The Category Errors of Sexual Politics

Writer, author, and Queer Majority Guest Editor Ben Appel sits down with the iconic gay writer and same-sex marriage pioneer Andrew Sullivan. They discuss today's political landscape and LGBT culture, what advice Andrew would give to his younger self, the concept of queerness, trans politics, biological sex versus gender, growing up as gay boys, and more. To preserve the organic flow of the dialog, this transcript has not been edited or altered.

Ben Appel: Andrew Sullivan, thank you so much for agreeing to chat.

Andrew Sullivan: Thank you, Ben.

BA: This is for Queer Majority, asked me to be guest editor for this issue.

The theme that I chose is heretics; I love that concept because I love talking to people who are brave enough to speak against the niche of, you know,  established narratives, and kind of question the prevailing narrative around cultural issues and so forth. So I knew that you would be a good person to talk to. I'm in town because yesterday there was [the hearing], the U.S. versus Skrmetti oral arguments at the Supreme Court. So we were doing a rally there. I had co-founded a group called the LGBT Courage Coalition that, you know, is concerned about pediatric gender medicine and the lack of an evidence base for it. And also the fact that we're veering towards just entering a space where we're just medicalizing gender nonconformity in young people. And we all know that so many young people grow up to be gay.

So, you know, since we consider this practice really backward in a lot of ways. So that's what I'm here doing.

Let's talk about, do you know Corinna Cohn?

AS: I know of her.

BA: She is — or he — Cory, Corinna, is a transsexual apostate or transsexual heretic who is one of the co-hosts of the Heterodorx podcast.

AS: Right.

BA: [She’s] written, I think the opinion piece was in the Washington Post. She has a piece that's going to be in this issue as well. You know, I said, Oh, I'm talking to Andrew. Is there anything that you think that I should ask him specifically?

And she said, I really would like to know what he would tell his younger self, teenage self, teenage gay Andrew Sullivan, if he was coming up now. Like, would he advise him to keep his head down, not come out, you know, not get swept up in the queer?

And I want to actually talk to you about this will be a segue to into queer because this issue, this magazine is called Queer Majority. A lot of us have hangups about queer and what that means to us. The approach that they come to is, you know, queer can essentially include everybody. That's why it's queer majority. Everybody has, you know, repressed parts of their sexuality and so on. So it's kind of like this universal queerness where everybody, it slightly differentiates from the norm, which is different from what we might understand queer to be right now.

So first I'll ask you, what might you tell your teenage self if you were growing up in this time to look out for?  How would you advise that person?

AS: Well, it's kind of interesting, isn't it? Because that's a huge period of time between when I was an adolescent and now. And so the differences would be quite big. You might have seen All of Us Strangers, which is sort of about this. Did you see it, All of Us Strangers?

BA: Yes, I did. Loved it.

AS: Andrew Haigh is doing and has done the best work on actually depicting gay life in reality without ideology, without an attempt to force it into some conclusion, which is why Weekend is such a beautiful film.

BA: Mm-hmm.

AS: And it really brought it back to me because that film has a scene where the guy is, I don't want to spoil it for anyone, but basically coming out to his parents in the 80s, which is when I came out to my family. And then you had the fear of the family absolutely not understanding, of you being completely socially isolated within the broader world, that the announcement of being gay or the public of it was a huge issue.

And [it] was understood to be something that would completely ruin your life. And therefore, you certainly didn't want to be public about it young. So that was the context. And also that everyone was going to, all these people were going to die anyway because they've got this horrible disease. So you don't want to be this because it'll ruin your career and life. And you don't want to be this because it'll kill you.

So that's what you're coming out into in '87, which is when I bit the bullet, as it were, with my family. Although I'd been out.. in my general life since ‘85.

And back then, my advice would simply have been roughly what I did, which is, don't be afraid. Don't think that because you're gay, you have to be a certain kind of gay, where there is some rubric you have to live up to. The point I always believed of the gay rights movement was not to enable people to be gay, but to enable everyone to be themselves.

Which is not going to necessarily mean any kind of aspect of gayness as we culturally understand it. It could be whatever. It could just be being you. So my advice would be [to] do what you're doing. Stand up. Don't be afraid. Tell the truth. Try and find some kind of love, if you can, in this world because that's ultimately what it's about.

That's actually what all of this is about.

And I would say something differently today, I think. I would say, first of all, I’d still say the last thing, which is this is all about love and sex to some extent, and how they intersect and don't.

And if I were coming [out], I'd say focus on that. Focus on finding someone you can fall in love with and spend your life with. Focus on… the difficult things that a lot of the culture today does not really want you to focus on. And also understand today that almost, well, no, all the core Civil Rights questions are settled, have been settled.

There is nothing more for you to do politically.

The point of gay politics, in my view, and it's very explicit and virtually normal, is to get past politics to life, to just be able to live like a straight person. In other words, there would not be a big issue or difference between how a gay person would grow up and live, and how a straight person was. That was the goal.

Now, of course, they will be different because we are constructed differently,  and we're going to have all male cultures are going to be incredibly different than co-ed cultures are going to be incredibly different than all female cultures. But it doesn't mean to say that our options for living shouldn't be just,  essentially the same. And also no different in as much as our brothers and sisters want to have a spouse, want to have kids, or just want to have a good career, all those other things. That's what we're finding here.

So, no.

