Why This Gay Rights Pioneer Opposes Gender Ideology
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This is honestly. I've been thinking a lot lately about how important it is to remember that the freedoms we enjoy aren't a given. I think about my own life, being a journalist who's free to speak my mind without fear that the government's going to throw me in jail. I'm a woman that can vote, who can own my own home, who runs my own business, and who regularly pisses off people on the internet without fear that all of those things will be taken away from me. And I'm a woman who's married to my wife.

And I introduce her as such in every context without fear of being attacked or even reprimanded. Until about two seconds ago in the scheme of human history, people would not have even imagined that these freedoms were possible. More than that, most people living in the world right now don't have the freedoms that I have. And I do not take them for granted.

And I am keenly aware of the fact that I only have them because other people that I don't know were willing to argue for them, were willing to persuade people with moral arguments, and were willing to fight for them, often by sacrificing their own reputations for the sake of people that they didn't even know. Most of the people that fought to make my life possible are now dead, but some of the people are very much still with us.

And one of them is my guest today, Andrew Sullivan. The broader argument, which is how do you combat prejudice, which isn't always the same thing as hate. I think the point I'm trying to make there is that if we, it's maybe it's emotionally satisfying for us to say we're always the victims and all these people hate us. And it is true that some people really are victims and some people really do hate. But there is enormous complexity of positions in between.

The point is how do we get across to people, to heterosexual people, our humanity and our dignity? The only way we can do that is by talking to them, by engaging them, by coming out of the closet in the first place, by carrying conversation on that is sometimes very difficult in places that are very difficult to do it. And my view is that there is no end run around that process.

You know, we know, for example, that the one indicator that will truly move someone from being vaguely supportive or hostile to homosexual equality, being actually in favor of it, is that they know and care about and humanize it because they know another gay person. That's what does it. You do it.

You might know Sully from his guest appearances on Real Time with Bill Maher, his essays in places like New York Magazine and The Atlantic, or more recently on his Substack. But what many people don't know, who are just encountering Andrew's writing, is just how important he was in the history of gay rights in America. So what do I want? Equality. Period. Period.

All that means is that as citizens, we should be as homosexuals entitled to just as much and no more and no less than anybody else. And currently, in most cases, we are. And we have the right to vote. We have as much economic freedom as other people. We generally speaking have the same amount of right to travel and so on and so forth. But in a few areas, we are not. Especially when it comes to gay people serving openly in the military. You think these people, these gay people, signing up to fight for their country are...

Queer radicals? You think they're going to join this institution to subvert it into a postmodern paradise? Are you kidding these people? All they want is to serve the country they love. We should be grateful and we're lucky to have them. Or even more controversially, getting married. Not civil unions, not domestic partnership. Marriage as the critical institution underpinning the stability of this society.

Gay marriage was something that seemed absolutely absurd when Andrew started making the case for it back in 1989. Marriage is a critical political construct because what it says about homosexuals is very simple. What it says about us is that we are not queer and that we're not arguing merely about sex. We're human beings. Three decades later, it's all but settled. What our orientation is about is about the simple concept

abatement of human loneliness. It is about the most fundamental need to be with another person and to express that love not simply as a mental and emotional thing, but as a physical and sexual thing as well. And to bring all of that together in one of the most ennobling experiences any human being can have.

Andrew is hard to put in a box. He's Catholic and he's gay. He's a longtime conservative and has been since college, but he's also maybe one of the most articulate and diehard defenders of liberalism. And like any good intellectual over the past few decades, he's created some formidable enemies and won over many, many fans.

The reason I want to talk to Sully right now is because of the debates that are heating up around the country, around sex, around gender, and especially about how we should relate to kids on both of those subjects. Andrew makes the case that those pushing for the more extreme views in this debate are actually not in sync with the ethos that animated the fight for gay rights. And he worries that they actually might be creating a backlash against

that puts those very hard-won rights in jeopardy. Stay with us.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Andrew Sullivan, welcome to Honestly. I just found out this is important to say just before we started this.

recording this that I've been pronouncing Barry Weiss's name wrong for several years that I've known her to her face. And she's only now been polite enough to mention it. She doesn't care. But anyway, for all of you listening, it's Barry. Like Barry. Pretend you're in Long Island and then everything will naturally flow. Anyway, Sully, I love your writing and your independence of mind.

and your willingness to be disagreeable has been an inspiration to me personally. And I will also add that, you know, I think about my life and the kind of rights that I'm able to enjoy. And I really see you as being crucial to having secured those rights. So before we get into the conversation, I just wanted to thank you. Well, thank you, Barry, for saying that. It's hard to explain to people today what...

those rights were. I mean, we were unable to visit one another in hospital. That's how bad it was, even when our spouses were dying. So it's a reward, Barry. It's the most wonderful thing to live through these changes and to see people reach more of their potential than they might otherwise have done. So let's go back in time to a world before COVID.

the rights that we are currently enjoying were possible or even conceivable. You were born in Surrey, England. You came of age when Thatcher was prime minister. Take us back there. When did you come out and what did it mean to be gay back in those days? Well, I had honestly never heard the word homosexual until I went to college, spoken or even written. I mean, I remember the only time I saw it in high school was on the back of a

a toilet wall, graffiti, that said, one of the things said, "My mother made me a homosexual." And underneath, someone wrote, "If I gave her the wool, would she have made me one too?" And that was the level at which this conversation was held. You were either utterly unspoken or it was some kind of joke. And so you had this in the back of your head.

I was asked by the Oxford University newspaper whether I was gay, directly out there. What year was it? 1982, because I was running for president of the union. Or maybe I had just become president of the union and I had some interview. And I remember saying, I have lots of relationships with men and women, which was almost true in as much as I didn't really have relationships with anyone. But I did have good friends. So it was only when I got to America...

And like a lot of gay men, once you leave home and go somewhere new, you get a little bit of excitement to start over. And for me, America was so bound up with the sense of liberation, of escape. I was a classic immigrant. And so I came out here just after I got here, really. So I must have been around 22, 23. So in 1982, if you kind of dodge the question to the Oxford student paper,

When did you fully embrace your identity as a gay man? And how did you get involved in what is now called the gay rights movement? Although maybe it was called something different at the time. No, it was called the gay rights movement back then. I didn't really intend to, except I did go to marches as a young gay.

I met a couple of people who were really wonderful role models. And then I was at an editorial meeting at the New Republic when we were discussing domestic partnerships and there was an argument. And I said, well, why don't we just let gay people get married? And Mike Kinsley at the time said...

That's a great, great point. He thought it would be great to screw conservatives with this argument because I could then make a socially conservative argument for gay marriage. But of course, he didn't realize that I actually meant it sincerely. And I wrote it. And in that piece, I actually used for the first time the first person plural pronoun, we.

And it was just a small little thing, but that was how I publicly sort of came out. And then when I got the big job at the New Republic, I was just asked at the end of a long conversation, "And you're gay, right?" And I said, "Yeah."

I wasn't going to lie at that point. And then, you know, the stories began. Outspokenly gay activist Andrew Sullivan has taken over the New Republic. And it sounds weird at the time, but I was actually looked around myself and realized I was the only openly gay journalist in Washington. Which was kind of staggering. The article that you referenced, the one that Kinsley got excited about, was the article that put you on my radar, although it was several years after you published it. This is 1989. Yeah.

It was called Here Comes the Groom, a conservative case for gay marriage. What was the argument that you made in that piece for gay equality and for same-sex marriage? Simply that if you ask yourself what homosexuality is, I would say it is the emotional and sexual attraction of one human being of the same sex as another.

Just as heterosexuality would be the emotional and sexual attraction of one person to another person of the opposite sex. And if you ask yourself, what is the civil institution or law most directly applicable to that issue of sexual and emotional attraction, there is no contest. It's marriage. It's so embedded that heterosexual people didn't even see it. It was so obvious to them. It was so much the background. And so never really saw...

our exclusion from this institution, which was given to our brothers and sisters and represented the meaning of our families, was a terrible denial of our humanity. And so it really wasn't

a request to be treated as another equal human being with the ability to have the same goals, even if they are banal, sensible, normie goals of just having a nice time, life together and bringing up kids together. So that was the case. My argument was that domestic partnership, these other laws, they create actually pseudo-marriage, marriage light, which gives everybody an incentive not to participate.

