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This week Texas will join the 20 or so other states that have passed laws restricting access to medical therapies and procedures for transgender children. The new law is a triumph for Governor Greg Abbott, who has tried a couple of different strategies to restrict gender transitions, first threatening to investigate parents and caregivers for child abuse and now, in the latest bill, threatening doctors with prosecution. Civil-rights groups challenged the bills, and some medical providers who oversee the treatments have already quit or left the state. The estimated  tens of thousands of young people in Texas who identify as trans—roughly 1 percent of the state’s population of kids between ages 13 and 17, according to one count—and their families, must grapple with a new political reality.

In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk to one trans girl who found herself caught in the middle of these debates in Texas. She says she’s not an activist. She doesn’t protest for her right to medical care or mention her identity on her Instagram bio. She’s not “super-pro Democrat,” she says. She describes herself as not a “cheerleader or anything,” just a “normal, semi-popular girl.” She’s grown up with supportive parents, in an accepting community. But just as she was facing puberty, trans medical care became something politicians argue over. She could handle middle-school bullies. It was knowing the Texas government was against her that made her worry that she would be taken away from her parents, and question whether she could stay in the state.

Her mother and father faced an agonizing decision about what to do. They loved living in Austin. But their family was not safe. And they started to see signs in their daily life—in school, in the dentist’s office, at the hospital—that their family was in danger. They ultimately decided to leave, becoming a new kind of domestic political refugee.

“I started realizing that not only it was the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.”

Listen to the conversation here:

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The following is a lightly edited transcript of the episode:

Hanna Rosin: I’m, like, fixated on your posters. I’m just, like—I really want to start the interview, but I’m just trying to guess what each of the posters are. Who set up your room when you moved?

Teenager: Me.

Rosin: You did? Did you have—are these movie posters from your old room?

Teenager: Yeah, I brought most of my stuff I’ve seen.

I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. And I’m talking to a teenager from Texas. Or she used to be from Texas. She left the state earlier this year and moved to a more suburban-y place in California.

Teenager: I was new. I got here after winter break, so I was like the only new kid in the middle of the year.

Rosin: What’s the first thing you noticed about it? Because you think of yourself as a city kid.

Teenager: The first thing I noticed was I saw the same cars all the time. I’ll say that.

Rosin: What do you mean? Your dad said you were into cars, and I was like, “Really? What do you mean?” What’s your favorite car, by the way?

Teenager: Subaru WRX STI, 2004.

Rosin: Damn, he was not kidding.

Teenager: And I work on cars too. You should see my shelves. I have an alternator, an oil cover, and a muffler, and a bunch of tools up on my shelf.

Rosin: Okay, so, before we go back to what happened and how you landed here: Your parents said that you wanted to talk, or were willing to talk, because we asked them about that. I was wondering, did you have a reason? Why did you want to talk to us?

Teenager: Um, well, I wasn’t 100 percent sure what we were gonna really be talking about, but if it is what I think it is, it’s just about me and everything in Texas.

Rosin: “Everything in Texas”

How one state senator wrote a letter to the attorney general one day asking whether what he called “sex-change procedures” for children equaled child abuse.

And then suddenly all the grown-ups—senators, judges, teachers, parents, reporters—were talking about things like puberty blockers and gender-reassignment surgeries and who was doing the better job “protecting children.”

And now this fact about herself, that she mostly talked about with her parents, her doctor, maybe one or two people at school, had now become a political issue.

She still cannot fathom why anyone would be yelling about this in the statehouse or on the streets or wherever.

Teenager: I’m not a part of the trans community; I am trans. That’s it. I don’t have flags up in my room; I don’t have it in my Instagram bio. I’m not a crazy super-pro-Democrat. I mean of course I’m against the people who are making my life like this, but I’m not an advocate or an activist; that’s why I want to do this anonymously.

I don’t go to protests; I don’t. I’m not very involved in the trans community, and not that I have a problem with that, but that’s just not who I am.

Rosin: Hmm. So who are you then? That’s really, really, really important, what you just said, because I think, if you’re talking about this, you’re affected by politics. People might just make those assumptions, but like, that’s just not you.

Teenager: I’m just—I’m not, like, “Oh, I’m a cheerleader,” or anything, but I’m a normal, semi-popular girl.

Rosin: Mhmm. And what do you most remember about living in Austin?

Teenager: My best day in Austin probably was summer of fifth grade, and everyone in the whole neighborhood got together, and we had water-balloon fights every day all summer.

Rosin: That sounds amazing. And are you good at water-balloon fights?

Teenager: I would like to say. Mostly, I remember being good, everyone being nice and happy. And when I actually, like, formally “came out” or whatever, I was probably 11. But everyone knew by the time I was, like, in second grade.

Rosin: Because had you said things?

Teenager: Kinda like how I dressed and how I acted. I didn’t act weird, but I just wasn’t a boy. It was never something that set me apart when I was younger. I was just who I was and everyone was okay with it. Then once everyone got older and got into middle school, they developed their opinions about me and people like me. Most of Austin was nice. But of course if you’re in the middle of Texas, people are gonna let you know what they think about you.

Rosin: Mhm. What’s the first time you remember having that thought?

Teenager: Probably COVID year, in sixth grade, when everyone was online. I was probably searching for something for class, and then the news things come up, and then, you know, I click on it, and I kind of went down this rabbit hole.

