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The point of a public intellectual is to make wild arguments with maximum conviction. And in this respect, Andrea Long Chu—transgender woman, Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic, irrepressible provocateur—always exceeds my expectations.

In a recent cover story for New York magazine, Chu makes the case for child gender transition using the most unpopular rationale possible: in essence, that minors should be allowed to have mastectomies and other gender surgeries if they want them, simply because they want them. “We will never be able to defend the rights of transgender kids until we understand them purely on their own terms: as full members of society who would like to change their sex,” Chu writes. “It does not matter where this desire comes from.”

Counterpoint: It does.

The most broadly appealing version of the argument for medical transition is that a small number of people have a psychological condition (gender dysphoria) that makes them unhappy (because their sexed bodies feel alien to them) and doctors have treatments (hormones and surgery) that can help.

In making the case for youth transition, activists have tended to emphasize the first part of that story—the distress of gender-nonconforming children—to justify treatments that would otherwise sound extreme. Even Marci Bowers, the president of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, has noted that blocking puberty early means patients might never develop adult fertility or sexual function. The price of a genetically male child never growing an Adam’s apple or having his voice break—the outcomes that will help that child pass more easily as a woman one day—can be giving up orgasms and the ability to have biological children.

Put simply, this is not something that most parents would agree to—unless the alternative was worse. And so medical-transition advocates have highlighted the possibility of suicide by gender-nonconforming minors: Would you rather have a dead son or a living daughter? (Thankfully, adolescent suicides for any reason are rare, although rates have risen in the past decade.)

Treating gender dysphoria as a clinical diagnosis with a medical solution, Chu argues, has “hung trans rights on the thin peg of gender identity”—the idea of a male or female essence (or something in between) that resides inside all of us. She notes that this argument was copied from the marriage-equality fight, where activists stressed that being gay was an innate and unchangeable state, not a trend, a pathology, or something into which a person could be groomed or seduced. Adopting a similar “born this way” argument for medical transition, Chu writes, “won us modest gains at the level of social acceptance.”

[From the July/August 2018 issue: When children say they’re trans]

She doesn’t think this is enough. Instead, she makes an argument for full-throttle libertarianism, albeit without ever using the word. She doesn’t want grudging accommodations and delicately balanced rights. She wants people like her—born male and living as women—to have unfettered access to female sports and services, based purely on their self-identification. And she wants Americans of any age to have the right to “change sex,” a phrase she seems to define specifically in terms of medical body modification.

The stark facts of child transition are that when the puberty-blocker model was developed, a few hundred minors sought treatment every year—England’s main clinic had only 210 referrals in 2011—and those treated were mostly natal males who had suffered gender dysphoria since early childhood and exhibited no other mental-health issues. What kicked off the current debate was a steep rise in the number of children seeking care, and the changing demographics of those children. In recent years most of the patients have been genetically female, and many of them presented with other issues, such as autism, eating disorders, anxiety, or past trauma.

Undoubtedly, such children need parental support, counseling, and appropriate medical treatment. The “affirmative” model departed from this assertion, though, characterizing extensive psychological assessments as transphobic gatekeeping. Removing barriers to medical transition was a “life-saving” approach, supporters claimed.

However, the evidence that adolescent medical transition prevents suicide turns out to be thin. As early as 2018, the Gender Identity Development Service—Britain’s leading child gender clinic, staffed by doctors involved with transition-related care—criticized a television drama called Butterfly that showed a gender-nonconforming 11-year-old attempting suicide. “It is not helpful to suggest that suicidality is an inevitable part of this condition,” the clinic declared in a statement. “It would be very unusual for younger children referred to the service to make suicidal attempts.” Last month, a Finnish study concluded that suicide was rare among minors seeking help at gender clinics, and when deaths occurred, they reflected overall mental-health challenges rather than being specifically linked to gender dysphoria.

