"Even gender-neutral pronouns don’t feel as if they fit me. I feel no identity or closeness with any pronouns I’ve come across. What describes me is my name."

Said Patch, formerly known as Patrick Abbatiello, formerly designated as male, who not only acquired a legal name change — to Patch, just Patch (It's Patch*) — but got the legal gender designation changed to "genderless."

This happened in Multnomah County, which happens to be a county name I know, because it's that county with the idea of spending $22 million building 300 "tiny houses" in the backyards of homeowners who agree to take in a homeless family for 5 years.

The linked article is at HeatStreet — which has an attitude that I find unappealing and where there's a Gender Identities quiz that's freeze-framed on an image that I'm not going to click on but is either snarkily or unwittingly trading in surprising phallus placement:



I'm creating a new tag — "gender privacy" — for this and yesterday's post "What a deceptive headline at The Daily Caller!"

Yesterday's post was about a teacher who, after losing her breasts to cancer, wanted to present herself as gender neutral and to say to any children who wondered about her gender: "We all have private lives, and it would not be appropriate to talk about our private lives during the school day." In the comments, people focused on the problem of what pronoun to use (which really is troublesome as we maintain an interest in speaking in a natural way), and I said:

I didn't take a position on the pronouns.

I talked about etiquette and decency in interpersonal relationships.

Note that this isn't a woman demanding to be spoken of as a man or raising the issue whether she somehow really is a man. This is a person who is asking for no reference to be made to her sex. It's a request for privacy about her body.

Out of simple empathy, you could respect that.

You could also ask why a person's sex is considered properly in the public realm. Why don't we all demand privacy about the body parts we cover up and demand that others cover up. If they must be covered up, why do we feel entitled to talk about them?

These are questions I really want to discuss.

Also, I see an analogy to something that happened in the development of the same-sex marriage issue. Many people started to ask why the government is involved in recognizing people's personal/sexual relationships at all. Why not privatize the whole thing, get government out of marriage? Now, you might want to think about why government concerns itself with our private parts. If you want to say gender is more than genitalia, that it's a state of mind, the question of privacy is only heightened: Why should government concern itself with how we feel deep inside?

As for those pesky pronouns, we have freedom of speech. That too belongs in the sphere of the individual. We get to decide for ourselves how to speak. There are many difficult decisions here, and the government should not be solving them.

________________________

* Let's never forget what the Saturday Night Live people found hilarious in the early 90s:



The movie was a big flop, but the character had been hugely successful on SNL in many sketches.

"Many of us view the practice of pronoun declaration as asking us to sign on to an ideology we do not share: that we all have an internal gender identity..."

"... which may or may not 'match' our sex, and that the third-person pronoun someone uses to describe us should reflect this identity rather than our sex. People call me 'she' because that is the third-person pronoun we generally use to describe female humans (and other animals), and I take that to mean nothing more than that they have correctly recognized me as female. However, announcing that 'my pronouns are she/her' would mean something very different: an indication that 'woman' represents my identity rather than simply my bodily reality; in other words, that I identify in some way with the social role of 'woman' or with stereotypical femininity (which I do not). People who have transitioned should of course be addressed with courtesy, but imposing the idea of 'gender identity' with corresponding pronouns on all of us is regressive and coercive. Not to mention that women in particular have good reasons for not wanting to foreground 'gender' in our interactions with others, particularly in a work setting."

That's a comment on a NYT advice column titled: "Do I Really Need to State My Pronouns?/A reader asks whether a workplace policy actually makes trans and nonbinary people feel more included." 

The reader was someone who worked in sales and had experienced losing a sale to a customer who said he was "turned off by the pronoun thing." The advice columnist only gave a vague answer. The commenter made a brilliant point and put it quite well. It fits my tag "gender privacy."

(This is a post about a comment over at the NYT, a comment that interested me more than what the NYT advice columnist wrote. But how, you might wonder, can a reader comment on this Althouse post? The answer is — because some trolls made open comments impossible — you have to email me here.)

FROM THE EMAIL: Lyssa writes

I’ve often thought that the gender concept is functionally a religion - the idea that there’s some deeper, non-biological concept of “man” or “woman” is non-falsifiable, a matter of faith which is, at least for some, deeply and sincerely held. Like a religion, it’s not appropriate for me to disrespect, or to point out my disagreement with its dogma outside of an open discussion. I won’t stop you from praying to say you’re doing it wrong, or “correct” you if you make a benign statement about your faith with which I disagree. But when you expect me to pray with you, to personally declare the beliefs of your faith, that’s a bridge too far.

