Trans-parency

My thoughts on the T

(Rather listen? Press ‘play’ above.)

I resent Trump and his allies for many reasons – I detest them for more – but somewhere in the swamp is my squirming discomfort with a subject that, in a certain way, not categorically, not whole-cloth but some part warp-and-weft, a surprise for me who’s always leaned, while not “liberal” because “liberalism” has just become another feckless stance struck by those with greased palms, then at least “progressive,” and now I’m just delaying, because in a way I don’t want to get into it but feel it’s time, a subject I (again, see the waffling above) might agree with him on a little bit:

The transgender mishegoss.

I’m unsure of how to wade into this morass, so the best I can do is with a series of anecdotes and reflections which will, hopefully, clarify my stance to readers and, perhaps, to myself.

Part I: Christ. The bathroom again?

New signage at David Geffen Hall

Over at Lincoln Center, hallowed ground to this opera queen, there’s a side theater where the NY Philharmonic performs, David Geffen Hall, and its lobby serves as an open space for New Yorkers to meet with friends, to work, read the paper, or just stare at the characters camping out on a cold day. If I’m over on that side of town and want a moment to warm up or perhaps write my Substack, I’ll stop in, delighted that it also has a bathroom which is A) clean and B) less likely to have a crazy person in it – major victories here in the Big Apple.

Sometime last year, I popped into the bathroom, but stopped at the door bewildered. This wasn’t my bathroom. What happened to the men’s side? Maybe it’s closed for cleaning? Oh, wait. This is a “gender neutral” bathroom now, complete with a sign declaring “This Restroom May Be Used By Any Person Regardless of Gender Identity or Expression.”

So I went in. A row of stalls. Got it. Most of us, men and women, alike, kind of nodded at each other sheepishly and found our stall, and once I got into mine, shut the door, I thought: “Jesus, if I were a woman, I would not feel good about this.” Men are creepers (see not only the Epstein files but, oh, the last several thousand years), and one of the places women can be mostly confident that men won’t be lurking is in their bathrooms.

Since that initial visit, I’ve been back, of course, and often, almost every time, actually, a woman has stood outside the door looking at the sign, looking elsewhere for another option, looking to me with a furrowed brow, or making a gesture of irritation. Once a foreign gal said, “I don’t understand.”

“This is for all of us. You and me.” I tried to smile, sound super gay, as I’ve done when hiking out west and I encounter a woman alone, whereuponI always say “excuse me” with a sibilant “s” that would make someone from Barcelona blush.

The bathroom insanity reminds me of the “urinary leash,” a term I first heard in a marvelous interview between scientist Richard Dawkins and Helen Joyce, an Irish reporter who ended up swimming in the deep end on the trans issue (and who, it should be noted, has a gay son). Historically in the U.K., women did not have access to any kind of public bathrooms, something that changed incrementally in time, so that they could only leave their house to the extent they could find a place to pee, which meant the homes of friends and family, a small footprint, thereby limiting women’s accessibility to the world at large. This eventually changed because of women’s involvement in WWI, but the fight was long and ridiculous.

Joyce’s point, something I glimpsed in the David Geffen Hall “All Gender” bathroom, was that women would increasingly seek out spaces that supported their needs for privacy and safety over spots that catered to, my view here, not Joyce’s, although I don’t imagine she’d balk, the smallest sliver of the population. Therefore women, a mighty population, is being asked to make way for someone else, perhaps even adjust their presence in the world for someone else, and that someone else, like it or not, just on biological fact, is a man.

Which leads me to my next point:

Part II. Get off my TERF.

I’ve hung around with a lot of 1960s- and ‘70s-era feminists. Being gay, being in the theater, being in the yoga world, being in the witch world, being in the goddess-worshipping world, I’ve met many inspiring and powerful women who’d been through terrible times, who’d overcome more, whose wisdom was hard-won.

Somewhere in my 20s, hanging out with one of these gals, then likely in her fifties, we both had a mutual friend, a cool lesbian, who decided she was a he and then underwent top surgery.

The older, feminist, witch lady said, “I just don’t get it. She has a daughter and she cut her tits off.”

Even before that, though, being a good little gay boy, at 18 years old, in my freshman year of college at Arizona State, I took a “Lesbian Culture” course with Dr. Annis Hopkins. Big surprise, I was the only boy in there, gay or otherwise, and I’d signed up to better understand my power drill sisters. We did have one trans person in there, male-to-female, and I recall one of the lesbians saying, “Sorry, but if you don’t bleed or you haven’t, bled you’re not a woman.”

