Gender Is Complicated for All of Us. Let’s Talk About It.

It’s hard to think of anything changing more quickly in our society right now than our understanding of gender. There’s an explosion of young people identifying as gender nonconforming in some way or another, and others are coming out as transgender or nonbinary throughout their lives, from childhood to old age. But this sea change has brought with it an enormous amount of confusion and resistance. As of July, lawmakers in 21 states had introduced bills that focus on restricting gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, such as hormone blockers, and 29 states had introduced bills banning transgender youth from sports. But we also know that the degree of support a young person receives when coming out — or doesn’t — can have profound consequences for their mental health. How should we process and understand this moment in gender? Kathryn Bond Stockton is a distinguished professor of English focusing on gender studies at the University of Utah and the author of the book “Gender(s).” She is incredibly skilled at explaining the fundamentals — and complexities — of what gender means and how people, including Stockton herself, have wrestled with it. In this conversation, we discuss: - Why and how Stockton has always felt out of place as a woman - How her entry to the evangelical church actually advanced her acceptance of her gender - Why gender is “queer” for all of us, regardless of how we identify or how much we think about it - The ways that we perform our genders without even knowing we’re doing it - How the choices parents make concerning things as seemingly banal as clothing and toys shape children’s gender identities - How an expanded sense of gender can bring pain as well as pleasure and playfulness - What Stockton has learned from discussions about gender roles with Mormon students in her Utah classrooms - What we would gain — and possibly lose — if we were to loosen social categories of gender - Why Pride celebrations can be so utopian And much more. Mentioned: Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters Butch Queens Up in Pumps by Marlon M. Bailey Book Recommendations: Histories of the Transgender Child by Jules Gill-Peterson Brilliant Imperfection by Eli Clare Asegi Stories by Qwo-Li Driskill 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. “The Ezra Klein Show” is produced by Annie Galvin and Rogé Karma; fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair; original music by Isaac Jones; mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones; audience strategy by Shannon Busta. Special thanks to Kristin Lin, Kristina Samulewski and Rollin Hu.

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

• 0:04Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:22Ezra Klein?

  I don't think anything in our society is changing as fast right now as ideas about gender. In 2014, Facebook gave people at least 58 genders to choose from. In 2016, Tinder added 37 genders. In 2019, Merriam-Webster named the personal pronoun "they" their word of the year. Corporations, they don't lead on things like this. They follow. They respond. And they practically follow the young. And that's very much the case here. There's an explosion in young people identifying as gender non-conforming in various ways.

• 1:00Ezra Klein?

  There's a real difference in how gender is being treated by people who are 16 than by people who are 66. But where there's change, there's backlash. We're seeing so-called "don't say gay" bills. We're seeing a lot of violence against trans people. We're seeing a lot of efforts to paint people who are trying to live a different life or just trying to live their own life as predators, as threats. And politics, for its part, and the media focuses on the hard cases, the ones most likely to cleave us apart. The questions of NCAA championship swimmers or what precisely we should do when an 11-year-old wants to medically block puberty.

• 1:43Ezra Klein?

  And I'm not saying those questions don't deserve attention, that they aren't real, that they're not important or hard. But I do think they lead us sometimes to skip a few steps. Because at the base of this conversation is a more fundamental idea, one that I think people know even if they don't want to know it or even if they don't want to know that they know it. Gender is weird. It's weird if you're queer. It's weird if you're straight. It's weirdest when we interrogate at least. And so I wanted to have a conversation more about the base layer of the gender question, the one that affects all of us and most of all, those of us fully at home in the stories we've been told about gender. Now, we are making a distinction in this conversation.

• 2:26Ezra Klein?

  I'm going to oversimplify it here between gender, which is the psychological and cultural expression of who we are, at least on this dimension, and sex, which is about biological differences, usually between men and women, and sexual orientation, which is about who we're attracted to. But this is primarily a conversation about gender, which I think is in flux, almost no matter what you believe, about those other questions. And so my guest today is Catherine Bond Stockton. She's a distinguished professor of English focusing on gender studies at the University of Utah and the author of the book Genders. There's a playfulness and an openness to her writing and her thinking that I don't just value as a reader,

• 3:11Ezra Klein?

  but that I think stands as an example of the kind of world she and many others are trying to create. And that, in a way, is what I wanted to get out of this conversation, a clear sense of what is the world that people who are trying to break open the gender binary, people trying to create space for 37 or 58 genders? What kind of world are they trying to build? What is gained in that world? What might be lost in it? As always, my email, [email protected].

• 3:47Ezra Klein?

  Catherine Bond Stockton, welcome to the show.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  Hello, Ezra. A pleasure to be with you.

• 3:52Ezra Klein?

  I want to start with your personal experience of gender, and then we'll expand outward. What was it like for you to feel like you were born into the wrong sex and gender?

• 4:04Speaker 01

  I'd say initially, very confusing. So this was just true for me at such an early age. It's hard for me to even put a number on it. Just my deepest sense of consciousness was, I always say there were two things that I felt to be true about me, that I felt I was a boy, and nobody else seemed to be understanding that or granting that. And I wanted to kiss girls. And I think that might be helpful for people to realize that for some of us, it happens so early, it is literally the deepest and most familiar thing we know about ourselves. So I think I would use the word puzzlement first because it was very hard to understand why nobody else around me could see that I was a boy.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  How is this not evident? Why is this not allowed? No one could really explain that to me. There was just always a sort of deep seated response, you're a girl. That's how it is. You can play with boys, you can do some boy things, but then you have to wear dresses and do these other things as well. So I think I was confused and bewildered about my circumstance.

• 5:13Ezra Klein?

  And how did that evolve for you? Today, you use she/her pronouns. I've heard you describe your ideal gender as a dandy butch, which I love. How has your relationship to your own gender changed over time?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's been a long arc. So I would say out of that kind of crucible of childhood, which of course, there were many happy things going on in my childhood, but that is so fundamental to how you walk in the world, that not being able to be a boy, as I say, having latitude in early childhood to do many things with my boy friends, lots of sporty things and so forth. I sometimes say in my writing that I was a girl by day and a boy by night. Now, that doesn't mean that during the day, I didn't think I was a boy. I did. But I had to go to school and by the dictates of the Board of Education at that time, or at least from everything I understood, I had to wear a dress.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  So I always felt like a boy in a dress at recess. And recess is when I could kind of let go and play baseball and dodgeball and all these things and really play with the boys, but then going back in after recess, having to be, you know, a girl again. So it's this very strange temporal split between day and night because as soon as I would get home from school, I would throw off those girl clothes, I would be in my boy clothes, and I'd be out in the neighborhood playing with my friends. So that lasted up till about sixth grade. And I think probably as anybody can relate to, when you're going to go to junior high, that seems like you were stepping across a whole new threshold. And for me, I would, I guess I would have to use the word terrifying.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  I could not see how this was all gonna come together. I couldn't believe that I might have to do something like wear stockings, which just seemed horrific to me. Have to wear a bra, have to sort of go deeper into the archive of female clothing. That, to me, was very distressing. Probably to go much farther than the beginning of junior high, we would have to get into sort of the moment where I enter into a religious commitment. And that would sort of take us into a new direction of this conversation.

