Remembering Dianne Feinstein

In recent years, I had stopped paying much attention to what Dianne Feinstein was about. With all the focus on the wretched state of the American pursuit of democracy and on evidence that an alarming number of my fellow Americans were actually throwing their support behind a charlatan and dictator wannabe, I had surrendered to the temptation to follow what a good many of my fellow citizens on the other side were doing and simply tune out. The passing of Dianne Feinstein woke me up. I was not practicing what I preached, I realized suddenly: that citizens can and should perform at least their minimum civic duty and keep their eye on what their political representatives were doing. 

I came to live in San Francisco when I got out of the army in the summer of 1965. I had spent a year studying Russian at the Army Language School in Monterey [it changed its name to the Defense Language Institute the year I was there],  had spent many weekends in San Francisco, and knew that I wanted to make it my home. It was in San Francisco that I rented my first apartment, got my first job as an adult, supported myself for the first time, and came out as a gay man.

After running through my savings from my army days, I got a job at the French Railroads providing European train tickets to travel agencies from an office which overlooked Union Square. I rode the last stretch of my commute on the cable car up from Powell and Market, which you could do in those days as an automatic transfer, and could often be heard to exclaim that I had died and gone to heaven, which happened to be known locally as San Francisco. I began memorizing all the city's street names and decided at some point that the only job I could imagine better than the one I had would be to drive a cab. I was absolutely in love with the city.

San Francisco had not yet been Manhattanized. It was still a city without a lot of skyscrapers and even the locals still rushed from one hill to another in constant pursuit of a better view. And my self-loathing as a gay man was fast diminishing as I was able to bounce around the periphery of one or another organization devoted to gay civil rights like SIR, the Society for Individual Rights, march in the annual Pride Parades and eventually, in the 70s and 80s, even join two Marches on Washington. Harvey Milk would not arrive and become the unofficial "mayor of Castro Street" for several more years. Support for gay liberation was already building but it still lacked the kind of leadership Harvey - and Dianne Feinstein - would come to provide.

I left for Japan for a few years and by the time I returned, in 1973, Harvey had established himself and I would see him handing out flyers from time to time. I left again for Saudi Arabia in 1976 and by the time I returned a year later, Harvey had finally succeeded in becoming part of the establishment, although it was still an uphill battle against the likes of Anita Bryant and the Briggs Initiative, with the majority of citizens still inclined to believe that gay was just another word for child molester. Briggs wanted to fire all gay teachers, and overnight I became politically active not just as a gay man, but as a teacher who might lose his number one choice of a way to make a living. 

When Mayor Moscone and Harvey Milk were shot, on November 27, 1978, I was living in Santa Cruz and teaching at UCSC. I came up to the city in a state of shock and despair, mitigated and channeled into sadness by the candlelight march from City Hall to the Castro. I made my way to Harvey's memorial service at Temple Emanu-El on Arguello Street, I think it was the next day or sometime not long afterwards.  I am left with two powerful memories from that day. One was the beauty of the Mourner's Kaddish, which brought me to tears and made me wonder if I could convert to Judaism on the spot. The other was of Dianne Feinstein coming down the aisle and taking her seat in the pew directly behind where I was sitting. I couldn't get out of my mind her having stuck her finger in the wound where the bullet had gone through Harvey's flesh. It was all too real, all too cruel.

I was not much of a fan of Dianne Feinstein after she took on the job of mayor. My politics were far to the left of her. I didn't like the fact that she vetoed domestic partner legislation in 1982, and her support for big corporations and for building high rises really rubbed me the wrong way. But that same year she began her life-long campaign to do something about guns killing so many Americans, and in time I came to see her role as a moderate democrat as defensible, if not all I would wish for.

Politicians are not my favorite people in the world. It's easy to come down hard on them when they don't represent your interests, and I've badmouthed Dianne quite a bit over the years. Even recently, as she held on to her job even when she was too ill to do it well. But as I go over the list of her accomplishments and recognize how widely respected she was for her work against guns, for abortion rights, her shift to opposing capital punishment in 2018, her efforts to protect the California coastline and forests from developers, especially her creation of the Death Valley and other National Parks and for dozens of smaller contributions - like opposing Trump's support of moving Israel's capital to Jerusalem, I'm comfortable calling myself a Feinstein fan. One of the decent politicians. One who doesn't always represent your interests - but who does? - but one who does the job she is elected to do.

Damning by faint praise, I realize, is not the best endorsement. But I'm not being fair when I stop at saying she's not one of the worst politicians. Considering what bozos and clowns, ne'er-do-wells and downright blaggards we've had go to Washington on the taxpayer dime, Dianne stands out as way better than "pretty good."

Just as I learned at Stanford that some of the best minds I've ever encountered can be found in female heads, the fact that I live in a place represented by Barbara Lee (representative for Oakland and Berkeley), Senator Barbara Boxer and, until yesterday, Senator Dianne Feinstein, means I've still got reason to believe the American democratic experiment might make it yet.

It's been a great run, these last six decades and more sharing a California identity with the likes of Dianne Feinstein. I wish now I'd sent her a thank-you note while I still had the chance.

photo: screenshot of Dianne Feinstein announcing the assassination of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, November 27, 1978, an image as vivid in my mind today as it was that night when I first took it in.