These were my (gruff, but provocative) introductions to a feminist perspective about what would become a wave of absurdities. I forgot about these moments until Bette Midler’s tweet in July of 2022 when she said, “They don’t call us women anymore; they call us ‘birthing people’ or ‘menstruators’ or even ‘people with vaginas!' Don’t let them erase you! Every human on earth owes you!” (Macy Gray, around the same time, made comments resonant with this.)

Wait. What the fuck is birthing person? Now, of course, the term is, sadly, more standard, so much so that as I attended an author talk about slow food systems among women-owned farms (really niche stuff), someone in the audience asked a question and included the term “birthing people.” (How I kept my eyes in their sockets after the tidal roll I executed is a testament to the strength of the optic nerve.)

If you can physically carry and eject a child from your body – which only happens through, wait for it, a vagina – you’re a woman. And how wonderful! If you have a monthly menstruation cycle, or did at one time for the post-menopausal gals, then, wait for it, you’re a woman. And how wonderful! And if you’re a nail-gun-wielding, big-rig-driving, rugby-playing “person with a vagina,” congratulations – you’re a woman, and how wonderful!

To some, the trans Voldemort. To others, someone just stating the obvious.

And it’s the “how wonderful” part of the above diatribe that needs attention, because what seems to be happening with trans fanaticism is that it’s powered, in part, by the ongoing, deep-ocean earthquakes of misogyny. Let’s see, after thousands of years of patriarchy, women are taught to hate themselves and their bodies, puberty often a stressful time of change, hormonal floods, desire, and a predatory eye from adult men. Young girls can now get rid of all of that by not undergoing puberty and/or opting for medical surgery, thereby, depending on how good the work was and the hormonal treatments take, passing as a man and being accorded all the privileges of a good ol’ boy. Instead of expanding the rights of women and even what a woman can be, how she shows up in the world, “people with vaginas” can buttress the very binary they insist they’re tearing down.

And going back to my feminist gal pal, what is this behavior teaching girls, children who have enough to parse in the world of womanhood without the encouragement that their interest in “masculine” pursuits doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with them – it just means they’re a boy – a backhanded reassurance delivered by the patriarchy.

Which at last brings me to:

Part III. The Personal.

I was never the butchest hammer in the toolbox. Musical theater, opera, art, dance, books, make-believe. You know the type. To this day, people always clock me as gay, or at least, straight men do, who understand what they’re dealing with when they interact with me. When my husband and I meet a straight couple for the first time at a party or a dinner, the man hugs me, he shakes my husband’s hand. At restaurants, my husband gets the check. He also gets the “bro nod,” where a straight guy looks at me, quickly looks away, looks at my husband and nods at him. I’ve had this happen to me if I’m out with a woman friend of mine somewhere in Amurika; it’s the straight man’s apology, the “I wasn’t looking at your bitch” communique.

All that to say, I’m not serving He-Man (although I’d service him – whatever). In fact, psychologically, I’m much more an archetypal woman than an archetypal man, which is how it’s always been. The terms of “manhood,” especially in this restrictive American form, never made any sense to me, and I happily understand myself as more expansive psychologically than those with a higher masculine animus.

But I have a dick. So I’m a man. That’s my body. This lifetime is this body, and part of the strangeness of the trans movement is its paradoxical focus on bodies, yet denial of them. Why is it that the “style” of so many non-binary people is hippie-unfuckable? Why is it that so many of them dress in hideous, body-concealing clothing? We could get into a whole shame story about bodies, but given the discourse I’ve heard among young people around sexual practices (a labyrinthine pre-game conversation that one gay therapist friend of mine said made him wonder how any of these people are ever having sex), there’s an almost Puritan squeamishness around the body and desire. Well, that and the fetishization of political idealogy, the hope that somehow the body will respond favorably to the burlesque of social identity. I’ve had a couple og gay male friends feel bad about not being able to have sex (or have sex more than once) with an ftm trans person, even going so far as to say they were transphobic for not being able to continue.

“No, my dear,” I responded, “you’re just not into pussy.”

Given my history (and given that I grew up in New England), if I was a kid in the last decade, and my parents were well-meaning liberals, and the states where I resided allowed for such “treatments,” I could have been shunted into a medical track for my “gender dysmorphia” (pretending I was an evil sorceress as a child, yearning after the prince in the stories, adopting “feminine” pursuits), and it would have been a catastrophe. The real gender dysmorphia would have started with medical intervention, and when I realized this wasn’t the right choice for me, it would have been too late.

