Pandemic lockdowns, gender meltdowns

Edvard Munch, Self Portrait with Spanish Flu, 1918… pretty sure Munch *didn’t* have a gender meltdown but my knowledge of modernist Scandinavian painters is not exhaustive!

In the early days of the pandemic, there were so many things that I expected to go one way that ultimately ended up going in a totally different direction.

Over the course of that first spring, I kept hearing stories about desistance, young people dropping their trans identities. This made sense, in the way that just about anything can be made to make sense, and theories sprung up to explain this trend. Perhaps the pandemic put us in touch with our humanity and mortality, exposing gender as superfluous and silly. Perhaps the performance of transgender identity lost its meaning without an audience or maybe young people just got tired of it all, in much the same way that many women stopped wearing makeup and dyeing their roots: who cares? The pandemic reshuffled priorities. Gender was sure to lose out.

But as the lockdowns and school closures and disruptions dragged on and on, that trend—if it ever was, in fact, a trend and not simply a mirage—reversed. The online communities I’d monitored for years exploded.