El Houb - a film review

الحب (El Houb) is the Arabic word for "love." It's also the title of a Moroccan-Dutch film that came out a few months ago about a young man, Karim Zahwani, caught in bed with another man by his father.  The discovery breaks the resistance Karim has long struggled with to come out to his mother and father, partly to free himself of the prison of silence he has been living in, partly to get them to stop nagging him to get married. To say it doesn't go well would be an Olympic-sized understatement. By the time the Zahwani family even begins to come to terms with their son's homosexuality, Karim has holed up in a closet, turned off the water and the electricity and even trashed their apartment. "Knock down drag out" doesn't begin to tell the story.

El Houb is not an easy watch. To start with, if one has lived in Europe or America or in most places in the modern world where homosexuality is now old hat as a topic, one has to go back to a time when LGBT people lived closeted lives of hypocrisy or deception.  The obvious question that comes to mind is why should we waste our time with yet another coming-out story?  "Been there, done that, didn't like it, moved on."

The answer is that along with the fact that, come January 1, 2024, Estonia will be the 34th nation to recognize same-sex marriage is the equally salient fact that it is still illegal in 35 countries, including every one of the Islamic states. That includes Morocco, the country of origin of the immigrant Zahwani family now living in the Netherlands.  Karim's mother has two major concerns: what will the neighbors think?  And how can her son possibly want to do such a haram thing?

I have to admit I was tempted to shut the film down several times. The Sturm und Drang gets seriously heavy and you want to throw things at the screen each time you see a face twisted in agony over the struggle both sides are going through. If Karim were clear-headed on the subject and it were just a question of getting his mother and father over the hump, it would be a lot easier. But a great deal of the agony is watching Karim struggle with his own doubts.

What made me stick with the histrionics - and that's an appropriate term here - was my lifelong interest in what happens when cultures clash. And the knowledge that the actor, Fahd Larhzaoui, who plays Karim, is himself a gay man of Moroccan origin born in the Netherlands. The story will no doubt frustrate you with its surfeit of homophobia, much of it self-imposed. But only if you fail to recognize that it is also, ultimately, a tale of homophobic Moroccans coming to embrace the modern values of their adopted country, and their gay son in the process.

Seen in that light, it's a nice little contribution to the long slow slog toward gay liberation.  Belgian-born Lubna Azabal, of Moroccan origin, plays the mother. Slimane Dazi, a French actor of Algerian origin  plays the father (and he apparently had to work hard to learn Moroccan Arabic to get the role). They are both superb, as is the kid who plays Karim as a boy in the flashbacks.

I watched it on Amazon Prime, but I believe it's also available online at:

https://tubitv.com/movies/100003839/el-houb-the-love?start=true&tracking=google-feed&utm_source=google-feed .

The transgender issue - Part VI - "I'm pretty sure I'm right."

"I'm pretty sure I'm right."

I love it when I get that feeling, as I do when I open up solicitations from the Southern Poverty Law Center where they tell me my contributions will go to fighting gerrymandering in Alabama or Missouri.

Why can't I get that feeling when I declare the best thing to do is withhold puberty blockers from kids under sixteen because it would lead to faulty bone development and because most kids then go on to do serious damage with hormone treatments and eventually surgery.

I just watched one of my favorite German satirists, Jan Böhmermann, take up the topic.  He sneers at the question by the unenlightend segment of the population who worry about men in women's changing rooms. No doubts. Why should they be allowed in? "Because transwomen are women!" 

There you go. Truth by declaration. He goes on to celebrate the rejection of the 1980-something law requiring trans people to jump through all sorts of hoops before being allowed to change their gender and congratulates Germany for catching up with fifteen other nations that allow the change on the basis of a simple declaration. Böhmermann has enough confidence that he's on the right side of history not only to declare what's true, but to sneer at those who disagree with him.

Why does this question continue to plague me? Why do I continue to want to hear from the other side, from the religious folk who tell me you need to stay in the gender you were born into because it's God's will.  (And I hate it that I have to use "gender" here because "sex" is an outmoded concept)  And from others of the political right wing.  Why can't I just do what I always do and go with the leftist flow? Not merely the leftist flow, but apparently with the majority of LGB people who are in solidarity with the transactivists?

A couple days ago, I blogged about how I was persuaded that professional theologians of the Christian persuasion had some of the most clear-headed arguments against transgendering and for detransgendering. I deliberately chose them because I knew they'd be on "the other side" and I needed to push the strength of my own convictions. Sean McDowell, the interviewer, makes clear he knows he's right because his convictions are biblically based. In another interview, with a more gay-friendly evangelical who sees no conflict between his faith and being gay, McDowell insists he's got it right and isn't going to be persuaded by any modernist attempt to restructure traditional theology. I sit here, in my lived gay experience, listening to a man who believes my soul depends on giving up my marriage to a man and my entire circle of friends and family who whole-heartedly believe, as I do, that God, if he exists, doesn't care what I do with my naughty parts. And I'm supposed to believe this man when he pronounces on the trans question? Because I am pre-disposed to believe him anyway? So much for listening to "people in the know" when you haven't got the time or the energy to dig for truth and understanding on your own.

This is the thorniest issue I've come across in a very long time. Reason doesn't help me out here. Arguments on one side are offset by equally convincing arguments on the other.

