← The New Yorker Radio Hour
The New Yorker Radio Hour
Masha Gessen on the Battle Over Trans Rights
00:49:30
Many culture-war politicians are attacking the rights of trans people, and making a regressive view of gender as biology the key to their platforms. In this episode, David Remnick talks to two people who’ve found themselves at the center of the battle over transgender rights. In Nebraska, a state senator has committed to filibustering every piece of legislation to ward off a vote on a Republican-sponsored bill that would ban gender-affirming care for trans people under age nineteen. Then Masha Gessen—who fled Russia years ago as an L.G.B.T. person targeted by government repression—explains why anti-trans messaging has been effective for the right, and why discussions of trans issues can be fraught even for those who support them.
Loading summary
Transcript127 lines
- [00:03]
A
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker.
- [00:10]
B
Welcome to the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. When you think about the issues facing our country today, what comes first to mind? Well, there's a major land war in Europe and the possibility of direct conflict with Russia. Relations with China are getting stiff, steadily worse. And there's always the global climate emergency. Or look at things at radical disparities in income, economic turmoil, the frequency of gun violence. And yet, for many politicians, particularly on the right, these issues are not as enticing as the culture wars, especially the subject of gender and trans identity. Whether it's Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis at home or Vladimir Putin in Russia, they're trumpeting trans people as a mortal threat to culture, to society, and to the minds of impressionable children. That's the subject of our program today. A little later, we'll hear from the New Yorker's Masha Gessen, who writes with great depth and perception on LGBTQ issues. But first, I want to talk with a politician who's in the midst of this fight, on its front lines, really. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the George W. Norris legislative.
- [01:24]
C
Chamber for the 39th day of the 108th legislature first session.
- [01:31]
B
According to the ACLU, nearly 400 state level bills are targeting gay and trans people. Lawmakers are introducing those bills from Maine to Oregon and almost everywhere in between. In the Nebraska state House Republicans put forward what they called the Let Them Grow Act. And since their party holds about two thirds of the seats, they expected that bill to pass quite easily until a state senator named Michaela Kavanaugh stepped into the breach.
- [02:00]
A
If this legislature collectively decides that legislating hate against children is our priority, then I am going to make it painful. Painful for everyone. Because if you want to inflict pain upon our children, I am going to inflict pain upon this body. And I have nothing, nothing but time. And I am going to use all of it.
- [02:32]
B
Kavanaugh is filibustering to prevent this bill from ever coming to a vote. And she is also filibustering an anti abortion bill. She comes from a political family. Her father was a US Congressman from Nebraska and her brother John serves alongside her in the legislature. Michaela Kavanaugh is about two weeks into her filibuster, and I caught her during a break between speeches on the floor. So tell me, what is the Let Them Grow act and what's in this bill that makes you so concerned?
- [03:04]
A
Oh, everything in this bill makes Me concerned. The Let Them Grow act is a bill that targets trans use of gender affirming care. So what it does is makes it illegal bans from the state of Nebraska, gender affirming care, which includes therapy, hormone blockers, and surgery. So starting with therapy, I mean, that's the most basic thing that we all should be probably seeking, is having more therapy in our lives. But when we're talking about transgendered youth or youth that are questioning their gender identity, therapy is essential to their well being, to their health care.
- [03:47]
B
Tell me this. When did this enormous concern grow up in the politics of the state of Nebraska and why?
- [03:58]
A
I don't believe that it has. I think that this enormous concern has come from national political talking points. As we see, this bill is being introduced in states across the country. The language is, you know, boilerplate language that's being introduced in every state.
- [04:20]
B
So here's the bill's sponsor, State Senator Kathleen Couth, speaking about the Let Them Grow Act.
- [04:25]
A
We have laws that protect kids from abuse, exploitation, and from exposure to dangerous substances like alcohol and drugs. As adults, we understand that a child's brain is not fully formed and cannot comprehend the ramifications of making irreversible medical decisions. When you see something that isn't original language, which is just copied off of other language that other states are introducing, that's when you know that this is not because of something that's happening here in our state.
- [04:54]
B
You're saying it's a phony issue in a sense.