This emerging evidence doesn’t bother Chu, because she regards evidence as a real downer. She criticizes the writer Jesse Singal’s 2018 Atlantic cover story on child transition—which included interviews with doctors and patients who had a variety of perspectives on the issue—and claims that it ushered in an unwelcome phase of the transgender debate. “The story provided a template for the coverage that would follow it,” she writes. “First, it took what was threatening to become a social issue, hence a question of rights, and turned it back into a medical issue, hence a question of evidence; it then quietly suggested that since the evidence was debatable, so were the rights.”

[Daniela Valdes and Kinnon MacKinnon: Take detransitioners seriously]

For Chu, the primacy of rights means that evidence is irrelevant to medical decisions—even when children are involved. This view has two logical implications: The first is that, if we are now just letting kids do whatever they want with their bodies, why not let them get married at 12, or drink alcohol at 13, or consent to sex at 14 with an adult partner? “Toddlers have the right to get tattoos” might be the worst political slogan I have ever heard.

The alternative argument is that gender—however you define it—is so unique and important that it alone justifies total bodily autonomy for minors.

Whenever I read Chu’s work, I get the sense that she’s mocking the strand of feminism for which I have argued all my adult life. The project of feminism, from Mary Wollstonecraft onwards, has been to decouple the material reality of being born female from notions of passivity and femininity. But in her book, Females, Chu writes enthusiastically about “sissy porn,” in which “getting fucked makes you female because fucked is what a female is.” (Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer the more standard definition of XX chromosomes and the body type evolved to produce large gametes.) Shorn of identifying information, the author of that quotation could be assumed to be an old-school misogynist rather than a darling of the progressive left.

But such trollishness is Chu’s preferred style when writing about gender. (Her literary criticism is more straightforward.) She has written that she transitioned to experience “benevolent chauvinism” and to wear hot pants, and argued that “my new vagina won’t make me happy, and it shouldn’t have to.” The modern trans movement has largely tidied away the suggestion that sexuality—and particularly, the sexual fetish known as autogynephilia, where men become aroused by the thought of themselves as women—has anything to do with transition. Yet Chu has steamrolled through that taboo too, wondering aloud whether sissy porn made her trans. Sometimes I think only her ideological opponents actually read her work. Certainly, liberals tend to get uncomfortable when you quote from it, because they know perfectly well that this is not the trans-rights narrative approved by GLAAD and the Human Rights Campaign. You have to argue against her with one hand tied behind your back, politely overlooking her actual, published statements, including her claim that the anus is “a kind of universal vagina through which femaleness can always be accessed.”

Anyway, it turns out that I wasn’t wrong to think Chu is mocking me—because she is, specifically, by name. Her New York article includes me on a list of supposed gender-critical “militants,” alongside Singal, Matthew Yglesias, Matt Taibbi, Andrew Sullivan, Meghan Daum, and Bari Weiss. “Many of these writers live in self-imposed exile on Substack, the newsletter platform, where they present themselves as brave survivors of cancellation by the woke elites,” she writes. Never mind that to most of America, my European center-left views make me a woke elite. My offense is to be “preoccupied with the ‘science denial’ of radical activists, who have put wokeness before rational standards of care.” Yes, I do think doctors should have a good evidence base before giving out drugs used for chemical castration. Guilty as charged!

Chu identifies my fellow militants as an insidious force against the affirmative gender-care model. The queer theorist Judith Butler believes that only fascists—and trans-exclusionary radical feminists, or TERFs, whom Butler sees as fascists in disguise—have questions about the new orthodoxy on gender. But Chu is willing to grant us membership in a third category. We are TARLs, or trans-agnostic reactionary liberals. (To my ears, this doesn’t sound as catchy as TERF, but then, I haven’t yet had the newer term screamed at me through a megaphone by a six-foot figure in a balaclava.) “The TARL’s primary concern, to hear him tell it, lies in protecting free speech and civil society from the illiberal forces of the woke left,” she writes. “On trans people themselves, the TARL claims to take no position other than to voice his general empathy for anyone suffering from psychological distress or civil-rights violations.” Again, guilty as charged.

