In Defense of Effeminate Boys

If anyone had suggested that I might really be a girl, I don’t know how I would have responded.

Growing up, I was quite the sissy boy. “Hey, Nancy,” people who called my family’s house would say if I happened to pick up the phone. Nancy is my mother’s name. “No, it’s her son, Ben,” I’d respond, and the caller would apologize profusely, as if there were no greater tragedy for a boy than being mistaken for a girl. But I didn’t know to feel this type of shame. I was raised in a fundamentalist Christian community called the Lamb of God, and—perhaps surprising—no one seemed to care about my flamboyance. What mattered was that my heart was on fire for the Lord.

The differences between me and other boys became clear to me only at age 12, when I enrolled in seventh grade at a public middle school. About a week into the school year, one of my teachers asked for a volunteer to fetch a box of chalk from the neighboring classroom, and I dutifully raised my hand. I went out to the next classroom and rapped gently on the door windowpane. “Can I interrupt you for a moment?” I asked the teacher, too fastidiously for a middle-school boy. The class snickered. “Is that a boy or a girl?” a kid whispered as I crossed the room. “Ben-gay,” my schoolmates soon began to call me. “Ben is a fag,” someone scribbled in a school library book.

Years later, I would come out as gay. I married a man. As an adult, I vowed to help create a world where sissy boys like me could find space in society to be themselves, without any pressure to change—a goal that still feels urgent today. What I know now is that gender nonconformity didn’t disqualify me from being male. Effeminate boys, however atypical, are a natural variation of their own sex. The notion that they are really girls is anything but progressive.

My childhood experiences make me skeptical about pediatric gender medicine today. In many kids who grow up to be gay, gender nonconformity manifests long before overt same-sex attraction does. Yet from peers, from social media, and even from some school districts’ teaching material, kids learn simplistic lessons that equate gender nonconformity with gender dysphoria—in essence, If you act and dress like a girl, you are one. In recent years, many doctors and hospitals have been willing to provide puberty blockers and gender-related hormone treatments to minors after only the briefest evaluation of each patient’s circumstances, and LGBTQ activists have cheered the lack of gatekeeping.

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If medical authorities have a rigorous way of distinguishing effeminate boys from transgender kids—or of distinguishing transgender kids from proto-gay kids—they aren’t saying. I have met a number of detransitioned gay men who tried to live as women for a time because they and their families were so averse to homosexuality. According to a 2019 report in The Times of London, staffers at Britain’s foremost gender-identity clinic joked darkly that, as a result of the facility’s work, “there would be no gay people left.” A statement last month by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons noted that there is no validated way to assess whether a child’s gender distress will persist over time or disappear without medical intervention. A lack of good research and recordkeeping means that we may never know how many patients who would have been considered effeminate gay boys not so long ago have undergone medical treatments for gender dysphoria.

To be sure, a backlash is now under way. The majority of red states have now banned medical treatments intended to alter minors’ external sex traits. Although most prominent physicians’ associations support the use of medical treatments in gender-questioning kids, the ASPS, citing low-certainty evidence and potential long-term harm, asserted in its February statement that gender surgery should not be performed on minors. Soon afterward, the American Medical Association issued a statement broadly agreeing with the ASPS’s position.

These steps toward caution are wise, but an underlying problem remains: Society still has an irrational fear of effeminate boys, who should be free to live their life without altering anything about themselves. Gender-nonconforming children continue to get the strong impression from censorious peers and well-meaning adults alike that they’d be better off if they became something other than what they are.

In my case, as puberty took its course, I came to realize that much of what my peers were saying about me was true. And homosexuality, I knew in my bones, meant AIDS and hell. Had anyone suggested then, amid my confusion and distress, that I might be a girl instead of a boy, I wonder how I would have responded. If a teacher or a guidance counselor or a therapist had told me that I’d been born in the wrong body and that there was a medical solution, I might have jumped at it. You mean this isn’t a spiritual defect? I’m not evil? It’s just a medical condition? There wouldn’t have been anything weird about my interests and behaviors—or with my liking boys—if I was just a girl.

When I started going to public middle school in 1995, nary a Pride flag was to be found on the campus. I was on my own. My survival instincts kicked in: I had to man up. Farewell, honey-blond highlights, which I’d cultivated over the summer with Sun In; hello, basic brown hair. So long, sea-foam-green tees and tailored trousers; hello, grunge and flannel. I tossed my Mariah Carey CDs and my My Little Pony collection, and invested in Nirvana and Airwalks. I was constantly preoccupied with what I absolutely should not do: tuck my hair behind my ear, stand with my hand on my hip, say words with lots of s’s in them, laugh.

