AI generated image based on the writing below. Another case (see here and here) of the young Andrew Sullivan lying about Trans* desire.
Today, I ended my paid subscription to Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish. I did so because his anti-Trans* click- and rage-baiting is evil.
Politically, I describe myself as a pragmatic liberal. By pragmatic, I generally mean that I think our politics should be attuned to what we human beings can and want to do to make our lives better. When politics refers more narrowly to a campaign to win electoral votes, I think pragmatism means championing progressive values that most Americans support.
In a recent clump of words about Trans* desire, Sullivan rightly points out that support for Trans* freedom has narrowed. According to Demsas’s poll, most Americans now support legislation to make use of public restrooms and participation in sports dependent on one’s birth sex and banning safe and reasonable healthcare that supports a minor’s desire to transition from one sex and/or gender to the other.
What this means pragmatically is that the next Democratic nominee for President should focus their campaign on ending discrimination against Trans* people in employment and housing.
Focus is not the same thing as “selling out.”
If Trans* rights and freedoms are important to you, then yes — winning elections is everything. That requires focusing on what the American public is willing to support.
Can a Democrat veto legislation limiting the rights of supportive parents of Trans* children if she doesn’t win enough electoral votes to become President? Obviously, no.
Pragmatism, however, is not always about what is “true.” It is almost always about what works for a person or group of people. And this is where the liberal in my self-description as a pragmatic liberal comes in.
By liberal, I mean, to echo John Rawls, a form of political power based on reason and reasons that may, at least in principle, be accepted by all citizens as justification for a particular action. By reason, Rawls means “public reason” or “political reason,” and such reason excludes metaphysics.
Religious reason, for example, is, in its own way, reasonable, but it is not a form of public reason. It is not public or political reason, reason all citizens are, in principle, capable of exercising because all the information we need to assess to make the case for some kind of action is not commonly available.
So, a Democratic candidate can make a pragmatic and reasonable case for making it illegal to discriminate agianst Trans* people in the workplace and in housing.
Sullivan also makes a few pragmatic and reasonable points in his post.
As I noted above, support for Trans* freedom has narrowed. Sullivan is absolutely right about that. Sullivan is right about a second thing, too: “the real world keeps intervening.”
“Readers keep telling me to shut up about this topic,” Sullivan writes. “I’ve lost some good friends. . . . [M]y social life has shrunk.” The real world is rejecting Sullivan’s unreasonable, unconscious fantasy of Trans* desire as justification for political action.
The real world is telling Sullivan it is unpersuaded by his fantasy of gay kids being forced to transition by evil, greedy doctors. Furthermore, it rejects the idea that because a majority of Americans support legislation banning Trans* discrimination in the workplace and in housing, Trans* people “already have [those protections].”
The real world, moreover, thinks it is unreasonable to ignore Trans* people. Pace Sullivan: “And so what sacred trans people say they want [Sullivan is opposed to sacralizing minorities, by which he seems to mean taking what minorities want for their own lives seriously] . . . is all that matters” (emphasis original).
What Trans* people are asking their fellow citizens to do is to listen honestly and openly to their testimonies. And it is in this context that Sullivan makes a third good point: some Trans* stories are not pretty.
In his recent post, Sullivan describes a tragic figure named “Mike.” “Mike” represents Sullivan’s most potent fantasy: that of Trans* terrorists — doctors, parents, therapists — destroying (“castrating”) the lives of genuinely gay male kids.
My contention is not that “Mike” doesn’t regret transitioning, but rather that his regret does not establish that he was forced into transitioning. Frankly, Sullivan is, on this point, lying to us. There is simply no reasonable evidence that “Mike” was forced into or thoughtlessly and recklessly offered Trans* healthcare.
Surely, some people regret transitioning. I feel for them. I am interested in hearing the facts of their cases.
Yet their stories do not amount to a reasonable basis for public policy decisions, because they are not representative cases. In fact, it is Sullivan who does “Mike” a great disservice by misleading the public about the facts of his specific case.
Of course, Sullivan is free to fob off to his own fantasy. But his picture of Trans* desire is simply not politically reasonable. It betrays the evidence any of us can assess with our eyes and ears, provided that we have eyes to see and ears to hear as citizens.
Unfortunately, Sullivan is committed to the same mind-snapped-shut-mentality that he attributes to his opponents (Sullivan’s reference to “a bunch of synapses” may be his way of calling his opponents “bird-brained.” The epithet is rooted in ignorance, as bird brains are bunches, if you will, of synapses–and birds are extremely intelligent. Close-mindedness, however, is something found in both stupid and smart people).
I think the only thing that will open Sullivan’s mind is another real-world intervention: a significant drop in his paid subscribers.
If you have a paid subscription to The Weekly Dish, I humbly ask you to consider unsubscribing. Unsubscribing is even easier than subscribing.
– Another chapter in the radicalization of young Andrew Sullivan, generated by AI based on the essay below –
“Words connect with the rational part of our brains; images target the sub-rational. And in a sub-rational world, liberal democracy simply cannot exist” – Andrew Sullivan
Andrew Sullivan can’t get enough of the video of Charlie Kirk’s murder. In a recent Substack, he claims to have “watched that video a couple of times.”
The video of Kirk’s shooting, along with the recording of a young Ukrainian woman’s murder on a train in Charlotte, North Carolina, especially the quasi-beheading character of the killings, seem to have reinvigorated Sullivan’s old-world imagination.
Sullivan correctly notes that these truly horrific murders attack two core principles of any decent democratic society: “the right to be safe in public, and the right to speak freely without fear.” Sadly, Sullivan goes on to write a Tudor-era fiction, and he needs villains.
Andrew enlists “the woke” as his story’s villains: Muslims, critical theorists of all kinds, anti-exclusionary feminists like Judith Butler, faggy gays, Trans* activists, Black activists, and others. These villains are those who Sullivan believes can’t handle the truth: speech is never violent.
“The woke left, especially in the fringes the mainstream left adamantly refuses to rein in, condemn, or control,” Sullivan asserts, “bears some responsibility [for Kirk’s murder], because it has long equated speech with violence.” The “deeply illiberal idea” that a “bullet is no different in kind than a verbal provocation” has, according to Andrew, been forced upon a nonconsenting “young generation” by “the academic and journalistic left.”