Have a listen to this Swedish documentary, for example, on efforts to get folks at the Karolinska Institute who enabled transgender kids access to hormones and surgery as part of "gender-affirming" care, and the disastrous results which followed.

Then listen to this Frontline Program which makes an equally powerful argument for listening to your kids when they describe the need to change sex (sorry - I know I'm supposed to say gender, but I just can't) as a life-and-death issue.

And then tell me you don't have the same doubts about declaring "I'm pretty sure I'm right."

Detransitioning - Part V on the Transgender Issue

About six weeks ago, I started a four-part think-aloud here on Hepzibah about the transgender issue, knowing I was risking being a fool by rushing in (on Aug. 7, 9, 11 and 15) and pretending I could both view it from a neutral position and take a stand at the same time. I still hold those dual views - that transgender people need our support on a personal level and the question of medical intervention on the human body should not be left to people who go through life saying "whatever!"

After four attempts to shed light on the topic I decided I'd had my say (my "think-aloud") and it was time to face my limitations and shut up and listen a while before saying any more. So I put it on the back burner, along with my concern over whether American democracy is in real danger or merely facing another bump in the road, whether I should take my love of animals more seriously and become a vegetarian, whether the U.S. should continue to support Ukraine (I'm not really on the fence on that one; I say yes.), and all the other "eat your peas and think of the starving children in Africa" issues that cross my path.

The response to my discussion of the transgender issue was disappointing. One friend asked me, "Why do you care? It's such a trivial issue in the greater scheme of things. And it affects so few people!"  I didn't argue with him, but my mind went to the several videos I had watched by people who had come to regret their choices to undergo breast and penis removal. I have no trouble imagining myself in other people's shoes, normally. I like to think I can imagine being Jewish, being black, emigrating to another country. But for the life of me I can't get my head around the idea of having my penis lopped off.  And back in the early 70s one of my closest friends took his own life, and for years afterward, I had dreams of shouting at him, "Why didn't you wait! Just a few years. Life for gay people will get better. Much better!" I have become obsessed with the idea of preventing young people from making decisions they come to regret - or would if they were still alive. So in some indirect way this issue has become personal for me.  

And then there's the fact that the place where I normally sit - on the left of the political spectrum, with democrats and LGBT people, doesn't quite feel at home anymore. Just as the Republicans have usurped American democracy, I have the sinking feeling that the trans activists are taking more of the LGBT space than is justified, and perhaps the people who like to label the extreme left "woke" are not just the Marjorie Taylor Greene idiots the left like to think they are. Maybe we ought to think more about lock-step support of some of our inclinations to do the right thing and come down on the right side of history. Hate speech, for example. I can't get a handle on that issue, either. In Germany, you can't say anything good about Hitler and the Nazis. They've shut down free speech on that issue and everything in me wants to shout, "Hallelujah, good on ya, Deutschland! Way to go!" But then where do I go with that other voice in my head that insists, "the only way to counter bad speech is with more speech, not with censorship." My head goes with that one. I understand, in principle, how the attempt at a cure can sometimes be worse than the disease.

So here's Part V of my thoughts on the transgender issue. What are we to make of the folk now claiming in ever-increasing numbers that they made a mistake by medically intervening their way out of gender dysphoria? I know the numbers are still small, but not so small they can be ignored. On the one hand, anecdotal evidence is quite often misleading and potentially worthless. On the other hand, if you listen to the collective testimony of individuals now filling the internet with their claims they made a mistake, if you've got a conscience, you have to let that testimony in. At least give the issue a serious hearing.

Of all the articles and videos I've come across on the issue of detransitioning, one in particular stands out. I am drawn to it because it comes from a place I normally run from. Two Christian doctors talking about the issue and insisting it has not only a social, a legal and a medical dimension, but a spiritual one. "Aaaargh" as they say in the comics. Gag me with a spoon. But my life experience has demonstrated that all sorts of b.s.ers and bloviators (if there's a difference) can sometimes come out with gems of wisdom. Nobody should be rejected out of hand until they've had their say. And the more I listened, the more I concluded they had a great deal of information I needed to consider.  Here I am, in bed with anti-gay homophobes, I said to myself. Just what I need to check the strength of my convictions.

I'm talking about Sean McDowell talking to Paul Rhodes Eddy, in an hour-long piece from three months ago.   Sean McDowell is a professor of theology at Biola University, a Christian college near Anaheim in the greater Los Angeles area. He is the author/editor of around fifteen books on Christian apologetics. He has a PhD in Christian apologetics from a Southern Baptist theological seminary. I'm familiar with him as an opponent of same-sex marriage of the "hate the sin and love the sinner" school of thought. Nice guy, from what I can see.

And here is the blurb on Dr. Paul Rhodes Eddy from the Center for Faith, Sexuality and Gender, with which he is associated: 

Paul Rhodes Eddy (PhD, Marquette University) is Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Bethel University in St. Paul, MN. He has authored, co-authored, or co-edited a dozen books, including Understanding Transgender Identities: Four Views (Baker Academic, 2019). He is also a Teaching Pastor at Woodland Hills Church in St. Paul, MN. He lives in White Bear Township, MN with his wife Kelly and their two sons. 

