I would like tickets to the human zoo where I can view the following:
1. Lisa's friends who have swung from full-bore SJW to full-bore MAGA. (I think abortion keeps a lot of former leftists from swinging too far right).
2. Your working class male friends who are full-time stay at-home dads. (Or did you actually mean men who still work but take on a lot of primary caregiving because the wife works as say, a nurse and works a lot of odd hours/shifts? - two related, but different things). Even in 2025 it's still rare even to see college-educated PMC men serve as full-time stay-at-home dads.
This is an excellent discussion. Meghan does such great work on gender, with who she invites on her show and how they frame various aspects of the discussion. I really appreciate Lisa's attention to the difficult politics for liberals and Democrats. I look forward to reading her book when it's out. I also worry about the people, including kids and their families, who are now losing access to what they have been told is "life saving care", but in any case is medical procedures that have altered their lives profoundly and irreversibly. I can't even think about these people without feeling profound grief and sadness, some horror, and maybe even a little bit of guilt on behalf of well-meaning liberals. I appreciate the grace of assuming good intentions, even if we have failed profoundly and essentially delivered this issue to Trump and the Republicans.
Women defined and led the gender critical movement, staring around 2011. Feminist scholars and writers like Kathleen Stock, Maya Forrester, Julie Burchill, Meagan Murphy, Kara Dansky, Jennifer Bilek, Helen Joyce, and scores of other women have been systematically fired, doxxed and silenced by trans activists when they sounded the alarm on the attack on women’s rights and solvency.
Republicans wisely picked up on it, and the Dems, most likely generously rewarded by the deep pockets of wealthy engineers of trans humanism, continue to die on the wrong hill. The early, liberal and brave women hounded off social media and out of their professions got it right early on, and paid a price for it.
"most likely generously rewarded by the deep pockets of wealthy engineers of trans humanism". This is nonsense. I think that Lisa explains very well how Democrats let themselves get backed into a corner by their own stupid passivity and inaction. Not everything is about money.
There is a certain group of people who just cannot accept psychological factors as motivation and, as a result, cannot see anything but money as a motivating factor.
This is so important. Money can be a crucible for amplifying destructive decisions. Money, and the corporate organizational "work" that the money funds, can also give self-destructive decisions the veneer of legitimacy and thereby reinforce commitment to bad decisions. But the Left's (and the Right's) self-destructive decisions are relatively typical from an organizational psychology perspective. As Lisa put it, it's doing the wrong thing in the name of doing the right thing. Like the disaster-ensuing "Teacher in Space" program, "Transwoman are woman" is a goodly organizational fantasy in which emotional investment in aspirational symbolism becomes a shortcut that can replace structural investment in tangible (real) improvement. Just take public school bathrooms. Why not just improve tangible structural reality for all students? Improve school bathrooms so all kids have access to safe, clean, and relatively private bathrooms at school. My heteronormative gender-conforming kid is terrified of having to go poop at school. I don't think that is a mental health issue, but rather because the bathrooms are disgusting and lack any privacy and are overcrowded. Even simply installing locks on stall doors that say "occupied" when in use would help. Not to mention that many schools have moved to block schedules and longer classes, making passing periods and breaks busier in the bathrooms. The reason schools don't do much of this mundane never-ending tangible work is because they would have to accept agency, admit failure, and ask for help. So instead, as an organization they escape into a perfection fantasy that seeks out shortcuts and pins the blame elsewhere. If a student is uncomfortable using the bathroom at school, the student is made the identified patient. What is the student's diagnostic problem and how can the school dramatize its own perfection and perform empathy toward that individual student's problem, rather than what is the structural problem with the bathroom and how can the school tangibly fix it? This is what Feynman's "Nature cannot be fooled" is telling us. That the moment you escape into a narcissistic fantasy in which structural information pointing to technical problems can be obscured by messages of aspirational symbolic ideology (whatever the ideology), you set yourself up for disaster. Like an alcoholic, the drinking looks like stupid passivity and inaction to an outsider, but internally it is an escape into a fantasy. And like an alcoholic, the only structural information you may finally heed to break you out of this fantasy is rock bottom, and by that time--like the Challenger exploding--it may already be too late. Schools have hit rock bottom with the failures of the aspirational symbolic ideology of Whole Language and for many students their educational opportunities for full literacy have been blown up. It's unclear if K-12 will ever recover in this domain, stop looking for shortcuts, and return to the mundane hard work of explicit reading instruction. And schools are spiraling toward another rock bottom with Chromebooks and "The Data-Driven Digital Classroom" that is in denial about how the non-verbal parts of the brain really learn and replaces it with a fantasy of performing STEM. Sure, there are lots of educational corporations that exploit and reify this fantasy (and also escape into their own corporate perfection fantasies), and the amount of money getting thrown around gives bad decisions the trappings of good decisions. I mean, why would Google donate all these Chromebooks and then all these legitimate educational corporations sell schools online edusoftware if it wasn't better than the paper-and-pencil learning that got us to the moon? And look, they even provide these curated "dashboards" as a shortcut, so we don't even have to look at the full work students are doing. But ultimately, this is about progressive institutions failing to take accountability for their own failures. And it is no surprise that this has backed them into a corner. I would argue that the success of the MAGA fantasy itself is the rock bottom for the failures of the progressive anti-conservative fantasy. And so, Liberals can't admit to Republican being correct on anything, because if first requires letting go of aspirational symbolic perfection fantasy and eschewing shortcuts.