And secondly, today, I would say, do not trust any of these quote-unquote queer authorities. We're in a period where the gay rights movement, so far as it exists, has been taken over by the people it was always a victim to, which is a bunch of extremists who want to change the world in their view for the better.

I don't think one should describe bad motives. It's there. But for these people, the goal is not just to become a person who can live your life like a straight person can. The goal is to transform society, to queer it from the bottom up, to undermine liberal democracy, to undermine fixed understandings of biological reality, to constantly queer our reality.

And this derives from queer theory. And it's an attempt to really co-opt all homosexuals into a queer ideology, which most of them have no idea of, haven't really studied. And when you actually look into what it is, it's all a sort of derivative of Foucault. In other words, it's a very recent… I think, largely impenetrable. And I have a PhD in political theory from Harvard. So it's not like I'm not qualified to understand this shit. Sorry, I shouldn't use that word. But I had actually sat down and read queer theory.

Ugh, it’s such dreck.

It's such third-rate dreck that I barely… I'm barely able to take it seriously as a political philosopher. And I do think that the fact that it now entirely dominates all discussion of what it means to be a homosexual is incredibly damaging and incredibly deceptive for you, the young gay boy who's trying to figure out the world.

Ignore them.

Don't be put off by the fact that to be openly gay, you have to somehow adopt a queer attitude to things, as opposed to a completely routine or normal. There we go. Normal.

Use that word again.

NORMAL!

You know, it's funny when normality is not… You know, for queerness, normality is always and everywhere wrong. It's oppressive. It's destructive. But of course, for most human beings, living a relatively normal life as human beings have always lived is not oppressive.

It's the way we live. It's the way we are.

And we don't feel the need to live according to some new ideology or some new kind of religion. So I think I would tell them, do not pick up the phone and talk to the Trevor Project. Do not go to a human rights campaign rally. Do not give any of these groups any of your money. And realize that the people who are trying to queer even Jaguar cars… or Bud Light are just members of a small elite who are trying to gain some privileges and some power within their own context by brandishing this as a way to control others and to advance their own career.

Ignore it. Really try and ignore it. Follow what you like.

If you're a gay man that loves RuPaul's Drag Race, fine. Love it.

But if you're a gay man that hates it, if they're stuck in a room with it, [they] would rather have pins stuck in their eyes, you don't have to be ashamed of that either! You can say, no, I fucking don't like that shit either.

I find it, personally, I find it horrifying. I find it, the way that it ridicules women. The way, primarily, however, that it is designed to set… these rather damaged individuals up to destroy each other, to be mean and horrible to each other. The way that Andy Cohen pits women together in his Real Housewives to make them horrible to each other. It's really horrible. And it's not something you necessarily need to support.

 So in other words, don't think that because you're attracted to your own sex, it necessarily says anything else about you politically, culturally, psychologically, or emotionally. You are YOU first.

And this is integrated into you, but there's no reason it should be integrated into you differently than heterosexuality would be integrated [into you]. Now, the difference is, of course, is that there are very, very, very few of us. Well, you know, that means that you will stand out.

You will be odd. But if you don't think of yourself that way, others won't. And that's the thing, we're sort of with our current use of the word queer, with our current celebration of weirdness really, queerness being essential to the homosexual identity. We're really repressing gay people. We are pushing them back into an old stereotype, in which heterosexuals, by the way, are very comfortable with.

It is like Homer Simpson: they like my beer cold and my homosexuals flaming! They like that. That's comfortable. You're in a corner. You're these funny, fave, dressed-up, minstrel-type things. Your job is to provide humor, the arts, irony, all the other things that we're supposed to do. Really good dinner parties and nice wedding events and all that shit. They're comfortable with that.

What they've always been uncomfortable with is us just being regular human beings like them. [You] don't have to be described in this way. You don't have to be put in a box this way.

So my goal — I think many of our goals back in the 80s and 90s — was to so change our political system. In other words, our basic civil rights, around the question of how the government treats us, to change that so the government treats us absolutely as it would a heterosexual, and then to just get on with your life.

There's really, we did it. Let's celebrate that we did it — and people do — but then they draw the wrong conclusions from that and say, well, therefore, they always have this phrase: but there's always more work to be done.

There isn't always more work to be done, collectively.

There may be lots of work to be done individually on your own life, but no, we're done. We're done, done, done. There's nothing more to be done.

And as far as there is, culturally, we fucking dominate the culture. We're actually, in some ways, oppressive in this culture. The [theme of] queerness is massively overrated in terms of the actual reality of queerness, if you look at public culture.

So we dominate the culture. We have won all our political battles. Most people are now very comfortable living with us as equals. Why are we constructing these new and unnecessary fights and making them somehow about being gay?

BA: So, what is the new and unnecessary fight?

AS:  The new and unnecessary fight is… a campaign to insist that the core biological, real-world differences between men and women do not exist.

BA: Right. And so that's linked to the gay movement how?

AS: A good question. I don't think it is related to the gay movement. In fact, I think it is antithetical to the gay movement insofar as, quite obviously, same-sex marriage, and that's the same-sex, requires the concept of sex.

It requires the concept of what we've always understood of sex, as a biological, physical thing. And there are only two of them. And therefore, homosexuality, which homo is about the same, if you do not have two sexes, you cannot have homosexuality.

Period. It's in its definition.

