NEW YORK CITY (TND) — In a lengthy editorial Monday, New York Magazine writer Andrea Long Chu defended the “freedom of sex” and argued people “regardless of age” should be able to access “sex-changing medical care.”
The Pulitzer-winning writer detailed the history of gender norms in the United States and citied author Judith Butler, who claimed the outward expression of one’s gender is a performance similar to drag. Going on to outline the debate surrounding transgender children today, Chu said liberals must refine their argument if transgender “rights” are to be taken seriously.
“The left must reckon with its part in this,” Chu, who is transgender, wrote. “It has hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity, a concept clumsily adapted from psychiatry and strongly influenced by both gender studies and the born-this-way tactics of the campaign for marriage equality. This has won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance. But we have largely failed to form a coherent moral account of why someone’s gender identity should justify the actual biological interventions that make up gender-affirming care.”
To do this, Chu dissected the opposition to child gender transitions by naming conservative Christians, gender-critical feminists and “trans-agnostic reactionary liberals,” or TARLS. These individuals, she said, are liberals who fear being associated with the “woke” left and therefore take no stance on transgender people.
If the liberal skeptic will not assert in mixed comp any that there should be fewer trans people, he still expects us to agree on basic humanitarian grounds that at least there should not be more,” Chu wrote. “It is quite possible, for instance, to believe that cancer patients should have access to aggressive treatments with potentially life-altering effects while also sincerely believing that, in a perfect world, no one would have cancer.”
Chu goes on to explain the answer to this problem is a concept she calls “the freedom of sex.” This concept is a “universal birthright” for all and should make sex and gender unrelated concepts which can change regardless of one another.
“What does this freedom look like in practice?” she asked. “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. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.”
Chu’s piece comes as Americans debate the morals and ethics of allowing children to undergo potentially irreversible sex-change therapies. Earlier this month, longtime daytime television star Dr. Phil McGraw blamed at least part of the growing trend of child sex transitions on “a social contagion.”
The reason for doing it is it stops this drive for suicide, that there’s this suicide epidemic,” McGraw said on The Joe Rogan Experience. “It doesn’t fix that. It doesn’t fix all the comorbid issues that come along with feeling like they’re in the wrong body but yet they’re pushing this.”
In promoting the piece via X Monday, Chu asked followers to donate to a GoFundMe page for a friend who “is having painful complications” from a gender surgery last year and “urgently needs a revision.”
Follow Jackson Walker on X at @_jlwalker_ for the latest trending national news. Have a news tip? Send it to [email protected].
