We Need Better Narratives About Gender

It’s a time of contrast and contradiction for gender queerness in America: At the same time that about 5 percent of Americans under 30 identify as transgender or nonbinary, over 20 states have passed some sort of restriction on gender-affirming care for children. In 2023 alone, over 550 anti-trans bills have been introduced across the country. The political push and pull can overshadow a broad spectrum of rich questions and possibilities that queer culture opens up — about how we think about identity and social categories, how we structure our communities and support networks, our anxieties about having children who are different from ourselves, how gender norms shape all bodies and how difficult it can be to make big life decisions. Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker who has thought deeply about many of these questions. “Gender is something that happens between me and other people,” they say. In this conversation, the guest host Lydia Polgreen asks Gessen, who identifies as trans and nonbinary, what the social and political shift around gender has looked like to them in the past few decades. They discuss why gender has captured the conservative imagination, how L. G. B. T. Q. activists have fallen into the “regret trap,” what it means to understand gender expression as a choice rather than something biologically determined, why Gessen prefers a liberatory framework focused on protecting freedoms-to rather than freedoms-from when thinking about L. G. B. T. Q. issues, how gender-affirming care is not just for trans people, how the making of the 1999 movie “The Matrix” reflects the rapid social change around trans visibility in the United States, the anti-L. G. B. T. Q. sentiments that made Gessen decide to leave their home in Russia,how gender conformity is social contagion and more. This episode was hosted by Lydia Polgreen, a New York Times Opinion columnist and a co-host on the weekly Opinion podcast “Matter of Opinion.” She previously served as the managing director of Gimlet, a podcast studio at Spotify, and as the editor in chief of HuffPost. Mentioned: The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson Book Recommendations: The Myth of the Wrong Body by Miquel Misse Conundrum by Jan Morris Who’s Afraid of Gender by Judith Butler Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Annie-Rose Strasser. The show’s production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Jeff Geld and Rollin Hu. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Isaac Jones.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  Hey, it is Ezra. I am still on bookly, but I've really been enjoying the show. It is fun to be a listener of your own show. And this week, I'm particularly excited because the great Lydia Polgreen is behind the mic. Lydia is a longtime international reporter for the New York Times. Now she is a columnist colleague of mine here at Opinion and co-host of Matter of Opinion. And she's going to do some great things behind the mic.

• 0:51Lydia Polgreen?

  It's a terrifying time for trans and non-binary people in America. State legislatures across the country have seen an uptick in bills regarding trans people. More than 20 states have now passed some sort of restriction on gender-affirming care for children. And with almost 200 healthcare bills introduced in 2023, this number will likely continue to rise. This onslaught of legislation has gotten important news coverage. But there's actually a broad spectrum of rich, interesting, and more personal questions that queer culture opens up. Questions about how we think about identity and social categories, our anxieties about having children different from ourselves, and how difficult it can be to make big life decisions. All of which made me want to talk to Masha Gessen. They're a staff writer at

• 1:35Lydia Polgreen?

  The New Yorker who identifies as trans and non-binary, and they're also a parent. Masha has spent their career not just reporting on LGBTQ issues, but also witnessing how queer culture has evolved alongside various shifts in politics and mainstream culture, both in the United States and in Russia, where they were born. They advocate for a liberatory framework for thinking about LGBTQ issues, which focuses on not just protecting trans people's rights, but on securing freedom for trans people and all of society to break free from social norms. Masha's thinking on questions of gender, identity, and transition are often nuanced, unorthodox, and playful, which is also how I describe the conversation

• 2:17Lydia Polgreen?

  we have today. As always, the show's email is [email protected]. Here's my conversation with Masha Gessen.

• 2:32Lydia Polgreen?

  Masha Gessen, thanks for being here.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  It's great to be here, Lydia.

• 2:36Lydia Polgreen?

  It's wonderful. We're going to have a very queer conversation, I hope.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  All right.

• 2:41Lydia Polgreen?

  Why are we talking about gender right now? Why is gender the thing that has, I don't know, seized the conservative imagination? Why is this assault on gender, nonconforming people, trans people, queer people, happening in the world right now? What's your theory?

• 2:59Speaker 02

  So my theory is that autocrats and aspiring autocrats need an effective way of communicating a very simple idea, which is, I can take you back to an imaginary past.

• 3:14Speaker 02

  And in this particular case, they're saying, I can take you back to an imaginary past where women were women and men were men and families were families and life was predictable and you felt comfortable and you didn't have to accept things that made you uncomfortable and made the future seem unpredictable and importantly, you didn't have to fear that there will be such a chasm between you and your child that you will not understand each other. And all of that, that whole big promise of past-oriented politics can be communicated with this very simple strategy of attacking trans people in particular, but then all

• 3:58Speaker 02

  of what they call gender ideology and LGBT rights.

• 4:02Lydia Polgreen?

  We're seeing an onslaught of anti-trans legislation in this country. More than 20 states have passed some sort of restriction on gender-affirming care for children and about 170 healthcare-related bills have been introduced this year. So we can assume that more states are going to be added to this list. What's your sense of what this legislation is doing? Is this something substantive or is it really about sending a message?

• 4:24Speaker 02

  Well, it's always both. I think the process of passing this legislation is very much about signaling. It's exactly that thing that I was just talking about. It's like, I'm going to take you back to the imaginary past. But of course, it has real consequences, right? It has real consequences, both for people who lose access to... Healthcare and for people who start living in fear, who feel like they have to move their kids out of state in order to keep them safe. You know, it's a snowballing thing, which is what happens when legislation actually works, right? It creates not just a set of legal rules, but actual social change.

• 5:00Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Speaker 02

  It's just social change that's really kind of horrifying to watch.

• 5:03Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. And against a backdrop of what had seemed like progress, right? I mean, I think over the course of our lifetimes, we've seen something that looks like a narrative of greater acceptance of the broader umbrella of LGBTQ people. But perhaps this, if we choose to call it backlash, is happening in the face of what's seen as progress.

• 5:22Speaker 02

  I mean, let's be honest about it. It's not just that we've seen progress in our lifetimes. It's that there has been such incredibly rapid change, just in the last, I don't know, five, seven years on trans issues. I mean, it's been head spinning. And if it's been head spinning for me, then I can only imagine how head spinning it has been for people who didn't even know such a thing existed, as trans people. And suddenly they feel, and they really do feel that, you know, like they're all around them.