The ostensible hook for Chu’s argument is a new book by Butler, and the essay begins with a review of it. My impression, however, is that Chu finds Butler’s prose dull (relatable) and their persona dour; she clearly prefers her own rhetorical fireworks and provocative poses to Butler’s pioneering work in the field of impenetrable subclauses.

Chu’s real motivation, surely, is a sense that her side is losing. In Europe, where the “Dutch protocol” of puberty blockers was developed in the 1990s, several countries are turning toward talk therapy as a first-line treatment instead. Just after Chu’s essay was published, England’s National Health Service announced that it would no longer routinely prescribe puberty blockers for dysphoria, saying that the evidence for their safety and effectiveness simply was not good enough. France, Sweden, Finland, Norway, and even the Netherlands have also pulled back—hardly a roster of countries that you’d describe as being to the right of the United States. Crucially, these decisions have been led by doctors, not politicians, unlike in the U.S., where the debate is extremely polarized and the most high-profile opponents of youth transition are Republican governors.

[Helen Lewis: The only way out of the child-gender culture war]

But even in America, the debate is shifting. Quite a bit of Chu’s essay is devoted to complaints about media organizations that have not sufficiently echoed the activist line—that puberty blockers are safe and reversible, and that the “science is settled.” The New York Times is deemed to have fallen into the hands of barbarians, or at least failed to stop them from storming the affirmative gates. (Its recent publication of more skeptical articles has led to staff revolts.) “The paper consistently refuses to treat transition-related care the way it would any other health-care matter … as an issue of access,” Chu laments, ignoring the fact that if rates of women seeking abortions, say, rose by thousands of percent in a decade, the Times probably would write about the phenomenon.

The loss of the Times as a reliable ally matters because the American model of youth transition is best described as consensus-based rather than evidence-based—which is to say, it rests on the agreement of credentialed experts rather than on the conclusions of highly rigorous studies. And when the clinical rationale for underage medical transition disappears, what is left is ideology. “The belief that we have a moral duty to accept reality just because it is real is, I think, a fine definition of nihilism,” Chu writes. She would prefer to make a radical claim for unfettered personal freedom, even for minors: “Let anyone change their sex. Let anyone change their gender. Let anyone change their sex again. Let trans girls play sports, regardless of their sex status. If they excel, this means only that some girls are better at sports than others.” (It doesn’t, of course—it means that male puberty and higher male testosterone levels confer significant sporting advantages, but that’s me being a reality-accepting nihilist again.)

Above all, Chu argues, we should treat children’s statements about their identity with unquestioned reverence: “To make ‘thoughtfulness’ a requirement of any universal right is to taper that right into an exclusive privilege. That trans kids’ access to care will in most cases be mediated by parents or legal guardians is an inescapable fact of the way our society regards children, rightly or not. For now, parents must learn to treat their kids as what they are: human beings capable of freedom.”

In making a case this way, Chu shows a titillating disdain for respectability politics—and will surely irritate many people who share her political goals. For skeptics of puberty blockers like me, who are used to arguing against people who claim that any overreach in gender medicine is not really happening, or that too few patients are involved to be worth caring, or that we should be writing about something more important instead—all the riotous flavors of denial and whataboutism—Chu’s case for unlimited agency for teenagers is refreshing. She said everything out loud, and her argument is logical, coherent, and forcefully delivered. You just won’t hear it made very often, because it’s about as popular as the case for letting 9-year-olds get nose jobs.

My daughter Maggie gave birth to Ellie, my granddaughter, by C‑section on a Saturday afternoon in November of 2014. That evening, my son‑in‑law, Aaron, came over for a warm hug and a celebratory shot of bourbon. I listened to Aaron’s play‑by‑play of the events, and after a decent pause, I asked the question that I had wanted to ask all along:

“Did you check the box?”

Without missing a beat, my good son‑in‑law responded, “Yes, sir. I did.”