• 7:26Ezra Klein?

  I'm here for it. What was your religious commitment?

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I am one of those unusual people who was raised Unitarian by two left-leaning Democratic Unitarian parents, but very much formed by their time, as I think they would say. And I met an evangelical girl, who was the most beautiful girl I had ever met. And I thought she also seemed smart and interesting and funny. And she played instruments and she was good at sports. So I had a great admiration going there. And at some point, it began to click for me that by accepting Jesus in my heart, that was the language of the time, still is for some people, that in some ways that could be proof to me that I was a good person.

• 8:11Speaker 01

  Because unfortunately, by that time, I had heard that homosexuals, that was the word in play, homosexuals were evil. And I was trying to figure out how in the world, though I did not feel myself to be evil at all, how in the world I could find a place where I could feel good. The other interesting effect of evangelicalism, as I've tried to explain, is that in many ways evangelicalism kind of confirmed, advanced, and catapulted me into my own queerness. So this might be strange for people to hear, but evangelical Christianity was a rescue for me because I'm part of the sex segregation. The pesky boys go one way, the girls go the other way.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  And I got to go with the girls. And in a very interesting way, particularly early on, I felt like a boy concealed in a girl gang. And I felt that I would be learning to become a gay girl by being evangelical. So lots of intriguing contradictions with that move.

• 9:13Ezra Klein?

  I want to go back to the experience you related about feeling on the playground like a boy in a dress. Because in a dizzying way, I think that's a good place for some of us who haven't had the experience to be able to empathically access it. One of the things I think about a lot in the conversations people have about gender is the salience it has for some and not others. It seems some people don't think about it at all, and others, it is the overriding fact of their lives. But if, thinking back to myself as a kid, frankly even now, if you had me put on a dress, I would be conscious of nothing else, right? Particularly as a kid on the schoolyard.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 9:59Ezra Klein?

  And that would be a kind of violent disruption of my, you know, my normal relationship between how I look in my mind, and how I believe I'm expected to be, and then how I would be presenting in the world. And it sounds to me a bit like what you're saying is that it's the same in the inverse of that. That to be a boy in a dress when you are expected to be a girl is not that different from being, in a way, a boy in a dress when you're expected to be a boy.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, that's an interesting question. And, you know, in a way, when you can't be something, right? And you're told over and over that you're a girl, on some level, a familiarity develops with that, right? Though I can say it so permeated my life that it's hard to remember anything where I wasn't sort of obsessed with that. But you do have to kind of finally begin navigating around these clothes you must wear. And indeed, I often wore jumpers to school, you know, so I'd throw a jumper over her turtleneck, easier to throw off at the end of the evening. And I remember having a dress that I was very fond of because my mother called it my sword dress. It had a sword on the belt.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  And she was sort of able to convince me that Robin Hood, you know, would be proud to wear this jumper. So there's a way in which I think my mom very sweetly and tenderly understood something about this. But again, it's not a problem, particularly in that time period, that a parent could solve for me. And so in many ways, on the playground, I had to sort of wrap my mind around what I was wearing and concentrate on what I was doing. But I will tell you, as I remember a particular terror, it would always be on Sunday when we would come home from the Unitarian church. This is before I had peeled off and was hanging with the evangelicals. And I'd be wearing patent leather shoes.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  And I just remember just the steel cold horror in my heart of thinking that any of my boyfriends in the neighborhood would see me get out of that car. And I would literally run from the car, you know, into the house because that sense of shame, you know, was so severe.

• 12:09Ezra Klein?

  I think a lot of people have a sense that gender is difficult and interesting for the people who are round pegs in the square cultural holes. And your argument is that gender is queer. It's weird for everyone and maybe even more so for those who accept their gender fully and don't consider it at all an interesting topic.

• 12:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 12:35Ezra Klein?

  So what do you mean by that?

• 12:37Speaker 01

  One of the things I was quite passionate to present is that gender is queer, as I say, for everyone. And by that, I don't mean LGBTQ. I mean that other definition of queer. So if you look queer up in the dictionary, you know, the dictionary used to say, you know, derisive term for homosexual. Well, I think the derision has fallen off. I think many queers are happy to say that they're queer. But that other definition is simply strange. And it's that part of the definition that I want to pick up and basically think about gender at large, that I don't think gender in the end really is easy for anybody. People may feel that they go through periods of ease.

• 13:20Speaker 01

  And you might have felt that you weren't thinking of it every minute of the day, and I was. But in many ways, the norms of gender are impossible to live for anybody. These norms that pretend to be ideal. And I wanted to pick up on that thought in the book and help my reader understand instances of how that might be true.

• 13:43Ezra Klein?

  Let's tether this a bit to some concrete examples. So take a, I don't know, take a 53-year-old man in Wyoming. He drives a truck, he wears pants, he's married to a woman, he feels comfortable as a man. He doesn't think much about gender. What is queer about his gender?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Well, again, I think what is queer is that everybody at some point will fail their gender expectations. Now, just because that person seems to be kind of walking easily through the world, we don't know what they're thinking at every moment. So, right, it may be true for that Wyoming man that day by day, not too much trauma or thinking about gender, but there can be moments where if he starts to feel that he fails the expectations of masculinity, or has interests in things that aren't classically masculine, that may feel that he is sort of at the tip of a sharp point, as it were, of the ideals of gender and gender expectations.

• 14:39Ezra Klein?

  I think you really rightly point out there the anxiety of gender. I'm somebody who's fairly comfortable in my own gender, but have had more instances than I can count of wondering whether or not what I'm doing at any given moment is like the man thing to do. But I'm also interested in the other side of the queerness there, which is all these signifiers that are completely, I don't exactly want to call them random, but what exactly a truck has to do with a penis, or pants for that matter?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:18Ezra Klein?

  There's just a lot about performing maleness.

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:22Ezra Klein?

  That's pretty peculiar. And what's often interesting to me about it is that it stops being so. I mean, that's true for me across a million different areas of life, but I always think that the weirdness of our life is most interesting when we cease to realize that it is weird, when it just becomes, well, of course, these things all go together.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:43Ezra Klein?

  And then when you begin to look at them, you think, well, why? Why do any of them go together?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  And in your example, too, we'd have to sort of ask about the racialization of our Wyoming man, right? So is he a white guy in Wyoming, which can play out very differently, the expectations surrounding his masculinity, as opposed to somebody who is Latino in Wyoming, or somebody who is a black man driving a truck in Wyoming. So those are the things that I begin to think about in this book, is that there's so many different things that are interacting with that thing that we kind of falsely isolate as gender, right? What is the interaction of those elements that produces either a sense of ease, or a sense of concern and anxiety, as you said? I think part of what we're seeing in our

• 16:32Speaker 01

  culture is there's tremendous anxiety surrounding boys, young men, and I have to imagine that that doesn't really end later, you know, in life. Sometimes later in life, we all kind of get used to things and we chill. But I have a feeling that these things do remain of concern because they're so extremely bounded. And that's where, you know, if you watch something like Fight Club, or watch other cultural, you know, products, they kind of get at the strange way in which particularly white men sort of painted themselves into a corner. It's a whole series, masculinity becomes a whole series of things you can't do, otherwise you will be in danger of losing your masculine status. And that seems interesting to me.

