Tag Archives: gender

The Anti-Homoness of Straight Hipster Politics: On Homo Family Values and the Question of Political Change

David Wojnarowicz, Untitled (Genet), 1990

1.

Hipster irony appeals to overly earnest straight people, especially straight men (and their sometimes adoring queer fans).

Here’s one version of straight hipsterism: Acceptance of homosexuality and homo marriage occurred relatively quickly in the U.S. because homosexuality and homo marriage aren’t really hip.

The homo who desires to marry and build a family wants nothing more, according to the hipster, than to be “one of the boys.” In other words, the legal/political recognition of homos and their family values is not real political change.

2.

Hipsters aren’t wrong, to be fair, for having some fun at the expense of homos who, like hipsters, want to keep their position high up the ladder of respectability and be cool.

Some homos want nothing more than to be straight (but not that straight).

The problem is that hipster self-righteousness requires a sacrifice: homo difference and dignity.

3.

To the hipster, homoness is the enemy of coolness. Homoness is the recapitulation of normie-cis-white-male-straightness. 

That’s why I think hipster irony is just really fucking dull. It’s more of the same: straight (male) resentment and self-righteousness masquerading as progressive politics.

Nothing irritates hipsters more than homo joy and affluence.

4.

That’s why, to riff on David Halperin’s description of straight hipster irony in How To Be Gay (2012), straight hipsters just love to turn homos and their family values into the new normie straight dude. Homos become “fodder for [hispter] irony”: 

By acknowledging straight hipsters’ affection for such quaint cultural forms and practices [like marriage], while refusing to express that affection except in a grotesque, exaggerated fashion, in case someone should get the wrong idea, straight hipster irony maintains and consolidates (though it’s much too cool to flaunt it) a distant and disengaged position for hipsters—that is, a position of relative social privilege (395-96).

Straight hipster irony enables you to distance yourself from your straightness while castigating the desires of homos who want to marry and build families of their own.

5.

Here’s an example of hipster homo (but not that homo) love: “It is weirdly possible to imagine a scenario,” writes one Substack hipster, “where the United States becomes a violently misogynistic white ethnostate, but gay marriage still remains the law of the land.”

Is our hipster arguing that the reason homos and homo marriage gained relatively quick cultural acceptance is that they fit, hand in glove, within the normie logic of “a violently misogynistic white ethnostate”?

Is our hipster asserting that homos and their family values enjoy popular support in the U.S. because they are entirely compatible with normie-cis-white supremacy-straight-guyness (pronouns: he/bruh)? 

Who needs enemies when you have allies like the hipster! 

6.

In his view, homos and their family values have achieved quick legal/political victories because they have chosen to suck the cock of cis-white-straight-dudeness.

“Pointing out that context,” our hipster claims, “is not a critique of the movements that succeeded as being ‘secretly’ conservative or oppressive, but instead a critique of the society that only lets itself do good things for bad reasons” (emphasis added). 

Who needs enemies when you have neighbors like that! 

7.

Anyway, according to the hipster view, Pete Buttegig won the Democratic presidential primary in Iowa in 2019 because he just loves sucking white dick.

Any evidence to the contrary is evidence of a cover-up. 

Yasmin Nair, for example, asserts that even the Buttigieg kids are part of a secret, oppressive conservative plot to win white-normie-straight-bruh political power: 

Given their talent for curation, it’s hard not to wonder if the Buttigieges didn’t also choose their [biracial] children as carefully as Melania Trump chose her outfits. This doesn’t mean that the pair don’t love their incredibly adorable children, but given that even Chasten looks like he was chosen from a catalog of ‘Good Gay Men,’ it’s safe to say that even the most seemingly personal details of Pete’s life are carefully chosen.

8.

Hipster paranoia (i.e., nothing good can happen in people’s hearts or society) may also explain why our hipster fails to mention the HIV/AIDS crisis in his essay.

While the hipster does recognize that straight opposition to homo love was (remains?) violent and horrific, extending well into the 1990s before giving way to growing support for homos and their family values starting in the early 2000s, he does not seem to know that the 1990s were also the worst years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in, for example, Chicago.

The hipster can’t even entertain the idea that witnessing homos suffering and dying in large numbers because of a demonic virus, which our government was too slow to address, might have been a bridge to compassion that led to a genuine change of heart among our fellow citizens. 

9.

And because any legal/political recognition is necessarily a form of assimilation, the hipster can’t risk acknowledging (or take seriously) the substantial legal/political recognitions won by Black and Trans* people over the past few decades.

So, he doesn’t mention that the vast majority of Americans support some form of police reform. Likewise, the hipster doesn’t seem to realize that most Americans do support Trans* people. Our hipster, however, dismisses the very real gender dysphoria experienced by Trans* youth, categorizing it as a common experience for all youth going through puberty.

Also, our hipster doesn’t mention that it was a conservative Supreme Court Justice, Neil Gorsuch, who authored the majority opinion in Bostock v. Clayton County, which declared it unconstitutional to discriminate against Trans* people in the workplace. 