In many cases, women also led the trans medicine, the queer theory in academia, the DEI departments, the online censorship bureaus, and they were also feminists. Judith Butler, Chase Strangio, Vijaya Gadde, etc. etc. This is an internecine battle.
The male cheerleaders irritate because of the yet further emasculation of American men, emasculation which is very pervasive, and doesn’t consider men’s actual well-being
It can be true broadly that there is an emasculation problem. But there have been male cheerleaders for a long time and the fact that some men are not stereotypically masculine isn't really the issue. Not sure that the NFL really needs that as part of their brand, but it doesn't strike me as a good fight to pick.
Late to this but one comment about why nice liberals got on the trans train: I don't think it was guilt, at least not for me. I grew up going to the "gay parade" in SF, spent my first career in a largely gay environment, etc.
Instead, I assumed trans was the next gay. It was "free to be you and me" and so no judgment if men wanted to wear dresses or women wanted to wear suits. It seemed a natural extension of that type of freedom to be whatever you wanted.
The challenge now is how to disentangle "freedom" from "trans": I think many of my cohort simply won't do that. It would pull a thread on many of our most fervently held beliefs about individual autonomy. If being trans is not a form of freedom, perhaps all sorts of other things aren't either (sexuality? dress and appearance?).
Meghan,
Excellent conversation as usual.
I would like tickets to the human zoo where I can view the following:
1. Lisa's friends who have swung from full-bore SJW to full-bore MAGA. (I think abortion keeps a lot of former leftists from swinging too far right).
2. Your working class male friends who are full-time stay at-home dads. (Or did you actually mean men who still work but take on a lot of primary caregiving because the wife works as say, a nurse and works a lot of odd hours/shifts? - two related, but different things). Even in 2025 it's still rare even to see college-educated PMC men serve as full-time stay-at-home dads.
This is an excellent discussion. Meghan does such great work on gender, with who she invites on her show and how they frame various aspects of the discussion. I really appreciate Lisa's attention to the difficult politics for liberals and Democrats. I look forward to reading her book when it's out. I also worry about the people, including kids and their families, who are now losing access to what they have been told is "life saving care", but in any case is medical procedures that have altered their lives profoundly and irreversibly. I can't even think about these people without feeling profound grief and sadness, some horror, and maybe even a little bit of guilt on behalf of well-meaning liberals. I appreciate the grace of assuming good intentions, even if we have failed profoundly and essentially delivered this issue to Trump and the Republicans.
Women defined and led the gender critical movement, staring around 2011. Feminist scholars and writers like Kathleen Stock, Maya Forrester, Julie Burchill, Meagan Murphy, Kara Dansky, Jennifer Bilek, Helen Joyce, and scores of other women have been systematically fired, doxxed and silenced by trans activists when they sounded the alarm on the attack on women’s rights and solvency.
Republicans wisely picked up on it, and the Dems, most likely generously rewarded by the deep pockets of wealthy engineers of trans humanism, continue to die on the wrong hill. The early, liberal and brave women hounded off social media and out of their professions got it right early on, and paid a price for it.
"most likely generously rewarded by the deep pockets of wealthy engineers of trans humanism". This is nonsense. I think that Lisa explains very well how Democrats let themselves get backed into a corner by their own stupid passivity and inaction. Not everything is about money.
There is a certain group of people who just cannot accept psychological factors as motivation and, as a result, cannot see anything but money as a motivating factor.