Rosin: And what did you understand? Or what words jumped out at you?

Teenager: Um, “unhealthy,” I think, jumped out, and um, “unhealthy” and “unnatural.”

Rosin: Mmm, those are hard words to read, unhealthy and unnatural. What was the thought in your head after you read those?

Teenager: I laughed. I thought—oh, I didn’t laugh, but I thought it was funny. Because, at first I thought, like, Oh, it’s a hick; it’s a redneck; it’s a … I don’t care, ’cause it’s not like I’m ever gonna be in contact with these people. So it didn’t affect me. I was fine. I honestly didn’t mind it. I was like, Okay. But then on and on, I realized, like, Oh, it’s not just random Texas guys and their trailers. It’s kids, and it’s everyone. A lot of people.

Rosin: How did you come to realize that?

Teenager: Probably seventh grade. And I got to be with, instead of with fifth graders, with seventh graders. Then I realized a lot of these kids think the same as what I thought was a couple of old rednecks. But I realized that a lot of people in my life agreed with what those people thought.

Rosin: And what was your main feeling? Were you scared? Were you sad? What do you remember of how you were actually feeling during that period?

Teenager: I was annoyed. I didn’t want anything to do with them either.

Rosin: Mmhmm. So at that point, it’s still just annoying?

Teenager: I thought that, eventually, they would move on. They did not. And so I became less annoyed and more angry, but never really sad. And then I started realizing that not only was it the kids and the people being mean, but it was the government in my state that was now also against me.

Mark Davis: That is today’s slate, so let’s go right to the phones. Say hi to Governor Abbott. Good morning, sir. How are you doing?

Rosin: In July 2021, Texas Governor Greg Abbott spoke to Mark Davis, a local conservative talk-show host.

Davis asked him about a proposal to outlaw medical treatments for transgender youth.

Which, heads up, Davis invokes a false notion about surgery for minors that is common in anti-trans circles, and he does it in pretty crude language.

Abbott: I’ll be candid with you. I’ll tell you what everybody knows, and that is: The chances of that passing during the session in the House of Representatives was nil.

Davis: Why? In a conservative state with Republicans in charge, a law that states, “We’re not going to let you carve up your tenth grader ’cause he thinks he’s a girl,” how in God’s name does that not pass in Texas?

Abbott: I can’t answer that. However, what I can tell you is: I have another way of achieving the exact same thing.

Rosin: Pretty soon, it became clear what his way was.

John Krinjak, Fox 7 News: In a letter to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, Governor Greg Abbott claiming so-called sex-change procedures constitute child abuse and directing the agency to investigate any reported instances.

In the letter, Governor Abbott calls on teachers, doctors, and nurses to report if they think these treatments are happening.

Rosin: This was the moment that these ideas, that this teenager was “unhealthy” and “unnatural,” moved from somewhere out there in Texas to the statehouse and then landed in her own house—more specifically, her mother’s bedroom.

Mom: I did not sleep at all that night.

Rosin: Because, theoretically at least, Child Protective Services could remove a child from their home. That’s her mom by the way. We’re keeping the family’s identities private to try to protect them and their children from harassment.

In their Slack group, the parents of trans kids started to try to manage their panic by trading information. Could they trust their teachers? Did they need to prepare an emergency medical file? Should they hire a lawyer?

Mom: Children could be taken from the home or school or anywhere at any time and put in foster care during the investigation. So that’s when the real fear began.

Rosin: Though maybe it would be more accurate to say: That’s when the fear became much harder to manage. The fear had always been there, just in a different way. The kind of fear you have as a parent when your child isn’t like everyone else and you have to actively work to convince yourself that it’s okay; they’ll be safe, if the world will just agree to be nice about it.

Mom: The first day that it was very marked was a school or a classroom play. And she auditioned only for the female parts, but at that time wasn’t socially identifying as female, and it was perfectly fine. She got the most glamorous female part, got the most glamorous dress, costume, makeup for it, and was the first time I think we really, like, She really likes that costume, and—

Rosin: Can you describe the costume? I’m curious. And what year was this, by the way?

Mom: Third grade, so 8 years old, and she was Glinda the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz.

So a pink tulle dress with a big, huge skirt and high heels. And she had long hair at that time.

Dad: Both of our kids had sort of long hair, and when we would go on road trips, when we’d go to restaurants, 75 percent of the time or more, the servers would think they were both girls.

Mom: That didn’t happen in Austin, but as soon as we left, whenever we’d leave Austin, it’d be like, “And for the little ladies?” And they’d be fine with it.

Rosin: [Laughs.] And just so I don’t exaggerate or say it wrong, was it really this smooth? Like there was nothing?

Mom: Totally. Before the transition: the only “boy,” invited to all the girls’ slumber parties, friends who were boys, no friction in the elementary school.

Rosin: So when is the first moment you remember that ease not being there anymore?

Mom: At age 12, when I think the early signs of puberty began, she started to show more distress and came to me and said, “I don’t want to be a boy. I want to be a girl.” And was from that moment on, and never any wavering, that she has been a girl.

Dad: Never a moment.

Mom: Change to a female name, female pronouns, everything.

Rosin: How did you think it was gonna unfold? Like, how did you—what did you think the next, like, the middle-school, high-school years were gonna be like?

Mom: She was very distressed by even the early signs of male development. So we spent a lot of time in the, What is this? Did so much research, contacted experts who were in these New York Times articles from both sides, had full consultations with them, pros and cons; got into the local endocrinology clinic, had very, very long conversations with them.