And in fact, it's good to commit to another person. The discipline required, the responsibility required, our conservative values, small c. And I could not see how conservatism could actually indefinitely put this off. And I argued for embracing it early.

and did so in those sort of more... There was a liberal argument for equality and a conservative argument for commitment and for connection, for us having a future reference for our emotional connections and loves and passions and lusts. Well, this is 1989, right? Yeah. A totally different universe in a lot of ways, honestly. How did people respond to this? How did conservatives respond to it? And how did...

I don't even want to say the gay community because it's gay communities. How did gay readers of the article respond to it? Well, the most common response from the right was laughter and ridicule. I actually went on Crossfire at the time with Gary Bauer. He said, this is the most ridiculous idea I've ever heard coming down the pike in a long time, Andrew. What on earth do you think about it?

And the mainstream civil rights groups were, what on earth are you doing? We're trying to get employment non-discrimination. We've done all the polling. This is way more popular than this. This will completely alienate everyone. Do not touch this. And also as that evolved, it was also part of the Clinton administration. So we had this extraordinary push and pull between those of us who were arguing about

for something like marriage equality and people were saying, "Don't mess with Clinton's support, and you're making him seem like a gay president and you're going to ruin." And that was part of what the line was from the Human Rights Campaign on was, "No marriage, don't talk about this, it's killing Clinton." And from the left, it was, "No marriage, because marriage is a heterosexist, patriarchal, evil institution that we are trying to destroy. The last thing we should do is join it,

Whereas we were, I was making another, a handful of others were making the argument that no, in fact, our right to serve openly in the military and our right to marry were not just essential rights, but they helped recast the entire conversation around gay people. It went from gay people been talking about simply having sex in dark corners to gay people having families and spouses and

and being like you. And what we try to do in this identity, if you call it identity politics, and I was very careful to try not to call it that, but insofar as it was, it was saying to straight America, this is what we have in common rather than this is what divides us. This is what we have in common. And one of the things we have in common is our family.

All gays are not born under a gooseberry bush in San Francisco and unleashed upon the world to improve people's interior decoration and conduct lovely dinner parties. No, we are born actually in Arizona, in Oklahoma, in Texas, in Tennessee right now, in all parts of this country. We are also born in Saudi Arabia. We are born in terribly oppressive and vicious regimes as well. There is no way you can...

segregate gay people from straight people because straight people give birth to us. And so the idea that we could become this separatist unit was, I think, a false direction. Now, the truth is that most of the gay rights movement at that point, having been taken over by the left, regarded that as anathema. And so there was huge, huge conflict over this. It's hard to

recall exactly how tough that was and because it was also going on at the time of AIDS emotions were incredibly high well I want to get into that tension because I find it not just historically interesting but deeply deeply relevant today which we'll get to right so it seems to me to put it crudely on the one side of the argument for gay rights you have the we're just like you

We're born in Saudi Arabia or born in San Francisco, but we're just like you. We drive minivans. We watch movies. We fall in love. We get fat on ice cream. We're just like you in the way that left-handed people are. And there may be less of us, but other than that, we're normal or as your book called it, virtually normal. And on the other side is this more

separatist argument, which is, you know, being gay is a precious distinctive identity, which, by the way, I think it is a distinctive identity. And we like what makes us different. And we don't want to assimilate into mainstream society because it will erase the very things that we treasure. And assimilating, which is what the we're just like you normal, virtually normal argument is, would mean a loss of something.

by kind of asking for entrance into this bourgeois straight institution. And I'd love for you to explain what that conflict looked like back in the days when gay marriage was something that was risable, that people ridiculed. Well, I remember one moment in this whole debate. I went to many, many places and had lots of debates, but this one was in Britain, actually. It was in London, England.

and I was introducing the book, and I wasn't allowed to introduce the book without an opponent. I couldn't be allowed to present this case straight, as it were. So anyway, I was in this debate, and at some point after the Q&A, Peter Tatchell stood up. I don't know whether you know who Peter Tatchell is, but Peter Tatchell was probably the most famous gay rights campaigner in Britain. He was one of the earliest and bravest people who opposed all sorts of

Hideous laws. And I have a great deal of respect for him, to be honest, even though I didn't agree with him. I understood him to be a man of principle. And Andrew, was he from the more kind of radical camp? Absolutely. And he had the authority of the entire gay rights movement in Britain behind him. So when he stood up in the crowd, the place went really quiet. And he said, I just want you to know that I do not support marriage. I think marriage is a heterosexual thing.

patriarchal, wicked institution that's been used to oppress people for centuries. I reject gay marriage. I reject this argument. Massive applause, standing ovation. And it slowly got down. I said, look, I absolutely understand your desire to fight marriage and to reject marriage. But you don't have that right right now because marriage has never even been offered to you.

I'm fighting for the right for you to reject it, if you so wish. At that point, gay people had no rights in their relationships. So the idea, we were just making a virtue out of this evil necessity.

If you want to be an outsider, choose it. But don't deny other people the right to have the same civil rights as other people and to have a different idea of what it is to be gay. Choose it. Gay marriage was not a way of imposing values on other people. It was offering people an opportunity to affirm their love and their relationship with each other and thereby strengthen the family and thereby help integrate gay people into society. But if you didn't want that, I wasn't going to.

Stop you in any way and in fact there is a perfectly legitimate tradition in the gay world of that Absolutely go for it. I'm again. Why did it have to be either/or? Why can't it be we have civil rights like straight people do? But straight people can also be swingers and poly and they can do all sorts of things that they want to and no one says the fact that they can get married somehow diminishes this this alternative lifestyle, of course it doesn't in some ways it makes it legit and

When you responded in that way, what happened in the room after the standing ovation for Thatchell? Well, it was interesting because there was a kind of ripple of applause.

But there was mainly quiet. But it was a good quiet. I think people were beginning to think this stuff through and realize that you didn't have to have this visceral, emotional, tribal responses to these things. Gay people were so emotionally damaged. We are still emotionally damaged. That it's kind of hard for us to see outside this. Are you with us or against us? Are you a good person or are you a good gay or a bad gay?

And my point with Virtually Normal was to say, you know, there are four different ways of approaching the politics of this. There's liberationist, there's liberal, there's conservative, and there's reactionary. There are all sorts of ways you can think about homosexuality. Stop being so defensive.

Stop being so tribal. And in a free society, if gay culture wants to evolve in certain ways, it will do so. And good for it. And it has dramatically since these things happened. And it keeps evolving. And this younger generation is doing all sorts of things. God knows what they're doing. But good for them, whatever. I mean, that's how we... These are the experiments in living that help society move gradually forward.

So again, marriage rights didn't impede any gay person's freedom. It enlarged everyone's freedom. And I think people will understand that. And the great code of the story is that 20 years later, I was in London to do a fundraise for immigration equality at the time. And Peter Tatchell showed up with his husband. And he actually said to me, you know, Andrew, I really do owe you an apology. I mean, he was awesome about it. He said, you know, you were right.

And I was too defensive to see it. Of course, we all really wanted deep down to be with someone we love for the rest of our lives. But we'd been so battered and brutalized and wounded and hurt, we couldn't take yes for an answer. And it took a while. For me, the question was not why did you bring up gay marriage, but why did it take you so long?

to get around to that. What was the damage psychologically and emotionally you held that you didn't think you were even worthy of it? And then made a virtue out of being excluded, like a fetish almost. And this is a paradox. You can't be in favor of marginalization and be in favor of equality. You just can't. There's a conflict there.

Now marginalization in some parts it means being different or creating and generating new ways of being, experiments and living. That's fine. And gay people have always done that. Sometimes with terrible consequences but sometimes with good ones. One of the things that I think is most astonishing when I think about the history of gay rights is how rapidly it won.

I was kind of going back in preparation for this conversation and reviewing, you know, 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, where were things? It was in just 2008. I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman. That Obama and Clinton... I believe that marriage is not just a bond, but a sacred bond between a man and a woman. Both, obviously, trying to win the Democratic primary, came out strongly against gay marriage.

Going as far to say that the rumor out there saying that we secretly do support gay marriage is a dirty lie. In 2003, gay sex was still illegal in a quarter of American states. And now, same-sex marriage is basically a non-issue in mainstream politics. It's a given outside of some relatively extreme religiously conservative circles.

You don't even see Republicans, you know, who are thrilled to wade into any number of other culture war issues in public talking about it. It's settled. So as someone who was sort of there at the genesis and helped create the movement, are you shocked by how rapidly and quickly it won? Did you imagine when you published that article in the New Republic that you would live to see this kind of progress? No.

