When I was young, I recall watching A Bridge Too Far, a star-studded 1977 film based on a book by Cornelius Ryan. It concerned Operation Market Garden, a failed first attempt to march allied troops across the Rhine River in service of an early knockout blow to the Third Reich. Tactically, however, the battle revealed much about under-planning, overconfidence, egos, poor intelligence, and failed discernment and judgment. Such details were largely lost on me at the time, but they recur with regularity in political, military, and social history.
An example of how overconfidence, stalled momentum, and misreading the terrain has undermined social change efforts is the recent retreat in support for transgender rights as well as declining rates of identifying as such. The overall effort has fared far worse than its predecessor movement, the successful quest to secure civil same-sex marriage (SSM) rights in the United States, capped off by a narrow (5-4) victory in the Obergefell case in June 2015.
It was not long after that questions arose about what might be next. At the time, key LGBTQ nonprofit organizations were at the height of their symbolic power and sitting on a war chest of resources. A victory of significant scale seldom spells the end of such organizations, such as when the March of Dimes pivoted after its raison d'etre - curing polio - became a reality. Organizations discern new goals rather than return donations and shut their doors. What would be the next big thing? Polygamy? Forget it: marriage was already receding. It would make no sense to spend time and capital on the right to enter more than one of them. Polyamory? People were already free to do it, albeit without legal recognition. Instead, the wishes of the transgender movement were to be pursued, and it would require legal, cultural, and economic resources.
Initial advances were swift. The academy signed on as if on retainer; researchers piled into a topic that had just a decade before been largely absent from significant attention. Social science and humanities faculty positions for gender and sexuality studies exploded in number. The "science" of transgender was now in the pipeline, and the 2021 Bostock decision on anti-gay and anti-trans employment discrimination was in the bag. So far so good.
Then progress stalled. Now it's in open retreat. Just last week Canadian social scientist Erik Kaufmann wrote that "the share of trans-identified students has effectively halved in just two years" and that numbers of those identifying as "nonbinary" are in freefall. Additional new population-based survey data collected from more than 5,400 Americans using Ipsos's KnowledgePanel reveals further erosion: only 18 percent of American adults now agree that "it should be OK for adolescents to 'transition' with hormones or surgery if they identify with another gender," down from 25 percent - using the identical question - in 2018. By contrast, surveys of support for same-sex marriage, such as Gallup's, are holding steady (or displaying minor erosion) at just under 70 percent.
What might have seemed like the next progressive triumph-in-waiting is instead running off the rails. How? Why? The answer is neither simple nor solitary. The stalled transgender revolution could be tenuous and temporary - I doubt it - but it's only partly about timing and politics. There are at least four key reasons why the gender saga has not enjoyed the same cultural, popular, and legal success that SSM has.
First, one reason that Americans have agreed to SSM is that marriage is voluntary. Biological sex, however, is not. The latter is observed, not chosen. Even if you think it's "assigned" at birth by a physician, it is not a personal act of volition. A claim to alter one's sex is an ontological move, because our sexed nature concerns part of our very being. On the other hand, a claim to marrying someone of the same sex is a cultural accommodation, a recognition of participation in a social institution. Just listen to the difference between a man saying, "I'm allowed to marry another man," and the same man saying, "I am able to become a woman." Being sexually or emotionally drawn to a person of the same sex is fundamentally different from asserting that you think you are, or wish very much to be, a member of the other sex. To claim that one is nonbinary is to confuse - and hence create an environment conducive to conflict with - others around you, because claiming one doesn't "feel like" a man or a woman is to mistake feelings for realities. I myself am hardly a portrait of rugged masculinity, but I know there are a thousand different ways to be a man.
Even famous actors, authors, athletes, and Silicon Valley elites sense the distinction between an institutional accommodation and an ontological matter. It's why same-sex marriage seems a no-brainer to an author like J. K. Rowling but transgender claims are not just uncomfortable but an offense, an unacceptable transgression of the social contract - a bridge too far. She's not alone. In the same new survey data noted above, 39 percent of American adults who support same-sex marriage are not okay with offering hormonal or surgical treatment to adolescents with gender dysphoria. Ms. Rowling is willing to risk cultural capital here against a cause that much of the world shares her misgivings about.
Second, same-sex marriage was only possible because the demand for marriage and the respect that the institution long commanded had been eroding for more than forty years. It was a very different climate than when Loving v. Virginia was decided during the last of three twentieth-century peaks in the marriage rate. The institution of marriage at the time of Obergefell, and now, was and is in tough shape; the timing of Obergefell couldn't have been better for its backers. Civil unions with identical benefits to marriage - just a different title - were not enough. The powerful symbolic language of "marriage" was a must for the left, for it signaled one of the last remaining elements of real social belonging. Meanwhile, our binary sexed nature remains a fundamental physical reality, one that is far more than a symbolic one. Selling the transgender vision was going to be a much harder task.
Obergefell was also a reflection of how much marriage has been bled of its understanding as a reproductive union. Most new marriages intermittently remain that, in reality, but our efforts to sterilize most acts of sexual intercourse have, slowly but surely, altered how we think about marriage. Many conservatives - more Protestants than Catholics but plenty of both - imagine a more pronounced distinction between marriage and family that once was never there. This is what John Paul II articulates as the contraceptive "mentality," namely, that we are far quicker to associate sex with an enjoyable time of erotic and emotional bonding than we are to remember what it's capable of producing. Without the contraceptive revolution, SSM would never have occurred.