I definitely had the thoughts of, like, Can a 12-year-old make this decision? We wouldn’t let our child get a tattoo. Why would we let them do this? So I definitely went through all of that and all the things of, What are these interventions? I am gonna read all of the real primary research on what is, what do these interventions do to brain development, heart development. I definitely was open to, like, if there’s a problem with this stuff, I want to know.

Rosin: It sounds like you guys are in the sort of parental tight space. You're like, What’s this gonna mean for my kid? What’s this gonna mean for us as a family? But you didn’t see any bigger trouble on the horizon. You weren’t thinking about that.

Mom: The Texas of it all. No. [Exasperated laughs.]

Rosin: They started “going to the endo,” as the teenager called it. Every three months, the nurse would inject a puberty blocker into her thigh. She asked her mom to video because it was a big needle and she wanted proof for her future self and everyone else of how tough she was.

At some point during her treatments, the governor’s directive went into effect, which meant that doctors and nurses were required to report any efforts to enable a child’s gender transition to Child Protective Services. It was unclear whether the governor had the authority to issue this directive, but he did.

The clinic told the family that, for the moment at least, they would keep seeing patients, implying they would not turn anyone in.

Rosin: When you said you were up all night, what were the thoughts in your head?

Mom: Yeah. The thoughts were, Can I send my child to school? Because I am sending my child into a state-run agency where all of the staff have now been instructed to report us to Child Protective Services, so does my child go to school? Or not? And decided the next morning that we had to let our daughter know if she were called to the office and asked any questions about her gender, to not answer them and to call us, to not give them any information, because they said they could take the child without informing the parents or talking to the parents first.

Rosin: There were already news reports of an eighth grader pulled out of a classroom without his parents present, of an investigator who visited a kid at home and asked, “Who’s the better cook, your mom or your dad? Do you know where your privates are? Has anyone touched them?”

Mom: We had to put together a whole docket of all the paperwork saying, trying to prove that it wouldn’t be abuse, so that if she were taken into foster care, we could get her back as soon as possible.

Rosin: Was it really like one day it was fine, the next day you hear about a directive on social media? Like, was that how it happened in your life?

Mom: Yes.

Rosin: It just came out of the—like, you’re living your life, driving your kids, doing whatever you’re doing, and then just one day this lands on you?

Mom: Yeah. And I’ll give two examples. We had an endocrinology appointment not long after the letter, and our daughter was afraid I was going to be arrested on sight. And at the dentist where a new hygienist pulled me aside and said, “Y’all aren’t safe here. We had a staff meeting this morning, and most of the staff said they didn’t think children should be allowed to be transgender, so you should find another practice.”

Teenager: At school, um, during standardized tests, they have to use my legal name

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: In the doctor’s office, they have to do the same protocols as they do with any other boy. Any, like, government or official office refers to me as someone that I’m not.

Rosin: And did that ever happen to you? Like did you ever have an encounter?

Teenager: All the time.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: It’s not just a political situation; it’s, like, making my life a crime, right? My parents could be sent to CPS, and I could go to foster care. So that was probably the moment where it started to make me more sad than angry.

Rosin: In May, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that the governor couldn’t compel DFPS to investigate. Civil-rights groups also sued the state, which created a legal standstill.

The teenager kept getting her injections.

As summer turned to fall, there was something to grab on to. Governor Abbott, who had opened the investigations, was up for reelection against Democrat Beto O’Rourke, and the race was at least a race.

The night of the election, some neighbors had planned a block party. The kids made Beto signs; Austin’s “gentle weirdos,” as her parents called them, gathered to do their thing: play vinyls, drum, have some beers.

The results started coming in.

Teenager: I remember that one night when my dad brought everyone and everyone from the street was watching the election and then the bad guy that we didn’t want to win won, and then I was around everyone else. Nobody knew what to say. Nobody talked about it; it was just like a Saturday-night thing. Like it was a party.

It didn’t affect anyone else, other than me. With this guy getting elected, for everyone else it was just like, they were into politics, so they wanted to watch it. And they were like, “Uh, he didn’t win.” And then, you know, said whatever they thought about it, but I was like, “Why is everyone …?” I didn’t say anything. I wanted to go home, because I didn’t feel like that’s something that should be a party.

Rosin: Yeah, I totally get that. For you, some tragedy happened, and everyone’s, like, cleaning up the dishes.

Teenager: It reminded me of the Hunger Games books, where they all go to watch this terrible thing happen. Which I didn’t understand.

I think that was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Probably.

Rosin: What was the straw? The election?

Teenager: Yeah. I only went to school for a couple days until I went to the hospital, so I, you know, obviously wasn’t in a safe place geographically and then also mentally. So those two combined things made me make some really bad decisions and made me close to making another really bad decision.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: So I went to the hospital for a couple weeks and then—

Rosin: Did you take yourself? Did you ask to go to the hospital?

Teenager: I knew that I had to.

When I was, like, getting set up for the hospital, my dad was asking me, like, “What’s going on?” And I told him, “It’s ’cause of Texas,” and he was like, “Okay.”

Dad: When a minor says that they don’t feel safe or that they might hurt themselves, it triggers an involuntary commitment process. And so they took her in an ambulance. I drove behind because, you know, I couldn’t drive her there. So this was really the first moment of, like, We are losing control of our child. Now this process that we’ve been afraid of for most of the year is now under way. The wheels are turning, and we don’t really know what is going to happen now.