I have 2 responses to that. First, being required to declare your faith at all — even your own true faith or lack of faith — is a fundamental violation of your privacy. This is the domain of your thoughts, and it belongs to you and deserves respect.

Second, the conjunction of religion and your experience of the meaning of your own body can be seen Supreme Court's understanding of the right of privacy, as articulated in the most important opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which declared: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." 

AND: Another emailer, who requests not to be named, writes: 

Celine Dion is a super-hero who bestows gender privacy on babies... with her new fashion line.

This weird commercial is worth watching — if only for the expression of philosophy:



Gender privacy for babies... and older kids... with stuff like this:



ADDED: At the shopping site, called CELINUNUNU, the brand explains itself in the kind of prose I've seen too often on wall cards at art museums:

"De-gendering" restrooms?

I understand the problem transgender persons sometimes have in finding an acceptable public bathroom, but I consider the solution of abolishing separate mens' and womens' restrooms quite intolerable.

People in Search of Safe Restrooms [is] a group founded here three years ago. It reflects a small but active movement, mostly on college campuses but also in a few cities, in which the bathroom, that prosaic fixture of past battles against racial segregation and for the rights of the disabled, has become an emotional and at times deeply personal symbol of a cultural and political divide.

In fact, bathrooms have become a cultural "fault line," said Mary Anne Case, a law professor at the University of Chicago, where the Queer Action Campaign for Gender-Neutral Bathrooms recently got 10 single-use restrooms on campus designated gender neutral.

"Very few spaces in our society remain divided by sex," Professor Case said. "There's marriage and there's toilets, and very little else."

To young transgender people, especially college students, the issue has particular resonance.

"Students are looking hard at the right to express their gender, a painful right of passage for every young adult," said Riki Wilchins, executive director of the Gender Public Advocacy Coalition, a nonprofit group in Washington that fights discrimination and violence based on gender stereotypes. "These kids are demanding the right to be who they are and what they are 24/7. They're tired of being harassed or hassled when they simply need to use a public facility."

And so many students - including those at Beloit College in Wisconsin, Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, N.Y., and the University of California, Santa Barbara - have lobbied successfully for gender-neutral bathrooms.

At the New College of California, a liberal arts college in the Mission District of San Francisco, men's and women's rooms have recently given way to "de-gendered" restrooms, devoid of urinals as well as of white stick figures with pants or a skirt. Signs on the doors proclaim the new restroom politics: "Lots of people don't fit neatly into our culture's rigid two-gender system."

Yes, but lots of women care a great deal about not being exposed to men while they are in the bathroom. There are some obvious safety and privacy issues here.

I'm old enough to remember when the Equal Rights Amendment went down to defeat. One of the main things people obsessed about at the time was whether it would outlaw separate bathrooms. Proponents of the ERA worked hard to assure people that of course, somehow, it couldn't mean that.

I have no problem with the sort of bathrooms that accommodate only one person at a time being made available to anyone. But once you have more than one person using the same space, separating the sexes is important. Having to mix with men in the bathroom would be like having to mix with men in the locker room!

UPDATE: One emailer writes:

People in Search of Safe Restrooms ... I feel an acronym coming on...

And a female law school colleague writes:

As for gender-neutral bathrooms -- forget it! I'd just as soon eliminate the one stall model too. I hate the messy toilets on the 6th and 7th floors. So long as men can't pee straight, nor wipe after themselves, I sure would prefer to keep them out of my space. I have sit in their mess and it's disgusting.

Well, now that you mention it, maybe I should take back my statement that I have "no problem" with the single-user unisex bathroom. The truth is I do. Years ago, the single-user bathrooms in the law school were labeled for one sex or the other. (Usage note: I don't say "gender" for "sex." I don't say "limb" for "leg" either.) In those days, the women's room was one floor up from my office, which was on a floor with a men's room. Nowadays, I can use the bathroom on my own floor. But I much prefer the days when I had to go up a floor, but got to use a women-only room. The simple reason is that a bathroom used by men is dirtier. It doesn't have to be, but it is! Get your act together, guys! It's a wonder women are willing to live with you at all.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Okay, there's a delicate issue here. There are varieties of filth. Jiblog writes:

[G]uys have a tendency to leave the seat a little damp. Outside of that, womens' rooms are much, much dirtier. I speak from experience. From ages 16 to age 25, I was employed in retail industries in some way, shape, or form. I had to do numerous bathroom checks/cleanings, and without fail, the womens' rooms were always dirtier. And disgustingly so at times. I'll spare you all the details.