- [04:57]
A
Oh, it's definitely a phony issue. A disingenuous conversation. What we're saying with this bill is that we don't trust parents to make healthcare decisions for their children. Children, trans children, are being used as a prop by an extreme agenda. I don't like to say that it's a conservative agenda or a Republican agenda because I don't think that that's who the Republican Party at least used to be. I don't think that that's who a lot of Republicans in Nebraska are. I believe very firmly that my colleagues, for the most part in the Nebraska legislature are fiscal conservatives who believe in liberties, parental rights, individual rights. This bill seeks to diminish all of that, and bills like this across the country seek to diminish that. It seems to be a loud minority is getting a lot of national attention for being hyperbolic.
- [06:02]
B
Well, you're filibustering, though, which suggests that the Republican majority in your legislature would vote for the Let Them Grow Act. No.
- [06:13]
A
Yes. The Republican majority in the legislature, a majority of the majority will grow, will vote for that act. That, however, does not mean that that's what they want or who they are.
- [06:27]
B
I don't get that distinction.
- [06:29]
A
Okay, let me explain.
- [06:30]
B
It's not that you know their head better than they do, or maybe you're suggesting that they. That you do.
- [06:35]
A
Well, I've had conversations with them about it, with a lot of my colleagues about it, and I would say that what has been expressed to me is a frustration over discussing policies like this instead of discussing policies that most of them ran to be here discussing. This is what a culture war looks like. Apparently. I am completely uninterested in litigating a culture war. We are an agricultural state, and property tax is a huge issue in our state. We fund our public educations partially through property taxes, and almost every single person in here ran on some platform to do with taxes.
- [07:25]
B
Then why don't the Republicans in your legislature rise up and say this is of no concern of ours and either vote against the bill or not bring it up in the first place?
- [07:37]
A
Well, that's what I'm asking them to do. By filibustering, by putting a time crunch on things. What I'm asking of them is to rise up and say that if this really isn't who they are, rise up and say that and stop having private conversations with me, telling me how much you don't like the bill, how much you don't want to be focusing on this issue and rise up and say something about it. So what are they fear? So I'm challenging them.
- [08:01]
B
What is their fear? They're fearing the Republican National Committee. They're fearing Donald Trump DeSantis. What is the motivation for a state senator, for a legislator in the state of Nebraska, to care about this and to put their political muscle into it.
- [08:22]
A
We in Nebraska, a lot of it has to do with campaign finance in that there's no limitations on money that can be poured into for or against a candidate. The last eight years of the Pete Ricketts administration here in Nebraska, when former Governor Ricketts vetoed a couple of bills his first two years, and they were. Those vetoes were overridden by the legislature. He poured personal wealth into ousting Republicans. That vote voted against him. And as a result, we've gone down this road of having people who are financially beholden to the Pete Ricketts of. Of this world, the Charles Herbster. Charles Herbster is a close friend of Donald Trump, that they are beholden to these individuals. And so they feel, and this is, of course, my assumption that they feel that if they vote against the platform of these individuals that money will be poured against them in their reelection.
- [09:20]
B
What you're saying is that the Republicans just simply don't have the courage to stand up to their financial situation and they fear losing the gig. Is it such a great gig that you would give up your conscience?
- [09:38]
A
I will say it. I love this job. I do. It is.
- [09:42]
B
But you're standing up for your conscience. I'm talking about your Republican colleagues.
- [09:47]
A
It's never a good time to do the right thing, and it's never easy to do the right thing. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it. Take your names off of that piece of poop. LB574 Talk to the Speaker. Demand good governance. Be better. Be who the children of Nebraska deserve.
- [10:07]
B
Tell me about your conversations with voters who maybe don't see eye to eye with you, who are watching Fox News, who are reading about this on Twitter. And you're at the supermarket, you're in the hallway of the state capitol. You're at kids schools. You're running into people who think, and I'm putting these words in their mouths, maybe children should stay in their assigned genders until they're older. How do you explain your position? Walk me through that.
- [10:36]
A
Well, first I'll say that people are not coming up to me saying that.
- [10:40]
B
There'S no such conversation.