Mom: At the intake, the intake person said she didn’t think kids should be given the right to choose this, as we’re there taking her in.

Dad: She had understood before I did that we have to leave.

Mom: I’ve been up thinking about what we can do, and I said, “One option is we can move to a different state where you’d be safe and legal.” And she lit up and said, “That would make me very happy.”

Rosin: So they made this maybe extreme arrangement. She would leave right away. The rest of the family still had a life in Texas—work, school—so in the meantime, the parents would split their time between California and Austin, and the whole family would reunite over the summer

Rosin: When they called you and said, “We’re moving,” what was your reaction?

Teenager: I was excited. Obviously, I don’t want to move from where I’ve lived, but it’s gonna be better.

Rosin: Mmhmm.

Teenager: Yeah, I was happy.

Rosin: Uh-huh. And what about the rest of your family? How did the conversations go in the house about moving?

Teenager: My brother doesn’t, my dad doesn’t, and my mom don’t. They don’t want to move, but I do. And if it were up to me, I would probably go and live with my grandparents and let them stay here in Texas, because I don’t want to do that to them. But at the same time, I’m not—I didn’t want the fact that I happen to live in a place that is in America, the country that is the home of the free, like, if I’m just a couple thousand miles away from, you know, not having to feel like this.

Rosin: Mmhmm. Mmhmm.

Teenager: I’m not gonna put up with everything.

Rosin: How is your California school, by the way? I was curious about it.

Teenager: I think at my new school, though, the politics of this area is better. My peers are a lot worse than in Texas, because they don’t understand truly how what they say can affect other people. So they’ll say a lot more hurtful stuff and a lot more often, but it doesn’t really affect me as long as I know that the politics—like, here, I’m safe.

I don’t have to hide.

Rosin: Best-case scenario for the summer and the next year, worst-case scenario?

Teenager: Best-case scenario: My family gets adjusted, and everyone has a good time. Worst-case scenario: They don’t like it here, and everyone’s miserable, except for me.

Rosin: By summer, her whole family joined her in California. It wasn’t easy for them to move, but they could pull it off—a lot of families in Texas couldn’t.

In May, all the doctors at the Texas clinic where the teenager had gotten her shots left after the attorney general announced he would investigate the clinic.

In June, the governor signed a new bill, which was a version of the original bill he’d been trying to pass all those years.

It points at doctors, criminalizing puberty blockers and hormones and any surgeries for minors—basically any medical interventions to enable a minor’s transition.

This law goes into effect in September.

[MUSIC]

Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Ethan Brooks and edited by our executive producer, Claudine Ebeid. It was mixed by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Sam Fentress.

If you or a loved one is having thoughts of suicide, please call National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988. Or text talk—T-A-L-K—to 741741 to reach the Crisis Text Line.

I’m Hanna Rosin, and we’ll be back with a new episode every Thursday.

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The phrase toxic masculinity was coined in the 1980s by a psychologist named Shepherd Bliss. He was a central figure in what he named the “mythopoetic” manhood movement. Bliss had grown up in a punishing military household with a domineering father, and he meant the new term to connote “behavior that diminishes women, children, other men,” a way “to describe that part of the male psyche that is abusive.”

It was a potent phrase, one that expressed something that had never had a name—that there is a particular poison that runs in the blood of some men and poses a deep threat to women, children, and the weak. The phrase didn’t break into the common culture until relatively recently, when the crimes of Harvey Weinstein and his ilk needed to be understood with some kind of shared language. They were men, but they were the kind of men who are filled with poison.

As it is with most new terms that roar quickly and powerfully into the culture, toxic masculinity was a rocket ship to the moon that quickly ran out of fuel and fell back to Earth.

[Read: The miseducation of the American boy]

Over the past several years, The New York Times has located signs of the brave fight against toxic masculinity in the television series Ted Lasso, in a production of the 19th-century opera Der Freischütz, and in a collage made in less than an hour. “White Lotus Didn’t Care About Toxic Masculinity After All,” wrote a disappointed Michelle Goldberg, as though someone had snatched away her bag of Good & Plenties.

Notably, however, the Times has not referred to toxic masculinity in its coverage of the Gilgo Beach murders. Nor does the term appear in an article headlined “Professor Charged in Scheme to Lure Women to New York and Rape Them,” nor in one about the abduction of a 13-year-old in which the suspect has been charged with kidnapping and transporting a minor across state lines for criminal and sexual purposes.

Why don’t these qualify as toxic masculinity? One suspects it is because murder, rape, and kidnapping are serious, and “toxic masculinity”—as we now use the term—is trivial. Still, I use it in this essay, because in its grammar we find something instructive. If the noun masculinity can be modified by the adjective toxic, then there must exist its opposite, which can be revealed by a different adjective. What is it?

The opposite of toxic masculinity is heroic masculinity. It’s all around us; you depend on it for your safety, as I do. It is almost entirely taken for granted, even reviled, until trouble comes and it is ungratefully demanded by the very people who usually decry it.

Neither toxic nor heroic masculinity has anything to do with our current ideas about the mutability of gender, or “gender essentialism.” They have to do only with one obdurate fact that exists far beyond the shores of theory and stands on the bedrock of rude truth: Men (as a group and to a significant extent) are larger, faster, and stronger than women. This cannot be disputed, and it cannot be understood as some irrelevancy, because it comes with an obvious moral question that each man must answer for himself: Will he use his strength to dominate the weak, or to protect them?