• 5:57Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah, change is hard. It's interesting because, you know, I've been working on an essay about regret and about, you know, sort of thinking about trans kids and what it is that we're saying when we worry about regret. And one of the things that's sort of come up in the process of reporting that is just really thinking about the sort of different tracks that, I don't want to say anti-trans thought, but there is sort of an element of anti-trans thought that comes out in, that is not actually the kind of totalitarian, like, we're going to bring, we don't believe that gender transition exists. We're all pretty familiar with that sort of attack on transgender people. I've been thinking a lot lately about the sort of softer side of the group that doesn't even think of itself as being anti-trans.

• 6:41Lydia Polgreen?

  And I think that particularly among, you know, I think the kind of people that you and I probably know and are in our social circles, there's a lot of discomfort, right? And you just referred to this, that, you know, just in our lifetimes, there's been a lot of change and a lot of discomfort. And I think that that discomfort shows up less in the form of like, let's ban all care, and more in the form of, well, geez, I'd really hate for a child to make a choice that they might regret. And you end up with a kind of perspective on transition that is basically, yes, there's this small, clearly defined group of people who are transgender. We can very closely look at them and decide who's who and sort them into the group, make

• 7:23Lydia Polgreen?

  sure only the right ones, who really, truly are, are the ones who transition. And to borrow a phrase, you know, transition should be safe, legal, and rare. And talk to me a little bit about that side of the conversation, because I think we spend a lot of time talking about the sort of more authoritarian side of it and the Ron DeSantis es of the world. I spend a lot of time worrying about the other side of it.

• 7:46Speaker 02

  I'd like to talk to you a lot about it, not a little.

• 7:50Lydia Polgreen?

  Great.

• 7:51Speaker 02

  Because I think there's so many things to talk about. And maybe I would start, since I'm talking to you, I would start with how it's largely, this framing is largely our fault. And by us, I mean queer people. And I think it goes back to this idea of choicelessness, that we sort of made the the main argument of the LGBT, well, the gay and lesbian rights movement, or really the gay rights movement, back in the early 70s. It was probably pragmatically brilliant.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Because it was the shortest way to getting homosexuality removed from the diagnostic manual, to get both the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association, to accept that homosexuality wasn't a pathology. And it was a way to argue for civil rights. It wasn't the only possible way to argue for civil rights.

• 8:49Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Nobody is born into a religion. Well, people are born into religions, but nobody argues that it's an immutable characteristic.

• 8:57Lydia Polgreen?

  No, but it has the advantage of actually being written into the United States Constitution. That's the but so it's a rare I'm just saying it's a very rare outlier to to what you're saying, which is that this this kind of rights based discourse requires you to adopt a kind of immutability.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  It's certainly the easiest way to make the argument. But I have an issue actually with the rights based discourse in the first place. Like, I would really much rather live inside a liberatory discourse than a rights based discourse. That's what I thought I was signing up for.

• 9:25Lydia Polgreen?

  Right. And you signed up for it, I mean, as a very young person, working in the gay and lesbian press in the, you know, when what year was your first job in journalism?

• 9:34Speaker 02

  1983.

• 9:36Lydia Polgreen?

  Okay, yeah.

• 9:37Speaker 02

  And I was 16.

• 9:39Lydia Polgreen?

  Right. Fragocious. So you felt like you were signing up for liberation.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  And instead, I got the right to marry, which is great. Got the right to serve in the military. Also, not terrible, if not for me personally. But yeah, no, that's I didn't get a redefined family. I didn't get a redefined concept of gender. I didn't get a redefined understanding of kinship and community, you know, like all the things that I thought I was actually going to get by joining this movement. So, you know, I have a chip on my shoulder about that. But I think we the LGBT rights movement, by choosing that strategy, fundamentally changed people's lives for the better for millions of people. I mean, the gains in a single lifetime have been staggering.

• 10:29Speaker 02

  But we also set a trap for ourselves, which I think we're seeing now with trans issues, and that's the immutability trap. We're so used to arguing, we don't really know how to argue anything else, that you're born in the wrong body, and that is, you know, I don't mean to say that that is not true for some people. For some people, it is absolutely true. But it's entirely possible that those are the people who fall into the safe, legal, and rare category.

• 10:57Lydia Polgreen?

  Mm hmm.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  And there's an entire spectrum of people who transition for other reasons, for a combination of reasons, who at some point at least experienced it as a choice. And we don't know how to see our way to that. That creates a lot of difficulties because it's very difficult, for example, to argue that a non-binary person was born in the wrong body. Because how do you even do that?

• 11:26Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah, yeah, because the body that you're born into is just the body that you're born into. But the identity piece of it, I think, is where it becomes sort of messy and confusing to people, right? So there is this notion that I see undergirding the conversations that I have with even, frankly, lesbian parents whose children come to them and say, I'm non-binary, or I'm trans. It really freaks them out. And of course, like, I think your child being different from you is a very, very scary experience. I'm personally not a parent, but you are, and I think I have many, many friends who are parents. It is sort of terrifying. And yet, we have an ability to metabolize regret. We have

• 12:07Lydia Polgreen?

  an ability to tolerate and understand that children will make decisions that they regret. So, you know, for example, I gave up swimming when I was a child. I was a very good swimmer. I could have been a varsity athlete. I can imagine a version of my life unfolding in which I did something very different. And in some ways, I regret not following that path, but that's life. I think most people would say, well, that's very different from something as fundamental to your identity as changing your gender. I guess I wonder if it is.

• 12:37Speaker 02

  Well, that's exactly the thing. So if the immutability trap is the trap we set for ourselves, I think the regret trap is a trap we didn't set for ourselves, but we fell right into. I think the regret trap was definitely set by people who are opposed to, nervous about, scared of.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Seeing more and more trans people, which is a statistical fact. And seeing people transition younger. And I think it is easy to explain by saying that 10 years ago, a 14 year old didn't have the option, didn't have the imaginary to be able to ask their parents for help in transition. And now they do. But another way, of course, of looking at it from the opposite side is it's social contagion and children are making decisions, irreversible decisions that they're going to regret. And we, proponents of trans rights, tend to respond to it by saying, but very few people are going to regret it, which is also a statistical fact.