So you abolish sex, replace it with various gender identities, nebulous, subjective gender identities. You have simultaneously abolished homosexuality as an understandable and explicable experience, as most of us experience being gay. And you can split [the] differences on all of this a million times.

But no, ultimately, is sex real or not?

My view is, as I think has been the case for almost every human who's ever actually fucking drawn breath, of course it's a reality! It's also an incredibly important reality. It's structural. It's not some sort of addition to you. It's in your very chromosomes, in your very ultimate being.

Our entire species is divided into these two parts. We, as gay people, are defined by our love of the same part, not the other.

That's different.

Of course it's different.

But that doesn't mean denial of sex. In fact, it means celebration of sexual difference. We celebrate the differences between men and women. Because we like men, as men. This is one reason people are a little suspicious of gay people. Because we don't need women as such to live emotionally constructive lives. And we do need women because women are 50% of our society and contribute 50% of all the inputs that we have to construct our society. We want to be part of that society.

So obviously that's true. But nonetheless… Get rid of the sex binary, as transgenderism requires, means getting rid of homosexuality. There is a real... It's either or. And when they have attempted to get rid of sex and turn it into gender, and gender itself becomes itself… entirely nebulous can mean a million different things. Then essentially you've undermined the core principles that sustain and made possible the gay rights movement. This is not an evolution of the gay rights, it's an abolition of it.

BA: Well, I'll say to you, you know, growing up — and I think you and I have different experiences — where I had told you that I was very gender non-conforming as a kid, really really girly: people asked me: “Are you a boy or a girl?”

And you had told me, I think, that you weren't necessarily so always... 

AS: Not quite that much.

BA: Not quite that much, right.

AS: But definitely I was... There was a question as to why I wasn't like all the other boys. I was, I was more bookish. But I could pass, as it were...

When I talked to my old friends from high school and I asked them, “Did you figure out that I was gay?” And I can't believe, I mean, Pierre himself says, I didn't have a fucking clue that you were gay. So I don't know why that was the case.

But nonetheless, yeah, go on.

BA: Well, so, you know, when I got through that period of that torment, you know, and I was coming into my own…I'm 41. So, you know, here I am turning 18, 19, 20. It's in the 90s and very early 2000s. And I'm thinking, oh, I want to be an activist, and I want to make a world — help create a world where gender nonconformity is more accepted — and that we recognize that gender nonconforming people, inherently gender nonconforming people like the kid I once was, right?

They might not be the norm, but they're a valid minority of people that should be protected from bullying and violence, and that they should just be nurtured and allowed.

Hey, you know what? You feel different. You seem different. You are different, and that's perfectly okay. And you might look around you right now, and you might think like, “Oh gosh, no one's like me.”

That's not true. There are absolutely people out there who are like you. There are fewer of them than the norm. And that's just how it is in life.

AS: But the key thing to my mind is that there is nothing to be fixed. There is no problem here.

BA: Correct. So that's where I'm coming from with... So as I got older and I thought, “Oh, this will be great!” And then suddenly, you know, it gets to be 2016, 2017, 2018, and I find out that clinicians are prescribing something called puberty blockers to gender nonconforming children, pubescent, prepubescent children. And I think that's the polar opposite of what I thought progress would look like, [which] would be creating more space for gender nonconforming people.

Instead, we're telling them, “No, actually, you do have to change everything about yourself in order to properly fit into society. There is one way to be a boy. There is one way to be a girl. If you are like this way, if you feel more like you're…” If someone had told me when I was,  asked me when I was young, a person that I trusted, a guidance counselor, a teacher, a parent, anybody, and said, “What do you feel? Do you feel more like a boy or a girl?”

I certainly would have said, “Of course I feel more like a girl. All of my friends are girls. I have all, you know, interest in girly things.”

There's no doubt in my mind.

And so to me, it's not progress.

AS: No, it's actually reactionary. It's regressive. It's telling gender non-conforming kids, “We can fix you.” 

If they're feeling distressed — which they may be feeling for a variety of reasons — we don't know how. Children can experience stress around the way they're a boy or a girl in a million different ways. It might be a bad relationship with their father or mother. It might be like every nerdy Jewish kid that didn't want to play basketball is not therefore gay. He's just a particular nerdy kind of kid.

Actually, growing up, you found that some of the more nerdy ones were more sort of simpatico because they got the sense of being a little out of it. But no one told them that there was something they could do to fix them, because there isn't anything to be fixed.

Yeah, so I agree.

And I think this notion that if girls and boys are behaving atypically, it is a problem to be solved. Now, I think they would say it isn't until it becomes really extreme, the distress becomes extreme. But again, my point there is like, you know, tackle the distress.

See why… if you're gender-knowing conforming, who is hurting you? What is happening to you? Who is sending you these messages? And counter that, and build up that kid's self-esteem, and certainly allow children to act out. I certainly have no problem with social transitioning for a period of time or whatever.

I really don't.

I think it's great that kids should be able to explore this. I just don't think it should in any way call into question the reality of their sex. And I think that it does call that into question for a tiny minority of people, of people, the actual genuinely transgender people who genuinely, I think, but it's a very tiny minority who genuinely are conflicted this way.

It then adds in this entire vague category of genderqueer, or gender nonconforming into that, and regards the word transgender as something that could mean someone who has absolutely no interest in appearing as the other gender, but just feels a certain way, or as came out in the hearings in the Supreme Court, can change over a period of time.