Third, civil same-sex marriage is one thing. The transgender movement, by contrast, is not. It is a panoply of matters involving legal sex change, variable criteria (e.g., self-description, hormonal use, various surgical options, birth certificate alteration, etc.), and ongoing costly medical/hormonal dependence. By contrast, neither a marriage license nor the vows that followed need renewal. The movement also displays significant internal contradiction. For example, some describe themselves as nonbinary or one of dozens of identifiers that require definition and description (e.g., genderfluid, genderqueer). Others simply want to be a man instead of a woman, or vice versa.
Compounding this - particularly for the public at large - is the confusion that can ensue. For example, when someone seeks to alter his own sex while also claiming to be homosexual, the wider public naturally wonders why. Disparaging responses to such normal confusion suggest a type of gnostic, esoteric understanding that only weakens the transgender case. Indeed, the possible confounding of homosexuality (in development) with gender dysphoria remains an understudied, underdiscussed matter. But when you combine two politically sensitive topics, it is no surprise that there appears to be little freedom (and time) to explore such associations, ask questions, seek clarity, and entertain doubts. One quickly discerns that the official answers are just that - declarations rather than the product of open, free inquiry and dialogue. The pace at which consensus is sought, then declared, in this entire domain has been ridiculously rapid, a political rather than empirical move. The official position of the American Academy of Pediatrics on gender identity and medical treatment of dysphoria is a prime example. There was no vote, no open discussion - just an edict.
All of this highlights how there is no one obvious goal here, as there was in the pursuit of civil same-sex marriage. It's a mess characterized by a new and complex vocabulary, mixed messaging, variable definitions among experts, little unity about direction, no final destination, and far too much reliance on the unpredictable actions and wishes of minors and young adults. By radical contrast, same-sex marriage was an attempt for adults - largely elites over age thirty - to "fit in" with a heterosexual institution. There was no attempt to stand apart, no new terms, and no fixed boundaries based on the testimony of unstable youth.
Nevertheless, one seldom-noticed aspect of our manipulation of the sexed body is our wide support for using synthetic forms of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone for our own ends. Treatments that can affect successful fertilization and gestation - or stave off normal symptoms of aging - are also what foster the development of sex characteristics that are not native to a person. And while no more than 10 percent of Americans have misgivings about the birth control pill, a solid majority opposes the same treatments applied to sex change efforts while endorsing the same for use in delayed puberty and later-life "treatments" like the testosterone I'm asked about every time I get an annual checkup. The impulse to manipulate the chemistry of sex, reproduction, and normal aging runs deep and wide.
Fourth, and arguably the most urgent reason why the transgender battle created more powerful enemies than did same-sex marriage, is that it became about children. In practice, the Obergefell decision affected adults - typically not young adults, either, since the median age at same-sex marriage hovered around thirty-seven to thirty-eight the year after the Court's decision. The gender battle, on the other hand, was not about cross-dressing adults. It concerned adolescents. That was a bridge too far.
The World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) made the mistake of lowering its recommended ages for surgical treatments in 2022. Then the gloves came off. Medical professionals and their scholarly defenders could no longer say - as they had been - that surgery was not being conducted on minors. (It was, of course, but they could no longer hide behind official policy and willful ignorance of what went on in clinics.) Now WPATH recommends age fifteen as the lower limit for "chest masculinization" treatment (read mastectomy), age sixteen for breast augmentation and facial surgeries (e.g., rhinoplasty, tracheal shave, and genioplasty), and age seventeen for hysterectomy, vaginoplasty, metoidioplasty (or bottom surgery for female-to-male patients), and orchidectomy (the removal of testicles).
Ironically, the American Medical Association had weighed in twenty years earlier on Roper v. Simmons, a case that concerned capital punishment for crimes committed by minors. The AMA emphatically claimed then that teenage criminals could hardly be held fully responsible for grave adult actions they had committed, using the language that today is recognized as the conventional wisdom that (prefrontal) brain development does not stabilize in human beings until around age twenty-five. They wrote, in 2005, that
[a]dolescents' behavioral immaturity mirrors the anatomical immaturity of their brains. To a degree never before understood, scientists can now demonstrate that adolescents are immature not only to the observer's naked eye, but in the very fibers of their brains.
A mere sixteen years later, the AMA felt quite differently about minors when it came to gender medicine. In a 2021 letter to state governors, the AMA urged them to "oppose state legislation that would prohibit the provision of medically necessary gender transition-related care to minor patients." When the governor of Arkansas did exactly that, the Arkansas state legislature threw down the gauntlet, voting overwhelmingly to override his veto of their decision to shut down transgender treatment for minors. Arkansas was the first of twenty-six states to pass legislation curbing gender-alignment procedures for minors. While its competent but overworked team didn't triumph in federal district court in Little Rock, they trusted the appeals process. Before that concluded, however, the state of Tennessee's Skrmetti case revealed the Supreme Court was willing to weigh in on - and overrule - medical providers' judgments, aided in no small part by the state of Alabama's damning amicus brief documenting how WPATH, the most pivotal medical professional organization in this field, was anything but unbiased. Money and raw ideology mattered more.
Without doubt, having a few more conservative Supreme Court justices probably aided Skrmetti in a way that did not prevent Obergefell. But as these four reasons document, the raw material of the underlying cultural, social, and legal dilemmas was quite different. Is the change sufficient to unravel Obergefell? For all the same reasons, it's unlikely - at least in the short run.