The Ezra Klein Show: A Very Queer Conversation About Gender

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

Hey, it is Ezra.

I am stonebookly, but have really been enjoying

the show as it is fun to be a listener of your own show.

And this week, I'm particularly excited

because the great Lydia Paul Green 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.

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 health care 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 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 we have today.

As always, the show's email is EzraKlineShow at nytimes.com.

Here's my conversation with Masha Gessen.

Masha Gessen, thanks for being here.

It's great to be here, Lydia.

It's wonderful.

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

All right.

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, non-conforming people,

trans people, queer people happening in the world right now?

What's your theory?

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.

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 of what they call gender ideology and LGBT rights.

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?

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.

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

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.

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 it has been.

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.

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 were about regret.

And one of the things that 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 brand.

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.

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

and make sure only the right ones who really, truly are the ones who transition

and to borrow a phase, 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 Rhonda Santas of the world. I spent a lot of time worrying about the other side of it.

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

Great.

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 frame 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

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, because it was the shortest way to getting

the homosexuality removed from the diagnostic manual to get the,

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.

Nobody is born into a religion, well, people are born into religions,

but nobody argues that it's an immutable characteristic.

No, but it has the advantage of actually being written into the United States Constitution.

So it's a rare, I'm just saying it's a very rare outlier to what you're saying,

which is that this kind of rights-based discourse requires you to adopt a kind of immutability.

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.

I would really much rather live inside a libertarian discourse than a rights-based

discourse. That's what I thought I was signing up for.

Right. And you signed up for it, I mean, as a very young person working in the

gay and lesbian press. What year was your first job in journalism?

1983.

Okay. Yeah.

And I was 16.

Right. Forgocious.

So you felt like you were signing up for liberation.

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, 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.

Like all the things that I thought I was actually going to get by joining this movement.

So I have a chip on my shoulder about that.

But I think 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.

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, 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.

And there's an entire spectrum of people who transition for other reasons,

for a combination of reasons, who at some point at least experience 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?

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 messy and confusing to people.

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, 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 friends who are parents.

It is sort of terrifying.

And yet, we have an ability to metabolize regret.

We have an ability to tolerate and understand that children will make decisions that they regret.

So, 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.

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 it.

I think the regret trap was definitely set by people who are opposed to nervous about scared

off 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 and transition,

and now they do.

But another way, of course, of looking at it from the opposite side is its social contagion

and children are making irreversible decisions that they're going to regret.

And we, the 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.

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.

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 anti-depressants.

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 that gets us into all sorts of other conversations.

Let me know if I'm going too fast with these.

But 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.

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 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 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.

Well, and it's how we show our gender in the world, right?

I mean, I think 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.

What an interesting question.

Just ballpark, what would you guess?

2%.

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.

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, really speaks to something that goes far beyond the experience of queer people,

of trans people, of gender non-conforming people,

and to the kind of human condition of having to show up in the world with a gendered body.

And we do ourselves no favors when we pretend that it's not missing 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 I often assign to my students Shulamith Firestone's chapter

down with childhood from the dialectic of sex.

And it's just, 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?

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,

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.

But also 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 a 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

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. 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 friends,

there's nothing casual about the way in which these issues are being discussed or dealt with

within a family. And 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 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 don't know. As an old queer, I am always a little bit careful about arguing for family

against government. I think ideally, it wouldn't be an anti-government argument. It would be

an argument for better politics. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And I think that's

actually a very good note, because families are not always supportive. Right. 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.

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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. 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 loft off left and right after 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. 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. But I think it's interesting to

me that your discomfort with this like 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 think that we're

talking about something bigger than one small group of people and sort of exploding that out to

to all of us feels as you put it liberatory. 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, there's something to see here

in the way that young people and old people interact with medicine in the new possibilities

that we see for our bodies that extend, that include gender, but extend far past gender.

And there's a lovely passage in Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts where she kind of accidentally or

coincidentally compares gender transition to aging. But 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. 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, 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 fiance 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.