So I agree with you.

I think this movement is actually regressive and directly threatening to gay children. More than anything else. The most important thing a gay child needs to know, a gay boy needs to know, or a gay, a lesbian girl needs to know, is that you're no less a boy for being gay.

BA: Or being gender non-conforming, or being... 

AS: Or being gender non-conforming.

BA: It's atypical, right.

AS: It's very important for gay kids to be reassured that they are in the right sex, that they're in the right body, and to own it.

And what we're doing is telling these gay kids, because we can't distinguish between the quote-unquote gay kid or proto-gay kid and the trans kid or proto-trans kid. We can't.

There is no objective, because their own identities are still nebulous by the time they're 9 or 10 or 11 or 12 or hitting puberty.

BA: Well, my frustration with that is that trans is something that you do. It's not something that you are. You know, homosexuals are people who are exclusively attracted to the same sex, right?

That's it.

Full stop.

Trans people are people who take steps to transition, whether that be to work to appear as the opposite sex, whether it's through wardrobe changes, haircut, makeup, and feminization of secondary sex traits with hormones, and then possibly cosmetic surgeries.

That is someone who transitions.

So when you're talking about gay kids versus trans kids, you're saying kids who will grow up to be gay, or kids who will grow up to make the decision to attempt to, live and pass as the opposite sex because they have, what, destabilizing gender dysphoria that they can't find a remedy to through therapy or through other means.

AS: In the before times — this is all a rather abstract question.

There's nothing we've done. So gay kids just figured it out. I mean, you got yourself through puberty. For most of us, puberty was a positive thing. For me, it resolved all my gender dysphoria and the sheer power of experiencing orgasm. It's such a liberating thing that the idea that a child could forswear that for their entire life without even knowing what it is, is a violation of a core human right, to be fully human.

And so the distinction between a trans person and a gay person is enormous. I do not see any inherent connection between gay people and trans people outside of a kind of critical theory context, which understands us entirely as groups subject to various forms of oppression. In which case, the oppression that's rooted in patriarchy, as is understood, is therefore equivalently applied to both trans people and gay people.

But if you believe that's just simply — yes, that exists to some extent, but is not the reality — the simple reality of our world. That, in fact, we're also individuals in a free society that all come from different perspectives and may want to live lives that are very different. And in other words, that we live in a basically free society with some constraints.

And therefore, we're not the same as trans people in the sense that we're not defined by the oppression. And certainly that's more the case now that we do have full civil rights for gay people and trans people under Obergefell and Bostock. So the oppression argument is only valid if you buy the entire Left’s understanding of the world as defined by these forms of oppression. And it's also invalid because the actual oppression that we've — the political oppression we've gone on — has disappeared. We have resolved it.

We are not subjected to differential treatment under the law by our own government.

So we're not oppressed at all, and neither are they. I would insist on that understanding of the word oppression, or you're having this word oppression being stretched to such an extreme degree that a minor irritation becomes some form of oppression, or microaggression as a form of oppression. 

No, it's fucking not.

And you need to go to places where there really is real oppression. You try being a gay person in Russia or in Saudi Arabia, or even in places like China. That's oppression.

So we don't have it here. So we don't have a shared oppression. We absolutely don't have a shared identity because we are attached to our own sex. They are defined by their hostility to their own sex, by the discomfort with their own sex.

BA: Yeah.

AS: So that is, of course, they are the furthest apart from the way gay people are in terms of our understanding of ourselves and our biology.

BA: So you don't, you know, are you familiar with like, let's say, traditional or kind of historically, the transsexual typology of kind of the homosexual, transsexual versus the autogynephile.

Because for me, in terms of male transsexualism, I do think that there is a commonality between gay people and trans people in the sense of homosexual trans people who are...autogynephilic.

Where I think what we gay people do not have in common with is autogynephilic trans people. Now, one person who's contributing to this issue is Debbie Hayton. Debbie Hayton is a transsexual… And is an out, a self-acknowledged autogynephilic trans adult.

AS: And the question is, what is drag?

BA: Well, right.

AS: Because that does feel pretty autogynephilic to me.

Although obviously it can be, it itself is a massively broad category. It could mean almost anything. Some forms of drag, for example, are deliberately designed to show that the person is still a male. Some is designed to fool you into thinking this person is a female. That's very, two different kinds of drag with very different kinds of...

Historically, most of drag has worked precisely because we know it's not real. Whereas the whole point of being transgender…

BA: Which in that way is a kind of minstrel —

AS: Yes. Whereas being transgender is very different in that respect.

So, and I also think in reality, if you were to do some, if you could do such a thing, and observe how gay men, lesbians, and transgender people actually live and operate in the world, I actually think there's very little overlap between most of gay male culture and transgender culture. There really isn't. It's not much in common.

You don't see many gatherings in which these groups are thoroughly integrated unless it's around a political or cultural question that would inevitably draw both. In other words, it's not a social event that's entirely just social.

Do you see lots of trans people in gay contexts? Maybe I need to get out more, but not many.

It's an entirely contrived alliance, or forced merger that doesn't actually have to be there at all and historically has held gay people back in some respects.

So, for example, we could have almost certainly have had federal non-discrimination in employment years before we got it in Bostock,

BA: Right.

AS: If we had just not included trans people in ENDA as we did.

