We Can't Know: Lisa Selin Davis On Getting Comfortable With The "Giant Mess" That Is The Current Gender Conversation

The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Meghan Daum

Society & Culture

4.7 • 855 Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2021

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Part three of Gender Nuance, a three-part series for the week of October 4, 2021 In the third and final part of the podcast's weeklong "Gender Nuance" series, Meghan talks with journalist Lisa Selin Davis about the cultural and political forces that have factored into the current gender movement and why the media has failed to cover the whole story. The author of a book about the evolution of gender stereotypes and herself the mother of a gender nonconforming child, Lisa explains how the movement was galvanized by shifts in journalistic norms during the Trump administration and how institutions like schools, the nonprofit sector and the medical establishment got caught up in a worldview and treatment protocol that's backed up by very little reliable data. She traces some of the history of gender nonconformity and explains what the concept of a "third gender" means in indigenous, nonwestern populations in places like India and Samoa. Mostly, Lisa talks about what she's learned as a journalist covering gender issues in recent years and why it's so difficult to publish anything that deviates from the accepted narrative. Ultimately, she says, we have to accept that talking honestly about the subject entails dealing with "a giant mess" and that "we have to get comfortable with the fact that are some things we simply can't know." Guest Bio: Lisa Selin Davis is the author of Tomboy: The Surprising History of Girls Who Dare to Be Different, and the forthcoming Housewife: Exploding the Myths of Motherhood, Women's Work and the Modern Family. She has written articles, essays and op-eds for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN and many other outlets, and has published two novels, Belly and Lost Stars. She writes a regular Substack newsletter about gender issues called Broadview.

Transcript

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0:00.0	My contention has always been that we're still not making room for actual gender non-conforming children,
0:09.8	these naturally gender non-conforming children who come out very early.
0:14.7	I still don't think we understand them or just provide room for them to be themselves without facilitating them into another category
0:23.9	that is often eventually associated with medicalization.
0:28.7	And also now requires us to change our understandings and definition of biological sex.
0:37.1	We're often now saying, like,
0:38.4	oh, these really are, you know, this, this gender non-conforming female is a boy. And that's
0:44.7	pretty new. And it's making us fight over what it means to be male and female and trying to
0:53.5	control how people think and talk about this instead of
0:56.9	saying, well, there are people disagree in some very fundamental ways about this very basic
1:03.0	part of being human. And we're going to have to talk about that.
1:09.3	Welcome to the unspeakable podcast. I'm your host, Megan Down. The conversation you're about to hear is the third part of a three-part series I released over the course of one week on the subject of gender transition among children and young people. The first part was with psychologist Dr. Laura Edwards Leeper. And the second part,
1:29.3	I brought Dr. Leeper together with two moms of gender dysphoric children who I had originally
1:34.6	interviewed several months ago. Those conversations were very much about what happens on the ground
1:40.2	when kids ask for medicalized treatment for gender dysphoria.
1:47.9	The one you're about to hear with journalist Lisa Selwyn Davis widens the aperture a bit and looks at the cultural and political forces
1:52.1	that have played a role in this issue reaching such prominence
1:55.4	and why the media has been so reluctant to cover the whole story.
1:59.6	Lisa has written extensively on this subject.
2:02.3	She's also the author of a book about the evolution of gender stereotypes over the last few
2:07.1	centuries and is herself the mother of a gender non-conforming child.
2:11.8	I felt like she was the perfect person to conclude this series.
	...

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