Heroic masculinity is the understanding that someone has to climb the endless staircases in the towers. On 9/11, 343 New York City firefighters died at Ground Zero, and there wasn’t one of them who didn’t know, or at least suspect, that he was climbing to his death. They didn’t do it because of a union contract or an employee handbook. They climbed those towers because they knew that it must be written into the American record that heroes were there that day, and that the desperate people inside those buildings had never—not once—been abandoned.

(There were also, of course, women who responded to the catastrophe, three of whom were killed—two police officers and an EMT: Kathy Mazza, Moira Smith, and Yamel Merino.)

A year ago, at a drag show in Colorado Springs, a man opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle. A second man, Richard Fierro, was at the club with his wife, his daughter, and a few friends. When the shots roared into that enclosed space, Fierro ran toward the gunfire and pulled the killer to the floor. When Fierro found that the man was carrying a second gun, a pistol, he seized it, and pounded the man’s head with it over and over again, screaming, “I’m going to fucking kill you.”

Fierro is a combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I don’t know exactly what I did,” he told The New York Times. “I just went into combat mode.” He told CNN simply, “My family was in there. My little girl was in there.”

These examples are about heroic masculinity at its most extreme. Heroism is usually much less dramatic. You can see it every time a high-school kid puts himself between a girl and some boy who’s hassling her, and every time a man steps up to another man who is screaming—or worse—at a woman. Girls and women do this, too. But the kind of men who harass women don’t tend to listen to them.

Toxic and heroic masculinity can easily exist in the same man. There are plenty of examples of a bad man who sees something unjust and who suddenly—if only for the minutes it takes to stop another man from harming someone—puts a stop to it. For that tiny stretch of time, he is connected to greatness.

There are questions that must be answered. For instance, aren’t women capable of heroic acts? Of course, and mere examples don’t suffice to tell the tale, but here are several: Heather Penney was one of the two fighter pilots sent screaming through the air on 9/11, on orders to find and take down the fourth hijacked aircraft. The only successful end to that mission would be suicide: There was no time to load the jets with missiles, so if they found the missing plane, they would have to fly straight into it. “There was no second-guessing,” she told a reporter on the 20th anniversary. “And there was no tears.” Leigh Ann Hester was the first woman to be awarded the Silver Star for combat valor, for her swift action during a 2005 firefight in Iraq.

But the heroism that marks most women’s lives is the endless effort to protect themselves—and very often, their children—from male threat or violence. It is in spite of this deep, perpetual vulnerability that the world goes on, that women go out alone with men they don’t know well, that they bear their children, and—on nothing more than trust—sleep at night beside them. The number of women who have risked everything—and in many cases lost their lives—in self-defense is without end, and the number who haven’t thought twice about throwing themselves between their children and great threat is all you need to know about female courage and sacrifice.

We know from experience, if we have lived long enough—and from thrillers if we have not—that there can be something deeply attractive in a man who is strong enough to hurt but also to protect. It is the knife’s edge of masculinity that women negotiate. No matter how far women have come in the modern world, the fact of male power remains a deep and, I would imagine, primal attraction for many women. How could it not be?

The next question involves the police, the overwhelming majority of whom are male, and the fact that so much corruption and malevolence exist within the ranks. There are many jobs, usually those that involve the possibility of danger and the conferring of power—that are appealing to both kinds of men. The bad cops reveal how malevolent a force manhood can be if exerted against the innocent. The good ones remind us that in the moment of violence, laws won’t protect us, and norms won’t protect us. In the moment of male violence, the best luck you’ll ever have is for a good cop to be nearby.

I’ve talked about this topic before, and almost instantly someone interrupts to report in outraged tones the monstrous action of some man who has been in the news. “Is he heroic?” they will ask.

Patiently I will explain that obviously he isn’t. There is a very simple test for whether or not something constituted an act of heroic masculinity, and here it is: Ask yourself if it was heroic.

In certain parts of the country, including Los Angeles, where I live, the strength and bravery of girls are specifically championed. The message is that it’s great to be a girl, and that girlhood itself is part of what makes each girl so powerful. On the soccer field I’ve often heard parents cheer “Girls rule!” after a winning goal.

But never once have I heard parents at a match yell “Boys rule!” Why not? Because in sports they do rule, and in such great measure that it’s rude to point it out. In 2017, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team played a scrimmage against a boys’ team in Texas. The boys were all younger than 15, and they won that match 5–2. The same thing had happened in Australia a year earlier; the national women’s soccer team played a team of under-15-year-old boys and lost 7–0. When CBS reported the loss in Texas, it softened the blow by noting that it “should not be a major cause for alarm.”

Alarm? Alarm about what? You would be alarmed only if no one ever told you that boys and men are stronger and faster than girls and women.

There used to be a T-shirt that I sometimes saw little girls wearing that said Boys are terrible. Throw rocks at them. Good luck with that, I would think. Maybe a rock-throwing girl would make contact with a boy who knows that you don’t get into a physical conflict with girls, because that’s not right. Or maybe she would make contact with a boy who believes that girls are the absolute equal to boys in every way, and she’ll get beaned.  

In progressive areas, there is a kind of suspicion about boys, a sense that if things aren’t handled very carefully, they could go wrong and the boy might never express his feelings.