Sullivan believes that speech and violent behavior are fundamentally separate realities, and he ridicules the supposedly woke notion that speech and violent actions can—and do—overlap. However, every democracy acknowledges a connection between speech acts and violent or hateful conduct.
In the U.S., the law makes a distinction between what is considered harm and actual harm. For example, it may hurt Andrew’s feelings if I call him a twat—but legally, my disagreement with Andrew is actionable only if I slap or scratch him. Actual harm involves a physical toll (Martha Nussbaum points out that courts recognize that smell can cause actual harm. See Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law[2004], e.g., 158-163).
A similar logic applies when distinguishing between speech, protected by the First Amendment, and conduct, which the law can restrict. Consider R.A.V. v. St. Paul (1992), a case Judith Butler discusses in Excitable Speech (1997).
In R.A.V. v. St. Paul, the Supreme Court ruled that a white person burning a cross in a Black family’s front yard is speech, not violent or harmful conduct. Therefore, St. Paul’s ordinance banning such burnings was declared unconstitutional.
The Court corrected itself in Virginia v. Black (2003). In this case, the Court ruled that Virginia’s law banning all cross burnings, regardless of context, is unconstitutional. However, the Court also decided that when context shows that a speech act, like cross burning, is intended to cause harm, it becomes unprotected speech and may be lawfully regulated.
U.S. courts distinguishbetween speech and violent acts (e.g., burning a cross at a klan rally). In these cases, words can—and do—act like bullets, piercing our psyches with unforgiving force, but that doesn’t make them unlawful or punishable by law.
U.S. courts also acknowledge a connectionbetween speech and violent acts (e.g., a klan member burning a cross on a Black family’s yard). Every democracy affirms that words can—and do—act like bullets when they are fired off with the intent, for example, of inciting a mob to attack the U.S. Capitol.
Andrew’s beef with his young woke despisers (he’s consistently miffed that the young woke don’t like him)is that they won’t make a distinction between speech and violence. Thus, the young woke believe, according to Sullivan, that violence/self-defense/legal regulation is always justified agianst speech they don’t like because such speech is alwaysactually harmful speech.
Sullivan, on the other hand, contends that speech is neveractually harmful. Words can never actually hurt us. Thus, violence/self-defense/legal regulation is never justified against speech.
So what?
Denying any overlap between speech and violent conduct enables Sullivan to neatly drop all speech acts in one bucket and all violent acts in another. Charlie Kirk’s public murder on a college campus in Utah, the young Ukrainian woman’s slaying on a train in Charlotte, and George Floyd’s death at the knees of a white cop in Minneapolis all go in the same bucket.
Likewise, arguments against gay marriage and abortion are treated similarly to arguments that deny or demean Trans* existence and oppose parents’ rights to make healthcare decisions for their Trans* children (while at the same time justifying the right of religious conservatives to determine the character of their children’s public school education [see also the New Thoughts Podcast, episode 4, Sex Changes]).
Sullivan’s refusal to recognize any link between speech and violent or hateful behavior allows him to take rhetorical aim from a high position on the whitewashed tomb of piety. “Tell the truth fearlessly,” Andrew preaches, “but always be open to correction. Decency, civility, nonviolence, humor, humility, grace: these are the virtues a free society needs to endure.”
Yet, without irony, humor, or humility, Sullivan claims, “It is never ‘hate’ to tell the truth: that men are not women; that children cannot meaningfully consent to sex changes. . . ,” while insisting that “the mainstream left . . . rein in, condemn, or control” the so-called “woke left,” including, presumably, parents of Trans* children (emphasis added).
It is dishonest, absurd, and manifestly wrong to either (a) collapse the distinction between speech and violent actions or to (b) deny any connection between speech and hateful acts. But what should a fair democracy do about and with disturbing speech?
The delicious irony is that Sullivan’s answer to that question (i.e., no regulation) closely resembles Judith Butler’s, as it is presented in Excitable Speech (1997).
Although Butler does acknowledge the overlap between speech and harm—arguing that speech can harm the human subject (i.e., the human being) because the subject is made of language—their solution to hurtful speech is resistant speech: more speech (of a different kind).
In fact, it is Butler’s reasonable, in my view, insistence that resistant speech acts–rather than political/legal intervention/regulation, are the solution to, say, fascist speech acts, that contributes to Martha Nussbaum’s damming assessment of Butler’s theory–worked out in Gender Trouble (1990) through to The Psychic Life of Power (1997)–as “quietism.”
Nussbaum concludes that Butler’s theory “collaborates with evil” (see Nussbaum, Philosophical Interventions[2012/1999],215; responses and Nussbaum’s reply, 215-222).
I cover the specifics of Butler’s theory and Nussbaum’s critique of it in a forthcoming essay. For now, I want to emphasize what is at stake (at least for us villains) in denying any link between speech and violent or hateful behavior, namely, the monarchic spirit manifestly possessing some speech acts is allowed to go entirely unchecked.
As I was reading Sullivan’s Substack, I kept thinking about Anne Boleyn as she’s portrayed in the Broadway musical SIX. In the song “Sorry, Not Sorry,” Boleyn reflects on her tonsorial audacity.
Speaking of Catherine of Aragon, she says, “[King Henry VIII] doesn’t wanna bang you / Somebody hang you. . . . / Mate, what was I meant to do? . . . / Sorry, not sorry ’bout what I said / I’m just tryna have some fun / Don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t lose your head / I didn’t mean to hurt anyone.”
Later, Anne recalls Henry taking issue with her flirtatious behavior with other men. She responds, “Mate, just shut up / I wouldn’t be such a b- / If you could get it up. . . . And now he’s going ’round like off with her head. Yeah, I’m pretty sure he means it (seems it).”
Even while lamenting that Trump is incapable of cooling the rhetorical temperature, and demanding that we “[c]ool the rhetoric,” Sullivan denies that what he—and any of us—says has any real consequences. Kirk/Andrew desperately wants us to believe that he is just having some good ole, traditional political fun. Like, what is he meant to do?
Don’t lose your head, Andrew.
Kirk/Andrew’s “free” speech leads to the free reign of conservatives over the most vulnerable in U.S. society, such as immigrants, Trans* adults and children, Muslims, and others.
