Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  What the radical feminists are arguing is that the act doesn’t only blur the distinction between men and women (thereby minimizing what they see as the oppression of patriarchy and misogyny), but that its definition of gender identity must rely on stereotypical ideas of what gender expression means. What, after all, is a “gender-related characteristic”? It implies that a tomboy who loves sports is not a girl interested in stereotypically boyish things, but possibly a boy trapped in a female body. And a boy with a penchant for Barbies and Kens is possibly a trans girl—because, according to stereotypes, he’s behaving as a girl would. So instead of enlarging our understanding of gender expression—and allowing maximal freedom and variety within both sexes—the concept of “gender identity” actually narrows it, in more traditional and even regressive ways. What does “gender-related mannerisms” mean, if not stereotypes? It’s no accident that some of the most homophobic societies, like Iran, for example, are big proponents of sex-reassignment surgery for gender-nonconforming kids and adults (the government even pays for it) while being homosexual warrants the death penalty. Assuming that a nonstereotypical kid is trans rather than gay is, in fact, dangerously close to this worldview. (Some might even see a premature decision to change a child’s body from one sex to another as a form of conversion therapy to “fix” his or her gayness. This doesn’t mean that trans people shouldn’t have the right to reaffirm their gender by changing their bodies, which relieves a huge amount of pressure for many and saves lives. But that process should entail a great deal of caution and discernment.)

  The Equality Act also proposes to expand the concept of public accommodations to include “exhibitions, recreation, exercise, amusement, gatherings, or displays”; it bars any religious exceptions invoked under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993; and it bans single-sex facilities like changing, dressing, or locker rooms, if sex is not redefined to include “gender identity.” This could put all single-sex institutions, events, or groups in legal jeopardy. It could deny lesbians their own unique safe space, free from any trace of men. The bill, in other words, “undermines the fundamental legal groundwork for recognizing and combating sex-based oppression and sex discrimination against women and girls.”

  The core disagreement, it seems to me, is whether a trans woman is right to say that she has always been a woman, was born female, and is indistinguishable from and interchangeable with biological women. That’s the current claim reflected in the Equality Act. But is it true that when Caitlyn Jenner was in the 1976 Olympics men’s decathlon she was competing as a woman, indistinguishable from any other woman? Contemporary orthodoxy insists that she was indeed competing as a woman, and erases any distinction between a trans woman and a woman. Similarly, public high-school girls track or wrestling teams would have to include female-identifying biological males—even if they keep winning all the trophies, and even if the unfairness is staring you in the face.

  Most of us, however, intuitively find this argument hard to swallow entirely. We may accept that Caitlyn Jenner, who came out as a woman in 2015, always understood herself as a woman, and see this psychological conviction as sincere and to be respected. But we also see a difference between someone who lived her life as a man for decades, under the full influence of male chromosomes and testosterone, and who was socially accepted as male and then transitioned… and a woman to whom none of those apply. It is highly doubtful that a nontrans woman could have successfully competed against men in athletics in the Olympic decathlon, no less. Whether you look at this biologically (hormones and genitals matter) or socially (Jenner was not subjected to sexism as a man for most of her life), there is a difference. If there weren’t, would the concept of “trans” even exist?

  This is the deeply confusing and incoherent aspect of the entire debate. If you abandon biology in the matter of sex and gender altogether, you may help trans people live fuller, less conflicted lives, but you also undermine the very meaning of homosexuality. If you follow the current ideology of gender as entirely fluid, you actually subvert and undermine core arguments in defense of gay rights. “A gay man loves and desires other men, and a lesbian desires and loves other women,” explains Sky Gilbert, a drag queen. “This defines the existential state of being gay. If there is no such thing as ‘male’ or ‘female,’ the entire self-definition of gay identity, which we have spent generations seeking to validate and protect from bigots, collapses.” Contemporary transgender ideology is not a complement to gay rights; in some ways it is in active opposition to them.

  And the truth is that many lesbians and gay men are quite attached to the concept of sex as a natural, biological, material thing. Yes, we are very well aware that sex can be expressed in many different ways. A drag queen and a rugby player are both biologically men, with different expressions of gender. Indeed, a drag queen can also be a rugby player and express his gender identity in a variety of ways, depending on time and place. But he is still a man. And gay men are defined by our attraction to our own biological sex. We are men and attracted to other men. If the concept of a man is deconstructed, so that someone without a penis is a man, then homosexuality itself is deconstructed. Transgender people pose no threat to us, and the vast majority of gay men and lesbians wholeheartedly support protections for transgender people. But transgenderist ideology—including postmodern conceptions of sex and gender—is indeed a threat to homosexuality, because it is a threat to biological sex as a concept.

  And so it is not transphobic for a gay man not to be attracted to a trans man. It is close to definitional. The core of the traditional gay claim is that there is indeed a very big difference between male and female, that the difference matters, and without it homosexuality would make no sense at all. If it’s all a free and fluid nonbinary choice of gender and sexual partners, a choice to have sex exclusively with the same sex would not be an expression of our identity, but a form of sexist bigotry, would it not?