• 13:42Speaker 02

  And that's how we fall right into the trap. What I think we should be saying is, possibly. So what? Like, what exactly are they going to regret? And what other things are they going to regret? The two comparisons that I usually go to, and maybe you can think of better ones, but teenagers sign up for the military. That's a huge life decision. I'm not really sure that 17 year olds are equipped to make that decision. It's binding. It really shapes people's lives for at least a decade or so. And I think people are likely to regret it. And we think that they're qualified to do it. In fact, we create all sorts of systems to facilitate their making this decision.

• 14:25Speaker 02

  Another, of course, is medical interventions, which is something that, a decision that parents often make for children, where children make together with their parents, going on antidepressants. Not dissimilar from transitioning, if you think about transitioning as a way to be in the world in a way that is more comfortable, makes it easier for you to cope, and then gets us into all sorts of other conversations. Let me know if I'm going too fast with these. But, you know, one of the objections that we hear from clinicians, and it's their job to raise these objections, is what if there's something else going on? What if there's depression? What if there's autism? And again, I think the go to answer is usually, that's rare.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  We can tell genuine transness from spectrum, the autism spectrum disorder, which A, I don't believe, and B, look, it is probably easier to be a boy on the spectrum than a girl on the spectrum. Like, not a bad choice. Go for it. Your life will be easier if you feel like, uh, like that's something, that's an option that works for you. And I can imagine listeners fainting at this because like, what am I saying? Am I saying it's a choice? For some people it is. It's a choice about being in the world. And that gets us back to what parents and allies of parents are so terrified that their

• 15:51Speaker 02

  children will regret, cutting off their breasts, preventing puberty. That comes from our understanding of just how essential these body parts are to who we are. But that's just how we construct gender.

• 16:09Lydia Polgreen?

  Well, and it's how we show our gender in the world, right? I mean, I think one, in the process of researching this piece, I did some research into cosmetic surgery for children. And how many children do you think receive cosmetic surgery? Teenagers, let's say, from 13 to 19?

• 16:26Speaker 02

  What an interesting question.

• 16:28Lydia Polgreen?

  Just ballpark. What would you guess?

• 16:31Speaker 02

  2%.

• 16:32Lydia Polgreen?

  So in 2020, fewer than 1% of teens in the United States received cosmetic procedures, according to a report that I found that was published by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. And there were some other numbers in this report about cosmetic procedures more generally that I found fascinating. So first of all, 92% of all cosmetic procedures are done on women, and rhinoplasty is the most popular surgical procedure. And you might say, what does that have to do with gender? Well, I mean, the ideas that we have about female attractiveness are of course very much bound up in gender. There are also thousands of breast augmentation and reduction surgeries for girls, and very, very interestingly, 2,800 surgeries performed on boys to remove excess breast tissue.

• 17:16Lydia Polgreen?

  So, I mean, that obviously is very much bound up in affirming the gender of these kids. And when you move into cosmetic surgeries for adults, there's been this huge explosion in popularity of a surgery to lengthen one's legs, and it's really growing among men. It's quite invasive and it adds a few inches of height. But again, this is a gendered expectation that men in our culture are going to be of a certain stature. And this is even more squeamish making, but there's been a huge explosion in the popularity of penile enlargement in adults. But I guess this all sort of gets to my broader sense that we're all feeling a little bit uncomfortable about our bodies and the way that we show our gender in the world. And this, to me, like, really speaks to something that goes far beyond the experience of queer

• 18:01Lydia Polgreen?

  people, of trans people, of gender nonconforming people, and to the kind of human condition of having to show up in the world with a gendered body.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  And we do ourselves no favors when we pretend that it's not messy and complicated, when we pretend that people under the age of 18 have no ability to make decisions and people over the age of 18 have all the ability to make decisions. And, you know, I often assign to my students Shulamith Firestone's chapter, "Down with Childhood" from The Dialectic of Sex. And it's just, you know, I can't remember, 18 or 25 pages, that just keeps pounding the reader with like, where did you get this idea that children were completely different from adults?

• 18:48Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 02

  Wasn't always so, the boundary was not always at 18. It would be really useful if, as we're making things messier and more complicated, if we at least question the category of childhood. I'm not going to go so far as to argue that it's completely meaningless. I can see very clearly that all three of my children, ages 11, 22, and 25, have much less life experience. And Less formed brains than I do. But do they necessarily correspond exactly to their chronological ages? Is the 11 year old who's not under the influence of raging hormones,

• 19:31Speaker 02

  not sometimes capable of much better decisions and better argumentation than the 22 year old? For sure. And so let's just make it worse.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  But also, as as uncomfortable as things like rhinoplasty in little girls makes you and me, I think probably also makes sense to imagine what it's like to be in that family, to be that girl who is probably in a majority of cases, suffering horribly from whatever she imagines her defect to be. To be that parent who might see that surgery as a life-saving surgery. And what is the cost of that? It's the cost of surgery and possibly regretting

• 20:30Speaker 02

  having a perfect nose at the age of 25 or whenever that crisis is over? That seems a very low cost for what I imagine, I only imagine this, the pain that's going on in that family.

• 20:41Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, right? Because I think that because we're so focused on the role of the law in all of this, one thing that gets lost is that these are decisions that are made within families. And having seen this up close with with friends, there's nothing casual about the way in which these issues are being discussed or dealt with within a family. And you know, I think the thing that I find so troubling and chilling is the idea that you want to interpose the government into what should be a discussion between a family, parents and children. Maybe you want to bring your rabbi into it. Maybe you

• 21:25Lydia Polgreen?

  want to bring a doctor and a psychiatrist into it. Maybe there are all kinds of people who are appropriate participants in that conversation, depending on your situation and the nature of your family. One person that I think is completely inappropriate is a politician. I mean.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I don't know. You know, I am, as an old queer, I am always a little bit careful about arguing for family against government. I mean, I think ideally, it wouldn't be an anti-government argument. It would be an argument for better politics.

• 22:02Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think that's a, that's actually a very good note because families are not always supportive.

• 22:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:10Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. So that's right. And the notion of a child being able to access some form of autonomy from the family is, I think, very, very important.

• 22:44Lydia Polgreen?