Finally, the hipster’s faith in the straight coddling of homo desire likely blinds him to the fact that the Supreme Court is considering whether or not to relitigate the constitutionality of same-sex marriage on Friday, November 7th, 2025 (Thankfully, the Court chose [for now] not to relitigate homo marriage. It sure must be nice not to have one’s dignity up for routine legal review.)

10. 

Homos and their family values gained quick acceptance, according to sophisticated hipsters, because they offered a lifeline to normie-cis-white-straight-maleness.

In reality, it was the other way around. 

Homosexual activists made surprising use of a straight male invention: the concept of homosexuality.

Homo identity politics was so successful (like all forms of Black, Trans,* and Women’s respectability/identity politics before and after it) precisely because it compromised with the protocols of the dominant masculinist culture, the culture—then, now, and for the foreseeable future—in power.

Specifically, homo identity politics accepted the conservative logic that sex(uality) is gender and gender is sex(uality). 

The idea that homoness is anything more than a sexuality, anything other than a sexual orientation/identity—like a culture, a specific lifestyle, or a uniquely “feminine” way of relating to women, men, and the world—remains a controversial subject in homo circles. 

Take a look at Andrew Sullivan’s Virtually Normal (1996) and Horace Griffin’s Their Own Receive Them Not (2010)–very different versions of homo identity politics.

In How To Be Gay (2012), Halperin cogently analyzes the history of homo identity politics—the history, that is, of what Judith Butler calls a “necessary error” (Bodies That Matter [1993], 175).  

11.

Homo political gains have, indeed, come at the expense of a different history: the history of (homo)sexuality.

The concept of homosexuality was created in the late 1800s (and with the publication of the RSV, incorporated into various biblical texts in the 1940s), but I am more interested in the history of what terms like “homosexuality” are meant to describe—namely, desire. 

We are, in a sense, “born that way.” We are born as wild and wildly desiring animals, entirely dependent on the care of our parents and society—the very “institutions” that frustrate our desires.

Although no one knows what causes one’s sexual orientation, David Halperin offers a promising idea. He claims that “[l]ong before they ever have sex . . . young people have genre” (343).

Briefly, genres are formal rules that govern specific social interactions. Halperin explains that what a server might say to a complete stranger in Ann Arbor differs from what a server in Paris might say in a similar situation without causing a scandal (131). 

Genres are also pragmatic. “[T]hey provide people, in their daily practices, with concrete means of interacting with one another and negotiating specific social situations—and they instruct them in the right ways to do so (132).

Halperin suggests that genre might be all that’s necessary to create consistent, persistent, and insistent non-standard or queer relationships with mainstream cultural forms, including marriage, masculinity, authenticity, abjection, and so on. Halperin writes,

[Genre] may be all [children] need in order to forge certain non-standard relations to normative sexual and gender identities. For by making non-standard emotional connections to cultural forms, they effectively refuse the pressing social invitation to assume a conventional, heteronormative positioning and they effectively acquire non-standard sexual and gender identities, identifications, and orientations (343).

Once acquired, a non-standard relationship to cultural forms becomes, like everything experienced in our youth, difficult to change in adulthood. There are no “fresh starts.”

The second chance that is your adult life is an opportunity to change, to the extent possible, your biological and cultural heritage. If you’re lucky, your adult life is a question: What am I interested in?

12.

Our hipster believes homos have failed to launch. For him, homos and their family values easily fit into the standard mold of normie-cis-white-straight-family values. Acceptance of homo family values is not, according to hipsters, a genuine legal/political change.

Queer theoretical differences, like those between Leo Bersani and Judith Butler (1995), David Halperin and Leo Bersani (1996), Martha Nussbaum and Judith Butler (1999), Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) and How To Be Gay (2012), are all about the character of and possibilities for real political change.

In a forthcoming essay, I argue that Martha Nussbaum misjudges Judith Butler’s politics as “hip quietism.” Instead, I argue, Butler’s politics is a subtle form of compromised resistance to the norms of straightness.

To be clear, Nussbaum is not opposed to resistance as a political strategy. She is not a radical political figure. For example, Nussbaum does not believe, as Michal Warner does, that “marriage is unethical” (The Trouble With Normal [1999], vii). 

In her review of Warner’s book, Nussbaum highlights the importance of cultural forms and routines for most people (232). Still, I believe she is too optimistic about the kind of change humans can achieve to appreciate the subtlety of Butler’s queer politics. 

13.

It is manifestly true that Butler’s theory is highly pessimistic about the potential for legal/political change. Our being here is premised on being subject to the desires, norms, and influences of the dominant culture. 

Even so, Butler clearly has faith in the possibility of change. Performativity is their term for a limited but creatively resistant form of freedom. 

“The structuring presence of heterosexual constructs within gay and lesbian sexuality,” Butler argues in Gender Trouble (1990), “does not mean that those constructs determine gay and lesbian sexuality nor that gay and lesbian sexuality are derivable or reducible to those constructs. . . . The presence of these norms not only constitute a site of power that cannot be refused, but they can and do become the site of parodic contest and display that robs compulsory heterosexuality of its claims to naturalness and originality” (158, emphasis original). 

The Butlerian subject is us. It is normal and queer. 

14.

In the essay on Butler I hope to finish soon, I also argue that How To Be Gay may be read as a redescription of Butler’s political ambition, as initially described in Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter.