And, you know, Barney Frank in the old days was also like, “Why would we do this?” as an actual… practical political matter. Why won't you take the half loaf, pocket it, and then try later, if that's what you want?

So I think we've been compromised by the trans connection for quite a while anyway, which I always found objectionable, but because...

But on the core question of marriage, transgender issues were completely irrelevant.

BA: So you think that perhaps there should be separate movements, if you will?

AS: Of course! 

BA: Yeah.

AS: I would simply say, why are gay people more allied with trans people than Latinos?

BA: Right.

AS: Or Venezuelans?

BA: What do you think the trans movement, what do you think that movement, the end goal is? Or what do you think trans people are lacking generally? What rights? How are they oppressed or marginalized?

AS: I think the average transgender person or transsexual person just wants to live a regular life but is a member of the opposite sex. That's all they really want. They don't want the whole world to be altered. They want to be able to live their own life and not be humiliated and hurt, victimized. And I thoroughly support them and defend that position and would always do so.

But what transgenderism is, is an attempt to infer from the transgender experience the reality of all humans, which is there's no such thing as biological sex. It's a figment of our imagination. That we are not constrained by the sex binary.

That there are not two sexes. 

BA: Right. 

AS: That everything is a choice. That physical reality is something that we ourselves give meaning to and has no meaning on its own.

It's an abolition of any idea of nature. Of the idea that biology or reproductive strategy or evolution, or any of these biological or scientific facts are relevant for human society. I think they are relevant for human society.

I think, in fact, the core biological distinction between men and women is probably one of the most fundamental building blocks of any functioning society, always has been, is self-evidently geared around reproductive strategy, which is about geared around the maintenance of the next generation.

And the idea that you can just abstract humanity from these biological facts and turn them into these sort of abstract people on an abstract chessboard that can become whatever they want to become is really an attempt, a postmodern attempt to escape nature. I like nature. The question of homosexuality in nature, it's a fascinating and deep question.

You can go back to Aquinas on this, or you can, where's where I would go, actually.

BA: What does Aquinas say?

AS: Well, Aquinas makes this interesting point, which is that homosexuality seems to be in nature, but not natural, inasmuch as, yes, we can observe this is obviously a natural phenomenon.

He could observe it in hares. They were obsessed with hares. There were lots of gay hares. H-A-R-E. That was the symbol of homosexuality because they'd observed this behavior between two male hares and their commitment and their mating. In other words…

BA: Fornicating.

AS: Fornicating. People were aware this existed.

On the other hand, they also knew or believed that because the sexual function is designed to reproduce, there's obviously a misapplication of that.

BA: Mm-hmm.

AS: That was the paradox that Aquinas attempted to resolve and never really did. And I think you resolve it by saying that, obviously, yes, it is observed in nature.The act of orgasm is overdetermined.

In other words, obviously, for the human species, not all orgasm is designed for reproduction. We have massive oversupply of sperm, a massive oversupply of potential humans in our balls. And we are programmed to get rid of those in a million different ways that are not solely reproductive.

Even if we were to follow Aquinas' view or the Catholic church's view, which is that you should commit to one other human being and reproduce solely with them your entire life, there are going to be long stretches of time when you can't reproduce with your wife because she's pregnant or she's postmenopausal when she can’t — well, what's the point of sex after menopause? etc. So, in other words, there is another function of sex that is natural, that is integral to heterosexuals, which also manages to provide a basis for the natural nature of homosexual sex.

So I think you can get of nature but not natural as one of the deepest understandings of what homosexuality is. And you don't have to reject nature.

We have nothing to be afraid of in our nature as humans. And nothing to be afraid of in our biology. And many things, actually, as men, for example, to understand about our sex. We are constructed differently than women.

Testosterone is a very powerful thing. It affects behavior, identity, everything. A same-sex culture. Gay culture is going to have all sorts of challenges in grappling with the reality of a single-sex culture. And you see our challenges. Challenges of sex and commitment, of how do you restrain these desires and not make them self-destructive?

How do you, even with two men in a relationship, deal with questions of money and of power and all thise other…We have lots, lots of issues to grapple with.

BA: I'm glad you said that because that's interesting to me where, you know, that's where the kind of “Love is love” campaign has fallen flat for me.

Of course, love is love, and that there, you know, is no one kind of love that's greater, whether it be in a heterosexual marriage or homosexual, you know.

But what was tough for me to grapple with, having been married for a long time now, and the ebb and flow of marriage and learning, and growing along with somebody is that, you know what, we actually are different.

You know, love is love, but gay people are different.

When you have two men together, it's going to be a different dynamic.

AS: But also, it's not gay. It's gay male and lesbian.

BA: Exactly. Lesbian experience is also dramatically different. 

BA: Dramatically different.

AS: Because of nature. And again, you get rid of nature. All these categories disappear.

BA: So then let me ask you this, though…

AS: The postmodern project is the abolition of homosexuality.

BA: Right.

AS: That is what the transgender movement is ultimately about. The abolition of homosexuality as a category. By defining homosexuality as same gender love, not same sex love, you include within homosexuality the experience of a heterosexual, of a biological male having sex and a relationship with a biological female, which in and of itself undermines and destroys the whole concept of homosexuality. If that is within homosexuality, then homosexuality no longer exists.

And that's the ultimate consequence.

BA: So, how do you resolve that? I mean, you say like, you know, I support trans people. There are people who just want to be left alone. How do you, how do you resolve that? I mean —

AS: It's resolved! Like, what is there to, what is there to resolve?