• 17:17Ezra Klein?

  So then, let's take a 15-year-old, I live in San Francisco, a 15-year-old who lives down the block from me, who identifies as non-binary, who uses the pronoun "they", who dresses in a more androgynous way. What's queer about their gender?

• 17:33Speaker 01

  Well, definitely, as they walk through the world, if to other people's sightlines, right, if they're encountering sighted people, and people are seeing them dress in a non-conforming way, that's going to be noticed. And then the question is, how does that affect that particular individual? Is being constantly noticed by other people, possibly having stares of displeasure, sometimes acclaim, you know, how is that going to be affecting that individual? Because whenever you enter into a place where you're sort of crossing against gender norms, and I'm going to say particularly for the people we call men and boys, then I think there's all kinds of possibility to have to, again, I guess I'll use the word navigate that in one's life.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  The fact that that person is identifying as non-binary, we might have to know more about why they make that identification. Is that something that feels like just deeply rooted from everything they've known? Has that been a more recent sense that they've come to? Do they have a sense of glee and exuberance in embracing that? Or is there a sense of trepidation? There could be so many different emotional registers surrounding the individual you just briefly described.

• 18:45Ezra Klein?

  Let's talk about an idea then that you have in the book, which you call the cone of gender. And I think it's a helpful metaphor. So can you talk a bit about the cone of gender and then how and why we fortify it?

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. So one of the things that's striking that we still see and we still do is that we do, in essence, of course, it's a metaphor, lower a cone over the baby at birth. So when we say it's a boy, it's a girl, we seem to be saying who that child is in a very profound way. And let's not forget that for a very long time in history, still in many places, we also conceive of these as opposite sexes. So in one sense, it's like we lower a cone on the baby and that is going to be your cone and it is not going to be easy to get that cone off of you. Trust me, I tried in childhood. I said everything I could possibly say.

• 19:42Speaker 01

  I tried to display all the boy behaviors I knew to display and I could not get that cone off of me. So it's a very rigorous thing that surrounds the child. Now, think about it. It's sort of interesting that we feel that we have to fortify something that many people believe is just a natural thing and will naturally express itself. It's as if culturally, we're very insecure and even though we say the boy and girl categories are highly natural, we've attached them to the genitals, that's just simply who these children are. Right from the get-go, we're gendering a child and producing a kind of gender fortification of that sex that the baby can't see and the baby doesn't know.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  And I think that's very telling that we don't somehow trust what we say is a natural unfolding development for the child. We're in there putting a bow on the newborn's hair. We're in there, you know, creating color schemes for the child. We're in there giving toys. That, to me, is very striking.

• 21:15Ezra Klein?

  I've been thinking, reading the book about moments in my life where it got fortified. And one, there's an instant for me that I've actually never forgotten. And I have a crap memory, just a terrible memory of my own childhood. So there aren't that many of them. But I was a pretty lonely kid. I had a lot of trouble making friends for a very, very long time. And I want to say this was in third grade. This kid moved into my school and we became very fast friends, a kid named Tommy. And I was so grateful that it had happened. And one of my parents had taken us to get ice cream.

• 21:56Ezra Klein?

  And we're getting out of the car, and I remember very, very clearly, I went to hold Tommy's hand. And my parent came to me and said, very kindly, right, not, you know, very loving parents, "Hey, boys don't do that. You don't hold each other's hands." And I never forgot that moment. One, I was a bit embarrassed. But two, it's always just struck me as incredibly weird.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:19Ezra Klein?

  And then later, I realized girls do hold each other's hands.

• 22:25Ezra Klein?

  And it's just a funny moment of something that really has nothing to do with whatever somebody might want to call sex. It's purely a cultural expectation, which is different in other countries. If you go to the Middle East, men do hold hands.

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yes, absolutely.

• 22:39Ezra Klein?

  And, you know, and I had no say in it, really. And I, to this day, don't hold my friends' hands.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:45Ezra Klein?

  And the whole thing, I mean, to your point about gender is queer, you know, even for those of us who think we're playing it straight, like, it's very queer.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm. And those moments are so defining, aren't they? I mean, the fact that you remember that, though, as you say, you don't have a good memory, that stands out to you because that one moment kind of chased you off that possibility, right? That was like, not just a light brush back, but really was sending a very strong message to you. You know, whatever was intended, right? We don't know the intent. The intent might have been gentle. I'm sure it was well-meaning. But the way that it operated for you was to be a reminder throughout your life. And this is where I think we have to understand for children that these messages to children are extremely heavy and extremely powerful. And some of them, you don't forget.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  You only need one experience to be told what can and cannot be. And some deep, weird, operative sense of shame rolls over you and may stay with you for a very long time. So children, of course, are imbibing these messages at a very young age. And I would say to a tremendous extent. And that's where we do have to be aware, you know, in the current conversation, this idea that, you know, we should not be talking about children's gender or sexuality until, I don't know, third grade, sixth grade, whatever people are thinking. But we're kind of skipping lightly over the fact that we have made boys and girls from

• 24:19Speaker 01

  birth without their consent and that we have been fortifying that gender at every turn. So there's some fascinating contradictions that surround what we say in relationship to children.

• 24:32Ezra Klein?

  I had an experience recently as a parent. My older son is three and he's very stereotypically male. In the way that as, you know, liberal parents out on the West Coast, who have tried to be pretty gender neutral in how we raise our kids, makes you wonder a bit more about essentialism. But, you know, he adores trucks and roughhousing and lasers and firefighters. And of course fireworks. And on July 4th, he was so excited for the fireworks. And he came to me and my, my wife. And he looked at us and really excitedly said that he needed a dress so he could look beautiful for the fireworks. And I had this very intense moment as a parent where you realize,

• 25:15Ezra Klein?

  oh, whatever I say next, this is how gender gets communicated.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:20Ezra Klein?

  Or maybe not communicated. But it's in exactly these completely discreet instances.

• 25:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, those, those can be watershed moments. I mean, might not be, but you know, given that your child is saying something to you that I take it you hadn't heard before. Am I understanding that correctly?

• 25:36Ezra Klein?

  That is correct.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. That is a watershed moment, certainly for you.

• 25:41Ezra Klein?

  Yes, that was distinctive.

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, think of how early on children are learning the complicated thing we call language. I mean, that, that blows me away. And it must be really striking as a parent to watch that happen. Kids, you know, taking on words and then forming sentences. And then sort of understanding how, you know, grammar works as they, as they speak the language. No less are they imbibing all these other, you know, systems and signs around them. So it happens, you know, very early on. And I think to your point, you know, as I try to say in the book, gender is really occurring at two very different levels, many more besides. But, you know, certainly at the level of system and at the level of word.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  So in that sense, as I say in the book, it's almost like gender comes to us from on high. And therefore, you know, parents don't control a child's gender. There are many other factors inside your child's gendering than what the parents, you know, what messages they're giving, or how they might be talking to a child. And then, of course, you know, inside the very words that the child is learning to speak, or the images that it sees, or watching how people dress around them, they are imbibing that to an astonishing degree. And that produces, you know, again, very strong and interesting effects. Now, what your child means when they say, you know, "I want to wear a dress", that will be fascinating to see. You know, what is that an indication of?