And I received email saying:

When I worked at [a Madison coffee shop] it was often my job to clean the restrooms, and the women's room was consistently dirtier than the men's room.

To which I answered:

Is it possible that the women's rooms were used more?

Do you think I'm more sensitive to the dirtiness of men (e.g. pee on the seat) and you're more sensitive to the dirtiness of women (sanitary products??)?

Oh, my friends: there is a divide between men and women!

I don't want to say anyone is better than anyone else, but, my friends, we are different! Please, leave us to our separate bathrooms, lest all hell break loose!

YET MORE: Sissy Willis comments.

"I have never met a nonbinary person who thinks that they/them pronouns are somehow exclusive to nonbinary or trans people."

"They are a way to opt out of the gender binary in third-person reference, and people may choose to do that for many reasons—gender-based, political, philosophical, even religious. One uses the pronouns someone requests because it is the courteous thing to do. It does not stop being the courteous thing to do because one disagrees with the person's reason for requesting them (at least so long as the request is made in good faith rather than as political trolling)."

Says a commenter to the NYT Ethicist column, "My Relative Isn’t Trans or Nonbinary But Wants to Use ‘They/Them’ Pronouns. The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on allyship and forms of solidarity" (NYT).

The Ethicist, Kwame Anthony Appiah, took a different position: "Using pronouns properly is a matter of not misgendering people. It isn’t part of a general policy of calling people whatever they want to be called.... [Y]our relative evidently identifies as cisgender and is motivated simply by allyship.... As the N.A.A.C.P. activist Rachel Dolezal notoriously failed to grasp, solidarity with a group does not grant you membership within it. Many will find the notion that you support people by appropriating their markers of identity to be passing strange."

"The proposed rule helps clarify that these blanket bans on transgender athletes are in violation of Title IX and is a really positive development."

"When it comes to the hard cases, this is saying that trans kids can be discriminated against."

Said Scott Skinner-Thompson, a University of Colorado lawprof, quoted in "Biden administration says schools may bar trans athletes from competitive teams/Proposed regulation would disallow blanket bans on trans athletes on the books in 20 states" (WaPo).

Under the proposal, schools would need to consider a range of factors before imposing a ban on trans athletes and would need to justify it based on educational grounds, such as the need for fairness. So, for instance, a school district could justify a ban on transgender athletes on their competitive high school track and field team, whereas a district would have a harder time making that case for an intramural middle school kickball squad....

So... just don't have a flat ban and schools can impose whatever limits they want if they say that's their assessment of "fairness"?

That sounds as though they are giving schools virtually complete discretion (at least beyond the little kids level) and the main effect is to preempt all the top-down bans from the state level. That would be using centralized national power to decentralize the decision-making to the local level.

But how much deference will there be to local judgment about "fairness"? 

Here's the text of the "fact sheet" about the proposed rule. The word "fairness" appears twice:

"... Grimes, the Canadian singer, and Elon Musk, the co-founder of Tesla, announced that they were calling their baby boy X Æ A-12..."

"... saying the name is inspired by the fantasy Elvish language, artificial intelligence and a CIA spy plane. Grimes, 32, whose real name is Clair Boucher, explained their inspiration last night, telling followers on social media that: 'X [represents] the unknown variable. Æ is the Elven spelling of Ai (love &/or artificial intelligence). A-12 = precursor to SR-17 (our favorite aircraft). No weapons, no defenses, just speed. Great in battle, but non-violent,' and added that the A additionally stood for Archangel, 'her favorite song.'... Grimes told followers before the birth that she would allow her child to choose its own gender. She described 'being knocked up' as a 'very feral and war-like state of being'...  She and Mr Musk have been a couple for more than two years after bonding online over an esoteric joke about artificial intelligence."

The London Times tells us.

There's artificial intelligence... and there's goofball intelligence.

Anyway, nothing wrong with gender privacy. And if Clair Boucher can rename herself Grimes, then this gender-private offspring can stop being X Æ A-12 any time said entity chooses.

What is the song "Archangel"? Is it this? ("So contorted and twisted/Condemned and submissive....")

"Abortion and choice aren't core principles of the Democratic Party. Rather, things like a Right to Privacy are."

Kos is tired of the way single-issue groups -- well, basically NARAL -- run the Democratic Party. The Republicans -- he worries -- have a political advantage because they -- it seems -- work off fundamental principles, while Democrats work off a checklist.