I mean, I just stopped making category errors. It's just a category error.

And of course, if someone wants to have sex with a biological male, wants to have sex with a biological female who has jacked herself up with testosterone, it's a free country.

We're in favor of sexual freedom. Absolutely go ahead and do that. But don't make that the basis of a homosexual identity, which thereby undermines the status of homosexuality in civil and political law, and society as a whole. These things are connected.

Look, I honestly think most gay men and women know all this.

I'm not saying anything [particularly] strange to people. I mean, it's weird that those of us talking like this have been regarded as heretics, as it were, whereas in fact, we're just expressing the most common experience of what it is to be a gay man or a lesbian. And to be told that we're not who we think we are, that sex is a fiction, that there is only gender.

And let's be clear, they make the distinction between sex and gender not to sustain the distinction between sex and gender, but to conflate it.

BA: Right.

AS: Yes, I think there is a distinction between sex and gender, a critical distinction, which means they're wrong! Yes, you can express yourself in a million different ways as a sexed being, but we are all sexed, either one or the other.

Even intersex, obviously, there are no people born capable of producing sperm and eggs.

BA: Right.

AS: We would be amoeba.

BA: Or an intermediate gamete.

AS: No, there's just nothing there. It's who we are. Why are we trying to flee from who we are? It's okay. There are paradoxes here. We don't really understand, in the grand mystery of the universe, why a species with a reproductive system that is binary, a tiny proportion of people will not function that way.

But what we do know is in all of nature, there are always, this is how evolution works, there are always small variations. With every generation, small variations, small changes. Of course, that's how a species can evolve. If circumstances change, our small changes in variations can lead to adaptability. That's the whole story of our entire life on Earth.

And there's also this denial of science, denial of evolution, denial of biology that is truly, I think, dangerous because it's fake news.

BA: Yeah. 

AS: It's bullshit. And we should not be afraid to call it out. And we should not be coerced.

See, one thing they do is, rather than making arguments that you can then counter, is they change the way we're allowed to talk about it. So we now have to talk about LGBTQ+ people as if such a thing exists.

It doesn't exist. They don't exist. There's no single LGBTQ person.

You literally cannot be all those things.

As I've said, those groups together aren't actually that coherent in society as a social fact. So stop using it. Do not use the term LGBTQ. Do not use this weird term gender-affirming care. The worst word there is care, actually. But no, sex reassignment is the, I think, the best term.

I mean, quite honestly, it's Orwellian. I mean, Orwell's...notion that people come up with these strange terms to disguise reality. I always think of gender-affirming care alongside intensified interrogation or the special interrogation techniques that really were a euphemism for torture. If you can't use the word torture, you say, we're having intense interrogation techniques.

They did. They said this.

And you can look through the New York Times and you'll see enhanced interrogation is the word they use to describe torture. And the New York Times used those phrases to describe torture because that was what they were told the correct phrase to use was.

Well, I think of gender affirming care purely linguistically, I'm not comparing them in fact, but purely linguistically, a similar euphemism to enhanced interrogation. The minute you hear these weird-ass euphemisms that all sound benign,stop, ask yourself, “Can I put this into real English?” 

Orwell was also obsessed with this weird thing, which is the use of Latinate words to sort of render a kind of false authority to things. And also, Latinate words can definitely be more abstract than Anglo-Saxon words. So the very idea [of] heterosexuality itself is a kind of abstraction in a way.

I'm just trying to think of, yeah — it's like we should talk into like vaginoplasty. You read how they describe the surgical procedures that they may use for minors, and it's all a bunch of Latin words. It's not actually chopping your dick off, castrating you, creating a permanent wound that has to be dilated, that will appear, will never appear to anyone to be a vagina, but which we are required to kind of believe is a kind of vagina.

Again, you kind of wonder who's killing who.

I mean, there is no way that someone who has had a vaginoplasty, a male who's had a vaginoplasty, could ever have sex in the way that a woman would have sex. It's just not possible. Not possible. You can create a simulacrum of it. Just as you can put a strap-on. You can do all sorts of things to create — but it's not it.

And if we have lost the capacity to describe reality, we've lost our capacity to describe and understand the world. And it's terrible that homosexuals would be part of this general obfuscation of reality. We have nothing to be afraid of.

BA: Yeah.

AS: I think to some extent, the transgender movement does have some things to be a little afraid of. They don't want, for example, they insist that we don't talk about genitals, for example. Although even though that's what the dude wearing a dress comes up to you, the first thing your average person will ask themselves is, “I wonder if that guy still has a dick.”

Sorry, it's not a reach to think that because the first thing you think of. The idea that this is not salient to people, the fact you have a vagina should be irrelevant to a gay man because sex is somehow this abstract sort of almost out-of-the-body experience.

And again, when they talk in this thing of, if a boy takes testosterone — if someone who thinks it's a boy takes testosterone, but is actually a woman that is, and then the boy thinks he's a boy because he is, and takes testosterone — maybe because, I don't know, let's say they want to bulk up in there.

Plenty of teenage boys are taking testosterone. Like most, mainly illegally. It's huge, actually. Steroids are huge, right?

Everywhere.