That’s why any just democracy should make speech acts that re-create and re-enforce a U.S. caste system, speech acts that come at the cost of the dignity of others, speech acts that demean and subjugate fellow citizens—and those who aspire to become citizens—not worth the cost of such illiberal behavior.
We can begin to rid our democracy of its monarchic spirits by supporting, defending, and fully funding a rigorous public school education in the sciences and humanities.
AI generated imaged based on the essay below. Notice the young Andrew Sullivan in the foreground?
Girl: “Are you sure you are not really a girl?
Boy Sullivan: “Of course not.”
Parent: My child knows who they are.
Adult Sullivan: “But do they? . . . I sure didn’t.”
I.
In a recent opinion piece for The New York Times, Andrew Sullivan contends that the gay rights movement has “radicalized, and lost its way.” Sullivan asserts that the gay movement has abandoned traditional, virtually normal politics (i.e., the defense of marriage equality and the expansion of non-discrimination protections in the workplace and housing for gays, lesbians and trans adults) and adopted a fascistic queer gender ideology—a transgender ideology that disregards the naturalness of the “sex binary” and seeks to impose itself, like a “theology,” on society—and especially on children and teens.
The irony is that Sullivan’s argument perfectly aligns with conservative theological reasoning. Sullivan follows the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, naturalizing a conservative theology of sex while masquerading it as liberal neutrality.
II.
Taking sex as a synonym for gender and vice versa is a hallmark of conservative theological thought. For example, Associate Justice Thomas Alito, writing for the majority inMahmoud v. Taylor, observes that “[m]any Americans, like the parents in this case, believe that biological sex reflects divine creation, that sex and gender are inseparable, and that children should be encouraged to accept their sex and to live accordingly” (24).
In queer and gender studies, the term gender ≠biological sex. As David M. Halperin reminds us, “Sex has no history. It is a natural fact, grounded in the functioning of the body and, as such, it lies outside of history and culture” (“Is There a History of Sexuality?,” in the The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader, 416 [416-431], emphasis mine).
In contrast to sex, gender (like sexuality) does have a history (although a much longer one than sexuality). It refers to the cultural habits and practices that a society determines make, for example, a male (= sex) a man/masculine (= gender).
Sullivan’s conservative theological sex ideology comes through in his definition of homosexuality. “My sexual orientation,” Sullivan shares, “is based on a biological distinction [= sex] between men and women: I am attracted to the former and not to the latter” (emphasis mine). What this implies is that (homo)sexuality is, for Sullivan, like sex: an entirely biological, neutral fact of the human condition.
Sullivan complains that “[d]issenters from gender ideology are routinely unfriended, shunned and shamed. . . . That’s the extremely intolerant and illiberal atmosphere that now exists in the gay, lesbian, and transgender space” (emphasis mine). If that’s true, it’s unfortunate because Sullivan’s conservative theological sex ideology does have an upshot: it implies that homosexuality “reflects divine creation.”
Like many proto-gay boys, I learned in middle school that having a penis does not necessarily make one a legitimate boy. According to my peers, the way I walked, talked, dressed, and styled my hair all cast doubt on the legitimacy of my penis. Thus, I was a queer, fag, and so on.
My middle school experience amply illustrates an essential point: sex has a gender. Sullivan may insist that sex/sexuality is “a neutral fact of the human condition,” but sex/sexuality is not merely a natural/neutral fact. Sex/sexuality is also an object of human interpretation.
Sullivan and his fellow conservative Catholic/religious friends are all too aware that politics will ultimately determine what sex/sexuality means. Sullivan and company want to end the hermeneutics of sex. They want the last word, and they know the deciding battlefield is the public school system.
III.
Sullivan worries that queer gender ideology is akin to an insurrection, a “societywide revolution” against traditional sex/sexuality norms. He is especially concerned about queer ideology being taught in our public elementary schools.
To Sullivan’s mind, helping children recognize that the relationship of sex to gender and vice versa is wiggly, by allowing them to play with pronouns and their gender comportment in public schools, is to play God. It has the power to resurrect Anita Bryant!
She is risen! She is risen, indeed!
The Supreme Court recently ruled in Mahmoud v. Taylor that parents can opt their children out of public school lessons that include books with queer themes, including same-sex marriage, on religious grounds. Consider the mercifully brief sample of Associate Justice Alito’s “legal” reasoning for the majority below (for a complete analysis of the Court’s overreading and misreading of the relevant children’s books, listen to the recent episode of the podcast Strict Scrutiny):
In light of the record before us, we hold that the Board’s introduction of the “LGBTQ+-inclusive” storybooks—combined with its decision to withhold notice to parents and to forbid opt outs—substantially interferes with the religious development of their children and imposes the kind of burden on religious exercise that Yoder found unacceptable.
To understand why, start with the storybooks themselves. Like many books targeted at young children, the books are unmistakably normative. They are clearly designed to present certain values and beliefs as things to be celebrated and certain contrary values and beliefs as things to be rejected. . . .
Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, the only book that the dissent is willing to discuss in any detail, conveys the same message more subtly. The atmosphere is jubilant after Uncle Bobby and his boyfriend announce their engagement. Id., at 286a (“Everyone was smiling and talking and crying and laughing” (emphasis added)). The book’s main character, Chloe, does not share this excitement. “‘I don’t understand!’” she exclaims, “‘Why is Uncle Bobby getting married?’” Id., at 288a. The book is coy about the precise reason for Chloe’s question, but the question is used to tee up a direct message to young readers: “‘Bobby and Jamie love each other,’ said Mummy. ‘When grown-up people love each other that much, sometimes they get married.’” Ibid. The book therefore presents a specific, if subtle, message about marriage. It asserts that two people can get married, regardless of whether they are of the same or the opposite sex, so long as they “‘love each other.’” Ibid. That view is now accepted by a great many Americans, but it is directly contrary to the religious principles that the parents in this case wish to instill in their children. It is significant that this book does not simply refer to same-sex marriage as an existing practice. Instead, it presents acceptance of same-sex marriage as a perspective that should be celebrated. The book’s narrative arc reaches its peak with the actual event of Uncle Bobby’s wedding, which is presented as a joyous event that is met with universal approval. See id., at 300a–305a. And again, there are many Americans who would view the event that way, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. But other Americans wish to present a different moral message to their children. And their ability to present that message is undermined when the exact opposite message is positively reinforced in the public school classroom at a very young age.
