Curator

Trans, Poly, Psychedelics

Dear Friends,

I haven’t done one of these in a while. This is my round-up of pieces from the more cultural side of the web.

Best,

Sam

CHU V. SULLIVAN V. DOUTHAT

I really am very wary of writing about trans issues. My analysis often doesn’t end up being much more complicated than ‘live-and-let-live.’ But there is now so much overlaid on the issue that all of our disparate ideas about sexuality seem to play themselves out over questions like puberty blockers and eligibility for sports programs. 

It is nice, though, to have everybody, in some sense, together in the same room for once on this, and Andrea Long Chu’s piece on the “Freedom of Sex” in New York Magazine provides the impetus for a few different thinkers to articulate what they really mean when they’re talking about sex. 

Chu’s piece is a difficult read. It’s vituperative, utterly self-confident, and almost dazzlingly incoherent. In a really punishing takedown on his Substack,

Andrew Sullivan

writes that the value of it is having “critical queer and gender theorists making actual arguments in the public square” — and it is an opportunity to dig through some of the usually unstated assumptions of a prevailing social orthodoxy. 

The position that Chu really wants to stake out is a kind of blank slatism — biology dictates nothing, everything is a choice, and everything that is genuinely conducive to human happiness is a ‘right.’ Here is how she describes what she calls “a universal birthright — the freedom of sex”: 

We should understand this right as flowing not from a revanchist allegiance to an existing social order on the perpetual verge of collapse but from a broader ideal of biological justice, from which there also flows the right to abortion, the right to nutritious food and clean water, and, crucially, the right to health care.

It’s very difficult to know, in an argument like Chu’s, how we get from one place to another. How exactly does children-having-the-right-to-choose-their-gender connect to universal health care? And what’s proven by the medical horror stories Chu cites going back to the 1910s? And how exactly does the Antebellum South figure in the case Chu is making?

As Sullivan more than demonstrates, Chu has taken a departure from reality altogether and is living in fantasy land — and not just fantasy land. Proud fantasy land. Fantasy land in which the imposition of any sort of biological reality is deemed inimical to progress. Here are a few choice morsels from Chu’s piece: 

- “Justice is always an attempt to change reality.”

- “If children are too young to consent to puberty blockers, then they are definitely too young to consent to puberty, which is a drastic biological upheaval in its own right.”

- “What does this freedom look like in practice? Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status.”

Well sure. It sounds nice for anyone to change their sex infinitely as many times as they want, but the whole point of the argument here is about irreversible surgeries and hormonal treatments, which may, among other things, eliminate the ability as an adult to procreate. It’s nice — citing the “freedom of sex” — to imagine that gender is as easy as endlessly swapping clothes, but, of course, these are human bodies, not dolls, and some things you do really cannot be undone. And, as for letting trans girls play sports, no problem — but why in the world are we pretending that that doesn’t create an unlevel playing field in women’s athletics. 

Sullivan dispenses swiftly with Chu’s more extreme characterizations of what she calls the “anti-trans movement.” He writes: 

Actually, we are just trying to make sure that kids aren’t medicalized irreversibly; that homosexuality is defined by attraction to the same sex, not the opposite one; and that trans people should have full civil rights (as they do), alongside a tiny number of sane, pragmatic accommodations to, yes, reality: in sports, in intimate spaces, and in the English language. That’s all.

In a debate like that between Chu and Sullivan, the sutures within the society become more visible. For Chu, reality is — yes, really — a form of “nihilism.” Justice is always found in the endeavor to alter, no matter the success or failure of that attempt. And the principle of choice overrides even something as inapparently inalienable as puberty. For Sullivan — who is, in Chu’s terms, a “trans-agnostic reactionary liberal” (TARL)— it’s exactly the opposite. The nihilism is in “blank slatism” and the turn to the abstract, in the complete denial of the world as-it-is in the service of some half-baked ideal. 

No wonder we can’t all get along. 

Ross Douthat, as is his way, tries to find a middle ground. Chu, he claims, gets carried away with a “more radical liberation,” but her reframing is actually important. The argument for childhood transitioning isn’t — as Douthat puts it — “a matter of certain, settled science.” It’s a matter of choice. All the appeals to science — to questions about the prevalence of “intersex,” to questions about percentages of people who are genuinely “trapped in the wrong body” as opposed to those who are subject to a craze — don’t matter. If you feel that you are a different gender, then — in a liberal paradigm — what is there to stop you? 