  Reuters did some reporting last year where they analyzed insurance data to look at gender-affirming care for children. And the numbers that they found were actually incredibly small. I mean, I think that there was clearly an increase in the number of kids that were taking puberty blockers, but it was 1,400 in 2021. And, but that's still in absolute numbers, a very small number of kids. Looking at the rhetoric, you would think that there are teenage girls that are getting their breasts lofted off left and right after, you know, watching a couple of TikTok videos. But the actual numbers that Reuters found in 2021, and again, this is a limited data set. It's just insurance and Medicaid, was 282.

• 23:23Speaker 02

  Right, that's tiny. And it also gets us to another point, which is not part of the public imagination at all, which is that that goes along with a fairly high percentage, I can't tell you off the top of my head, of young people identifying as trans or gender nonconforming, and results of a Washington Post poll that showed that more than half of people who identify as trans have had no medical intervention.

• 23:49Lydia Polgreen?

  But I think it's interesting to me that your discomfort with this minimizing, and it's interesting, I guess, I'm saying interesting, what I mean is, I feel it too, that this sense of discomfort with saying, no, no, no, nothing to see here, this is just a little group over in the corner that you don't need to worry about. And I guess if I ask myself, why does that make me uncomfortable, I guess it's partly because of my own uncertainties about all of these questions, right? And that looking at the data of medical interventions that nominally cisgender children get, it really makes me

• 24:31Lydia Polgreen?

  think that we're talking about something bigger than one small group of people. And sort of exploding that out to all of us feels, as you put it, liberatory.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  I'll tell you why it makes me uncomfortable to argue that there's nothing to see here and it's a very small group of people, because that's, first of all, it never works. It's like, let's just avoid attention, means you give up your opportunity to shape language and narrative, and you give it over to someone else. And that's exactly what we've seen happen. It also, the argument strikes me as disingenuous, because there's something to see here. There's, as you were saying, right, there's something to see here in the way that young people and old people interact with medicine, in the new possibilities that

• 25:24Speaker 02

  we see for our bodies that extend, that include gender, but extend far past gender. And, you know, there's a lovely passage in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts.

• 25:38Lydia Polgreen?

  Great book.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Where she kind of accidentally, or coincidentally, compares gender transition to aging. But you know, that's exactly right. It's a development of the body. It's something that happens over time. So it's silly to argue that there's nothing to see here because I think it is one of the formative experiences of our society at this moment, even if it's a small group of people.

• 26:05Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. I mean, it's also interesting, right? Because I think that we often underestimate the rapidity with which we can metabolize change. I mean, one example that I think about is, you know, because again, thinking about regret, my parents met, my mother's Ethiopian and my father's a white American from a very conservative family in Wisconsin. And in 1973, when my father brought home his black African fiancee and my grandparents were wonderful people who I don't think were prejudiced at all. But I think that in that milieu, the concern about the sort of regretability of biracial children was very real. You know, we were less than a decade past the loving decision.

• 26:48Lydia Polgreen?

  There was a 19th century literature about the sort of tragic mulatto, the child that is at best the product of doomed love or at worst evidence of a crime of rape. And a sense that like, oh, well, this just isn't, this just isn't a good idea because we had very fixed ideas about race that, you know, at that time, I think there was still a belief that there was a biological component to race. And you fast, I think I looked up the polling in 1973 or around then, you know, about 30% of people thought that interracial marriage was okay. And I could see how it would seem like this huge, you know, sort of life, like you're taking a huge risk here.

• 27:30Lydia Polgreen?

  You know, it was officially sort of like stamped by science that biological, that there's no biological reality to race, that, you know, once all the genome mapping was done. And in 2021, when Gallup polled the question about interracial marriage again, 90 something percent of people said, no, it's totally fine, that they have no problem with interracial marriage. I mean, we're talking about a series of events that have happened over my lifetime, right? From being a potentially regrettable person to, which is

• 28:00Lydia Polgreen?

  Very strange phrase, but to, you know, the vast majority of the country saying, this is no big deal. So I don't know, like, and I'm not a person who believes in the sort of inevitability and linearity of progress, but there are some interesting parallels there, right? I mean, a belief about sort of a biological or determinative basis, or at least the search for one to prove that one side is inferior to the other, a binary that is collapsing in a way that makes a lot of people uncomfortable. Yeah, I don't know.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  You know, this weekend, we watched The Matrix with my 11-year-old son, a movie that I'd never been able to get through before. But I dread that the new reading of it is that it's a trans allegory. Eh, but anyway, we watched it.

• 28:50Lydia Polgreen?

  And just for, just for people who don't know, the sort of retrofitting of the trans allegory is that the makers of this film later came out as trans, the siblings who made the film.

• 28:59Speaker 02

  Right. Both of them came out as trans and said that as much, said that.

• 29:04Lydia Polgreen?

  Yes, I shouldn't, I shouldn't call it a retrofitting. You're right.

• 29:08Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, it sounds like they were, because they were both, to various extents, closeted when they were making the movie. It is in a way retrofitting. They read themselves retroactively. But then we started reading up on the movie. And one of the things that we discovered, probably widely known, in fact, to fans of the movie, was that the character Switch, who is the sort of androgynous woman in the movie, was actually supposed to present as male in the computer world and female in the real world. And the studios nixed it, which, the movie came out in 1999. So

• 29:47Speaker 02

  I was a full-grown adult by that time. My oldest kid had been born. And it just, it almost defies my imagination. Like, I can't imagine into the past. A situation where the studios think that that's too risky a move. A character who presents as one gender in that in one world and another, a sci fi movie, right? Where all sorts of things happen that, you know, don't happen in the real world. Whereas that actually does happen in the real world and was certainly happening in 1999. And on the following day, we went to see the movie Bottoms, which I don't know if you've seen, it's absolutely delightful. Fantastic, loved it. And it's just the most casually queer high school movie, but it's not even shocking anymore.