- [10:42]
A
It hasn't happened. Which is fascinating. I have people in my district and across the state reaching out to me, telling me that they appreciate me fighting for our trans youth and for parental rights. But if someone were to come up to me and, and say that I would talk to them about the substance of the bill, that this is a parental rights issue that we shouldn't be getting involved in. Decision, healthcare decisions in individual families and individual households. This isn't a pervasive issue. It's pervasive in the trans community, of course, but it's not pervasive in Nebraska. And we're going to legislate away. Parental rights for what? For why?
- [11:29]
B
Now we've seen that in, in the Congress, the US Congress shutting down the government is usually pretty unpopular politically. Republicans in Nebraska are one seat shy of a filibuster proof super majority. Will there be a political price to pay for you?
- [11:47]
A
Oh, for me? Well, I'm term limited and I was just reelected. So for me personally, no, there's not a political price to pay for other. For the Democrats in Nebraska, perhaps.
- [12:01]
B
You getting any pressure from your fellow Democrats to knock it off? No, they're behind you.
- [12:08]
A
Yes.
- [12:09]
B
With the filibuster, Michaela Kavanaugh is fighting how the process has gone in the legislature, including how two bills sailed through committees with little consideration of opposition. Today's session triggered this exchange from two fellow senators to let one person and.
- [12:27]
A
Their personal vendetta against someone else or.
- [12:31]
B
Her wishes aren't met.
- [12:33]
A
So she's going to filibuster these bills.
- [12:36]
B
That's the way that bullies do things. And the only way that you can.
- [12:42]
A
Deal with a bully is to hit him head on. She absolutely feels strong in her conviction, but that does not make her a bully. And I think it's unfortunate that that is now on the record.
- [12:52]
B
Let's say you win this. Let's say they withdraw the Let Them Grow act from a vote. What prevents a senator from reintroducing it later?
- [13:01]
A
Nothing. But hopefully we as a body have learned a lesson.
- [13:07]
B
The way I understand it, as you portraying it here, is that the Republicans in the Nebraska legislature are really, if quietly, either uninterested in or even against the Let Them Grow act, but they don't seem to have the inclination to overturn the directive from the national party, and they're just going along with it. Am I getting that right?
- [13:33]
A
I think that they have the potential to rise to the occasion, and I don't want to paint them into a corner and say that they can't do it. I think that they can.
- [13:42]
B
How would that happen?
- [13:45]
A
Well, one of the great things about Nebraska, one of the many, is that we are a unicameral, which means we're nonpartisan and our legislature is not run by a political party. And that means that unless you have aspirations for federal office, which we only have five federal seats, so, you know, not too many people are going to be having their eye on that. As a result, unless you have aspirations for federal office, you have much more autonomy here than you do in other legislatures. And so it is easier on both sides, Democrat and Republican, to stand up against perhaps what the party is pushing you to do.
- [14:30]
B
And when and how might that happen?
- [14:34]
A
Well, when to be determined, how would be my colleagues coming together talking to the speaker about how much airtime this bill is going to get and what other things are we going to schedule? What is, what is the purpose of this legislature? What do we want to accomplish?
- [14:58]
B
Senator, thank you so much.
- [15:00]
A
Yes, thank you.
- [15:10]
B
Democrat Michaela Kavanaugh was elected to the Nebraska state legislature in 2018. She plans to keep up the filibuster for about three more months. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'll be joined by Masha Gessen in just a moment. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Masha Gessen is a staff writer at the New Yorker. The author of many books on Russia and the nature of autocracy. Masha, who identifies as trans, is also a leading figure in covering LGBT rights. The other morning, I wrote Masha Gessen an email asking to talk about the arguments taking place all over, from the New York Times to Netflix to the political stage about how we talk about trans issues. They wrote back immediately and with such insight that I quickly asked Masha to come join us here. Masha, to hear many Republicans right now, you'd think that LGBTQ rights are somehow as big a threat as the new Cold War or nuclear war. I just spoke with a Democratic state senator in Nebraska and she's fighting to block a bill that would withhold gender affirming care from trans kids. And she said to me that the Republicans in her legislature aren't really that worked up about trans rights, but that these bills are designed to get airtime on Fox News and are a kind of directive from the national party. And that seems like a convenient argument for a Democrat to make in a certain way that doesn't want to make too many enemies with her Republicans. What is the motivation for DeSantis, for Trump, for the Republican Party to make this issue into something so enormous?