Sullivan argues, compellingly, that a facile case like that misses the intricacies of consent that underlie all our frameworks on thinking about childhood: 

New York Magazine has a cover story implicitly defending sex with children. Think about it for a millisecond: if a child of any age can demand to have his own genitals removed with no safeguards at all, why can’t he demand to have his genitals played with by an adult as well? Who dare impede a child’s total freedom? 

Which, right, puts us back to where we started. Consent and choice are all very good and well until you get into that other progressive sticking-point of who can genuinely, freely give consent. Here, again, Chu’s point collapses into incoherence and all that we’re left with is an ideal — “freedom of sex” — shouted at the top of one’s lungs, with no thought at all to how that manifests, and with anybody who even dares to try to think it through called a TARL or a reactionary or worse. 

POLYAM IDEALISM

But Douthat is right to sense that Chu is getting at something apart from the ‘more radical liberation.’ And what it is is a notion that authority — whether ‘scientific’ or traditional — can be excised from sexual practices. That sex is always about figuring things out, trying new things — and the job of society-at-large is to back away and let it be. 

Douthat takes 2017 as the watershed year — #MeToo combined with the death of Hugh Hefner — in which a new regime of sexuality emerged. “That idea of sex-as-process, with the sexual act itself embedded inside a kind of ‘best practices’ of dialogue and interaction, seems to be where social liberalism has settled, for now, in its attempt to create a post-Hefnerian sexual culture,” he writes.

So long as you talk about it is the consensus of the moment. 

That’s being raked over in an another set of articles related to the current fascination with polyamory. Molly Roden Winter’s memoir of her open marriage, combined with a New York Magazine issue dedicated entirely to polyamory, produced the expected outcries in response. Almost everything about poly rubs the normies the wrong way. It seems privileged and twee — a nightmare of a millennial affectation. It seems deeply unhealthy — the reviewers of Winter’s book notice that she seems to be crying most of the time, in more troubled waters than she ever expected to be. And, reading something like Allison P. Davis’ New York Magazine feature, it also seems profoundly unsexy — with all the google calendars, all the dating rules and even appendices, all the endless relationship check-ins. “It’s like for relationship nerds,” says one of the polys in the New York piece.

And here’s a spoiler alert: polyamory, open marriages, ethical non-monogamy, all of these never work. Human jealousy is too powerful of a force, too easily overwhelming all of the boundaries and rules and emotional compartments. Probably the cute polycule structure works for New York Magazine’s 20-somethings. It’s a different story once you get into kids and middle age and the deep dark woods of relationships. 

But, in the context of this magazine-piece debate, the polyams make a good showing for themselves. The argument, as they present it, is not that they can overcome jealousy. The argument is that jealousy is the third rail for any monogamous relationship. Once that’s tripped in any way, then the relationship, essentially, is over. But it’s impossible to not trip that wire since the relationship itself is based on sexual attraction — and absurd to imagine (reams of romantic comedies notwithstanding) that that attraction would never extend to anyone else. Monogamous relationships are a logical contradiction, is the argument, and bound in, defined, by the repressions inherent in them. 

What poly represents is a genuinely idealistic way of imagining the world, believing that jealousy doesn’t have to be hidden away in a relationship — that jealousy can be examined, talked about, overcome. The poly people in the spate of articles on the subject are quick to emphasize that they view poly as the hard choice, not the easy one. “I joke that polyamory is like the Olympics of relationships,” said a poly in a Guardian piece. “Some people like to run marathons, we like to do complex relationship stuff,” said one of the polys in New York. “It’s living life on hard mode,” said another. 

Put like that, it’s more comprehensible — and admirable. Plenty of societies have polygamy. The book I’m reading now, Joseph Henrich’s WEIRD, argues that the West is truly an outlier in its insistence on monogamy — and the chivalric/Romantic fairy tales that grew up around monogamy — and that that tradition puts absurd, intolerable pressure on a relationship: people change and the romance goes out; people find themselves facing a sense of deep disillusion. In practice, what most people do is either divorce or cheat and compartmentalize. The poly movement is — the degree of difficulty notwithstanding — a response to an era of weak bonding and an attempt to get back to something that predates the European chivalric tradition and has more in common with other cultures. Relationships are somewhat utilitarian, is the idea. You’re not looking for the one — or, even if you found them, your sexual drive wouldn’t be entirely satisfied. You can get what you are looking for from multiple partners, good communication, an acceptance of tradeoffs and compromises.

