For the past two years, supporters and critics of what is often referred to as “gender ideology” in schools have not been arguing so much as they have been talking past each other. 

Polls show that the plurality of Americans do not want elementary, middle, or high school-age students studying transgender and nonbinary gender identities in school. While opinions differ by party, only 22% of Democrats and 6% of Republicans say that middle and high school students discussing these topics in school are a good thing (with even lower numbers for elementary school students). Meanwhile, over 80% of Americans (including 53% of Democrats) oppose medical interventions that alter the sex characteristics of minors. 

On the far left, some erroneously claim that those in favor of limiting discussion of sexual topics in schools and banning so-called “gender-affirming care” are oppressing gay and trans youth. Meanwhile, some on the far right have equally erroneously insisted that all those attempting to introduce gender ideology into schools in the name of protecting and validating gay and/or transgender children are “groomers,” enabling pedophiles to sexualize children. 

In preparation to do better by the truth and by one another in these battles, it would behoove us all to acknowledge that this culture war of gender ideology is not really about sex or sexuality. Whether or not the far left is effectively incentivizing the sexualization of children, the argument over sex and gender is a mere by-product of the far left’s far broader agenda: institutionalizing the perpetual infantilization of adults. 

The Thrill of Sexual Transgression

Ever since the newness of the sexual revolution wore off sometime in the 1980s, it has been the transgression of sex rather than sex itself that has seemed, well, sexy to some extreme progressives. To be a revolutionary, after all, you have to be not just for something, but also against something.

The sexual revolutionaries were against sexual repression, so, until very recently, they focused their attention and support on sexually explicit material that flouted norms of religious morality. Sex itself was still sexy because it was still, to some degree or another, verboten. The sexual revolution continued, as those pushing the boundaries of what is considered appropriate met with resistance from the then-ascendent (though compartmentalized) religious right, as well as from the mainstream. Popular culture was pulled toward ever more risqué norms. Today, revealing clothing and sexually explicit lyrics are accepted by almost everyone—including many mainstream and right-leaning people.

We now live in a culture where pornography is ever more ubiquitous, ever more easily accessible, and ever more explicit. Like pornography itself, mainstream music and entertainment often attempt titillation by shock, even with diminishing returns. While somewhat risqué at the time, Britney Spears’ 1998 “…Baby One More Time” no longer raises eyebrows, from any side of the aisle. It seems, frankly, quaint. When it comes to heterosexual sex, it now takes Cardi B’s 2020 “WAP” to raise even a hint of disapproval from the so-called conservatives. Put more pointedly: He of “grab ’em by the pussy” is the champion of many self-identified traditionalists. Enough said.

Now that heterosexual (and, increasingly, homosexual) adult sexuality—no matter how explicit—is culturally banal, the only way for sexual revolutionaries to continue their assault on what might remain of sexual repression is to go back the other way: to reject altogether the reality of biological sex, without the cultural significance of which nothing would be risqué. More importantly, for today’s far left, rejecting biological sex is merely the most politically salient byproduct of rejecting altogether the adulthood from which a mature sexual identity has heretofore been inextricable. 

Before the early twentieth century, little boys and little girls all wore long white nightgowns until somewhere between ages 5 and 7. Early childhood was an androgynous time. This is not to say that boys and girls were not acknowledged to be different, but that differences between the sexes were understood to emerge and intensify as children grew older.

Prepubescent childhood lends itself to a great deal of androgyny and some amount of gender fluidity; little boys often pretend to be pregnant or to breastfeed when their mothers have babies. Adolescence has traditionally been the time when that fluidity falls away, along with other aspects of a softer, more forgiving, early childhood. Adolescents and teens are expected to manage their schedules, friendships, school work, and future plans more or less on their own, without the handholding that they received at age 5 or even (to a lesser degree) at age 10. Half of them have to deal with menstruation; the other half have to register for the draft.

For today’s sexual revolutionaries, though, greater androgyny should accompany greater maturity, rather than the other way around. This is not prima facie pedophilia or grooming; and it does not necessarily have anything to do with sexual orientation, which is merely a variance of human sexuality, not a rejection of human biology. Moreover, there are many more common examples of potential pedophile-enabling embedded in such “traditional” elements of American life as little girls’ cheerleading routines and beauty pageant outfits. 

But reducing sex to a gender identification rather than a biological reality is dangerous, as a byproduct of the illiberal segment of the left’s broader project: pursuing oversimplified conceptions of “equity” and “inclusion.” These are meant to advance the dignity and worth of each individual but instead result in reality-indifferent, utopian thinking that is fundamentally at odds with mature adulthood. 