- [17:20]
C
I think I probably agree with the state senator a little bit in the sense that all of these bills are about signaling. And what they're signaling is the essence of past oriented politics. And it's a really convenient signal because some of the most recent, most clear and most rapid social change concerns LGBT rights in general and trans rights and trans visibility in particular. All the autocratic politics that we see around the world right now are past oriented politics. It's Putin sort of returning the great Russia. And note that Putin's war in Ukraine goes hand in hand with extreme anti LGBT rhetoric. I mean, in his last speech, he took time to assert that God is male and that the crazy Europeans and the Nazi Ukrainians are trying to make God gender fluid. I'm not kidding. Right?
- [18:19]
B
And more simply, men are men and women are women, and that's the end.
- [18:22]
C
Of the story, right? And that simplicity, right? Women are women, men are men. There's social and financial stability. There's where relevant, there's whiteness. There's a comfortable and predictable future. That's a message that says, we are going to return you to a Time when you were comfortable, when things weren't scary, when things didn't make you uncomfortable, when you didn't fear that your kid was going to come home from school and tell you that they're trans. Andrew Solomon has written beautifully about this, about the very specific disconnect and anxiety connected with having children whose identity is completely different from yours. And I think how upsetting that is.
- [19:14]
B
To so many people who. The appeal is that this wouldn't happen.
- [19:19]
C
Is what you mean, right? Promising to take that fear away, promising to take that anxiety away is truly powerful.
- [19:27]
B
Now, I think a lot of our listeners, maybe almost all of them at this point, because we're in the middle of the story of the war in Ukraine, know you at least recently, as somebody who's covering that and covering that so magnificently.
- [19:42]
C
Thank you.
- [19:42]
B
But as I more than once reminded you, the first time I ever met you or even saw you was, I think, in 1990, and you were leading or part of a gay rights demonstration in Moscow. You're a citizen both of Russia and the United States, and this has been a big part of your life. I thought maybe we'd go back even farther in time and for you to tell me about your own journey, about gender, about sexuality, and why this has become such a big part of your life, as well as your journalism and your writing.
- [20:21]
C
So professionally, I started out in gay and lesbian journalism, as it was known at the time, in the mid-80s. So obviously, because at the time it was obvious that if somebody was doing gay and lesbian journalism, they were at least queer. But, you know, growing up, I was most definitely trans identified, except I didn't have words for it.
- [20:44]
B
We're talking how old then?
- [20:47]
C
Five, six. I remember at the age of five, going to sleep in my Dzetzkisat, the kindergarten, Russian preschool, and hoping that I would wake up a boy. And I had people address me by a boy's name. My parents, fortunately, were incredibly gay. I remember that in the late 70s, so I would have been like 10 or 11 years old. They read in a Polish magazine about transsexual at that point, surgery, and told me about it. And I said, oh, I'm going to have an operation when I grow up. And they said, that's fine. And then I went through puberty and I could no longer live as a boy. So clearly. And then I was a lesbian for many, many years, or more likely, queer. But I've always thought of myself as having more of a sort of gender identity than a sexual orientation.
- [21:47]
B
What does that mean?
- [21:50]
C
It means that my, you know, we're not supposed to talk like this. In the 80s and 90s. In the 80s and 90 s, we were supposed to be very clear about sexual orientation being separate from gender and that if you were lesbian, that didn't mean you wanted to be a man. But I've always been attracted to both men and women, but I've always been very clearly gender non conforming.
- [22:17]
B
Now, one of the things that became part of a certain kind of education after a while and at a certain period of time was the following sentence. Gender is a construction. And I think most people over the centuries thought of gender as given to you by biology. What is the origins of the notion of gender as a construct?
- [22:43]
C
Actually recently, I think Judith Butler, who did a lot to popularize that idea and the idea of gender as performance, which I think is even more relevant to what we're talking about, she said fairly recently. I'm sorry, they said fairly recently in an interview that I think it would.
- [23:03]
B
Be warming for some listeners to know that you made this mistake.
