(Some Of) Your July 2025 Questions, Answered

Pride flags, male versus female brains, epistemic humility, and more

A photo of a painting of a guy painting a painting. This image is very deep!

Here are responses to most of the top-ranked questions from my late-July call for Ask Me Anything questions. As I note at the bottom, I’ll try to knock off a few more later on. These were great questions — thanks so much.

This is something I’ve been wondering for a while now. Why haven’t we had any moment where Johanna Olson-Kennedy, Rachel Levine, or Marci Bowers have been subpoenaed before Congress to explain why the science is or isn’t actually settled re: children transitioning. Seems like a GOP that loves grandstanding as much as they do, they’d salivate over the opportunity to ask about Olson-Kennedy withholding a report she was commissioned because of political reasons, or Levine’s intervention in WPATH guidelines. Yet we’ve not seen anything like it to my knowledge. I do think activist clinicians and endocrinologists owe it to the public to articulate why the science is on their side, especially when federal dollars are at stake and a GOP Congress has subpoena power. Or am I missing something? (Almost certainly.) —Chris

I don’t think you’re missing anything. As far as I know, there’s no reason Congress couldn’t subpoena these and other figures involved in youth gender medicine. I’m guessing this just isn’t a top priority and these lawmakers are quite busy, what with the big, beautiful bill, getting yelled at by their constituents over tariffs, the newly reinvigorated Jeffrey Epstein scandal (by scandal I mean that there is no such thing as the Epstein files, but if there is it consists mostly of phony documents inserted by Barack Obama and the Clinton Crime Family), and so on.

I agree with you that “clinicians and endocrinologists owe it to the public to articulate why the science is on their side, especially when federal dollars are at stake.” I find myself torn, not for the first time, between this argument and the also-true argument that politicians are not the ideal people to expose these sorts of problems. As you noted, any such public interrogation would entail a lot of grandstanding. There’s also a long-standing tradition of politicians interfering with perfectly valid science and perfectly good-faith scientists, as we’re seeing with this very administration in myriad other areas.

I will say that while I’m less and less interested in offering my own views on what the exact policy should be on youth gender medicine — as opposed to simply attempting to explain what the science should and shouldn’t say — I’ve found myself slightly softening to the idea of interventions on the part of lawmakers. That’s because, over the course of my decade or so covering this issue, I’ve realized that a lot of the most prominent proponents of youth gender medicine make misleading arguments, hide or refuse to publish data, engage in prima facie reckless practices toward vulnerable youth, and on and on and on. Both the Biden administration and Democratic states had a lot of levers to pull to at least regulate this area of medicine; instead, powerful people kept passing the buck and deferring to “experts” whose views on this, in retrospect, were quite radical and out of step with the available science.

I say all this after having tried, dozens of times at this point, to get basic answers to basic questions from important figures in the field as well as gatekeeping figures like journal editors. They will never, ever answer any substantive questions in meaningful ways. So what do you do when basically all the experts have failed to conduct themselves in a responsible, transparent way? I don’t know; but I also don’t think you can complain if and when the subpoenas do start flying. And they are flying — not for future Congressional hearings, but as part of ongoing investigations conducted by the Department of Justice.

Do you think that schools (including elementary) should do things like celebrate Pride Week, have Pride parades, and hang Pride flags? I used to be a huge supporter of these things and organized them myself in the various K-9 and K-12 schools I have taught in. Now I’m not so sure. —Alison

I would have thought this to be a no-brainer until fairly recently, in part because questions like this are a bit of a trap. I’m not saying Alison is trying to set a trap, but oftentimes this conversation is short-circuited by The Pride flag just represents tolerance, and who could possibly be against tolerance?

It’s 2025, though, and everyone knows that some districts run by lefties have pushed the envelope, exposing even very young kids to material perfectly tolerant parents might not be comfortable with. The best recent example came in the Supreme Court’s decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor. That case was sparked when the Montgomery County, Maryland school district, which had introduced certain LGBT material into the elementary curriculum, stopped allowing parents to opt out.

Here’s Times contributing opinion writer Megan K. Stack, a resident of the district, reflecting on the likely outcome back in April:

Most of all, I feel that our community’s failure to resolve a thoroughly predictable tension with the time-tested tools of straight talk, compromise and extending one another a little grace has made for a demoralizing spectacle. And I can’t help but notice that our district, in its clumsy efforts to force tolerance, might have given the Supreme Court an opening to repress L.G.B.T.Q.-related speech in the nation’s schools.