As I listened to their discussion, I saw my task as trying to distinguish the parts of what they had to say that I might assume to stem from their bias as anti-LGBT Christian apologists from what they had to say as objective scientists. And when I say "they" I mean chiefly Dr. Eddy, the sex researcher being interviewed by Dr. McDowell. My starting place comes from lived experience as a gay man; Dr. Eddy's starting place is almost certainly colored by the world he lives in of men and women who believe my embrace of homosexuality as a positive thing is misplaced, and transgendered people - perhaps - I can't be sure - are even more in need of corrective thought. That raises the obvious question: can either of us be objective here? 

The longer I listened, the more I thought I saw their Christian orientation (not to say bias) leaking through their conclusions, the more I was persuaded that Dr. Eddy is no less sincere in his desire to understand the transgender dilemma than I am.  And the more I found a meeting of the minds. We both reach pretty much the same conclusions on transitioning and detransitioning. Tempting as it is to ascribe his conclusions to a Christian ideological bias, how can I explain away the fact that I reach pretty much those same conclusions?  I felt that obligated me to give him the same benefit of the doubt that I am inclined to give myself.

I recommend you give them a listen, if you have the time. It's only an hour.  But if you want a condensed version, here's my take on what they had to say:

McDowell and Eddy begin their discussion with a Christian liberal admission that the church has not always done the right thing in dealing with sexuality. I am reminded of the times I have observed how readily people can become conciliatory once their ability to bully has been checked. And their claim that they see their goal as "missiological" - wonderful word, that - gives me the creeps. But we're just getting started.

First off, "detransitioning" is defined, simply, and I'd say obviously, as "reversing the transitioning process."  Transitioning is divided into three parts: social (taking on attitudes and behavior of the opposite sex), medical (from puberty blockers to hormone therapy to surgery), and legal (taking steps, such as official name change, to reorient the world to one's transgender change). [Please note that I am following the transgender activist practice of using "transgender" to include what was once commonly distinguished as medical-biological (transsexual) as well as social (transgender). I don't like blurring the distinction, but I'm going with the flow here because I don't want to get hung up on the linguistic dilemma.]

Alarm bells went off for me when Eddy observed that Darwinian evolutionary theory opened up the perspective of seeing sex and non-binary and on a spectrum, since embryonic development takes us through the female-to-male journey in the womb. My thought was, "What's he getting at? Is he trying to shade evolution at the same time as the choice to transgender?" They move on before I can get an answer to that question.

Eddy credits the internet with the growth of interest in transgendering. Specifically with the idea that it was something one might consider doing. At the end of the last century there was relatively little interest, but between 2004 and 2007 there was a sudden spike in the number of adolescents reporting gender dysphoria. And, of course, as dysphoria became more prevalent, so did transitioning - and ultimately detransitioning, as well. Eddy cites two studies of adolescents in schools, one in Minnesota in 2016 showing 2.7% of 80,000 students surveyed in grades 9 and 11 reporting "some sort of transgender or gender-diverse identity."  A second study, in Pennsylvania in 2021, showed 9.2% of students reporting "gender-diverse identity."  If these studies are reliable (a big "if") they suggest a strong increase in dysphoria-consciousness. (And that, of course, opens up the question of whether transgender-consciousness is the same thing as dysphoria. I believe it is not, but that's a question for another time.) 

Another question that cannot be ignored is why the sex ratio has changed so remarkably. Where once it was boys/men wanting to be girls/women, these days it is primarily girls/women wanting to be boys/men.

And a third question is what is the explanation for the high correlation between people with gender dysphoria and people with autism.

When they reach the question of why it is that transgendering has become such an issue at this time, I begin to appreciate Eddy's ability to be neutral. He acknowledges the culture war which polarizes us all: him on the Christian "God wants us to marry the opposite sex only and remain in the bodies we were born into" side, and me on the side of those who come up with things like"you don't tell me who I can love and who I can marry - I have the right as a citizen living in a democracy to make that decision on my own" and "seems to me the 'born into' question is up for grabs at the moment." But to his credit (in my view) he suggests we look at these questions from a multivariate perspective, and not assume simple single causes. He advocates a "bio-psycho-social" model to follow. I grit my teeth when he adds that, as a Christian, he'd like to add a spiritual component to that mix and make it a "numa-bio-psycho-social" model, and I immediately want to know how the spiritual differs from the psychological. But that's clearly another rabbit hole we probably need to walk past.

What kinds of issues does the bio-psycho-social model direct us to? The "bio" part leads us to ask whether there are chemicals in the environment, for example, that ought to get us to focus on such things as the intersex question. Sounds to me like asking us whether there's something in the water. But who knows? Maybe there's something there. The "social" aspect is the biggie, as far as I'm concerned. When somebody identifies as transgender, are we doing the right thing by insisting on a gender-affirming approach? Are we seriously doing right by kids by going with their assertion that they are "in the wrong body"? I've come down on that side, so far, and I'm still there. But I recognize it as a legitimate question, mostly because my life has been one discovery after another that I have held firm convictions that I later come to understand as erroneous, and the only proper approach to scientific questions is to assume truth to be "the sum total of all knowledge to date subject to change at any moment with the introduction of new reliable information."

