Yesterday’s opinion section of The New York Times included a column on gender pegged to the occasion of a nation-shaking 50th anniversary. In 1972, this event led a generation of young Americans, especially girls, to believe that they could be and do just about anything.
Maybe you’re thinking: It’s Roe vs. Wade, the Supreme Court case that guaranteed a constitutional right to abortion. 1972’s Roe, along with the 1965 Griswold vs. Connecticut decision on contraception, meant that I, like the woman who wrote the Times piece, came of age in a new world: one in which women had bodily autonomy. Unwanted pregnancy remained a fear, but reproductive freedom ensured unprecedented economic and social freedoms. A column at the close of 2022, the year in which the GOP overturned Roe vs. Wade, looking back on what we’ve lost, would make sense.
If this was your good guess, you’d be wrong. The column wasn’t focused on Roe vs. Wade, or its loss, or the concerted half-a-century conservative campaign to turn back the clock on the rights and freedoms of Americans. Its focus was instead on 1972’s Marlo Thomas media juggernaut — album, book, and network television special — Free to Be…You & Me.
The columnist took the opportunity of the anniversary of a favorite children’s program to explain how in the 1970s, America was a better place to grow up. Traditional gender roles were being upended and children were taught they could do and be anything they wanted. But then, she tells us, the ideologues screwed everything up.
The columnist is Pamela Paul, who briefly mentions a “conservative backlash” before devoting the heart of her piece to how progressives are ruining these egalitarian ideals. This is part of a pattern for Paul, an undisputed champ in the both-sides competition among contrarian centrists and faux-so-reasonable conservatives:
Opinion writers have our favorite angles. My temptation was to focus this newsletter on who Paul chooses as the main villains of her piece. It’s not the Supreme Court justices who took reproductive rights from tens of millions of Americans or the powerful conservative organizations who engineered the current court — because of course she never mentions Roe. It’s not the toy manufacturers or the helicopter parents she throws into the mix to seem fair and balanced. It’s teachers. That’s right, lefty teachers are the group trampling on young people’s ability to be themselves:
Now we risk losing those advances. In lieu of liberating children from gender, some educators have doubled down, offering children a smorgasbord of labels — gender identity, gender role, gender performance and gender expression — to affix to themselves from a young age.
But the teacher smearing shouldn’t be my focus, though we’ve seen accusations they are sexualizing children become a talking point of right-wing extremists, leading to threats, intimidation, and harassment of educators, especially LGBTQ+ ones.
My focus should be on Paul’s purpose, which is important. Yesterday’s column is another in a series she has written that are transphobic, part of an effort, as Melissa Gira Grant describes it, of “laying the groundwork for a mainstream case for trans exclusion.” In July, Paul argued that recognizing transgender people is “misogynist” and is “to deny women their humanity, reducing them to a mix of body parts and gender stereotypes.” Grant explains that Paul’s argument is “lightly laundered anti-trans propaganda, presented as a sensible centrist argument.”
Reading Paul yesterday, I was reminded of the limits of my parents’ open-mindedness when I was growing up in the 70s; they moved from stone silence about the older bachelors we knew to a vague insistence that “some people are asexual,” an attitude they seemed to think was evolved. I was reminded of the unremitting and uncorrected bullying peers were subject to throughout school as they feared opening up even to those of us who were their closest friends about their sexual identity. Oh, yes, and like Paul, I grew up in a "remotely liberal enclave.”
Gregg Gonsalves noted that Paul’s nostalgia for the 70s is nostalgia for a time when members of the LGBTQ+ community could be more easily disregarded:
When Gonsalves appropriately calls out the Times for the timing of the column, it serves as a reminder that we rarely get distance these days from new attacks on LGBTQ+ people and spaces. (Here’s one from yesterday.) LGBTQ+ students in K-12 schools are experiencing markedly increased harassment all year round. Far-right rhetoric around gender and sexuality is psychologically and physically dangerous to human beings, and a major newspaper seems to be helping mainstream it.
Pundits like Paul would like to distance themselves from the virulent sexism, racism, and homophobia of the MAGA crowd. They don’t want to go all the way back to the 1950s, only the 1970s, back to the illusion of that moment that some Gen Xers and Boomers had that the civil rights and women’s right battles had been fought and won. It would be unseemly to suggest liberals took things too far in the 1950s and 1960s, but it’s okay I guess to argue they did so after that. Paul celebrates the nonbinary clothing and toys familiar from her youth, but rejects the nonbinary children rendered invisible in that time — and this. The weak logic helps highlight the delusion, as Michael Hobbes pointed out:
I have to circle back to the glaring omission in Paul’s piece. It is revealing that she crowed about women’s advances in the early 1970s while erasing how reproductive freedom was a key driver of those advances. (While some conservatives can act as though singular cultural products like Free to Be hold the same power as federal or state laws enforceable by arrest or fine, they know that’s not true.) To address the indisputable importance of Roe vs. Wade would be for Paul to admit the severity of the threat to women from the right wing and the importance to all of rights regarding sexual health and reproductive freedom. The many failures of Paul’s column — the both sides-ing, the confusing logic, the refusal to recognize the historical moment — arise from her need to underplay the threat posed by those uncouth MAGAs whose views about gender overlap with hers. It’s a reminder that feminism requires inclusivity, that disappearing transgender people without disappearing women is a task impossible.