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David Remnick: Masha Gessen is a staff writer at The New Yorker, the author of many books on Russia and the nature of autocracy. Masha, who identifies as trans, is also a leading figure in covering LGBT rights. The other morning, I wrote Masha Gessen an email asking to talk about the arguments taking place all over, from The New York Times to Netflix to the political stage, about how we talk about trans issues. They wrote back immediately and with such insight that I quickly asked Masha to come join us here. Masha, to hear many Republicans right now, you'd think that LGBTQ rights are somehow as big a threat as the Cold War or nuclear war.

I just spoke with a Democratic state senator in Nebraska, and she's fighting to block a bill that would withhold gender-affirming care from trans kids. She said to me that the Republicans in her legislature aren't really that worked up about trans rights, but that these bills are designed to get airtime on Fox News and are a directive from the National Party. That seems like a convenient argument for a Democrat to make in a certain way that doesn't want to make too many enemies with the Republicans. What is the motivation for DeSantis, for Trump, for the Republican Party to make this issue into something so enormous?

Masha Gessen: I think I probably agree with the state senator a little bit in the sense that all of these bills are about signaling. What they're signaling is the essence of past-oriented politics. It's a really convenient signal because some of the most recent, most clear, and most rapid social change concerns LGBT rights, in general, and trans rights and trans visibility in particular.

All the autocratic politics that we see around the world right now are past-oriented politics. It's Putin returning the great Russia and note that Putin's war in Ukraine goes hand in hand with extreme anti-LGBT rhetoric. In his last speech, he took time to assert that God is male and that the crazy Europeans and the Nazi Ukrainians are trying to make God gender fluid. I'm not kidding.

David Remnick: More simply, men are men and women are women, and that's the end of the story.

Masha Gessen: That's simplicity. Women are women, men are men. There's social and financial stability. There's where relevant, there's whiteness. There's a comfortable and predictable future. That's a message that says, "We are going to return you to a time when you were uncomfortable when things weren't scary, when things didn't make you uncomfortable, when you didn't fear that your kid was going to come home from school and tell you that they're trans." Andrew Solomon has written beautifully about this, about the very specific disconnect and anxiety connected with having children whose identity is completely different from yours. I think that's--

David Remnick: How upsetting that is to so many people or who are the appeal of is that this wouldn't happen, is what you mean?

Masha Gessen: Right. It's promising to take that fear away. Promising that take that anxiety away is truly powerful.

David Remnick: Now, I think a lot of our listeners, maybe almost all of them at this point, because we're in the middle of the story of the war in Ukraine, know you, at least recently, as somebody who's covering that and covering that so magnificently. As I more than once reminded you, the first time I ever met you or even saw you was, I think in 1990 and you were leading or part of a gay rights demonstration in Moscow. You're a citizen, both of Russia and the United States, and this has been been a big part of your life.

I thought maybe we'd go back even farther in time and for you to tell me about your own journey, about gender, about sexuality, and why this has become such a big part of your life as well as your journalism and your writing.

Masha Gessen: Professionally, I started out in gay and lesbian journalism as it was known at the time in the mid-80s. Obviously, because at the time, it was obvious that if somebody was doing gay and lesbian journalism, they were at least queer. Growing up, I was most definitely trans-identified, except I didn't have words for it.

David Remnick: We're talking how old then?

Masha Gessen: Five, six. I remember at the age of five, going to sleep in my [Russian language], the Russian preschool, and hoping that I would wake up a boy and I had people address me by a boy's name. My parents fortunately were incredibly game. I remember that in the late '70s, so I would've been like 10 or 11 years old, they read in a Polish magazine about transsexual at that point surgery and told me about it. I said, "Oh, I'm going to have an operation when I grow up." They said, "That's fine."

Then I went through puberty and I could no longer live as a boy so clearly and then I was a lesbian for many, many years or more likely queer. I've always thought of myself as having more of a gender identity than a sexual orientation.

David Remnick: What does that mean?

