The gender-y culture war is hard to wade into. Let's do it.

My friends told me not to go there. But here I am.

ATTENTION REASONABLE GROWN-UPS: We need to stop being too scared to wade into tough gender and sex discussions. Because young people are suffering. In part due to our cowardice.

Now that I’ve set up my intention and scope of interest, I wade in.

(Pray for me. Or perhaps help me gently steer any unfairly reactive responses in the comments to kinder, more productive, life-expanding territory.)

It’s been a very gender-y start to the year, a phrase I purloin from the team at Blocked and Reported. There’s been the Scottish self-ID implosion (see below), the protests against the New York Times’ coverage of trans issues and here in Australia we are in the midst of Sydney WorldPride - largely, so far, a beautiful and hate-free celebration.

But then, earlier this month, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released its latest Youth Risk Behavior Survey results. The survey, published every two years, is the big kahuna picture provider on the state of teen mental health.

There are a number of alarming trends to pull from this latest update. The MSM has focused mostly on teen girls and vape use from what I can tell.

But this is the finding that grabbed me:

• For LGBQ teenagers, life is worse in almost every respect measured by the survey. Note: The survey did not ask about trans identity.

• Close to 70 percent experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year and more than 50 percent had poor mental health during the past 30 days.

• Almost 25 per cent of LGBQ teens attempted suicide in the past year.

Digest this for a bit

Now let’s discuss.

First, this phenomenon has emerged as the number of teens who self-identify outside of the cisgender¹, heterosexual framework has increased markedly. Last week, Gallup reported that 20 percent of Gen Z Americans identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender - several times higher than for any previous generation (for whom the figures have remained much the same over the past ten years). Figures for Australia, according to this global Ipsos survey, reflect a similar trend. (The ABS introduced collecting responses on non-binary sex in 2021² but “did not yield meaningful data”). In the UK, 71 percent of Gen Z identify as straight (only 53 percent said they are exclusively attracted to members of the opposite sex.)

Second, as I flag above, the CDC report didn’t include specific results for those who identify as trans. Very possibly the alarming figures would be even higher if it did.

So. We are talking a lot of young humans who are in a lot of distress.

Third, this is all going down against a backdrop of increased acceptance of diverse sexual identities, right? Which gets me wondering, what else is going on here? As the CDC survey itself reveals, other markers of a struggling teen spirit, such as drug use and drinking, have declined. Bullying has not increased among boys; for girls, it’s declined slightly. Which makes the LGBQ phenomenon even more marked. Now, the pandemic would certainly account for things in part (a lot of evidence shows LGBTIQA+³ kids were harder hit for a host of reasons). That said, the data was collected after schools and institutions opened back up. So I don’t think anyone is wanting to pin things on this variable alone. Indeed, Jonathan Haidt breaks things down to show Covid had very little impact on the results. Additionally, the report noted, “although we see differences in behaviours and experiences when the data are examined by race and ethnicity, the patterns are less consistent.” Indeed behaviours have improved for Black and Hispanic teens.

Lots going on here. And on a superficial reading, it doesn’t immediately add up. But whatever way you want to skin it:

When most of one-fifth of a generation are in serious mental distress daily, we really must pay attention.

“But don’t go there, Sarah!”

I’ve been chatting gender-y things a lot in the past few weeks. You might have been too. Most people around me are vaguely aware of the issues surfacing. Young people have anecdotes. But takes, hot or otherwise, have not been forthcoming, or have been heavily couched. (Indeed, as above, MSM led with the teen girls and vape angles.)

Most of us are too scared to wade into this new gender-y space and say anything at all. The child transition discussion is raging in certain silos overseas. But on the ground, everyday grownups won’t go there. The fear of being cancelled, of being punished for getting a pronoun wrong, of being labelled a woke elite …it’s all too much.

A number of friends expressed concern that I am writing this post. “Don’t go there,” they advised. “You’ll be slaughtered from the Left and the Right.” Indeed the issue has been royally hijacked by the extremes and is the THE white hot topic in the horribly destructive culture wars around the world.

But! Isn’t the above concern precisely why we - reasonable grownups - should go there? To reclaim such a delicate and charged issue back from the death spiral of polarisation? To haul it into kinder, more productive and expansive realms?

(I’ll also encourage everyone to go through the global Ipsos report to see how many Australians identify beyond the cis model - one of the highest ratios in the world. And yet our views on basic concepts like same-sex marriage don’t fully reflect this reality.)

The (hard) Left v (hard) Right pit fight is ruining, well, everything. Because (in large part) we are letting it. If we cower, if we don’t step into the arena with takes and ideas that sit between and beyond their binary dictates, The Extreme wins.

And the kids won’t be alright.

In no way am I going to try cover the topic in an authoritative or conclusive way. I'm (merely) stepping into the arena and encouraging everyone to do the same. I’m going to plant a few ideas that I find concerning and that I feel we need to be alive to, starting with the stuff that came out of the CDC report. And I’ll also share some links to some heterodox thinkers and writers who are going there. One or two are conservative. All are trying to drag the debate in from the extremes. I invite you to share further links to good commentary in the comments.