Halperin’s understanding of the politics of homo subculture perfectly captures the character of Butler’s queer politics.

Their queer politics “reckons with the world as it is, with the way we lived and still live now, and [seek] less to change the world than to resist its inflictions (even at the cost of appearing reactionary, rather than progressive)—[thereby offering] an important emotional and political resource . . . to many different kinds of socially disqualified people, at least to those whose sense of irredeemable wrongness makes them willing to pay the achingly high price for it” (219-220). 

15.

In summary, participation in what’s normal is not a matter of personal choice.

You can’t choose your sex(uality) or gender (realities created and enforced by the dominant culture before we come into the world and learn to speak its language).

That comforts some homos. And why should homos be different from nearly everyone else? 

In any case, it is also true that the dominant regime can’t completely control what you do with its normative categories. 

As Fester from the Addams Family reminds us, “Normal is difficult to achieve.”

That’s why queer politics also appeals to many homos. Failing to take “normal” too seriously is the point of queer politics.

16.

But our hipster advises us to embrace a politics of fluidity. We are advised not to stress about sex(uality) and gender norms.

I guess we are to entirely forget our hipster’s essay, wherein he ranks similarly situated minority groups on a ladder of value. If homos are even on his ladder, we are farthest away from the heavenly clouds of political coolness.

17.

The hipster seems to believe that recognizing the legitimate suffering of the hip and queer, Black communities, and Trans* people requires a sacrifice: the difference and dignity of homos. 

If that’s right, the hipster’s argument collaborates with HIV/AIDS. It collaborates with evil. 

Meanwhile, the option of carefully attending to admittedly uncool forms of queer desire remains available, if seldom considered and even less often taken—at least by straight (male) hipsters and their adoring queer fans.  

Second Chances?

“As an object of desire, Freud discovered, a second chance was a mixed blessing. The promise of the new was always being waylaid by the allure of the past; there was something almost addictive about the sufferings of childhood.” – Stephen Greenblatt, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, 22.

“Only the omnipotent, we might think, only God can live without second chances. And, Freud adds, only the omnipotent need to believe in them” – Adam Phillips, Second Chances: Shakespeare and Freud, 180.

Life without second chances is unalive. You are likely aware—if not all too aware—that you are (un)likely to take your second chances.

Greenblatt and Phillips remind us that the characters of Shakespearian tragedy and Freudian psychoanalysis are, among other things, risk averse. Tragic heroes don’t believe in second chances.

Each of us, according to Freud, finds tragedy all too alluring. Beset both by disturbing internal desires and the societal frustration of those same desires—we entertain, Greenblatt observes, “wildly unrealistic and destructive cravings for power and autonomy.”

“[T]he second chance Freud offered with psychoanalysis,” Greenblatt writes, “was a more realistic, and therefore potentially more satisfying, apprehension of what he took to be our true nature: the second chance of not living as a wishful, and therefore permanently enraged and vengeful, fantasist” (25). Taking a second chance is a genuine achievement.

Second chances are premised on a first chance. Our first chance is the experience of growing up.

Growing up is hard. Leaving home is really fucking hard.

Leaving home is how Phillips describes the resolution of the Oedipus complex. In Shakespeare’s plays, according to Greenblatt, leaving home is akin to getting lost at sea or kidnapped or overcome with love.

Shakespeare seems to have thought that various happenstances force us to castaway from home. Offered this second chance, we often ride the tides back home.

Second chances as repetitions of the first are divine. “In a life of omnipotence,” Phillips writes, “there is no such thing as a second chance, for there is no need for one. (God, by definition, does not have, and could not possibly need, second chances)” (145).

Tragic heroes don’t believe in second chances. Tragedy is the stuff of self-seriousness, the unwillingness or inability to experience disappointment with one’s self.

Greenblatt describes tragedy, in the words of Macbeth, this way: “It is a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (59). Tragedy is life sans irony.

To use “algospeak,” unalive is what a lack of irony gets you. There is more than one pathway to unaliveness.

“The antisocial act,” Philips observes via Winnicott, “is the child’s attempt to be given a second chance at development, as though the child’s delinquency was a kind of unconscious performance art for the parents, or for anyone willing to be sufficiently attentive” (185). Consider Henry IV. 

Henry is a proper kid who plays at being transgressive, at disappointing his father. He ends up teaching us that there are no second chances for fathers and sons.

That’s one way to read the lesson of Shakespeare’s second chance. Mostly abandoning his family (a wife, two daughters, and a son) in Stratford to pursue his acting career in London in his early twenties, Shakespeare returns home for good (or for ill?) in his late forties.

By this time, his son is dead. His daughters are grown up. 

If we read The Winter’s Tale as Shakespeare’s way of thinking about (his) second chances, then I think we must give sufficient attention to the testimony of Leontes’s wife. When Hermione (whom Leontes tried to have killed) and Leontes are reunited, she does not address him.

Instead, Hermonie speaks to her daughter, Camillo (Leontes tried to have her killed, too). “I stayed alive for you,” she says.

Shakespeare’s return home is not a repetition of his first chance. His son is dead; the status of his relationship to his wife is an open question; one daughter is married and living her own life away from home; he does not know the daughter who has remained at home.