• 30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like it's, yes, you can go to movie theaters, playing all over the place. It's, and so, you know, that, that change in a, in a very young person's lifetime is staggering. But like you, I'm not, I'm not a believer in, in the linearity of progress. And I think that, that it is possible to lose all or most of the gains. And, you know, I've seen, I've seen it happen in Russia, where I had to, I had to leave Russia for this very reason. And, but I also want to pick up on the biological component. Yes, please. Because I'm sure people are listening to you and thinking, well, yeah, okay, we've debunked the biological component of race, but obviously there's a biological component to gender.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  And yes, I mean, there's also a biological component to race in the sense that you can see it, but you're not seeing categories. Categories is what we make up. And I grew up, in fact, I grew up and became an adult and had up until the year, I think 2000, a passport that indicated my so-called nationality, which was Jewish. And in fact, all of my documents, including my personnel file at work, my, my, my school files, my healthcare records, all of them indicated that I was Jewish. Not as a religion, but as an ethnicity. Because where I grew up, it was perceived as an essential immutable characteristic.

• 32:00Speaker 02

  And I'm saying both immutable and essential, because it was essential to identifying me to the state, to the systems that I interacted with, the same way that gender is. If you're not paying attention, you may not notice that your, if you get a ticket for improperly recycling, they will actually attempt to indicate your gender on it in this city.

• 32:26Lydia Polgreen?

  Did this happen to you?

• 32:27Speaker 02

  Yes, it did happen to me.

• 32:29Lydia Polgreen?

  Masha, I'm very embarrassed that you were improperly recycling. I mean, I'm shocked.

• 32:33Speaker 02

  No, I wasn't. It was...

• 32:37Speaker 02

  I can't... It was a while ago. I had just moved to the city. But I was like, really? Gender? I mean, it's not just your passport, your driver's license, all your healthcare records, but things like your recycling ticket and all sorts of things that... You know, there's absolutely no reason why my badge for entering the New Yorker offices at One World Trade Center should indicate my gender.

• 33:00Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  But it does.

• 33:01Lydia Polgreen?

  But it does. Yeah, I mean, I think these binary identities are very important to us and they are anchored. They're ways to anchor and make meaning in the world, right? I mean, I think that being able to sort things into categories is a very human thing. And it's interesting, right? Like, I had a very strange experience when I was 10 years old. You know, I grew up mostly in Kenya. We moved to Kenya when I was a toddler. And we moved back to the United States when I was 10 and I was going into sixth grade. And I was in gym class and a kid referred to me by a racial slur. And everyone freaked out immediately. The teacher freaked out, you know, and sort of sprung into... It was the word that you can imagine that it was. And my response to it was just confusion because I had never heard this word before.

• 33:46Lydia Polgreen?

  And on a deeper level, I think that I actually did not understand the concept of race. I mean, I'm biracial. I, you know, now think of myself that way. But I grew up in a context where there were certainly identity categories that were extremely important, right? I mean, nationality, tribe, language, all of these things that were very hard identities that were, you know... But the sort of binary concept of race as it exists in the United States was just completely invisible to me. So there I was, 10 years old, learning something about myself that was plain as day to anybody who could see my face, that I didn't know about myself. So when people talk about...

• 34:29Lydia Polgreen?

  Knowing an identity and all of these things, I find myself puzzled. Because if someone else can know something immutable about me before I know it myself, what does that tell us about the nature of identity? And the idea that there is some sort of sovereign self that you can anchor yourself to?

• 34:50Speaker 02

  Well, and that's another problem with the whole "Born in the Wrong Body" discourse.

• 34:54Lydia Polgreen?

  No, exactly.

• 34:55Speaker 02

  That I've always felt and after a certain point was able to put words to it, that gender is something that happens between me and other people. It doesn't actually happen inside my body. It's what people see, what I want them to see, what I feel when they see one thing and not the other thing. All of that is my gender. And so my gender has changed over my 56 years. But it also changes, I mean, I'll tell you a ridiculous and somewhat humiliating story. So I guess this was two years ago. I was at a conference in Kiev and, you know, I've never changed my name.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  So my name to Russian speaker or any Slavic language speaker is undoubtedly, completely 100% Russian and I'm known to, I was known at this conference. So I wasn't going to make anything of it. Like, I just knew I was going to be presenting as female to all the people at this conference who knew who I was. And that was, that was fine, except when I had to pee. Because at this conference venue, they had people minding the door, the entrances to the bathrooms. So there I was, and I tried to go into the ladies' room because I was female at this conference.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  And this lady immediately blocks my way. Because obviously I look the way I look, like, what?

• 36:25Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 36:26Speaker 02

  Except to people who are primed to see me as a woman. So I'm standing there thinking, what am I going to do? Because I can't go into the men's room because they all know me. And if they know me, then they know me as female. But a person who doesn't know me clearly knows me as male. And so that's, you know, that's how gender happens. I mean, I finally told her that I really knew what I was doing.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  And I belong there. But that's how gender operates.

• 36:56Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 36:56Speaker 02

  And it's also, you know, it's a funny comment on the impossibility of presenting as male one minute and female the next, but I was actually like doing it in real time.

• 37:06Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah, we haven't talked about your own transition and how you identify. But I can tell people who are not like me, sitting across from you, that you have a masculine presentation, what would be received as a masculine presentation. I think I also have a fairly masculine presentation and have had very, not exactly that experience, but lots of bathroom confusion. But as you were talking, I was thinking about this great quote that I got for this piece that I'm working on from a historian named Jules Jill Peterson. And she said this wonderful thing to me that was, we were talking about this issue of sort of where gender comes from and, you know, might it actually be a problem for everyone as opposed to a problem just for people who have gender?

• 37:49Lydia Polgreen?

  It used to be that people who had gender were just women and then it was, now it's transgender and queer people. But she said this wonderful thing. She said, "It might be comforting and reassuring to imagine that trans people are fundamentally different, but I think the real startling possibility is that they are not and that we all depend on the generosity of strangers to give us our gender every single day."

• 38:09Speaker 02

  That's beautiful.

• 38:11Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 38:37Lydia Polgreen?

  So I want to talk a little bit about the kind of radical edges of this conversation about identity, right? Because I think that you and I have a particular experience and we're of a particular generation. I think we're a little bit, a little bit generationally distant, just in the sense that you experienced things as a young queer person that because of the passing of time in history and particularly because of the AIDS epidemic, I think were pretty different from what I experienced just maybe 10 years later. But I'd love to just sort of hear you talk a little bit about the kind of where we're at in that kind of overall arc of the story of queer life. Because I think you have an interesting perspective and vantage point on it.

• 39:19Lydia Polgreen?