[S]ingle issue groups have hijacked [the Democratic Party] for their pet causes. So suddenly, Democrats are the party of abortion, of gun control, of spottend [sic] owls, of labor, of trial lawyers, etc, etc., et-frickin'-cetera. We don't stand for any ideals, we stand for specific causes. We don't have a core philosophy, we have a list with boxes to check off....

Problem is, abortion and choice aren't core principles of the Democratic Party. Rather, things like a Right to Privacy are. And from a Right to Privacy certain things flow -- abortion rights, access to contraceptives, opposition to the Patriot Act, and freedom to worship the gods of our own choosing, or none at all.

Another example of a core Democratic principle -- equality under the law. And from that principle stem civil rights, gender equity, and gay rights. It's not that those individual issues aren't important, of course they are. It's just that they are just that -- individual issues. A party has to stand for something bigger than the sum of its parts.

We have confused groups that are natural allies of the Democratic Party for the party itself. And the party has ceded way too much power, way too much control, to those single issue groups.

It seems to me that both parties make too much of the abortion issue. Both parties hold lots of attraction for voters who disagree with their position on abortion.

Personally, I like the idea of seeing privacy and equality as fundamental. Actually, I think both parties should accept these things as so fundamental that there is nothing to fight over. They ought to need to look elsewhere for issues.

ADDED: What strikes me about Kos's statement and made me want to quote it at length is that it would put libertarian values at the center of the Democratic Party. There are plenty of people with libertarian values who don't feel at home in either party. But if the Democratic Party really were committed to this more abstract ideology, it would have an entirely different feel. The reason I broke out the quote I chose for the title was because I don't believe it. I think the party begins with its politically useful defense of the right to abortion and that Kos's effort to derive a "core principle" is motivated more by the desire to make the abortion right more appealing than by an interest in understanding what motivates the party to try to distinguish itself with abortion-centered political activity.

UPDATE: I note that part of what Kos is saying here is nearly the same thing Howard Dean said on "Meet the Press" yesterday:

Here's the problem--and we were outmanipulated by the Republicans; there's no question about it. We have been forced into the idea of "We're going to defend abortion." I don't know anybody who thinks abortion is a good thing. I don't know anybody in either party who is pro-abortion. The issue is not whether we think abortion is a good thing. The issue is whether a woman has a right to make up her own mind about her health care, or a family has a right to make up their own mind about how their loved ones leave this world. I think the Republicans are intrusive and they invade people's personal privacy, and they don't have a right to do that....

But when you talk about framing this debate the way it ought to be framed, which is "Do you want Tom DeLay and the boys to make up your mind about this, or does a woman have a right to make up her own mind about what kind of health care she gets," then that pro-life woman says "Well, now, you know, I've had people try to make up my mind for me and I don't think that's right." This is an issue about who gets to make up their minds: the politicians or the individual. Democrats are for the individual. We believe in individual rights. We believe in personal freedom and personal responsibility. And that debate is one that we didn't win, because we kept being forced into the idea of defending the idea of abortion.

"Germany must create a third gender category for people who do not identify as either male or female or were born with ambiguous sexual traits..."

"... the country’s constitutional court ruled on Wednesday, finding that binary gender designations violated the right to privacy.... The ruling arrives as society, medicine and law increasingly recognize the ways in which gender is socially constructed and not necessarily fixed or stable.... 'The assignment to a gender is of paramount importance for individual identity; it typically occupies a key position both in the self-image of a person and how the person is perceived by others,' the court found. 'It also protects the sexual identity of those persons who are neither male nor female.''

The NYT reports.

"With its psychologists overbooked, the clinic relied on external therapists, some with little experience in gender issues, to evaluate the young patients’ readiness for hormonal medications."

"Doctors prescribed hormones to patients who had obtained such approvals, even adolescents whose medical histories raised red flags. Some of these patients later stopped identifying as transgender, and received little to no support from the clinic after doing so.... Pediatric gender medicine is a nascent specialty, and few studies have tracked how patients fare in the long term, making it difficult for doctors to judge who is likely to benefit.... In the United States, health groups have endorsed what’s known as affirming care even as their peers in Europe have grown more cautious.... In a statement to The Times, [Washington University] said that it would not address specific allegations because of patient privacy, and that 'physicians and staff have treated patients according to the existing standard of care.' But doctors in St. Louis and elsewhere are wrestling with evolving standards and uncertain scientific evidence — all while facing intense political pressure and an adolescent mental health crisis...."

