This past Saturday in Provincetown, Massachusetts, Chase Strangio, the staff attorney who is co-director of the ACLU’s LGBT and HIV Project, faced a group of supporters to debrief the historic loss of the United States v. Skrmetti at the Supreme Court. The justices had ruled that restricting minors’ access to puberty blockers in Tennessee did not qualify as discrimination. And the decision set a precedent for other states to restrict kids’ access to puberty blockers, stopping most other legal avenues to challenge state-level bans of youth gender medicine.
Strangio, who is elf-like and buff, wore a hip button-down, tailored slacks and a very nice pair of what appeared to be Prada loafers ($1,200 for similar, online). He took the stage to robust applause and proceeded for the next hour to evade and shift away from the crowd’s questions. He was received by appreciative nods, thoughtful “mmmms” and occasional applause from the Boomer audience. The crowd was mostly older and well-heeled, wearing pastel beach-tees and sporting deep, early-season tans. Neither the queer anarchist radicals nor the Ptown party vibe was in effect, and there was no visible representation from the trans kids.
It was a strangely oppressive experience, not exactly boring but more soul-crushing. I am the kind of persuadable centrist voter whom the trans movement has lost, but I’d gone to the event hoping for a clash of ideas and the occasional spark of recognition that the other side had a point. Instead, the audience was presented with a leader who didn’t offer direct answers to the queries posed by his most ardent supporters. And beneath the tans and the bonhomie, some of them, I believe, recognized his avoidance tactics.
The event’s host, Celeste Lecesne, founder of the Trevor Project LGBTQ+ youth hotline service, started with a tribute to Strangio’s heroism in defending the rights of trans youth. This wasn’t a surprising choice for a group of super-fans in America’s preeminent gay beach destination, but it makes the independent observer’s brain hurt given that the ACLU’s miscalculation and overreach had just curtailed the potential to fight similar bans in other states. Lecesne asked Strangio about this: Would the Tennessee decision “pave the way for the other 24 states banning trans youth care to do what they’re going to do?” Strangio explained that those states, for the most part, were already banning the healthcare, and the decision wouldn’t change that.
The statement is true but also blame-shifting and deliberately misses the point. In his opening remarks he’d implied that the ACLU had known all along that the case was unlikely to succeed, saying, “I know exactly what to expect from [the Supreme Court]” and “I’m very used to reading distorted, disingenuous decisions from this court.” But he showed zero accountability for why the ACLU was willing to gamble something they have continuously claimed to be “necessary” and “lifesaving.” Why take the risk?
What did Strangio think the “core of the objection” to this kind of healthcare is? Lecesne asked, in a tone of deep puzzlement. The answer: A mysterious “retrenchment around gender” that often coincides with the rise of authoritarian governments. (A retrenchment that has nothing to do, of course, with sterilized adolescents or aggressive activism.) The objection is also, Strangio speculated, “a manufactured set of concerns” created by the right-wing media. For the latter argument, he pulled out the shifting and contested numbers often used by the Left to suggest that the trans population is minuscule and should be of no concern to anyone. This too is disingenuous and brain-hurting. The percentage of trans kids undergoing medical care is much higher than minuscule in my observable reality (admittedly, Brooklyn). And trans activism has focused precisely on making it affect everyone by framing themselves as a utopian liberation movement.
There was more. Strangio denounced The New York Times for having “contributed more to the anti-trans laws than almost any other thing in this country.” He elided the Cass Report’s findings that the case for pediatric gender medicine is unusually weak even for pediatrics. He mocked the idea that kids are being rushed into care.
Lecesne criticized the social-contagion theory of trans identities and then explained that “I thought I was a gay man for my whole life” until the pandemic, when whilst leading online workshops for LGBTQ+ youth who were discovering their transness, he’d discovered his own and changed his name and pronouns. “They changed me,” he said. Seems kind of contagious, no? Lecesne described watching kids in those workshops as “watching butterflies coming out of their cocoon,” and said the only contagion was “of happiness.” This is a common trope among trans-activist adults. And it’s unfair to place the burden of proof on the trans kids — but still, if unchecked and glorious happiness was really what most adults were observing as trans kids hit their school systems, the debate today might be very different.
“The important thing is loyalty, which can be demonstrated even better when positions are shifting or incoherent.”