  And I think I've had some trepidation about sort of prematurely making a turn toward a kind of universalist liberationist thinking. Because we're living in a time of great danger. And I suppose one could think of it as a sort of dialectical moment, where the contradictions of the old order are showing themselves and that something new is being born. But dialectical moments are fraught with a lot of danger and for a lot of vulnerable people. So if you're a person who's liberation-minded, but aware of the perils of the present, what do you do?

• 40:01Speaker 02

  I think you do both. I think that it would be silly and irresponsible to, for me, say, as a journalist and a public person, to literally act on my opinion that rights-based frameworks are not so great and libertarian frameworks are so great. Because there are actual rights that people can actually exercise that are under attack and rights that they lack, that they could conceivably gain. And as a journalist, as a public person, I can speak in favor of those rights and maybe make a small difference. So it would be completely irresponsible to not do that.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  I also think it would be irresponsible not to exercise my imagination as much as I can and maybe try to remind us in moments when we have the time and energy for contemplation that Having some rights within a political community that's constructed the way it is constructed now is not our ultimate goal, that maybe we can imagine a better world. Because if we don't imagine, if we don't imagine it actively now, we're not going to be able to build it in the future.

• 41:19Lydia Polgreen?

  Hmm, yeah. At the same time, you have a very real experience of what happens. Tell me about your experience of going back to Russia and then leaving again. I mean, that was a moment where it felt that a certain kind of freedom or liberation, you could at least work towards it, but my understanding is that it sort of got snatched back and you had to leave.

• 41:41Speaker 02

  So I was born in the Soviet Union. My family immigrated to the States when I was 14. And then 10 years later, I went back as a young journalist and just kind of stayed. And in fact, I went back, the first time I went back was on a story, but the second time I went back a few months later in 1991 was to help organize and run the first gay lesbian conference and film festival that was held in Moscow in St. Petersburg. And this was like two weeks before the failed Hardline coup. And so it all felt of a piece. It felt like that sort of, you know, you could show queer movies in a movie theater

• 42:22Speaker 02

  in the center of Moscow, and the Soviet Union was collapsing, and these things were actually related, and I think they were. And I ended up staying there for 22 years. At first, I didn't expect I was going to stay forever, and then I kind of did expect that I was going to stay forever. And it wasn't that progress was that rapid. It was, there were all sorts of other things going on. And I think that LGBT people never quite had the time to form communities that could then result in a political movement. There were basically sort of community building organizations in a number of cities when

• 43:03Speaker 02

  suddenly the Kremlin went on the attack against LGBT people, and these organizations, these like coffee clutches, had to turn into political organizations. And really quite extraordinary things happened and a lot of incredible activism and heroism. What happened to me personally was that

• 43:27Speaker 02

  In 2013, the Russian Parliament passed legislation against propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations among minors, which was, and I didn't realize this right away, but as legislation sort of went through the process, I realized that it basically placed all LGBT parents outside the law. And by that point, I had three kids. And one of them was adopted. And then they immediately passed another law banning adoption by same-sex couples or raising kids in same-sex couples, because the male recipient wasn't legally adopted in Russian territory by two women, but in point of fact, was. So we, and I was actually singled out

• 44:12Speaker 02

  as sort of the protagonist of this particular piece of legislation. So we had to pack up and leave. I mean, not nearly as dramatically or nearly as fast as people who had to leave because of actual violence or people who had to leave after the full-scale invasion started, who packed up and left in a matter of days. But I did, you know, I did have to leave with my family and, you know, leave my home, leave my entire community. And at this point, these things have sort of moved in parallel. So earlier this year, the Russian Parliament has literally outlawed trans people.

• 44:57Speaker 02

  It is illegal to transition. It is illegal to accept or supply any kind of medical intervention. It is illegal to change your documents, et cetera, et cetera. So it's like they've really banned transness. And at the same time, it appears that there's a criminal case against me for knowingly spreading false information about the Russian military. And so, and you know, to me, I think that is a very fairly harmonious predicament. Like, that's actually how it works. I happen to belong to two groups that the Russian government is trying to outlaw: trans people and journalists.

• 45:40Lydia Polgreen?

  What does that experience make you think and feel about where we are right now in the United States? I mean, obviously, we're a very different country, but, you know, in terms of what's thinkable?

• 45:50Speaker 02

  Well, I used to, I used to say that, that my friend and mentor Larry Kramer taught me how to catastrophically imagine. And, and I thought that was, and to those who don't know, Larry Kramer was a playwright, novelist, and a founder of both GMHC, The Gaidman's Health Crisis, which was an early service organization for people with AIDS, and then ACT UP, the AIDS activist organization.

• 46:19Lydia Polgreen?

  And you were also a member of ACT UP, Masha.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  And I was also a member of ACT UP. And what I found remarkable about Larry is that I thought he'd imagined AIDS before AIDS ever happened. And so when AIDS started happening, he was, and I think I can use this word as, is that allowed to be used? He was hysterical, right? He was, he was screaming, he was calling people names, he was, he was writing screeds that said that 82 people were sick and that men's, that means we're all going to die. And that was his catastrophic imagination at work. He could have been wrong, but it so happens, he was right.

• 47:01Lydia Polgreen?

  Tragically, he was right.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  Tragically, he was right. And so I think that Russia and Larry has given me the gift of catastrophic imagination. Anything is thinkable. It doesn't mean it's going to happen. It doesn't mean that five, 10, or 20 years from now, it's going to be illegal to be trans or a journalist in the United States, but it is possible.

• 47:26Lydia Polgreen?

  Well, and I think that, that, you know, something that, that has certainly sharpened my attention is, you know, the way that the reality of abortion in this country has changed. For example, we all thought as a bedrock certainty that this was, the Roe versus Wade was decided law, that there was a, it was unthinkable to go back to a time when abortion was, was outlawed. And that was, of course, foolish. Of course, it's thinkable. I have been seeing a lot of interesting thinking about the kind of interlinking between the struggle for bodily autonomy for queer, gender nonconforming, and trans people, and the struggle for abortion rights. What, what, do you see possibilities there? Do you see some, some room for solidarity?

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Absolutely, but first let me just make a comment on this unthinkable. Because if we look back at the Dobbs decision, and if we look back at the election of Donald Trump, those are two examples of when reasonable people were saying that something was impossible after it had become a clear, identifiable, describable reality, that Donald Trump was going to get the Republican nomination. And he had it locked in, and reasonable people were saying, there's no way. And after Amy Coney Barrett had been confirmed, reasonable people were saying there was no way they were going to overturn Roe. But I think the moment she was confirmed, we knew. So it's important to force yourself to think things that seem unthinkable.

