We Need Better Narratives About Gender
About this episode
Guest host Lydia Polgreen talks with New Yorker staff writer Masha Gessen about the intensifying backlash against trans and nonbinary people. Gessen theorizes that autocrats and aspiring autocrats weaponize gender to promise a return to an imaginary, predictable past where families and identities felt fixed. They critique the LGBTQ movement's 'immutability trap' — the born-this-way framing — arguing it fails nonbinary people and those who experience transition as a choice, and advocate a liberatory framework of freedoms-to over a narrow rights-based discourse. The conversation ranges across regret, gender-affirming care for minors, the gendered ubiquity of cosmetic surgery, and Gessen's own history of fleeing Russia after 2013 legislation targeted them as an LGBTQ parent.