David Wallace-Wells is an opinion writer at the NY Times. He has a newsletter up today titled “Our Regression on Gender Is a Tragedy, Not Just a Political Problem.” Some of what he says is worth considering but ultimately he’s writing this from a solidly progressive point of view so I think he mostly winds up missing the point or downplaying a problem that’s obvious to a lot of us on the right.
Before we dive in, notice that Wallace-Wells himself is sort of talking pretty vaguely and interchangeably about “the Trump coalition” and Republicans. He’s not pinning this on any particular group but he’s sort of just alluding to the right in general.
On the surface, the Trump coalition might appear powered by an unapologetic, rakish U.F.C. party-bro energy — think of the glimpses we’ve gotten of Pete Hegseth’s naked torso or the way his confirmation hearings were meme-ified as a hard-ass man, accused of sexual assault, staring down a hectoring panel of hysterical grandmas. Or for that matter, the time when the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, invited her Instagram followers to observe her working out in a sports bra.
I think he’s talking about this Instagram post from 2023 in which Leavitt is explicitly highlighting a conservative sports bra manufacturer in the text. In any case, back to Wallace-Wells:
It’s not just in policy or party leadership where you see the shift. In 2022, fewer than 30 percent of Republican men believed the proposition that “women should return to their traditional roles in society,” according to the Views of the Electorate Research Survey assessed by a group of political scientists writing for The Times. Two years later, that number was 48 percent. Republican women underwent a similar surge — from 23 percent in 2022 to 37 percent in 2024…
There’s a reactionary turn outside the workplace, too. There has been a similar drop in surveyed backing for gay rights, with Republican support for marriage equality falling 14 points in three years, according to Gallup, and The Economist/YouGov reporting that nearly two-thirds of Republicans are now in opposition.
I think there are some probably explanations for why these numbers would double which we’ll get to in a moment. For Wallace-Wells, signs that the arc of history is no longer bending toward justice are worrisome.
Faith that social progress would be inevitable was always at least a bit naïve, even if it also served as a basic foodstuff of complacent liberalism. But for about a generation, here as elsewhere across the wealthy world, culture seemed to be trending in that direction. You could take issue with the pace of change, but when people talked about the right and wrong side of history, on these matters, it was clear what future was expected. And now?
So what changed?
You can date the backlash in a number of ways: to 2022 and Dobbs, which one might’ve assumed would produce a thermostatic response in the other direction; to the recent half-decade of heated fights over trans rights, which contorted arguments about novel medical treatment and the right to various legal protections for a remarkably small number of Americans into something that looked to many others like triggering debates about the very truth of biology; to 2017, and the peak of Me Too, which might have pushed many alarmed men into a more reactionary posture on gender; or many decades farther back, still, with male resentment growing along the long arc of women’s empowerment and integration into the work force, with all the cultural shifts that both required and produced…
All of these may play a role. My own sense is that most men were on board with #MeToo when it was an effort to hold some real creeps responsible for their bad behavior. Democrats quickly squandered that bipartisan goodwill by using the hashtag and the conversation as a cudgel to attack Bret Kavanaugh. #MeToo instantly became partisan and men learned that any allegation would be taken seriously, even gang rape, if a conservative were the target.
Still, I think in the past several years the online battle over gender and children has done more to radicalize people than anything else. As trans identity spread (mostly among girls) like a social contagion, progressives informed us this was great news and we should be ready to teach kids as young as kindergarten that boys and girls get to choose their sex when they grow up. When Florida pushed back on this, limiting what teachers could say to kids in K-2nd grade, the left universally freaked out. They reacted the same when conservatives objected to men competing in women’s sports or being sent to women’s prisons.
Nevertheless, the far left made it clear that total acceptance of their view of children was required in order to avoid being called a bigot and a transphobe. No reasonable compromise would be accepted or even considered.
I think the more people realized that LGBTQIA+ rights were being presented as a complete package that allowed no discussion, the more people (especially parents) decided they would reject all of it rather than accept the new dogma about trans kids. If there has been a regression (the author’s framing) on issues that seemed mostly settled, I think this is why.
Lots of conservatives, myself and my former boss Andrew Breitbart included, were very much fine with gay marriage, in part because gay men and women are adults. But teaching the gender unicorn to 5-year-olds is something different. That’s not something many parents think is needed or acceptable at that age. Nor is the consensus among progressives that schools shouldn’t be required to let parents know if their kids start identifying as a different sex. Nor is the idea that kids too young to vote or buy a beer or get a tattoo should have access to hormone treatments or surgery that will permanently change their developing bodies. Nor is the idea that a boy who decides to identify as a girl should be allowed in the girls locker room and to compete against the girls on the field. If that’s all part of the same package then many American will say we can do without it.
Of course gay marriage and gender affirming care for minors are different things. There’s an obvious division based on age which ought to be used to separate one argument from the other. If support for gay marriage has dropped somewhat it’s because activists have made a point of obscuring the obvious differences in an effort to force their views about trans issues on people. It would be easy to say adults can marry as they choose and that doesn’t mean we need to send trans women (i.e. men) to women’s shelters or women’s prisons. But most progressives won’t say that. They stick to their nonsense mantra: Trans women are women.
Some of the commenters get it, even if the author doesn’t.
It’s all a predictable result of the 10-year push to make the erasure of gender a societal goal, to hold drag queen hours in public school, and to actively promote and facilitate gender-affirming procedures as a fix for garden variety mental health problems. The mandate was not just lacking. It was done over the strident objections of a majority. It’s the exactly the same lesson democrats failed to learn with border control. When you are losing a culture war, the only thing you control is how many people you alienate by persisting, and how bad the defeat will be.
Another good one.
To not acknowledge the overreach that led us to this place is to continue the head-in-the-sand that will prevent a return to sanity, not merely on the obvious trans issue but also on the more general dismissal of boys and young men and the things they enjoy and are good at. If we don’t affirm and channel those things and instead simply demonize them, well.. I am a father of three boys who were told they were too active, too aggressive, not properly emotional and even called violent as they navigated what used to be normal boyhood. We were offered medication (no thanks) and now all three are well-adjusted, happy, respectful to all young men.
Even liberals are calling the author out for downplaying the trans issue.
You lost me at suggesting “Trans rights” debates “contorted arguments” into “triggering debates about the very truth of biology”. Is this where the progressive left, the “I believe in science” people are? So scared about biological truths on gender and the advantages it brings that you accuse people of contorting arguments? No.
SO much in this column is worth discussing and scary, but then that gets lumped in. It’s not a “remarkably small number of Americans” when all the woman that are on the field or bathrooms with those “remarkably small number” of biological males enter their spaces. And it doesn’t matter that a small number of female teen athletes embrace them (because that’s what they’ve been trained to do)- it’s not less than 1% that are impacted, it’s a much larger number, and most liberal women I know agree.
Last one:
I have never voted for Trump, but must say that I am glad to see him take a stand for biological females playing sports.
Clearly a biological male who chooses to identify as a he-she is going to have an advantage every time and that robs biological females the chance to compete on an equal playing field.
The trends aren’t all regression. In some important cases the trends represent sanity.