Then comes the troubling possibility that some people have come upon gender dysphoria through interaction with their peers. Adolescents are notoriously susceptible to peer group influence and it's an open secret that a lot of bad ideas get into the heads of kids from television and social media. There's even as word for it: social contagion. Add to that the increasing social acceptance of transgender folk and the fact that insurance companies, some of them, are now willing to pay for medical transitioning, and you've got a whole new ball game, a whole new reason to make the leap. And, of course, from the perspective of somebody who later wants to detransition, a whole new risk one should avoid. Either way, a whole new complexity. Not as dramatic as the possibility that, perhaps not in the immediate future, but eventually, we may see uteruses transplanted into male bodies. But complex for sure.

I'd like to make a brief discursion here to take up two issues McDowell and Eddy do not address. I'm old enough to remember when people went to extremes to hide the fact that they were gay. Old enough to be astonished at how radically the world has changed. Today I can be openly gay and the world I live in, at least, is totally supportive. Positive images are everywhere. The most popular movie on Netflix recently has been Red, White and Royal Blue, a wonderful fantasy in which two drop-dead gorgeous men, one the second in line to the British throne and one the son of America's first female president fall in love and even get portrayed having anal sex in one scene. How's that for a switch? And the world roars its approval. Given this reality, it will surprise no one that all sorts of young men and women who probably would have been too inhibited to explore same-sex sex only recently are now giving it a go. I celebrate this. I think it's good for young people to get drunk a few times. It's the only way one can learn what drink does to you. Do you become a silly drunk? An obnoxious drunk? A morose drunk? You need to know yourself and know what the risks are. Similarly, I think you should know yourself sexually. Young people experiment with sex and if they discover they are essentially heterosexual after a couple gay trysts, all the better. Self-knowledge is essential to a good life.

But what about experimenting with switching sex and gender? Socially, I'd say the situation is the same as experimenting with same-sex behavior. No harm done, except possibly to your dignity and loss of standing in your old social circles. Do it, if you feel like it, I say. If nothing else, it will put you in the shoes of more serious-minded gender dysphoric people. You will experience the difficulties they go through. But again, I draw the line at medical intervention. Cut off your breasts or your penis and you don't get to go back again. Not something to mess with. Not a parallel with experimenting with being gay.

The other issues is a big one, in my mind. There is a glaring inconsistency, as I see it, in the transgender claim, from guru Judith Butler on down, that gender (and sex!) are fluid, that there are any number of ways of being a man or a woman, that being non-binary is the way to go. But at the same time people who believe they were born into the wrong body and want to change their gender seem to go for the stereotypes of the opposite sex. Male to female candidates want to be Marilyn Monroe, not Angela Merkel. Female to male often go for the lumberjack or tough guy image, not the self-effacing polite gentleman who gives his seat to a lady. What's that all about, other than calling the "multiple gender" notion into doubt? 

But maybe I'm making too much of that idea. Let me get back to the discussion between McDowell and Eddy.  They don't use the word zeitgeist but theyacknowledge that transgendering is so much with us that there are now children as young as three or four being socially transgendered.  And it's now clear that once the three-step process starts (from social to blockers and hormones [estrogen or testosterone] to surgery) it's quite likely to continue. And that means that detransitioning will as well. I note, though, that that does not speak to the real issue, which is whether the percentage of those transitioning warrants the calls to stop the process entirely. That, it seems to me, remains very much an open question which McDowell and Eddy, now thirty minutes into their discussion, have not resolved.

Eddy takes up the distinction between regret over transitioning and detransitioning. The three main reasons for the former, regret, are: 1) some medical complications; 2) a less-than-satisfactory functional outcome; and 3) a less-than-satisfactory esthetic/appearance. However, while the statistics on the regret rate run between 1% and 2.2%, the rates for actual detransitioning run between .5% and 1%. But, I suspect, there is an issue of numbers, here. Eddy himself describes the statistics as "dicey."

Once Eddy gets into the think of the discussion on detransitioning, he focuses on the complexity behind the figures. Many of the early studies on transitioning, he points out, were undertaken at a time when transitioning came only after extensive counseling, and an attitude which favored moving slowly and carefully.  Thus one should expect lower levels of detransitioning from that early era because more thought went into the decision to transition in the first place. Nowadays, when people launch into medical measures after sometimes as little as thirty minutes of counseling, one supposes the risks of an unwise choice have shot way up. This highlights the dilemma one faces over whether to listen to those who threaten suicide or self-harm if they don't get permission to transition or to those who insist on taking it slow, and call their bluff. No enviable spot to be in, for sure.

But don't miss the point here. The overwhelming majority of those who transition find their lives are better after doing so. Figures go as high as 98%. That too is not an insignificant fact, fuzzy statistics notwithstanding. And both Christian apologists reach that conclusion from the data available. And yet, they also warn that in years to come we may have to reevaluate these conclusions as the almost inevitable increase in testimonies from detransitioners eventually comes in. By the end of their session, I find myself better informed, but no less convinced I should be put off by an overriding approach that favors caution.

At the end of their discussion, Eddy gets into the question of the reliability of psychological research in general, the search for data on the transgender issue being only one subset of that research. The problem, he stresses, is what he calls replication bias, the fact (he asserts) that 1) much psychological research never gets replicated, and 2) some research gets taken early on as authoritative and research that counters its findings gets ignored. Add to that the fact that there is yet to be established a standardization of linguistic terms and of measuring tools and the fact that much of what we claim to know is based on retrospective studies, and there is good reason to push the pause button. Just as self-report data is notoriously unreliable, so is data that comes from recall.  