The Stubborn Reality of Biology

Obviously, traditional gender identity as it is typically understood can be unnecessarily restrictive for all kinds of people, including many who are cisgender, meaning that they identify with the sex associated with them at birth. Most individuals, after all, do not live out all of the stereotypes or traditional roles of their gender. I am a woman, for example, and a mother and primary caregiver to three, but “nurturing” is not on the list of adjectives that anyone—including and especially my children—would use to describe me. Someone might use that word, though, to describe my (male, traditionally masculine, primary breadwinning) husband.

Few Americans with mainstream sensibilities, even when I was born in 1987, ultimately objected to the widening array of opportunities available to both women and men. And almost no one in 2023 insists that all women “are like this,” that all men “behave like that,” or that there is no such thing as a masculine woman or a feminine man. To do so would be to deny psychological, societal, and moral reality.

But nearly all of us know, deep down, that biological sex cannot be gainsaid. To insist that athletes who have experienced male puberty can compete fairly against athletes who have not is to squint so hard that one’s eyes are squeezed shut against all contrary evidence. To perform elective surgeries that can result in permanent sterilization on children who are not yet fully in possession of their mental or legal faculties is to perpetuate medical malfeasance. And to teach elementary school students that biological sex is essentially a spiritual or semantical reality rather than a physical one is not to groom them, but to lie to them.

The Sting of Truth

I am a Democrat surrounded mostly by other Democrats, and I hear a lot of quiet comments to these effects. This is not surprising. It’s very hard, after all, to keep a lie going when nearly everyone sees the truth with their own eyes. 

Hence, I am optimistic that we will not be talking about elective mastectomies on 14-year-olds a decade from now. (Except insofar as we find prurient interest in all of the forthcoming medical malpractice lawsuits and their settlements, as more countries inevitably follow Sweden and England in disallowing various medications and surgeries that endanger trans-identifying youth). Nor will we be teaching gender ideology to seven-year-olds. The illiberal segment of the left on this issue will, I am fairly certain, do what the illiberal segment of the left always does: experience sufficient pressure and dissension from fellow progressives that maintain a foothold in reality to retreat predominantly to their increasingly irrelevant safe spaces in academia. 

But the insistence on telling children feel-good lies instead of hard truths is a legacy that today’s sexual revolutionaries and those who abet them are likely to leave in their wake. Sex actually should not matter that much at age four; even our forbears, dressing their youngest children in unisex garments, knew that very little girls and very little boys are more alike than not. The same is true of other realities and attributes that divide individuals along lines that are sometimes obfuscated in early childhood but become important as adulthood looms: intelligence, strength, work ethic, a regard for others, and the like. Some people are smarter than others, funnier than others, or more interested in science or literature than others. As every parent learns, people’s attributes and interests are not nearly as malleable as we might want or expect.

Just like biological sex, these facts are not particularly important in kindergarten (nor should they be). But these and a host of other incontrovertible realities will come to matter greatly to the people in a given kindergarten classroom a decade or two later when some of them will want to be engineers, doctors, or athletes. Therefore, helping each child to figure out what her gifts are—and to develop a work ethic that allows her to cultivate those gifts to best serve herself and the world—should be the motivating project of elementary and secondary education.

But instead, the illiberal segment of the left is myopically focused on perpetuating fundamental misunderstandings of equity and inclusion. They are creating a world in which all the limitations of mature reality can be put off as long as possible, and perhaps forever. And they are creating this (anti)utopia not in deference to the needs of children, but in obeisance to the whims of childish adults for whom an identity as an ostensibly inclusive transgressor supersedes all other considerations. We have long heard about “extended adolescence,” meaning that people are not taking up adult burdens and societal responsibilities until a decade later than they once did (that is, 35 is the new 25). But the gender identity craze is best understood as an attempt not merely to delay the formational work of adolescence—figuring out who one is and what one has to offer the world—but to eliminate it. For today’s far left, the wider world should conform to the impulses of individuals, rather than grounding adolescents by inculcating the ability to contextualize themselves—physically, socially, and emotionally. 

If we raise children in such a way that they are constitutionally and ideologically unable to acknowledge what they are not, we will wind up with adults stuck in arrested development, who cannot embrace all that they are. That will be tragic in ways that far supersede today’s debates about how gender is discussed in our schools. 

A nation of perpetual children will be, inevitably, a nation that is ever more androgynous. But in such a society, “gender ideology” will be among the least of our worries. After all, perpetual girlhood and boyhood are no more useful than perpetual androgyny, in the end. 

Yes, it is important to keep discussions of gender as separate from biological sex away from young children’s classrooms. Whether the recent proliferation of red state laws accomplishes this effectively and/or respectfully is a question on which reasonable people can disagree. Regardless, it is even more important to meet the future with the resolve to raise mature women and men who are ready to encounter all manner of realities in the world that awaits them beyond their school days. 

And no law can do that. 

Only the truth (about sex and gender, as about anything else)—and most people’s willingness to acknowledge it even when doing so is hard—can create and sustain the grown-up culture of both respect and reason that nearly all of us want to hand down to our free society’s future adults.