Masha Gessen: It means that we're not supposed to talk like this in the '80s and '90s. In the '80s and '90s, we were supposed to be very clear about sexual orientation being separate from gender and that if you were a lesbian, that didn't mean you wanted to be a man. I've always been attracted to both men and women, but I've always been very clearly gender nonconforming.

David Remnick: Now, one of the things that became part of a certain education after a while and at a certain period of time was the following sentence, gender is a construct. I think most people over the centuries thought of gender as given to you by biology. What is the origins of the notion of gender as a construct?

Masha Gessen: Actually, recently, I think Judith Butler, who did a lot to popularize that idea, an idea of gender as performance, which I think is even more relevant to what we're talking about. She said fairly recently-- I'm sorry, they said fairly recently in an interview that--

David Remnick: I think it'd be warming for some listeners to know that you made this mistake. We're leaving it in.

Masha Gessen: Okay. They said that gender is imitation without an original. I think that's a beautiful description, not only of how gender operates but also why we have so much trouble when we do journalism, especially about transgender issues.

David Remnick: What does it mean that it has no original? Some would say, "Well, of course, there's an original. There's Adam and there's Eve."

Masha Gessen: The simple answer would be, and a lot of standard journalism will give this answer, which is, "That's different, that's sex." It's not so different. Sex is also not so clear-cut. There are biological determinants of sex that vary from person to person, and there are expectations of gender which change with time, both historical time and personal time.

One of the best quotes I've heard from somebody who studies gender and actually medical intervention was, "Look, the gender of a five-year-old girl and a 50-year-old woman is not the same." Oh, right. You're right. We think of these things as stable and knowable, but they're not. They're actually fluid by definition and in our lived experience, they're fluid.

David Remnick: I think some people would say homosexuality is something that we have known about for many, many centuries. It's in our literature, it's in history books, but that somehow, generationally, trans people with very, very rare notable exceptions. Renée Richards, the tennis player, Jan Morris, the writer, and it seemed extraordinarily exceptional. Then suddenly, it becomes part of our modern lives. How do you mark that historically and socially?

Masha Gessen: First, I want to challenge it a little bit.

David Remnick: Sure.

Masha Gessen: There's a lot of documentation of people living as the opposite sex in various historical periods. In fact, there's a lot of art depicting especially the young woman who dresses as a man and goes to war, is a plot that we see in so many different cultures, is a woman who lives her life-- A person assigned female at birth in or modern language who lives their entire life as a man, marries a woman and is discovered to have unexpected genitalia after death. Is that a transgender person? Part of it is not dissimilar to homosexuality, which was something that existed, but wasn't talked about, and then all of a sudden was out in the open in this country in the late '60s, early '70s. It's also different.

This is where we started getting into so much trouble with journalistic coverage because it is plainly noble that so many more people, especially young people, are identifying as transgender than were even 10 years ago, even 5 years ago. The easiest way to try to wrap your mind around it is to pretend that being transgender is again something stable. That being transgender today is exactly the same thing as being transgender was 20 years ago and that we can distinguish it from being homosexual, but we can't.

Being transgender today is different from being transgender 20 years ago. Being transgender in a society that understands that some people are transgender is fundamentally different.

David Remnick: What's the most important thing right now? What are the issues when it comes to trans people that are urgent and crucially important?

Masha Gessen: Well, I think the bills around the country are absolutely crucially important. Part of what makes me think that is that I have seen, not just in Russia, but, say, in Hungary and in Poland, the attacks on LGBT people and attacks on what they call gender ideology.

David Remnick: Which is what?

Masha Gessen: Gender ideology is the specter of a totalitarian regime that will enforce gender fluidity best as I can interpret it. Gender ideology is a term that floats around.

David Remnick: This is the creation of a hysteria?

Masha Gessen: Right, but this is a term that appears in Brazil and in Hungary, and in Russia. It is heavily weaponized by autocrats and I don't know if you remember some years ago, there was footage of Judith Butler being attacked, I think at an airport in Brazil. They were attacked by some person. There was some protest with placards saying down with your gender ideology. That was actually, I think the first time I heard the term.