We were less than a decade past the loving decision. 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 a good idea

because we had very fixed ideas about race. At that time, I think there was still a belief

that there was a biological component to race. And I think I looked up the polling in 1973 or

around then, about 30% of people thought that interracial marriage was okay. And I could see

how it would seem like this huge sort of life, like you're taking a huge risk here.

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 pulled 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 a 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.

You know, this weekend, we watched The Matrix with my 11 year old son, a movie that I never

been able to get through before. But I dread that the new reading of it is that it's a trans

allegory. But anyway, we watched it. And just 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. Right, both of them came out as trans and said that as much.

Yes. I shouldn't call it a retrofitting. You're right. 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 in the movie.

And one of the things that we discovered probably widely known 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 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 one world and another sci-fi movie, right? Where all sorts of things

happen that don't happen in the real world. Whereas that actually does happen in the real

world and was certainly happening in 1999. And then the following day, we went to see the movie

Bottoms, which I don't know if you've seen, it's absolutely delightful. And it's just the most

casually queer high school movie. But it's not even shocking anymore. Like it's, yes, you can go

to movie theaters playing all over the place. And so that change in a very young person's

lifetime is staggering. But like you, I'm not a believer in the linearity of progress.

And I think that it is possible to lose all or most of the gains. And I've seen it happen

in Russia, where I had to leave Russia for this very reason. 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. 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 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. 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 the gender is. If you're not paying attention, you may not

notice that if you get a ticket for improperly recycling, they will actually attempt to indicate

your gender on it in the city. It did happen to you? Yes, it did happen to me.

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

I can't remember. 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 tickets. And all sorts of things that,

there's absolutely no reason why my badge for entering the New Yorker offices at

one World Trade Center should indicate my gender. But it does. 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. I mean, I think that being able to sort

things into categories is a very human thing. And it's interesting. I had a very strange

experience when I was 10 years old. 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 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. 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 knowing and 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? Well, and that's another problem with a whole

born in the wrong body discourse. No, exactly. 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, they're 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. So my name to

a Russian speaker or any Slavic language speaker is undoubtedly, you know, 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 fine, except when I had to pee. Because at this conference venue, they had

people minding the door or 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. And it immediately blocks my way.

Because obviously I looked the way I look like, except for 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. And I belong there. But that's how

gender operates. And it's also, you know, it's a funny comment on sort of the impossibility of

presenting as male one minute and female the next. But I was actually like doing it in real time.

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 is 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? 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. It's beautiful. Yeah.

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 experience things as a young queer person that because of the passing of time in history and

particularly because of the AIDS epidemic, I think we're 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. 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? I think you do both. I think that it would be silly and irresponsible to, for me 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 will be completely irresponsible to not do that. I also think it

would be responsible 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 it, if we don't

imagine it actively now, we're not going to be able to build it in the future.

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 and liberation could, you could at least work towards

my understanding is that it sort of got snatched back and you had to leave.

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, 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 Gainless Bin 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 could show

queer movies in the movie theater 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 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

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 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 military kid wasn't legally adopted in Russian territory by two women. But

in point of fact, was. And I was actually singled out 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 have to leave with my family and 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. 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 to me, I think that is a fairly harmonious predicament. 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. 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 in terms of what's

thinkable. Well, I used to say that my friend and mentor, Larry Kramer, taught me how to

catastrophically imagine. And I thought that was, to those who don't know, Larry Kramer was a

playwright, novelist, and a founder of both GMHC, the gay men's health crisis, which was an early

service organization for people with AIDS, and then ACT UP, the AIDS activist organization.

And you were also a member of ACT UP, Masha. 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 screaming, he was calling people

names, he was writing screeds that said that 82 people were sick and 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. Tragically, he was right. 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. Well, and I think that something that has certainly sharpened

my attention is the way that the reality of abortion in this country has changed, for example.

We all thought as a bedrock certainty that the Roe vs. Wade was decided law, that it was

unthinkable to go back to a time when abortion was outlawed. And that was, of course, foolish.