The whole event reminded me of Hannah Arendt’s book The Origins of Totalitarianism, which both the Left and Right having been turning to lately to explain today’s politics. Even if a comparison between the actual totalitarian leaders of the book and our situation today is too strong, Arendt’s description of the political mechanism is revelatory. She describes the conditions that led to totalitarian rule in Germany and the Soviet Union as those in which the “masses” (meaning the bourgeoise) lost their class identities because of a new focus on individualism, and because of destabilizing social and economic change after the First World War.
People became atomized, isolated, and “superfluous,” meaning, without social purpose or stable employment. Under these conditions (which sound very familiar), they were ripe for totalitarian leadership. One of the central features of this kind of leadership, Arendt says, is that it doesn’t stand for anything coherent. It’s not a movement of people towards a shared goal, but instead confers membership in a safely correct group, whose goals are by necessity always shifting and “expanding.” Totalitarian propaganda, Arendt says, is under no obligation to be consistent, and in fact it’s better if it isn’t. The important thing is loyalty, which can be demonstrated even better when positions are shifting or incoherent.
Totalitarian movements, Arendt says, do not originate with the masses themselves, but with an alliance between “the elite,” and what she describes as “the mob,” which is a collection of criminals and grifters who make up the lowest elements of society. (Columbia student, meet Albanian looting gang.) In times of social instability, elites — and particularly the best and most idealistic elites, perhaps like Strangio — come to believe that the anything-goes tactics of the mob are refreshingly practical, lacking in bourgeoise hypocrisy, and so on. These elites feel intense “nausea” when looking at their messed-up social institutions and are ready to destroy them for change. Or at least, this is what happened in the Thirties, when artists and intellectuals were misled by Stalinism and Nazism in numbers we don’t like to think about.
Part of the beauty of The Origins of Totalitarianism is how well it applies to both sides of the current culture wars. Trump’s resemblance to a totalitarian leader requires no explanation; and in Leftist circles I’d say the totalitarian trend is led not by a person, but by the social-media zeitgeist, with the correct position being whichever is angriest and most extreme, or the most “expansionist” in Arendt’s terms. It strikes me as an awfully good explanation of how we got to the current incoherence of both theory and strategy on transgenderism, despite the sincere passion and actual best efforts of many people involved. The trans movement is riddled with internal contradictions. It has long been a loyalty test. And as the ACLU strategy shows, it has always been about endlessly expanding activism, rather than the best results for trans people. If they hadn’t brought this case to the Supreme court, which they knew they’d likely lose, trans people would be better off.
An odd bit of hope for Americans today comes in what is almost a side observation of Arendt’s. She notes that Britain never succumbed to fascist or totalitarian rule, despite experiencing many of the same cultural and economic conditions as the European countries, because, she thinks, its robust two-party political system prevented the total atomization that occurred in countries ruled by more fragmentary coalitions. It would be funny if America’s dueling totalitarianisms were in fact its secret strength. Perhaps our vicious polarization is only thing holding back the deluge. But it’s not so funny that we should rely on it.
Strangio offered hope to the faithful through more of the same — the possibility of unexplored legal strategies, new gender clinics popping up on the borders of friendly states, and the historic ability of the LGBT (and now Q+) community to band together and get along through oppression. I found myself wanting a fair and non-totalitarian resolution to the issue, one notably not forthcoming from the Trump administration. If youth gender medicine isn’t settled, let’s settle it, without evasions and twisting the evidence. Instead of destroying our institutions, let’s use them: democracy, the law, the “both sides” media. The good Ptown bourgeoise in the Hawthorne Barn seemed at least a little bit on the same page as me. They were warm and friendly to Strangio, but they were asking questions.
One woman suggested that no one should be “assigned” a sex at birth, and that we should always give it a couple of years to see what kind of identity develops. In my view this is a denial of human reality and would be terrible for children, but at least she was honest about her objectives, and somewhat consistent. (Strangio said this would be “doing a service to the child,” but also added “I didn’t do that. I took my child’s sex assignment and went with it.”) Another woman, very politely, raised an article critical of the youth gender medicine orthodoxy, written on the Skrmetti decision by Nicholas Confessore and published last week in The New York Times. She asked about Strangio’s response to “a kind of pulling back in the medical opinions not only here but in England and elsewhere in the world.” Strangio ground-shifted away, but the question was brave, and it went over with the crowd just fine. May this too be contagious.
