The increased expression of ambiguous sexuality reflects a deeper metamorphosis that has been under way since the 1960s, of which today’s obsession with gender identity is but a part. There is a gravitation toward an androgynous mean, which I believe has been forced upon us by the sexual revolution’s reconfiguring of the human ecosystem.

As the recent furor over “drag queen story hour” in public libraries goes to show, many people—mainly, many older people who themselves grew up in a less cumulatively fractured time—have found the proliferating of “gender identities” to be the most baffling phenomenon of the day. Stories about gender barrel nonstop through the news cycle and popular culture. The drive to construct identities independent of all limitations, including chromosomal constraint, has become as unexceptional to many as an Internet connection, and unavoidable to anyone else on the grid.

The increased expression of ambiguous sexuality reflects a deeper metamorphosis that has been under way since the 1960s, of which today’s obsession with gender identity is but a part. There is a gravitation toward an androgynous mean, which I believe has been forced upon us by the sexual revolution’s reconfiguring of the human ecosystem.

Androgyny appears to offer competitive advantages in a world redesigned by the massive, radical, and largely unacknowledged communal dislocations incurred by Homo sapiens since the 1960s. Androgyny, including its instantiations of gender fluidity and gender ambiguity, has emerged in this new world as an adaptive way of augmenting one’s substitute clan. It operates, in effect, as a mechanism for reconstructing the extended family/community in prosthetic form in a time when the actual Western extended family/community is in decline.

Like today’s other identitarian groups, the new virtual gender communities offer what in-person communities used to: connections, an audience, a sympathetic ear, and a relational answer to the question Who am I? in an age when real live and literal human relations have become more riven and problematic than ever before.

Consider a few facts about the ubiquity of ignoring la différence. Following the sexual revolution of the 1960s, sex differences in strength and endurance have been increasingly ignored or minimized, and standards for physical fitness altered, in venues where physical strength matters. These include the armed forces and police and fire departments. As one consequence among many, for the first time in American history, young American women stand a chance of being drafted into combat positions.

There is also the explosion of gender ambiguity and fluidity in popular culture, beginning, though not only, in the United States. MTV, following the new ideological regimen, in 2017 moved to “gender-neutral” awards for acting (i.e., no more separate awards for “actors” and “actresses”). Other vetting boards in the performing arts and related circles are following suit.

Then comes fashion. Denim jeans became the first sartorial plumage signifying the interchangeability of the sexes. In the 1990s, a handful of designers including Helmut Lang, Giorgio Armani, and Pierre Cardin pioneered what was called “unisex” clothing. Today, it is hard to name a major designer who hasn’t reinforced the trend and gone further.

Androgyny is also front and center in popular music—and has been, for a while now. Once, David Bowie was a lone, mildly sexually ambiguous figure on the rock scene. Today, stars who flirt with gender bending are assured not only of fan love but also of competing on a field that gets more crowded by the day.

Androgyny’s rewriting of popular culture isn’t an expression of European or American sexual exceptionalism. In Japan, designers such as Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and Kenzo Takada render versions of the same androgynous cool seen in Europe and the United States. As with fashion, the pop-music trend is just as pronounced on the other side of the planet.

Androgyny is a staple of Korean and Japanese popular genres, from K-pop and J-pop to anime and manga. In society after society, it is androgyny that is most visible across the genres of fashion, music, and other byways of pop culture.

In short, an increase in androgynous expression is now to be found around the world—specifically, in societies transformed by the postrevolutionary remaking of primordial ties. Plainly, something unprecedented is happening to humanity across the planet, something so hitherto unknown, and operating with such power, that it demands more than passing explanation.

Here’s one thesis: The new androgyny is not incidental to the collapse of family and community. To the contrary, the new androgyny is being driven by the collapse of family and community.

I am arguing here for a new interpretation of the scene, according to which transgender bathrooms and related controversies are manifestations of a bigger and more abiding story: the ways in which post-1960s changes have increased pressure to gravitate away from the traditionally masculine and feminine and toward a more ambiguous, androgynous mean.

Economists say that to subsidize something is to ensure more of it. And this is essentially what the sexual revolution has done: It has inadvertently subsidized androgyny by raising the penalties for traditional masculinity and femininity. Let us count some ways.

Begin with simple arithmetic. The sexual revolution reduced the number of men who could be counted on to serve as protectors from time to time, and in several ways. Broken homes put father figures at arm’s length, at times severing that parental bond for good. The ethos of recreational sex blurred the line between protector and predator, making it harder for many women to tell the difference. Simultaneously, the decline of the family has reduced the number of men offering affection and companionship of a nonsexual nature—fewer brothers, cousins, uncles, and so on.

In such a world of reduced primordial ties, the incentives for women to act more “male”—say, via the coarsened language and belligerent demeanor now commonplace in public demonstrations and elsewhere—makes sense as an adaptation. It amounts to protective coloration in the new ecosystem. If men cannot, or will not, be found to help protect women (and children), to whom does that task fall? The answer would seem to be, a woman—a woman who’s being more like a man, that is.

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