The New York Times is a central purveyor of this What’s wrong with boys? agenda. A couple of years ago it published an op-ed called “What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human.” The writer reported that despite her intention to raise her sons in a gender-neutral way, the culture kept getting its hands on them.

First “preschool masculinity norms” meant that while girls’ books are about the inner lives of people, boys’ books explore “the emotional lives of only bulldozers, fire trucks, busy backhoes and the occasional stegosaurus.” Setting aside the weird, sexist assumption that some books are for girls and other books are for boys, we learn about what happened next:

“Now, they are 10, 7 and 3, and virtually every story they read, TV show they watch or video game they play is essentially a story with two men (or male-identifying nonhuman creatures) pitted against each other in some form of combat, which inevitably ends with one crowned a hero and the other brutally defeated.” Despite all of her best efforts, she has managed to produce boys who care deeply about being heroic and saving good people from villains.

Boys are various and wondrous, and their inclinations are wide and changeable. There are boys who love art and literature, boys who are dreamy and funny, boys who play football and also study ballet. Let them be who they are, including those boys—among them many artists and poets—who are very interested in what it means to be heroic, in the sense of defending and protecting the weak.

Have you ever noticed that there are a lot of otherwise reasonable young men who admire Andrew Tate, a vile and widely watched influencer facing charges of rape, human trafficking, and organized crime? (He denies the allegations.) That is because the only thing they have been taught about masculinity is that it is a dangerous and suspicious and possibly socially constructed fantasy that they must cast off in every way possible. They’re so confused that when they finally see a thug like Tate, reveling in talk of dominating and abusing women, they think he’s admirable. At least he isn’t telling them that they’re bad seeds.

If we don’t give these boys positive examples of strength as a virtue, they will look elsewhere.

[Tom Nichols: The narcissism of the angry young men]

The final complaint about men is the demand for tears. Why aren’t more men crying? Crying is important and men should cry!

Men do cry. Freely and openly. But women are often looking in the wrong places for it.

When a gunman attacked the Covenant School, an elementary school in Nashville, in March, only 14 minutes lapsed between the first 911 call and officers on the scene taking the shooter down. The Nashville chief of police, John Drake, spoke to the press often on that day and the days that followed. He spoke in the language of data and facts—but also in the language of human beings trying to understand this great evil.

About a week after the shooting, Drake spoke again. First he thanked everyone who had helped, including the cops who had entered the building first, and were also at the press conference. And then he talked about a memorial service he had attended with other members of the force:

“As I sat in a church Saturday, and I watched students from Covenant School take flowers down to the altar, literally I’m in tears. And the other first responders, police officers, firefighters are in tears. And I look at these kids, and they look at us and say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ And they believe that their classmate is going to Heaven, that they're in a better place and they’re not hurting. The ones that was hurting the most was us.”

Almost overcome, he said that the thing he always tells new recruits, men and women alike, is “No one ever said it would be easy, but they said it would be worth it.” And then he turned to the cops: “I’m totally proud of these men.”

What if we showed that speech to boys? What if we didn’t repeatedly tell them that we want to know their feelings and that we want them to be unashamed to cry, but instead showed them that everything is possible for a man—even a straight chief of police? If you think that boys, even ones raised in liberal places and by liberal parents, aren’t deeply interested in the testimony of this kind of man, then you haven’t been around boys very much.

What if we understood that boys are born into a destiny, not a pathology?

The first tide of syringes washed ashore on Thursday, August 13, 1987. Hundreds of unmarked hypodermic needles spilled out of the surf that afternoon, accompanied by vials and prescription bottles, along a 50-mile stretch of New Jersey beaches during peak tourist season. By the next morning, New Jersey Governor Thomas Kean, an environmentalist Republican with national ambitions, was aloft in a helicopter surveying the floating slick of medical waste and other garbage that now stretched from Manasquan to Atlantic City. Disembarking onto Island Beach State Park for a press conference, Kean vowed in front of a huddle of news cameras that New Jersey would join legal action to “sue in federal court to have the guilty party pay every penny of damage that this tide of garbage has caused.”

New Jersey officials pointed eastward, across the water, toward Staten Island’s Fresh Kills landfill, the 2,200-acre disposal site whose mounds of garbage by then ranked among the largest man-made structures in history. Perhaps an inbound barge filled with trash had spilled. Perhaps a Gotham crime syndicate was luring hospitals into an illicit dumping scheme. Federal officials, including Samuel Alito, then the U.S. attorney for New Jersey, began preparing legal action. But New York City’s mayor, Ed Koch, said there wasn’t any proof that the ​​needles had washed over from his jurisdiction. New York, the Koch administration insisted, was “not missing any garbage.”

The legal battle ended a few months later, with a cash settlement and a technological fix. New York agreed to deploy a $6 million “superboom” with a 15-foot curtain in the water near the Fresh Kills landfill, to prevent its waste from floating over to New Jersey. But the settlement only skimmed the surface of a deeper panic. Some of the beached syringes had visible residues of blood and other bodily fluids. A few tested positive for hepatitis—or for what was known then only as “the AIDS virus.” In October, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey welcomed his colleagues to a special Senate hearing in Atlantic City at which more syringes were on display, along with the evocative story of a 3-year old boy whose foot was punctured when he stepped on one, leading to weeks of shots to stave off possible infection.