  There is a solution to this knotted paradox. We can treat different things differently. We can accept that the homosexual experience and the transgender experience are very different, and cannot be easily conflated. We can center the debate not on “gender identity” which insists on no difference between the trans and the cis, the male and the female, and instead focus on the very real experience of “gender dysphoria,” which deserves treatment and support and total acceptance for the individuals involved. We can respect the right of certain people to be identified as the gender they believe they are, and to remove any discrimination against them, while also seeing biology as a difference that requires a distinction. We can believe in nature and the immense complexity of the human mind and sexuality. We can see a way to accommodate everyone to the extent possible, without denying biological reality. Equality need not mean sameness.

  We just have to abandon the faddish notion that sex is socially constructed or entirely in the brain, that sex and gender are unconnected, that biology is irrelevant, and that there is something called an LGBTQ identity, when, in fact, the acronym contains extreme internal tensions and even outright contradictions. And we can allow this conversation to unfold civilly, with nuance and care, in order to maximize human dignity without erasing human difference. That requires a certain amount of courage, and one thing I can safely say about that Heritage panel is that the women who spoke had plenty of it.

  Why Joe Biden Might Be the Best Bet to Beat Trump

  May 3, 2019 | NEW YORK magazine

  If you’ve been reading the liberal media and Left Twitter the past couple of months, you’d be certain of one thing: Joe Biden is hopelessly out of touch—too old, too white, too male, too handsy, too racist, too misogynist, too unwoke, and far too compromised by his past positions to be the Democratic nominee in 2020. Josh Marshall, while liking Biden, regarded him as “unsuited to the moment in almost every way imaginable.” Jamelle Bouie saw him as a repugnant variant of Trumpism: “For decades Biden gave liberal cover to white backlash.” My colleague Rebecca Traist
er recently called him “a comforter of patriarchal impulses toward controlling women’s bodies.” Ben Smith declared: “His campaign is stumbling toward launch with all the hallmarks of a Jeb!-level catastrophe—a path that leads straight down.… Joe Biden isn’t going to emerge from the 2020 campaign as the nominee. You already knew that.” Michael Tomasky summarized the elite consensus: “Nearly everyone thinks [Biden] can’t win the nomination.”

  “Nearly everyone”—i.e., all my friends and acquaintances in the journalistic and political elite—also thought Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in to win the general election. But Biden has had an extremely good start to his third campaign for president. His announcement video was aimed at those on the left who see Trump as the tip of the spear of white nationalism, and to those swingier voters who simply want to return to normalcy, constitutional order, and, well, decency. That’s a message that rallies the base but also appeals to those who may be exhausted by the trauma of Trump. As an opener, perfect. Even, at times, moving.

  The polling is just as impressive. In three separate polls released this week, Biden’s support is somewhere in the upper 30s, and his nearest competitor is in the mid-teens (or, in one case, low 20s). In a field of twenty candidates, that’s a big share, and in Nate Silver’s analysis, “Well-known candidates polling in the mid-30s in the early going are about even money to win the nomination, historically.” Yes, Biden’s riding an announcement bump right now and his numbers may and almost certainly will fade over time. His name recognition is sky-high compared with some others, who could catch up as the campaign progresses. And he might once again gaffe his way into oblivion. But he has a big enough lead to be able to afford a certain amount of erosion.

  And his strength is drawn from two contrasting bases: older, moderate whites, and African Americans. Although his share is in the 30s overall, he has a whopping 50 percent share among nonwhite Democrats, according to the latest CNN poll. A Morning Consult poll found him with 43 percent of the black vote, including 47 percent support among African American women. Biden’s deep association with Obama gives him a lift in the black vote no other white candidate can achieve. And so it turns out that the base of the Democrats has not been swept into the identity cult of the elite, wealthy, white left. As a brand-new CBS poll finds, Democrats may prefer a hypothetical female nominee over a male (59–41 percent), a black nominee over a white one (60–40 percent), and someone in their forties to someone in their seventies. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, Biden seems to scramble these preferences.

  He’s also been able to reach non-college-educated white men in ways few other candidates could. That’s a big fucking deal in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—and if Biden can carry those states, he’ll be the next president. He’s a union man, and always has been. In what was a brilliant ad lib, Biden began a speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers by making a joke about the excesses of #MeToo—“I had permission to hug Lonnie,” the union leader, he quipped. Later, as he brought some kids onstage, he joked again, as he put his hands on the shoulders of a boy: “He gave me permission to touch him.” The crowd’s reaction both times was bellows of laughter.

  Yes, this might be seen as insensitive, or tone-deaf. It is certainly politically incorrect. But what Biden’s joke did was tell the white working class that he has not defected to the woke, white urban elites. This matters. In a recent poll, 80 percent of Americans say “that political correctness is a problem in this country.” Hostility to new speech codes from elites was one factor that drove support for Trump in 2016. Americans do not want to abolish all differences between men and women, do not support reparations, and view college campuses as strange, alien pockets of madness. Any Democrat in 2020 has to reach that “exhausted majority” who are sick of all that. Biden has already done it.