David Remnick: You speak of Brazil, Russia, Hungary, and absolutely correct, but let's move closer to home. At CPAC meeting last week, Michael Knowles from The Daily Wire made a speech calling for the, and I quote, "eradication" of what he called transgenderism. He then had to clarify that it was not a call to eradicate trans people as such, but an ideology of transgenderism. Is there any distinction?

Masha Gessen: No, of course, there's no distinction. That's why I started with Russia because I remember back when I was stupid about 12 years ago, seeing that there was some regional bill to outlaw LGBT propaganda and thinking it was ridiculous and wouldn't apply to me.

David Remnick: This is why you left Russia.

Masha Gessen: Two years later I was on the run from Russia because they were actually coming after my kids.

David Remnick: The fact somebody in the legislature made specific mention of you, tell us about that.

Masha Gessen: It was a politician named Vitaly Milonov who was at the forefront of fighting the LGBT scourge who said that all Americans want to do is adopt Russian orphans and raise them in perverted families like Masha Gassen's, which was basically a sign to me that I had to get my adopted son out of the country, which also meant I had to leave the country. When I see that transgender care, first for kids, then for adults, is already illegal in some states, and for adults is likely to become illegal in some states, I know that, my testosterone in New York is probably not as safe as I think it is.

David Remnick: Last week, both Mississippi and Tennessee banned gender-affirming healthcare for trans youth, all of them. When we talk about gender-affirming care, let's be clear, what specifically are we talking about there or anywhere?

Masha Gessen: This is actually another topic where I think that criticism of the journalism is misguided because some of the criticism of the journalism has been don't question standards of care. Well, it is our job as journalists to question standards of care. Journalists should absolutely question standards of care, and there's some legitimate controversy about standards of care for trans youth. What's completely uncontroversial is social transition.

David Remnick: By social transition, you mean?

Masha Gessen: I mean living as this gender that the person identifies as, fully changing name, changing pronouns, et cetera. What's not terribly controversial is hormone treatment in young people who have gone through puberty. What is somewhat controversial is puberty blockers which are in many places the standard of care, which puberty blockers are exactly what they sound like. They delay puberty. Then the idea and certainly people's experiences that if they don't go through the puberty of the sex with which they don't identify, they don't grow ab breast or they don't grow hair and testicles, then it'll be much easier to transition when they start receiving hormone treatment.

There's some studies that point to potential risks of long-term, more than a year or so, use of puberty blockers. That is absolutely a legitimate topic of discussion. Of course, it's become very, very difficult to cover because there are bills in Texas, Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and other states that lump all of these treatments in the same bucket and seek to outlaw or have already outlawed.

David Remnick: Where does surgery come in?

Masha Gessen: Surgery is very, very rarely something that people under 18 have.

David Remnick: It seems to me that when I listen to the rhetoric of the right, you would think that surgery on very young people without parents knowing it is somehow sweeping the country.

Masha Gessen: As far as I know, not a thing.

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David Remnick: I'm talking with The New Yorker's Masha Gessen. They've written for years about LGBTQ issues, and we're going to continue in a moment wrestling with trans coverage in the media. Dave Chappelle's, trans jokes, and much more. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, stick around.

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This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick. I'm talking today with Masha Gessen, who's been contributing to The New Yorker since 2014 and has been a staff writer since 2017. Alongside their coverage of Russia and the war in Ukraine and American politics, Masha has written in-depth on LGBTQ issues. We spoke earlier in the program about why the American right has fastened onto gender issues with such ferocity. Politicians have introduced bills all over the country that would have drastic effects on trans children and adults.

Apart from the politics, it also seems to me that many supporters of trans people, people of all kinds, often have a difficult time talking about and understanding issues of trans identity. I wanted to hear from Masha Gessen on that as well. Masha, we've seen any number of instances, whether it's a tumult at The New York Times about its coverage or at Netflix about Dave Chappelle and his comedy and the controversy that's caused and the upset that that caused and the reaction back and forth.

How would you approach talking about the conversation about trans people? What is the state of it? Where are we? Why is it so fraught and difficult and so often painful?