From their first appearance in the U.S., the syringe tides were a ready-made tabloid sensation, and a shocking visualization of the perils of a throwaway society. In the years that followed, major efforts would be taken to reduce Americans’ solid-waste production and protect its shores. But the steel-and-plastic flotsam raised a more specific warning, too, about the increasing and deliberate wastefulness of the American health-care system. That concern went unheeded at the time. Nearly four decades later, its implications are harder to ignore. The long-term ecological costs of single-use medical devices can now be seen on a planetary scale.

The disposable syringe was a relatively new form of waste in the 1980s, and a new kind of environmental threat. Sure, a busted sewer main could put bacteria in your drinking water—but you could always boil your water just to be safe. Aerosolized dioxins from an incinerator might lead to pulmonary disease—but those with means could make sure they lived in a “nice” neighborhood that wasn’t anywhere near the exhaust plume. A hypodermic needle, however, is designed to violate the barriers that keep you separate from the outside world, regardless of income, race, and ethnicity. It is engineered to transgress, to deliver contents from the outside in. When the syringe tides struck, they brought the anxiety that the contents of another person’s body might spill over into and contaminate your own—or perhaps your child’s—through a sudden prick on a sunny day.

When the syringe tides struck again in the summer of 1988—like a terrible blockbuster sequel—the consequent media event spread fear even more effectively than the original. New York City’s “superboom” had failed and shorefalls of used syringes were now spreading north and south, devastating coastlines from Massachusetts to North Carolina, with regular beach closings all summer. Newspaper coverage called to mind the tagline for Jaws 2: “Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water …”

The disposable syringe became an object of terror, a mechanical viper hidden in the sand. In the late 1980s, AIDS was still understood to be a universal death sentence, and one tied directly to the bodies and bodily fluids of other people, especially other kinds of people: homosexuals, heroin users, Haitian immigrants, hemophiliacs—the infamous “4-H Club” of at-risk populations. Syringes could now be understood as vessels for their germs, and a man-made vector for increased transmission.

If at first officials thought the seaside syringes had originated through the negligence of hospitals and clinics, now they wondered if the tides could be blamed on junkies, whose used, discarded needles had been flushed out into the ocean via the sewer system. When 39 syringes washed up on the beaches of Monmouth County in the first week of June, the Asbury Park Press described the glass vials that appeared alongside them as “the kind associated with ‘crack’ drug use.” After New York City closed down two beaches in the lead-up to a 99-degree weekend that July, local health officials said they’d come to understand that beached syringes were to be expected, given prevailing social conditions in the city. As The New York Times put it, “The repeated discoveries of waste had made them realize that needles were becoming as common on beaches as jellyfish and cracked seashells.” Perhaps the syringe tides were just another threat that we would need to learn to live with, like nuclear war. “We now understand that needles on the beach are part of the ecology of New York, just as crack vials in Washington Square,” New York City’s health commissioner told the Times.

[Read: The lost nurdles polluting Texas beaches]

The CDC tried in vain to reassure the American public that this new normal wasn’t all that bad, because medical waste is no more infectious than residential consumer waste. Representatives from the American Hospital Association had already testified at the Senate hearing in Atlantic City the year before that the risk of contracting AIDS from the rising tides of medical waste was overblown. And the chief of environmental protection at the National Institutes of Health had agreed: “Although the washing up of syringes on New Jersey beaches by barge accident is deplorable,” he told the lawmakers, “a sea voyage would be a fairly hostile environment for most human pathogens to survive.” From early in the crisis, then, these experts had agreed that widespread fear of beach-syringe-borne viruses was ultimately more dangerous than the syringes themselves.

They’d also pointed out that the disposable syringe was best understood as a tool to stop the spread of infectious diseases, especially among health-care workers and intravenous-drug users. Several first responders to the AIDS and hepatitis epidemics had been infected with these fatal conditions via needle sticks throughout the early ’80s, leading to a call for safer, disposable technologies. Meanwhile a cadre of harm-reduction activists was switching from a strategy of helping intravenous-drug users disinfect their needles with bleach to one of maintaining a supply chain of fresh needles and syringes. The supply chain was evolving to meet these goals. Syringes were no longer made of glass but of plastic, and steel needles that previously were sharpened between uses were now designed to end up in a landfill or an incinerator.

The new system didn’t just equate hygiene and safety with disposability; it promised new modes of efficiency as well. Hospital managers favored single-use medical devices because they were cheaper and easier to manage than the skilled employees who were needed to sterilize reusable equipment. Shifting the architecture of the health-care sector toward disposable technologies entailed other, longer-term costs, but they weren’t visible. At least, not yet.

Not all objects thrown away remain thrown away. In the syringe tides, thousands of them were now returning. More than 2,000 pieces of medical waste landed on New York beaches in July 1988 alone. By the end of the tides’ second summer, they were even showing up in the Midwest, dotting the shores of the Great Lakes. After hundreds of used needles washed up on the coast of Lake Erie in August, Cleveland hosted a follow-up to the original Atlantic City Senate hearing.

