Shannon Minter On Trans Life And Politics

Shannon is a civil rights attorney, most notably as the lead counsel for same-sex couples in the landmark marriage case in California. He’s currently the legal director at the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, where he is leading several federal court challenges to the trans military ban and other new federal policies targeting transgender people.

I’ve long tried to find an interlocutor on the new radical direction of trans activism and its hostile takeover of the gay rights movement. Shannon was the first to agree, and we got along great. In some areas, we strongly agree; in others, we strongly disagree; but we can talk and not hate each other. If we want to restore liberal democracy, this is the way.

For two clips of our convo — on the new “conversion therapy,” and how trans activists need to adopt persuasion as a tactic — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: his “awesome” childhood in rural East Texas; hunting and fishing all the time; his Methodist church; his terrible adolescence with gender dysphoria; the evangelical teacher who mentored him; his unlikely path to practicing law; helping teens after conversion therapy; coming out as lesbian; becoming a trans man in his 30s; the “It Gets Better” project; gay Mormons; the ghetto approach of queer activism; the AIDS crisis; Virtually Normal; Bush and the Federal Marriage Amendment; Evan Wolfson; the California marriage case and Prop 8; Edie Windsor; when trans weddings were legal and gay ones weren’t; “nonbinary” and “genderfluid”; affirmation-only vs. watchful waiting; the suicide canard; Chase Strangio; autism; detransitioners; Tavistock; the Cass Review; puberty blockers; the Dutch Protocol; Johanna Olson-Kennedy and her closed clinic; Marci Bowers and lost orgasm; Rachel Levine’s politicization; fairness in sports; Sarah McBride; Shannon losing and regaining his religion; and moving back to his tiny hometown in Texas with his wife.

In our debate over kids seeking puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, Shannon emphasized a recent study out of Utah that he wanted to share with Dish readers:

Utah’s Department of Health and Human Services and experts from the state's leading health organizations concluded from a study of thousands of transgender people that gender-affirming care generated “positive mental health and psychosocial functioning outcomes.”

He recommended a few more links:

This is an amicus brief from clinical guidelines experts about the WPATH standards of care. This is an amicus brief from Drs. Erica Anderson and Laura Edwards-Leeper, who are often invoked to justify banning this care and who have clarified here that they adamantly oppose such bans.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Scott Anderson on the Iranian Revolution, Jill Lepore on the history of the Constitution, Katie Herzog on drinking your way sober, and Johann Hari interviewing me. Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of last week’s pod with Tara Zahra on anti-globalization between the world wars:

What a nice week on the Dish! Tara Zahra’s college experience parallel’s mine. Like her, a professor’s note encouraged me to go to graduate school — in my case, in a field I had never encountered before college. I hope all the teachers and professors who listen are reminded of the power they have to put someone else’s life on a new and wonderful path.

And thank you for the most recent essay. I’ve poked you repeatedly about the tone of your writing on immigration, so I appreciate your recent shift. America is a great place because being an American has nothing to do with genetic heritage. I think of my country as a great table where the world gathers to make their dreams come true. We need to set thoughtful policy about how many people can gather and how quickly, but our citizens should never lose sight of what it means to start fresh in a place where possibility is unlimited. If we lose our compassion, are we Americans anymore?

May you and Truman continue to enjoy a delightful summer in Provincetown!

He couldn’t be more delighted:

On another recent episode:

I just listened to your discussion with Paul Elie — the first one I’ve listened to in awhile. (I couldn’t bring myself to listen to Batya Ungar-Sargon and Chris Matthews, and I have to admit I find your discussions with people on contemporary political issues boring. Mostly it’s “I hate Trump.” Okay! I get that.)

I enjoyed listening to Elie and have ordered his book from the library. But I did find his comments on Leonard Cohen way off. Cohen didn’t disappear in the ‘70s. Songs of Love and Hate — arguably his best album — came out in ‘71, and his live album came out in ‘73 (I bought both). I believe he put out two or three more albums in the ‘70s, including the Phil Spector-produced Death of a Ladies Man, which got poor reviews but definitely got attention. Cohen also put out a book or two in the ‘70s. I saw him perform at The Bottom Line in New York in 1974 and he toured during that decade. That’s no disappearance!

