Sex

FADS COME, FADS GO:

Fewer Young People Are Identifying as Trans, Non-Binary, or Non-Heterosexual: A new report suggests the recent surge in non-traditional identities may have peaked (Steve Stewart-Williams, Oct 14, 2025, Nature-Nurture)

First things first, it’s not that young people have become less woke, more religious, or more conservative. It’s also not that they’re spending less time on social media. Kaufmann tested all those hypotheses, and found no support for any of them.

One hypothesis he did find some support for, though, is that the trend is partly due to changes in mental health. Youth mental health hit a low point during the pandemic, and has since bounced back to some degree. Consistent with the idea that this shift drove changes in identification, statistically controlling for mental health weakens the time trend considerably. It doesn’t eliminate it entirely, however, so it can’t just be down to changes in mental health.

Another possibility is that identifying as non-binary or non-heterosexual was, to some extent, a youth fashion that’s now going out of fashion. As Kaufmann put it, the decline “seems most similar to the fading of a fashion or trend. It happened largely independently of shifts in political beliefs and social media use, though improved mental health played a role.”

BIOLOGY IS A STUBBORN THING:

Revealed: How Male and Female Brain Cells Differ in Gene Activity: Variations in gene expression could help to explain why brain-disease risks differ according to sex. (Miryam Naddaf, 4/17/26, Nature)

[T]he study also identified 3,382 genes that showed sex-biased expression in at least one of the six brain regions. A closer look at these genes revealed a set of 133 genes with consistent sex differences in their average expression levels across all cell types and all regions studied. “That’s very much a ground zero for the molecular effects of sex,” says study co-author Armin Raznahan, a child and adolescent psychiatrist also at the National Institute of Mental Health.

TALKING IT OUT:

A Win for Christian Counselors and Religious Liberty (Jonathon Van Maren, April 2, 2026, First Things)

Colorado’s 2019 “Minor Conversion Therapy Law” defined “conversion therapy” as “attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, including efforts to change behaviors or gender expressions or to eliminate or reduce sexual or romantic attraction or feelings toward individuals of the same sex.” It banned treatments, including talk therapy or counseling, that could help minors resolve their gender dysphoria and align their identity with their biological sex.

These laws have been sold by conflating coercive practices with helping gender-confused children—many of whom will have been deliberately confused by LGBTQ public school curricula—become comfortable with their own bodies. Colorado’s law essentially sought to lock children into the path toward “transition”—a staggering Orwellian irony, since “transition” is itself just another form of “conversion.” This is precisely why LGBTQ activists shifted from using the phrase “gender transition” to “gender-affirming therapy”: to enable them to claim that there was not actually a “conversion” from one gender to another being perpetrated.

Thus, according to LGBTQ activists and their political allies, to oppose the attempt to convert someone from one gender to another through social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and sex change surgeries is “conversion therapy.” In order to clear up any confusion that this inversion might cause, Colorado’s law specifically listed an exception to its “conversion therapy” ban: “Assistance to a person undergoing gender transition.” A child could be counseled into gender transition, but it was illegal to counsel a child out of gender transition.

THE TALKING CURE:

Justices Reject Colorado Law Banning ‘Conversion Therapy’ for L.G.B.T.Q. Minors (Ann E. Marimow, March 31, 2026, NY Times)

“Colorado may regard its policy as essential to public health and safety,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wrote for justices from across the ideological spectrum. “But the First Amendment stands as a shield against any effort to enforce orthodoxy in thought or speech in this country.”

Two of the court’s liberal justices — Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — sided with the majority. […]

A lawyer for Mrs. Chiles, Jim Campbell of the Alliance Defending Freedom, called the decision a significant win for free speech and common sense.

“States cannot silence voluntary conversations that help young people seeking to grow comfortable with their bodies,” he said in a statement.

In her court filings, Mrs. Chiles said she was not seeking to “cure” clients of same-sex attractions or to “change” their sexual orientation, but rather to help patients with their own stated goals, which sometimes include “seeking to reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions.”

DEPROGRAMMING THE CULT:

Plastic surgeons ditch gender ideology (Benjamin Ryan, 4 Feb 2026, UnHerd)

On Tuesday, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons came out in opposition to providing gender-transition surgeries to minors. The recommendation, the first of its kind from a mainstream medical association, was published in a nine-page policy statement that marks a watershed moment in these debates. It’s part of a broader rethink among many experts, a reminder that science can trump ideology when investigators follow time-tested, evidence-based processes.