“Very good,” I responded, as I poured a second shot.

Aaron, a young white man, had checked the “Black” box on the form that Americans are required to complete at the time of the birth of a child.

Now, my daughter’s father’s admixture—in other words, mine—is 50 percent sub‑Saharan African and 50 percent European, according to DNA tests. My son‑in‑law is 100 percent European. Because Maggie is 75 percent European, Ellie will test about 87.5 percent European when she spits in the test tube.

Eleanor Margaret Gates‑Hatley, who looks like an adorable little white girl, will live her life as a “Black” person, because her father and mother checked the “Black” box. That choice will define so very many of Ellie’s encounters with the world—from how her college application is read to how her physician assesses her risks for certain medical conditions. And she will be destined, throughout her life, to face the challenge of “proving” that she is “Black,” simply because her self‑styled “race man” grandfather ardently—and perhaps foolishly—wished for her racial self to be socially constructed that way.

[Read: How did we get here?]

Such is the absurdity of the history of race and racial designations in the United States, stemming from “the law of hypodescent,” the proverbial “one‑drop rule.” Perhaps Eleanor will choose to dance the dance of racial indeterminacy, moving effortlessly back and forth across the color line. Or maybe she will claim a social identity that reflects her European ancestry. Or maybe she will keep a photograph of her grandfather in her pocketbook and delight in refuting—or affirming, as the case may be—the laughable, tragic arbitrariness of the social construction of race in America. The most important thing is that this be her choice.

The “black box” has become a powerful symbol for me. In the event of a plane crash, of course, the black box is what survives—a record of the truth amid disastrous circumstances. The black box is something you can’t see inside—it has inputs and outputs, but its internal workings are not comprehendible. Above all it is a metaphor for the circumscribed universe within which people of African descent have been forced to construct a new identity on this side of the Atlantic.

The Yale legal scholar Stephen L. Carter defined his own box in this way:

To be black and an intellectual in America is to live in a box. So, I live in a box, not of my own making, and on the box is a label, not of my own choosing. Most of those who have not met me, and many of those who have, see the box and read the label and imagine they have seen me.

In Carter’s usage, the black box is a place of identity confinement through predefinition, akin to the late literary critic Barbara Johnson’s definition of a stereotype as “an already read text.” The Black face enters the room, and at a glimpse, the viewer knows all that they need to know about the person wearing the mask of Blackness. Good luck, Carter is suggesting, shedding any of those connotations.

And yet a great portion of the history of African Americans consists of the marvelous and ingenious means by which they have navigated their way in and out of the box in which they’ve been confined.

Perhaps the first black box was the definition of Africa as “the Dark Continent,” a metaphor for the color of its inhabitants’ skin as well as for their supposed benightedness. This metaphor was used to justify the second, even crueler black box, within which people of African descent found themselves placed by Europeans—the dreadful transatlantic slave trade, responsible for perhaps the largest forced migration in human history. It was the repository of all the racist stereotypes employed to justify the enslavement of a continent of human beings and then, subsequent to the abolition of slavery, to justify the rollback of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow segregation.

The author Henry Box Brown literalized this trope by escaping from slavery in 1849 by being shipped from Richmond to Philadelphia in a box measuring three feet, one inch long; two feet, six inches high; and two feet wide. The box was labeled this side up to keep Brown upright, but the instruction was often ignored, meaning Brown spent hours of his trip upside down, drinking water from a beef bladder and breathing through three drilled holes.

But the black box was also, somehow, a place of creativity, a universe of culture mysteriously and inexplicably produced, and often unintelligible to those outside it. Frederick Douglass recognized this when he mused about the “Sorrow Songs”—spirituals composed by enslaved men and women. “They would make the dense old woods, for miles around, reverberate with their wild songs, revealing at once the highest joy and the deepest sadness.” These songs were composed in code, music set “to words which to many would seem unmeaning jargon, but which, nevertheless, were full of meaning to themselves.” Douglass himself confessed he did not understand: “They told a tale of woe which was then altogether beyond my feeble comprehension.”