Elie also seemed under the impression that Cohen’s literary career amounted to a few poems. Besides a fair number of poems, he wrote two novels, including Beautiful Losers — which is relevant to Elie’s religious theme, as it centers around Kateri Tekakwitha, now canonized. Cohen was never a popular writer, but he won many literary awards. Beautiful Losers was widely reviewed, and Cohen got compared to James Joyce, William Burroughs, and Henry Miller. Bob Seger also took the name of his song “Beautiful Loser” from Cohen’s novel:

Cohen dabbled in a number of forms of religious expression. He had some involvement with Scientology (see “Famous Blue Raincoat”) and The Rosicrucians (see “Dress Rehearsal Rag”). The biggie: Buddhism! That went way beyond dabbling and played a central role in his life. I believe he first went up to a Buddhist monastery on Mt. Baldie in the 1970s. The picture of him on the ‘73 live album has him with a shaven head after leaving the monastery (he’d go back and get ordained):

I remember reading, many years ago, one of those printed discussions you used to see, probably the Village Voice, where he and Allen Ginsberg discussed their relationship to Buddhism, and Cohen explained he saw no contradiction between Buddhist practice and Judaism. (I suspect some Orthodox might not have agreed.) I thought it was downright strange that Elie didn’t even mention Buddhism in this context.

Also, I don’t think late Cohen is anywhere near as good as the early stuff. No I don’t think “Hallelujah” is a better song than “Suzanne” or “Bird on a Wire” or “Famous Blue Raincoat.”

As far as Madonna, I think she played you and Elie. I’d say there’s no there there. Years ago I read a movie review about Maria Full of Grace, and the reviewer made the perceptive point that the movie’s title is simply a bid to make the film sound deeper or more profound than it is by giving it a false religious gloss — a profundity by association. That strikes me as a good comment on Madonna’s early stuff, like “Like a Prayer.”

I love Camille Paglia, but I think she was seeing stuff that wasn’t there. Madonna played with Catholic stuff because it helped give her an image both of some kind of depth and of being transgressive in the current sense of what that means. Her subsequent fixation on kitsch Kabbalah suggests the depth of her vacuity.

Every now and again, I’m gobsmacked by a Dish reader’s breadth of knowledge and fearless expression of opinion. This is one of those times. Thank you.

Here’s Elie on Andy Warhol’s faith practice:

Here’s a rec for the Dishcast:

As a biomedical scientist, one of the most disheartening things of the current administration is the ideological, irrational attack on science — from climate to environmental science, from energy technology to health. Perhaps most striking is the broadside against one of the most remarkable achievements of Western medicine: vaccination. I can think of no better person to address the factual reality behind some of MAHA’s most egregious claims than Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. He’s a frequent speaker and engaging interviewee.

Yeah I know of Paul — used to commission from him at TNR. Another rec:

Tim Dillon! A good guest he would be:

He’s too big for the Dish. But I love him anyway.

A reader writes:

I loved your gorgeous column last week, “A Fusion of an Idea and a Place.” I’m so glad someone wrote a rebuttal to Vance’s idiotic speech. I actually teared up as I was reading to my husband that passage from the letter to Reagan he recalled in his farewell speech.

The full portion of that speech is even more stirring:

From a commenter on YouTube:

Damn, I almost cried when he told the story about that old WWII POW. Why, you may ask? Well my grandfather was serving in Africa, under Rommel, when he got captured in 1942. The boys took him to Texas, where he was held a POW for almost three years. Later he returned to Germany and told me how good they had been treated by their guards. They received good food, had a soccer team, and had generally good living conditions. My grandfather was grateful to the American people until he died. He knew that it could’ve been far worse. He started to see the horrors of war when he was an 18-year-old boy, drafted into military service at 17, in the USA he learned what forgiving really meant.

That’s how this young Brit was taught to understand American values. It’s part of why I find Trump so despicable.

Here’s a dissent from a Dish reader:

I’m one of those lurkers who always looks forward to your weekly email but never writes in or subscribes. (It’s not due to any disagreements; I’m just a tightwad.) This week I finally thought that I’d write back — not out of rage at something you wrote, but with the aim of providing an alternative view.

I read your interpretation of a part of Vance’s speech and thought you had misinterpreted him, so I decided to read the whole speech to reach my own conclusion about what he had meant. Whether you correctly interpreted Vance is not why I write. I didn’t think his speech was particularly good, which I found disappointing because I’ve found Vance to be a bit of a Trump Whisperer. He has had a gift for making Trump’s often incoherent utterances seem more coherent, reasonable even. But this time I don’t think Vance was up to his usual standard, so I thought I’d try my hand at being his whisperer.

Just as conservatives are liberals who have been mugged by reality, MAGA are both liberals and conservatives who were mugged by Bush’s wars. But to fully explain my reasoning, I need to invoke Arnold Kling’s distinction between the three languages of politics (btw, you should have him on your podcast).