My takes may be flawed, limited or just different to yours. I try super hard to research responsibly and get terminology⁴ right. But this shit is big and I am new to it. As we all are.

To kick off…

A concern: This gender-y stuff is …so very cisgendered.

There are a lot of reports showing that teenage girls are leading the nonbinary shift. Research conducted as part of this Stanford project found twice as many teens assigned female at birth as those assigned male at birth identified as nonbinary. The explosion in the number of young women being referred to gender identity clinics has also been reported for some time.

The gay conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan highlights this same phenomenon in his The Weekly Dish Substack. He references more evidence of this female assigned skew and posits a potential correlation with other findings in the CDC report referred to above. The CDC report highlighted unprecedented levels of hopelessness and suicidal thoughts among teen girls, twice that reported by teen boys. The stats for young women were a nudge lower than the ones I lay out above for LGBQ teens (ie 59 percent of young women experienced persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness every day for at least two weeks during the previous year).

“Is there a connection? I don’t know,” Sullivan asks. “What I do know is that it’s the job of the media to find out, and not to shut itself down.”

I agree. It’s also the job of grown-ups to be asking similar questions.

One of the authors of the Stanford research, a professor of psychology and the director of the Sexual and Gender Diversity Laboratory at the University of California–Santa Cruz, writes elsewhere:

“Teenage girls are challenging the meaning and the traditional constraints of gender in ways I couldn't have imagined, but many boys are still trying to fit into a gender structure that has historically benefited them.”

This is interesting and significant, given all the other masculinity shifts and challenges that are playing out, particularly among young men, which I am following at the moment. Young men and women are clearly struggling in different ways.

Which might be a good time to bring in my interview with heterodox whiz kid Helen Lewis who writes regularly on these kind of issues:

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OK, now are you ready for this?

During the week I took this piece of the debate - how young men and young women are engaging differently in gender-dismantling behaviours - to about a dozen young people and friends with Gen Z kids. It’s a small sample size but I feel compelled to raise something particularly tricky and confronting that came up repeatedly.

It’s kind of haunted me. And I will try to tread carefully here.

My friend’s 21-year-old daughter is in a band with two guys. She says these young men often behave in a sexist or misogynist fashion. They comment regularly on women’s weight and appearance in a degrading way and find it a hoot to put women down. They also both identify as non-binary, and vocally so. My friend’s daughter says these guys wear skirts and ballgowns, but show no signs of questioning gender stereotypes any further.

Now, to identify as non-binary does not preclude these men from partnering with the opposite sex nor identifying simultaneously as men/male. Nor, it would seem, from being douches. What this young woman was flagging was that despite their (demonstrative) awokeness to gender issues, they were continuing to adhere to the (worst parts) of the old gender paradigm.

Asking around, I realised this was something a lot of young women and members of the Queer community are discussing. I heard (in my roving chats on the topic) of one senior gay commentator who was going to give a presentation on it at WorldPride, but withdrew, due to fear of retribution. I believe the gist was this:

Some white (and yes, specifically white) young men are self-identifying as non-binary, polyamorous or heteroflexible as a way to, how do we put it, not be left out.

In a world in which marginalisation is a focus and attention has turned to the needs of those who have been disadvantaged by the patriarchy, these young men are, I’m gathering, feeling they don’t have a stake. As per the Stanford research author quoted above: “Many boys are still trying to fit into a gender structure that has historically benefited them.”

Shit, hey.

Another friend’s 18-year-old daughter reported to similar effect: White boys, she says, are feeling self conscious in their perceived privilege so they are saying they’re nonbinary to “have a thing”, a uniqueness that removes them from the the privileged category. A young woman in her early twenties who works in my local bookshop made this point: “It used to be all about checking your privilege, now they check how much of a victim they are.”

All kinds of conclusions could be drawn here. One that immediately surfaces for me is that we have reached a juncture where everyone is being injured by the patriarchy and in all kinds of distorted ways. I’m also left with a bunch of questions I just don’t have answers for yet:

• Is there a link between the despair young women are feeling from living in the current system and their increased need or desire to redefine gender boundaries?

• Young men are feeling left behind in so many ways. How do we bring them along?

• Are these hot gender-y issues exposing more worrying stuff happening with cisgender dynamics?

The young woman from the bookshop later sent me this meme on IG DMs. These issues intersect with race, too. And class.

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Some extra layers and thoughts

The gender-y debates and challenges are reflecting back to us a chunky mix of highly problematic flaws in our system. Young people are exploring these realms, pushing boundaries, shaking it all up. But they are not prepared or psychologically equipped for the fall-out.

Which is why, once again, I argue the grown-ups need to step in to the arena.

Here are a few things that are part of all this:

Ian Leslie on the self-ID Scottish prison debacle:

Ian Leslie over at The Ruffian presents a few confronting takes on this.