- [23:06]
C
We're leaving it in. Okay, so they said that gender is imitation without an original. And I think that's a beautiful description, not only of how gender operates, but also why we have so much trouble when we do journalism, especially about transgender issues.
- [23:29]
B
What does it mean that it has no original? Some would say, well, of course there's an original. There's Adam and there's Eve.
- [23:36]
C
You know, the simple answer would be, and a lot of standard journalism will give this answer, which is, that's different. That's sex. Right. It's not so different. Sex is also not so clear cut, their biological determinants of sex that vary from person to person. And there are expectations of gender which change with time, both time, historical time, and personal time. One of the best quotes I've heard from somebody who studies gender and actually medical intervention was, look, if the gender of a 5 year old girl and a 50 year old woman is not the same. Oh, right, you're right. Right. Like we think of these things as stable and knowable, but they're not. They're actually fluid by definition. And in our lived experience, they're fluid.
- [24:36]
B
I think some people would say, you know, homosexuality is something that we have known about for many, many centuries. It's in our literature, it's in history books, but that somehow generationally trans people, with very, very rare notable exceptions, Renee Richards the tennis player, Jan Morris the writer, and it seemed extraordinarily exceptional. And then suddenly it becomes part of our modern lives. How do you Mark that historically and.
- [25:11]
C
Socially, you know, so first, I want to challenge it a little bit.
- [25:15]
B
Sure.
- [25:15]
C
There's a lot of documentation of people living as the opposite sex in various historical periods, and in fact, there's a lot of art. Depicting, especially the young woman who dresses as a man and goes to war is a plot that we see in so many different cultures. Is a woman who lives her life, a person assigned female at birth in our modern language, who lives their entire life as a man, marries a woman, and is discovered to have unexpected genitalia after death. Is that a transgender person? So part of it is not dissimilar to homosexuality, which was something that existed but wasn't talked about, and then all of a sudden, was out in the open in this country in the late 60s, early 70s. And it's also different. And this is where we start getting into so much trouble with journalistic coverage. Right. Because it is plainly knowable that so many more people, especially young people, are identifying as transgender than were even 10 years ago, even five years ago. The easiest way to try to wrap your mind around it is to pretend that being transgender is, again, something stable. Right. That being transgender today is exactly the same thing as being transgender was 20 years ago, and that we can, say, distinguish it from being homosexual, but we can't. Being transgender today is different from being transgender 20 years ago. Being transgender in a society that understands that some people are transgender is fundamentally different.
- [27:13]
B
What's the most important thing right now? What are the issues when it comes to trans people that are urgent and crucially important?
- [27:25]
C
Well, I think the bills around the country are absolutely crucially important. And part of what makes me think that is that I have seen, not just in Russia, but, say, in Hungary and in Poland, the attacks on. Attacks on LGBT people and attacks on what they call gender ideology.
- [27:54]
B
Which is what.
- [27:56]
C
So gender ideology is the specter of a totalitarian regime that will enforce gender fluidity best, as I can interpret it. But gender ideology is a term that floats around.
- [28:12]
B
This is the creation of a hysteria.
- [28:15]
C
Right. But this is a term that appears in Brazil and in Hungary and in Russia. It is heavily weaponized by autocrats. And I don't know if you remember, some years ago, there was footage of Judith Butler being attacked, I think, at an airport in Brazil. They were attacked by some person. There was some protest with placards saying, down with your gender ideology. That was actually, I think, the first time I heard the term.
- [28:51]
B
You speak of Brazil, Russia, Hungary, and. Absolutely correct. But let's move closer to home at CPAC meeting last week, Michael Knowles from the Daily Wire made a speech calling for the. And I quote, eradication. Eradication of what he called transgenderism. And he then had to clarify that it was not a call to eradicate trans people as such, but an ideology of transgenderism. Is there any distinction?
- [29:21]
C
No, of course there's no distinction. And that's why I started with Russia, because I remember back when I was stupid about 12 years ago, seeing that there was some regional bill to outlaw LGBT propaganda and thinking it was ridiculous and wouldn't apply to me.
- [29:38]
B
This is why you left Russia.
- [29:39]
C
And two years later, I was on the run from Russia because they were actually coming after my kids. So the fact that somebody in the.