THE TIES THAT BIND:

Masculinity at the End of History (Matthew Gasda, Fall 2025, American Affairs)

By the close of the twentieth century, the links in the chain of value transmission were under severe pressure, but the whole chain hadn’t completely disintegrated. The internet was new. Teen behavior had not yet turned antisocial. And there were old men around who belonged to things or at least had vivid memories of belonging to mass membership organizations: unions, churches, veterans’ associations, Rotary Clubs, Masons, Elks, Knights of Columbus, neighborhood bars. That kind of communal memory is now largely gone, as any trip to the now virtually empty or decaying physical meeting places of these organizations can attest.

Today, male adolescence largely lacks that primitive, self-organizing spontaneity. Sports has been co-opted into ultra-organized traveling sports. Boys learn from watching role models online and become hyper-optimized one-sport athletes. If they gamble or bet, it’s not over cards on a porch; it’s on a phone, on DraftKings. The steep decline in drinking as a habit for young adults may be heralded as a moral victory of sorts, but its dire consequences for male socialization and dating (outsourced to the antiseptic world of Tinder) are already in evidence, a too predict­able development. Even games have become less ritualistic because these are played online with headphones on: enervated, isolated, overstimulated. No real bonding.

I will argue that today’s young men are not just experiencing the technological foreclosure of their own possible development into functional manhood—but are enthusiastically participating in it. They are subject to many of the same social expectations and psychological pressures as men before, yet they are simultaneously living through a warped form of traditional American masculinity that carries all the burdens and drawbacks of that tradition with few (or none) of its former benefits.

It’s no wonder that young men are atomized after our war on fraternal organizations.

FIRST, DO NO HARM:

Supreme Court Delivers the Obvious Result in Skrmetti (Frank DeVito, Jun 22, 2025, American Conservative)

Tennessee had banned surgical and hormonal interventions for minors with gender dysphoria. There are many reasons to impose such a ban. First and foremost, “changing one’s gender” is not possible because it does not comport with nature and the design of the human person.

But putting fundamental reality aside, there are additional, prudential reasons to stop these procedures for minors: Despite the clearly biased and ideologically driven “science” that supposedly shows sex-change surgeries are good and healthy for confused children, the adverse consequences are becoming increasingly obvious as more data becomes available. The long-term effects of doing these terrible things to minors are starting to come to light. While we shouldn’t need statistics to prove that it is good to prevent emotionally troubled and confused children from mutilating their sex organs, they help bolster the obvious argument.

If leftist activists want to oppose laws like the one in Tennessee (about half of U.S. states have similar laws), fine. Start a movement and go convince the voters that children should be able to surgically sterilize themselves or take drugs to interfere with puberty.

MY SUMMER OF HOTNESS:

There’s Never Been a Better Time to Be a Dull Man: Gather ’round, men with nerdy hobbies and unstereotypical interests. Society’s “dull” is the new “incredibly attractive.” (Joanna Sommer, June 18, 2025, Inside hook)

Whether it be plants, Pokémon cards or chess like my boyfriend, it’s clear that having a partner with a mundane hobby is kind of hot. For one, the science is all there: Having a hobby is good for you. It can help with managing stress levels, social wellbeing, mood and even your immune system. And if you’re feeling good mentally and physically, a potential partner is bound to notice your confidence and pleasure for life, which in turn makes you generally more attractive.

Having a hobby also gives you something to make time for outside of your work day, which seems like a pretty impressive thing to do anymore. Life is busy, but rallying your energy toward something you like and feel driven about simply for pleasure? Hot. That said activity having nothing to do with scrolling on your phone? Even hotter. It shows you’re well-rounded, passionate and not chronically glued to screens like the rest of us. You’re also educated on a hyper-niche topic that not everyone is, which adds another lovely layer to all of this.

It doesn’t even matter if the hobby seems “dull” to the public eye. That gives it a negative connotation. Even if it’s simple like watering plants or bird watching, you’re doing more than a lot of other people. Only 67% of adults in the United States report having multiple hobbies. In a world where people are social media-obsessed and constantly staying on top of “trends,” it’s much cooler to do your own thing that makes you happy, even if it seems dry by societal standards. You aren’t alone in your dry hobby, either. Enter: the Dull Men’s Club.