There wasn’t much fanfare or outcry when, just as a school year began in 2022, the district added a handful of L.G.B.T.Q.-inclusive storybooks to the elementary English curriculum. For example, “Pride Puppy!,” an alphabet book in which a pet dog gets lost at a Pride celebration, includes a search-and-find list for incipient readers with words like “leather,” “[drag] queen” and “intersex.” In the fairy tale “Prince & Knight,” a handsome prince rejects a parade of princesses before realizing that he would rather marry a knight. “Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope” was written by the mother of a trans boy.

. . .

Hisham Garti, who met with district officials as a Muslim community representative, said he was told that the decision to end opt-outs came about after L.G.B.T.Q. families reported that their children’s feelings were hurt when their classmates left the room to avoid the books. He told me that he was sympathetic to the students but that religious pupils had also suffered stigma. Some of them, he said, were shamed over their families’ request to opt out.

I’m sorry, but an alphabet book with terms like leather and drag queen is going to come across as an act of provocation to a not-insignificant number of parents, including plenty who are far from religious fundamentalists. As for the book about the trans boy, social transition is an issue that is hotly debated — both societally and scientifically — and there’s a genuine case to be made that elementary school–aged kids, at least below a certain age, might lack the developmental capabilities to fully understand the difference between biological sex and gender identity.

One of the beautiful things about America is its diversity. It’s good that kids from different faith and political backgrounds are, in effect, forced to attend school with one another. But it requires compromise. We all know there’s a difference between an adult diversity training that simply instructs employees about federal law and their nondiscrimination obligations under it versus one that comes across like an attempt to indoctrinate them into the weird and controversial ideas of Robin DiAngelo or Ibram X. Kendi. I think roughly the same logic applies here: It isn’t reasonable to expect your child to be “shielded” from hearing that gay people exist, gay marriage is legal, and that it’s completely unacceptable to bully a classmate for not adhering to gender norms. If a parent can’t handle that, they should consider home or private Christian or Muslim schooling. But a lot of parents don’t want their fourth grader to come home asking what a leather daddy is, or for their third-grade teacher to be the first adult to explain transness to them.

A common counterargument is that a lot of this stuff just flies over kids’ heads anyway. Surely this is true, but if that’s the case, why try to get these materials into the curriculum in the first place? Clearly the advocates doing so think it’s important, or they wouldn’t fight so hard over all this — and they definitely wouldn’t seek to rob parents of their opt-out rights!

I guess what it comes down to is this: If a school itself flies the Pride flag — and to be clear, this is different from student groups doing flyering and so on when kids are old enough to have such groups — it’s unclear to me why conservative parents wouldn’t have a right to ask the school to display other secular but politically charged symbols, including flags supporting the police or the military. So it’s probably gotta be an everything-goes thing, or a we-remain-neutral thing.

Either way, what an own-goal on the part of those parents in Montgomery County. It’s just wildly shortsighted to introduce controversial books to elementary school kids, have a bunch of parents opt out (rather predictably), and then say, “You can’t opt out! That’s stigmatizing other students!” Did any of this actually help the small group of kids who, say, were socially transitioned as elementary school students? I wonder how much of this was, deep down, about parents feeling insecure about their own values and consequently seeking to impose them on other people’s kids. That’s just speculation, though, and possibly speculation of the unfair variety.

Jessica Riedl had a Twitter thread linking to research that shows a trans woman’s brain is configured like a woman’s brain, and that a trans man’s brain is configured like a man’s brain.

No claim that these configurations are linked to any traits beyond a sense of gender identity, as far as I recall. But apparently men’s and women’s brains have their physical differences, and a trans woman’s brain has one set of differences (female), and a trans man’s brain has the other (male).

Are you familiar with the research? If so, do you think it’s reliable? —potrou

Jessica’s thread is here. I’m a fan of hers and quoted her in one of my Dispatch columns. She’s a very smart and good-faith, right-leaning economist, and we need those, especially as mainstream Republican policy continues flying at the speed of light straight into the heart of Crazyville. Jessica also dealt with an unmitigated torrent of bullshit after coming out as trans. Just completely unacceptable stuff, full-stop.

Anyway, in Jessica’s Substack post announcing her transition, she writes:

Students who continue in biology and related fields learn that each person’s genes contain a full blueprint for both male and female development. And while the vast majority of humans still develop consistently male or female in the womb, approximately one percent of people trigger genes, chromosomes, hormones, and/or physical/brain developments that cross between the two sexes (and who do not always meet a strict definition of intersex either). Examples include being chromosomally female but hormonally male. Or—because the genitals and the brain implement their sex instructions during different trimesters—following first trimester male genital development with third trimester female brain development, due likely to chemical changes in the womb in between those points. For a sample of the research on the (very real) biology of transgenderism, from basic overviews to dense medical studies, see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

My understanding is that one percent is likely a significant overestimate for the percentage of people with meaningful “overlap” of this sort with the other sex, although Jessica does phrase this in a pretty inclusive way. As for the research, it’s a mix of YouTube videos, other educational resources, and peer-reviewed studies. Readers can poke around and make their own judgments.