- [29:46]
B
Legislature made specific mention of you.
- [29:50]
C
Correct.
- [29:51]
B
Tell us about that.
- [29:54]
C
It was a politician named Vitaly Milonov who was at the forefront of fighting the LGBT scourge, who said that all Americans want to do is adopt Russian orphans and raise them in perverted families like Masha Gessens, which was basically a sign to me that I had to get my adopted son out of the country, which also meant I had to leave the country. So, you know, when I see that transgender care, first for kids, then for adults is likely to become. Is already illegal in some states, and for adults is likely to become illegal in some states, I know that my testosterone in New York is probably not as safe as I think it is.
- [30:43]
B
Last week, both Mississippi and Tennessee banned gender affirming healthcare for trans youth. All of them. So when we talk about gender affirming care, let's be clear, what specifically are we talking about there or anywhere?
- [30:56]
C
Right. So this is actually another topic where I think that criticism of the journalism is misguided, because some of the criticism of the journalism has been, don't question standards of care. Well, it is our job as journalists to question standards of care. Journalists should absolutely question standards of care. And there's some legitimate controversy about standards of care for trans youth. What's completely uncontroversial is social transition.
- [31:26]
B
By social transition, you mean.
- [31:27]
C
I mean living as the gender that the person identifies as fully, changing name, changing pronouns, et cetera. What's not terribly controversial is hormone treatment in. In young people who have gone through puberty. And what is somewhat controversial is puberty blockers, which are, in many places, the standard of care. Which, you know, puberty blockers are exactly what they sound like. They delay puberty. And then the idea is that if. And certainly people's experiences that if they don't go through the puberty of the sex with which they don't identify, they don't grow breasts or they don't, they don't grow hair and testicles, then it will be much easier to transition when they start receiving hormone treatment. There are some studies that point to potential risks of long term, right. More than a year or so, use of puberty blockers. That is absolutely illegitimate topic of discussion. But of course, it's become very, very difficult to cover because there are bills in Texas, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas and other states that lump all of these treatments in the same bucket and seek to outlaw or have already outlawed.
- [32:50]
B
Where does surgery come in?
- [32:53]
C
Surgery is very, very rarely something that young people, people under 18 have, because.
- [33:00]
B
It seems to me that when I listen to the rhetoric of the right, you would think that surgery on very young people without parents knowing it is somehow sweeping the country.
- [33:12]
C
As far as I know, not a thing.
- [33:16]
B
I'm talking with the New Yorker's Masha Gessen. They've written for years about LGBTQ issues. And we're going to continue in a moment wrestling with trans coverage in the media, Dave Chappelle's trans jokes, and much more. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. Stick around. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. I'm talking today with Masha Gessen, who's been contributing to the New Yorker since 2014 and has been a staff writer since 2017. Alongside their coverage of Russia and the war in Ukraine and American politics, Masha has written in depth on LGBTQ issues. We spoke earlier in the program about why the American right has fastened onto gender issues with such ferocity. And politicians have introduced bills all over the country that would have drastic effects on trans children and adults. But apart from the politics, it also seems to me that many supporters of trans people, people of all kinds, often have a difficult time talking about and understanding issues of trans identity. And so I wanted to hear from Masha Gessen on that as well. Masha, we've seen any number of instances, whether it's a tumult at the New York Times about its coverage or at Netflix about Dave Chappelle and his comedy and the controversy that's caused and the upset that that caused and the reaction back and forth. How would you kind of approach talking about the conversation about trans people? What is the state of it? Where are we? Why is it so fraught and difficult and so often painful?
- [35:10]
C
I think it's so. It's so painful and so fraught because it is very difficult in discussing transness, in covering transness, to avoid Engaging with the argument about whether trans people actually exist or have the right to exist. That is deeply painful to trans people and I would imagine, to people who love trans people. Right. That's actually something that should be off limits. Right. But it is very hard because, for example, in Emily Bazelon's excellent piece in the New York Times Magazine last summer about the battle over transgender treatment, there's a quote from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay journalist, who says, well, maybe these people would have been gay if they hadn't. Maybe implying they're really gay. Right. And they're not really transgender. And that really clearly veers into the territory of saying, you know, these people don't exist. They're not who they say they are.