This is so important. Money can be a crucible for amplifying destructive decisions. Money, and the corporate organizational "work" that the money funds, can also give self-destructive decisions the veneer of legitimacy and thereby reinforce commitment to bad decisions. But the Left's (and the Right's) self-destructive decisions are relatively typical from an organizational psychology perspective. As Lisa put it, it's doing the wrong thing in the name of doing the right thing. Like the disaster-ensuing "Teacher in Space" program, "Transwoman are woman" is a goodly organizational fantasy in which emotional investment in aspirational symbolism becomes a shortcut that can replace structural investment in tangible (real) improvement. Just take public school bathrooms. Why not just improve tangible structural reality for all students? Improve school bathrooms so all kids have access to safe, clean, and relatively private bathrooms at school. My heteronormative gender-conforming kid is terrified of having to go poop at school. I don't think that is a mental health issue, but rather because the bathrooms are disgusting and lack any privacy and are overcrowded. Even simply installing locks on stall doors that say "occupied" when in use would help. Not to mention that many schools have moved to block schedules and longer classes, making passing periods and breaks busier in the bathrooms. The reason schools don't do much of this mundane never-ending tangible work is because they would have to accept agency, admit failure, and ask for help. So instead, as an organization they escape into a perfection fantasy that seeks out shortcuts and pins the blame elsewhere. If a student is uncomfortable using the bathroom at school, the student is made the identified patient. What is the student's diagnostic problem and how can the school dramatize its own perfection and perform empathy toward that individual student's problem, rather than what is the structural problem with the bathroom and how can the school tangibly fix it? This is what Feynman's "Nature cannot be fooled" is telling us. That the moment you escape into a narcissistic fantasy in which structural information pointing to technical problems can be obscured by messages of aspirational symbolic ideology (whatever the ideology), you set yourself up for disaster. Like an alcoholic, the drinking looks like stupid passivity and inaction to an outsider, but internally it is an escape into a fantasy. And like an alcoholic, the only structural information you may finally heed to break you out of this fantasy is rock bottom, and by that time--like the Challenger exploding--it may already be too late. Schools have hit rock bottom with the failures of the aspirational symbolic ideology of Whole Language and for many students their educational opportunities for full literacy have been blown up. It's unclear if K-12 will ever recover in this domain, stop looking for shortcuts, and return to the mundane hard work of explicit reading instruction. And schools are spiraling toward another rock bottom with Chromebooks and "The Data-Driven Digital Classroom" that is in denial about how the non-verbal parts of the brain really learn and replaces it with a fantasy of performing STEM. Sure, there are lots of educational corporations that exploit and reify this fantasy (and also escape into their own corporate perfection fantasies), and the amount of money getting thrown around gives bad decisions the trappings of good decisions. I mean, why would Google donate all these Chromebooks and then all these legitimate educational corporations sell schools online edusoftware if it wasn't better than the paper-and-pencil learning that got us to the moon? And look, they even provide these curated "dashboards" as a shortcut, so we don't even have to look at the full work students are doing. But ultimately, this is about progressive institutions failing to take accountability for their own failures. And it is no surprise that this has backed them into a corner. I would argue that the success of the MAGA fantasy itself is the rock bottom for the failures of the progressive anti-conservative fantasy. And so, Liberals can't admit to Republican being correct on anything, because if first requires letting go of aspirational symbolic perfection fantasy and eschewing shortcuts.
In many cases, women also led the trans medicine, the queer theory in academia, the DEI departments, the online censorship bureaus, and they were also feminists. Judith Butler, Chase Strangio, Vijaya Gadde, etc. etc. This is an internecine battle.
The male cheerleaders irritate because of the yet further emasculation of American men, emasculation which is very pervasive, and doesn’t consider men’s actual well-being
It can be true broadly that there is an emasculation problem. But there have been male cheerleaders for a long time and the fact that some men are not stereotypically masculine isn't really the issue. Not sure that the NFL really needs that as part of their brand, but it doesn't strike me as a good fight to pick.
💯
I still like the word androgynous and wish it to be revived. Thank you for this conversation.
Thanks to you both for the update! The politics are poorly understood by less online Republicans and Democrats alike.
Late to this but one comment about why nice liberals got on the trans train: I don't think it was guilt, at least not for me. I grew up going to the "gay parade" in SF, spent my first career in a largely gay environment, etc.
Instead, I assumed trans was the next gay. It was "free to be you and me" and so no judgment if men wanted to wear dresses or women wanted to wear suits. It seemed a natural extension of that type of freedom to be whatever you wanted.
The challenge now is how to disentangle "freedom" from "trans": I think many of my cohort simply won't do that. It would pull a thread on many of our most fervently held beliefs about individual autonomy. If being trans is not a form of freedom, perhaps all sorts of other things aren't either (sexuality? dress and appearance?).
Thanks for this interesting and nuanced conversation.