In 1884, this magazine published a long article called “The Negro Problem,” by the Harvard professor Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, a paleontologist and geologist as well as a strong proponent of scientific racism and eugenics. Shaler’s white-supremacist discourse fell squarely into the school of thought imposed on the Black community that was used well into the 20th century to justify the eradication of rights gained by African Americans during Reconstruction. Thirteen years later, also in this magazine, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote, “Being a problem is a strange experience.” His essay, “Strivings of the Negro People” (which he would revise slightly for his 1903 book, The Souls of Black Folk), described the “Negro Problem” label as a kind of black box:

The ‘shades of the prison-house’ closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly watch the streak of blue above.

(The writers of these two Atlantic essays knew each other: Shaler was Du Bois’s professor at Harvard. Perhaps paradoxically, Du Bois expressed gratitude to Shaler for defending his presence in class against the protests of a southern student.)

It was to free himself and the race from the bounds of this box that Du Bois and many others wrote and spoke so prolifically, addressing the subject again and again. For Ralph Ellison, in Invisible Man, the black box is both a boxing ring in which two blindfolded Black boys are forced to beat each other senseless and also the hole in which Ellison’s protagonist hides from a world that seeks to impose upon him its masks of identity, where he types the manuscript that we eventually are surprised to learn we are reading over his shoulder.

But being doomed to fight against racism could also be a trap. As Du Bois’s fellow Harvard graduate and sometime ideological foe, the philosopher Alain Locke, put it, even “the thinking Negro” inside a black box forged “in the mind of America” is forced “to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality.”

More recently, Terrance Hayes’s poem “The Blue Seuss” explores the metaphor of the black box. It begins:

Blacks in one box
Blacks in two box
Blacks on
Blacks stacked in boxes stacked on boxes
Blacks in boxes stacked on shores
Blacks in boxes stacked on boats in darkness
Blacks in boxes do not float
Blacks in boxes count their losses

And ends:

Blacks in voting booths are
Blacks in boxes
Blacks beside
Blacks in rows of houses are Blacks in boxes too

As a professor, I try to teach my students about how Black people have sought to escape from this box. But even more important, I endeavor to expose them to the long tradition of Black discourse, and the often disregarded fact that Black people have been arguing with one another about what it means to be Black since they began to publish their thoughts and feelings in the latter quarter of the 18th century.

When Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had the audacity to insert himself into the morality of American involvement in the Vietnam War, for example, even—or especially—several of his fellow leaders of the civil-rights movement told him that he was out of bounds, demanding that he redirect his concerns to issues relevant to those doomed to dwell within the black box, advice that the good reverend boldly ignored.

The moral is that there never has been one way to be Black; that African Americans are as varied and as complex in their political and religious beliefs as any other group. And they have voiced those internal differences with great fervor and passion, stunning eloquence, and vehemence, often even subjecting those Black thinkers with whom they disagree to the nastiest and pettiest ad hominem attacks.

These debates within and about the African American tradition have for too long been opaque to most Americans, in the same way that the songs of his enslaved sisters and brothers remained opaque to Frederick Douglass. Too often, we talk about “the Black community” as if it were a village composed of a unitary group, one with shared experiences and unified views. Reflecting on what binds Black Americans together and on what distinguishes individuals and subcultures within that tradition has never been more crucial than at this contested and polarized moment, with its focus on identity and identity politics, and Americans’ lazy predisposition to think of every group as monolithic.

But the tradition of Black thought is most correctly described as a series of contentions, many of them fiery ones. And fire, as the greatest Black intellectuals have always known, can generate light as well as heat.

The “right” answer about how to escape the black box has never been formulated, precisely because there never has been, and never will be, one right answer to that haunting question.