Next, consider the messages sent by the storybooks on the subject of sex and gender. Many Americans, like the parents in this case, believe that biological sex reflects divine creation, that sex and gender are inseparable, and that children should be encouraged to accept their sex and to live accordingly. Id., at 530a–531a, 538a–540a, 543a, 625a. But the challenged storybooks encourage children to adopt a contrary viewpoint. Intersection Allies presents a transgender child in a sex-ambiguous bathroom and proclaims that “[a] bathroom, like all rooms, should be a safe space.” Id., at 323a. The book also includes a discussion guide that asserts that “at any point in our lives, we can choose to identify with one gender, multiple genders, or neither gender” and asks children “What pronouns fit you best?” Id., at 350a (boldface in original). The book and the accompanying discussion guidance present as a settled matter a hotly contested view of sex and gender that sharply conflicts with the religious beliefs that the parents wish to instill in their children (23-24, unattributed italics mine).
The Court rightly observes that “there are many Americans who would view [the marriage of two men as a joyous occasion], and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so.” What the Court does not recognize is that such a view is not only that of “many Americans,” it is also the nonmetaphysical position of their Government.
If the Court’s majority were at all inclined to affirm the appropriateness of the Government teaching a nonreligious, nonpartisan view of sex in our public schools, it would have concluded the following: There are many Americans who would view the marriage of two males as contrary to their religious beliefs, and it goes without saying that they have every right to do so. However, the Government has no role to play in teaching theological metaphysics. Religious instruction is the obligation of parents of faith and their respective religious institutions.
We are right to worry that the majority opinion in Taylor takes religion from the football field (Kennedy v. Bremerton School District) into the classroom by implicitly questioning the legitimacy of the Government’s nonreligious view of sex. In my opinion, Taylorgoes far beyond protecting religious liberty. It protects the status quo by incentivizing the teaching of traditional, religiously inflected sex ideology in our public schools.
But Sullivan is worried about Big Trans “overhauling the education not only of children with gender dysphoria, but of every other kid as well.”
Sullivan does not mention Mahmoud v. Taylor in his opinion piece for The New York Times. Besides the shared insistence on the naturalness of a conservative theological understanding of sex, one other thread links Sullivan’s essay to the majority opinion in Taylor.
Sullivan, like the majority in Taylor, is expressly concerned about (gay and lesbian) youth being coerced by authority figures, such as teachers and doctors, into believing what he considers to be an unnatural gender ideology.
“As a child, uninterested in playing team sports . . . ,” Sullivan writes, “I was once asked by a girl when I was just 10 years old, ‘Are you sure you are not really a girl?’ Of course not, I replied” (emphasis mine). Nonetheless, Sullivan wants us to believe that he may not have given the same answer to the same question if the questioner had been “someone in authority—a parent or a teacher or a doctor [or a priest?].”
Alito expresses a similar concern in Taylor,
“The books therefore present the same kind of ‘objective danger to the free exercise of religion’ that we identified in Yoder. Id., at 218. That ‘objective danger’ is only exacerbated by the fact that the books will be presented to young children by authority figures in elementary school classrooms. As representatives of the Board have admitted, ‘there is an expectation that teachers use the LGBTQ-Inclusive Books as part of instruction,’ and ‘there will be discussion that ensues.’ App. to Pet. for Cert. 605a, 642a.” (25, emphasis mine).
Among the things Alito thinks coercion means is teachers communicating to young students a nonmetaphysical interpretation of sex, namely that it is not a synonym for gender and vice versa. Alito writes, “The upshot [of how Alito [over]reads Born Ready, written by Jodie Patterson and illustrated by Charnelle Barlow] is that it is hurtful, perhaps even hateful, to hold the view that gender is inextricably bound with biological sex” (25, emphasis mine).
The Court affirms the right of conservative religious parents to direct the public education of their children in Mahmoud v. Taylor. InU.S. v. Skrmetti,a case in which the Court’s majority allows states to ban gender-affirming care (while permitting the same treatments for minors not seeking gender-affirming care), the majority declines to resolve the legal question about the right of parents to direct the healthcare of their (trans) children. In this case, the Court neutralizes the authority of parents who are not (religiously) conservative or religious to care for their children, trusting the (conservative) Government to “parent” them.
IV.
Sullivan goes a step further than the Court’s majority in Skrmetti. Sullivan wants us to believe that no one is looking out for trans kids (except him and his fellow compassionate conservatives, of course). Even the supportive parents of trans children cannot be trusted to direct their healthcare.
Sullivan provides three reasons to remove the power to provide healthcare to children from the hands of their parents:
First, supportive parents trust their children’s testimony. Though young Sullivan was very clear with his female classmate about his sex, he questions whether or not trans children “know who they are.” He even contradicts himself, asserting that during the period between the ages of 9 and 13, he was unsure whether he was a boy or not.
Next, Sullivan argues supportive parents are the cucks of a fascistic queer ideology (i.e., of Big Trans). Specifically, they are illiberal cucks. They do as Big Trans tells them to do (i.e., force our kids to transition) for fear of being canceled—and they cancel others, like Sullivan, who refuse to obey the will of Big Trans.
Finally, Sullivan also believes supportive parents are reactionary cucks of a fascistic queer ideology. Sullivan asserts that if Trump (i.e., an election denier, encourager of insurrection against the U.S. government, Project 2025 supporter, and, according to one judge, a rapist) is for, say, the biological truth of gender,the cucks of a fascistic queer ideology are necessarily, unthinkingly against it.
What critics of the majority’s decision in Skrmetti (e.g., the 5-4 podcast) miss is that Trump’s conservative theological assertion of the “biological truth of gender” is underlying their reasoning.
State laws denying gender-affirming care to a teen male who desires to become a female is not, to the majority, discrimination based on sex. Healthcare providers may not deny gender-affirming treatment to a male because he is male. In many states, they must deny said treatment because he is a male who desires to become a female.