I figure many of you would like to know the details of the self-ID issue he references, so I’ll flesh out a little, in case you missed it:

In Scotland, a few days before Christmas, PM Nicola Sturgeon oversaw the passing of the gender recognition bill, that - working to Sturgeon’s “all trans women are women” line - removed a number of barriers for anyone wanting to change gender legally, including reducing the amount of time that someone has to show that they have lived in their acquired gender from at least two years to three months. The bill also allows for “self-ID”, doing away with panels and psychiatric diagnoses.

But. A month later a trans woman who’d been arrested and charged with rape as a man - and who’d self-identified as trans while awaiting trial - was convicted and sentenced to a women’s prison, in line with the new self-identification laws. As Leslie points out, women in prisons have often been subjected to abuse by men. And here, a convicted rapist was being released into their midst.

An anomoly? Maybe. Except a few days later it happened again.

Leslie makes several arguments, warning of the dangers of simplistic thinking applied to such a complex issue and adds a postscript - a trans woman’s take. It’s controversial. But he goes there…"precisely to remind people on both sides of this debate that trans people are individuals.”

If good people “don't go there” in this debate, the humanity will get missed.

Jonathan Haidt on how anxiety feeds identity politics which feeds anxiety…

As I’ve been swirling around in all these ideas I came across something Haidt wrote last year in The Atlantic which I find relevant and fascinating:

Depression makes people less likely to want to engage with new people, ideas, and experiences. Anxiety makes new things seem more threatening. As these conditions have risen and as the lessons on nuanced social behavior learned through free play have been delayed, tolerance for diverse viewpoints and the ability to work out disputes have diminished among many young people. For example, university communities that could tolerate a range of speakers as recently as 2010 arguably began to lose that ability in subsequent years, as Gen Z began to arrive on campus. Attempts to disinvite visiting speakers rose. Students did not just say that they disagreed with visiting speakers; some said that those lectures would be dangerous, emotionally devastating, a form of violence. Because rates of teen depression and anxiety have continued to rise into the 2020s, we should expect these views to continue in the generations to follow, and indeed to become more severe.

We have a vicious circle on our hands, apart from anything else.

I’m wondering if we can talk about identifying?

When we stake our identity to a group or label or category our worth is turned extrinsic. This is a problem because our esteem gets tethered to the system and up for outside assessment. And control. Capitalism, largely - but individualism more specifically - demands our value be judged extrinsically.

The psychological and spiritual salve is to cultivate our intrinsic sense of worth. Our forebears knew this and encouraged practices that nurtured and evolved an inner life. They knew that through mindful cultivation, this intrinsic sense of worth could evolve into character, a thing that can really take a human places and shield them nefarious ebbs and flows.

Culture’s role should be to teach young people how to do this. Instead it funnels them out to the extrinsic war zones of online comparathoning and plants their esteem in the laps of global corporates.

It also leaves their esteem at the mercy of The Extremes who use young people’s vulnerable and important explorations of who they are as weapons in their culture wars. Both the Left and the Right co-opt them for their cruel or destructive “identity politicking”.

And so I’m wondering if we should be encouraging the cultivation of character, not the declaring of identity right now? I heard the hosts on Smoke ‘Em if You Got ‘Em quote one of their friends, a trans woman, who said she wants to be identified as a person first-and-foremost (listen to their analysis of the Roald Dahl and the NYT open letter fiasco for some challenging heterodox listening).

Yep, let’s not miss each other’s - and our - humanity.

It’s hard and overwhelming…let’s allow this much

I need to wrap this up. So I’ll bang out a few final remarks, all of which, as with the above, are up for measured, forgiving, generous discussion here.

We are in unchartered waters. None of us bloody knows what we’re doing. It’s going to be messy for a while. Let’s give each other permission to be messy in this, to be overwhelmed and to get things wrong.

Besides, progress happens when we get things wrong and go back, and back again, to correct and understand and fine-tune our way to a better place. The caring and the trying is the part that sees us evolve. The caring and trying is what we most love in our fellow humanity.

Let’s wrestle the topic away from the extreme Right and Left. They can not be allowed to own this.

Beyond encouraging the cultivation of character, I don’t have solutions - but Jonathan Haidt has just started exploring them on his very new Substack After Bable.

Let’s not be bystanders. Let’s be grownups.

And, finally, this is how I replied to my friends’ concerns about my posting this: “We have to go there, and we can go there differently. We can show the better way.” We can find all these important questions and shifts exhilarating. We can see it all as an opportunity to come in closer to each other.

In love,

Sarah xx

1. Cisgender describes a person whose gender identity corresponds to their sex assigned at birth. The word cisgender is the antonym of transgender. The prefix cis- is Latin and means “on this side of”.

2. Nonbinary encompasses all genders that fall outside of the traditional categories of "man" and "woman." Nonbinary people's gender may fall somewhere else on the gender spectrum or outside of it entirely. 

3. LGBTIQA+ is an evolving acronym that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, queer/questioning, asexual.

4. I found this glossary of gender terms helpful.