Is the short answer to that, I did not. I thought of it as a thought experiment. What if? It was a way of reimagining what it was to be gay. Reimagining it in terms of love rather than just sex. Not that there's anything wrong with sex. Again, that was another misunderstanding. You can be in favor of love and being in favor of sex too and understand that there's often a tension between the two, but they're not mutually exclusive. No, I didn't think it would happen, but I...

But this is what I really did think, that we already as gay people had enormous power because we were already randomly in every single family and institution. We were already running things. We were already people in charge of institutions. We were already, all that we lacked was self-esteem. And once you gave people that sense, once you gave permission to have the self-esteem to be

a real part of society as a whole, part of your own family, part of your own country, able, for example, and this was the other great symbol, to serve your country in the military with dignity and honors and not be then fired when you got back. Once you started that, then you had someone in every single family capable of making that argument. In every single workplace. If they had the capacity to just come out. That was...

really how it happened. There's a mass persuasion intimately. We talked to each other. We actually made, it was difficult. It certainly was something no one should have had to do, but we did. We opened ourselves up to straight people, to our families. We took risks and we showed ourselves to be vulnerable and willing to

to engage in debate. I never turned down an invitation to debate. I went to fundamentalist churches. I went to Boston College. I went to Catholic institutions. I went everywhere to talk. And it's amazing what that will do. You show your opponents a minimum amount of respect. Immediately, they up their game. Immediately, you started getting into a non-zero-sum engagement in which everyone begins to win. And so I think that's the key to it,

that we were able to persuade from the inside because we already had the power. And so it was quite quick. It was all a matter of ourselves. I remember this is the story. I was invited when I became editor of the New Republic, a few gay rights groups thought I should be invited to go to give talks, which they subsequently realized was not the greatest idea. And this was at the Human Rights Campaign. And I was walking in to give this talk in Washington, 1991.

Outside the human rights campaign dinner were these big posters saying no cameras allowed. No one wanted to be actually photographed.

at the Human Rights Campaign dinner, which of course was never called the Gay Rights Campaign, because it too, its missives were originally posted and mailed in brown paper packaging so you couldn't tell what was inside. That's the level of it. And I gave a talk that way. And at some point in the talk, I looked around the room and I said, I just saw these posters outside. How many of you here are out to your friends and your family and your co-workers?

and only about a third of the people there put up their hands. And I said, "How many of you are not?" And another third to a half put up their hands. And I said to those people, "Well, why don't you go home now and come back when you've done something for gay rights?"

Which is one reason I never got invited back. But my feeling was if you can't put your own self on the line, why are you writing these big checks for someone to do your work for you? People can smell that cowardice a mile away. Go out there and make your case. And so there was also this imperative to be out, imperative to be visible.

whether as a gay person or as eventually as someone with HIV, that these things had to be, you had to put yourself on the line in order to show that you cared and you meant what you were saying. You weren't just posturing. But I also think that there's something in coming out

you were speaking before about like the intimacy of it, that there's a gay person in every family and every community and every friend group of being able to look across the table at someone who you know to be just like you. And it kind of makes your argument for itself, the we're normal just like you. And when I look back, you know, there are all of these flashpoints that

I think about and that I'm sure historians think about Ellen DeGeneres, of course, coming out as gay, Will and Grace being on TV. But what they all sort of have in common is the normalcy argument, right? No one, it's not, you know, it's not the drag parade. It's not the pride parade, frankly, that makes the case. It's that

It's your brother. It's your sister. It's your cousin. It's your friend. It's your boss. It's your employee. So I guess I'd love for you to reflect, Andrew, on how your side of that debate inside the gay rights movement won. Well, because even though we were profoundly opposed by the human rights campaign and other gay groups and were loathed by the left,

We had a better argument. We just had a better argument and we made it better than the opponents. And we had a court case in Hawaii in 93, which is crucial. Then we had the Defense of Marriage Act. By that point in 1996, you couldn't run away from this fight.

The Democrats has always wanted to duck it, pretend it's not happening, it's not really here. And I remember the head of the human rights, I went in to testify. I was in front of the Congress and the head of HRC said to me just before we went in, we were both on the floor of the palace, he said, God, this is hell week. We're going to lose so badly. And I'm like, what do you mean? We are debating our right to marry in the halls of Congress.

Five years ago, this is unthinkable. Look at how far we've come. We can now make this argument right in the public square and force people to talk about it. That is huge.

If you believe in what we're doing, every time we raise this, we're going to win. Because our arguments are stronger. I could put out an anthology which had all our arguments, but also included all the best arguments against. That's self-confidence. That's saying, we're not afraid of debate. We're not going to yell at people and call them bigots the minute they say they don't agree with us. We're going to say, why? Show us. Explain it. And they couldn't. And that was the key.

You know, people talk about liberal democracy as if it doesn't work. And by liberal democracy, I mean making arguments in the public sphere and changing people's minds and thereby changing people's laws. Well, my life here, and this is why I love being an American, is proof that it still works. Absolutely proof. Do not give up on it. The truth is it's hard because you have to put yourself in really difficult situations.

You actually have to put yourself in the hands of your enemies, as it were. You have to open your heart in ways that's going to make you vulnerable, easily picked off. And that's where the change happens. And if you compare that to the atmosphere today, where everybody is so closed off, like so tightly wound and controlled and only aiming to hurt the other side,

No progress comes from that. And that is trying to find a way to get from that atmosphere to where we were and to try and persuade people that, in fact, if you care about these things, you should care about the methods because your methods never worked. They're still not working. And, in fact, in my opinion, they're beginning to create the first real backlash.

to gay rights and trans rights that we've seen, a real one that's not just simply panic and fear, that has some concerns about it. And I just want us to chill and remember how we got here. We'll be right back with more of Andrew Sullivan. Stay with us. Sully, that is a perfect segue to where things stand today.

So recently, the author, our friend, fellow gay rights activist Jonathan Rauch published an article where he said, until fairly recently, like most gay Americans, I've seen the trans movement as an extension of our own. I believe trans people deserve equality in all meaningful respects. This notion, right, of seeing the trans movement as an extension of the gay rights movement has changed, right? It's really something that's up for debate.

And I know you feel the same way, as do many people who took part in the fight for gay equality and for same-sex marriage. So I want to start by asking why. What makes this movement, which some people call gender ideology, but sort of resists being categorized, what makes it different? Well...

If you look at what I was arguing, what many of us were arguing on gay questions, a matter of civil rights, the right to marry, the right to be in the military, the right to at some point be protected by broad anti-discrimination laws. Those are our understanding of civil rights. Well, the truth is that's all done. The Bostock decision, and it kind of blows my mind that I've never heard a trans activist say,

hail the Bostock decision. I've never seen them boast about it. I don't hear it front and center. The Bostock decision embedded the rights of trans people in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. There are some minor things they could probably improve on it, but as a core reality, it's over. The civil rights question is done. Meaning you can't be fired from your job because you're trans, etc.?

And you can marry who you want, and you can, thank God, after Trump, you can also serve in the military. All the core issues that gay people fought for are already won for trans people as well. It was only recent. So you can see why, in fact, because broadly speaking, the question of people behaving in ways that is not usually associated with their sex, namely sexism,

being attracted to someone of the same sex, or a very different experience, feeling that you're a different sex than you present as, or than your body tells us you are, those have a sort of rough,

a similarity on the outside. And certainly trans people definitely sought refuge among gay people too, although there was a lot of bullshit around that too. Stonewall, for example, was very not trans-friendly. And there's always been some tension between gay men and trans women too on that front. But nonetheless, broadly speaking, agreement. Because again, the idea of being against trans rights is appalling me.

I think it's a genuine identity that people do not have control over. I think that they absolutely have a right to be who they want to be and to do what they want with their own bodies as adults and to organize and live freely and openly. But subsequently we realized that in fact what's been driving this is not a liberal civil rights question because that's been resolved. It's a very illiberal idea that

that we are going to use trans people as a way to detonate the sex binary altogether. So we can unwind, unwind sex differences, unwind the differences between men and women, because part of the project of the Foucaultian left is to deconstruct everything to maximize human freedom.

So deconstruct the nuclear family, deconstruct marriage, deconstruct the military. Don't join them. This tension was always there. And I think what's happened is that as those of us basically succeeded in the gay rights movements, we didn't think there was anything more to do. We went on with our lives. But that just leaves some of these causes able to be cannibalized and taken over by extremists. And that's what has happened, I think.

And part of it is saying, and this is the core issue at hand, it's not about do you support trans rights? It's not. I support them up the wazoo, so to speak. It is a question of whether we are able to define reality. Whether biology actually is an important issue in your sex. Now this wouldn't have been thought controversial 10 minutes ago. Quite obviously your biology determines your sex.