Recall that in Taylor, the Court’s majority similarly empowers parents to affirm a conservative theology, namely that sex and gender are inseparable. The rest of us must live with it—or else.
V.
Sullivan’s opinion piece for the New York Times is gross—and not principally because it is a conservative theological argument. It is also problematic because it is an example of the homophobic literary genre (e.g., queers are victims of queers; conservatives = persecuted; healthcare may be denied to women/queers; states should be allowed to decide the legality of queer life, etc.).
There is one aspect of Sullivan’s anti-trans/queer rhetoric that I find especially problematic: his deployment of the heuristics of fear. Echoing the logic of the late Cardinal Ratzinger (see, e.g., §10), Sullivan wants us to believe that we have only ourselves to blame for violence perpetrated against us as a consequence of our insistence on our difference from the (virtually) normal.
In The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks At Our Political Crisis(2018), a book inspired by Hillary Clinton’s electoral loss to Donald Trump in 2016, Martha C. Nussbaum draws on psychological research to describe two “heuristics” of fear. The first is the “availability heuristic,” and the second is the “cascade heuristic,” which has two aspects: reputational and informational (47-51). These heuristics can function to overwhelm our ability to carefully consider whether or not fear is warranted in a given situation, instead activating our instinctual impulses.
In his opinion piece, Sullivan employs the availability heuristic, creating an immediately recognizable image of imminent, life-threatening danger. He argues that the radicalization of the gay movement by trans/queer ideology is collapsing public support for gay and lesbian civil rights.
Sullivan combines the availability heuristic with thecascade heuristic, motivating people to come together to overcome an imminent, life-threatening danger: trans/queer ideology. If we don’t act, gay and lesbian civil rights, our rights, will be erased—and we will be subject to violent acts (the reputational aspect of the cascade heuristic).
Sullivan also offers us new information. He contends that advocates of trans/queer ideology are essentially raping children, forcing them to transition. Moreover, by forcing trans kids to transition, trans/queer advocates are ending the lives of gay and lesbian kids, as Sullivan believes a lot of trans kids are just confused gay and lesbian kids (the informational aspect of the cascade heuristic)
The heuristics of fear are highly motivating. They compel us to act together to avoid immediate danger.
The problem arises when the fear they amplify is not based on a sober assessment of evidence, facts, data, or our experiences. For example, there are good reasons to avoid the path of a tornado. However, when our fear is unwarranted, as it is in the public’s assessment of trans lives and experiences, it can destabilize democracy.
Unwarranted fear, especially combined with disgust, can destabilize democracy by motivating violence. Trans/queer ideology, Sullivan imagines, inspires “a sane backlash” against trans/queer people—and not only them, but virtually normal gay and lesbian people, too. As many trans people and queer gay men and lesbians already know: the threat of violence for being misaligned with (virtually) normative straight (male) society is not an idle one.
VI.
Queer gay men and lesbians stand in solidarity with their trans comrades (a word I use intentionally to enflame conservative passions) for many reasons, not least of which is our shared experience of the violence of (virtually) normative gendered politics. David M. Halperin observes,
If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, emphasis mine).
Yet, Sullivan believes that the radicalized gay movement is the real threat to a liberal or reasonably pluralistic society (see John Rawls). He asserts that the ever-expanding alphabet of queer welcome (e.g., L.G.B.T.Q.I.A+), and the new colors added to the pride flag to incarnate it, nowadays “demarcates a place not simply friendly to all types of people . . . but a place where anyone who does not subscribe to intersectional left ideology is unwelcome.”
Youth are the worst offenders of Sullivan’s law of welcome. The “young queer generation” are contemptuous, according to Sullivan, of “those who came before them.”
Dear Andrew,
It’s true. Trans/queer youth and adults don’t want to hang with you.
It’s not us. It’s your habit of villainizing, demeaning, and disparaging our lives and loves.
I don’t doubt that you believe you care about trans/queer youth and adults. However, if you take a moment to listen, you’ll likely gain a better understanding of why hanging out with us just isn’t currently working out for you.
As they say in Chicago, “He only had himself to blame.”
Jon Favreau and Jon Lovett of Pod Save America recently interviewed the inimitable Representative Sarah McBride (D-Delaware). Among McBride’s interesting insights and arguments is the idea that the two major U.S. political parties are gendered. Republicans are gendered masculine (or identified in terms of fatherhood). Democrats are gendered feminine (or identified in terms of motherhood).
Here’s their conversation (if you prefer to watch, jump in at 12:44):
Rep. McBride: I’ve been thinking about how do you fight back against Trump in a smart way . . . because we are so susceptible to sort of this Trump derangement syndrome dynamic. We’ve been screaming about democracy. . . rights and the rule of law for so long—and clearly, this country voted for someone who incited an insurrection. . . .
The Democratic party is the woman of politics and the Republican party is the man of politics. It’s why Donald Trump can scream and yell and people see him as strong—and why when [Democrats] scream and yell we’re seen as hysterical and shrill. It’s why Donald Trump can hate and insult more than half of this country—because we tolerate deadbeat dads, but Democrats can’t say anything about any voters that [impugn] their motives and their good faith—because a mom has to love every single one of her children. So, I’ve been thinking about how do you grapple with that reality that is a real double standard. . . .
Lovett: Let’s test this new way of talking . . . . You’re trying to make people understand how dangerous it is that Donald Trump is coming after basic academic freedom, but you’re worried it’s not going to resonate with people. How do you talk about it?
Rep. McBride: With all of these actions that we’re seeing against immigrants, against institutions, [the Trump Administration is] picking on the most unpopular, the most vulnerable. They’re picking on people who are easy targets. I do think . . . you have to go back to what we were talking about before, which is that if they can do it [to them], they can do it to you . . . . They can do it to my constituents . . . . I think we can do a better job by making the main character [of our story] our constituents.
Changing our political situation requires, McBride claims, recognizing how political party affiliation is gendered. For example, Republicans can get away with being angry, but Democrats must always be empathetic. “[A] mom,” McBride says, “has to love every single one of her children.”
Motherhood is often the object of politics because the public sphere, the sphere of politics, is gendered masculine. The traditional story is that politics is for men; the management of the home is for women. For McBride, motherhood is the subject of political action.