(I also have a suspicious twinge that moving a feminine boy into a girl identity has more to do with deep-seated homophobia, misogyny’s cruder brother, than with helping out the sissy in-question. The real assistance for the sissy is to make sure he’s safe from the brutes and has access to dance classes, not telling him he should change his name to Barbara.)

So when I hear about children given carte blanche to determine their own gender, I have deep concerns. The cerebellum doesn’t fully develop until our latter twenties, so, no, a child is not allowed to begin puberty blockers just because they don’t “feel like a girl.” Someone has to be the adult in the room, and that’s the parent, who absolutely has a right to be involved in their child’s understanding of themselves. Do I think schools should notify a parent if their child has started to call themselves a different gender name and has started touse the opposite sex’s bathroom? Yes, with the hope that the guidance counselor is a skilled psychologist/social worker who can meet the needs of everyone involved to the best possible outcome.

Some might say this is hypocritical, because I would not have wanted my parents to know about me being gay before I was ready (which, it turns out, was in freshman year of high school), and while that’s true, I also was not engaging in behaviors that could cause me serious trouble (e.g. using the opposite bathroom and getting the shit kicked out of me by the jocks). If the behaviors cause bodily harm to the young person, the parents have a right to know.

It’s not clean, but it’s a conversation we should be able to have in the public discourse without being dismissed as a TERF (which, given the materials of J.K. Rowling that I’ve seen, admittedly not all, because, well, I have a life, she hasn’t said anything that crazy).

Away from the personal now and on to the political and the LGBTQ movement (don’t even get me started on the alphabet mafia or the idiocies of adding recondite hues to the rainbow flag – people, it’s a fucking metaphor), Andrew Sullivan, a commentator and writer I’ve always found irritating, wrote a brilliant piece for the New York Times in June of 2025, in which he assessed the movement and the deleterious effect that its fanatical trans stance has created. Most notably, he mentions that the movement’s bargain with straight America was, “You give us our basic rights, we don’t touch your kids (because you’re a bunch of fucking perverts who think we want anything to do with your offspring).” The deal was struck. Wins started coming in. Public opinions swayed in our favor.

But then, the movement started touching their kids. Not in the ways they’d feared, not as molesting teachers and nasty men in the bathroom, but as well-meaning educator and bathroom advocate. Now the kids could determine their physical destiny and the government should support whatever that self-determined fate was, and, surprise surprise, public opinion on gay issues, e.g. marriage, are swerving against us. We violated the contract for the statistic equivalent of two people, and all of us are paying the price.

Part IV. Caveat and Peroration.

Let it be known that I think trans folks and non-binary folks should not be in threatened positions. Want to use the bathroom? Let’s provide three. One male, one female, one for the in-between. No, you shouldn’t be fired from your job, George, because you wore a dress. No, frat boy fuck head, you’re not allowed to attack the butch woman, just because she dares masculinity better than you.

However, do I think we all need to announce our preferred pronouns in work places or other group settings? No. Do I believe there should be “gender affirming care” for minors? No, not if that care is about moving them into the opposite sex. Do I believe trans athletes should compete with the sex of their choice? No, it’s not the same body by birth, therefore it’s not fair. Why not get a trans league going? I’d go to those games.

And do I believe that we, as progressives or liberals or whatever we’re calling ourselves, should unquestioningly accept the current dogmas without public examination? No. That’s what wise, compassionate, and detailed debate is for – the chance to come around, to learn more, to see where we’re right, where we’re wrong, and where it doesn’t matter.

So, do I agree with Trump on trans issues? No. Not because of any of the reasons listed above, but because of the fraudulency of his position. It’s not that he cares about women (see his whole life) or children (Epstein, anyone?); this issue is something he grabbed in order to gain more votes. It was brilliant – that ad about Kamala being for “them” and not “you” was flawless – but it was also transparent.

I’m sure I’ll lose subscribers over this post, because, well, we live in the age of umbrage and in an age of adolescence whereby we don’t engage, we just turn our backs on conflicts not resolved in a TikTok timeframe. So be it. I know what I’m about. I know my positions are inquisitive, if not always right; I know my gay identity is something far more interesting and glamorous than what the LGBTQIA2S+ automatons want to make it (cultural McCarthyists all); and I know that, when it comes down to it, facts, in public policy, take precedent over self-determined feelings.

In the last ten years, I noticed a certain conversation among my super liberal, BIPOC, LGB, feminist, friends, and it went something like the following:

“I’m confused about the whole trans thing.”

“Okay, tell me more.”

“I mean, I get it if you want to be a woman or a man instead of what you are and that’s fine, have at it, but I don’t think that kids know what the hell they’re talking about, coming out as trans at nine or whatever.”

“I hear that.”