And when you really push some of these activists, they will almost concede that. But what they want to say is that sex is a choice. And they do that by conflating sex with gender and then unraveling every legal and constitutional means to distinguish between men or women as biologically different people. And that is a totally different debate than trans rights. That's a question about reality.

That's a question about whether you are a postmodernist interested merely in the invention of identities or whether you are a liberal that wants to append rights to individuals and understand those individuals as being partly biological beings. That's the conflict. I think a lot of people who are just straight, normie people going about their day and are like, LGBTQA+, it's one thing. How are you sitting there, Sully, thinking,

saying that they're separate, right? What makes the LGB different from the TQ? Here's a very fundamental way. The challenge for a gay kid, for example, let's say a gay boy, is to own his own sex, to believe the fact that he's in love with other boys does not make him any less of a boy. It's incredibly important. A trans child has to be actually compelled by a desire to disown sex

their own sex becomes something else entirely. Those are two radically different psyches and psychological formations. They really are. And a lot of gay boys and lesbian girls

Often have, because you will often have a range of gender expression. Little boys will play with dolls sometimes. They will not be so much into rough and tumble sports, although some gay boys are. And again, they need to be understood as well. There are plenty of gay boys that are absolutely great at sports and hide there in their machismo, as it were. But others have slightly what you would call

gender non-conforming, I hate these words, but it basically means you're not a stereotypical boy or a stereotypical girl. And they're being told, you know, maybe that makes you actually not gay, but trans. And of those kids that feel this way and have this gender non-conforming capacity and predilection, almost all turn out to be gay in adulthood.

So the question simply is, in general you'd say, well, let them all sort it out. Let them grow up and figure out who they are and who cares. But when there is a movement coming in to say, if you are not stereotypically acting as a girl or a boy, you could be trans, and you're telling people this at the age of three, four and five,

You're telling kids at a very impressionable age all sorts of incredibly confusing things that are going to particularly, it seems to me, destabilize a gay boy or gay girl's psyche. So that is the conflict.

And it's always been a conflict. And if we just had the civil rights movement, trans people would already have civil rights, we'd be fine. But we don't. We have something else, a much more pernicious product of critical gender theory, critical queer theory, which really doesn't believe in biology at all, believes biology itself is a function of white supremacist culture, that really believes the sex binary itself is a function of white supremacist culture, that previous civilizations didn't have it, which is of course untrue.

But it's smuggling itself in under the guise and in the language of the next, you know, the next civil rights movement.

And I think that is why... But we should be inclusive. But that is why I think it will sound maybe strange to certain people who don't follow this debate to suggest that it's not just an extension of the kind of progress that you have devoted so much of your life to fighting for. Well, here's the thing. If sex is replaced by gender and gender is chosen, then what happens to homosexuality itself?

what happens is it disappears. It becomes being homogendered, which is how they're now rewording it, which means you're just attracted to this sort of concept of masculinity. And if homosexuality is the attraction to the same sex, you get rid of sex, turn it into gender, then it's perfectly possible for a gay person to be gay and have sex with a woman as an expression of gayness.

No, I'm not kidding. I know you're not. And if you then say, I'm only attracted to men with dicks, to put it bluntly, in other words, to men, they'll say you're a bigot. A bigot. Yeah, it's very, very strange because this claims to be a movement that is about radical inclusion and progress. But in my experience, it is...

it is reifying some of the most sort of retrograde ideas that there are about gender and in a lot of my experience, especially about women. That to be a woman means to be submissive. That to be a woman means that you wear heels and get a blowout and, you know, a facelift or whatever the most extreme stereotype is. That rather than the progressive argument being,

You're a girl and you're a tomboy? Great. You're just as much a girl as the one who likes to play with Barbies. It's instead saying, if you're a tomboy, well, maybe you need a mastectomy. Maybe you're actually a boy inside. A little story from my childhood. I've told this before, but forgive me. I was at my grandmother's and my grandparents' for Christmas. I was like eight. My brother was four. I was sitting around reading a book.

My brother was jamming a toy truck up against the wall, making a dent into the... And my grandmother looked at my mother and looked at us two boys and looked at my brother and said, well, at least now you have a real boy. That's what a gay boy hears all the time. Back home in the car...

My mother said to my dad, what was your mother talking about? What does she mean he's not a real boy? Do you mean you think he might be blah, blah, blah? I'm listening in the back because my mother has no filter mechanism. And my dad said, well, I don't know. All I can tell you is he's 100% male. And I can't tell you what that meant to me to be affirmed as a boy. However, I wanted to express that.

Whether it be painting flowers, whether it be writing poetry, translating Latin, or playing rugby. They were all manifestations of being a boy. And when teachers are telling me when I'm eight years old, you know, you could be a girl actually, because you like poetry and you seem to be too attached to your books and you're not into rugby. What would that do to my self-esteem? And if that could lead to my taking irreversible decisions about my body,

then that's an incredibly dangerous thing to do for a child. And that's what scares me. I wouldn't mind at all if this weren't for some children a dead end before they even hit puberty. When I say a dead end, I don't mean a place where they can never get back to. So, for example, if you are a prepubescent boy...

and they diagnose you as trans or you diagnose yourself as trans or you keep insisting you're a girl and they decide to put you on puberty blockers and then in due course they put you on cross-sex hormones to turn you into a woman before the testosterone of your natural puberty would hit you, you get the estrogen. One of the side effects of this is that the boy will never develop genitals as a man with all the sensitivity and that means they do not have material

to turn into a clitoris. So this boy will not only be sterilized his whole life, he will never experience an orgasm as a woman. Now I don't know how you explain to a nine-year-old you'll never have an orgasm when they don't even know what an orgasm is. Now maybe that is a complete outlier, right? Maybe that's the most extreme case. And if I could be totally reassured that this is happening only to a few under very careful conditions,

Kids who genuinely absolutely are trans and need this, I would be fine. I mean, I'd leave it to the parents and the doctors. In general, that's my impression. But when this becomes a craze, when it becomes some sort of ideological achievement to transition children, when they're bragging about it, and when we have no real restraints on it, so far as we could see until recently in these red state laws,

And when, in fact, the Biden administration is affirming the notion that you should immediately move trans kids, people, gender dysphoric kids, onto the gender-affirming path, notice that what gender-affirming actually means is sex change. Yeah. And again, the way they use words, if you simply put in all the stories about the... Sex change for kids. If you just said sex change for kids, for people below puberty, basically 98% of the country would say, what?

But when you say gender-affirming care, and then when you call it just health care, we're going to deny health care to trans kids? Are we going to stop giving them penicillin? I mean, the sheer lies about this, you know, it's staggering.

I want to have a deeper conversation about the deeply complicated, disturbing sometimes, issue of kids and medicalization in a minute. Before we do that, I want to go back to something else that Jonathan Rauch wrote in that essay.

Because I thought it was sort of profound. You talked about how many of the arguments that were once made against the gay rights movement are now being made against trans rights activists. And here's what he wrote.

There, well, you get the idea. Seeing the many parallels, he writes, makes me humble about getting the trans issue wrong.

I really admire that kind of intellectual humility, and I think it's worth us taking a beat and just sitting with that for a second. When you see that list from Rauch, is there any part of you that says, maybe I'm getting it wrong? Well, we have to distinguish, it seems to me, between several different issues. And one is, and you've got to focus on each one in particular. The question is, what's the best thing for a trans kid or a gay kid? And how should we navigate that? The second thing is,

What are the motivations of people who are opposing these practices? Some of them I think are completely legitimate and need to be supported. I think it's a legitimate concern for a parent to say, you know, I don't want my three-year-old being told that you can be a boy or a girl or both or neither or something else entirely. I just don't think that's quite appropriate. And I'm quoting exactly from a book in the curriculum. However...

Then you get into this point where you're dealing with teachers teaching children and suddenly the opposition comes in and starts deploying these ancient ugly tropes about gays recruiting, grooming. And that's where we're stuck, Barry. I mean, so we can oppose this, but if we do in our current polarized context, we're going to also be empowering some ugly shit. Mm-hmm.

And that's always terrifying. And if you are a gay person and involved in this and trying to figure this out and not just ducking into tribal loyalty, you've got to call this stuff out, it seems to me, early, quickly and decisively and say this is not the right way to do this. And I try to do that with this. And I've been incredibly discouraged by people like Chris Ruffo or Jim Lindsay saying,

who've just jumped on this, teachers raping kids or teachers teaching kids in order to seduce them, groomers, all the rest of it. And that stuff, you just realize, Jesus, so where do I go? I'm stuck between your child who's acting in ways that are not exactly gender conforming, is probably trans and we need to talk them into transitioning or we need to talk to them about these things or...