But what is maternal politics, exactly? In her response to Lovett’s question about how to discuss maternal politics in the context of education, McBride attempts to clarify the character of partisan gendered politics. Her answer, namely that the mother protects “easy targets” of public abuse, isn’t specific enough–so it can’t inspire serious Democratic political action.
In what follows, I ask a revised version of Lovett’s question to McBride: How do you talk about maternal politics in the context of early childhood public education? To answer the question well, we need a definition of maternal politics that is specific enough to avoid confusion (e.g., terrorist organizations like Moms for Liberty claim to love all children) and to provoke serious liberal and/or progressive public action. I propose the following definition:
Maternal politics = public action(s) to secure and defend a boy’s rightto become a man who desires like a woman/mother.
Why a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother? Consider recent oral arguments before the Supreme Court of the United States regarding an opt-out option for religious conservatives who do not want their children exposed to readings that mention/feature same-sex desire in the public school classroom. It was a book about male same-sex marriage that caught the attention of conservative Associate Justice Samuel Alito.
Conservatives are manifestly not as passionate or concerned about a girl’s public education. What they care about is the reproduction of traditional or normative masculinity. Hence their focus on male same-sex desire. Conservatives think that male homosexuality is especially threatening to the future of straight maleness.
I think my definition of maternal politics helps explain the recurring outbursts of straight anxiety about male homosexuality and the “indoctrination” of boys in our public elementary school. Furthermore, the specificity of my definition of maternal politics (one of many possible proposals) allows us to form a more direct and beneficially partisan answer to (the revised version of) Lovett’s question about gender politics and academic freedom in Trump’s U.S.
Here is the take I will explain and defend below: Conservatives have used the public school system to indoctrinate boys, and we have generally failed to resist it because we (unconsciously) agree with the “obvious” meaning of the conservative premise: boys should be boys. Instead, we should reform early childhood public education by securing and defending a boy’s right to desire like a woman/mother.
A traditional public school education entails learning skills, especially (though it is never explicitly acknowledged) the skill (and appreciation) of straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity). Between the ages of 5 and 6, boys are forced by law to leave the sphere of maternal power (i.e., the home/family) and enter the public school system. It is in the public school classroom that they begin to learn, formally (i.e., curriculum) and informally (i.e., socially), to desire “proper” manhood or straight maleness.
The irony is that the reproduction of “proper” manhood necessarily requires/inspires homoerotic desire. Boys must be motivated to undertake an education in normative masculinity. Thus, they are taught to want men/manhood.
You may argue that what boys are taught is the protocols of normative masculinity rather than to desire adult males–but the foundation of straight logic is that sex, gender, and sexuality are inextricably linked. Male/penis > masculine > heterosexual. In other words, a boy can’t want masculinity without also wanting men.
A second irony: the propagation of masculinity requires a boy to desire like a woman/mother. The transmission of normative masculinity from one generation to the next requires, at least initially, the misalignment of sex, gender, and desire (i.e., male/penis desiring man/masculine). It is at this early stage that normative masculinist logic shows its ass (= its vulnerability).
The vulnerability of normative masculinity is its unnaturalness. In other words, “proper” maleness does not inevitably proceed from being born with a penis. “Proper” maleness must be taught.
The fact that straight maleness is taught is not exactly the problem. The way normative masculinity is taught is the source of its tyranny.“Normal” masculinity is presented uncritically, and it requires uncritical acceptance to be mistaken for normal (i.e., natural) or, as the Trump Administration prefers, for “biological truth.”
Traditionally, this is why the acknowledgment of (male) homosexuality in public schools has been a source of straight panic. It exposes the hole of straight maleness: straight masculinity is not natural. It is optional.
Nowadays, homosexuality is not as often considered inherently opposed to straight masculinity. It’s an interesting development. Today, dudes sucking dick (homie head, brojob, etc.) is just another way for boys to be boys.
Straight ideology is flexible, and gay identity politics is clever. It’s a win-win situation: straight masculinity remains (if not natural) inherently desirable, and male homosexuals are welcome to enjoy its privileges–well, at least if they are good students, willing to learn/embody the protocols of “proper” masculinity.
So, recent arguments before the Supreme Court about readings in public schools that mention same-sex desire may be read as a form of social progress. Before books that acknowledge the reality of happy adult male homosexual relationships (happiness being what I think Justice Alito means by the “subtle” moral message of the book that offends religious conservatives) defiled God’s male children, the biggest threat to the “proper” education of our male children was the gay male English teacher. And before the English teacher became sus, the “gay” male philosopher was considered the corrupter of male youth.
“In a famous passage in The Divine Comedy,” writes David M. Halperin in “Deviant Teaching” (2007, 146-167), Dante represents himself as encountering, in the course of his journey through Hell, the soul of [philosopher] Brunetto Latini . . .” (146). Why did Dante put poor Brunetto in Hell? “His sin is tellingly not named in Canto 15, but other passages in Inferno remove any doubts about its identity. Brunetto is damned for sodomy” (146).
When Dante asks him about his companions in Hell, Brunetto answers that “all were clerks and great men of letters, in the world defined by one [and the] same sin” (148). “Sodomy,” Halperin declares, “is evidently a sin to which literary scholars, critics, and writers (such as Dante himself) are particularly prone” (148).
Halperin, a public university English professor trained as a classicist–and no stranger to controversy–reminds us of “how ancient is the association between teaching and sodomy, between paedagogy and paederasty” (149). “[T]he abolition of any clear or firm distinction between the relation of teacher and student and the relation of lover and beloved is,” Halperin writes, “one of the most notorious consequences of Plato’s metaphysical theory of erotic desire” (149). Teaching “has an extended history of association with deviance and has long figured as a deviant practice” (151).
If gender were a “biological truth,” as the Trump Administration claims it is, then straight anxiety inspired by the fantasy of homosexual indoctrination in public schools would be a genuine absurdity. The reality of old school straight anxiety exposes a glitch in the code of masculinist transmission: gender is a social–not a biological–reality. It must be taught and learned.
For a boy to become a man, he must leave the maternal sphere, the home. He must also leave his father’s side. A boy’s father “is too closely tied to the boy by blood and domesticity . . . so they cannot fully . . . incarnate the cultural ideal of male identity . . . ” (151).