PSYCHEDELIC BACKLASH

This seems to finish the round-up of what my generation — at least on its more idealistic end — has tried to give to the world: a notion of gender fluidity; a notion of sexual relationships as ongoing dialogue (as opposed to the earlier premise of sexual relationships as covenants); and an excitement about the transformative powers of psychedelics. 

And, at the moment, everybody seems to be unhappy with the fall-out of every one of those ideas. The psychedelic renaissance — which seemed a dizzying, miraculous event five years ago — is in the middle of a pushback. The old taboos against psychedelics — concerns about flashbacks, the stigma against anything tie-dyed — vanished without a trace. Ketamine and psilocybin showed up in the toolkit of clinical practitioners. Microdosing became almost a part of an optimized productivity regime. 

But a backlash was inevitable. In October, a pilot who tried to cut engines mid-flight claimed that he was microdosing mushrooms. Whether that’s really what was going on or not is hard to know, but it’s the nightmare scenario for legalization advocates. Compact Magazine — not so surprisingly — has an article against ‘the pseudo-religion of psychedelics,’ although somewhat more unexpectedly taking aim at its capitalistic applications:

An experience of transcendence instantly occasioned by a drug but leading to no systemic change isn’t revolutionary. It is instead a powerful tool for the captains of industry who need a never-ending supply of laborers just happy enough to show up and clock in.

And Richard Friedman, in The Atlantic, gives a thoughtful discussion of the over-promise of psychedelics. “Limitless drug-induced self-enhancement is simply an illusion,” he writes. The point here is not about some catastrophic event occurring during a psychedelic trip, and not about addiction or physiological damage (which turn out to be negligible risks with psychedelics), but about people simply over-believing in miracle cures and being let-down when regular life can’t quite match the epiphanies engendered by the psychedelics. 

This is a real challenge and a major question in how society integrates itself with the psychedelic renaissance. The psychedelics are there, becoming more readily available — as they should be — and they seem to be, for most people who take them, an important part of a journey of self-discovery. On the other hand, the disillusion is very real — and integration is, for most people who do psychedelics, something of a lifelong process. What hasn’t really happened — and I expected it would by now — is a sense of a collective shift in the society as a result of access to psychedelics (the sort of thing that occurred in the ‘60s with the sudden prevalence of LSD). I’ve seen so little clearly psychedelic-infused art (maybe Maniac and Russian Doll) and so little publicly-stated belief that the psychedelics can serve as pathfinders for a different, more harmonious way of being. A great deal of the social movement of the late ‘60s was an extension of LSD. I haven’t seen that to be the case now — and the backlash is already at hand. 

There is a recent New York Times article that I was very happy to come across on a round of trials for ibogaine. I worked on a documentary about ibogaine and It was, without any question, the closest I’ve come in my life to witnessing a miracle. I’ve written about it here. I had the experience of being around heroin addicts - people who had tried every possible cure — and who, within hours of taking ibogaine, had no cravings, no side-effects, and had a window in which they could reset their lives. Some of them went on to relapse, but there was no question that it was, by many orders of magnitude, far more effective than anything in the current medical pharmacopeia for the treatment of heroin addiction.

Addict’s note to self — ibogaine center

The problem with ibogaine — what its advocates have struggled with for decades — is the sheer weirdness of it and the inability to navigate the FDA testing process. I remember it being explained to me that $20 million really was the minimum for taking a drug through the FDA process, and the difficulty in patenting ibogaine as well as its history as a Schedule I substance meant that — no matter how startling the benefits — it almost certainly would never have a fair trial. 

But that day is coming very sooner than I ever thought it would. There are the usual chicken-and-egg problems. As Nolan Williams put it in The New York Times piece, “Without a greenlight to conduct studies from the F.D.A., you just can’t do the kind of randomized trials that are the gold standard for clinical studies.” But, amidst all the (understandable) backlash on psychedelics, these trials genuinely represent something new and exciting in the world — a willingness to think outside of the box and to work with a substance that may be weird but is also efficacious and that is representative of an entirely different paradigm of consciousness.