  Would upping the white working-class vote for the Dems alienate minorities, women, and high-income whites? Maybe. Charles Blow recently argued that these working-class voters are fickle, getting smaller and smaller as a segment of the electorate, and are “hostile to the interests of women and minorities.” That is, they’re deplorables, unworthy of attention. Clinton tried that strategy. And she lost the presidency because of her thinly veiled contempt for the white working classes in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Ohio. The idea that the white working class is incompatible with a multicultural coalition is what two Obama campaigns disproved.

  Biden’s positive message is a defense of the worker from the excesses of decadent late capitalism. He can effortlessly channel that and compete with Trump in the Rust Belt. Sanders can do this as well—but Bernie, for all his sincerity and authenticity, does not have the heft of a two-term vice president who has long been at the center of his party. For those who simply want to defeat Trump at all costs, Biden, for now, seems the safest bet. He can run on a platform deeply informed by the left’s critique of the market, without the baggage of left wokeness or those eager to play into the GOP’s hands and explicitly avow “socialism.”

  That’s exactly what the Trump campaign fears. And in the critical head-to-head dynamic against Trump, Biden already seems to have gotten into the president’s head. Despite what we have been told is strong internal advice from his mute dauphin-in-law not to engage Biden, Trump couldn’t help himself. When Biden got an endorsement from the firefighters union, Trump unleashed a torrent of fifty-eight retweets before 6:30 a.m., all citing firefighters’ support for Trump. The president insists that every firefighter, cop, and service member supports him. All of them. And so the president went on to attack the union itself: “I’ve done more for Firefighters than this dues sucking union will ever do, and I get paid ZERO!” After this sad temper tantrum, Biden was ready for a response: “I’m sick of this President badmouthing unions. Labor built the middle class in this country. Minimum wage, overtime pay, the 40-hour week: they exist for all of us because unions fought for those rights. We need a President who honors them and their work.” Biden 1, Trump 0.

  In subsequent remarks, Trump revealed his current strategy for reelection: he’ll tout a strong economy, fight mass immigration, and run against the threat of “socialism.” But he’s obviously terrified that Biden won’t fit easily into this AOC–Ilhan Omar rubric. He’s hoping that the left of the party will kneecap him: “I think Biden would be easier from the standpoint that you will have so much dissension in the party, because it’ll make four years ago look like baby stuff.… They want the radical left—they want the left movement—and he probably isn’t there. And I think you’re going to have tremendous dissension [sic] just like Hillary did.” So the president just told the country that his most potent opponent is no leftist. A “Trump adviser” told Politico: “We don’t think Biden can make it out of the woke Democrat primary.” Boy, are they hoping he doesn’t.

  The reason Trump is so rattled is that Biden is seven points ahead of him in head-to-head polls right now and, after four years of Trump’s assault on this country’s constitutional order, Democrats are likely to turn out in high numbers, and back whoever gets nominated. As it becomes clearer that this president regards himself as above the law, and has an attorney general who shares this view and will also target Trump’s opponents if told to, opposition could intensify. New data from 2018 show how big Democratic turnout was: 36 percent of young people voted, compared with 20 percent in 2014. Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians all saw their turnout rates soar—up 11, 13, and 13 points, respectively, compared with 2014. When these voters have a chance to get rid of Trump, whoever the nominee is, I have no doubt they’ll show up. If Biden could make some inroads with non-college-educated whites and seniors, it could be another big fucking deal. Adding Kamala Harris as his veep could unify the Democratic base behind the ticket.

  Two other points: Biden is a Catholic. Anyone who has ever been saturated in American Catholicism can swiftly recognize the figure: old-school but open, a believer in the innate dignity of every human soul, regularly at Mass, deepl
y comfortable in the world of white ethnic America, surprisingly liberal. Catholics—shockingly, given the depravity of the Republicans—split their vote last time. Move them a few points, as Obama did in 2008, and you have a real shift in our politics. And then there’s the fact that Trump’s uncanny ability to define someone with a brutal but telling nickname seems to have failed him with Biden. “Sleepy Joe”? I can detect nothing sleepy about this septuagenarian embarking on a third run for president. Biden seems to genuinely flummox Trump. Which is very good news.

  There is also, dare I say it, a deeper contrast between the two men. One is decent, kind, generous, funny. The other is indecent, cruel, miserly, and has the callous humor of a bully. There would be a moral gulf between any current Democrat and Trump, of course. But with Biden, we’re reminded of the America we thought we knew. Yes, this is partly nostalgia, but no one should underestimate nostalgia in a country as turbulent, afraid, and resentful as America right now. Biden’s moment, in my mind, was 2016, but he was prevented from competing by Clinton and Obama. But history takes strange turns. This already feels to me like a two-man race. That may change. It’s extremely early, but the odds are with Biden. And the tail winds behind him are intense.