From "How a Small Gender Clinic Landed in a Political Storm/Washington University’s youth gender clinic in St. Louis, like others around the world, was overwhelmed by new patients and struggled to provide them with mental health care" (NYT).

Andrew Sullivan on Elena Kagan's "emotional orientation" — emotional orientation?

Apparently, there's a new euphemism. I hadn't seen this one before, and I haven't heard the argument for why it's a good one. Is it something like the way we started saying "gender" instead of "sex"? Maybe "sex" is something that people are supposed to keep quiet, and that makes it hard to insist that talking publicly about someone's sexual orientation is appropriate and important. But there are problems with the term "emotional orientation." It suggests that all of your emotions are centered around your sexual preference. Perhaps the term is intended to convey an argument that if you are gay and not open about it, your public persona is shallow and false.

Anyway, Sullivan says:

There are three possibilities, it seems to me, behind the kerfuffle over Elena Kagan's emotional orientation. The first is that her orientation is heterosexual and she is merely a dedicated career person who never had time for a date. The second is that she is lesbian, and she remains in a glass closet, and the Obamaites, revealing their usual tone-deafness on gay issues, never asked and blundered into this. The third is that she is a highly cautious political lesbian who has drawn a line around her real life in order to prevent her orientation being used against her - especially by the Christianist right.

He suspects it's the third and that Obama knows it and is going along with the cautious approach to forestall criticism from the right. Sullivan thinks that Obama doesn't mind "provok[ing] an outing from his 'left'" because then "senators [could] rally around the closet their generation cherishes and defend a person from 'charges' that invade her 'privacy.'"

Note the use of quotes— "left," "charges," "privacy." If it's not sexual orientation but emotional orientation, the revelation is not really an invasion of privacy? "Left" is in quotes, I think, because Sullivan is in the category of persons who are being provoked yet he still styles himself as a conservative.

If the left/"left" outs Kagan...

The president can say, appealing to the middle, that he respects privacy and has reluctantly allowed Kagan to come out under despicable pressure from people like me. 

Allowed Kagan to come out... Obama hasn't been keeping her in.

Then he dares the Christianist right to vote against her merely because she is a discreet lesbian. And so his jujitsu becomes a triumph for gay rights, and his nominee, who I suspect is far more left-liberal than anyone now believes, helps shape the court for a generation.

I'm not sure what he means to conclude here. The post is titled "The Kagan Rope-A-Dope?" and ends, after the part quoted just above with "Where's that rope again?" If you perceive that someone is playing Rope-A-Dope with you, you should choose not to take a shot at them when they are in that position. (The image is of a boxer leaning against the ropes looking easy to hit but in fact tricking his opponent to wear himself out taking harmless shots.) So why what does "Where's that rope again?" mean?

Is Sullivan saying he sees why he shouldn't try to out Kagan, because he doesn't want her — he thinks she's a big lefty! — on the Court? Or is he saying he should try to out her, because it would be "a triumph for gay rights"? If it's the latter, then he doesn't understand the term Rope-A-Dope and he's not even trying to maintain his conservative credentials.

He's looking for the rope — Where's that rope again? — but what is he planning to do with it? Maybe he intends to be the one playing Rope-A-Dope, and he's inviting people to take energy-expending shots at him. I'm not sure how that would work.

"The gay rights movement has been having some remarkable success lately. Why do abortion rights keep losing ground?"

Wonders Gail Collins, and one obvious answer springs to mind: Many people genuinely believe that the unborn is a human being. There's no live-and-let-live accommodation to the rights other people have won in the legal and political process for those who feel morally challenged to save millions of babies from impending murder. The very demand that they ought to accept defeat gracefully reignites them.

A second answer follows on (in my mind, and I've still not read past Collins's question): Rights in the form of equality appeal to virtually all Americans. Gay rights have mostly taken the form of equality rights: equal access to marriage, to employment, to restaurants and shops. Gay rights have also taken the form of privacy rights, that is, the freedom to make your own decisions about what to do with your body, but nobody recently has bothered with trying to stop gay people from having sex with each other. The idea of criminalizing sodomy seems ridiculous, especially when heterosexuals are deeply involved in the practice, and the notion of banning it only for gay couples brings us back to the equality principle that resonates with virtually all Americans. 

Now, I'll read the rest of Collins, who begins by asserting that there are some "easy" answers to her question. She begins with:

"Our gender identity non-discrimination policy states that members and guests may use all gym facilities based on their sincere self-reported gender identity."

