note, one thing that the law can't stamp out and never has been able to, even though it has historically tried, is the like defiant diversity of gender expression and identities, including in kids, who are being themselves against some pretty horrible odds.

So if they can do it, so can you.

We love you guys.

We support you guys, and we'll fight for you.

We'll see you on the other side.

Thanks for listening.

In Bed with the Right, I'd like to thank the Michelle R.

Clayman Institute for Gender Research for generous support.

Jennifer Portillo for setting up our studio.

Our producer is Katie Lyle.