Family, Fertility, and Gender Fluidity

Part two on young people and the new culture wars.

Social psychologists like to analyze recent American history as a succession of distinct generations, but these analyses obscure as much as they reveal. What, for instance, do we learn from the fact that Rep. Jamie Raskin, who was part of the congressional committee investigation into January 6, and Donald Trump are both Baby Boomers? Or that Taylor Swift and Enrique Tarrio, the leader of the Proud Boys, are both Millennials? Nothing really.

However, there have been two periods in modern American history where many of the young have adopted distinctive and effective political and cultural outlooks.

The first is the “Sixties,” which roughly spans the generation of young people who came of age from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, and which showcased a politics of protest, particularly on the left, along with a libertarian and feminist counter-culture. The second is the period of the last two decades—what some call “The Great Awokening”—that also saw a leftward turn among the young fueled by new social and cultural trends around sex and gender, race and ethnicity, and family. The second period in many respects builds upon the first.

During the Sixties, some of the young hoped that they were witnessing the beginnings of a political revolution, but with the end of the Vietnam War the flames of protest died out. There are already signs, evident in the 2024 election, that the young's leftward turn in recent decades, evident in large margins for Democratic candidates, may have halted. I described these signs in a prior column, "Where Have All the Young Democrats Gone?"

But some of the most prominent social and cultural trends are likely to endure. These have to do, primarily, with sex, gender, marriage, and family. They are trends that go back to the Sixties, but that were given new impetus during the last decades. And they figured prominently in the 2024 election not only in the fight over abortion rights, but also in the uproar over former Senator and now Vice President JD Vance’s quip about "childless cat ladies" and in the Trump’s campaign ad declaring that "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you."

What's important to recognize is that these trends are based in broader social and economic changes that will make them difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.

Changing conceptions of the American family among the young

The recent beliefs and practices regarding marriage, childbirth, and gender are rooted in the growing obsolescence of the older ideal of the nuclear family that delimited women's social roles and acceptable sexuality. This ideal prevailed in the decade after World War II and provoked books like Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. It consisted of identifying the man in a marriage as the "breadwinner" and the woman as mother and housewife, whose primary role, even if she worked outside, was to a raise a large family. Pre-marital sex was frowned upon, homosexuality was a taboo, abortion was illegal, and sexuality was tied—if less firmly than before—to procreation. The ideal was frequently defied, but not without a guilty conscience and public disapproval.

During the Sixties, this ideal was not merely challenged by younger women but started to unravel due to changes in the economy. The shift from goods production to services that began in earnest in the early 1950s and continued through the next seven decades, created new opportunities and demands upon women, while imperiling men's status as traditional breadwinners. Many of the jobs in goods production were held by men, and in the '70s, blue-collar wages began to stagnate, making it difficult for husbands alone to support families, and laying the basis for proliferation of two-earner families. Many women were, of course, already working but this trend was reinforced by the rise of a feminist movement agitating for equality within the two-earner family and for increased access to higher-level employment in healthcare, education, law, and other services.

Given these larger economic transformations, the family as previously conceived lost much of its prior function. As Eli Zaretsky has recounted in Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life, women's subordinate place had been rooted in the family's role in older agricultural and early industrial economies. Women had specific roles in the division of labor and the reproduction of labor. Children, too, were supposed to contribute to the family's viability, and the more of them the better. Now, as the family has become detached from the economy, the division of labor and inequality within the family has lost its economic basis, and children, too, have ceased to be assets and investments. This created an opening for a feminist movement to challenge women's subordinate role in the family and workplace.

As economist Claudia Goldin has described, women began to seek careers and not merely jobs. And even those who did not, but who found themselves part of a two-earner family, no longer saw their jobs as "secondary" to that of her husband. A woman's "occupation and employment" began "to define one's fundamental identity and societal worth," Goldin has written. Young women no longer saw getting married and having children as the be-all and end-all of their lives. Women began to go to college in droves and to marry later. More remained single and married women were less likely to have large families. Young men who no longer made enough money to support a family also began marrying later and having smaller families.