"The manner in which this member expressed her concerns about the policy exhibited behavior that management at the Midland club deemed inappropriate and disruptive to other members, which is a violation of the membership agreement and as a result her membership was cancelled."

Do you have a problem with the Planet Fitness policy? If so, why? I've been avoiding talking about this particular controversy of the week. I'm writing about it now because Planet Fitness has put into words something very close to the way I was thinking about it.

First, I don't know how the woman who complained expressed herself (and that is something you need to know to understand what happened). But second, Planet Fitness has a particular brand, using slogans like "Judgment Free Zone" and "no critics." That's what it offers and that, it seems, is what it delivered. There are other gyms. If you want a gym with a strict no-penises-in-the-ladies-room policy, shop for one. If there is none, then the product you want isn't in the marketplace. You can exercise at home.

By the way, I think there are many people who use health clubs and avoid the locker rooms. Show up in your gym clothes, leave in them, and shower and change at home. There are plenty of people who prefer privacy when undressing and bathing, and the same-sexitude of even a traditional locker room is not privacy enough. 

There's "much more to this story" of a little girl whose Christian school sent home a letter that said something about her failure to look and act feminine...

... but the school can't talk about it because it has an obligation to protect the child's privacy. Meanwhile, the girl's grandparents have gone to the press, presenting the story in a way that makes it viral: The school seems backward and mean, and the grandparents just want to let Sunnie be Sunnie.

I've watched the video and wonder if the problem is more centered on a dress code that applies to everyone. Are girls required to wear skirts? If girls are allowed to wear pants, are both girls and boys forbidden to wear the kind of oversized shorts and T-shirts that we see Sunnie wearing in the video?

The one-sidedness of the reporting really bothers me. Note that the girl was not kicked out of the school, but only advised to adapt to the school in some ways. It's a private school, so she's free to go somewhere else. It's not terrible for there to be a private school that maintains gender distinctions in dress and some kinds of behavior. I'm thinking about teaching some traditional etiquette — like boys opening doors for girls and boys asking girls to dance — and having girls' sports different from boys' sports.

I take it the letter was written in a diplomatic style, stressing the religious beliefs that make this school different from other schools and worth choosing. It's interesting that the girl's I've-gotta-be-me claim militates against the school's determination to do things its way and to offer a distinctive option to all the other children whose parents and guardians may specifically want a refuge from gender neutrality, a place where boys are boys and girls are girls.

The girl's grandparents have reacted to the letter by deciding she belongs somewhere else, and there is another place for her. But they've also chosen to open this little girl up to the hungry hungry media, and she — and probably they — have no idea where that's going to go and how that is going to feel. It is no longer possible for little Sunnie to just be herself. Now, she's Sunnie the media icon, Sunnie the boyish girl who proves fundies are meanies.

And all the school can say is: We respect the privacy of the child. At the very least, they are right about that.

"There they were, gathered around the fire at Tribal Council on Wednesday night’s episode of 'Survivor.'"

"One of the contestants, Jeff Varner, in a last-ditch attempt to keep himself from being voted off the show, turned to a man by his side. 'Why haven’t you told anyone you are transgender?' he said.""

That was a very intense episode of "Survivor," with everyone turning on the man who outed the transgender contestant and that man, Varner, suffering so much opprobrium that I would think almost anyone watching at home would be thinking: Never let that happen to you.

ADDED: The linked article, at the NYT, is extremely unfair to the other contestants on that tribe. The next 2 paragraphs are:

Zeke Smith, familiar to viewers of the previous season, went blank. His eyes lost focus, and it seemed, for a moment, as if he were disassociating. The thing that he had wanted to avoid was now about to unfold, on national television.

Mayhem ensued. Words like “deception” were thrown around. Repeatedly, Mr. Smith was accused of having misled his fellow tribe members because, yes, he was — or had been — trans.

Look at all the passive voice in the last 3 sentences! It gives the impression that a lot of tribemates turned on Zeke, but everyone was strongly supportive of Zeke. Varner, fighting for survival, called Zeke deceptive. Everyone else criticized Varner so severely that I said out loud "He's going to have to commit suicide." Varner was so deeply shamed that he apologized over and over and he too was extremely supportive of Zeke after he realized, under the pressure of all of his tribemates, that he had made an abysmal social blunder.

Mayhem ensued. Yeah: against Varner.

Words like “deception” were thrown around.  Only by Varner, and only trying to save his own skin. No one — absolutely no one — took the serious position that Zeke had done something wrong by following a personal policy of what I call gender privacy.