• 27:09Speaker 01

  Wanting something that perhaps they see, like, why should that be off limits? You know? I think kids would probably understandably wonder, "Why can't I have access to that thing? Why can only have access to these things?" And this might be a time period in which children would imagine that they should have greater latitude.

• 27:29Ezra Klein?

  And of course, he sees his mom when she's dressing up, put on a dress to look beautiful.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Right, absolutely.

• 27:35Ezra Klein?

  It really stuck with me. It made my gender feel so much weirder to me than his. I'm still thinking about, "Why do I never wear any clothing that is flowy?" My wife has mu-mus, has dresses, has kimonos, has, you know, robes. I'm not a big bathrobe person. But it really got me thinking about how men where, at least in this culture, were almost no flowing clothing.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 28:03Ezra Klein?

  No clothing that is loose enough to flow. And it's just really peculiar.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I mean, to your point, in this culture, I mean, I think that's a really important point. Because, of course, before the rise of plain style clothing for men, right, in the 19th century, centuries before that, you have men running around in powdered wigs, you know, men of a certain class, of course. And men running around in powdered wigs and very ornamental, you know, beautiful clothing. But right, what your child is seeing is a sort of difference in clothing that seems a little more ornamental, a little more intriguing, a little more decorative, and might want that, but then associates that, you know, with your partner and seeing that clothing in that way and doesn't see that type of clothing on you. And the question is, hey, why can't I have some of that beauty? You know? That's where, and again, knowing nothing, you know, about your child or where your

• 28:55Speaker 01

  child may be headed in life, you know, as I would talk to some of my, you know, gay male friends who really wanted access in some ways to girls' clothing. I mean, some did, some didn't. Certainly, folks who ended up later presenting, you know, as trans women may have talked about this in childhood, just sort of the way in which these things were so completely off limits and wanting to feel beautiful. Now, this may have changed, you know, dramatically, but girls who became queer, talking about a feeling of shame, like, you put me in those girls' clothes and I felt shame. Boys, again, sort of talking about, you know, I just wanted to have clothes that were beautiful. I wanted to feel beautiful and I didn't understand why I couldn't have those clothes.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  There's a fascinating asymmetry there, right? Between what the girl is saying, you know, what the person assigned girl is saying and what the person assigned boy is saying in that moment.

• 29:48Ezra Klein?

  I want to talk about another emotional layer of it here. Something that is very striking to me about your book and your work is the emphasis in form as well as content on playfulness.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 30:04Ezra Klein?

  And you use the word a couple of times, but also just the way it is written, what you're, what it seemed to me as a reader you're trying to do is interact with this playfully. And we're so used to the very, very hard questions of gender that bubble up into politics, where it's really deadly serious and we're often talking about hate crimes, or bills, or surgeries, or, I mean, things that are really, really tough conversations, that the idea that it could be a little bit more playful, that we've taken something that could be a space of some experimentation and some openness and locked it down for no, at least totally obvious reason. It is an interesting provocation.

• 30:49Ezra Klein?

  And so I wanted to see if you could talk a bit about playfulness to you and how it interacts, or maybe doesn't interact with these ideas.

• 30:59Speaker 01

  It's very striking to me that, again, in childhood, I did have this opportunity to be able to play in boy ways so that my play scene gave me a lot of power, gave me a lot of freedom. It was only later, as I've narrated, right, in the kind of move from elementary school, where you do have recess, you know, to junior high, where things felt more serious, more locked down. You did not want to make one possible misstep. So I think that sense of play, of course, is age-related. No surprise, we do associate children with play. And it's interesting, you know, working with students now, again, students of color, queer students, queer students of color, you know, often students are saying how fearful

• 31:41Speaker 01

  they feel of walking into a classroom in terms of what response they're going to get. And I had been a vice president for diversity here at the University of Utah. So I would work with a lot of student groups and listen to students. And I really did a lot of deep-seated listening. You know, in my head, sometimes I was trying on for size, but I just didn't know if this would be the strategy, you know, of me as an older, white, queer person, of thinking, you know, I can see your beauty. If you walk into that classroom, I would love for you to be able to say, I am so beautiful. I am so righteous. The ideas that I want to share with you are so compelling. I dare you to withstand this beauty.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  You know, that was a sense that I would love to convey and to say, remember that I will be by your side, maybe not in that classroom, but I am also holding your beauty for you because I can see it. I'm here to share ideas with you. I love the idea of seduction. So if you talk to people who know me, they will say that I am all about this idea of intellectual seduction. I'm going to share my views. And again, in my heart, I'm going to feel, they seem so interesting to me. I can't picture that you won't find them powerful. And so I think that might be the sense of playfulness that you find in my writing. And I would just also say, you know, I'm in Utah. I'm in a red state.

• 33:07Speaker 01

  Seduction was my mode from the beginning, from 1987, to come into the classroom and to absolutely assume that many of the students are going to disagree with me. They're going to disagree with what they consider to be my lifestyle, right? They might like me, but they might not like the fact that I'm gay. I'm going to need a mode to be able to share ideas and this passionate, deep-seated, you know, 15 weeks at a time sense with students.

• 33:38Ezra Klein?

  I'm interested in the use of the past tense in that answer. And it connects to something I've been wondering. One of the things I'm going to weave in and out of in this conversation is a question of what world are we or you attempting to build here? What does a world where gender is opened up look like? And one question I have is whether it is playful and open, or whether it's actually just more performances. And one reason I've thought about that is I have a lot of friends who are gay. I read, as a lot of people did over the last year, detransition baby. And it sometimes strikes me that in the places where gender is most in question, or

• 34:19Ezra Klein?

  at least normative gender is most being rejected, the rules of gender performance often seem to tighten rather than loosen. They maybe become something different, but they're very, very competitive. And it doesn't seem to me that my friends in those communities, there's a certain amount of playfulness, but there's also a lot of pressure. And so I wonder if this all has a tendency to resolve down into different versions of the thing that people are often trying to reject, which is overly rigid rules and expectation.