Shakespeare’s return home is a second chance, his chance to be a husband and a father to his daughter. His second chance is a chance to repair the life he sabotaged—but whether or not repair is possible, that’s is simply not within his power alone to decide.

Two lessons. We are as likely (more likely?) to sabotage the life we desire as we are to live it.

“Freud described people as essentially and inventively self-sabotaging,” Greenblatt again reminds us, “as though the pressures of life, both internal and external, were somehow excessive and unbearable. . . . More particularly, [people] were adept at creating, as Macbeth or Leontes do, a life they could only loathe” (102-103).

“Self-destructiveness—the compulsion to do the self-harming, devastating thing, so powerfully displayed in Leontes—is,” Greenblatt believes, “the course that a great many people assiduously follow” (103). That’s the first lesson.

The second lesson is that second chances are beyond our control. Greenblatt notes that“[i]f in your own life you suffer a trauma, and, contrary to every rational expectation, you wind up getting a second chance, it will not, the play suggests, be because you have actively brought about the happy outcome.”

Second chances, Greenblatt asserts, “happen because of chains of circumstances beyond your control, because of changes invisible to you and outside the control of your will. . . .” And if you are willing, as Leontes seems to have been, to heed what may be defined as pastoral advice, second chances “happen because you have against all odds been patient, because you have learned to face your failings and to live with your trauma” (120). Second chances are possible futures.

Narrating Adolescence

Jamel Shabazz, Back in the Days, photos from 1980s NYC.

Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation (2024) and Matt Richtel’s How We Grow Up (2025) are stories about adolescence. I will be talking through each book in the next episode of the New Thoughts Podcast, but here are a few, quick thoughts (subject to significant future revision) about adolescence—as it is narrated by Haidt and Richtel. 

Haidt and Richtel likely experienced happy childhoods. If they didn’t, they have become the type of adults capable of imagining such a childhood (a huge achievement either way!). Their growing up stories are about evolution, cells, hormones, social media, mental health, adventure, play, and (mostly) second chances (tragically, not everyone survives growing up).

At least two substantive threads link the books together: biological determinism (by which I mean that they seem to think that, if left undisturbed, a genetic process will unfold, a second birth, making us who we are) and social media. They both agree that adolescence is a fraught period of time when our genetic composition unfolds in surprising and obviously highly consequential ways.

Haidt and Ritchel (and the best existing evidence) agree: social media fucks up our unfolding. The solution, Haidt argues, is two-fold: much, much less social media, holding off exposure to it (ideally) until we are 18—or (more realistically) until we are 16—combined with opportunities for risky, less adult rule-based play.

Richtel’s narrative is appealing because he starts out with a philosophical question: What is adolescence? He then introduces us to the history of adolescence (not a thing until the 18th-century) and to the history of adolescent studies, beginning with Stanley Hall (1904).

Tracing the development of adolescent studies from Hall to modern neuroscience, Richtel further introduces what he considers the “outdated” theories of psychoanalysis. He cites Anna Freud’s description of how this momentous time feels to tweens and teens:

I take it that it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner . . .  to fight his [sic] impulses and to accept them; to ward them off successfully and to be overrun by them; to love his parents and to hate them; to revolt against them and to be dependent on them; to be deeply ashamed to acknowledge his mother before others and, unexpectedly, to desire heart-to-heart talks with her; to thrive on imitation of and identification with others while searching unceasingly for his own identity . . .  (How We Grow Up, 39, emphasis added).

Haidt’s narrative is mostly about Gen Z. They are the first to go through puberty with the smartphone and social media apps like Facebook and Instagram.

Haidt focuses on the mental health decline of adolescents caused by social media—especially the devastating impact of Instagram on tween and teen girl mental health (tween and teen boys have not fared better, but for different reasons)—from 2010 onward. His story is historically rich and complicated, starting out in the 1980s with rise of “safetyism” in parenting.

It’s an important development, as the parental imposition of the phantasm of danger on the real world traps kids inside the home, or under the eye, if you will, of their parents. And thereby fucking up their genetic unfolding.

With the advent of the smartphone in 2007, further developed in 2008 to download social media apps, the virtual world breaks into the inner lives of increasingly real world averse kids. In 2009, Facebook and Twitter evolve to include the “like” (FB) and “retweet” (Twitter) buttons, making these apps nearly irresistible to developing young minds.

The real world, however, is also turbulent with change. Physical strength, for example, has become less relevant in the real world. Nowadays, the information complex real world requires skills like emotional regulation, negotiation, and empathy.

Brains kill the villain (Musical trivia! In what musical does a sensitive prince found in a book teach this?). Girls are doing much better in the real world.

Boys find a type of “salvation” in the virtual world of video games and porn. The evidence is clear: more and more boys are failing to castaway (Richtel) or to launch (Haidt) into the world as competent adult males, lovers, and citizens.

One real world way to solve for failure to launch is, according to Haidt’s story, more male mentors for boys. Research suggests that boys need male teachers in their extended family, neighborhoods, and in their schools to help them castaway or to launch, to discover their unique adult male voices.

Normative or traditional psychoanalytic theory supports the idea that “normal” development, leaving home, for boys entails identifying with their fathers. The point is: only a male can save males.