- [36:20]
B
So you're saying that Emily Bazelon should not have included that remark from Sullivan. I think it was a paraphrase of Sullivan rather than a quotation.
- [36:28]
C
I wouldn't have. I think that that piece would have been even better without that quote. I think that you can. You know, as journalists, we're not under obligation to quote every single view on an issue. And I think we have the right to exclude the view that somebody is not who they say they are.
- [36:50]
B
I think it's even true. Marcia, correct me if I'm wrong, that even you, as a trans person writing about trans issues have not escaped getting whacked across the head. I believe I'm right. No.
- [37:04]
C
Absolutely, yes. I was canceled by trans Twitter once. What happened? And this is another reason why it's so difficult. Different trans people have vastly different experiences of being trans. I had a whole life as a female person. Not only that, I carried a pregnancy to term and gave birth and breastfed and then years later cut off those breasts and am enjoying the effects of that. I didn't start my transition until the age of 50, and I have talked about it as a series of choices that I've made for a lot of people. And this was. You know, this is also true when we talk about sexuality for a lot of people, it really, truly never feels like a choice. It feels like an existential issue. They feel like there's a single true self. And that single true self narrative kind of dominates the trans side of the controversy around coverage of trans issues. I think wrongly so. I think it's one way of living and experiencing life as a trans person. I'm really concerned about a lot of the criticism of the coverage of trans issues, because even though I'm very unhappy with a lot of the coverage, I think that criticizing it on the grounds that there's too much of it is wrong and kind of dangerous. Right. Because the argument generally goes, there's so few trans people. Why are you obsessed with them? Well, you know, I'm old enough to have been an AIDS journalist, and I remember when the New York Times wasn't covering AIDS because there were so few people affected by it. That's a crazy reason not to cover something. Trans issues are absolutely newsworthy because it's new, Right? In the sense that the prevalence of people who identify as trans is new. It's literally news. Republicans are making political hate about it. That's news. And most interestingly, and this is where we get into why it's so difficult, being trans is unlike anything else. Being trans is not a medical condition, but it marries you for life to the medical system. It almost always, not always, involves some kind of medical intervention. You know, how do we think about the way that people make decisions? Both sides of the debate are really interested in the issue of regret and look at regret and detransition as a measure of the rightness or wrongness of particular approaches to trans treatment. Right. I hate using the word treatment. I'm always stumbling over it because it's not actually treatment, but it is treatment, but it's not a medical condition. One side, especially the opponents of childhood medical intervention for trans identified kids, say that many of them go on to have regrets. And detransition. Proponents say, no, very few of them have regret. I say, wait a second. Kids and their parents, especially teenagers, make a huge number of decisions that have lifelong implications and that are likely to result in regret. For example, for example, taking out huge student loans to go to college and being saddled with them for life, for example, joining ROTC and becoming part of the military for life.
- [40:33]
B
But is that comparable to a physical.
- [40:35]
C
Decision, for example, starting to take antidepressants or other medical treatments? I mean, you know, I teach college. Fully half of my students are in some kind of lifelong medical treatment that either their parents or they're in their parents together decided to commit to when they were kids or teenagers.
- [40:56]
B
Right?
- [40:57]
C
Not that different. Not the same. Right. And this is where coverage is so difficult because a lot of trans people, being understandably offended or hurt by some comparisons, say, don't compare. But the only way we as humans make meaning is we compare one thing to another and say, okay, it's like this in some ways and unlike it in other ways. But back to the issue of regret. Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could think of transition as a lifelong option. Some people transition more than once. Some people transition from female to male and then transition from male to female and then maybe transition again. And that doesn't tell us that their first transition was wrong any more than my living as a woman and being pregnant and having children was wrong. Although I'm sure I would also have lived a very happy life had I had the chance to transition to 20. Sure.
- [41:57]
B
We talked about the New York Times. The Atlantic also sparked a lot of backlash in 2018 for a cover article about detransitioning. Has the amount of coverage that detransitioning received in the media, has that amount of that been skewed? Has that altered your perception of how the press is covering this in general?
