The Unspeakeasy With Meghan Daum

Critical Race Theory, or CRT, is everywhere all of a sudden. Having made its way from academia to K-12 education, it came to the attention of the Trump Administration last year and quickly became a bogeyman of the political right. From there, state legislatures began crafting bills that would ban the "divisive concepts" allegedly embedded in CRT-based curriculum. But the bills have only added to public confusion over what CRT really means and partisan media coverage has whipped up the whole debate into something resembling a moral panic. _   Dr. Erec Smith is a professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College of Pennsylvania and has written extensively about race and its role in pedagogy and public debate. He talked with Meghan about the origins of CRT, when it can be useful, how it's often misapplied and, above all, how most of what's got people so upset these days has little to do with CRT in the first place.     Guest Bio: Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and focuses primarily on the rhetorics of anti-racist activism, theory, and pedagogy. He is a co-founder of Free Black Thought, a website dedicated to highlighting viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia. His latest book is A Critique of Anti-racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment.

This week's episode is a little different. Meghan's two guests appear anonymously and speak about their sons' struggles with gender dysphoria and subsequent desires to transition into females. Calling themselves Jolene and Marie, they explain why they're wary of the "affirmative" model of care, which operates from an assumption that even very young children can know for sure if they are in the wrong gender and often demonizes parents who question the approach. Jolene and Marie talk about how this issue has affected their whole families, the ways gender dysphoria can intersect with autism and other neurodivergent conditions, and the way online communities can blur the boundaries between gender identity issues and other emotional or psychological challenges. Relevant links: Genspect: A voice for parents with gender questioning kids https://genspect.org Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) One Size Does Not Fit All: In Support of Psychotherapy for Gender DysphoriaGuest Unspeakable Podcast interview with gender therapist Sasha Ayad    Bios: Jolene and Marie are pseudonyms for two moms of gender questioning kids. They live in the United States.

Playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Paul Rudnick is one of the most celebrated humorists of his generation. From his 1993 breakout off-Broadway hit play, Jeffrey to Broadway hits like I Hate Hamlet and screenplays for films like In and Out, Addams Family Values and Sister Act, Paul is a master of not just the quippy one-liner but also deeply realized characters and relatable, if often absurd situations. He's also been a regular contributor to The New Yorker for decades and is the author of several books, mostly recently the novel Playing the Palace, which is about a gay relationship between a young New York party planner and an imagined version of the Prince of Wales. Paul spoke with Meghan about gay subject matter in his work over time, his fascination with the British royal family, his latest project for HBO and his feelings about the ever shifting battle lines of the new wars. They also talked about growing up in New Jersey, which is its own kind of culture war.        Guest Bio: Paul Rudnick is a novelist, playwright, essayist and screenwriter. His Obie award winning plays have been produced both on and off Broadway and around the world, and include I Hate Hamlet, Jeffery, and The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.  His screenplays include Addams Family Values, In and Out and Sister and his many book include Social Disease, I'll Take It and, most recently, Playing the Palace.

Novelist Lionel Shriver is known for placing social topics (sometimes radioactive ones) inside the frame of fiction. Her 2003 novel, We Need To Talk About Kevin, which won the Orange Prize for Fiction and was made into a 2011 film starring Tilda Swinton, was told from the perspective of a mother whose son commits a school shooting akin to the Columbine massacre. Lionel's thirteen other novels take on such subjects as obesity, the US healthcare system, the national debt, global overpopulation, and homegrown terrorism. Her new novel, Should We Stay Or Should We Go, is about suicide, specifically the pros and cons of ending your life on your own terms before nature-or modern medicine-prolongs it in ghastly fashion. Lionel spoke with Meghan about her new book and also her feelings about illness, medicine and her own death.  As an American who's lived in the UK for several decades and still lives in New York part time, Lionel also offers her thoughts about single payer health care and what the venerated National Health Service does right as well as often gets wrong.    Guest Bio: Lionel Shriver's fiction includes The Mandibles, Property,  So Much for That, the New York Times bestseller The Post-Birthday World, and the international bestseller We Need to Talk About Kevin.  Her journalism has appeared in The Guardian, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harper's, and the London Times, and she currently writes a regular  column for The Spectator in the UK.  She lives in London and Brooklyn, NY.

One sure way to lose a popularity contest is to fight for the rights of convicted sex offenders. But The National Sex Offender Registry, which was established during an era of panic over crime and child danger, has come with a host of unintended consequences. Sociologist Emily Horowitz is one of a handful of academics and researchers who speaking out against the registry, showing how it's yet another blunt instrument of "tough on crime" 1990s legislation and ultimately does more to ruins lives than to protect kids. Emily spoke with Meghan about what led her to this work and why our assumptions about sexual predators are often wrong. She also  explained some of the reasons why sexual abuse against children, and sexual violence in general, has declined over the last 30 years-for reasons having nothing to do with the registry.   Relevant links:   New York Times: At 18, He Had Consensual Gay Sex. Montana Wants Him to Stay a Registered Sex Offender   New York Times: Did The Supreme Court Base a Ruling on a Myth?   The New Yorker: The List     Guest bio:   Emily Horowitz is a professor of Sociology & Criminal Justice at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of a number of articles about the harms of sex offense registries, including the book Protecting Our Kids? How Sex Offender Laws Are Failing Us. At St. Francis College she co-directs a program that helps those with criminal justice involvement earn college degrees and she is currently conducting research on the experiences of veterans with sex offense convictions.