All teachers teaching any kids about homosexuality or gender identity are obviously attempting to rape them. And I don't take eyes at those positions. I'm sorry. And at some point you're asked, you know, so whose side are you on? And you basically get to choose. You get to choose the liberal left or you get to the liberal right. Yeah. And what do you choose?

You choose your own position. Look, you're a writer. You're a thinker. You explain the case. Now, I was making the case for gay marriage in 2004. The Republican Party, Karl Rove, decided to use that issue to turn Ohio around very consciously.

So I had to go to war with the Bush administration, which I did dutifully. But that point is that these things will happen. But did I say, "Oh, forget it. Let's not stick to our guns on marriage"? No, this is regrettable, but if we keep our arguments straight, we'll get to some good resolution at some point. But morally speaking, you're also a moral actor, and so you have to feel conflict here.

And with someone like DeSantis, it seems to me there's a couple of things. One is that he made a move to write this bill. The bill is not written anywhere near as well as it could be. Seems to open all sorts of doubts about how it could be abused and used, although we'll see in due course. We're talking here about what's been labeled the parental rights in education, but the left has called don't say gay.

But that's, I mean, I don't even want to repeat that because it's just not true. It's about instructing children between the ages of three and eight in gender identity and homosexuality, which in this case means queer theory, I'm afraid.

But he passed it, right? So now we can see whether there will be lawsuits, what actually happens, et cetera, and so on. But if most people were asked to worry about we're no longer teaching gender identity to eight-year-olds, they'd be like, I don't really care, but that sounds like a good idea. And that's what the polling kind of says. But then having won, he then goes after Disney and ups the ante on the grooming rhetoric, just behaving like a thug.

behaving like Victor Orban or Donald Trump saying, I don't like this corporation because you disagree with me on this public policy, so I'm going to make life difficult for you. That's not, certainly not conservatism as it's been properly understood. It's not classical liberalism. It's culture war, illiberalism. Now, I know we are stuck in this position where we have to pick between one illiberalism or the other, and there will be moments when we can't duck it. So we have to make a choice when we vote.

When we can articulate a third position, we should. In fact, if we do not, we're going to lose our liberal democracy altogether. So there are obviously some people out there who are just straight-up bigots against trans people in the way that there are just straight-up bigots against gay people. They're grossed out by gays, and they're equally grossed out, or maybe more so, to know that a woman in a dress might have a penis underneath.

But when I see many of the people in public life that get labeled as anti-trans, including, of course, most famously J.K. Rowling, but lots of my lesbian heroes, including people like Julie Bindle or Kathleen Stock that was run out like a witch from the University of Sussex for suggesting that biology is real.

You know, including us, frankly, you know, we're saying, no, no, we're not anti-trans. We believe that trans people deserve equal rights, dignity and respect. What we're saying, though, is that gender and sex aren't simply chosen identities, that there are meaningful differences between men and women.

And those differences aren't simply social constructs created by a racist patriarchy to oppress anyone who isn't born white, cisgendered, and male. And the frustrating thing to me is that that, it's not even nuanced, that like huge distinction, because of course many of the people that get labeled anti-trans are themselves gay, gets completely lost and

And all of those people who are saying, no, no, no, equal rights, equal dignity, just acknowledge that biology is real and that science is real. All of that gets sort of whitewashed with, nah, you're a bigot. You know, in the same way that arguing against defund the police gets you accused of being an apologist for systemic racism. Yeah. I used to say,

And I wrote this in Virtually Normal all those years ago that we've got to get past one side yelling pervert and the other side yelling bigot. Because first of all, it's incredibly boring. And secondly, it's emotional, yes. And in a way that's not necessary. What I worry about with someone like Joe Biden or Jill Biden or Jen Psaki is that they actually have never even talked.

dealt with the questions at hand. They've never even presented with the possibility that there could be a debate about this.

But, Sally, what's so strange about that is that so many other progressive countries, as you know, countries like Norway and others that have gone down the path that America's currently on, are now radically reversing course because the data simply isn't there that these kind of medical interventions, what has been framed as gender-affirming care by the administration, actually makes a difference in the mental health outcomes of people.

gender dysphoric children. You have to remember that in many ways there are no long-term studies on some of this stuff yet. So to some extent, we're experimenting on children.

Insofar as these experiments have continued on a large scale in Western European countries, there has been real pushback now from the leaders themselves, also here from trans surgeons and trans specialists who are alarmed at the sudden massive increase in particular teenage girls showing up wanting to become men. And this doesn't seem to be comport with historic standards or the possibility that there are people who've been trans who now feel more self-confident coming out, which would be a wonderful thing.

But this sudden onset in early teens, only among girls, very weird statistically. You're just like, what's going on here? And it seems to me our first instinct should be first do no harm. And the way that it's been set up as a binary, do you hate these kids or do you love them? Do you want them to live or do you want them to die? To die. To die.

I'd rather have a live girl than a dead boy, as they sometimes say. And I'm just like, that is certainly not the right context in which to address that.

the obvious mental health needs of a teenage girl or boy dealing with their own gender dysphoria, which can be a manifestation of a multiple number of causes and origins, whether that be domestic disturbance in their own household, whether it be autism on some level, whether it be depression, whether it be all sorts of things that have got into their heads, whether it be a social contagion, which can exist. Who wants...

to misdiagnose a trans kid because we're being too expansive. Who wants to turn a gay kid to change their life in a way that they will in the future regret forever? We really, really want to be careful when we are permanently changing the physical nature of people's bodies. And I also have just a deep sense, and maybe this is my Catholicism speaking, I don't know, but the body is the body.

It's not something we can just re-engineer in a postmodern way. Somewhere underneath all this is some kind of rebellion against nature itself, which I think is partly a function of our distance from natural law, from our distance from a sense of solid biology into this postmodern world where everything can be invented, everything can be dismantled, everything can be recreated.

And that's why you have to focus on the language also. I mean, here's, let me give you one thing that upsets me. And I probably, there are two points here. One is the individual gay people being called LGBTQ. Like Pete Buttigieg said, you're LGBTQ, aren't you? He's like, yes. No, you're not. You're a G. You're a G. You can't be a T or an L. These things are literally oxymorons.

So why are you using this ugly word when you could just say gay man, which actually has two vowels you can work with? And the answer is because they're deliberately changing language to enforce changes without debate, like suddenly changing it from sex change to gender-affirming care. You don't think that matters?

And when I listen to the ACLU or I listen to the Biden administration, I just hear this linguistic abuse constantly to propagandize people, not to actually air the issues involved, but to make any dissent indistinguishable from hatred. Again, this word hatred. If you ever meet a young kid who is dealing with gender dysphoria, the only reason

Only moral position is compassion and empathy and support. Whether that kid is going to be gay or whether that kid is going to be trans, obviously... Now, being gay is not, I don't think, for most people, anything like as traumatizing as it is to be trans. And that's the other thing I think we need to be clear about. You know, you can talk about gay kids. They will be okay.

They will have scars because we'll always have scars because when you're a tiny minority, when you're a kid, it's always tough, right? So that's going to happen. But they'll be all right. The trouble with the trans kids is that if we intervene too soon, they're not going to be all right. And even if we don't, they're not going to be all right. This is a very difficult, challenging experience. I loved, you know, the end of that Dave Chappelle thing where the trans woman just simply said,

Can you just acknowledge that this is a human experience? And we absolutely should. And compassion does not mean railroading people into some sort of ideological position. It does not mean

prematurely rushing kids into transition. It means concern and love and care and support their whole lives because this is a struggle every day for a lot of trans people. There is no most, many honest trans people will tell you there's no sudden day when I wake up and everything is all right. And it's tough. And the idea that those of us who are concerned about excessive medicalization of trans children

or concerned that we don't give up the idea of biological sex altogether because that will have repercussions in ways we don't fully understand and don't want. The idea that we somehow feel hatred or contempt for these children is just so disgusting and untrue that one doesn't even know how to counter it. And yet it is the most common tactic. You hate.

And the fact that you can't even begin to have an argument without being told you hate all trans people, you harbor hate, it's just, no, we don't. And if you see the world in that way, we're never going to have any kind of civil agreement or conversation. One of the things that is, you know, it's one thing to sort of anecdotally know people who

transition or parents that are dealing with kids that identify as trans. If you look at the data, though, it's just unbelievably striking. You know, in the past decade, the number of young people seeking treatment for gender dysphoria spiked by 1,000% in the U.S. In the U.K., jumped by 4,000%.