“Every proper boy,” Halperin writes, “has to have at least two daddies” (151, emphasis original). Boys learn to become traditional or “proper” men in the public sphere (e.g., schools, sports teams, etc.).
The glitch in the heteronormative educational regime is further exposed by how it represents the social transmission of masculinity (154-155). Consider how the Sambia of Papua New Guinea ritualize the reproduction of strong warrior men.
Elder males take boys ages 8-9 off into the forest where they are forced to perform oral sex on adolescent males. Halperin observes that the young boys are taught to think of “cock-sucking as a kind of breast-feeding” (155).
Ingesting semen, the boys receive the nourishment they require to grow “into real men who will be strong warriors” (155). They continue to ingest semen until they turn 15, at which point they become “the breast” for younger boys.
Listening to social and religious conservatives today, one would never know that third and fourth grade boys in the U.S. are not being taught to suck cock in public schools. What they are being taught, and in ways not entirely different from how the Sambia “represent to themselves symbolically the means by which they reproduce themselves socially,” is how to become proper Western men (156, emphasis original).
Halperin considers the 1953 Western movie Shane an example of a Western form of masculine transmission. The movie’s focus on the mechanics of masculine reproduction makes it a standout Western (157).
Shane is about how a 9-year-old boy, Joey, is made into a man (i.e., taught how to shoot a gun and fight) by a mysterious stranger, “a gunfighter and a killer” (i.e., a social deviant), a cowboy named Shane (158). Joey’s father cannot teach Joey how to become a man because he is too busy managing and defending the family farm. For obvious reasons, Joey’s mother can’t possibly teach him how to become a man.
Halperin compares Shane to the Holy Ghost. “It is only when Shane’s potent shadow falls across the holy American family that the family succeeds in . . . reproducing masculinity . . . and ensuring its own futurity” (159–for my reading of the Holy Ghost, go here). And “[g]unfighting in Shane is,” Halperin observes, “like cock-sucking among the Sambia: both are cultural practices connected with initiation into the symbolic order of masculinity and heavily laden with phallic meaning” (160).
The relationship between Shane and Joey mirrors the relationship between Shane and Joey’s mother, Marian. It is not sexual, but it is erotic. Marian wants to play with Shane’s pistol, too.
Like his mother, Joey feels some kind of way about Shane. In desiring him, Joey gives Shane the “charismatic power necessary to enable those enamored of him (Joey and male viewers) to accede to manhood by means of identification, emulation, and endless, unfulfilled desire for him” (160).
Moreover, Joey’s desire for Shane is no accident. Like Socrates, Shane has a way with his young male students (160-161). Shane makes his manhood hot to both Marian and Joey (= it’s object a). He inspires Joey (and male viewers) to observe his gunobsessively. Masculinity is transmitted “ocularly” in Shane (162).
In seeing/receiving Shane’s manhood, the male viewers “make the supposedly identity-affirming, gender-consolidating experience of masculine identification coincide, as if nothing could be more normal, with the urgent and inescapable solicitation of homoerotic desire” (162).
Question: Did Shane indoctrinate Joey? Did Shane require Joey to accept his warrior manhood uncritically to begin becoming a “real” man? No. Joey wanted the manhood Shane offered him.
Masculine indoctrination requires boys to accept Shane’s manhood as “biological truth.” In that way, Shane becomes the “proper” man, the kind of man boys must become to be considered real men, the type of man women must desire and whose prerogatives they must support to be identified as pious/conservative/real women.
Shane’s “Republican manhood,” if you will, undoubtedly continues to appeal to women/mothers and their boys. I accept that, and I am prepared to secure and defend a boy’s right to want Shane and to become a man who either desires women/mothers or other men who desire men like Shane.
There is nothing inherently wrong with conservative masculinity. That is, I think, a liberal (if not progressive) position to hold–and it is consistent with McBride’s–and my own–definition of maternal politics. “[A] mom has love every single one of her children.”
Apparently, dads have a choice in the matter.
What I reject is the fascist spirit that often animates a traditional education in straight maleness. Republican manhood is manifestly not appealing to every boy. It is not even appealing to every boy’s parents, and there is no reason to believe it will appeal to all who will enter a boy’s life as an adult male.
Moreover, it is an offense to common sense and reason (and I, as a biblical Christian theologian, think it is an offense to the gospel of Jesus Christ) to enforce, as a matter of (unacknowledged) policy or law, Republican manhood. If “biological truth” requires the enforcement of norms and/or the sword of law, just how biological–or true–is it?
The assertion of the biological truth of gender reveals that social and religious conservatives have, like a God, forgotten themselves:
For with the old Gods things came to an end long ago–and verily they had a good and joyful Gods’ end! Theirs was no mere “twilight” death–that is a lie!
Rather: one day they–laughed themselves to death!
This happened when the most godless words issued from a God himself–the words: “There is one God! Thou shalt have no other God before me!” . . . a God, most jealous, forgot himself thus:
And thereupon all the Gods laughed and rocked their chairs and shouted: “Is just this not Godliness, that there are Gods but no God?”
In a gloss on this passage, psychoanalyst Adam Phillips writes, “God, in Nietzsche’s fabulation, forgot Himself, and even His own name; He thought he was God, THE God, when He was simply one among many others (inner superiority means we are on the wrong track, it means we are too intimidated) (Unforbidden Pleasures [2015], 42).
In another text–but in a similar context–Halperin describes how the “inner superiority” of straight maleness may work out in the context of sexuality and gender, nowadays:
If homophobia sometimes functions less to oppress homosexuals than to police the behavior of heterosexuals and to strong-arm them into keeping one another strictly in line with the requirements of proper sex and gender norms, for fear of appearing queer [remember: declaring “no homo” after receiving, e.g., homie head will protect you from appearing (too) queer] it may be that one of the functions of transphobia is to police the behavior of lesbians and gay men and to terrorize them into conforming to the gender style deemed appropriate to their respective sexes (How To Be Gay [2012], 307, italics mine).
As we discovered earlier, the propagation of straight maleness can accommodate a disconnect between sex and sexuality. Nowadays, being a homosexual doesn’t necessarily make you a sus male (i.e., gaaaaaay).