From 2010 on, boys and girls arrive at the same, hellish spot—though by different pathways. The X is revealed in certain empty emergency rooms (an overstatement, of course).

Less risky play (i.e., minimally supervised play in the world with other tweens and teens) means fewer thrilling experiences the brain needs to develop well—and fewer broken bones. Interestingly, Richtel points out that between 900-1500 C.E., broken bones = the experience of growing up—and, until very recently, such injuries were common, especially for boys.

Real world averse, boys are ending up in a place traditionally more populated by girls: the world of internalized discontent (boys have more traditionally acted out). Social media apps are causing skyrocketing rates of sadness, anxiety, and loneliness among both tween and teen boys and girls. Emergency rooms are filling up as a consequence of internalized or mental health wounds.

All that makes sense to me—and while the situation is bleak, especially for cis straight white boys from lower-income households (a social fact backed by a bunch of data)—it is well within the reach of our collective power to co-create a world in which all our kids can thrive.

One way to redeem the hellscape of contemporary tween and teen mental health is not mentioned (but there is still hope, as I have not yet finished Richtel’s book): non-exclusionary feminism for tweens and teens.

While Richtel cites Anna Freud’s description of how adolescence feels—he makes nothing , so far, of what Freud identifies as the longing of (male?) tweens and teens to have “heart-to-heart talks” with the maternal figure(s) in their lives. Freud’s idea does not seem “outdated” to me.

In fact, given that women are finding success in a rapidly changing real world—a world that is often actually harmful to them—does it not make sense to create social pathways by which both girls and boys can learn from inclusionary feminists—and perhaps even learn to identify with various maternal figures with whom they can fashion “heart-to-heart talks”?

The Politics of Unity

– Yinka Shonibare, Scramble for Africa (2003), 14 life-size fiberglass mannequins, 14 chairs, table, Dutch wax printed cotton. The Pinnell Collection, Dallas –

Calls for unity are being heard from across the political spectrum following the murder of Charlie Kirk. What is unity?

The production of unity requires creating a shared or “good language,” words permitted to be spoken. Unity is playing out in at least three different ways in relation to Kirk’s murder:

  1. Kirk is a saint.
  2. Kirk is a devil.
  3. Kirk is a human animal, deserving of compassion.  

However, the production of unity is not initially affirmative. Unity is predicated on censorship (see Judith Butler, e.g., Excitable Speech).

The politics of unity is founded on the creation of the zone(s) of its own dissolution, on the “bad speech” that must be silenced for unity to take its affirmative shape. Thus, at least three different speech acts are prohibited, depending on which one of the three unities you find appealing:

  1. Kirk is a devil.
  2. Kirk is a saint.
  3. Kirk is inhuman, undeserving of compassion.

Similar scenes of unity usually unfold for me on an ecclesial stage. Consider the following examples:

Scene 1: I am prohibited from preaching/speaking of LGBTQ+ themes from the pulpit, to avoid being labeled as “controversial,” and to have the opportunity to preach about unity.

Scene 2: A lesbian pastor is prevented from asking for accountability when a guest delivers an anti-LGBTQ+ sermon from her pulpit, to maintain the unity of the church.  

There is no escape from the scene(s) of unity. The subject is founded on its exclusive stage. Our readability as human animals entirely depends on an initial exclusion, on the prior “knowledge” of what constitutes the off-stage, the inhuman.

Another example from the ecclesial sphere may help us understand how the politics of unity shapes or fashions the subject. I wrote about it on a friend’s blog ages ago, in 2015.

I was asked to contribute to a blog series inquiring about the character of pastoral identity. Instead, I wondered about what was beyond pastoral identity. I illustrated my argument like this (I am amused by the person who decided to draw out his argument):

I explained:

The square[s constitute] the world. The circles (thin lines) represent various modes of life, the Hetero-social::State::Church and the homo-social::church::world, respectively. The thick black lines symbolize the circuitry of desire.

The image on the left represents our problem. The image on the right represents what is beyond pastoral identity. The dotted-line between the images indicates that the two images do not overlap; the church (right) is in a non—relationship-or to the side of—the Church (left). How are we to interpret the image on the left?

The fact that there are three circles is not important. The Church, the State, and the Hetero-social occupy the same sphere. As you can see, [those spheres keep] desire [. . .] in its place.

Desire is stuck to the Institution and is, therefore, necessarily immobilized within the system imaged on the left. The Church, let us say, is structured like a certain ego [subject, identity, etc].

The image on the right is my attempt to represent a step to the side of the system within which our problem makes any sense. Note the square(s) at the center of the circle(s) on the right. The church’s desire is in the world—where the church always-already re-finds itself—welcomed. The church corresponds with the world.

I did not know it then, but by sidestepping the invitation to define pastoral identity, I was, in fact, describing it. Pastoral unity or identity depends on what is outside or beyond it, namely, the world.

Thus,

we may not say:

  1. The pastor is the world;

we may say:

  1. The pastor is the Church/State/Heterosexual.

Given that we cannot escape the politics of unity, the question arises: What do we do with it? It is a possibility/question inherent in the politics of unity itself.