But we understand that the consequences of doing that, which are real, I mean, they can damage you, and they're very powerful drugs. They can shrink your balls. They can render your ability to actually function sexually long-term impossible. You're on it for life. If you don't cycle it right, you'll never reboot your own endocrine system. You'll never be pumping your own testosterone around. You will lose the capacity to produce your own testosterone. But we definitely understand it to be different than if you're putting it into a female.

But what I'm saying is, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that, in that case, you have this abstract idea of a boy who could have a male or a female body. And therefore, that's why it's a question of sex discrimination. But so you have to start with the idea of a person as being without a body.

BA: Right.

AS: And I hate to break it to them, but we are embodied creatures.

BA: Right.

AS: This is what mortality means. If we were not, it would be an entirely different conversation.

BA: Well, it's a Cartesian. It's Cartesian. I mean, it's, you know, “I think therefore I am.” It's this kind of dual.

AS: But even the Cartesians understood the body existed. These people seem to believe that it doesn't really even exist. That humanity can be understood outside of —

BA: But it's also this idea that the mind is separate from the body or that the soul is separate from the body.

AS: Well, the soul is questioning it because the mind itself is gendered. We know that. We know that everything is affected by chromosomes and hormones. And we know the reason why.

Again, you watch one of these David Attenborough documentaries. They're not mystified as to why the male is stronger from the female. They don't do a little documentary of a bird's nest and say, “And now, because the female is oppressed by a system of patriarchy, she cannot go and get the food. She has to stay in the nest.” And we don't. We say, obviously, it makes sense for there to be a division of labor in rearing young.

And in fact, it's a genius idea in terms of how you provide the full array of care for your offspring. That's why we have different fucking natures as men and women! Because we're trying to have children that can learn from both of us and be better sustained by reinforcing complementary skills. They're obviously never going to be exactly the same. They're obviously also going to overlap.

But they are quite clearly different. And we can see that in nature. Now, why then, does the human animal become utterly different than every other animal on the planet? It's an anti-scientific. It's as bulk as is creationism.

BA: Well, that's what I was thinking.

AS: It is. It's a form of creationism.

And I'm sorry, but we can and must understand and empathize with the plight and challenge of being a transgender person. It is a really tough thing. And it does happen in nature, but it's obviously also contrary to nature.

Right?

BA: Right. 

AS: So it's in that same category, I guess, which requires a great deal of compassion and a great deal of civil equality, but not substantive equality. You can't deny the substantive difference between men and women. You can't. You can pretend they don't exist civilly. Well, I will call you Mr. Seligzo.

BA: You can't deny that and have a functioning society.

AS: Yeah. 

BA: Yeah.

AS: And the other thing is about this is that, really, it's not that hard. We've basically solved the question.

BA: How?

AS: We've solved the question by granting equal civil rights to people insofar as they behave as and appear as a member of the opposite sex. But, we understand that that ends when biology matters. Most of our lives, biology does not matter that much. If you're applying for a job, your actual biology does not matter. But you can tell whether you're a man or a woman.

So it's not relevant. It's not going to affect anyone in any other way. But if we're talking about nakedness, if we're talking about, for example, if we're talking about sports, where you have an obvious biological issue, you adjust. You create an exception to the rule.

Not hard, because it's biology.

Same with intimate spaces where you're seeing each other naked. The human mind, for some reason, from the Garden of Eden on, humans have covered themselves up in front of each other in terms of the opposite sex. You go to look at the hunter-gatherer tribes, and dudes are wearing loincloths for some fucking reason.

It's the way Nietzsche called humans the beast with red cheeks, because we're the only animal that feels somewhat ashamed or wants privacy for fucking. We actually think of that as something that we want to, and we actually think of the display of our genitals as something that is something we do not do in a civil way.

We only do it in a private context or in a place where intimacy, same-sex intimacy is allowed, such as locker rooms. Stalls, you can get away with it. Bathrooms, I don't think they're a big deal. As long as you have stalls, you're going to be fine. And so I have no issues with that.

But, showers and locker rooms, yes, you are going to see — I don't think it's fair that women have to see someone's schlong waving around in the showers. I think that's completely legitimate. I think it's completely legitimate for women who have suffered abuse at the hands of biological men to want to be able to have some space in which they are free of those people, and similarly in prison. But these are not big categories. They are quite limited categories in terms of competitive sports, in terms of locker rooms.

Most people aren't in competitive sports, and most people spend a tiny amount of their time in a locker room. We can carve out exceptions.

BA: And you're not saying carve out exceptions for, oh, we ignore sex in these places. You're saying, no, we carve out exceptions in terms of we have to acknowledge sex.

AS: We ignore sex insofar as we can. When it becomes a question of biology, we can't.

BA: That's the exception. So let's say the changing of legal sex. Okay, so changing one's legal sex. So you're saying…

AS: You can do that, and you should be able to do that.

BA: You should be able to — so you're saying that a woman shouldn't have to, you know, see a schlong in a locker room. Understandable.

So if the male adult person gets what is called a vaginoplasty, where if they get the castration surgery and they get something that resembles a vagina, is that okay? You know, is that okay for them to be naked in the locker room?

AS: I think it's probably, it's all subjective as it is, how one reacts as a human being naked next to another human being who's naked. I, as a grown man, have not been around in a public space a naked woman my entire life.

BA: How would you react to that, do you think?

AS: I'd be freaked out.

BA: Yeah, me too.

AS: I think women have a much stronger reaction for obvious reasons.