Masha Gessen: I think it's so painful and so fraught because it is very difficult in covering transness to avoid engaging with the argument about whether trans people actually exist or have the right to exist. That is deeply painful to trans people and I would imagine to people who love trans people. That's actually something that should be off-limits, but it is very hard.

For example, in Emily Bazelon's, excellent piece in The New York Times magazine last summer about the battle over transgender treatment. There's a quote from Andrew Sullivan, the conservative gay journalist who says, "Well, maybe, these people would have been gay if they hadn't." Maybe implying they're really gay and they're not really transgender. That really clearly veers into the territory of saying these people don't exist, they're not who they say they are.

David Remnick: You're saying that Emily Bazelon should not have included that remark from Sullivan. I think it was a paraphrase of Sullivan, rather than a quotation.

Masha Gessen: I wouldn't have. I think that that piece would have been even better without that quote. I think that you can-- As journalists, we're not under obligation to quote every single view on an issue. I think we have the right to exclude the view that somebody is not who they say they are.

David Remnick: I think it's even true, Masha, correct me if I'm wrong, that even you, as a trans person writing about trans issues have not escaped [crosstalk] and whacked across the head. I believe I'm right. No?

Masha Gessen: Absolutely, yes, I was cancelled by trans-Twitter once.

David Remnick: What happened?

Masha Gessen: This is another reason why it's so difficult. Different trans people have vastly different experiences of being trans. I had a whole life as a female person. Not only that, I carried a pregnancy to term and gave birth and breastfed. Then years later, cut off those breasts and am enjoying the effects of that. I didn't start my transition until the age of 50 and I have talked about it as a series of choices that I've made. For a lot of people, and this is also true when we talk about sexuality, for a lot of people, it really truly never feels like a choice. It feels like an existential issue. They feel like there's a single true self.

That single true self-narrative dominates the trans side of the controversy around coverage of trans issues, I think wrongly so. I think it's one way of living and experiencing life as a trans person. I'm really concerned about a lot of the criticism of the coverage of transitions, because even though I'm very unhappy with a lot of the coverage, I think that criticizing it on the grounds that there's too much of it is wrong and dangerous. The argument generally goes there so few trans people, why are you obsessed with them?

Well, I'm old enough to have been an AIDS journalist. I remember when the New York Times wasn't covering AIDS because there were so few people affected by it. That's a crazy reason not to cover something. Trans issues are absolutely newsworthy, because it's new. In the sense that the prevalence of people who identify as trans is new, it's literally news. Republicans are making political hay about it, that's news. Most interestingly, and this is where we get into why it's so difficult, being trans is unlike anything else. Being trans is not a medical condition, but it marries you for life to the medical system. It almost always, not always, involves some kind of medical intervention.

How do we think about the way that people make decisions? Both sides of the debate are really interested in the issue of regret. Look at regret and de-transition as a measure of the rightness or wrongness of particular approaches to trans treatment. I hate using the word treatment, I'm always stumbling over it, because it's not actually treatment, but it is treatment but it's not a medical condition.

One side, especially the opponents of childhood medical intervention for trans-identified kids say that many of them go on to have regrets and de-transition. Proponents say, "No, very few of them have regret." I say, "Wait a second, kids and their parents, especially teenagers make a huge number of decisions that have lifelong implications, and that are likely to result in regret."

David Remnick: For example.

Masha Gessen: For example, taking out huge student loans to go to college and being saddled with them for life. For example, joining ROTC and becoming part of the military for life.

David Remnick: Is that comparable to a physical decision?

Masha Gessen: For example, starting to take antidepressants or other medical treatments. I teach college, fully half of my students are on some kind of lifelong medical treatment that either their parents or their and their parents together decided to commit to when they were kids or teenagers. Not that different, not the same. This is where coverage is so difficult because a lot of trans people being understandably offended or hurt by some comparisons say, "Don't compare." The only way we as humans make meaning is we compare one thing to another and say, "It's like this in some ways, and unlike it in other ways."

Back to the issue of regret, wouldn't it be wonderful if we could think of transition as a lifelong option? Some people transition more than once. Some people transition from female to male and then transition from male to female, and then maybe transition again. That doesn't tell us that their first transition was wrong any more than my living as a woman and being pregnant and having children was wrong, although I'm sure I would also have lived a very happy life had I had the chance to transition at 20.