Libby Emmons now works mainly as a journalist, writing articles about ideological divides in culture and politics for places like Quilllette, The Federalist and The Spectator, and serving as editor of the conservative Canadian news magazine The Post Millennial. But before she entered the sphere of public debate about the news, Libby was in the theater world, specifically the radical feminist theater community. The author of a many award-winning dramatic works, including the play How To Sell Your Gang Rape Baby For Parts, Libby was a founder of the New York downtown theater company, Puss Collective. But when she published an article about transhumanism that made a conceptual comparison with transgenderism, she was exiled from the theater community and began to see culture and politics in a new way.     Libby talks with Meghan about how this evolution came about and what frustrates-and inspires-her most about the current political moment. She also explains what "transhumanism" is all about. (You sort of don't want to know. But you also want to know!)     Guest Bio: Libby Emmons is the editor-in-chief of The Post Millennial and a senior contributor to The Federalist. She has an MFA from Columbia University and a BA from Sarah Lawrence College.

Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and a speaker and educator about transgender issues, particularly issues related to trans healthcare. Now in his late 50s, he transitioned from female to male in his late 20s and has more recently became a controversial figure in certain corners of the trans community. He talked with Meghan about why he's so controversial, what it's been like to spend decades on masculinizing hormone therapy, and why he's worried about the number of clinicians now prescribing such therapies to young people after minimal psychological counseling.    For the record: at one point in the interview Buck mistakenly referred to the biotech entrepreneur Martine Rothblatt as Martine Rathbaum. He also suggested that Rothblatt, who is the founder of the biotech company United Therapeutics, is among the billionaire class. As of March 2021, United Therapeutics was reportedly worth $7.1 billion. Rothblatt herself, according to Forbes, is worth $390 million.     Guest Bio: Buck Angel is an entrepreneur and educator in the area of trans male healthcare and sexual wellness. He has also been a groundbreaking figure in the porn industry, which you can learn about on his website and also in a documentary about his life, Mr. Angel, which was released in 2013 and premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival.

Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of many novels, including You Should Have Known, which became the basis for last fall's hit HBO limited series The Undoing, starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant. Her brand new novel, The Plot, is a literary suspense thriller about a struggling writer who stumbles upon what by all accounts is the greatest story ever (or in this case never) told. The problem is, it belongs to someone else. In this conversation Jean talks with Meghan about what a "story" really is and why the boundaries of ownership can get so murky. She also discusses some of her other books, two of which, 2009's Admission and 2017's The Devil and Webster, were set on college campuses and delve into the lives of school administrators trying to negotiate a changing world. Jean has a lot to say about the state of higher education, the state of higher culture, and how reading-and writing-has been reshaped by the constraints of the pandemic.    Guest Bio:   Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of nine books, most recently The Plot, just out from Macmillan's Celadon Books. Yet another novel, The Latecomer, will be published in 2022. With her husband, the poet Paul Muldoon, Jean adapted James Joyce's The Dead as an immersive theatrical event that was performed at New York's s American Irish Historical Society. She is also the founder of Book The Writer, a pop up book club enterprise that brings authors and readers together for curated book discussion groups.

You've probably noticed more buzz than usual lately about anti-racism training modules in schools and workplaces. Often referred to as DEI or Diversity Equity and Inclusion, this framework has turned into a big business, with concepts like "white fragility" and "black despair" sometimes weaponized in the name of fighting inequality. Amid the swirl of approaches (which are often indistinguishable from one another), a 27-year-old writer and entrepreneur named Chloé Valdary has developed an alternative model. Called The Theory of Enchantment, it model uses the arts and developmental psychology to help people of find a common humanity through a shared love of culture. In this interview, Chloé talks with Meghan about how she came up with this idea, how her own unusual family background made her resistant to essentialist identity categories, and why she thinks the frequently invoked social justice refrain "it's not my job to educate you" is so misguided.    Relevant links: Black People Are Far More Powerful Than Critical Race Theory Teaches, by Chloe Valdary   I Refuse To Stand By While My Students Are Indoctrinated, by Grace Church School teacher Paul Rossi   What Is Systemic Racism? John McWhorter, Lara Bazelon, Glenn Loury, Kmele Foster, Chloé Valdary and Kenny Xu weigh in.     Guest Bio: Chloé Valdary is the creator of Theory of Enchantment, a framework for compassionate antiracism that she has introduced to workplaces around the world, including in South Africa, The Netherlands, Germany, and Israel. She has lectured at universities across America, including Harvard and Georgetown and she has been a Bartley fellow at the Wall Street Journal and written for that publication as well as The New York Times and elsewhere.

For most of her career, University of Sussex Professor of Philosophy Kathleen Stock was known primarily as a scholar on philosophical questions related to fiction and the concept of imagination. But in 2018, she began to speak and write about the issue of gender identity. Among her questions were why her philosophy colleagues were so reluctant to discuss something so seemingly ripe for the kind of inquiry philosophers live for. The backlash came swiftly but so did tacit messages of support and over time Kathleen has become a leading voice on gender identity theory, policy reform, and their effects on women and girls. Kathleen spoke with Meghan about this unexpected turn in her career and also the various tensions between recognizing the rights of transgender people and recognizing certain material facts. She also explained the difference between sex and gender, which, despite the ubiquity of those terms, many people remain confused about.   Guest bio:  Kathleen Stock is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex in England. Her book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism was just published by Little Brown in the U.K. and is available everywhere on Kindle. The U.S. edition will be published on September 21, 2021.