• 34:51Speaker 01

  It can be. I'll put it this way. It can be rigid in queer communities. Or you could have, and this could be rigid or playful, a kind of expansion of fixity. So part of what I love about Marlon Bailey's great book, Butch Queens Up in Pumps, where he talks about black, gay and trans ballroom culture and talks about the six different categories that we created inside the ballroom culture that he was studying in Detroit. And I describe that in my book as a kind of expansion of fixity. And it's based on performance norms. So right to your point. Now, you could see that as rigid, or you could see that as playful,

• 35:32Speaker 01

  or you could see it as drawing on both in some way. But I certainly know what you're talking about. There can be contexts, I've been in some contexts over time, that do strike me as fairly locked down, even though they're meant to be queer. Now, again, that word queer, I think, is very helpful because it is such a stretchy term. Strange could mean so many different things to so many different people. I, of course, as you can tell from my writing and what I argue, I would like to see us go to the very playful place. And I think at times we have been in a very playful place. I do think that there has been, as I like to say, a brilliance to queer communities and communities of color

• 36:17Speaker 01

  and where they overlap to create whole new taxonomies and classifications. That's why I was sort of giving in the book that I'm a dandy butch and my partner calls herself a feminist farm femme. There's a playfulness to that, but we're also kind of serious. But I hope across the scene of gender that we would allow for a loosening, a creativity, a kind of riot of surface performances, dressing in different ways, doing things with hair. I always just love to see somebody who's doing something with their hair, whether it's the best hairdo for them or not. I'm like, cool, you are doing something with that hair. I'm all about it. I'm entertained by that.

• 37:00Speaker 01

  I feel gleeful in seeing that. So I think across the scene, we need a loosening. Will that necessarily mean that gender becomes loose and fluid for every single person? It will not, because we do have our preferences and our predilections for the ways that we want to dress and present, right? So I think sometimes passion comes into the equation, because for some people, they are very passionate about a particular performance that gives them pleasure. Yay, I say. And other people, and I know some people who really dress wildly differently, have very different hairstyles from time to time. And that's somebody who absolutely takes pleasure in kind of curiously forming new

• 37:45Speaker 01

  surfaces over time. What we don't want to have, I think, and this is what we've had for a very long time, certainly what I had in childhood, we don't want things locked down on people, you know, without their consent, without inviting them to kind of experiment and find what seems right to them, what seems pleasurable to them. So to get away from that problem of deciding for people, really back to your point about the lowering of the cone, and then you have to go through all these tremendous difficulties to get the cone off of you, I would love to see that come to an end. And one other thing I hope, you know, would change is that we would learn to encounter

• 38:28Speaker 01

  people's surface presentations with a sense of deep curiosity and humility. I'm really trying to train myself to do this. I am a sighted person, so when somebody, you know, walks past me on the sidewalk, I can feel that my brain is firing away, you know, I'm seeing them as white or male or this or that. And I'm really trying to stop myself and say, okay, I see this surface presentation in front of me. If it should be my opportunity to talk with this person, I'm going to do deep seated listening. Maybe they want to tell me something about their identity, maybe they don't. But my job, as I get to know them, will be to do that deep seated listening over time, to listen for the words that are important to them.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Some of those may attach to little stories and narrative, you know, as you've been doing. Maybe I'm really going to get to know this person, like I know my partner, and we're going to be like in the constant unfolding of narrative arcs, you know, that we create together and separately. But I'd love to see us sever The surface that we see from the presumptions that we make, and not to imagine that certain surface forms, whatever they may be, have certain contents, you know, going on behind their eyes.

• 39:45Ezra Klein?

  I love your line on seeing somebody who's doing something to their hair. I'm thinking, oh, good for you. I always, as somebody who really enjoys other people's stylistic experimentations and functionally never engages as any myself, I always feel like a deep freerider on other people's

• 40:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 40:05Ezra Klein?

  contributions to aesthetics and cultural diversity.

• 40:10Speaker 01

  And hopefully, I would say it gives you pleasure not to. You know, if that's not something that you're jam, you're not doing it. I'm going to respect that. And you're happy you're not doing it. So that would be my hope, you know, is that people through this experimentative playful process in childhood and beyond. I mean, my goodness, why do we, you know, just consign play to children? Why do we not allow playfulness to extend? Now, I think we do. You know, there are a lot of adults who enjoy video games, for example, or sports of all kinds that are forms of play. Problem is, later in life, those things kind of get a capitalist net around them, right? They get a certain type of seriousness, you know, a real investment in winning or failure

• 40:55Speaker 01

  that I think can be detrimental to certain forms of play.

• 41:00Ezra Klein?

  I want to go back to what you had said about the profusion of categories. So in 2014, Facebook gave people 58 genders to choose from. In 2016, Tinder added 37 genders. One of the impetuses for this conversation is gender feels to me like the major space of our time undergoing the most rapid change, that it is a place where, even compared to what I knew of at 18, there are spaces here that are unrecognizable to me at 38. Why now? How do you understand what is changing gender at this moment?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  It's such a good question. I guess some of the things that I would say is, you know, first and foremost, is sort of the bravery of the few for a long time, you know, coming out into these other forms, you know, whether they were making a statement or not, right? But let's say coming out as gay for a long time, coming out as trans. Now, interestingly enough, I have to give a caveat there. Judith Butler writes about this in a very important way, is that coming out isn't always just like a liberatory thing, right? I'm gay, I'm free, here I am, I'm a trans woman. Because coming out, as she pointed out, and I think it's a brilliant point, we often come out into the arms of the law and into other people's definitions, particularly

• 42:27Speaker 01

  society's definitions. So, you know, early on in 1987, when I came out, when I came to the University of Utah, I wanted to be out in the classroom. I wasn't kidding myself that I was like liberating myself in some way with my students, because I felt in many ways I am stepping out into the arms of the law and into the definitions my students carry, many of which were given by the law. But for me, I always had like a phrase in my head, "I want you to see who you won't protect." And at that period of time, I was a sodomite by state law, but I was employed by the state, all right? So, one thing I really want to honor is, I say, the bravery of those people who have

• 43:08Speaker 01

  come out in any which way and have braved the strong arm of the law. Secondly, I would say, and I think this one's profound, you know, people coming out in families. So, gay folks, queer folks coming out in their families, trans folks coming out in their families, non-binary, gender non-conforming people coming out in their families.

• 43:33Speaker 01

  That has had a massively transformative effect. Now, obviously, people get kicked out of their families. You know, I'm living in Utah, and some of that stuff is still happening. I think it still happens all over this country. But in many cases, you know, families were confronted with something that they had not thought deeply about before. And in many cases, say, a family in a relationship to their gay male son, you know, or their now-trans daughter. It's hard to say that, mm, yesterday, you know, I loved you when I thought you were straight, or when I thought you were not trans, and I'm going to stop loving you now. So many families have had to kind of come around, wrap their mind around this.

• 44:16Speaker 01

  And many families have become fierce defenders and advocates of their kids in terms of whatever their kids are telling them. So that's made a huge difference, right?

• 44:26Ezra Klein?

  But can I interrupt you for one second?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:28Ezra Klein?

  Why now? Why has there been more coming out? And then, I don't know if I want to say public experimentation, but a profusion of identities, of categories, you know, you can be agender, and you can be androgynous, and you can be a dozen things I had never heard of before a couple of years ago. There's been an explosion of that in, let's call it, the past 50 years that

• 44:50Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:50Ezra Klein?

  to my knowledge is different than the 50 years before that, or the 50 years before that, or the 50 years before that. Do you have a theory of why?