The largest youth gender clinic in Los Angeles where I now live, there were 1,000 patients in 2019. In 2009, they saw about 80. Now, some people look at those numbers and they say,

you know, just like with gayness, it's not that all of a sudden people turn gay. It's just now that they're, now they're visible. It's just become safe to be out and be gay. And a lot of people who look at those numbers say those trans kids were here all along. They just now have permission to seek the care that they need. How do you respond to that argument?

Some of it's true. One thing I would say, there's a kernel of truth there. There's no question that it must be easier for a trans kid to acknowledge their transness. On the other hand, it's also true that if you're telling three-year-olds that they can choose whether to be a boy, girl, neither, or something else entirely, and they decide they want to be a fish or some other, then you're going to introduce into the minds of children all sorts of

of options that will confuse and bewilder them and be difficult for them. So some of this is suggestible to some extent, and that's what concerns me with young children. They're very suggestible. I mean, that's why Catholics get them early. We indoctrinate them very young.

But we don't do it via the public school system. We do allow parents to choose to do that. And I just think we want to be careful as not to make a mistake. Now, maybe you could argue this is the way things happen. They're pushing things too far. Things will come back. We will find some balance eventually. And I pray that is the case. And in fact, I think we're beginning to see that happen, that we are beginning to see medical specialists with people who pioneered these surgeries

really concerned because what you've had here is not just simply medical advances. You've had a medical advance fueled by an ideological revolution. And that is what's dangerous. And so, for example, they're also, I mean, they actually describe giving children who are gender dysphoric, contemplating being trans, broad mental health support to explore other possibilities before they, they're calling that conversion therapy now and trying to ban it.

And that is my concern. As I said, with gay kids, you just let it be because we don't need medicalization. Well, there's something also kind of strangely homophobic about that. There was this piece that I just read in Newsweek by a young gay man who wrote, activists who favor medical interventions often ask these parents a morbid question. Would you rather have a trans daughter or a dead son?

But he wrote, the real question should be, would you rather have a trans daughter or an effeminate gay son? I fear that for many, if they were honest, the answer would be the former. There's something weirdly homophobic, actually, inside this ideology. Yes. It's there. It lurks around. And suddenly, occasionally, it's very clear. So, for example, as a gay man, if I do not want to have sex with a trans person who has a vagina...

I am exhibiting bigotry around genital preference. Now, the last time I was told I should try and have sex with someone with a vagina was by a priest. And now I'm being told it by a queer activist. Notice they have an idea of how you should act, and it includes controlling your most intimate sexual choices. Now, sorry, but get out of my movement.

The movement for gay rights is about also our ability to choose sex in whichever way we want. And for gay men to be called bigots by their own movement because we don't want to have sex with people with vaginas is an outrage. It's a fucking outrage. We wouldn't accept this argument from the religious right, and we shouldn't accept it from the queer left. And our position is let everybody do what they want. And look, if a gay man can't say...

I want to have sex with other gay men, I want to have sex with men, then what can he say anymore? And what has happened to us that this has become a contentious point? It's more worrying for lesbians in a way because there's this, again, if you're taught that this is an evil patriarchy and you're a butch dyke, you know, the temptation to become a man seems to be quite powerful, right?

elements of this which are really homophobic in a way. And I don't think gay people should abandon our ownership of our own bodies in every single respect, and certainly not gay men. And I honestly believe that that's a pretty overwhelming majority of gay men will believe that. But again, what happens is small activist groups take over these organizations and

And most gay men are funding them and just don't want to get into hassle with all this. They want to be on the right, quote, unquote, right side of history. So in other words, an organization like the Human Rights Campaign, which once fought for gay marriage, once it won gay marriage, it didn't, you know...

Close up shop because it, yeah, it has its whatever it is, you know, tens of millions of dollars in budget and all of these employees. And it had to go sort of like, you know, a zombie to find a new cause. And oh, whoops, here's the new one using the same play. And you and also the astonishing amount of money from foundations, from progressive groups that goes into this. I mean, I'm kind of astonished that.

at how fascinated so many straight people are with advancing trans rights. It's become almost, you know, like a Ukraine flag on your Twitter bio. It's a sort of demonstration, either he/him or your pronouns. It's a kind of virtue signal that you are post-binary sex.

One of the things that disturbs me about where we're starting to see the backlash to this is not in suggesting, hold on, slow down, let's make sure kids have the right mental health support. It's punishing parents for making choices that certain states see as being terrible. Let me give you one example. In March, the Idaho House of Representatives passed legislation to make it a crime punishable by life in prison.

for a parent to seek out what has been called, obviously we've disputed this, gender-affirming care for their transgender child. There was a directive in Texas from the governor there, Greg Abbott, who ordered child welfare authorities to conduct prompt and thorough investigation of any reported instances of minors undergoing elective procedures for gender transitioning as child abuse. So the thing that I find...

deeply screwed up here is on the one hand, do I think 15-year-olds should be opting to get mastectomies? And no. On the other hand, do I think parents who have been told by a political establishment, by a culture, by their medical providers, that if they don't give this to their 15-year-old daughter, she might kill herself?

that we would then punish those parents seems to me deeply, deeply retrograde. And I imagine we're going to be seeing more along these lines. I agree. I've opposed all these laws. I oppose the Florida Parental Rights Act because of its vagueness and its invitation to abuse. And just as people like Jen Psaki have never even contemplated, I think fully, the arguments against her position. So in these red states,

galvanized by Fox News and by the internet, the notion that there is actually a possibility of a genuinely trans child and a parent doing their best is something they've also never really fully conceived of. I think the conservative position, my position, is the government should not be intervening drastically in these medical decisions, should offer some broad parameters for care and at some point let it go. I don't want...

government to be coming in and dictating what is taught in schools. I don't want government to be coming in in a way that is obviously driven by populist instincts, not by a democratic process via school boards, via curriculum assessments and all the rest of it. And I don't want state governments banning healthcare or worse, applying criminal penalties for some people's genuine healthcare.

Even though, at the same time, we see what I think is quite self-evident overuse of this stuff right now. Now, the way that in a liberal society that sorts itself out is lawsuits. And one way of pushing back against critical race theory is not banning it, but insofar as it ever violates the civil rights of someone, to prosecute it under the Civil Rights Act of 1964. You could prosecute...

lawsuits against doctors who rushed a child into transition and I have a feeling that we're going to see lots of them. And those lawsuits will eventually then trickle down and make the private sector much more careful about what they're doing.

Okay, so you don't want the government coming in. And yet when I read from you about what exactly is being taught, I desperately want it to be stopped. This is how I explain what being transgender means to kids. When a baby is born, the doctor looks at the baby and says, "Oh, this is a little girl," or, "Oh, this is a little boy." And sometimes the doctor gets that wrong. So when I was born, the doctor looked at me and said, "This is a little girl." And so everybody thought that I was a little girl.

But when I got older, I realized, wait, that's not actually who I am. And when I was able to tell people, I said, I'm not a little girl, I'm a little boy. And that just means that I am transgender. That who everybody said that I was isn't actually who I am. And I just had to explain that to people. Just as one example, in an essay you published recently,

you explain what's being taught in some public schools around the country when it comes to sex and gender, not just in the elite private schools that we've been reading about for a while. Hi there, everyone. My name is Brennan Hamm, and I'm the health education specialist and trainer for Seattle Public Schools. I prefer my name to pronouns, but anything said with respect is great. So they, she, and he all work for me. And one of the examples you use is a video that's being shown in the Seattle Public Schools. And in it, a man reads through this book called Introducing Teddy.

The full title is Introducing Teddy, a gentle story about gender and friendship. It's on a list of recommended books by the Human Rights Campaign and President Biden. Now take a look at this picture. We see here on the cover of this book a really sad-looking teddy. This teddy has a little sad face and has a bow tie. We see a mirror here, and then we see a teddy with a bow and a really big happy face.

So what do you think this story might be about? Sully, walk me through this video and the ways that it exemplifies problems that you think a lot of parents are responding to. I think the core message of the book, and to some extent there's plenty in these books that's good. Now before we begin, I would like to cover some important words that'll really, really help us understand this story better. Now the first word is acceptance.