The antagonism against Varner — who is openly gay — was so intense and obvious that they didn't even need a vote to oust him. Jeff Probst (the host of "Survivor") simply observed that everyone already knew the outcome and all Varner's tribemates agreed.

You can watch the episode on line, here.

"In the case of the male vegetarian, what may look like vegetarian or sexual orientation discrimination is really sex discrimination in the form of gender stereotyping..."

Says the abstract for a law review article titled "Of Meat and Manhood," which has led to a defamation and invasion of privacy lawsuit against the author:

New Jersey banker Robert Catalanello on December 28 sued Zachary Kramer, an associate dean at Arizona State University Sandra Day O'Connor School of Law....

The article cites former employee Ryan Pacifico's 2009 complaint against Catalanello, including a charge that he made numerous derogatory comments equating Pacifico's vegetarianism with homosexuality. "You don't even eat steak dude. At what point in time did you realize you were gay?" he said, according to Pacifico's complaint....

"Catalanello harassed Pacifico not because Pacifico is vegetarian, but because Pacifico was not sufficiently masculine," reads one passage that Catalanello cited. "The key here is that vegetarianism acts as a proxy for effeminacy."

Defamation? Presumably, Catalanello disputes Pacifico's allegations and doesn't like the way Kramer, in at least one part of his article, presents the allegations without saying something like "according to Pacifico's compliant."

Here's the "Meat and Manhood" article. More from the abstract:

[Current doctrine says] that an employee cannot raise an actionable theory of sex discrimination to “bootstrap” protection for an unprotected trait.... By focusing on the male vegetarian case study – which involves allegations of vegetarian, sexual orientation, and gender-stereotyping discrimination – the Article argues that sex discrimination often manifests as other forms of bias.

That is, the law doesn't give special protection to you because you're a vegetarian, but it does let you sue for sex discrimination. So the litigant tries to present anti-vegetarian animus as a matter of gender. That's an interesting problem of employment discrimination law, but think about why the courts don't approve of this "bootstrapping."

(Via Taxprof.)

"Only two thirds of Generation Z identify as 'exclusively heterosexual.'"

The UK Telegraph reports.

Maybe they don't like the absolutism of the question.

Research by Ipsos Mori found that 66 per cent of young people, aged between 16 and 22, are "exclusively heterosexual" - the lowest figure of any generation.

Among millennials, 71 per cent say they are exclusively heterosexual, as do 85 per cent of those in "Gen X", and 88 per cent of baby boomers....

Researchers said the statistic showed that the youngest generation were "being affected by more open and fluid attitudes".

Why do pollsters think it's okay to ask about the sexual inclinations of people they don't even know? I'm giving this my "gender privacy" tag. The question might be experienced as retrograde or politically incorrect. The thought might be: These old people with their stupid categories. And then: I'll give the answer that most challenges their pathetic little minds.

That's how I thought when I was 20 (and kind of still do).

Distinguishing gay marriage and polygamy.

Charles Krauthammer says legalizing gay marriage paves the way to legalizing polygamy:

In an essay 10 years ago, I pointed out that it is utterly logical for polygamy rights to follow gay rights. After all, if traditional marriage is defined as the union of (1) two people of (2) opposite gender, and if, as gay marriage advocates insist, the gender requirement is nothing but prejudice, exclusion and an arbitrary denial of one's autonomous choices in love, then the first requirement -- the number restriction (two and only two) -- is a similarly arbitrary, discriminatory and indefensible denial of individual choice...

To simplify the logic, take out the complicating factor of gender mixing. Posit a union of, say, three gay women all deeply devoted to each other. On what grounds would gay activists dismiss their union as mere activity rather than authentic love and self-expression? On what grounds do they insist upon the traditional, arbitrary and exclusionary number of two?

If Krauthammer has been writing about this subject for 10 years, it boggles the mind that the obvious distinction has not yet dawned on him.

Legal marriage isn't just about love, it's an economic arrangement. Having the state authorize your union is not the same thing as having your friends and neighbors approve of you and your religious leaders bless you. It affects taxes and employee benefits -- huge amounts of money. A gay person with a pension and a health insurance plan is incapable of extending those benefits to his (or her) partner. He (or she) can't file a joint tax return. That's not fair. A polygamous marriage, however, puts a group of persons in a position to claim more economic benefits than the traditional heterosexual couple. That doesn't appeal to our sense of fairness.