As Representative Dennis Eckart of Ohio welcomed colleagues from Washington, D.C., to his home district, he complained that junkies in the city were “rummaging through Dumpsters trying to find hypodermics,” and, by implication, that their reused needles were the ones that ended up littering the shores. “As long as a needle and a syringe is recyclable, it becomes a tool for self-destruction,” he said. In other words, the problem was that the disposable syringe wasn’t disposable enough. The EPA chief J. Winston Porter agreed that the health-care industry’s move toward a system where everything is thrown away had probably helped safeguard patients and providers while creating new dangers elsewhere: first for the intravenous-drug users who recycled those supposedly single-use syringes, and then for anyone else who might come across one after it had washed up on a beach. The disposable syringe had transformed from a public-health innovation into a public-health crisis.

Lawmakers now asked how the crisis could be reversed. Two federal laws, the Ocean Dumping Ban Act and the Medical Waste Tracking Act, would be passed and signed by President Ronald Reagan in the months to come. The first sought to eliminate our use of the ocean as landfill. As the U.S. changed its approach to dumping into bodies that drained into the ocean, so did the rest of the world, with a substantial effect in reduced shorefalls of trash. It was, quite literally, a watershed moment. The second reconceptualized medical waste as a particular kind of refuse that carried a particular set of hazards. New monitoring systems, implemented first in New York and New Jersey and then copied elsewhere, followed and documented medical waste from its creation to the place of its eventual disposal.

By singling out “medical waste” as a special category of refuse, the Medical Waste Tracking Act also had the effect of making medical waste a more expensive form of garbage. The cost that hospitals would now pay for “red-bag trash” was more than 10 times that of regular sanitary disposal, even though less than 20 percent of medical waste from hospitals was understood to be pathogenic. “These changes,” the New York Daily News reported, “could mean a boom for the medical-waste-disposal industry.”

[Read: Animals are migrating to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch]

If the syringe tides came to symbolize, for the public, the horrors of runaway waste, the health-care sector would learn a very different lesson. Media coverage of syringe tides led everyday consumers to question their wasteful habits: to reduce, reuse, recycle. But hospital managers came to understand that their wasteful habits should be formalized, if not spruced up. By 1991, former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop and colleagues declared that the epidemics of AIDS and hepatitis, and epidemics to come, necessitated better single-use health-care technologies. “The development and widespread production of a syringe truly designed for one-shot use could break chains of infection dependent on syringe reuse,” they wrote in a joint statement. “It is possible to make disposable syringes truly disposable.”

Here lies the paradox of the syringe tides: The solution to the crisis of medical waste would lead to the creation of more medical waste.

Wheel of Fortune, Sally Ride, heavy metal suicide
Foreign debts, homeless vets, AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz
Hypodermics on the shore, China’s under martial law
Rock and roller, cola wars, I can’t take it anymore

Sandwiched between AIDS, crack, Bernie Goetz, and the Tiananmen Square crackdown, the syringe tides were one of 11 admittedly arbitrary selections that Billy Joel used to commemorate the 1980s in his triple-platinum chronicle of the Boomer era, “We Didn’t Start the Fire.” At the time the song emerged, in September 1989, the tides had just receded. Only a handful of syringes had been found on the New York and New Jersey shores in the preceding summer, with barely a beach closing. By the following year, the syringe tides seemed a thing of the past.

Looking back at a few decades’ remove, however, a more subtle point was missed. The media spectacles of 1987–88 helped build political pressure for addressing the buildup of solid waste in general, but they had the opposite effect on medical waste. In effect, they served to valorize and naturalize the increasing production of medical trash, and to separate it out from all other garbage in a special category that, by design, could never be reduced, reused, or recycled. We have lived quietly with the consequences ever since, accepting health care as a sector of the economy that is necessarily wasteful for our own good.

The paradox of disposable medical technology as both a solution to and a cause of the threat of contagion became visible again in the supply-chain crises of the coronavirus pandemic. Countries around the world struggled first to obtain, and then dispose of, thousands of tons of masks, gowns, and other forms of personal protective protective equipment, as well as plastic test kits and vaccine syringes. Recognizing with alarm that nearly one of every three health-care facilities around the globe lacked the capacity to handle waste under normal circumstances—let alone the added mountains of disposable devices needed to contain the pandemic—the World Health Organization official Maria Neira declared, “COVID-19 has forced the world to reckon with the gaps and neglected aspects of the waste stream and how we produce, use and discard of our health care resources, from cradle to grave.”

By 2020, the health costs of climate change, which Neira’s division of Environment, Climate Change, and Health could enumerate all too easily, were compounded by the climate impacts of a disproportionately wasteful health-care system. If the global health-care industry were treated as a single country, it would have the fifth-largest carbon footprint in the world. Biomedical industries and health-care complexes are among the leading contributors to nondegradable plastics in landfills, incinerators, and oceans—especially the microplastics now seemingly found in every living thing. The uncritical embrace of single-use medical devices in the global health-care sector has become, in all meanings of the word, unsustainable.

Now, in these heady times, syringe-strewn beaches are making headlines once again. In early 2020, as the coronavirus was just emerging, dozens of syringes and bloody medical plastics were discovered on a beach in Dakar, Senegal—discarded there because a nearby hospital’s incinerator had broken down. In July 2021, beaches in Monmouth County were very briefly closed after large numbers of home-use disposable syringes washed up to the sand, on the same shores where the first syringe tide made landfall in the 1980s. A similar event had occurred just a few years earlier, in the summer of 2018.

As we are only now realizing, those New York City health officials who long ago likened hypodermic needles to jellyfish and cracked seashells in the ecology of the late-20th-century seashore may well have been correct. It will take even more work today to ensure that syringe tides do not remain our new normal.