We accept without condition the idea that gender follows from biological sex. Your body arrives in one of two options—male or female—and your gender is decided in the same moment your sex is named. But what if binary gender plays the decisive role and it is biological sex that is retrofitted to serve our need for boys and girls, men and women?

What would it mean to define your life as an erotic project? What if we believed and expected our education, work, political commitments, and relationships to generate the passion that we are told is only possible in sexual relationship?

We explain and explore the concept of amatonormativity, or the social demand and expectation that all people seek romantic coupling. We'll also hear from another voice in the asexual and aromantic community.

In this episode, we will consider more carefully the difference between sexual and romantic orientation as well as hear from a voice in the asexual and aromantic community.

Compulsory sexuality is a social system that requires sexual desire and experience for all people. We will discuss this together with asexuality, or the experience of feeling little or no sexual attraction to another person.

Although it sounds benign enough, civility norms and demands do not benefit everyone. They largely benefit power and we approach them as a form of soft repression.

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s work on complaint, we will think about why institutions and systems often work to block complaint, why we are made anxious by the act of complaining, and why it is important that we record our grievances for those who came before as well as those who will come after us.

We explore a more radical version of hope here, as we learn how to hope in ways that do not deny the intolerability of the present or the necessity of striving for a different future.

We talk about the political force of the angry white man right now as well as the many ways he is positioned as the last defense of both patriarchy and white supremacy.

How and why does modern culture elevate ‘bro culture’ in modern political life? What are its rules and demands, especially of young men?

In the first of three dialogues with Dr. Suzanne Ashworth, we consider: what does masculinity feel? And what might masculinity feel?

We will track the many ways that Project 2025 is invested in diminishing or denying the personhood of LGBTQ individuals as well as normalizing their social erasure.

Focusing on the plan to restrict and deny access to both contraception and emergency contraception, we examine how and why Project 2025 is intent on erroneously redefining both so that they can be folded into larger efforts to regulate and ban abortion.

As we begin a multi-episode and closer examination of Project 2025, we focus on the larger plan to regulate, obstruct, and ultimately end the provision of abortion services in the United States.

Because we live in a grind culture that insists on incessant productivity and normalizes exhaustion, we have lost the capacity to define and defend rest. Thanks to Tricia Hersey’s work in Rest is Resistance, this episode describes how we are damaged by the ‘cult of urgency and busyness’ and how we might begin to reimagine the radical potential of learning how to rest.

In this episode, we are going to examine the shortcomings and liabilities of resilience. For one, it can easily become accommodationist—that is, adapted to the survival, rather than elimination, of ongoing harm—and, as a result, resilience tends to reward the individual who persists in ‘bouncing back’ from intolerable situations.

Together with Dr. Kristy McCray, we discuss the many ways that sports work to reinforce (or challenge) gender norms, why trans women have especially become the locus of so much social anxiety, and the importance of ensuring participation in sports for all persons.

Let’s look more closely at the increasingly normalized ‘fear of gender’ and the many ways it reinforces the purported ‘biological reality of sex.’ The fear of gender, in many ways, is the fear of gender self-determination, or the right of a person to decide their own gender identity rather than obey what ‘biological truth’ has determined to be true and unchangeable.

We will continue exploring the assumptions that underlie ‘woke gender ideology.’ This time, we will focus on the purported ‘biological reality of sex’ as defined by the Trump administration’s Executive Order ‘Defending Women from Gender Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.’ Learn how a scientifically inaccurate understanding of biological sex is leveraged in anti-gender and anti-trans political efforts.

What is driving the new rhetoric of ‘woke gender ideology’ and its weaponization in the current political climate? We pay special attention to the concepts of ‘wokeness’ and ‘ideology’ this week as well as discuss how to allow for despair without falling into paralysis.

This episode continues the conversation of last week, Preparing for Trump 2.0. Eighteen speakers from the larger podcast community share brief and powerful insights into what they are doing differently or refusing to do in this volatile political climate.

Let’s consider how we might differently approach the second presidency of Donald Trump. How, for one, can we guard against overwhelm and dysregulation? How can we direct our energy and attention to meaningful projects rather than fall into another extended outrage cycle?

Let’s discuss the rise in trans panic, or the cultivation of widespread anxiety and fear at the very fact of trans existence. We talk about the ways in which trans panic serves particular political ends as well as underscores the phantasmatic nature of gender. Using gender affirming care as an example, we consider how much trans panic relies on fictitious stories about gender and ignores the lived realities of trans youth specifically.

Together with various voices from Generation Z, we will examine the shifting gender and sexual identities and practices of this generation. For one, at least one in five members of Gen Z identify as LGBTQ, so they are the largest demographic of LGBTQ persons in the United States.