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Well, in some ways, you sort of anticipate the third point that I was going to make, and that is talk, ideas, representation, right? Social media. These things have also had a massive effect on how things spread inside our culture. So sometimes people don't like that answer, because people might want to say, but, you know, you don't choose to be gay, or you don't choose to be trans. Well, we can kind of follow up on a more complicated view of that particular thought. But I think it's unquestionable, as people begin to encounter ideas that they had not encountered before, they might say to themselves, huh. What about me, right?

• 45:42Speaker 01

  I just think you can't deny the fact that as more people, you know, came out as gay, it wasn't just people coming out as gay who, from the time that they were three, you know, came out as gay. So I really do believe that the representational field is so much richer than it's ever been before. And things spread through social media, right? People having access to an internet. I mean, my goodness, I tell the story, you know, in my work, as you know, that I never saw a live gay person until I went to divinity school at the age of 21. Not one. Not one live human being ever. I saw nobody on TV. I saw nobody in the movies.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  I felt like I had come from another planet. That is not likely to happen now because kids and teenagers have access to an internet and they can find all kinds of sources of information and other people's stories and, you know, fiction and novels and short stories and movies to see representation. I honestly think that's had a tremendous effect on the possibilities for these different ideas spreading. One other thing I'll say, I'll give an example of this, you know, in the early 1990s, when really the word queer was just being taken back, right? We usually say that queer theory as a field is forming sometime around 1990.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  I don't know if that's actually true, but nonetheless, it's kind of when the field coalesces. Back in that time period, the phrase "non-binary" would be a phrase that would come from the academic thought of deconstruction, right? Post-structuralism. And if you had told me in 2022, "I'll be talking to Ezra Klein and we'll be using the term 'non-binary' because lots and lots of people out there in the world use that of themselves," I would have said, "Okay, that one, I did not see coming." I would not have predicted that because that seemed like such an academic term, right? But partly, academic theory has seeped out into the community and community activism, you know, has had a tremendous effect on the ways we think and talk.

• 47:52Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about that more complicated idea about choice you gestured towards a minute ago.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  Well, I do want to say that, you know, it's a tricky one to talk about, so I always sort of enter into this terrain gently, as I like to say, tenderly, as I sometimes say, but I think it's undeniably the case that so many more women that I know will use that word. Like, at some point, I chose to be queer. At some point, that in the past, people say, I chose to be a lesbian. And there were hardly any gay men I ever met, you know, and still, to this day, there are very few gay men that I meet who say, I chose to be gay. So another interesting asymmetry there. But let me now kind of produce some interesting complication around the very idea of choosing while I

• 48:43Speaker 01

  also confirm it, right? So at one point, it kind of upset me as a, you know, somebody identifying as a queer woman in that time period, feeling myself to be a boy, that so many women's stories, right, were not really being honored, that when many women would say, like, no, in college, I actually, as a feminist, decided, you know, to be a lesbian. And people were just constantly talking about the category gay as if nobody ever chooses it. Well, many, many women might use that word choosing of their sexuality. Now, let me give an example. And my partner's given me, you know, permission to share a little bit about her life. So she's somebody grew up as a

• 49:25Speaker 01

  normative white woman, as a rural Mormon, raised in rural Utah, never in any way thought about herself as queer, lesbian, being attracted to women. Indeed, she was involved with a young man. They intended to marry each other. So she was sort of headed towards marriage and probably having children. And very sadly and tragically, he died in a car crash. And at that point, her life was thrown into crisis. She thought about going on a mission. So she went to her bishop, who was one of the rare people who was a Buddhist, who also then became a Mormon. So he was like a Buddhist Mormon bishop. There aren't too many of those folks out there in the world. And she described that she was dreaming of swimming in

• 50:08Speaker 01

  the ocean, which you're not allowed to do when you're on a mission. And she said, I just don't think I'm supposed to go on a mission because I don't know how I can say this is the one true church when I haven't studied any other religions. And he was the somewhat rare person who said, I agree. I think maybe you need to go off for yourself and study other religions and see where it takes you. She moved to San Diego, started studying other religions, heard about the Great Peace March to walk across the United States in 1986, which she did. So she walked from Los Angeles to Washington DC with hundreds of people. And on that march, she met lesbians and thought they were so cool, she wanted to be one. But figured out she wasn't a lesbian.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Moves back to Salt Lake City, starts a rock band, and here comes a female saxophone player knocking on the door. She opens the door and by her own rendering, she was attracted and started a relationship with that woman. Now, question, could you say that she was choosing to be lesbian? She really wanted to be one. She was like trying to choose that thing. And of course, many things had to happen in her life to even open up the possibility that she would end up, you know, saying that she was queer. She does not feel in any way, shape or form that she was like born a lesbian. She does not feel that her sexual orientation is inborn. It's not the right language for her.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  But you can see that choosing doesn't quite work either because there are many things that kind of had to happen in her life to make the thing that looks like choosing possible. So I don't know if that'll make sense to your listeners, but that's one way I would speak to that question.

• 51:55Ezra Klein?

  It makes sense to me. And in part because I'm very interested by the politics. Oh, when you say the politics of choice, we tend to mean reproductive choice, but I mean something different. So in this category, in this area, in the 90s, in the aughts, I remember how urgent choice was in the politics of gay acceptance, of gay rights, of eventually gay marriage. How could you withhold equal treatment under the law from people who had no choice in what they were?

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:33Ezra Klein?

  And so it was very, very politically important. And there, I mean, you remember this history much better than I do, of course, but, you know, the searching for a gay gene and the emphasis on, you know, born this way, as the later Lady Gaga song goes. And now that being gay is much more accepted, I see a lot less of that discourse. And it's actually sensitized me a little bit to thinking about choice elsewhere. Let me give an example from a whole other domain. We know that being exposed to lead as a child reduces your executive function and as such, your impulse control. And we know that people are environmentally exposed to lead for because they grew up in

• 53:16Ezra Klein?

  a poor area, because they drank the water in Flint. And as such, it's always a very fraught question to me, how much we should blame people for executive control decisions that happen later in their life. I, as a person, have always just had a lot of emotional restraint, to some degree, too much. It's something I struggle with in another direction. But somebody who grew up in a house with lead, you know, because they get into a bar fight that I didn't get into, did I make a choice they didn't make? I mean, on some level, maybe, to refrain. But to have the choice to make the choice was not my decision.

• 53:58Ezra Klein?

  That was a resource that I had because I didn't grow up under their circumstance, which is all to say that I often think where we put choice and don't put choice into American politics says a lot about where we want to blame people versus where we don't want to blame them. And it's a very fraught, you should be very alert to what we decide is somebody's fault, what we decide is their decision, and in the other direction, too, right? I mean, the whole fight over you didn't build that, and Elizabeth Warren is her saying that it's actually a lot less about choice and decision making when people are successful, that they've benefited from a lot they never chose. So, as you say, this may not make sense, this may seem like ramble, but I don't really think it is.

• 54:42Ezra Klein?