BA: Yeah.

AS: Because they're also physically vulnerable.

BA: Right.

AS: And if this person with the vaginoplasty is 6'2 and weighs 220 pounds, I don't think it makes much of a difference. So yeah, I don't have a problem saying, “You know what? We just think there's an issue here in which girls don't want to see wing-wangs.” And that's obviously understandable and not a feeling of bigotry. And if you're a grown-up transgender person, I think you want to accept that and acknowledge that.

It's understandable.

BA: Right.

AS: There is no, what you haven't seen in the transgender movement is any acknowledgement of understandable discomfort or even, for example, in terms of sports, the fact that there is unfairness. I mean, you could be honest and say, “We know it's unfair.”

We still think we should treat these people — and even if this person is the number one in every part of his or her sport, we should be fine with it. That's one thing. But they can't do that. They then just sort of insist there isn't an advantage.

BA: When you talk about the transgender movement, you're saying that like the activist movement, the activist wing of the transgender… 

AS: The current position of every single lesbian and gay group is currently the most extreme...position imaginable.

BA: Trans women are women, trans men are men, there's no distinction, sex doesn't matter, etc. Yeah.

AS: That's a lie. Everyone knows it's a lie. Every sane person knows it's a lie. To sustain a lie, you have to come up with increasingly esoteric words and language to believe it.

BA: That's where I struggle, because when you say that, it's a lie, and then you say, “I'm having trouble lately reconciling the legal change of sex because of that.” Going back and changing birth certificates, for example, if we're doing that, then, you know, the law is, I feel like, needs to reflect reality and truth, right?

And I feel like that's a really important distinction. If we're going back and we're changing a birth certificate, then it doesn't mean anything. Then what was that identification?

AS: The whole point of a birth certificate, is it's a recording of a moment in time.

BA: And so there's really no difference between changing a birth certificate and changing legal sex. It's like, that's what folks are doing. They're changing IDs and birth certificates, changing legal sex and being recognized. So it's, like, it’s messy — and I'm just acknowledging the messiness of it in terms of “Oh well, which male person who identifies as transgender —” we're talking about passing as female we're talking about —

AS: I think you can make a very simple case that the transgender category should be defined in a way that can be defined, that has a limiting principle. Otherwise, if anybody who just simply feels a little girly that day is transgender, which is roughly where they're at, well, they cannot provide a line beyond which you're not transgender.

That's why they call gender-diverse people or other bullshit terms. It seems to me we used to have a very clear idea of that, which is that you would undergo physical, medical transition and you would present yourself constantly as the opposite sex. And that once you had done that for a short period of time, or whatever period of time, you could be then registered as the opposite sex. But if you haven't taken any medication, you've got a big old beard and you just like wearing a dress, no. Sorry, no.

BA: You said earlier, you would tell your teenage self, find love. You said it really is ultimately all about love in the end. So it sounded like you were talking about romantic love, but Are you talking about just love in any kind of form? I mean —

AS: Well, in respect to the gay person, yeah, love in every form. I'm a Christian in that sense. But specifically with a gay boy, it's to imagine your future with someone. And being without someone, I am now divorced on my own. It's not the worst thing in the world. I'm fine with it. But I do think that we're all humans, and we're all born with a capacity for emotional love, which can be sexually expressed and has a sexual dimension to it.

And I do think that that is realized most profoundly in a lifelong commitment to another human being. It's immense, an immense responsibility. But a great nobility. And ultimately, I believe the fullest fruition of our capacity as humans for sexual and emotional love. It is the highest form of it. And I do think it is. And I think I have nothing against fucking around. I don't. A consensual adult sexual experience is wonderful. But we as humans deserve more, and we as gay people always deserve more. And the idea that we were somehow a category that would not be amenable to long-term commitment to one another was a dehumanizing idea.

And it's a humanizing idea that we can marry and love each other and be with each other. And, you know, politics is not… And this is really the point of virtually normal.

The argument of virtually normal was not so much an argument about homosexuality, as an argument about the limits of politics. We can't resolve all of human life through changing laws. Sometimes life has to do the work of life. And there's no deus ex machina to fix it. There's no ideology that will render it easy.

But we can lose sight of what we're trying to just expand the possibility of human flourishing to a group of people who previously had been made completely unnecessarily miserable and subjected to horrible levels of persecution, both criminal, civil, and psychological. And we've ended that.

It's a wonderful thing.

I think we've also, by and large, ended it with trans people. But I do think the danger of reviving all these old stereotypes of what gay people are, the obsession with this word queer, the attempt to abolish biological reality, all of which is undoing or certainly hurting so much of what we tried to do in the 80s and 90s. It's not a further evolution of it. It's an undermining of it.

And we got a settlement. Against all the odds, we were told we couldn't, we told it wouldn't happen, we did get a settlement. By which I mean we have no discrimination, employment, we have marriage, we have access to the military, and to our own government in ways that is not uniquely discriminated against. Done.

The last thing people want to hear is “It's up to you. It's your life. No one's out here going to save you.” And I think that's a lot of what the younger generation has been told more generally, which is the last thing you do is rely upon yourself. No, the first thing you do is rely upon yourself.

BA: Everybody needs to read it. It's Emerson's Self-reliance. That's what's required reading.

AS: Yes.

BA: Thank you so much. I appreciate that.

AS: Cheers.

Published in Issue XIII: Heretic