These trends begin showing up in the wake of the Sixties, but some have accelerated over the last two or three decades—an effect at least in part of the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic. In 1970, there were 10.9 marriages for every 1000 Americans. By 1990, it was 9.80, but by 2018, it was only 6.5—a precipitous drop. The fertility rate also plummeted. In 1960, there were 3.65 births for every woman; in 2007, that had fallen to 2.12, which is about the number needed to replace the existing population. By 2022, the rate had dropped to 1.66. As demographers like Nicholas Eberstadt have remarked, these trends pose a threat to the viability of the social compact in the United States and other advanced capitalist countries, which depends on a rising number of young workers contributing to social insurance for growing numbers of retired workers.

The changes in the economy have altered the fabric of life for young people. In 1980, six percent of 40-year-olds had never married. By 2021, it was 25 percent, including 22 percent of women and 28 percent of men. In 1980, 18.2 percent of women between the ages 25 to 44 had not given birth. By 2020, this had risen to 20.6 percent. There has come to be, in other words, a proliferation of young single people and of JD Vance’s infamous "childless cat ladies."

Vance's quip—from a 2021 interview with then Fox News host Tucker Carlson—became a major issue in the 2024 campaign. His remark came during a segment bemoaning the declines in family and fertility, which he termed a "civilizational crisis." Vance himself is part of a what is called a "pro-natalist" movement that is primarily, but not exclusively, identified with the Republican right. It calls for more aggressive government policies to spur families to have children and to have more children (“I want more babies in America,” as Vice President Vance recently stated at the March for Life rally.). This movement is also skeptical of childcare programs that encourage women to work outside the home rather than to take care of their young children. Some on the heterodox right also promote a "family wage." Vance and other Republicans accuse Democrats, who applaud working women and childcare programs, of being "anti-family."

The debate over natalism and the young has become central to the culture wars.

Transgender ideology among the young

Likewise, in the 2024 election, the Trump campaign took aim at Kamala Harris's past support for "taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners." In Trump's inaugural address, he declared "there are only two genders—male and female—a statement that in an executive order later that day he would apply to government documents and programs. Trump's campaign ad targeted transgender surgery, but his executive order was aimed more broadly at what the young call “gender fluidity." The term refers to a growing trend among young people to draw a distinction between the sex they were born with and the sex, or gender, by which they identify themselves publicly, including on government documents. Like the decline of marriage and of the birthrate, this practice has risen to the center of the culture wars.

The young's embrace of gender fluidity can be traced back to the Sixties when they began to question the heterosexual norm that was central to the older idea of family. The first departure, inspired in part by the introduction of the contraception pill in 1960, was the sexual revolution of pre-marital sex and "free love." That was followed by the rise of the gay rights and liberation movement in the late '60s. Just as the feminist movement was partly inspired by the civil rights movement, gay liberation took off from the example of women's liberation.

Gay rights were initially an unpopular cause. In a 1987 survey, 75 percent of respondents thought homosexual relations were "always wrong." But over the next three decades it gained acceptance, particularly among the young. By 2005, 49 percent of Millennials (born from 1980 through 1994) approved of gay marriage which represented both the enduring attraction and the rejection of the older (heterosexual) family ideal. By 2015, 73 percent approved. In the 2004 election, George W. Bush ran successfully against Democrats' support for gay marriage. By the 2016 election, neither Trump nor Hillary Clinton voiced opposition to it.

Beginning in the late 2010s, young Americans began going beyond the sexual dichotomy of gay and straight—and even of male and female. Terms like "non-binary," "cisgender," "LGBTQIA+," and "queer" (which was once a pejorative term for male homosexuals) became common. Young people used pronouns that concealed or did not correspond to their biological sex. The largest group that departed from the heterosexual norm were classified as "bisexuals," but a large group also rejected the biological classification of male and female.

Beginning in 2016, and accelerating during the pandemic, the percentage of young people who identified as "non-binary" and as "trans" (i.e. "transgender) shot up noticeably. In a 2021 survey, one of 18 young adults (about five percent) identified as either trans or non-binary. In the Household Pulse Survey last year, seven percent of Generation Z adults (born in 1995 and later) identified themselves as non-binary when given the choice of male, female, transgender, and non-binary. Notably, biological women were 45 percent more likely to choose "non-binary" than men.