When it comes to detransition studies, there is another huge problem, according to Eddy. Many of the studies deal with people who decide to - or decide not to - transition after a few months or a couple years. But other studies show that most of those who detransition do so only after eight or ten years. So these people's experience is not being captured in most of the current studies on detransitioning. Also, detransitioners are less likely to seek the advice of those medical advisors they transitioned with. I wish I could question Eddy about this, though. What difference does it make where the statistics come from on detransitioning? Wouldn't an individual detransitioner be counted as such no matter whether they went through their original transitioning doctor or another doctor? I'm now beginning to worry that maybe my original suspicion that and understanding of the transgender issue is riddled with bias. But is it, in this case, a pro-Christian bias? Or my inclination to see an ideological pro-Christian bias where there isn't one? I am none the wiser after two careful engagements with this video.

We are left with the impression that we are only at the beginning of a useful understanding of how to proceed rationally with people suffering from gender dysphoria, despite the number of years the problem has been around. 

Eddy and McDowell end on the question of where to go from here and how to advise parents faced with children with gender dysphoria. Eddy advocates use of not a gender-affirming model but what he calls a gender-exploratory model.  In plain English: more "let's think about this" than "whatever you say, dear." Once again we are confronted with a choice of going with the head or the heart, the head being the exploratory approach where we question and reason, the heart being affirmation as a way to show love to our children by giving them assurance we trust them to know what they need from life.

And - again, no surprise - which way you go will depend on the kind of relationship you have with your kids, how much trust you have established with them, how much freedom you've granted them to try new things and fail, and how much you believe they have acquired the maturity to make wise decisions.

Not something you can get help with from outside. Not something a counselor or therapist can assess with certainty. Something that has to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Welcome to reality, where you have to call the shots with the knowledge you are limited to and accept the consequences they leave you with.

Identities

I've got a whole bunch of identities I've worn like skin over the years. I am a New Englander, a Californian, a gay American, a brother, son and grandson, a man married to another man, a German-American, a member of the extended Johnston clan of Nova Scotia, a dog lover, a professor emeritus.

I wear these identities with pride. They ground me and provide me with a sense of security. I know who I am and where I come from.

I have had other identities in the past, some of which mattered for a brief time such as member of the Class of 1958 (the Gilbert School in Winsted, Connecticut) and the Class of 1962 (Middlebury College). Others, like my religious identities - Baptist, Congregationalist, Lutheran, I grew out of and away from. My friend Frank likes to refer to me as "flaquito" (skinny), an affectionate reminder that I spent my early years with less weight on my bones. In Japan I was identified as a "gaijin," an "outside person," a term that got under my skin the first few years I lived there.

I love it when I see others wearing their identities with pride. I grew up in a small town full of Italian immigrants, and watching them live life loud and filled with affection used to make me wish I was Italian.

And in more recent years, I've observed the same kind of relationships among Mexican families and Jewish families. Not as loud, maybe, but as affectionate.

One could do worse than grow up in a family that revels in its roots.

I don't want to shed any of my long-lasting identities. I want forever to remain a dog-lover. But I wouldn't mind - at least for a time - living life as an Ashkenazi American Jew, particularly if I had a father who was a cantor:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiafwfZaweE

Democracy is slipping away

"For the first time in my life, I have wished somebody dead," a friend of mine wrote recently. She was referring to the former president of the United States. "Time for him to have a stroke."

I didn't pick up on her comment. I might have. I agree the guy is loathesome and dangerous in his habit of saying things that are patently untrue, counting on his cultlike following to march, lemming-like, off the cliff and take the rest of us with them. But I don't wish him dead because I've come to understand that the hatred such a wish would require takes too much out of me. I'm pretty good at getting my spirits back up when they go down - good music, good food, good conversation all do that - but why use the energy, I tell myself, when I could put it elsewhere.

For one thing, I think blaming the orange road kill, to use one of his ninety-nine names in current use, is not the problem. The real problem is a combination of two things. One is an uninformed populace willing to follow-the-leader because we live in what some call a "post-epistemic age" - an age when we no longer believe in the idea of objective truth, but think truth is simply whatever you want it to be. If I want to follow an American Führer, I can. I know my rights.

The other problem is our failure - is it laziness? simple apathy? ignorance? - to do the work necessary to keep democracy alive. We have allowed it to slip through our fingers, to wither away, because (and this connects it to the first problem) we have lost the will to educate our children in the art of critical thinking. Where once we valued being smart and working hard, we now put our effort into equity and diversity. 

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not against including the whole population in the American experiment in democracy and, God knows, as a gay man I committed to diversity and inclusion decades ago. But I also value nuanced thinking, and avoiding pendulum swings like overcompensating for leaving kids out of competitive games by giving them all participation trophies.  I have weak muscles and flabby skin because I built an aversion to physical education early on, when my elementary school physical education program consisted of baseball or football instead of calisthenics or soccer, and I was almost always the last to be selected when my colleagues chose their team members. I know the feeling of being left out; I know where the impetus to award participation trophies rather than reward athletic performance came from. But the push for inclusion came with a loss of excellence. And the notion that "learning should be fun," much as I agree with it, also brought with it the feeling that there was something off about a dedication to hard work and struggling against the odds.