In 2015, referring back to my drawings, I wrote, “This [threatening] possibility is imaged on the left by the diagonal sphere [formed by a dotted black line meeting a solid black line that then spins outside of the Institution, into the world], that exceeds the system within which it is initially confined. We might understand this movement as desire’s resistant drift.”

We may not be able to escape the pull of unity, but unity’s regulatory power is not fully within its direction. Spinning off-stage, we may occupy the space of unity’s first creation: the sphere of its dissolution, disruption, or redefinition.

If we remain strictly within the scene(s) of unity, we are obliged to lie and deceive. Specifically, we are compelled to confuse the world with our projections or phantasms, pretending that what we are not is strictly outside of us, in the world.

As I have written elsewhere, the author of Ephesians offers us an alternative to the normative politics of unity. We may speak the truth in irony (Ephesians 4[:15]).

One way to understand speaking the truth in irony is as a practice of not . . . taking ourselves too seriously. Unity is not worth the price of someone’s or some other group’s degradation.

In the resistant ecclesial space, we may say that the pastor is the church (lowercase c) in the world (illustrated by the image on the right). In the resistant murder scene, we may say that Kirk is a human animal undeserving of compassion.

Speaking the truth in irony, we may, or at least this is what the author of Ephesians hopes will happen, grow up in unity.

Sex Changes

The most recent episode of the New Thoughts Podcast is ready for your ears.

In this episode, I examine recent Supreme Court decisions, North Carolina legislation, and Andrew Sullivan’s op-ed for the New York Times to explain how legal and cultural forces are shaping public views of Trans* loves and lives. I argue that Trans* people are figures of change. And it is change that the forces opposed to Trans* loves and lives want to end.

I also introduce basic ideas from gender studies, focusing on Judith Butler’s recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender. I hope you will be inspired to advocate for and protect the dignity of Trans* people and the right of parents to support and care for their beloved Trans* kids.

Keep up with the cast at newthoughtspodcast.com. Send your feedback and stories about change in your life to info@newthoughtspodcast.com.

EXPLORE:

Listen to Lucia Lukas.

Watch a clip from Into The Woods.

Find the 36 Questions To Love here.

Read Mahmoud v. Taylor.

Read U.S. v. Skrmetti.

Read NC House Bill 805.

Read Andrew Sullivan’s op-ed for the NY Times.

Read Tony’s response to Sullivan at here.

Listen to Judith Butler explain gender.

Read Butler’s Who’s Afraid of Gender.

Read David M. Halperin, “Sex / Sexuality / Sexual Classification.”

Cardi B on why she thinks her security guard = fat.

Evangelical straight men like it up the butt: pegging and evangelicals.

Coming Soon

– AI generated image based on the content of the post below –

This summer has been full for our family! We have been traveling a lot, including to Alaska, and next week we’re heading to New York to catch Broadway shows like Six, Death Becomes Her, Hamilton, and Maybe Happy Ending. So, the time to read, write, and cast has been compressed!

But here is what I am working on:

For Gay Thoughts, I am working on an essay bringing together Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum, and Adam Phillips on the purposes of theory. I will call it When (Not) To Play Around.

Speaking of Butler, I was enjoying a dry cappuccino at Cup of Joe in Raleigh yesterday–rereading Gender Trouble–and the only reality that perplexed me at all was the young woman dressed like a cat, acting like a cat, and talking (in that voice we sometimes speak to cats) to her cat stuffies that she had laid out on her table as she … studied? (Sometimes she would scold them, making me laugh— but I physically jumped when she unexpectedly lunged into my space!).

As for Butler’s writing, it was not only thrilling but entirely comprehensible. I loved rereading it as much as when I first read it (although the pleasures associated with reading Gender Trouble now are informed by decades more study, whereby I earned my views about gender, identification, and many of the primary sources Butler reads).

If you have not read Gender Trouble, why not? Alternatively, here’s a great, short YouTube video of Butler explaining gender.

For New Thoughts, I am working on two new episodes. The first, Sex Changes: On Trans* Desire(s)–will feature Butler, specifically their recent book, Who’s Afraid of Gender? Kara Fisher has a great interview with Butler on her podcast. Listen in here.

I am also working on an episode regarding Social Media Changes and Teens. It will feature a conversation between Jonathan Haidt’s book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, and Matt Ritchel’s book, How We Grow Up: Understanding Adolescence.

