Grand Marshal Chase Strangio in front of the Stonewall Inn attends the New York City Pride March on June 26, 2022. (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)
“What I tell myself every day is that the confusing, unsettling nature of transness for other people is the thing that will spark the revolution we need. It’s the uncertainty, the inbetweenness, the traversing of binaries that we offer that’s gonna destabilize the whole thing,” - Chase Strangio, April 2025.
I think this could be the beginning of the end.
I’m referring to the attempt to capture the remnants of the gay and lesbian rights movement in order to promote the abolition of the sex binary in law, society, and culture. The Supreme Court just brutalized it with facts in the Skrmetti case. And Nick Confessore’s deeply-reported piece in the NYT Magazine is the knockout punch. The NYT shift is the most surprising — no one thought the queers would win Skrmetti after the oral arguments — and it’s worth a review.
An impressive piece of narrative writing, the Confessore piece wrestles many of the complexities and plot twists to the ground, but it’s particularly helpful in informing liberal readers in a source they may trust that this is no longer the gay and lesbian rights movement they thought they knew.
It is, instead, a Gender Revolution, led by a figure Confessore paints vividly: Chase Strangio, the transman who has headed up the ACLU campaign to abolish the sex binary, and who argued and just lost Skrmetti 6-3. In his own words, he is
“a constitutional lawyer who fundamentally doesn’t believe in the Constitution,” an L.G.B.T.Q. activist who felt his movement was overly devoted to gay white men with “social power and capital and political power”
(Never mind that rich gay white men always had the resources to protect their relationships in law — that’s what fancy lawyers are for. It was working-class lesbian and gay couples who benefited the most from marriage rights and employment protection.)
Strangio’s disdain for gay white men is of a woke piece with his view that the Supreme Court is “a vile institution”; that “the law is not a dignified system”; and that gay marriage (which he did some begrudging legal work for) was a mistake. As the Respect For Marriage Act passed in 2022, entrenching gay marriage rights in congressional law, Strangio wrote:
I feel an inexplicable amount of rage witnessing the Senate likely ... vote to codify marriage rights for same-sex couples ... I find it disappointing how much time and resources went into fighting for inclusion in the deeply flawed and fundamentally violent institution of civil marriage.
I believe in many ways, the mainstream LGBTQ legal movement caused significant harm in further entrenching the institution of marriage as an organizing structure of civil society ... and the political capital that went into passing this means capital lost somewhere else — for voting, abortion, trans people, student loans.
This disdain for the greatest gay rights victory made him a Grand Marshal in the New York pride parade that year (that’s how far left the gay elite has now gone). His view of his critics was: “I think they genuinely want to take away rights for trans people and kill trans people.” Yeah, I’m not worried about safeguards for children and good scientific evidence; I just want to kill trans people.
For good measure, Strangio insists that “a penis is not a male body part. It’s just an unusual body part for a woman.” He also wrote:
Many advocates defend the use of the ‘born male’ or ‘born with a male body’ narrative as being easier for nontransgender people to understand. Of course it is easier to understand, since it reinforces deeply entrenched views about what makes a man and what makes a woman. But it is precisely these views that we must change.
Strangio, in line with the deep illiberalism of his movement, refuses to debate anyone who is not fully in agreement with him; won’t provide evidence to back up wild claims; and wouldn’t even agree to be interviewed in person on the record by the trans-friendly NYT! He opposed any journalistic coverage of the debate on child sex changes, and supported targeting the Times: “The NYT’s horrible coverage of and fixation on trans people has been central to the progression of anti-trans bills and policies nationally.”
He also believes in banning books. Abigail Shrier’s tome worrying about social contagion among some teen girls evoked this response: “stopping the circulation of this book and these ideas is 100% a hill I will die on.” He even made a personal statement on Twitter that criticized his own group, the ACLU, when it took up a free speech case for hard-right gay, Milo Yiannopoulos, whose book ads, alongside ads for the First Amendment, had been banned on the DC metro: “I don’t believe in protecting principle for the sake of principle in all cases.”
Like the new queer and trans groups, he’s also hostile to religious freedom. As Confessore notes, legislative compromises in Congress that could both protect gays and lesbians while guaranteeing freedom of religion — the Utah model — have become anathema among the radicalized queer groups. Their Equality Act would strip all religious freedom protections where they conflict with gay rights and goals — religious protections that Joe Biden had once voted for and championed.
In front of the Supreme Court, the gist of Strangio’s argument was, well, absurd. It was about puberty blockers that are used medically to stop a condition called “central precocious puberty” — where kids younger than 8 go into puberty because the hypothalamus triggers the pituitary gland prematurely. It can be caused by an endocrine disorder, tumors, rare genetic mutations, or appear without apparent cause in girls. Strangio actually tried to argue that because the drug is used for cis kids for this reason, it cannot be denied much older “trans” children with no precocious puberty who want to change sex before puberty for psychological reasons. Apart from the age and the diagnosis, exactly the same!