  I think the politics of choice are much more fraught than people think they are. Yeah. And who we attribute choice to and don't attribute it to is often doing a lot of political work that has nothing to do with the Completely untraceable set of factors that led to the outcome we're actually evaluating.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  I think choosing is a very complicated term, and that's why you sort of heard me just say that in many ways, you have to kind of see, it's why I sort of tell her story at some length, so people can see all, again, all the different things that had to happen to make the thing that looks like choosing, or that you might even call choosing possible, right, to your point. Something else I'll say about that whole business about, you know, we don't choose to be gay. You know, for the longest time, obviously, that argument worked, to your point. It was very powerful. And when I first moved here, as a queer theorist, wanted to trouble that a bit, you know, the way that I've just done, people were very nervous about that, because that argument seemed to work in religious contexts. If

• 55:43Speaker 01

  I say, I have tried everything in my power to change this thing about myself, and I can't change it, right, that seemed to be an argument that worked, or some people thought, you know, was working in some way. I get that argument, because honestly, that's how it feels like to me in my life, right? This very early sense, I'm a boy, and I want to kiss girls. Those two things did not feel debatable, you know, or changeable in my life. But one thing that I always just wanted to point out is that there's some ways that early on, this could be the case, that people who were out as gay men, right, were people

• 56:23Speaker 01

  who really, really were saying to themselves, I cannot be anything but this thing, right? Because if you were a white, middle-class man, and you were gay, you were losing a lot of privilege, right? So in some ways, you could say that outness was selecting also for the men who felt so deeply like, I cannot be anything but this thing.

• 56:46Speaker 01

  The problem was, as I say, I felt like it did not honor so many other women who described themselves as lesbian or queer. So that's where the complication of choosing comes in. It was an argument that worked for a very long time. And my point is, if this is not a bad thing to be, and it's not, why would we care whether somebody says they're choosing it, or somebody for themselves feels that in some measure it's inborn? Some of us are going to feel that it's the earliest thing we know, didn't seem changeable. Other people are going to feel it was a lot more amiable. In both cases, it's a beautiful thing to be. And so that's where I would hope that we would get to on that front.

• 58:00Ezra Klein?

  Let me talk about the people whom these arguments are meant to convince. For a lot of people, this opening around first sexuality, and now even more so, it seems to me, gender, is frightening. And I want to try to take that feeling seriously, even if it's not one that a lot of people listening to the podcast are going to be sympathetic to. There is this traditionalist or philosophically conservative impulse to resist changing or obliterating categories that have been fundamental to a lot of societies, including our own, a view that it's playing with forces none of us really understand.

• 58:42Ezra Klein?

  And that even if you put aside the religious arguments, that it shouldn't be done, letting little kids pick their gender, adding 37 genders or 58 genders in one pill swoop. That you have no idea what you're playing with here, and no idea what would happen if you actually create this world of true gender openness.

• 59:04Ezra Klein?

  So I guess I'd like to ask you to do two things here. One is, as somebody who's taught around this a lot, and I think, as you say, taught to more conservative groups, what do you as the strongest account of the argument against opening up the gender binaries that you've heard? And then what is your answer to it? What do you think about the argument for conservation?

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Well, believe it or not, and this could surprise your listeners, I'm just gonna say the strongest arguments are the religious ones, because they're very hard to argue with, right? If you really do believe this is a divine book, this book reveals the way things must be. It's gonna be very hard for any of us outside of that, you know, or even inside of that, to argue with that. That's one of the hardest ones for me to bump up against. And of course, you know, I live in Utah, so I'm in a place, you know, that has a very dominant religion. Lots of folks here from, you know, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, as they like to be called, and I honor that.

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  So I've been blessed with the opportunity to teach so many students, you know, in my classrooms that have come from that church. Now, one of the things that I think is kind of gorgeous over time is our ability to bond with each other over these differences. So one of the things I always liked about being in Utah, some people really dislike this, it tends to be a very polite culture, all right, on the surface. Who knows what people are saying behind closed doors, maybe not so polite. And of course, you'd have to point out that people are like politely telling you in some cases that you can't have particular rights. That can annoy folks, understandably. But for me in my classroom, I always tried to take that kind of at face value,

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  that this sort of politeness allowed us to kind of skate along the surface with each other long enough. To find out that we were capable of really liking each other. And I always felt with my students, sometimes I would say this at the start of a class, is that, you know what? I think you're going to like me because my default is set to like. I'm already liking you. I'm excited to know who you are. I want to know how you think. I want to know what you believe. And I'm going to do very deep seated listening, you know, to take account of that. And so we would have some very spirited, you know, conversations with each other. You know, I remember some of them, we would go like this, okay, Catherine, I just have to tell you, I think that, you know, my wife should not work outside the home.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  I hope you don't feel less of me. And I would say, well, come on, tell me, tell me why you think that. Lay it out for me. You know, and we're reading like 19th century texts about women fighting for the right to work or whatever. But we end up having a very strong bond across that view. Because as I say to that student, it's not my job to tell you, you know, what you need to do in your family circle. That's for you to work out. Let's talk about these ideas. Let's debate them. And then he would say something and I'd say, okay, I see you to this point, but then hmm, here's where I get stuck. Here's my thought to that. And then he'd go, oh, hadn't thought about that. I'll be back. And so there'd be that kind of, you know, back and forth. And again, to me, that was important.

• 1:02:21Speaker 01

  I don't know if we moved each other's ideas over the course of a course, but I began to understand more deeply why people believed what they believed, very important to me. And I think my students, because they were there, they were reading, they were talking, they were responding. I have ways to find out, you know, if they've read texts. And so that type of bonding for 15 weeks at a time, where you share these very in-depth, and I'm going to say, you know, intimate experiences, even, you know, 45 people in a room, sharing ideas with each other, something happens in that moment.

• 1:02:57Ezra Klein?

  Well, let me make an irreligious argument from religion that I've been thinking a bit about. So when I think about analogies for the opening of gender, the profusion of genders, the increasing malleability of gender categories, at least for some people in some parts of the country, I think a bit about how religion has opened up. There are a lot more forms and formats of Judaism now than there were 100 years ago, you know, ranging all the way from the ultra-orthodox and the Hasidic to the secular hippie Judaism that often dominates where I am. And not only that, but the idea that you might move from Judaism to maybe a hyphenated Judaism,

• 1:03:42Ezra Klein?

  much more of my spiritual practice is Buddhist than it is honestly Jewish. I'm very interested in Taoism. I'm very interested in Christianity and the Catholic tradition. And I think that's true for a lot of people. There's a lot more, as people call it, cafeteria religion. You know, maybe the analogy to some of the newer gender categories is the profusion of New Age and quasi-accolled categories that have, you know, jumped up in recent decades. And a lot of people who aren't even religious today lament what was lost as organized religion entered decline. A sense of community, a sense of a world and a structure and a moral code

• 1:04:27Ezra Klein?

  that even if it wasn't chosen anew at every moment of your life, was there to provide some stability in your life. There's a feeling among many that this has worked well for some people, people who love change and have enjoyed learning about all these new religions and dabbling in this and that, and that for a lot of other people, they've lost the stability and the community and a rootedness that has left them adrift.

• 1:04:53Ezra Klein?