Like accepting other people who are different, like someone comes into school one day and they're wearing a bow, not a bow tie. Yeah, don't bully that person. Let's accept it. The second word is compassion. Insofar as these books teach that kind of tolerance, I think they're great. They're kind of generic and Sesame Street-y and all the rest of it, but fine. And now that third word is gender. Take a moment and think, what does gender mean? Where have you heard it before or seen it? But insofar as they're telling children...

That third word, gender, means a person's feeling about being either a boy or a girl, neither, both, or somewhere in between. You can choose to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or something else entirely. And I'm quoting that verbatim. That's incredibly weird for a child to understand. When you're told that boys can have periods and girls can have willies...

as they are being taught in England, for example, under their... Then that's also incredibly weird and freaky. I'm sorry. Why does a five-year-old need to be taught that? And why, you know, as someone who would acknowledge that what's taught in schools is up to the government, why shouldn't they oppose that kind of thing? I think they should oppose it. Because on the one hand, you're saying what's being taught is kind of crazy...

and maybe actually deeply damaging and psychologically confusing. But on the other hand, you're saying the measures to try and stop it are illiberal. Maybe the answer is we just need a more clearly written bill, as in the case of Florida. I think structure, this is the problem we have. We have an educational establishment, because we have an elite that is completely captive to a certain ideology, that is really not responsible

held by the vast majority of ordinary citizens. They control the institutions to such an extent that they have determined these things in curriculum and so on. No one bothers to look at the stuff. And parents only found out about it partly during the pandemic and because some of the stuff has leaked and so on.

So what do you do when the entire... When, in fact, there isn't... The democratic process is kind of broken down when this stuff is just being imposed in ways that you never... There wasn't a debate about this. When did we have a legislative discussion about whether we're teaching three-year-olds, whether they're boys or girls or not? When was that actually done? When was the school board meeting about that? A lot of this stuff didn't happen, and now it's being flushed out by school board meetings, and people are having input into these things. And you're right. Public school curriculum are political things. What I don't like...

is governments jumping in and picking and choosing books and I just don't like that abandonment of academic freedom. At the same time, I also worry about how these institutions and unions have been captured by certain ideologies you can't get rid of. This is the right-wing argument that says essentially we're run by an administrative state. It doesn't matter who you put in, this will happen. Like in Britain,

The civil service under a Tory government is putting critical race theory, making it mandatory for every single person to be employed by the British government. Under the Tories, why? Because it's just this educational elite class that determines everything quietly and imposes it on your kids is at work. And they, because they're increasingly bubbled and not listening to most people, don't even realize that they're completely out of step. And they look at you, why are you worried about this? What are you...

And you're like, because most normie people will think this is fucking bonkers. And it is, to be honest with you, it is completely inappropriate for kids. And you'll notice in most of the mainstream coverage of this, they never actually include the content. They don't tell you what people are objecting to. So you get this confusion that it's just all a bunch of bigots. Like that whole Taylor Lorenz thing, whatever you pronounce her name, on the episode of TikTok.

I mean, they didn't produce a single piece of quote or video that you could see what Libs of TikTok was putting out there. Libs of TikTok is not picking, obviously, but nonetheless, there are plenty of nuts out there in the field of high school and primary school education. It seems to attract them in some ways. And I don't think that's appropriate. I just don't know. But I think most normal voters, if they heard that their child in kindergarten

was being told that they might not be a boy or a girl and if they feel a little boyish one day, maybe they're actually trans. I think most people would say that is crazy and I absolutely would support a law getting that out of my kids' school.

Well, that's why it passed in Florida. That's why these things are being passed elsewhere. That's why the Democrats will not address the substance of it. They will just talk about this in terms of right-wing reaction and anti-gay stuff and all the rest of it. They'll just send out tribal signals without actually engaging the substance. We don't have to teach kids about this at all.

Let them be. Teach them colors and shapes and math, you know, and let this be. And this is quite esoteric. It isn't even birds and bees. This is before they ever find out our reproductive strategies as species. They're being told they can invent whether they're a girl or a boy. So when the Florida law comes out,

And, you know, I think the most controversial section is the following line. I think most parents would hear that and say,

Duh, how is that not already the law? Why would there ever be discussion of sexual orientation and gender identity for anyone below third grade or maybe anyone below sixth grade? But you oppose the law, so explain to us why. Well, I oppose it not because I don't agree with you on that basic issue, but because the enforcement mechanism is so difficult. In other words, you're inviting lawsuits against teachers.

by parents. So it opens it up to a kind of lawsuit mayhem. And also because it leaves vague what is age appropriate and age inappropriate. And because even though it says in the law instruction, it says in the preamble discussion. Anyway, I thought there was too much vagueness in this, too much sort of vigilante justice elements of it.

But I don't object to a legislature passing a bill that says such a blatantly obvious thing. And I think the key in debating this is the focus on that. That's the winning argument. Instead, these people go to... They're grooming them. They want to have sex and they want to rape them. You don't have to go there at all. You can just make your strongest argument on the text of the law, insist that's all you ever want to do, and let it go. So...

Unfortunately, we don't have a place in America where that can happen right now. But with any luck, we can create a space where that can be the case and resist some of this. But there's a lot of money fueling this polarization. And there's a lot of gay people who are just very easily tribalized about this. And some of the ugliness coming at us is very reminiscent of ugliness that we've seen before.

So there is a tendency, of course, to gather together and defend this and to give up on the actual difficult argument, which is the centrist argument, and instead just rely upon tribal stigmatization of the other. And the Democrats want this tribal stigmatization. They're not interested. And to some extent, I fear DeSantis wants the same thing. Mm-hmm.

So you're saying that facing a right that is now bringing up language like grooming and predation and kind of sexual panic, that a lot of gay people who are sort of in the center are

on these issues and are totally obviously opposed that kind of language and yet also oppose gender ideology, especially in public schools and especially the medicalization of kids, will find themselves sort of running leftward in reaction to what's happening on the right. Yeah, this is the horrible ratchet dynamic, I'm afraid. And this goes for a whole bunch of topics. What does the ratchet dynamic mean? That...

Through the existing sort of establishment, whether that be educational, political, or whatever, certain ideas are introduced without much democratic discussion. They push things quite radically to the left. The minute there is a response to that, it is re-described as a reactionary Trumpist, racist, white supremacist, homophobic movement, which then leads people to oppose it. So you...

you never get into the actual details of the question or the intricacies of the debate. It tribalizes instantly. And the truth is that I think gay people are very easily tribalized. We have a lot of trauma, collectively and individually. And when we hear or see members of the religious right rejoicing and calling us pedophiles, we're going to have a very powerful response that may not actually be

intellectually the most coherent that we might have. And that's a problem. How do you respond to the argument, and I get this a lot, of...

Sully, you have such a platform. You're such an important voice for gay people. And this is what people say to me. They'll say, you have an opportunity to focus on X, Y, and Z, and instead what you're doing by criticizing gender ideology is not just putting a target on the back of a vulnerable population. You're actually giving sucker and fodder to people on the right who oppose you, who wish you never got the rights that you have.

don't you see that you are fueling the backlash yourself? How do you respond to that? I'm asking you that both as because I'm curious, but also as a kind of therapeutic question for myself. You respond by saying that's a bit of a cheap shot, first of all. Secondly, you say, I support every gay right imaginable. I support every trans right within the civil rights context imaginable. I have some differences with you.

on the question of biological sex and to some extent the treatment of children. If you want to call me a traitor, a collaborator, whatever you want, then you're going to be able to call me that. I had people scream "collaborator" at me in gay bars in the 90s. I had drinks thrown at me because I opposed outing in the middle of the AIDS epidemic. Because I said, "Even though times are this bad, we do not give up on civilized behavior."

we do not punish people for being gay, whatever their viewpoints are. That was regarded as treason. Supporting marriage equality was also regarded as treason. In the long run, I think you can say, no, I think that I was right about those two things. And in the emotions of the moment, certain tribal instincts took over. But I am coming from a place of principle and consistency. And there is nothing that I support for gay people that I do not equally support for trans people.

Nothing. I feel this way also when I'm asked about questions about whether I believe in immigration control or border security or reducing illegal immigration. They say, you just want to pull, this is the language, pull the drawbridge up after you, right? Fuck everybody else who came after you. You just got yours. You got yours. Now you're sitting pretty. And I'm like, well, no, I got mine and I got yours too. And I got yours today. And we disagree about something other than this.

And we can have a good faith disagreement about this without me calling you a traitor and without you calling me one. Now, that's never going to happen in reality. I mean, it does more than you think, quietly. The people who are listening and are quietly thinking, he has a point, I can see that. Thinking about it, that's what you aim for. Publicly, you're going to be called as I was, an antichrist. I've been called, you wouldn't believe what I've been called. And the...

