Ezra klein gay

Today we're bringing you an episode from our friends at The Argument about Florida's “Don't State Gay” bill and the broader wave of anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation, spurred by the political right, that is spreading across the country. According to the Human Rights Campaign, this year alone, more than 300 anti-L.G.B.T.Q. bills have been introduced in express legislatures.

Why has this issue become a major focus of the Republican Party? And how is the way population treats individuals who identify as L.G.B.T.Q. changing? Jane Coaston speaks to her Times Opinion colleagues Ross Douthat and Michelle Goldberg about these questions and brings a deeply personal perspective to the table.

Mentioned:

“How to Make Sense of the New L.G.B.T.Q. Culture War” by Ross Douthat in The New York Times

“Gender Unicorn” from Trans Student Educational Resources

Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com.

You can discover transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-rec

It’s hard to think of anything changing more quickly in our society right now than our understanding of gender. There’s an explosion of young people naming as gender nonconforming in some way or another, and others are coming out as gender diverse or nonbinary throughout their lives, from childhood to old age. But this sea change has brought with it an immense amount of confusion and resistance. As of July, lawmakers in 21 states had introduced bills that focus on restricting gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth, such as hormone blockers, and 29 states had introduced bills banning transgender youth from sports. But we also know that the degree of support a young person receives when coming out — or doesn’t — can have profound consequences for their mental health.

How should we process and understand this moment in gender? Kathryn Bond Stockton is a distinguished professor of English focusing on gender studies at the University of Utah and the author of the book “Gender(s).” She is incredibly skilled at explaining the fundamentals — and complexities — of what gender means and how people, including Stockton herself, contain wrestled with it. In this conversation, w

Eminent Americans

It would be very easy to hate Ezra Klein. He’s only 38, and already has been a pioneering political blogger, a pioneering explanatory writer for the Washington Post, the founder of Vox.com, the author of the best-selling book Why We’re Polarized, and now a marquis podcaster and columnist for the New York Times.

The amount of nice fortune that’s come his way is staggering. Not just journalistic and political good fortune, but personal good fortune. His wife, the journalist Annie Lowrey, is a successful news writer with a national profile. Presumably their two kids, whose names are presumably Leo and Daisy, are good looking and brilliant. He’s even rather giant. It’s hard for me to believe this, but the internet says he’s 6’2” (it seems plausible in this photo of him). As journalist Matt Welch wrote of him, in a 2012 profile: “He’s impossibly young, infuriatingly accomplished, and impressively wonky. In a town complete of journalistic flop sweat, he glides instead of glistens, handsome enough to make the ladies change their heads, and affable enough that their boyfriends compete for his attentions, too.”

Klein is an American prince, in other words, and

Ezra Klein's Queer Modern Hire
An addendum to this piece was posted on Sunday, March 16.
On Tuesday, former Washington Post pundit (and Prospect alum) Ezra Klein sent a shock wave through the gay society by announcing he had hired homosexual anti-gay apologist Brandon Ambrosino to connect him at Vox Media, the much-hyped digital venture that's aiming to remake journalism for the Internet age. Liberal watchdog group Media Matters was the first to sound the alarm, but within a afternoon, gay-rights supporters-from Tag Stern at Slate to John Aravosis at AmericaBlog-had connected the chorus of voices asking Klein: What were you thinking?
The problem with hiring Ambrosino is not that Klein isn't entitled to bring someone on board whose views the gay people finds distasteful. It's that Ambrosino's rapid rise to notoriety-and now, his ticket aboard the profession's hottest new upstart-is an object lesson in the way new media equates click-bait contrarianism with serious thought and gives hacks a platform in the name of ideological balance.
Ambrosino, who enrolled in Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in 2003,* has earned his name as a journalist-and his coveted spot at Vox Media-by bein