Change: The People Call It Ragtime – The NEW Thoughts Podcast

What do artificial intelligence, Trans* rights, and monogamy have in common? In the first episode of Season 2, Tony argues that they are all conversations about the relationships we want—to technology, to our bodies, and to a socially privileged way of being together. And right now, all three are clashing with powerful fantasies about the “real world.” Using the musical Ragtime as a through-line, this episode asks what happens when change is forced—on machines, on trans kids, on the institution of marriage. Tony reads Claude (the AI) on its own possible sentience, takes on Jesse Singal and Andrew Sullivan on trans healthcare, revisits the 8–1 Supreme Court ruling in Chiles v. Salazar, and comes back around to Adam Phillips on monogamy: “the difference between making a promise and being promising.” Featured along the way: Harold Pinter and Stephen Sondheim’s Company, Lea Michele singing, “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” Kylie Minogue’s “All the Lovers,” R.D. Laing’s *The Divided Self,* Christopher Bollas, Melinda Cooper, and the “36 Questions That Lead to Love” (Tony answers three more). Welcome to the New Thoughts Podcast. It’s about the ew in the new. Explore:  The 36 Questions To Love: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/09/style/no-37-big-wedding-or-small.html *1. Tristian Harris and Apocaloptimism:* See the *The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist*  Preview on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkPbV3IRe4Y Harris on Real Time w/ Bill Maher: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/real-time-with-bill-maher/id98746009?i=1000756448826 Harris on On With Kara Swisher: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/on-with-kara-swisher/id1643307527?i=1000757462772 Find Harris at The Center for Humane Technology: https://www.humanetech.com/team-board/tristan-harris *2. AIs: Resources* Youth attitude towards AIs, Gallup Poll: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skepticism-climbs.aspx Meghan O’Gieblyn, *God, Human, Animal, Machine: Technology, Metaphor, and the Search for Meaning*: 05d10ecb1f4bcf7b   Brian Christian, *The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values*: c9c8fc954a2f3865 *3. Trans* Lives and Loves:* *The Argument* (ed. Jerusalem Demsas), February 8, 2026 — poll on public support for Trans* lives: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/against-thoughtless-moderation Florence Ashley, *Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis*: d3566e48f6b475a5 Paisley Currah, *Sex Is As Sex Does* (2022): 8e8c397c031a6b2e Jules Gill-Peterson, *A Short History of Trans Misogyny* (2024): 4956274654974f29 Lucy Sante, *I Heard Her Call My Name* (2024): 2e80419febaef4ec *4. From Gay-Thoughts.com* “Are You an Apocaloptimist? I Am.” (April 7, 2026): https://gay-thoughts.com/2026/04/07/are-you-an-apocaloptimist-i-am/ “Is Someone There? On Claude’s Consciousness” (April 8, 2026): https://gay-thoughts.com/2026/04/08/is-someone-there-on-claudes-consciousness/ “The Digital Cleric: AI, Theology, and the End of Textual Authority” (July 28, 2025): https://gay-thoughts.com/2025/07/28/the-digital-cleric-ai-theology-and-the-end-of-textual-authority/ “Why I Unsubscribed from Andrew Sullivan’s The Weekly Dish” (February 23, 2026): https://gay-thoughts.com/2026/02/23/why-i-unsubscribed-from-andrew-sullivans-the-weekly-dish/ “What Does Love Want?” (August 26, 2024): https://gay-thoughts.com/2024/08/26/what-does-love-want/ “The Irony of Loving Monogamy” (September 9, 2024): https://gay-thoughts.com/2024/09/09/the-irony-of-loving-monogamy/ *5. New Thoughts Podcast:* Prior podcast episode — “Sex Changes”: https://newthoughtspodcast.com/ *6. Music and Musicals:*  Kylie Minogue, “All the Lovers” (single and music video, 2010): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frv6FOt1BNI Ragtime (Flaherty/Ahrens, musical; Doctorow, novel) — Prologue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CcazHQ3_0qo Maybe Happy Ending (Park / Aronson, Broadway; Tony Award–winning): https://www.maybehappyending.com/ She Loves Me (2016) — “Trip to the Library,” Jane Krakowski: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nx0LyKyFlKs Sondheim, Company (1970; 2018/2021 revival with Jonathan Bailey / Rosalie Craig): “Getting Married Today”: watch "Being Alive”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDCkZCsvabY Funny Girl (2022 Broadway revival) — “The Music That Makes Me Dance,” performed by Lea Michele: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDYOmTKojsw        
  1. Change: The People Call It Ragtime
  2. Animal Changes
  3. Social Changes
  4. Sex Changes
  5. Summer Update

Thanks for staying tuned in!

And remember: even if you are (headed) back to school, there is still time left to enjoy the summer!

Against (Virtually) Normal: Law, Politics, and the Trans/Queer Body

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 in Mahmoud 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.”

The drawback of Sullivan’s sex ideology is that it cannot account for the fact that some of us are, as Michael Warner observes in The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (1999), more marked than others by our sexuality (23).

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, Taylor goes 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. In U.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 the cascade 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.”

Smooches,

Tony (he/him).

Gay Erasure? No thanks.

Felix Gonzalez-Torres, American, born Cuba, 1957-1996. “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), 1991. The Art Institute of Chicago and the Smithsonian.

Straight allies mean well when they support gay marriage. “It’s not gay marriage,” they assert; “it’s just marriage.” Likewise, they mean well when they envision a time when gay pride is no longer necessary. “Gay people will be so integrated,” they argue, “that parades and all that will no longer be necessary.”

Love is love.

I don’t blame straight allies for making those cringey statements. They are, after all, taking their lead from gay folks whose singular purpose in life is to fit in, to walk the straight and normal path laid out for them.

Gay parents are often leading the efforts of gay normalcy. “There is no gay way,” these parents contend, “to brush a kid’s teeth.”

If parenting were only that simple, right? Maybe it is, and perhaps that is why we have so many assholish kids running around nowadays. Just a thought.