Neuroscience is not my area but here’s what I’ll say. As of 2016, researchers could train a computer algorithm to distinguish male from female brains (in a preexisting set of real-life images of them) with 93% accuracy. It’s also true that male and female brains overlap in a lot of ways, and these two facts aren’t contradictory. Dogs and cats share a lot of similarities (four legs, usually covered in fur, vocal emanations that often correspond to certain emotions), but it’s also very easy for a well-trained computer (the human brain) to tell the two apart. And suffice it to say that if in 2016 computers could distinguish male from female brains at 93% accuracy, that percentage is likely to go up in time, if it hasn’t already; this is an area of research I do not follow closely.

I also think there’s some interesting research suggesting that prenatal exposure to unexpectedly high levels of sex hormones (testosterone for female fetuses, estrogen for male ones) is linked to gender-nonconforming behavior and (later) sexuality. So this is a pretty straightforward explanation for how a male person might have certain stereotypically effeminate characteristics.

But as for brain studies purporting to show clear differences between trans and cis brains, I’m skeptical that the story is quite as straightforward as Jessica says. My sense is that, setting aside the difficulty in drawing straight lines between observable brain structures and human feelings and behavior in light of our near-Stone-Age-level understanding of the brain, a lot of these studies suffer from one of two confounds: First, they are posthumous brain studies in which the owner of the brain had taken hormones, which could itself change the brain. Second, the studies don’t control for the possibility that observed differences are at least partially related to sexuality, not gender dysphoria per se, which is an issue given that a disproportionate number of trans people who are, relative to their biological sex, same-sex attracted. So if you observe a brain difference, it’s important to account for the possibility that what you’re seeing is a marker of homosexuality, not gender identity.

Anyway, Jessica is defending herself against the charge that she is mentally ill. She is pointing to a biological cause of her need to transition. “I’ve unmistakably known I was transgender since the age of 4,” she writes. “Medical scans and examinations—performed as a volunteer in medical studies—have since confirmed my predominantly female brain biology, along with other biological characteristics that have countered my outwardly male appearance.”

From a scientific perspective, that’s obviously quite interesting. But what if someone else — an adult, for the sake of argument — strongly felt they were or wanted to be the other sex and didn’t have these markers? Would that mean they shouldn’t be allowed to transition? I don’t think so. I also don’t quite understand the moral distinction between “people who have a physical condition causing misalignment between their biological sex and gender identity should be allowed to transition” and “people who have a psychological condition causing misalignment between their biological sex and gender identity should be allowed to transition.” I think the point, in either case, is that there is a real possibility transitioning will alleviate suffering, and there is a meaningful moral argument to allow adults to transition, as long as they are given full information about the genuine lack of hard evidence on this question.

It seems undeniably true that a subset of people either feel they were “born in the wrong body” or that they would simply be able to live a better or more authentic life if they transitioned. It’s unlikely that we’ll ever have a complete scientific explanation for this, or that any scientific explanation will cover all the different sorts of people who want to transition. So at the end of the day, I think the questions about brain imaging and prenatal hormones and all that are scientifically interesting but don’t really tell us much about how we should treat trans people.

All that being said, I think it’s impossible to have a meaningful conversation about this without drawing at least some lines. At the moment, the LGBTQ community has chosen to draw the lines around transness really broadly: If you say you are trans, you are trans. This is a reaction against the idea of “gatekeeping,” which is understandable in context. But this has brought with it many different shades of transness, some of which exist at a sizable distance from the feelings Jessica describes. For example, in a recent article in Them, we learn that “Broadly speaking, if you find yourself not resonating with traditional ideas of womanhood or manhood, then you might be nonbinary.”

It seems to me that in figuring out the debates over how trans people should be accommodated in those situations where such accommodations have raised controversy — think locker rooms and prisons and so on — it’s hard not to recognize the difference between someone who says “I’m trans because I don’t resonate with traditional ideas of manhood” and someone who says “I have crippling dysphoria and have trouble leaving the house if I am presenting as a man.” But there’s been a massive flattening, a massive attempt to pretend that all these very different ways of being trans can be given the same label.

What do you think is going to be the next fight in the intersection of [the] medical/scientific world and society? —Tima

This is a great question but it’s just so hard to say, in large part because Trump’s wrecking-ball approach to everything overshadows everything at the moment.

Setting that aside, a couple areas I’m hoping to look more into are harm reduction and intentional racialization.