• 48:55Lydia Polgreen?

  Well, and also to understand that events are not predictable. So, I mean, it could be that Donald Trump won the presidency, but did not sort of get the lottery ticket of being able to name three Supreme Court justices in a single, you know, misbegotten term. So, I mean, it's not just the things that you can predict, it's also add into that the things that, you know, maybe some of those, well, at least one of them was predictable because it had been held over by the Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. But yeah, no, I think that's right.

• 49:26Speaker 02

  And, you know, and I agree, things are not preordained. I think there's, it definitely behooves us to think about the best-case scenario in addition to the worst-case scenario. But like, face that the worst-case scenario is realistic. As for a movement for bodily autonomy, yes, of course. But again, we have to do something without thinking about immutability and being born in the wrong body. There's a bit of a leap from that to this is my body, my choice.

• 49:57Lydia Polgreen?

  Well, and I think that there's, I mean, one of the things that's been most troubling to me has been seeing the way in which, the way in which women who think of themselves as feminists, and I'm not, I'm not talking about the ones that we call TERFs, you know, although I don't love that term because I don't think that they actually are feminists. A lot of this sort of soft-shoulder concern, you know, but what about women, is coming from...

• 50:25Lydia Polgreen?

  Women who are probably in your social circle, just as they are in mine. And, you know, I have those hard conversations. But, but yeah, it sort of feels like rather than being an opportunity for solidarity, it often ends up being an opportunity for assertion of like relative privilege within a hierarchy that, that we all live with.

• 50:49Speaker 02

  And, and look, I don't want to actually dismiss that as an argument.

• 50:53Lydia Polgreen?

  No.

• 50:53Speaker 02

  I think that dismissing out of hand, the argument that people raised as boys have a completely different social experience, have a completely different experience of being in the world than people raised as girls, not all girls and not all boys and, you know, all of that, but by and large, we're talking about different social experiences. And there, we have opportunities to hash that out. If we sort of assume that we're allies. And if we assume that we're in a common struggle for control of our own bodies, then we can discuss the ways in which we're different.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  But I think one side saying, you're not me, and I'm not talking to you, and the other side saying, I am you, and you have to accept me as you, not terribly constructive, even, you know, and I'm not saying that one side is not more wrong than the other. One side is more wrong than the other. But they're both a little bit wrong.

• 51:52Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. No, that's right. And I think, you know, in conversations with friends of mine, you know, both friends who have children who are assigned female at birth and who've either come out as non-binary or transitioned, there is this kind of feeling that like particularly for mothers, that my child is rejecting womanhood, that they're rejecting femininity. And I think that that's painful, right? I think that that's something, I think it's probably true across genders, but I think particularly for a certain kind of. Feminist woman who's excited to raise a feminist daughter, that person who you thought of as a daughter telling you, "No, that's not who I am," I think is painful. And it's a thing that, I agree with you, it doesn't help anybody to tell that person,

• 52:36Lydia Polgreen?

  "No, you should just be happy about it, and you should have no feelings."

• 52:40Speaker 02

  But I think it does make sense to put it in the context of other things that are like it. Andrew Solomon has this wonderful book, Far From the Tree, which is all about a variety of the horizontal identities. So identities that are not passed on from parents to children. And it's all about the difficulty of navigating that distance that forms between parents and children. So what is transness like? Right? That's the question that I'm most interested in, and the one that gets me into the most trouble. Because the only way that I think we learn about things is by comparing them to other things.

• 53:24Speaker 02

  And it, again, does us a disservice to say transness is like nothing else. Well, of course, it's like nothing else. But it's also like a bunch of other things. Transness is like crossing borders. Transness is like being a stranger in your own country. Transness is like finding a religion that is different from the religion that your parents raised you. And transness is moving to a country and learning a language that's very different from your parents' language. And transness is also like a million other things. And making those comparisons helps us understand what transness is, but also helps us just accept it.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Right? Because we accept all sorts of other things that put a distance between parents and their children.

• 54:15Lydia Polgreen?

  One thing that goes hand in hand with this idea of contagion is this notion that a child will see something on TikTok and decide that they want to change their gender. This seems particularly to apply to trans masculine kids, kids that are assigned female at birth. And I think, again, one can make a minimizing argument, oh, this is, this is only for a really, really small number of people. But the numbers are real. You know, according to the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, adolescents assigned female at birth seek out transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth. And I guess the question that I would ask is, when isn't gender socially contagious? I mean, how did you learn to act out your gender? And you've

• 55:00Lydia Polgreen?

  had a few different ways of acting it out. We, we learn it from other people.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  I mean, I can tell you the exact moment when, well, I mean, the exact moment, I don't actually remember the exact moment in childhood when I like wore boys' clothes and insisted that people use a boy's name. And then after I started school, I couldn't do that anymore, or I could only do it after school. And then my parents were reading a Polish magazine. So we lived in Moscow, and Poland was like comparatively a free place. And I believe it was 1978. And my mother was like reading stuff out loud, and she read this short item on transsexual, at the time, surgery. And I think it was

• 55:47Speaker 02

  like passing through the kitchen. I said, when I grow up, I'm gonna do that. And my mom said, okay.

• 55:52Lydia Polgreen?

  Wow.

• 55:55Lydia Polgreen?

  Lucky Masha.

• 55:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was, I was very lucky in that respect. And, you know, would I have been able to imagine that if my mother hadn't read that item out of a magazine? No.

• 56:07Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  It would have taken many, many more years to know that something else was possible. And then another, you know, several decades later, after many years of happily living as a lesbian, I learned the concept of non-binary. Like, well, that's a great idea.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  I think I could be that. I didn't invent it. I wasn't really smart enough to invent it. Someone else invented for me.

• 56:36Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, all of these things that we discover about ourselves over time, it's interesting, right? Because I think part of the sort of discourse around contagion and grooming and all of that kind of stuff, it's contradictory, right? Because on the one hand, if gender is so powerful and binary and immutable, then, you know, how could it be so easily disrupted by, you know, by teeny bopper trends? But, you know, everything from the Beatles mop top craze to Bama Rush, you know, are examples of gender contagion, ways that they've influenced the way that that people live out their gender. But I think that there's also, there's also sort of examples on the other side of it.

