Making mess/art/sense of Opinions.

Getting dirty with NYT's Sunday Opinion section.

I read the paper today, pen in hand (and mouth), sitting on a chilly NYC Parks bench while my kid played with her bestie. It was nice. Normal?! A familiar kind of urban Sunday afternoon. In the middle of a very abnormal feeling month.

Many of you have cut ties with the paper of record or only read pixels, but I still enjoy the ink on my fingers. And while The Times has made itself an international media behemoth, it’s also my hometown rag. You can still find stories that read like a Scorsese synopsis. Did you see the one about the corrupt (allegedly) priest running afoul with the Bishop after doing deals with Sabrina Carpenter and maybe the indicted Mayor? Insane and A1 today, above the fold: The Priest, the Power Broker and the Pop Star. Alas, the well-heeled Monsignor with a knack for NY real estate and a power struggle with the diocese is not why we’re here. (Except that I want to impress you with all that Catholic vocabulary and genuflect to the copyeditor for that headline. Hi, mom!)

No, I’m writing about the paper tonight because today’s Sunday Opinion section over-delivered. Some weeks, nothing pops off the page. Today? All hits. Including bylines from my Holy Trinity: Lydia Polgreen, Tressie McMillian Cottom, and M. Gessen. Three big thinkers I frequently turn to for wisdom showed up to brunch together. The current situation is that fucking serious.

When I read the paper, well, anything on paper, I mark it up. (This, too, is thanks to my mother.) My books (and hers) are full of marginalia. And when the newspaper is particularly great, I make space/sense in my journal.

NYT Sunday Opinion, Nov 24 2024—remixed.

Though I recommend clicking through and reading all of the below, shining a spotlight on some key sections that I deliberately cut and pasted.

Tressie McMillan Cottom: How an Empty Internet Gave Us Tradwives and Trump

The podcast bros, the masculine twin of tradwives, deserve an entire library wing. There is no doubt that the podcast ecosystem is now a thriving information environment with its own rules about legitimacy, ethics and audience. The crude economics of the medium defines it. You get paid if you get popular, you get popular if you are already famous.

….

Influencers can claim to be apolitical. But they promote ideas like “doing your own research” and “being a freethinker,” convenient gateways to political extremism online.

Lydia Polgreen: I Never Panic. I’m Panicking Now.

What that experience taught me is that none of us know the direction or velocity of our vulnerability. It is, mercifully, unimaginable to us. The best-case scenario for the luckiest among us is a gentle drift into frailty and old age. We will all die, one way or another, and so will everyone we love.

….

Trump’s victory feels like a diagnosis, though Americans disagree profoundly on whether he is the disease, symptom or cure. Anyone who has faced mysterious symptoms knows that diagnosis brings its own bleak satisfactions, even or especially if the news is very bad. Cancer, with apologies to Susan Sontag, is an irresistible metaphor for our current moment. If 2016 felt like a fluke, a bolt of lightning akin to a freak accident, this feels systemic. What is cancer, after all, but something mysterious and unconstrained that our own body builds within itself?

….

He seems determined to take his slender victory and treat it like a historic mandate to reshape American life in profound ways. No matter how you voted, we are all about to find out precisely how vulnerable we really are.

And one of the only people I actually want to hear talk about trans issues right now…

M. Gessen: What Democrats Are Getting Wrong About Transgender Rights

Democrats are now debating how much the issue of trans rights hurt them and how fast they should retreat from it. Which is remarkable, because throughout her brief campaign, Kamala Harris was all but silent on the subject. It’s not clear how much further Democrats could actually retreat.

The party’s decision to focus on the issues that matter to most voters, especially reproductive rights, and set trans rights aside is based on a misconception. The two issues can’t be separated, because trans rights don’t just resemble reproductive rights; trans rights are reproductive rights.

….

I am trans and I am a parent of three children, one of whom I carried. Their existence, and my relationships with each of them, are essential to my understanding of life itself. I also have many friends (none of them trans, as it happens) who never had children. I occasionally envy their freedom. They may occasionally envy me my sprawling family. In neither case is the feeling of regret — if it can even be called that — significant or particularly long-lasting. It is, rather, an awareness that life is a series of choices, all of which are made with incomplete information.

I have spent some time reporting on the global movement for “traditional values,” or for “natural family,” or against “gender ideology.” I have heard its natalist message and understood its barely hidden subtext: White heterosexual cisgender people should have as many babies as possible, not just for their own sake but for the benefit of their Christian nations. I have also seen how this movement acts when it is in power, as it is in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

…

Trump’s and Vance’s politics are coherent, and their legislative agenda is clear: Roll back trans rights, lesbian and gay rights, reproductive rights and women’s rights, all in the name of making America great, straight and white again. It’s entirely possible that Harris’s evasions on the issue of trans rights helped cost her the trust of voters, and by extension the election. But the price trans Americans will likely pay if we are abandoned by the Democratic Party as a small and unpopular constituency may be much higher.

Oof. There it is.

I don’t want to end this essay on the regressive slide that Gessen has repeatedly, FOR YEARS, warned us about. Honestly, as bleak as things feel, I’m constitutionally incapable of stopping here. Instead, here’s a glimmer of something I heard while making dinner.

Feeling clearer after my time with my favorite Opinion columnists, I rewound two weeks and finally listened to Lydia and Tressie’s post-election conversation. There are so. many. thoughtful takeaways. While we were barely standing upright, those two offered up brilliance, seemingly effortlessly. Tonight, what they gave me was encouragement to keep going and, in particular, keep finding ways to tell our stories.

Tressie: The thing is, you don’t know your moment in history until it’s long gone. So you can’t treat things like you know your moment in history. You really do have to operate as if tomorrow is happening.

Thank you to everyone who read and responded to my post-election essay. It filled my heart to hear from so many of you. Let’s keep talking. And listening.

I ordered Rep. Sarah McBride’s 2019 memoir, Tomorrow Will Be Different: Love, Loss, and the Fight for Trans Equality, and kicked up a chat thread here in Substack to discuss. The book is back-ordered (good for her!), but when it seems like copies are shipping again, we’ll set up a time to get together. This is a bit of a test; I’ve long wanted to host conversations for the Transmasc Library. If there’s interest, I’ll organize more in the new year.

xx Kyle