Consider this paradox: The very concept of “race” is the child of racism. “Blackness” was an arbitrary category invented by Europeans and Americans in the Enlightenment to justify the horror show of Black subjugation. The human beings who suddenly became “Black” were then forced to play a complex game of “representation” to claim some space in the world, and that vexed process evolved into a rich legacy of self‑definition within this diverse community composed of every type of person living on the planet Earth—some 50 million of them in this country alone—connected by their relationship to this proverbial black box, a metaphysical construct invented to justify an economic order in which their selfhood could be objectified, their subjectivity robbed, and their labor stolen.

They created this legacy of self-definition, in no small part, by using the master’s tool: writing.

During the Enlightenment, Black authors such as Ignatius Sancho, John Marrant, and Olaudah Equiano managed to forge successful careers against all the odds. Others were less fortunate. Despite her unprecedented fame, the poet Phillis Wheatley died in obscurity and poverty in 1784. Jacobus Capitein, a formerly enslaved man from the Gold Coast, defended his doctoral dissertation (which argued that the Bible did not oppose slavery) at the University of Leiden in 1742. He returned home, founded a school, and, after falling from Dutch grace, was buried in an unmarked grave. We can begin to understand how he was seen by his contemporaries through the words a fellow student at Leiden inscribed in the foreword to Capitein’s dissertation: “See this Moor, his skin is black, but white his soul … He will bring faith, hope and love to the Africans, so they will, whitened, honour the Lamb.”

The small, elite group of Black intellectuals wrote very few words about the matter of their “Blackness” in a world still wrestling with who and what they were, and what the relation between “Blackness” and “whiteness” could possibly be in European economies defined by the trade in Black human beings. No matter how brilliant an individual of color might be, no matter how much fame, respect, or financial success he might achieve, he was standing on a trap door.

Thus was the fate of Angelo Soliman.

Soliman was born around 1721, likely in what is now Nigeria. According to the scholars Iris Wigger and Spencer Hadley, he was stolen from his family as a child and forced into slavery in Italy, where he became the property of the imperial governor of Sicily, Count Lobkowitz. When the count died, Soliman became a servant to a prince in Vienna, dressed in exotic styles as a so‑called court Moor. The prince dismissed Soliman when, without permission, he married an aristocratic widow. Nevertheless, Soliman’s stature only increased, and his black box began to crack open.

[From the November 2023 issue: Black success, white backlash]

He continued to move in aristocratic circles, rejoined the royal court as an educator under the prince’s successor, and joined a Masonic lodge that counted Mozart and Haydn among its members. Soliman became the grand master of this lodge and gave its rituals a more scholarly bent, so much so that he is still celebrated in Masonic lore as Angelus Solimanus, the “Father of Pure Masonic Thought.” He spoke multiple languages. He may well have been the most prominent Black person in Europe at the time.

In death none of this mattered. Soliman died on November 21, 1796. Despite the pleas of his daughter, Josephine, Soliman would not receive a proper Christian burial. Instead, his body fell into the hands of the director of the Royal Natural History Collection, Abbé Simon Eberlé, who had hatched his heinous plan while Soliman was still alive, petitioning the government for the “cession of the corpse.” What followed was horrific.

As Wigger and Hadley write, Eberlé “ordered a death mask to be created before Soliman’s skin was removed and prepared for exhibition with a stuffing compound. The so created figure was then dressed up as a ‘savage’ in a loin cloth, with an ostrich feather crown and glass beads, and presented to the public in the midst of taxidermised exotic animals.”

In the ultimate humiliation, Soliman was placed on display at the museum, a debased artifact trapped behind glass. As late as 1806, this perverse specter of European primitivism and anti‑Black racism was still proudly on display—a literal realization of permanent suspension in a black box. Eventually it was moved to a warehouse, which burned in the October Revolution of 1848.

The quest for culture and individual identity in the face of such history is an argument without end. Like all truly great arguments, it is a story of ceaseless creativity and reinvention, without which any attempt to understand America is not just incomplete but absurd.

This essay is adapted from the forthcoming book The Black Box: Writing the Race.