• 57:19Lydia Polgreen?

  So, I mean, I think about my own relationship to queerness. And I had a gay uncle, and he was out from my early childhood. Like, I've never known him as being a person in the closet. And I was incredibly lucky in that regard. You know, I was born in 1975. I grew up with an example of a proud out person in a long term, loving relationship over time, and, you know, who had a great career and a life and, you know, who I think worked very hard to maintain that against, you know, significant barriers that made it not an easy thing to do. But so there was really nothing in my childhood that would tell me like, oh, it's, it's actually scary. You're not okay to be gay. Like, I had this

• 57:59Lydia Polgreen?

  very clear example. But I didn't, I didn't have some sort of early childhood sense that I was, that I was queer. I mean, I had some gender stuff, you know, and it was hard for me to tell, like, did I have a crush on Jenny, you know, Lenny Kravitz? Or did I want to be Lenny Kravitz? And the answer was a little bit of both. And isn't that the way all attraction works? It's a mysterious potpourri. And, you know, throughout my adolescence, I had, you know, kind of romantic relationships with boys, some of them happy, some of them unhappy, college also. And then in college, I met my wife, and we have been together ever since. And, you know, I kind of settled into a life as a, as a lesbian and definitely think of myself that way.

• 58:44Lydia Polgreen?

  But I certainly don't feel that I was born that way. And, you know, in a sort of sliding doors world where I met somebody else. And it feels like a very sad life to me because, you know, my, my wife is great, but it's possible.

• 59:00Speaker 02

  Wait a second, you don't believe in the one?

• 59:04Lydia Polgreen?

  Well, I do believe in the one.

• 59:07Lydia Polgreen?

  But, uh, but, you know, I wouldn't impose that belief on anyone else. I think I just got particularly lucky. So it's interesting, right? Whenever I hear people talk about this idea of contagion, you know, the idea like if, I don't know that I knew about being gender nonconforming, but I knew that I had two brothers and that I liked their clothes better than mine. And, um, what influenced me was I sort of groomed to be queer. None of it makes any sense to me because I, I feel as though I sort of groped my way through the tumult of my own self and psyche with all of the inputs that came from lots of different places and ended up here.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  Well, I think the problem is that we just assign such disproportionate importance to both sexuality and gender.

• 59:57Speaker 02

  And so if they're so important, if they're so central to our identities, then how could they be accidental? How could they be chosen? How could they be mutable? We need them to be cores of who we are. And for that, we have to invent all sorts of narratives about how they were always there. But the way you just told the story was so lovely. You met your wife. You could have not met your wife, right? You got really lucky. But to think that these absolutely central identity forming things happen because you

• 1:00:37Speaker 02

  got lucky is so destabilizing to the whole way that we've constructed them.

• 1:00:46Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah. Well, and I, that's the thing, right? I mean, we'd, we'd like to think that there's some grand design or lacking a grand design, at least a set of principles by which we can make sense of the world, but.

• 1:01:00Speaker 02

  But what if we just agree to be playful and have fun with the one life each of us has given?

• 1:01:09Lydia Polgreen?

  Yeah, and I think that's right. I mean, I don't know if you saw this, but there was a very beautiful essay in the New York Review of Books by Jacqueline Rose that was originally a lecture, and it was about Stuart Hall and his legacy. And Stuart Hall, of course, was the founder of cultural studies and a great thinker in Britain, originally from the Caribbean, and very influential to me and clearly also to the wonderful writer and thinker Jacqueline Rose. But at the end of the piece, where the piece deals with migration and with transgender identity and all the agenda and all these kinds of things, she quotes a message that she'd gotten from a friend in the United States, I think in New York, and the friend had just transitioned from female to male.

• 1:01:53Lydia Polgreen?

  And I'm paraphrasing here. What a wonderful thing to be able to live another life in this life.

• 1:01:59Speaker 02

  That's exactly how I feel about it.

• 1:02:01Lydia Polgreen?

  Me, too. I mean, I think that's the notion that we would all get to live different lives in this one life. Because at the end of the day, I'm a strong non-believer in binaries, but there's one binary that I'm quite certain about, and that is the binary between life and death. And we've only got one of these, as far as we know, so we've got to live it. You were talking about, I mean, we've been sort of talking about things that are hard and depressing. I'm curious for your impressions about the state of queer life, because I feel very, very, on the one hand, obviously, I see all the terrible things that are happening, and on the other hand, I look around and think how lucky I am to be a queer person living in this particular moment, because it feels so rich. How do you experience it?

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  I mean, I agree that it's, I'm incredibly lucky to, that, that exact experience of being able to live another life is something that is an accident of the time I was born.

• 1:03:05Lydia Polgreen?

  Hmm.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  If I were 10, 15 years older, might not have happened. If I were 10 or 15 years younger, or maybe 20 years younger, it might have happened very differently. So I feel oddly lucky to have landed in this time of, of incredible sort of progress and, and transition.

• 1:03:29Lydia Polgreen?

  So one of the things we do on this show is ask people to recommend three books that they think the audience should, should read. So do you have three books for me?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  I do. So I have one contemporary book, one very old book, and one book that hasn't come out yet. So there's a contemporary book by a Spanish activist and intellectual, Mikel Misé, called The Myth of the Wrong Body.

• 1:03:59Lydia Polgreen?

  Hmm.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Short book, translated into English, a very clear critique of the myth of the wrong body.

• 1:04:08Speaker 02

  I love Jan Morris's memoir, Conundrum. Jan Morris was a British travel writer, the incredible travel writer, who transitioned fairly late in life, or I think in middle age. And this, this is a beautiful memoir of that period of her life. And Judith Butler is coming out with a book called Who's Afraid of Gender?

• 1:04:34Lydia Polgreen?

  Turns out a lot of people are afraid of gender.

• 1:04:39Lydia Polgreen?

  Well, thank you, Masha.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  Oh, this was really fun.

• 1:04:55Lydia Polgreen?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Kristin Lin. Fact checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Annie Rose Strasser. The show's production team also includes Emefa Agawu, Jeff Geld, and Roland Hoot. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Isaac Jones.