  And in a sometimes inchoate way, I hear that in this conversation. From people who don't exactly believe that what is happening here is a violation against divine law. But do worry that what is happening here is a change to an order that is going to leave a lot of people adrift. That even if there are a lot of people who will be served by it, there will be others who lose in it. That it is not just freedom, but that freedom can also come with this kind of untetheredness. Do you think there's anything to that? Do you think that a more open world of gender will leave people behind who are somehow served by a more closed world of social expectation and hierarchy?

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

  I really don't, in the truest sense. I don't deny that people may feel that, right? And I can imagine how bewildering it might feel if you're somebody who's inside a set of categories, you know, that makes sense to you. You feel you don't have many questions surrounding them. You've had a lot of rewards for being in those categories. I mean, let's face it. I mean, a lot of the worry about allowing these other things to come to be is, yes, a loss of cultural power and cultural privilege. And I know that's not what you're talking about. You're talking about, you know, other types of things that aren't sheerly about power.

• 1:06:19Speaker 01

  But I actually think that the more people sort of allowed themselves a kind of ability to embrace other thoughts, other ideas, other people's ways of being, that aside from the loss of power, you know, which is real, but nobody should have that consolidated power. That aside, I think people would find that there's a greater possibility for community, a greater possibility for collective coming together and building collective ideas and collective forms. You know, and I've just watched people in my life who were formed at different points, you know, in history, different generations than I am, and I've watched them come to accept.

• 1:07:02Speaker 01

  Like, I'm just going to continue to use it, like the loosening of the categories, the multiplication of categories. And I've watched a kind of fear-based approach to those begin to drop away. You know, there can be real joy in that, even if those are not things you want to be or identify as. So let's say you're a straight person, you're like, yeah, I don't see myself, you know, if I'm, think of myself as a man, you know, wanting to sleep with men. Maybe that's not going to happen. But allowing yourself not to feel fearful that you would ever let any thought into your conscious mind that you wanted to, or that you found another guy attractive, that's freeing in some way. So at heart, I believe if we were to move towards more collective forms on so many

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  fronts, in terms of, you know, income, in terms of sharing resources, the way that I would feel knowing that people in my neighborhood have access to really good healthcare, that will deepen my pleasure. And one of the things I like to challenge people with is to actually broaden the boundaries of your own pleasure. Let more things in that will give you pleasure. And as I see other people begin to let go of some of that tightness, you know, for themselves, in their fantasy life, in their dream life, and with the people that they

• 1:08:26Speaker 01

  love in their lives, that has multiplied happiness, in many cases, not taken it away. So it's very hard for me to think, you know, what the true losses would be. I don't deny the fact that people will feel a sense of loss as they have to encounter new ideas and new forms of being.

• 1:08:48Ezra Klein?

  Before we get to books, then, I want to end by having you expand on that vision a bit. If we imagine a world 50 years from now, in which the edge of the conversation over gender has become the center. In which it isn't just a weird thing some tech platforms have done to offer all these genders, but it is a normal thing in which we try to loosen the cones and the forts of gender around children. What does that world look like? What is different for a child growing up in that world? A child who maybe wouldn't have fit well, you know, in the world I grew up in, but also

• 1:09:32Ezra Klein?

  for a child who maybe would have? Like, how does it really? How do you understand the opportunities to those children as being different?

• 1:09:42Speaker 01

  I just went to Pride in Salt Lake City this year. I usually go to Pride. I always go to Pride out of a sense of duty, if nothing else. You know, I'm a queer theorist, so I don't quite believe in the categories as received. But as I was walking around our city building, our city-county building, and seeing the people that I was seeing, I was blown away. I, who write on this, now, for two years, you know, we hadn't been able to have the parade, so there was a little lag time in there, but I was seeing people of every possible skin tone, every, back to hair, every possible way you could do your hair, things I had thought about, things I had never thought about. I saw people gendered in ways I had never imagined.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  I saw little kids running around in new gendered forms. I saw teenagers. To me, and I know this is so strange, this is not the way I generally speak as a queer theorist, but for me in that moment, it was the most truly intersectional scene I had physically been in, to that extent, with so many people in attendance. The paper said somewhere around 70,000 people were in attendance. Salt Lake City only has a population of about 200,000. So it was very striking to me. And for that one moment, I said to my friends, even my friends, you know, who are very jaded and cynical, that cynicism is earned, I said to them, you know, I saw a little vision of the future, and it is now.

• 1:11:10Speaker 01

  It gave me such hope because, first of all, pride had ceased to be a white thing in Salt Lake City, thank goodness. And there were so many other categories at play and in the mix and changing and circulating with each other. It is this intersectional future that I think we have to hearken towards, and that will lead us to attend to things like race and money and indigeneity. There really is no way, this is the thesis of my book, and so, you know, you or anybody else, I invite you to have a, you know, a different thought when you read it. But these things really are so deeply in relationship to each

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  other that gender, you know, can't be changing, never is changing unless we sort of see the way that racialization, you know, plays around it. And yet, these things are quite asymmetrical to each other, right? So they're not the same, they don't follow the same logics. But I do think, even if it's not true that you can isolate gender, I mean, it is, to my mind, absolutely not true, something that looks like somebody's, you know, gender, genderizing, as it were, is opening up, is creating less presumptions attached to that body. It may also help to loosen up those other presumptions that we have, right? You

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  might be thinking like, hmm, I also need to have a deep-seated humility about, let's put it this way, disability. That's something that, as an academic, I'm doing catch-up because I have not studied along the way much about disability. And I'm reading like crazy to get myself educated, you know, on that particular front. So I think it's not impossible that thinking about some of these things that seem more malleable, the way that we talk about gender in that way, may have some very good effects for the other categories that may or may not be more locked down. And that also kind of create promise for where change could happen. So I think that there is a way. I do have a hopeful

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  view that what we're talking about in terms of gender in the public square is also allowing us to talk about race and money, you know, in new and different ways. And that's all to the better, disability also.

• 1:13:33Ezra Klein?

  And then always our final question. What are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience?

• 1:13:38Speaker 01

  Well, I give a lot of thought to this, as you can imagine I would. I want to mention the three books that I think were most important for this project, for me and writing genders, because they really pushed my thinking and took me to places that I had not gone on my own. First and foremost, Jules Gill-Peterson. She has written a book called Histories of the Transgender Child. Really important book because from that book I was able to glean, where does the concept of gender come from? Going into this project, I wasn't sure I could answer that question, but her book helped me with that. Eli Claire, who writes on disability. And this book is partly memoir, partly conception. The book is called Brilliant Imperfection. It's really helping me in thoughts about disability.

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  And the third book is by Quoli Driscoll. The book is called Asegi Stories: Cherokee Queer and Two-Spirit Memory. Learned so much that I didn't know from that book about the history of Cherokee gendering. And then, of course, there's many more people I could name that I hope your listeners also encounter through my book and by other means.

• 1:14:48Ezra Klein?

  Catherine Bond Stockton, thank you very much.

• 1:14:50Speaker 01

  Ezra, thank you. What a pleasure.

• 1:15:01Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Annie Galvin and Roshay Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones. Mixing by Sonia Herrero and Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. And special thanks to Kristin Lynn and Kristina Semilouski.