I have no way of measuring this claim, if indeed it is true, but I'm not alone in my concern that we are throwing American democracy out because we aren't willing to do the work to keep it alive and well.  Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, two professors of government at Harvard have put their heads together and written a book titled Tyranny of the Minority. I haven't read it; it's due to come out next week, but you can read about it in a splendid history and summary of the slide of American democracy in an article in the latest edition of The Atlantic.  [You may need to have a subscription to gain access.]

It starts out by making the point that the United States, which once led the world as a model for the pursuit of democracy, has fallen behind. What jumped off the page at me was the claim that even Argentina, my idea of a country that knows how to shoot itself in the foot, now outranks the U.S. in Freedom House's Global Freedom Index. Not economically, I assume, but in other measures. Freedom House, I should mention in passing, is roundly criticized by conservative voices for being too "progressive" (don't you love that notion - "too progressive"!), but at the same time it receives most of its funding from the U.S. State Department and other government grants.

Levitsky and Ziblatt's main point, if the Atlantic article is anything to go by, seems to be that the U.S. has painted itself into a corner and no longer has the mechanisms needed to gain rule of the majority. We read on a daily basis how the tail wags the dog in America, how the Senate blocks such things as voting rights and those wearing the mantle of retrograde Southern racists like George Wallace and Orval Faubus, who today would clearly be in the Republican Party, and Strom Thurmond, have infiltrated the Republican Party's power brokers. Evangelicals, themselves infiltrated by "God loves you more if you're rich" prosperity-gospel leaders, now exercise power way beyond their numbers, although one might prefer to describe what's going on as political manipulation by right wing politicos of clueless religionists. 

I'm on so many democratic party politicians' mailing lists that I spend hours every week clearing out my inbox of "please send five dollars...three dollars... anything you can?" solicitations from worthy candidates. I understand that the only way around deep pocket Republican donors is for small donors on the left to pitch in, but I can't escape the worry that anything I send barely covers the cost of mailing me and asking for more donations. It seems so much like a losing proposition.

I don't know what else to do, other than stay awake (something that has gotten harder and harder to do as the brain-fog descends), pay attention, and share the information that comes my way when my bullshit detector goes off.

I don't believe in intercessory prayer. I don't think that getting Saint Francis to use his clout with the Big Boss to save the squirrels from my favorite animals - dogs - is the way to go. But if you do, please, will you, get somebody upstairs to shake my fellow-Americans into awareness that we are losing our democracy as we speak. And guide the hands of Jack Smith and Fani Willis and all the other heroes fighting the good fight to throw aforementioned road kill's ass in jail.

And to think clearly, to question, to speak out, to vote, and not to surrender to cynicism.

Yokohama AIDS Conference 1994

Still trying to throw away tons of paper in files in my closets. Still failing because there's so much there that brings back memories. I blogged earlier today about planning a sabbatical in San Francisco to coincide with Taku's new venture as a foreign graduate student at San Francisco State. I then went back to work for all of twenty minutes before I came across some notes I kept from my attendance at the AIDS Conference in Yokohama in 1994.

When I took the job at Keio in 1989 we were still up to our ears in death in San Francisco. AIDS was raging out of control, and I didn't hide the the fact that I felt, upon arriving in Japan where AIDS was largely unknown, a sense of blessed relief.

For the first few months, at least. Then, gradually, it began to get under my skin how clueless everybody was. How can you not see what's going on in the world, I heard myself thinking all the time.

Because I had a tenured professorship, I had free rein to teach almost anything I chose to focus on. I decided to massage my "cross-cultural" credentials a little bit and proposed a seminar with the title, "Cross-Cultural Responses to the AIDS Crisis." It wasn't exactly a roaring success. Only four students signed up.  Keio, I want to acknowledge with gratitude, let me go ahead with it and we dug into responses around the globe to the AIDS crisis to see what they might tell us about the attitudes, values and beliefs of the people of the various countries involved. We dug up lots of interesting stuff. The French were offering condoms with long-distance train tickets. The Brazilians assumed that advice would only be taken seriously if they never lost sight of the fact that having sex was fun, and thus couched messages in samba music and sexy poses. The Japanese avoided possible embarrassment by using real people in their public messages and used stick figures instead. The Dutch posted messages like, "When you fuck, use a condom!"

By the end of the semester, our little group had become quite close and their interest in AIDS had intensified to the degree that we all decided to attend the Tenth International Conference on AIDS that year which, conveniently, was going to be held in Yokohama. I can't remember how I did it, but I managed to wrangle some money out of the university to enable us all to go. The normal registration fee was outrageous - about $1000, if I remember right. But that made sense when you realized that they set the fee this high so they could give lots of radically reduced tickets to people from poor countries, countries suffering the most from AIDS.

No sooner did I get involved than I learned the conference directors were embarrassed by the fact that Japanese people were not signing up. The apathy I first encountered when first arriving in Japan was still there. In the end, the government decided to provide free, or next-to-nothing, tickets to Japanese doctors and their families. Not academics, for the most part, not people accustomed to attending academic conferences.