That is, certainly in the 90s, it was much more explicable than today. And that's the one thing I would say too, in terms of perspective. I see rates of depression and mental health disturbance among gay teens reporting incredibly high levels of stress. I'm told we're under unprecedented assault. I'm just like, please have some perspective. Try being a gay person 10, 15, 20 years ago.

You are living in paradise compared to what we live to. And we didn't complain. We got on with our lives. We changed things, but we weren't sitting here whining. And there's a certain amount of this that can be self-generated.

If you want to live in a world in which you are constantly oppressed, you can construct the world around you in your imagination so that's true. You can notice every slight. You can look at everyone who looks the other way. You can be completely paranoid about people's metaphors, the words they use, all the rest of it. Or you can make a choice. I don't give a shit about that. I'm going to live my life. I'm fine. And...

What we have failed to do, and this is not just true about gay youth, but regular youth, is to teach a principle of resilience, of strength, of power. ACT UP is called AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power. What we had in the 80s and 90s was a sense of empowerment on our own behalf, which did not seek mercy, which didn't seek pity, which sought action,

which thought change and was incredibly clear about it. The idea that we did all this, we fought for all this, for gay kids today to be more depressed than ever just strikes me as just terribly sad. And again, I'd say try being a gay kid in Pakistan. Try being a gay kid under the Palestinian authorities. Try being a gay kid in Zambia. Just get a fucking grip and get some perspective. And the other thing about getting too radical over here is

playing all this stuff, we behave as if this is completely our own business. When we push the envelope on so many things and we start challenging very basic concepts of gender and sex. Would you know who it's not helping? It's not helping gay people in Eastern Europe. It's not helping gay people in Russia. It's not helping gay people in the Middle East. It is, in fact, fueling a wave of homophobia which is helping legitimize those authoritarian regimes and hurt gay people everywhere.

And we must stop playing into Vladimir Putin's hands. And we must stop allowing the extremes to define us when they do not define us. The most important thing I learned as a gay man when I first came out was, when I was watching the gay bar, was, Jesus Christ, these people are nothing like I was told. This is nothing like I was warned about. There is nothing weird or strange or quote-unquote queer about any of this. These are human beings.

regular people who live their lives and want to have their life. And when you actually gave a message that allowed that to be empowered, it worked brilliantly. And now they want to turn every gay person into a queer person. The use of that word. Well, queer now just means straight but politically left.

I'm part gay. Well, yeah, except it also means gay. And when you get these polls that say 40% of LGBTQIA plus people believe such a thing, you're like, well, who are they talking about? When you find out 40% of them are straight and married, you're just like, well, you know. But the point about using the word queer, which to men of my generation is actually, talk about a trigger word.

It's the last word you heard before you were punched in the face. It is used by people all the time. Now, a small group of lefties tried to reown it in the 80s and 90s, that queer nation. Most of us didn't adapt it in that way. Now it is imposed on us, imposed on us by the New York Times in a news article calling us queer. And, you know, I hear that. And again, just by their own...

Aren't you supposed to be the people that are most leery of triggering anyone? And here you are using a very, very toxic word to define all gay people. And you don't give a fuck. Why? Because you're not actually interested in taking care. You're interested in controlling people. You're interested in naming them and defining them against their will and against their reality. And that's why I object to it. One of the reasons that I've personally felt

so passionately about opposing this illiberal ideology, which goes by many names. We've been talking about the gender aspect of it during this conversation, but it's called wokeness or successor ideology. I don't really care what we call it. Is...

is not just because I oppose it on its own merits or demerits. It's because I deeply fear the backlash that I believe will come in response to it. Because anyone who knows anything about history, think obviously about Germany in the 1920s, but there are other examples, knows that when a society becomes...

crazily decadent as I think ours is, that the thing that comes to challenge it is not liberalism. It's deeply retrograde and repressive. And, you know, given the choice between left-wing extremism and right-wing extremism, many people choose the right. And there's this

really amazing quote from Camille Paglia, who says, people who live in such decadent times feel they're very sophisticated, they're very cosmopolitan. But in truth, they're evidence of a civilization that no longer believes in itself. And on the edges of that civilization, she says, are people who still believe in heroic masculinity. And she doesn't mean that in a laudatory way. She means that in a real, real rough way.

So one of the reasons that I have felt the need, even though I'm accused of fueling the backlash myself, to push back against the illiberal left is because I believe that its excesses are going to give rise to something very, very scary on the right.

Like when things become chaotic and structureless and words have no meaning and there are no differences between men and women, people react by going extremely hardcore in the other direction, like the violent imposition of rules and structure and hierarchy at all costs. And I worry that that's where we could be going. Yes, that has often been a worry. And what frustrates me most is simply the refusal to even acknowledge that that could be a factor.

So, in fact, it's always treated as if the right-wing reaction is out of any context, that we've done nothing to deserve this, nothing to provoke this. I don't know what they're talking about. Critical race theory in high school is completely untrue, the New York Times says, even as it pushes its own critical race theory project into high schools around the country.

They don't acknowledge that they have played a role in creating Trump. They've played a role in creating Le Pen and Zemmour. They've played a role in creating some very ugly strains of illiberal conservatism. And it's happening here. You can see it with DeSantis. You can see it with Chris Ruffo, who I think did important work and has done important work, and I'm grateful for him. But the way he thrills to the exercise of raw power

It just gets me a little nervous, to say the least. And if it's a contest purely for power, if truth is out the window, there's no reason to be asserted, then the people who are better at enforcing their physical power will tend to win. They tend to be on the far right. But the reason I think that Chris Ruffo, who has done amazing work exposing what's going on, let's say, in schools and corporations, they'll basically say,

You know what, Sully? In a perfect world, we would respond to the excesses of the left with reason, with common sense, with deliberation. But all they know is power. All they force on us is power. They say we're barbarians. They say we're, you know, bigots, racists. They haven't hesitated to call us Nazis for believing in the right to free speech. So if that's the language they understand, that's the language we're going to speak to them in. And I understand how they get there.

I do too, and I sympathize with it. My concern is that once you adopt those tools, you never have recourse to any others, that it becomes a pure war. It becomes mere battle for power, and it becomes a crusade for no compromise ever, and it becomes a crusade for controlling other people and imposing your view of the world on them.

And you enter that cycle, you enter it, it's a civil war cycle. It's not a liberal democracy cycle. And one of the reasons when I said I thought Trump was and would be an extinction level event for liberal democracy, and people didn't realize liberal democracy, I meant precisely this.

that will become a war against each other. This will be about imposing power from one side to the other. And we are quite evenly balanced as a country, which means an incredibly fruitless, constant battle with individual people and vulnerable people as victims of it.

an incoherent public policy, the inability to pass anything constructive that we can agree on. And this is my concern. Look, I'm in agony about this. I really want to prevent this stuff. But I also have to, you have to at some point make a decision. Am I a classical liberal or am I not? Am I going to sustain the principles of civil discourse, compromise, an impartial state?

an attempt to construct an open public square which can be pluralist without being oppressive. And those are principles I come back to, I believe in, and I believe the minute I throw them away, I look around, I got nothing left to defend myself against people with more power than me. And it seems to me that minorities in particular...

should be incredibly careful about empowering authoritarians because we're the first on the chopping block. So, for example, when gay people, of all people, start wanting to constrain freedom of speech, I feel like saying, do you understand what you're doing? That for a long time that was the only freedom you had.

For a long time, that was the only way to express your opinion. That was the freedom that got you your freedoms. Yes. It was the premise for everything that followed. We couldn't even talk to each other without it. But we could publish magazines in the most homophobic country on earth in the 1950s, and we could still communicate. And that was what allowed us to sustain this over time. We can't abandon our principles the minute

One side turns illiberal. That's just a recipe for all of us going down the drain. And that means just a certain amount of discipline, patience, balancing out power so that you don't adopt one tribe or the other. You pit them against each other and attempt to get some middling path. It has not been easy. It has been awful for all of us. Sully, thank you for everything you're doing to...

model that kind of behavior. There's so much else I want to talk to you about. Substack for one, Israel for another, speaking of ferocious disagreements. Oh man, we do have a lot to talk about. But we'll have to save that for another time. I really appreciate you coming on. You bet, Mari. Thanks for listening. And thank you as always to Andrew Sullivan for the conversation. Please go subscribe and read his work at andrewsullivan.substack.com. We'll see you soon.

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