Keep in mind few people were even aware of these terms until recent times, let alone identifying with them.

Prior to the 2010s, there were certainly young Americans who felt uncomfortable with their biological sex, but from what is known, they were primarily young men who aspired to be known as women. Many of them, too, decided that they were merely gay males. But beginning in the 2010s, more young girls than boys declared they no longer wanted to be identified with their biological sex. Unlike earlier instances of boys who wanted to be women, the girls who wanted to be boys appeared to make this discovery about themselves in their teens rather than in their childhood, and the discovery often shaded into what psychologists define as mental illness. That suggests that more was at work than simply the erosion of older family norms.

Social psychologists Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt have argued that what they call the "crisis in mental illness" among the young is due to the eruption of social media, particularly among young girls, that begins in the 2010s with the introduction of the smartphone. That could also apply to the belated discovery by teenage girls—who spent more time on social media than boys—that they want to be boys.

In Anxious Generation, Haidt speculates that the rise in reported "gender dysphoria"—the halfway house toward actually becoming transgender, when a young person is confused and distraught about their sexuality—may have been encouraged by social media.

Some portion of this increase surely reflects the “coming-out” of young people who were trans but either didn’t recognize it or were afraid of the social stigma that would attend the expression of their gender identity...But the fact that gender dysphoria now often appears in social clusters (such as a group of close friends), the fact that parents and those who transition back to their natal sex identify social media as a major source of infor­mation and encouragement, and the fact that gender dysphoria is now being diagnosed among many adolescents who showed no signs of it as children all indicate that social influence and sociogenic transmission may be at work as well.

The transition from doubt about one's sexuality to conviction that one is a different sex has also been encouraged by activist groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Human Rights Campaign, and by WPATH (the World Professional Association for Transgender Health), which began as interest group but has unaccountably achieved the status of a dispassionate scientific body. These groups have gone beyond supporting civil rights for transgender people. They have championed "gender-affirming" surgery and drugs for minors and the participation of biological males in competitive female sports.

These radical steps provoked a backlash that Trump and the Republicans were more than willing and able to exploit in the 2024 campaign.

What’s next?

Like the cultural innovations of the Sixties youth, the current trends away from family and fertility and toward gender fluidity are likely to endure in some form. They are rooted, for the most part, in underlying social and economic changes that politics and policy cannot easily reverse. They are not confined to the United States but common in other advanced capitalist countries.

The natalist right-wing has championed the attempt by Hungary's Viktor Orban and by Poland's Law and Justice to encourage childbirth through generous subsidies. Both Hungary and Poland have had some success, but their fertility rates are still way below what would be required merely to reproduce their current population. That doesn't mean countries shouldn't try. It does mean that the primary strategy needs to be adaptation to rather than reversal of these trends among the young. (One means of adaptation is encouraging emigration from the more fertile countries of the South, but many on the right reject that option.)

Attempts to suppress young people's embrace of bisexuality or celibacy or their uncertainty about their gender may also prove daunting. These reflect the decline of heterosexual norms that were intrinsic to the older idea of family. Those who want to reverse current trends through legal means should note what has happened to abortion since conservative Republicans finally succeeded in stocking the Supreme Court with judges who overturned Roe v. Wade. While states have used the Dobbs decision to ban abortions—the right to which was a cultural innovation of the Sixties—the number of abortions has reached record proportion in the wake of the decision.

The one important exception in the last decades' cultural explosion may be the precipitous rise of transgender young people and of the practice of surgery or hormonal therapy among minors. In contrast to the ACLU or WPATH, most Americans do not approve of biological males participating in women's sports or of "gender-affirming" drugs or surgery for minors. In Europe, medical groups have begun to acknowledge the dangers of "gender-affirming" care. If that happens in the United States that could stem newfound teen enthusiasm for changing sexes.

But politicians are not going to resolve the sexual identity crisis plaguing the young through new laws and executive orders. Nor will they succeed in restoring the norms of the traditional family. In trying to do so, they confront winds of change that started blowing well before they arrived in politics.

John B. Judis is author of The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism and, with Ruy Teixeira, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?