The result was we got to see a large number of cultures in contact which otherwise would not likely have been in contact.  Typical of many of the presenters, for example, were sex workers from Rio de Janeiro and typical of many of the Japanese audience members were high-society ladies in high fashion clothes and shoes costing a Rio slum dweller's annual income. You can imagine the look on the faces of these ladies when the speaker's Portuguese presentation was translated into Japanese and they heard, "Some of our biggest problems come from doctors who prescribe medicine before they've even had a look at your dick!"

An unforgettable moment of that conference that remains with me came during the plenary given by the head of the World Bank.  Somebody asked him, "What is the single most important thing we can do in confronting this crisis?"  I expected, given his role in dealing with the world economy, he might say something like, "write letters to your congress people and urge them to fund better health care," or something to that effect. His actual answer was: "Educate women."

Another unforgettable moment, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous, was listening to the Japanese Minister of Health predict that AIDS would not become a problem in Japan because "there are few homosexuals and Japanese are very educated." At the same time, his ministry was publishing the information that 50% of 20-24-year-old males and 20% of females were having sex outside of a partnership and only a third of those were using condoms.

During one presentation a (Mr.?) R. Msiska, head of the National AIDS Control Program in Zambia, put it out there in black and white: "We are undone by this disease. Our economy is in shambles. Our productive workers are dying. Not a single Zambian individual is untouched by this disease." At the same time, in another part of the conference, Norio Hattori, who I believe was press secretary at the Japanese foreign ministry at the time, urged "all the people of the world to work together." I shouldn't be too hard on him, strong as my inclination to disparage the work of Japanese bureaucrats is. I understand his ministry was pledging billions of dollars by the year 2000. I just checked and I see they actually followed up, so maybe it's time I stopped biting at the heels of Japanese bureaucrats.

The fact that the seminar had only four students attending had the upside that the university was willing to pay their entry fee. I doubt they saw anything at Keio to match that level of educational experience. On the last day, to quote from my own notes from 29 years ago:

I walked out of a meeting at 7 p.m. in a state of near total mental exhaustion, because I simpy couldn't take any more. I went out onto the plaza where, despite the heat, people were mesmerized by a razzle dazzle high tech multimedia presentation on PWAs (people with AIDS) in all stages of life and in death, poetry written by and about them, scenes of protest juxtaposed with official responses, etc. When you can't stand it anymore, out come the dancers and the rock music. Even at age 54, I understand the need to be loud.

That was 1994.  Just over twenty-nine years ago. Today we struggle over how to deal with the transgender issue, we worry whether there will be fighting in the streets if our gangster-president gets sent to jail, Covid lingers on, the German economy is in full stagnation, people are throwing democracy into the trash can in several places simultaneously around the world, and global warming is making fools of us all.

But we are no longer terrorized by AIDS.

I remember vividly when we were.

Sometimes things actually do get better.

Using memories to avoid house repairs

 That guy in the photo on the left with shoes to die for and a very transparent desire to look a lot taller is the previous Japanese Emperor Heisei, known while he was alive as Akihito. Japan uses two calendars, the Gregorian one we and most of the world use for modern-day international business exchanges and the official Japanese calendar, which changes with each emperor. I was born in Showa 15 [Showa = Hirohito], first went to live in Japan in Showa 45. And while teaching at Keio University, I applied for a sabbatical to run from September of Heisei 9 to March of Heisei 10. I know that because I've been avoiding the task of getting people to come fix the walls of my house by cleaning out my closets and trying to throw away the tons of stuff there gathering dust.

I never get very far in these moments. Something always grabs my attention and I get carried away with memories. This morning it was coming across that sabbatical application in Heisei 9 (1997) and the fateful decision to fulfil Taku's lifetime wish to come to the States. We were just starting out as a couple and didn't want to be separated, so we calculated I'd take a sabbatical for a semester while he came to live in my house in Berkeley. It worked. He got into San Francisco State in women's studies, I got my sabbatical and Taku got his first taste of living in what would become his adopted country. Good times.

Lots of water under the bridge since those days. Taku decided one day he had gone into women's studies not so much out of a desire to study women, but because he wasn't up to telling the world his real academic interest was in gay studies - and the opportunities in that area were far fewer. He switched to graphic design and got a job with a Japanese company in San Francisco. When we first met, we spent a lot of time talking about Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir and the state of feminism in Japan, and I rode him about wanting to give that fascinating stuff up just to become "another fairy who wants to make things pretty." But he was undeterred.

To read my sabbatical application is to roll your eyes and wait for your bullshit detector to go off in your head. But it wasn't all bullshit. I really was interested in postmodernism, still a new idea to me in those days, and I had no doubt I would be picking things up I could use in my seminars in culture theory. And that came to pass, even though I never pursued anything to publication.

I am still plagued by postmodernism and how to walk the line between holding to the conviction
there is such a thing as objective truth, on the one hand, and, on the other, recognizing the words of anthropologist Clifford Geertz,

that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun…I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretative one in search of meaning.

These days the struggle is less over political correctness per se than the best way to approach the T in LGBT.

I went into retirement seventeen years ago already, and no longer have seminar students to toss ideas around with. Taku is now an American citizen and wonders aloud after dinner sometimes whether he made the right decision to leave his home country for one that sometimes seems to be eating itself alive. 

Life goes on.

And I still need to get those damned crumbling walls fixed.