David Remnick: We talked about the New York Times. The Atlantic also sparked a lot of backlash in 2018 for a cover article about de-transitioning. The amount of coverage that de-transitioning received in the media, hass that amount of that been skewed? Has that altered your perception of how the press is covering this in general?

Masha Gessen: Yes, I think there's way too much focus on de-transitioning, and you know what? I think that's about in part, there's this it's almost is what Susan Sontag called the sex exception, except it's the gender exception. We normalize regret on all other areas of life. We do things and then we regret them. We have children and regret it all the time. That's perfectly normal.

David Remnick: Speak for yourself, he quickly added.

Masha Gessen: We think that something so catastrophic happens to a person who transitions. It's like this book a few years ago by Abigail Shrier called Irreversible Damage. This idea that you do something to yourself, that you will never gain back. In particular, she was talking about girls making the choice to forfeit being able to bear children, which is a big thing, but also not a unique thing, not a life-ruining thing necessarily bute do talk about it. All the older losses a person can have in their life, this is one that we can't make up for.

David Remnick: How much do you care about eruptions of conversation and Twitter furor when it comes to J. K. Rowling or Dave Chappelle? Are these important moments in the development of the way we talk about trans people?

Masha Gessen: I'm going to get myself into so much trouble. Twitter furor is not generally a useful tool for cultural sense-making. Dave Chappelle, to my mind, is absolutely fascinating. I've watched, I think, all or most of his trans jokes recently because I needed to discuss them with somebody, and I found them brilliant and radical. The way, for example, he talks about bathroom bills, it's quite incredible. Basically, the point that I heard him making was that he would rather share the bathroom with a man with a vagina than a woman with a penis. That is a completely next-level trans-accepting kind of humor.

Then I was speaking to a very prominent trans woman writer who was so upset that I liked the Dave Chappelle special because all she heard him say was that her vagina was an, "Impossible Burger." That's a quote. I can understand that. I thought that was funny, but I also didn't take it personally. If we could sit down and discuss these things, especially with Dave Chappelle, I think that would move the conversation forward.

David Remnick: Masha, do you think the left generally does a good job of speaking on trans issues in a way that a broader public can understand? We've been talking about CPAC. We've talked about the Republican Party, Ron DeSantis, Trump, and the rest. What about the other side of things, with the Democratic Party dialogue broadly speaking about these issues?

Masha Gessen: I want to be generous about this.

David Remnick: Why?

Masha Gessen: I want to acknowledge the difficult situation that we're in. I'm very frustrated with both LGBT activist organizations and other prominent advocacy organizations with the very reductive ways in which they frame trans issues, for example, framing access to gender-affirming care for trans youth as a question of suicide and survival. There's extremely high rate of suicide risk among trans people in general, but gender-affirming care doesn't actually seem to be the answer to the suicide risk. Maybe, more social acceptance is the answer.

I think that, in general, the Democratic Party follows the lead of advocacy organizations, which is actually good. The blame is with the advocacy organizations, but it's very hard to blame the advocacy organizations for not being complex and nuanced in their rhetoric when the right is on social rampage. That's why I want to be generous.

David Remnick: We've been talking about The New York Times, but what do you hope for our own publication about as we move forward and we write about this, grapple with this, think about this? What should we be doing, and how do we get better?

Masha Gessen: I think one thing that I'm really happy to have been able to do is just write about trans people, is there's nothing unusual about trans people.

David Remnick: The transness is almost incidental to what you're writing.

Masha Gessen: Exactly. I guess, we have to wade into this controversy, which does exist. Some of the criticism of trans coverage in The Times and elsewhere has said, "Oh, it's a manufactured cultural war." Of course, all cultural wars are manufactured, but this one is happening. We have to figure out a way to cover it, I think, in a complicated way.

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David Remnick: Masha Gessen, thank you so much.

Masha Gessen: Thank you.

David Remnick: You can read all of Masha Gessen's reporting on Ukraine and Russia and much more at newyorker.com.

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