In a truly surreal piece yesterday, Masha Gessen repeats the other “argument” about kids whose puberty is unnaturally late:
If a teenager who was assigned male at birth [a boy] can be prescribed testosterone to address delayed male puberty — that is, to receive a form of gender-affirming care — then a teenager who was assigned female at birth [a girl] should have access to the same hormone. [My clarifications.]
In one case, the use of blockers and testosterone is to correct real medical conditions that interfere with natural puberty so that it occurs at the right age. In the other case, the use of blockers and testosterone is for a sex change rooted in psychological feelings that cannot be objectively measured. And they wonder why they lost 6-3.
(Note also how in Gessen’s piece she only talks of “teenagers,” conjuring up images of kids as old as 19. But definitionally, puberty blockers are for kids who have yet to go through their natural puberty — and the average age for that is 10.5 to 11 years for girls and 11.5 to 12 years for boys. You might squeak in a 13 year old, I suppose. But she starts the piece with “Imagine you are a transgender teenager.” Sophistry.)
Strangio wasn’t personally responsible for the Biden administration’s trans radicalism. But he didn’t have to be. Confessore notes that Biden just “deferred to the L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups and the medical associations” in office:
On his first day…, Biden signed an order mandating that executive agencies interpret the word “sex” in all federal antidiscrimination laws to include “gender identity” ... A slew of other orders and proposed rules would follow, instructing prisons, schools, the State Department and other institutions to recognize a person’s gender identity without condition — even a child’s. More or less by fiat, the administration had deemed self-ID the law of the land.
You want to talk about authoritarianism? That’s authoritarianism: imposing massive cultural and social change on a country by executive mandate, allowing no debate, and calling all resistance bigotry. Clueless Joe even seemed to think, according to Confessore’s reporting, that Republicans wanted to ban all mental health therapy for kids with gender issues — not realizing that, in fact, it was his own beloved trans groups who wanted to ban therapy because exploring all possible reasons for dysphoria was now deemed transphobic “conversion therapy”.
In the absence of a functioning president, Biden’s trans appointee, Rachel Levine, filled the breach, calling child sex changes “suicide-prevention care. It ... saves lives.” But even Strangio conceded to SCOTUS that suicides are “thankfully and admittedly rare.” Then Levine secretly politically interfered in the new medical guidelines for the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, by removing all lower age limits for treatment.
Blindsided by Levine, the Biden DOJ nonetheless had to make decisions about joining legal cases. As it pondered, Strangio pulled a Netanyahu and just went ahead with the Skrmetti case in Tennessee, daring Biden not to follow. So Biden … followed. It took discovery in the Alabama case to reveal that WPATH knew there was no good evidence behind transing children but had told the public and parents otherwise. By then, the pathetic Biden peeps privately “worried that their allies had pushed them onto thin scientific ice.” You think?
Strangio and his fellow nutters have also pushed the gay and lesbian rights movement onto thin political ice — and it’s now cracking beneath our feet. The queer radicals have lost an election, debates in 27 state legislatures, the Biden DOJ, public opinion, the Supreme Court, and now — with this definitive piece and a solid podcast series, The Protocol — the New York Times. And next month, the most famous clinic in the US transing kids, run by Johanna Olson-Kennedy, will shutter. She was a key promoter of the suicide lie. The lawsuits are going to be brutal.
Does that mean we can finally actually have a debate about this in the gay and lesbian world? Or that the Democrats will begin to realize just how bamboozled they have been — and right the ship? Ezra Klein’s new interview with Sarah McBride is the first admission from a leading trans figure that they have fucked up badly, and need to regroup. It’s a welcome change of tone and direction.
But I cannot help but note that McBride offered no change in policy, no reassessment of self-ID, no retraction of 73 genders, “chest-feeding,” mandated pronouns, and the crazy rest — let alone an end to child sex changes. On women’s sports, she wants decisions made at a local level and biological men competing with women. It’s a start, I suppose. But it’s going to take sterner stuff to protect vulnerable children from being transed with no safeguards in place, and to recognize that binary sex is a biological reality that is integral to a functioning human society and indispensable for gender variation to exist at all.
Maybe there’s a chance for what’s left of the former gay groups to recover their liberal principles, support free speech, engage opponents, respect religious dissent, use plain English, and trust rigorous, evidence-based science again. If we can do that, and help kids in gender distress without irreversibly and prematurely medicalizing them, we can begin to regain the broader public trust we have recently lost. Know hope.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a paid subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my friendly and very contentious convo with Batya Ungar-Sargon on Trump 2.0; my latest take on the war with Iran; our regular raft of reader and listener dissents; nine notable quotes from the week in news; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of a Hitchcockian Big Bird; a towering window from Columbus; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
A new subscriber on paying for the Dish:
It’s fun! — enlightenment over outrage — high-caliber conversations — principled. Hey, I need my “safe space” too.