Of course, it's thinkable. I have been seeing a lot of interesting thinking about the interlinking

between the struggle for bodily autonomy for queer, gender nonconforming, and trans people

and the struggle for abortion rights. Do you see possibilities there? Do you see

some room for solidarity? Absolutely. But first, let me just make a comment on

this unthinkability, because if we look back at the Dobs 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 that there's no way. And after Amy Kuhlman 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. 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 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. And I agree, things are not preordained. I think 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 the movement for bodily autonomy, yes, of course. But again,

we have to do something with our 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.

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 women who think of themselves as feminists. And I'm not talking

about the ones that we call TERFs, 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, but what about women

is coming from women who are probably in your social circle just as they are in mine.

And I have those hard conversations. 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 we all live with. And look, I don't want to actually dismiss

that as an argument. No. 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 all of that. But by and large, we're talking about different social experiences. And we have

opportunities to hash that out if we sort of assume that we're allies. And if we're assumed that we're

in a common struggle for control over our own bodies, then we can discuss the ways in which

we're different. 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,

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. Yeah. No, that's right. And I think,

in conversations with friends of mine, 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 particularly for mothers that my child is rejecting

womanhood, that they're rejecting femininity. And I think that that's painful. 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 it's painful. And it's a

thing that I agree with you. It doesn't help anybody to tell that person, no, you should just

be happy about it and then you should have no feelings. 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 that 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.

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 that's in 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, right? Because we accept all

sorts of other things that put a distance between parents and their children.

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 transmasculine kids, kids that are assigned female at birth. And I think, again,

one can make a minimizing argument. Oh, this is only for a really, really small number of people.

But the numbers are real. 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 had a few different ways of acting it out. We learn it from other people.

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 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 comparatively a free place. And I believe it was 1978. And my mother was reading

stuff out loud, and she read this short item on transsexual at the time surgery. And I think it

was like passing through the kitchen. I said, when I grow up, I'm going to do that. And my mom said,

okay. Wow. Lucky Masha. Yeah, I was very lucky in that respect. And what I have been able to imagine

that, if my mother hadn't read that item out of a magazine, no, it would have taken many,

many more years to know that something else was possible. And then another 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. 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. 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 people live out their

gender. But I think that there's also, there's also sort of examples on the other side of it. 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 actually scary or not okay to be gay. Like, I had this very clear

example. But I didn't have some sort of early childhood sense 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 lesbian and definitely think of myself that way. 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 that feels like a very sad life to me because, you know, my wife is great, but it's possible.

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

Well, I do believe in the one. 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 what influenced me was I sort of groomed to be queer. None of it makes any

sense to me because 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.

Well, I think the problem is that we just assign such disproportionate importance

to both sexuality and gender. And so if they're so important or 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

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

Well, and that's the thing, right? I mean, 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 what if we just agree to be playful and have fun with the one life each of us is given?

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 Group 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 sort of 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. And I'm paraphrasing

here. What a wonderful thing to be able to live another life in this life. That's exactly how I

feel about it. 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 kind of 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?

Do I? I mean, I agree that I'm incredibly lucky that that exact experience of being able to

live another life is something that is an accident of the time I was born.

If I were 10, 15 years older, it 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 incredible sort of progress and transition.

So one of the things we do on this show is ask people to recommend three books that they

think the audience should read. So do you have three books for me?

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,

Miquel Misse, called The Myth of the Wrong Body. Short book translated into English,

a very clear critique of the myth of the wrong body. I love Jan Morris' memoir Conundrum.

Jan Morris was the British travel writer, the incredible travel writer who

transitioned fairly late in life, or I think in middle age. And 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?

Turns out a lot of people are afraid of gender.

Well, thank you, Masha. Oh, this was really fun.

This episode of the Ezra Klein Show was produced by Kristen Lin,

fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair,

mixing by Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Annie Rose Strasser.

The show's production team also includes Emmafa Agawoo, Jeff Geld, and Roland Hoot.

Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Christina Samilowski and Shannon Busta.

The executive producer of New York Times' opinion audio is Annie Rose Strasser.

And special thanks to Isaac Jones.

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