And it worked, up to a point. I blended in, became one of many. Just another boy. The costs of enduring bullying, suppressing my inherent femininity, and failing to square my growing attraction to men with my religious upbringing all became clear over the next decade, in the form of a drug addiction, a few psych-ward stays, and the beginning of a long recovery.

Eventually, I found a 12-step program and put down the drugs. As my mental health improved, I worked as a hair stylist, met a guy, and got involved in the fight for marriage equality in my home state. Winning that campaign in 2012 made me feel righteous again, for the first time since I’d left the Lamb of God. After I got married in my early 30s, I went back to school, enrolling at Columbia University to study creative writing, and worked as an intern for a prominent LGBTQ group.

It was in those spaces, in the late 2010s, that I realized that the fundamentalist Christians I’d grown up with weren’t the only people enforcing rigid ideas about how others should think. After arriving in New York with mainstream Democratic views, I took classes heavy on critical theories that fixated on identity categories and reflexively decried capitalism and the West. Within influential LGBTQ organizations, gay rights had given way to radical queer politics, and academic theories about sex and gender had hardened into doctrine. Widespread revulsion toward Donald Trump had narrowed the boundaries of permissible discussion on the left. The more Trump and his followers opposed something, the more we were supposed to support it. The prevailing view was that any debate within our side would become ammunition for the right.

For a long time, I feared that if I didn’t keep my thoughts to myself, I would lose the only community I’d ever really belonged in. As controversy flared up nationally about pediatric gender medicine, though, I started voicing concerns, rooted in my own experiences, over what looked to me like a rush to medical treatment. For all the sloganeering about protecting trans kids, I heard no discussion about protecting effeminate gay boys from unnecessary medicalization. When I and others asked whether progressive norms might be nudging effeminate gay boys to think of themselves as girls, no one wanted to hear it. Instead of answers, we were given the LGBTQ community’s official line. “Gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things,” the Human Rights Campaign asserts. But the confidence with which people claim that the two have nothing to do with each other is hard to square with research findings: According to data collected mostly before the recent surge in pediatric-dysphoria diagnoses, most prepubescent children who experienced gender distress went on to experience same-sex attraction and ultimately did not pursue a gender transition. Of 70 adolescents whom Dutch clinicians subjected to puberty suppression from 2000 to 2008, the overwhelming majority were attracted exclusively to people of their biological sex.

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Activists attempt to impose social costs on people who voice reasonable misgivings about youth gender medicine. Someone added me to an online blacklist, so now when someone Googles me, one of the first hits is a page titled, “Ben Appel vs. Transgender People.” It includes personal details not only about me but also about my family members. It states falsely that I’m associated with an “anti-trans hate group.” To support my writing, I work in sales. At my former job, someone who disagreed with me on pediatric gender medicine contacted my employer’s CEO to report my journalistic work. This wasn’t a great way to meet the boss, but thankfully, my antagonist failed to get me fired.

The interpersonal costs have been worse than the professional ones. Two years ago, at my best friend’s baby shower, someone I have known for decades—someone who came to my wedding and my father’s funeral, and who has seen me ugly-cry on many occasions—bristled when I hugged her and later told a mutual acquaintance that I was hurting trans kids. After I published a memoir late last year, another old friend wrote on my Facebook page, “You and your book are disgusting.” At times, I’ve been tempted to join the right—especially because so many conservatives have been kind to me and my own people have been so cruel. But the politicization of gender-nonconforming kids is what has made healthy debate about it so difficult, and my leaving one side for the other would only add to the problem. We need less black-and-white thinking about this complex issue.

Meanwhile, real kids who don’t understand much about gender and sexuality are experiencing confusion and being bullied. How are adults supposed to respond in the moment to a little boy who demands long dresses and dolls, and who insists that he’s really a girl? What do we tell him when he comes home from school crying about how different he feels from his peers?

My suggestion is to tell him the truth: The difference he feels is real. He is unlike most of his peers. Throughout history, there has always been a minority of people who share the interests of and behave more like the opposite sex, and he happens to be one of those people. And this means that, from time to time, he might be on the receiving end of cruelty, because people often fear what they don’t understand. In many situations, he might feel like he doesn’t quite fit in, because society is organized in a way that suits the majority. What all of this means is that he will need to be just a little bit stronger than his peers. Soon enough, he’ll find others who are like him, and all will be well. In the meantime, let him wear the dress and carry the doll if he pleases. Boys can do those things too.