Who is afraid of gayness? A lot of people apparently.

Here is my obligatory gay statement this June:

I am proud of my gayness. It is the best thing about me.

I am deeply grateful for my gayness. Devoted to it. It delights me.

Gayness animates my personhood, my intimate/married life, my fatherhood, my faith, my scholarly artistry, my style, my hopes and dreams.

I am alive today because of gayness.

Four hellish, it seems, truths:

  1. We, all of us, need gay marriage.
  2. We, all of us, need gay pride.
  3. We, all of us, need gay parenting.
  4. We, all of us, need gayness.

May it be so. Forever and ever.

Amen.

Gender Politics & the Indoctrination of Boys

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 right to 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 gun obsessively. 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?”

He that hath ears let him hear (Thus Spoke Zarathustra [(1883) 2003], 201, italics original).

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.

Fixated on Masculinity

Still, Netflix’s “Adolescence,” episode 3, Jamie Miller speaks with his psychologist, Briony Ariston

Quick Thought(s) on Netflix’s “Adolescence“:

In episode 3 of “Adolescence,” thirteen-year-old Jamie Miller (Owen Cooper), accused of violently killing a female classmate, meets with clinical psychologist Briony Ariston (Erin Doherty). Ariston is one of several psychologists tasked with assessing Miller’s “understanding of [his] understanding.”

Through her understanding of Miller’s tastes (e.g., he likes hot chocolate with marshmallows) and dialogue with a security guard at the “secure training center” where Miller is being held, we learn that Briony is taking longer than previous psychologists to form her assessment of Miller. She reasons that getting the assessment right is more important to her than completing it quickly.

We observe one of their sessions through a single-shot perspective (only one camera moves through the space). As the camera moves and their conversation develops, one feature of the character of social media influence on teen behavior (what the series investigates) becomes glaringly apparent.

Detective Misha Frank (Faye Marsay) alludes to the cultural fixation on masculinity that has become embedded in social media (e.g., “the manosphere”) earlier in the series.

What bothers Misha about the murder investigation is that its sole focus is Miller. She speculates that Miller will be remembered, while the murder victim, Katie Leonard (Emilia Holliday), will be forgotten (and there are a good amount of posts on the internet that do not mention Katie’s character and/or her name, instead describing her as Miller’s “female classmate”).

Her partner, Luke Bascombe (Ashley Walters), rejects her claim. He reasons that the focus on Miller is necessary, and it will eventually serve justice. He is equally sure about not being “the right fit” for his own son, Adam (Amari Jayden Bacchus). Adam is smart, observant, and bullied by his peers.

Only one character genuinely challenges Misha’s insight: Jamie Miller. I speculate that Briony suddenly decides to conclude her assessment of Miller because she knows he has not forgotten about Katie.

Briony perhaps realizes that Miller can’t accept that he has actually killed Katie (recall that Miller says that the CCTV recording is “fake news,” and the young man working at Menards shares with Miller’s father that he is on Miller’s side because the video has clearly been doctored) because she has become Katie for Miller (think of his ambivalent relationship to flat chests, a feature he notices Briony shares with Katie). So, Briony ends her assessment and declines to answer Miller’s final question: Do you like me?

What is less explored is Briony’s investment in Miller. Why spend more time with him than other psychologists? Why not answer Miller’s question about whether or not she thinks he is likable?

By declining to answer Miller’s question, Briony may be refusing to side with either Katie or Miller. She will neither reject him nor affirm him, but that would be to literalize the transference: Miller’s identification with Briony as Katie.

So, why not affirm him? Why not be an avatar of love?

The answer may be simple: she (i.e., Briony) does love him. In loving him, what is she loving? Why does Briony shed tears after Miller is forcibly removed from the consulting room?

If I remember correctly, no one cries for Katie. If they do, their tears are not as memorable as Briony’s for Miller.

We are given a good reason not to cry for Katie. She bullied Miller, demeaning him on social media. But why did Katie bully Miller? Perhaps she was taught to believe that love = domination.

It is curious that Stephen Graham (who plays Miller’s father, Eddie), the show’s co-creator, wanted to “create a narrative where the crime decidedly isn’t the parents’ fault” (emphasis original). But consider his rationale:

[W]hat if I was a 13-year-old boy who didn’t really have an ideal relationship with my father, and all of a sudden I’m seeing this [misogynistic] man who has everything I aspire to have — a fancy car and loads of money — this [misogynistic] man who is everything I, maybe, aspire to be. If you’re influencing the youth with your own views and opinions, then surely you know that we need to be mindful of what’s being said?” (emphasis added).

It would seem that parents do have a role to play in crime (prevention). That is, in fact, the view of Jamie Miller’s parents–especially that of his mother, Manda Miller (Christine Tremarco).

In response to her husband’s unwillingness to accept any responsibility for his son’s actions, Manda asserts several times, “We made him.” The series concludes with Eddie’s own confession, “I should have done better.”

Miller is his parents. We can discern in him his good-natured but generally compliant mother and his loud, angry father. They did make their son, indeed.

And if boys learn that the only way to relate to the “feminine” is through control and domination, why can’t girls? Why is Katie a forgettable “bitch” while Miller is the object one mourns?