NYT Publishes Andrew Sullivan’s Incoherent Mishmash of Anti-Trans Politics

Once again proving its commitment to anti-trans bias, the New York Times today featured a fearful, incoherent opinion piece by gay conservative Andrew Sullivan. In it, Sullivan echoes a spate of other recent NYT pieces blaming trans and LGBTQ+ activists for conservative attacks on the trans community, and takes them a step further still.

For those familiar with Sullivan’s work, none of this is a surprise. The former editor of the New Republic is known for two things: Championing same sex marriage as a conservative answer to calls for gay and lesbian equal rights and promoting discredited race science. However, the piece is useful as a way to talk about two of the most widely held ideas about the trans rights movement and how fundamentally incompatible with each other they are. First, there’s the belief that modern LGBTQ+ activists have sought to destabilize the gender binary. Then, there’s the belief that LGBTQ+ activists are unnecessarily medicalizing kids. The problem? The second idea cannot be true if you believe the first.

For an aging gay man whose brain is soaked in prejudice and fear, it’s very easy to be afraid of nonbinary people existing and kids transitioning at the same time. This fear presents them as new and strange, even though Sullivan must know that nonbinary identities aren’t new – Sullivan’s assimilationist gay politics followed on the heels of more radical activism such as that of Leslie Feinburg, a nonbinary transmasculine lesbian whose defiant Marxist politics have aged incredibly well. It’s perhaps more forgivable to think young people transitioning is new, as most recent accounts erroneously date the phenomenon to the Netherlands in the 1990s. (This is inaccurate as Jules Gill Peterson’s History of the Transgender Child showed, unearthing examples of young people being helped to transition with hormone therapy in the 1960s and 70s in the U. S.)

However, anyone who honestly investigates this topic will find that over-medicalizing gender-nonconforming people has been a concern among the LGBTQ+ movement much longer than it’s been a concern of Sullivan’s, and the push for more acceptance and understanding of nonbinary identities is part of the solution activists propose, along with the request to see trans people as their genders whether they medically transition or not.

One fact that has been habitually highlighted by anti-trans activists is the rise in young people who identify as trans. However, they typically leave out the fact that the big increases have come in young people identifying as nonbinary, or that the number of youth who also transition medically has remained well below the percentage of trans adults.

Andrew Sullivan is right that loosening stereotypes about maleness and femaleness, allowing young people to explore different modes of expression in adolescence, and responding with affirmation to the words they use to label themselves is a major social shift. It’s one that makes people uncomfortable. He grew up in a world where sex was the single organizing principle on which every social situation was built. In that world, people were taught that a near total segregation of the sexes outside of dating and marriage was natural and right and even biologically based. The fact that young people of both sexes are increasingly rejecting the rigidness of this system and looking for alternatives is destabilizing for anyone who bought into this worldview.

This new openness to crossing gender barriers, however, provides an answer to the concerns about overmedicalizing transgender youth. In his essay, Sullivan describes being a young boy of 10 who didn’t like sports being asked if he was “really a girl.” He now fears that if he’d ever been told he could be a girl it might have led him to identify that way.

It’s a fear that’s already decades out of date – today many girls like sports, many boys don’t. In some places the rules around gender have relaxed even further, to the point where a child can be free to explore hobbies, styles of dress, different names and pronouns, all without being told what that should mean. It’s the kind of change that could ensure that no one’s gender exploration would ever be medicalized again, and that only those who consistently feel the need for medical options like hormones or surgery will have any reason to consider them. It’s also the kind of change Andrew Sullivan decries as too destabilizing, too extreme, too against conservative common sense.

By putting gender-affirming care alongside efforts to weaken gender stereotypes, conservatives like Sullivan are seeking a return to having as few gender-nonconforming people as possible, with the medicalization of such people as a way to prop up the larger system of gender norms. It’s a dismal vision for anyone who loves freedom and free expression, one that represses the individual in the name of stability and tradition as conservatism always has.

Evan Urquhart is the founder of Assigned Media.