BROADVIEW Podcast

BROADview is a reader-supported publication. Thank you for the support! Hello listeners, welcome to the audio version of Broadview. I’m Lisa Selin Davis. And here’s a story I forgot to tell Phil Illy, my guest today: I was having reading time with my 11-year-old daughter, and I didn’t realize that instead of reading her own book, she was peering over my shoulder as I read Phil’s book Autoheterosex...

The new book Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans: Tales from the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Kids is out today. You can find more about how to order on PITT’s Substack here . I spoke with two of the editors about PITT’s origin story, and what they’ve learned by letting parents, and others, have a forum to speak up. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other...

Remember when I complained about “ gender fatigue ?” And a bunch of you wrote to me and said, tired or not, gender identity has been enshrined into law while a lot of liberals weren’t paying close attention—replacing sex, or added as a facet of sex , a protected class. We can’t fall asleep now! The mainstream media dedicates a lot of real estate to covering “anti-trans” laws, but very little on bl...

Greetings, listeners! Julia Malott is a trans woman and parent who lives in Ontario, and has some of the most nuanced and philosophical thoughts on gender issues I’ve encountered. She’s been willing to stand up to the Canadian orthodoxy which, believe it or not, is in some ways even less flexible than the US’s. If only more people could have her attitude, and her approach to her own transition, I...

Penny Adrian has a happy trans son, who transitioned in adulthood after a lot of reflection and evaluation. Penny supports him, but she has watched as a faction of activists has taken over the conversation, imposing gender identity ideology where science, debate, education, medicine and journalism should be. Her son declined to participate but supported her in doing so. I wanted to know: How can y...

The Aarons—Kimberly and Terrell—are part of the Gender Dysphoria Alliance , which penned an open letter after those by GLAAD and New York Times’ contributors , which demanded censorship and control over the coverage of gender-affirming care. The GDA wants the opposite: transparency, research, open debate. You know, they want real evidence-based healthcare, and they want to be able to talk about th...

Happy New Year to you all! For my last post of the year, I’m sharing a conversation with one of my favorite friends that I’ve met by way of looking at gender issues from a heterodox viewpoint, Corinna Cohn. Corinna is co-host of the wonderful podcast Heterodorx , in which she speaks with people from all over the gender and ideological—and gender ideology—spectrum with co-host Nina Paley. She’s als...

In the next installment in my ongoing series of interviews of trans people with diverse viewpoints comes a therapist and trans man who goes by the pen name Stillman Cray. We’re not using his real name because he fears personal and professional repercussions. Stillman has penned a book called Being Transgender Is Not Normal : A Manifesto by a Transman, and also crafted an interesting checklist for...

Zander Keig is an award-winning licensed clinical social worker, health educator, and anthology editor who served in the US Coast Guard. He currently serves as Director of the Transgender American Veterans Association Community and Healing Committee and as an Advisory Board member and Senior Fellow for the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism (FAIR). Additionally, he develops and delivers corpo...

We were going through the procedures for dealing with student records and things like that. And just immediately as if it was a totally normal thing to say, my supervisor said you might want to do a pronoun check in if you're ever concerned. And then the example she gave is: For example, if you have a girl who comes in with a short haircut, you might want to ask her, “Hey, are your pronouns still...

“I still have and always will have the scars and the fact that these aren't breasts, these are silicone balls that were put under my muscle to replicate the idea of a breast. And that is very distinctly different from being a breast. And I think that trans ideology tends to conflate aesthetics with reality, and we need to decouple that because it is confusing to young people who are gravitating to...

Last year, I sent Ben Appel a fan letter after reading his Quillette piece. I was fascinated by his personal story—as an atheist with no religious background (but a vaguely Jewish ethnic identity, if I may use that word) I am always a bit jealous of those who grew up with strong religious communities, even (or especially) if, like his, the communities were more like cults. I was also jealous of hi...

If you’re a good liberal—and, believe me, I have learned that not all of you reading this are, and thank you for letting me know—you’re likely to believe that Obama’s changes to Title IX were a good thing; Trump’s subsequent changes were bad; and whatever Biden’s doing to reverse what Trump did is restoring justice. Well, it’s way more complicated than that. The proposed changes, to which you can...

In 2018, as I was beginning to research turning my New York Times op-ed into a book, a friend told me she had a must-read book for me: Robert Ostertag’s Sex, Science, Self : a Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone and Identity. It influenced me perhaps more than anything else I read about gender—although for several years I was too afraid to share some of what I’d learned in it. Sex, Science, S...

Welcome to my first recorded interview! Well, actually, I’ve recorded hundreds of interviews in order to write articles, but this is first time I’ve recorded one for other people to listen to. I wanted to have a conversation with Stephanie Davies-Arai, founder of the advocacy group Transgender Trend , about her organization, her thoughts on gender dysphoria and her recent award of the British Empi...