- [42:21]
C
Yeah, I think there's way too much focus on detransitioning. And you know what I think that's about? In part, there's this. It's what Susan Sontag called the sex exception, except it's the gender exception. We normalize regret in all other areas of life. We do things and then we regret them. We have children and regret it all the time. It's perfectly normal.
- [42:48]
B
Speak for yourself. He quickly added.
- [42:55]
C
But we think that something so catastrophic happens to a person who transitions. It's like this book a few years ago by Abigail Schreier called Irreversible Damage, Right? This idea that you do something to yourself that you will never gain back. You know, in particular, she was talking about girls making the choice to forfeit being able to bear children. Which, yes, a big thing, but also not a unique thing. Not, not, not a, you know, not a life ruining thing necessarily. But we do talk about it.
- [43:31]
B
As.
- [43:31]
C
Though of all the losses a person can have in their life, this is one that is just that we can't make up for.
- [43:37]
B
How much do you care about eruptions of conversation and Twitter furor when it comes to J.K. rowling or Dave Chappelle? Are these important moments in the development of the way we talk about trans people?
- [43:59]
C
I'm going to get myself into so much trouble. You know, I mean, Twitter fear is not generally a useful tool for sort of cultural sense. Making Dave Chappelle, to my mind, is absolutely fascinating. I've watched, I think, all or most of his trans jokes recently because I needed to discuss them with somebody and I found them brilliant and radical. The way, for example, he talks about bathroom bills is quite incredible. So basically the point that I heard him making was that he would rather share the bathroom with a man with a vagina than a woman with a penis. That is a completely next level, trans accepting kind of humor. And then I was speaking to a very prominent trans woman writer who was so upset that I liked the Dave Chappelle special because all she heard him say was that her vagina was an impossible burger. That's a quote. And, you know, I can understand that. I mean, I thought that was funny, but I also didn't take it personally. Right. You know, if we could sit down and discuss these things, especially with Dave Chappelle, I think that would move the conversation forward.
- [45:37]
B
Masha, do you think the left generally does a good job of speaking on trans issues in a way that a broader public can understand? We've been talking about CPAC. We've talked about the Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, Trump, and the rest. What about the other side of things, the Democratic Party dialogue, broadly speaking about these issues?
- [46:00]
C
You know, I want to be generous about this because.
- [46:04]
B
Why?
- [46:05]
C
Well, because I want to acknowledge the difficult situation that we're in. I'm very frustrated with both LGBT activist organizations and other prominent advocacy organizations with the very reductive ways in which they frame trans issues, like, for example, framing access to gender affirming care for trans youth as a question of suicide and survival. I mean, there's an extremely high rate of suicide risk among trans people in general, but gender affirming care doesn't actually seem to be the answer to the suicide risk. Right. Maybe more social acceptance is the answer. I think that in general, the Democratic Party follows the lead of advocacy organizations, which is actually good. The blame is with the advocacy organizations, but it's very hard to blame the advocacy organizations for not being complex and nuanced in their rhetoric when the right is on such a rampage. So that's why I want to be generous.
- [47:22]
B
We've been talking about the New York Times, but what do you hope for our own publication about as we move forward and we write about this, grapple with this, think about this. What should we be doing, and how do we get better?
- [47:38]
C
So I think one thing that I'm really happy to have been able to do is just write about trans people as though there's nothing unusual about trans people.
- [47:50]
B
Transness is almost incidental to what you're writing.
- [47:52]
C
Exactly. I guess we have. We have to wade into this controversy, which does exist. I mean, some of the criticism of trans coverage in the Times and elsewhere has said, oh, it's a manufactured culture war. Well, of course, all culture wars are manufactured, but this one is happening. Right. So we have to figure out a way to cover it. I think in a complicated way.
- [48:21]
B
Masha Gessen, thank you so much.
- [48:23]
C
Thank you.
- [48:29]
B
You can read all of Masha Gessen's reporting on Ukraine, Russia and much more@newyorker.com I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
- [48:43]
A
The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbes of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Breda Greene, Adam Howard Kalalea, Avery Keatley, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, and Ngofen M. Putabwele, with guidance from Emily Botin and assistance from Harrison Keithline, Michael May, David Gable, and Meher Bhatia. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Tsarina Endowment Fund.