The law doesn't assess how much two people love each other. Two persons of opposite sexes can marry for all sorts of reasons. If there were a device that could look into their souls and measure their love, we wouldn't accept the outrageous invasion of privacy it would take for the government to use it. Excluding gay couples from marrying does generate the complaint that society does not sufficiently respect homosexual love, and by harping on this point, proponents of gay marriage activate their opponents who think that's a good thing.

But it's not all about love and who respects what. It's also about economics. And in that dimension, it's easy to distinguish polygamy.

UPDATE: This one has a lot of comments! And then there are the other bloggers writing about it. Eugene Volokh is disagreeing with me, but only because he's misreading me, and if he's misreading me, I've got to expect that misreading is rampant. I've tried to keep the commenters here focused on what I'm actually saying, but I can't rein in everyone who's talking about me. There are 98 comments right now on the Volokh post, and I'm probably not going to read many of them. But let me just say why I think Volokh has misread me. He seems takes that last clause "it's easy to distinguish polygamy" to mean what it literally says ripped out of its context. But I'm not saying that the distinction is so obvious that everyone will accept it. I'm just refuting Krauthammer, who thinks there is no way to stop the slip down the slope from gay marriage to polygamy. I'm against the scare tactic that is being widely used: don't accept gay marriage or nothing will stave off polygamy. All I'm saying is that there is a principled basis for drawing a line between the two. Nothing compels us to choose that line, however. I freely admit that.

"These days, at least in liberal enclaves, a girl who likes baseball or wants her hair cut short is more likely to be called 'gender-nonconformist' or 'gender-expansive'..."

"... with any suggestion that she’ll grow out of such behaviors suspect as evidence of condemning rather than honoring them. She may be applauded for transcending another paradigm (the dread princess, with her ball gowns, glitter and wands) or monitored closely for signs to her adult orientation."

From a NYT article "Where Have All the Tomboys Gone?" Is there something wrong with the word (or the idea of) "tomboy" (or something good that should be revived)? I think it's better to use a word that expresses what we are seeing in the way a young girl looks and acts as she is now, than to be making predictions about what she'll do later on in life, especially if we're jumping into visualizations of her future sexual preferences and activities. It's creepy to impose adult templates. Leave the child to her freedom and personal privacy. Let children be children.

That doesn't mean you have to say the word "tomboy," which could be objected to because it's calling the girl a "tom" and a "boy," saying she's somehow male. It was a lighthearted word in the old days, and maybe for some it still is, but wearing comfortable playclothes and engaging in sports doesn't need to be associated with maleness. I'd step back and not go all gender-y with children. Let them be individuals and try to support whatever healthy, positive interests and attributes they find for themselves.

ADDED: Proofreading this post, I think I sound absurdly, flat-footedly sensible. The answers here seem so obvious to me. I don't know why so much discussion is needed.

"'People get very wrapped up in the idea of spontaneously desiring sex,' Dr. Nagoski said, but, especially in women, it’s fairly rare."

"Based on a wide body of research on gender and sexual desire, Dr. Nagoski estimates that roughly 15 percent of women experience spontaneous desire, whereas most experience responsive desire — wanting sex when something erotic is happening. 'When we study people who have great sex over the long-term in a relationship, they do not describe spontaneous desire as a characteristic,' she said.

From "Take Back Your Sex Life/With all its stress and uncertainty, this year hasn’t exactly been a banner year for intimacy. But that can change" (NYT). 

A highly rated comment: "Same old suggestions. Here's the real deal: if you are in a sexless marriage, and you are unhappy, and you've tried to fix it but nothing changes, GET OUT. I stayed, and now I'm old, but I'm still bitter that I have lived without touch, without intimacy." 

I can't tell if that's a man or a woman, but many of the comments criticize the article for taking the woman's perspective. The article does begin with a woman telling her (non)story: “It’s not that I don’t want to... It’s just that there’s so many things to do besides have sex with my partner, who I do hypothetically find attractive and theoretically want to have sex with. It feels pretty — at times — hopeless, our sex life.”

Theoretically want to have sex with... I thought that was pretty funny. Especially on second read. The first time I saw it, I felt uncomfortable that this woman was identified by name: "Melissa Petro is a 40-year-old writer who lives in New York with her husband of four years and two children."

Key word: "writer." I was just saying yesterday: "Writing is an invasion of your own privacy and the privacy of others, but the writer is always deciding where and how far to invade."

ADDED: I wonder how old that "old, but... still bitter" person is and whether she/he has "tried to fix it."