Sensitive Men In Suits and their Lady Producers Talk About Gender Dysphoria.

This American Life is a very good radio program. it stands head and shoulders above every other NPR show save radiolab. And radiolab is an unfair standard against which to measure anything. But both shows work because so much of their affect and politics seem to be shaped by a constant confrontation with human experiences of the world, and an openness to being undone by that confrontation, and those experiences.

But Ira Glass, he of the soothing-and-seemingly-unrehearsed radio informality, slips into being the Unequivocal Voice of the very self-consciously equivocal radio program. Ira is that sensitive, bespectacled, soft-spoken, lightly tousled, don't-quite-buy-that-he's-straight variety of man, instantly recognizable to the plentiful offspring of any number of progressive liberal arts Alma Maters. The problem with this kind of guy (as anyone who's made it through a class, a party, a few drinks, or an uncomfortable and abortive flirtation with him can attest) is that he's so performatively careful in choosing his words, he'll choose ones you're really not ok with before you can catch it. and when you do catch it, you feel sort of bad bringing it up. Because he's so nice, after all, and really seems to genuinely get it, most of the time. And we wouldn't want to shut him down, right? So he can provide the unifying theme for stories of disparate experiences, share his seemingly thoughtful, hesitantly-arrived-at generalizations, and his producers will join him in the background noise of Polite and Genuine Interest. There's a lot of Interest in This American Life, and very little Passion. the experiences Ira & Co confront might undo or disturb some part of their world, but the moment when the undoing happens is always being recalled, after it's been assimilated and dealt with. This American Life already knows what they think about what you're about to hear. but they might be politely interested in how you feel about it, once you hear it.

(Jad and Robert, on the other hand, are loud, and silly, and absolutely firm in their beliefs. Beliefs which are performed as constantly in flux, and drastically different from those of their co-host. These are differences they will argue about up until the moment of being undone by the big, loud, messy, beautiful, jaw-dropping Eureka moment which Radiolab pivots around. And then they'll catch their breath, change their minds a bit, and resume arguing.)

but that's not what i came to tell you about,

i came to talk about the draft.

Just today, I listened to Ira & Co's podcast from 2 weeks ago. This episode, for reference and context, is entitled "Somewhere Out There."

Chronologically, the episode starts with a story of running numbers to find out how many potential partners any individual might have, in the universe, the world, or the city of boston. but ontologically, it starts with a world where everyone has one single fated life partner. This fate is recognized as a fiction, but an emotionally True fiction. the specialness of a heterosexual pair bond lies, to an enormous extent, in the feeling that it is the Only Possible True Pairing. (whether the rest of us have that problem is left unresolved, as our existence is mentioned throughout, but only by exclusion. the first statistical order of business when running the numbers is to eliminate members of the same sex from the pool.) so, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, this week's episode is about the Possibly Futile Search for the One Other Person Out There who will understand and complete you. which sounds, to me, like the blurb on the back cover of the Trashy Bestseller of heteronormativity and the neoliberal nuclear family.

As if dizzied by trying to focus on sexual and gender experiences so close to the end of its own nose, this collection of stories takes a sudden zag out of the romantic realm altogether, and starts talking about Thomasina and Lilly, two young girls who meet and are instant best friends. I realized that this was not going to be a Gay Story at the instant of the Reveal:

Thomasina and Lilly are both transgender. We can now rest assured that the rest of the segment will focus on the trauma that this has inflicted upon their families, and their struggles to fit in as totally normative, unremarkable, appropriately feminine girls.

and i don't imagine the producers of this american life know they've tapped into this genre, but the rest of us now also know that this will be a story about being petrifyingly alone, and maybe managing to find one other person like you, who can, in the most chaste manner possible, penetrate the well of loneliness for a fleeting moment. (anyone who thinks trans women don't belong in lesbian separatist spaces, just look at pop depictions of our social lives while wearing a flapper dress, and it'll all start to make sense).

What's sort of reassuring though, is how much of the fear and trauma in all the rest of the story is so transparently... parental. Thomasina's parents are the ones who are bereft, without support structure. They try to find other parents with similar experiences, but can't. None of their friends even understand that such a thing is real. then Lilly and Thomasina talk about their friends, and the conversations they have with those friends about The Trans. Those conversations are about genuine friendship and genuine ambiguity. All their positive fantasies seem to focus on not having gender matter so god damned much. And the worries their conversations bring up seem to focus on a negative fantasy of media exposure and shame. and for this tranny's money, 9 year olds don't come up with a fear of paparazzi on their own.

and then Lilly's mom cries about how her daughter said she was angry at god, and about having to send her daughter to school with a haircut that made her look like a boy. and Thomasina's dad cries about the emotional and mental reality of the situation for his kid, while using the wrong pronouns.

and the kids, through all of it, seem pretty fine. and don't seem desperate to maintain this one, precious connection in the way their parents are.

The Kids Are Alright. Let Them Be.