The chronic misalignment of sex/penis (male) and normative gender style (straight maleness) does, however, remain socially problematic. At some point, one must put childish ways behind them.
At this point, straightness has shown a lot of ass. It concedes that heterosexuality is not natural. No one (bi, lesbian, gay, straight, none) knows what determines one’s sexuality (or lack thereof). It also concedes that straight maleness (i.e., normative masculinity) is not natural: it does not proceed naturally from having a penis. It must be taught (and even enforced).
And given that gender does not proceed naturally from sex or depend on one’s sexuality, it follows that anyone, of whatever sex or sexuality, can, if they so desire, learn a specific gender style. Women can, at least in principle, learn to embody normative masculinity.
What all this means is that the claim of straightness to have no other Gods before it is laughable. But the Gods before it need not laugh themselves to death! Instead, they can get on with baptizing newly persuaded converts.
The epigraph of How To Be Gay, a description of gay male masculinity, or masculinity that is gendered feminine because it is resistant to straight maleness, reads: “Let the pagans beget and the Christians baptize” (see also How To Be Gay, 532-533).
The epigraph of How To Be Gay echoes the central argument of Halperin’s essay, “Deviant Teaching”: The “introduction . . . to [non-sexual methods of instruction in maleness,] to non-standard ways of seeing, to distinctive ethical and aesthetic modes of relating to the surrounding culture, to a unique set of sensibilities, and to dissident ways of reading cultural objects (movies, opera, Broadway musicals, emblems of fashion and styles, embodiments of masculinity) [is] what I have been calling deviant teaching,” and what, in How To be Gay, is called gay male subculture (“Deviant Teaching,” 165).
Gay male subculture, as a deviant form of masculine propagation (i.e., it resists the allure of straight maleness), is similar to straight maleness in that it does not depend on either one’s sex or sexuality. It is a style that anyone who finds persuasive may learn to embody.
Gay maleness is among the gods a boy may reasonably desire. Accordingly, maternal politics entails defending and securing a boy’s right to become a man who desires women/mothers or other men who desire gayness.
As a non-normative gender style, a lifestyle misaligned with one’s sex, gayness is a form of Trans*ness (I use the * to indicate gender nonconformity in addition to sex nonconformity). However, Trans*ness moves us well beyond gender misalignment to sexual misalignment.
In her interview on Pod Save America, McBride addresses one of the challenges of Trans* politics (42 minutes in):
I think one of the challenges that we have in conversations around Trans identities that’s different than conversations around gay rights is that most people who are straight can understand what it feels like to love and to lust –and so they’re able to enter into conversations around sexual orientation with an analogous experience. People who aren’t Trans don’t know what it feels like to be Trans–and for me the closest thing that I can compare it to is a constant feeling of homesickness, just this unwavering ache in the pit of my stomach that would only go away when I could be seen and affirmed and live as myself . . . .
I imagine one reality that Rep. McBride is expressing here is that her body initially provoked a conversation: Is this you? She answered either “No” or “Not exactly.” I am guessing (because I am unfamiliar with the details of her experience) that McBride desired a new alignment of sex and gender–and one made possible by a radically new understanding of sex: sex, like gender, is not a natural fact. Sex is an opportunity for conversation rather than indoctrination.
Although Evangelical men really want women to have penises, male to female Trans* experience constitutes an upheaval of normative thought. It inspires intense—and, unfortunately, intensely irrational—emotions.
The animus directed toward Trans* women is a fruit of the fascist spirit that often underlies the commitment to the reproduction of Republican manhood–and one that more than a few fruits enjoy. We have only to think of Andrew Sullivan.
Sullivan is usually an interesting and nuanced public intellectual, but his screeds against “big trans” are becoming increasingly overdetermined (i.e., inspired by irrational forces). On a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Sullivan comments:
I love the idea that Democrats should get back into building things, into making things happen, into deregulating, into supercharging the economy. I just think that until the Democrats address some of the core issues, they seem not to want to control immigration. They have extremist views about race. They think that boys should compete with girls in sports, and that children should be… have their sex reassigned. Until they grapple with that. . . .
We have not taught civics in this country. They’re too busy learning that America is white supremacist without learning that there are three branches of government. They’re all separate. They’re kept apart so that we can be freer than other countries. Why are we teaching that? We should be teaching that (italics mine).
The claim that Democrats “think . . . that children should be . . . have their sex reassigned” is blatantly false. I am curious, though, about the Levitical themes of Sullivan’s commentary: separation and purity.
Sullivan seems to think biological males should not be separated from their penises–even when they desire to be so separated. In his view, effeminate gay boys are being misled by “big trans” into thinking they are Trans* women rather than gay males. “Big trans,” again in Sullivan’s view, is “transing away the gay.”
The second of Sullivan’s falsehoods, related, I think, to the first, is: “We have not taught civics in this country.” Sullivan seems to believe that “we” have not learned anything about the separation of powers–and too much about the separation of racial groups enforced by those same powers for several centuries.
Is his argument that “we” would become less preoccupied with white supremacy if “we” were taught the philosophy of “separate but equal”? If I am not mistaken, “we” were taught in school that Sullivan’s approach is not unique in history. Hence the focus on white supremacy.
I don’t think it’s uncharitable to read the argument of the unruly forces underlying Sullivan’s Leviticus-like political theology this way: In a good society, penises should remain attached to their original bodies; races, like the branches of the U.S. government (like the sexes?), should be separate but equal.
Maternal politics, at least as I understand it, entirely rejects Sullivan’s (unconscious) definition of a “good” society. Instead, it defends and secures a biological male’s right to discern who they are, really–including a woman/mother who desires women and/or men who desire a new alignment of sex and gender.
Maternal politics, as I understand it, is a form of deviant politics. Securing and defending the right of boys to become (wo)men who desire like women/mothers takes us into scandalous and fraught territory.
How do we talk about maternal politics across a range of issues that are important to our fellow citizens? In other words, how do we make it an electorally desirable politics? If we allow ourselves to have a real conversation about the political body, what is our answer to the question, Is this us?
If maternal politics appeals to us, it could be defined more broadly as taking public action(s) to secure and defend everyone’s right to have complicated conversations about the political body, especially now. Among the lessons Trump has (unknowingly) taught us is that we require a genuine upheaval of political thought.