Another writes:
Like many, I’ve read your columns since the New Republic days. I’m finally ashamed enough to pay for it. Sorry it took so long.
Israel’s Latest War
It continues as I write. Read my latest take here, for paid subscribers.
New On The Dishcast: Batya Ungar-Sargon
Batya is a journalist and author. She’s a columnist for The Free Press, a co-host of The Group Chat on 2Way, and the author of two books: Bad News: How Woke Media Is Undermining Democracy, and Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women. Her forthcoming book is about, as she puts it, “why Jews are Democrats and why the left turned on the Jews.”
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on Trump’s class warfare, and deporting non-citizens over speech. After a really lovely start, we got heated over Trump, free speech, and Iran. On the pod page, I go through the moments when we disagreed on the facts — and get the neutral Grok to judge who got what right. One correction Grok cannot make: I have indeed read and enjoyed Batya’s work, and have watched her perform on CNN.
Browse the entire Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Paul Elie on crypto-religion in ‘80s pop culture, Walter Isaacson on Ben Franklin, Tara Zahra on the revolt against globalization after WWI, Thomas Mallon on the AIDS crisis, and Johann Hari turning the tables to interview me. (NS Lyons has indefinitely postponed a pod appearance — and his own substack — because he just accepted an appointment at the State Department; and the Arthur Brooks pod is postponed because of calendar conflicts.) Please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This week I joined another pod, The Queer Majority, to talk with Ben Appel (who joined the Dishcast two years ago):
I support enforcing federal laws. I support sending troops or the National Guard to do it if there’s resistance. Nothing fascist about that. Miller’s rhetoric is over the top, but I would take Trump over Harris any day.
I feel like it’s not as bad as you are making it out to be. Democracy is alive and well. Dems will take over House in 2026. If they can nominate a normal human, they will win the White House in 2028. This is about culture and policy differences. I am so happy we have Trump until 2028 — compared to the alternative. Harris would have opened the border even more.
On the second item from last week:
You wrote, “The surprise attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is so new and fresh that it’s wise, I think, to refrain from commenting until we understand events more clearly.”
You probably should have stopped there, since what followed was, at best, shortsighted. In just 36 hours, it has become clear that Israel has done the world an enormous favor by neutralizing Iran’s nuclear program and decapitating its leadership. It’s also clear that the US is and has been involved, which reflects a policy choice the voters made last November. The world is a safer place today than it was on June 12, which was fairly obvious when you published your comment and was inarguable just 12 hours afterwards.
Neocons gonna neocon, I guess. And if you really want to hoist a Mission Accomplished banner now, be my guest. But if you think Trump was elected to pursue another war of choice in the Middle East, I beg to differ. Polls show real opposition to war with Iran; in the WaPo, 45 percent oppose and 20 percent support; and in YouGov, 60 percent oppose (including 53 percent of Republicans.) But hey: it could just be another US war over WMDs in the Middle East. What can possibly go wrong?
As always, please keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com. And follow more Dish debate in my Notes feed.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as Iran, grooming gangs, and a shitposting Mike Lee. Below are a few examples, followed by a new substack:
Jack Goldsmith tackles “Trump’s Continuing Illegal Refusal to Enforce the TikTok Ban.”
John Mac Ghlionn observes that “the real origin of woke’s cultural power wasn’t the classroom — it was the newsroom.”
New to Substack, Matthew Vines mulls over “the paradox of Pride.”
Here’s a list of the substacks we recommend in general — call it a blogroll. If you have any suggestions for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday at 11.59 pm (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month sub if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the VFYW). Contest archive is here. Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Last week, the VFYW biologist covered raccoon dogs, and here’s an excerpt:
I can’t wait to read just how the winners figured it out! But every one of the Chinese cities I searched has an interesting animal in common, so I can still do the animal report. Here’s the raccoon dog:
Like foxes, raccoon dogs have a history in the fur industry, which was responsible for much of their spread across southern China. I found some horrifying exposés of the current fur farms. The fur is apparently often sold as “Asiatic raccoon,” to avoid upsetting dog lovers.
One trait distinguishing raccoon dogs from other foxes is their ability to truly hibernate, with a decreased metabolic rate. They aren’t reliable sleepers, though; if their stored fat starts to run low, or the temperature increases, they may get up and go foraging. I’d be surprised if they hibernate at all in Chinese cities, where they have access to garbage year-round.
You can’t have a pet raccoon dog in the US, but here’s a charming video of a Korean man rescuing and rearing a family of pups:
