Dear Jessica Grose - If You're Switzerland, I'm Ukraine (an Open Letter to Jessica Grose)

Dear Ms. Grose,

In your recent essay for the Times, ("Kennedy's Comments on Circumcision Are Only Going to Confuse and Shame Parents," Oct. 15, 2025), you wrote, "Let me say upfront that on the issue of circumcision, I am Switzerland."  Let me say up front that if you're Switzerland, I'm Ukraine.  I say this not to trivialize the monumental suffering and horrendous loss of life among the Ukrainian people nor to equate the harm that was done to my body with the harms that have been done to thousands of Ukrainians but simply to illustrate, in a way that is consistent with your own metaphor, a few important points about your approach to the topic of forced circumcision.  After all, even though there are no credible reports that it has been used in Putin's war against Ukraine, forced circumcision is, in fact, considered a war crime and a crime against humanity and is a tactic with a long history of use in conflicts around the world, including as recently as 2007 in Kenya.  (What does it say about a practice that in one context is viewed as a parent's "choice" but that, in another, is considered a war crime?)

But, to your metaphor - first, as you are no doubt aware, Ukraine's president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, has repeatedly been excluded by Trump from his discussions with Putin, who is incontrovertibly the aggressor in Russia's war of conquest against its much smaller neighbor.  I think we can agree that it defies reason and the basic principles of conflict resolution - to say nothing of justice - for bilateral talks to include an aggressor nation (Russia) and a third party (the United States) but not the invaded nation itself (Ukraine).  Yet, this is exactly how you approach the topic of forced circumcision in your essay.  Your concern is exclusively for how parents may be made to feel ("confused" and "ashamed") by HHS Secretary Kennedy's assertions concerning a conjectured (and unproved) link between acetaminophen and autism in the context of post-circumcision pain-reduction.  Completely absent is any concern for the infants themselves or for the boys, men, and transwomen that such infants inevitably become and how we might feel about having been circumcised against our will.  If only you had the same concern for our bodies and our right to bodily autonomy that you have for parents' feelings.  Excluding our voices (failing even to acknowledge that they exist) from any consideration of the topic of forced circumcision is like excluding Ukraine from negotiations to end the war.

Second, you profess neutrality on forced circumcision yet, immediately after doing so, you make a categorical statement in support of it (". . . there are real health benefits to the procedure. . . .").   And while there have been numerous peer-reviewed, scientific and academic papers and professional medical position statements raising serious ethical, medical, and epidemiological objections to forced circumcision, you fail to acknowledge any of these in your essay.  An impartial treatment of the topic (even one in which the topic of forced circumcision is almost tangential since Kennedy's comments were primarily about acetaminophen) would have included, at the very least, an acknowledgement that there is (and has been for a long time) a robust body of criticism of forced circumcision (to say nothing of providing links to some of these sources) by legal scholars, medical researchers, ethicists and physicians themselves.  Instead, the only published academic works to which your article links are those supporting forced circumcision.  That's not Switzerland. 

At the same time, following the example set by Mark Joseph Stern - whom you quote at length and to whose essay criticizing intactivism your essay links - you lump all forced-circumcision opponents together under the label of "intactivists" whom you characterize as "entrenched and aggressive internet partisans" and whom Stern, as you paraphrase him, has accused of making "untrue and exaggerated claims."  Let us assume, if only for the sake of argument, that everything you (and Mr. Stern) say in disparagement of the most hardcore intactivists is true: pointing to internet trolling and portraying intactivist keyboard warriors as the sole representatives of the movement to end non-therapeutic, forced penile circumcision (which, you should know, is but one part of a broader genital autonomy movement that includes efforts to eradicate female genital cutting and medically unnecessary intersex surgeries) is merely a way of discrediting that movement.  This rhetorical technique is first cousin to a straw-man argument.  Focusing solely on extremist spokespeople for a cause makes it easy to delegitimize the cause altogether and saves one the trouble of having to engage with its more temperate emissaries on the actual merits of their position.  Thus does your essay depict forced-circumcision opponents to your readers (many of whom are likely unfamiliar with the mainstream medical and ethical objections to this practice) as being invariably hyperbolic, "anti-establishment," unscientific, and unreasonable in contrast to forced-circumcision advocates whom you represent as "reasonable."  This oppositional and highly unbalanced framing strongly suggests a bias against the former and in favor of the latter.  That's not Switzerland, either.  If anything (and to stretch the Switzerland/Ukraine analogy a bit), it's Belarus.

You wondered whether "it's useful . . . to get into the wacky statements Kennedy makes" (and by the way, I happen to agree that they are not only "wacky" but dangerous) but ultimately concluded that "it's necessary because his public statements have so much power and reach." You might not have quite the platform that Kennedy has but much the same can be said of you, which is why I'm writing this open letter.  After all, 50 to 100 million people visit the New York Times each week.  That's an awful lot of potential readers of an article that greatly mischaracterizes and even misrepresents the truth about forced circumcision, about those who support it and about those who oppose it.  So allow me to attempt to undo some of the damage by correcting, both in a general way and specifically, some of the misinformation in your essay.

First, since your approach to this topic at least to some extent mirrors that of Mark Joseph Stern (though without the contumely), I think you should be aware of a point-by-point rebuttal to Stern that was written by Brian D. Earp not long after Stern's piece came out in Slate.  Dr. Earp is a widely respected bioethicist who has written extensively on this topic.  He currently serves as an Associate Professor of Biomedical Ethics at the National University of Singapore and is also a Research Associate of the Uehiro Oxford Institute of the University of Oxford.  Not coincidentally, Dr. Earp was a finalist for the John Maddox Prize (in 2020).  This is known, informally,  as the "Standing Up for Science" Prize and is awarded jointly by Sense About Science and Nature. The Maddox Prize recognizes "researchers who stand up and speak out for science and evidence-based policy [my emphasis], advancing public discussion around difficult topics, despite challenges or hostility, and successfully making a change in public discourse or policy."  Earp, to put it simply, is the antithesis of the stereotype of intactivists that you presented to your readers.  He cannot be dismissed as an "entrenched and aggressive internet partisan" nor does he make "untrue and exaggerated claims."  On the contrary, one need not resort to such polemical excesses in order to refute, as I believe Earp has successfully done, Stern's opinion piece in Slate.  Rather than reinvent the wheel, therefore, I will simply encourage you - nay, I implore you - to read Earp's "An Open Letter to the Author of 'How Circumcision Broke the Internet.'"  Everything Earp says there applies to your recent essay, as well.

Second, your readers deserve to know a thing or two about the authors you cite in support of forced circumcision and whose opinions and conclusions you treat as dispositive.  The first of these is Aaron A. Tobian, MD, PhD, to whose paper, "The Medical Benefits of Male Circumcision" your article links with the statement "there are real health benefits to the procedure."  According to Retraction Watch, which reports retractions in scientific journals and which is a project of The Center for Scientific Integrity (itself the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation grant in 2014), Tobian was the "sole reviewer" of a 2016 article in support of medical circumcision by Brian Morris (with whom Tobian is a "frequent collaborator") co-authored by John N. Krieger and Jeffrey D. Klausner in the World Journal of Clinical Pediatrics.  As RW reported, because of the inherent conflict of interest (Tobian's having reviewed the article notwithstanding his prior collaboration and ongoing association with Morris), the article should have been retracted.  The publisher of WJCP, however, refused to pull the article and, as a result, its editor resigned in protest.  When RW contacted Tobian, "he declined to comment, saying 'I am conflicted.'"  RW notes in its reporting on this episode that there were two comments on Morris's article, one by "circumcision critic John Dalton and the other a response by Morris."  RW then includes part of Dalton's comment, which provides context for anyone who wants to evaluate the merits of any pro-circumcision article written by Dr. Tobian:

Morris, Krieger, Klausner and reviewer Tobian are members of an authorship cartel who seek to promote circumcision by co-authoring papers and reviewing each other's work.  They also seek to repress papers with opposing views by writing damning reviews.

Your readers should have been informed, therefore, that the authority whom you cite in support of forced circumcision is every bit as much a partisan as the intactivists you criticize for their partisanship.  Incidentally, do the tactics of Tobian et al. described here - "seek[ing] to repress papers with opposing views by writing damning reviews" - differ substantially from the online tactics of intactivists that you (and others linked through your article) decry?  

As for Brian Morris, since his name has come up, although you did not cite him directly nor link to any of his published "studies," Stern does in his screed against intactivists that you cite in your essay.  Responding to Stern, Earp likewise provides some context about Brian Morris:

. . . Professor Morris runs a pro-circumcision advocacy website, has founded a highly active circumcision lobby group (some of whose board members derive a substantial income from performing circumcisions), and has recently been profiled in the International Journal of Epidemiology as being engaged in systematically distorting the academic literature on circumcision [hyperlinks in original]. . . .

The point of all this is that, while calling yourself Switzerland, you very clearly apply a double standard to the antipodes in the forced-circumcision controversy.  Those who oppose it you dismiss as "[v]ery loud anticircumcision partisans [who] have been flooding the comments of articles and social media posts about the procedure for over a decade."  Those who support it, on the other hand, you cite uncritically as measured, disinterested authorities - the "adults in the room," if you will.  The result, if not the intent (or is it?), of this disparate treatment is to present opposition to forced circumcision as inherently irrational and support of it as valid by default.  Again, that's not Switzerland.

Consistent with this approach, the other ostensibly neutral but arguably pro-forced-circumcision authority that you cite is the American Academy of Pediatrics.  Quoting the AAP's defunct 2012 Circumcision Policy Statement (a document that expired years ago and that should be regarded as having only as much relevance as is consistent with that status) you write that it "seems reasonable" to claim that "'parents ultimately should decide whether circumcision is in the best interests of their male child'" and that "'they will need to weigh medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices [my emphasis].'"  Only in a nation where male genital cutting is a deeply entrenched social custom - one in which male genital cutting has been normalized and medicalized - could an otherwise thoughtful journalist write in the New York Times that it "seems reasonable" to claim that "religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices" are valid criteria on the basis of which a parent may decide to subject a child to a medically unnecessary genital surgery.  Or, to put that more bluntly (and at the risk of appearing to be one of those internet partisans), that it "seems reasonable" for the AAP to cite "religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices" in support of a parental right to visit upon a child precisely the same act that in another context is considered a war crime.  That's also not Switzerland.  

If the AAP's 2012 position on forced circumcision "seems reasonable" to you, the reason it does - to give you the benefit of the doubt - may simply be that you are writing from the perspective of someone who is a product - as we all are - of a male-genital-cutting culture.  To me, however, someone who was subjected to this genital surgery without my consent and who has had to live with the consequences of it, the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement is anything but reasonable.  On the contrary, I don't see how it is any different from arguing that it is the prerogative of parents to decide that female genital cutting (but let's call it "labiaplasty" or, better still, "female circumcision") is in "the best interests" of their female child after weighing the "medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices."  This "medical information," after all, could include the opinions of medical professionals who actually claim that female circumcision has health benefits ("It has been proven scientifically that women are healthier if they are circumcised," according to one Egyptian gynecologist as reported by Amy Wright Glen in 2015), or it could simply include the (implied) medical imprimatur for female circumcision that one may reasonably infer from the fact that more than 25 percent of female genital cutting procedures worldwide are now performed by healthcare providers.  What about parents who decide to withhold medical treatment from their children after weighing the "medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"?   What about parents who choose "conversion therapy" for their gay or gender-non-conforming child after weighing the "medical information in the context of their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"?  How is any of this different from anti-vaxxers (to get back to Kennedy) who withhold life-saving vaccines from their children because vaccines violate "their own religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"?

The problem with this approach, as should be obvious from all of these examples, is that, in attempting to justify "access to [forced circumcison] for families who choose it" the AAP was inviting parents to compare apples to oranges or, more specifically, to weigh matters from two distinct and mutually exclusive "non-overlapping magisteria," as Steven Jay Gould put it.  Gould reconciled the seeming incompatibility and not-infrequent conflicts between religion and science by ceding to each only that which is properly in the domain of each:

The net of science covers the empirical universe: what it is made of (fact) and why does it work this way (theory).  The net of religion extends over questions of moral meaning and value.  These magesteria do not overlap, nor do they encompass all inquiry. . . .  [W]e get the age of rocks, and religion retains the rock of ages. . . .

What, then, would it actually mean to come to a decision about forced circumcision by "weigh[ing] medical information in the context of . . . religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices"?  The classic image that comes to mind of the figurative use of "weigh" in this sense is that of Lady Justice holding a double-pan balance scale - like this one:

 

                                                                           GALDEF

- in which facts or evidence supporting one point of view are placed in one pan and facts or evidence supporting an opposing point of view are placed in the other.  While Gould was speaking specifically about religious beliefs, I  think it's fair to say - broadly speaking - that "cultural beliefs and practices," as well as religious beliefs, are not facts and they are not evidence.  The AAP does not specify the amounts of each (that is, how much weight to give them) that should go into the pans or even which pan they should go into.  Were the authors of the AAP 2012 Policy Statement saying that scientific evidence should go in one pan and religion in the other?  Or did they mean that conflicting scientific evidence should go into opposite pans but that the religious and cultural context in which the weighing of evidence occurs should be permitted to alter the gravitational field (to skew the results, that is) so that the scale agrees with a religiously- and culturally-desired outcome?  However the items from these non-overlapping magisteria are distributed, what the AAP asserted in its 2012 statement was nothing less than the radical (and pre-Enlightenment) idea that, in the case of forced circumcision - but only in the case of forced circumcision - whether or not to subject an infant - and only if that infant has a penis - to genital-modification surgery is not a decision that need be made strictly on the basis of medical evidence and in strict conformity with standard, well-established medical ethics (as opposed to personal and culture-specific ethics) and informed by contemporary universal principles of bodily autonomy and individual rights but, rather, is one in which the parents' personal religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices may be given as much or even more weight.  That's not science, it's not medicine, and it certainly isn't "reasonable." 

Don't take my word for it.  Almost as soon as it came out, the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement was widely criticized - not just by "entrenched and aggressive internet partisans" but by, among others, physicians from numerous technologically advanced nations with widely respected healthcare systems.  Their response, which, to its credit, the AAP published in its journal Pediatrics, not only criticized the AAP's policy statement on scientific, medical, and ethical grounds but, significantly, concluded that "Cultural bias [in the AAP Policy Statement] reflecting the normality of nontherapeutic male circumcision in the United States seems obvious."  Because it would appear that you are not familiar with this rebuttal to the AAP Policy Statement that you defend as "reasonable" in your article,  an extended quotation is warranted here:

The conclusions of the AAP Technical Report and Policy Statement are far from those reached by physicians in most other Western countries. As mentioned, only [one] of the aforementioned arguments has some theoretical relevance in relation to infant male circumcision; namely, the questionable argument of UTI prevention in infant boys.  [A condition that, as the authors note elsewhere, can easily be treated with antibiotics and, in any case, is so rare that approximately 100 circumcisions would need to be performed in order to prevent a single case of UTI.] The other claimed benefits are also questionable, weak, and likely to have little public health relevance in a Western context, and they do not represent compelling reasons for surgery before boys are old enough to decide for themselves. Circumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria for the justification of preventive medical procedures in children. . . .

The AAP report lacks a serious discussion of the central ethical dilemma with, on [one] side, parents' right to act in the best interest of the child on the basis of cultural, religious, and health-related beliefs and wishes and, on the other side, infant boys' basic right to physical integrity in the absence of compelling reasons for surgery. Physical integrity is [one] of the most fundamental and inalienable rights a child has. Physicians have a professional duty to protect this right, irrespective of the gender of the child.

There is a growing consensus among physicians, including those in the United States, that physicians should discourage parents from circumcising their healthy infant boys because nontherapeutic circumcision of underage boys in Western societies has no compelling health benefits, causes postoperative pain, can have serious long-term consequences, constitutes a violation of the United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child, and conflicts with the Hippocratic oath: primum non nocere: First, do no harm.

Several years after this critique of the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement was published, one of the lead authors of the Policy Statement itself, Andrew L. Freedman, MD, FAAP, published another commentary in Pediatrics in which he as much as conceded the cultural bias for which the AAP had been criticized.  In "The Circumcision Debate: Beyond Benefits and Risks," Dr. Freedman wrote,

To understand the [AAP's 2012] recommendations, one has to acknowledge that when parents decide on circumcision, the health issues are only one small piece of the puzzle.  In much of the world, newborn circumcision is not primarily a medical decision.  Most circumcisions are done due to religious and cultural tradition.  In the West, although parents may use the conflicting medical literature to buttress their own beliefs and desires, for the most part parents choose what they want for a variety of nonmedical reasons.  There can be no doubt that religion, culture, aesthetic preference, familial identity, and personal experience all factor into their decision.  Few parents when really questioned are doing it solely to lower the risk of urinary tract infections or ulcerative sexually transmitted infections.  Given the role of the phallus in our culture, it is not illegitimate to consider these realms of a person's life in making this nontherapeutic, only partially medical decision.

. . . 

In circumcision, what we have is a messy, immeasurable choice that we leave to parents to process and decide for themselves rather than dictate to them. . . .

[W]e have to accept that there likely will never be a knockout punch that will end the debate.  It is inconceivable that there will ever be a study whose results are so overwhelming as to mandate or abolish circumcision for everyone, overriding all deeply held religious and cultural beliefs.

You were right to point out that the AAP "stops short of a universal recommendation" of forced circumcision but the way that you did so (again, not Switzerland) blurs the distinction between medical practice and social custom.  Yes, "the issue is complex," as you say, but it's not medically complex.  The reason the AAP stopped short of making a universal recommendation is because one simply cannot be justified by the medical evidence.  Yet despite this, the AAP still wanted to preserve "access to [forced circumcision] for families who choose it."  "Protecting this option," Freedman wrote in 2016, "was not an idle concern at a time when there are serious efforts in both the United States and Europe to ban the procedure outright."

If there were any doubt as to the lack of a medical justification for forced circumcision sufficient to override (or usurp, more properly) the right to physical integrity and the right to bodily autonomy of people who have been (and continue to be) subjected to it, perhaps it will now be dispelled once and for all by the even more candid admissions by Dr. Freedman and another one of the authors of the AAP's 2012 Policy Statement, Douglas S. Diekema, MD, MPH, in a recently published article in the Journal of Medical Ethics by Max Buckler.  For this paper ("As controversies mount, circumcision policies need a rethink"), Buckler interviewed Freedman and Diekema and both now explicitly acknowledge that, on balance, forced circumcision cannot be justified on medical grounds.  "When you look at all the data," Diekema explains, "I don't think you can honestly say in a recommendation that the benefits outweigh the risks."  Of the 2012 Policy Statement, Diekema now says

"My feeling was that there was not sufficient data to suggest that this is a procedure that should be outlawed, particularly given that there were multiple religious communities for whom this was an important practice.  But I also didn't think paediatricians should be recommending it.". . .  "The only situation in which I would give a recommendation is to the parent who is on the fence.  To them I would say they are probably better off not doing the procedure."

For his part, Freedman likewise acknowledges unambiguously that forced circumcision 

"is a non-therapeutic procedure.  If it can be called a preventative medicine, it is at the very weakest level. . . .  [Y]ou cannot recommend circumcision based on the medical benefit alone." . . .  "[T]he best analogy is that the AAP guidelines are a 'permission slip' for those who want to circumcise their children so that society cannot say they are bad parents or outlaw the practice." . . .  [But] . . . "it's not really a medical practice.  It's only a 'medical procedure' in the sense that medical professionals are performing it."

By that definition, of course, female genital cutting is also a "medical procedure" because medical professionals are performing it.

One can only hope that this will prove to be the final nail in the coffin of medicalized male genital cutting in our society.  It's not, however, the final thing I wanted to mention in relation to your article.  There remains one more non-Switzerland-like passage that I need to address because it epitomizes the rhetorical technique that I have been criticizing here.  Namely, the repetition of the bluntest and most sensational claims of intactivists in order to represent objections to forced circumcision (and by the principle of guilt by association, all objections to forced circumcision) as outlandish and hyperbolic.  Not surprisingly, it is one of your quotations of Mark Joseph Stern, so credit (or blame) goes to him.

"Check any internet message board, and you'll find the same ideas peddled as unimpeachable fact: Circumcision is amputation, a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse.  It damages penises and violates human rights.  And it irrevocably, undeniably ruins male sexuality for life. . . ."

These ideas do seem shocking on their face.  I can imagine that they would seem especially so to someone who, like Stern - and you, and me, and your readers - was raised in a male-genital-cutting culture.   But the "problem with these arguments" is not, as Stern goes on to say in his Slate essay, "that they're either entirely made up or thoroughly disproven."  The problem, rather, is that they're mostly true. 

My medical dictionary (Mosby's Medical, Nursing, & Allied Health Dictionary) defines "amputation" as "the surgical removal of a part of the body or a limb or part of a limb."  The prepuce, or "foreskin" is a part of the body and an integral part of the penis.  Ergo, removing it surgically is, by definition, an amputation.  While there are those who prefer to categorize circumcision as an "ablation," Mosbys' first definition of "ablation" is simply that it is a synonym for "amputation."  In its second sense, "ablation" is differentiated from "amputation" by defining the former as "an excision of any part of the body or a removal of a growth or harmful substance."  Given that the male prepuce has been devalued in our culture and is often regarded as mere "excess skin," I can see how "ablation" might be the preferred term to describe its removal among those who share the view that the prepuce is an extraneous "growth."  Similarly, because the penile prepuce has been pathologized for over 150 years (Peter Charles Remondino, for example, referred to the prepuce as a "malign influence" and another popular nineteenth-century source called it a "mark of Satan"), I can see how "ablation" of the foreskin fits with the view of the penile prepuce as a "harmful substance."  But no matter how you slice it (to be tastelessly apposite) circumcision is, medically-speaking, an amputation.

As for whether or not forced circumcision "damages penises," given what study after study after study after study have all demonstrated about the sensory and functional properties of the penile prepuce and how critical it is to the overall natural functions of the penis, it goes without saying that removing it "damages" the penis.  That would be true of any body part: removing an ear would damage one's hearing; removing a finger damages the hand; removing a fingernail damages a finger.  Only in the case of the penile prepuce is an exception so often made to this rule of bodily integrity such that removing it is not held to be damaging but, rather, is treated as benign at worst and downright beneficial, at best.  But, again, this is a cultural view of the penile prepuce as a worthless or even a "malign" appendage.  (If it's worthless, how can the penis be damaged by removing it?)  It is not the view of the penile prepuce, however, that is supported by science, including the sciences of anatomy, physiology, and medicine. 

Forced circumcision "violates human rights."  Yes, it does.  Most emphatically it does.  Several important human-rights instruments, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, include language under which forced, nontherapeutic penile circumcision cannot be viewed as anything other than a human rights violation.  As Frisch et al. have pointed out, forced circumcision "constitutes a violation of the United Nations' Declaration of the Rights of the Child."  Cutting off part of an infant's or child's normal, healthy genitals - whatever their sex or gender may be - before they can consent or effectively object is a human rights violation.  That should be obvious to anyone who values bodily integrity and subscribes to the belief that every human being has an innate and inviolable right to bodily self-ownership.

As for the claim that forced circumcision "ruins male sexuality for life," that's a subjective determination, which means that if it cannot be proved that it does, neither can it be proved that it doesn't.  Stern cites the examples of men who exercised a (presumably) informed choice to undergo circumcision who didn't regret doing so but ignores other similarly situated men who did come to regret it, citing, among other things, diminished sexual sensation and function.  Speaking for myself only, I was in my 50s before it even dawned on me that PIV intercourse is supposed to be physically pleasurable for the male partner.  Having compared my experience with other men who were subjected to circumcision and contrasted it with others who were not, there is no doubt in my mind at all that what I experience or don't experience in the way of sensation is due entirely to the fact that I was subjected to circumcision.  On the principle of Occam's Razor, the fact that the primary sensory part of my penis was removed shortly after birth is the explanation for this that is most likely to be the right one.  Can I prove what I feel or don't feel?  Of course not.  But the fact remains that, because I was subjected to circumcision at birth, I have no way of knowing what intercourse might feel like otherwise.  More to the point, I will never know what sex is supposed to feel like because what was done to me cannot be undone.  Was my sexuality "ruined"?  Not completely.  But it was definitely harmed and that harm has been present throughout my life and will last for the remainder of my life.

As for the claim that forced circumcision is a "a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse," as I have mentioned already, forced circumcision is considered a war crime and a crime against humanity.  Calling it "a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse," therefore, does not seem so far-fetched or out of bounds.  If a comparable act of genital cutting were committed against any adult of any sex (that is, female, intersex or male), it would be treated under the law as a criminal assault.  If one is disposed to regard the forced circumcision of an infant or child as fundamentally different from the forced circumcision of an adult, it may be illuminating to watch a video (at 10:20 in this presentation) of this "procedure." 

Having said this, I do not share the view that forced circumcision, as routinely practiced, is intended as "a brutally cruel and despicable form of abuse," nor is that the view of most mainstream opponents of forced circumcision.  I have no doubt that, for the most part, parents who subject their children to circumcision believe that this particular form of genital cutting is not something they do to their children so much as something they do for them.  But that doesn't make it right or any less harmful.  Nor does it make it any less of a human rights violation.  After all, this is exactly the view of parents who subject their children to female genital cutting in those societies where this practice is still prevalent.  They don't view female genital cutting as "mutilation."  They view it as culturally significant, socially important and, in some cases, religiously mandated.  They also love their daughters every bit as much as we love our sons.  So, while there are certainly some intactivists who go out of their way to ascribe evil intent to those who impose genital cutting on their children, most opponents of genital cutting of all types, including forced circumcision, do not and, instead, prefer to live by the motto, "When we know better, we do better." 

It's not hard to understand why Stern was so triggered by the claims of intactivists.  As with any deeply entrenched cultural practice, forced circumcision is not just "normal" but normative, which is to say that the state of being circumcised is accepted as an unquestionable good and the practice of circumcising is regarded as sacrosanct.  Moreover, because it has been so thoroughly normalized in our culture, the state of being circumcised is treated as the default and the state of being intact is regarded as a deviation from the norm (hence, "uncircumcised," rather than "intact").  To someone who is of and a part of our own male-genital-cutting culture, any criticisms of forced circumcision are bound to seem like exaggerations and the critics themselves are bound to seem like extremists.   Forced circumcision is probably even more a special case among cultural practices because of the nature of the practice itself, including its involving an act of ritualized cutting and an act of cutting that which is regarded universally as intimate sexual anatomy.  Having it questioned, therefore, to say nothing of hearing it attacked in the "unfiltered" language that intactivists are wont to use, could easily lead to cognitive dissonance, the mental discomfort that results when new information conflicts with one's deeply held, preexisting beliefs.  That could explain the over-the-top scorn for intactivists that Stern displayed in his Slate essay.  This phenomenon, as it plays out in the case of society's coming to terms with forced circumcision, has been distilled into a few simple lines (which have been attributed to Marilyn Milos but also to Gabor Maté) : "No parent wants to believe that he has harmed his son, no man wants to believe that he was harmed, and no physician wants to believe that he has harmed a patient."

I hope you will revisit and revise your views on forced circumcision - both in your heart and in your column - and become less like Switzerland (to take you at your word) and more like Iceland (ranked number one in human rights).  (Not surprisingly, Iceland has come closer than almost any nation on Earth to banning the forced circumcision of anyone under 18 when not absolutely medically necessary.)  In time, if you view all the medical evidence in its totality, I believe you will come to agree with the medical professionals who have stated that forced "[c]ircumcision fails to meet the commonly accepted criteria for the justification of preventive medical procedures in children," that it "is a non-therapeutic procedure" and that parents "are probably better off not doing" it.  What's more, I hope you will weigh any medical evidence that you may find in support of forced circumcision not "in the context of . . .  religious, ethical and cultural beliefs and practices" that tilt the scales in favor of male genital cutting but, rather, in the context of contemporary standards of universal human rights which, by default, would result in an overwhelming preponderance of weight in favor of bodily integrity and personal bodily autonomy.  If you do this, I believe that you will conclude, as so many establishment medical professionals, legal scholars,  bioetchicists, and, yes, intactivists, have concluded, that physical integrity, self-defined boundaries, and autonomy deserve to be defended.  You know, like Ukraine. 

David Balashinsky

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About me:  I'm originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York. I'm a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics. I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.

Dear River Page, The Problem Isn't The Democrats

by David Balashinsky

Last June, The Free Press published an essay by River Page entitled ("entitled" being the operative word, here) "How the Democrats Lost Men Like Me" (The Free Press, 06.03.2025).  What Page means by "like me" is that he is a young, White, cis man, although he also happens to be gay which, to the credit of the gay rights movement, is not nearly the liability that it once was. 

It's no secret that young White men have been turning away from the Democratic Party and turning toward Trump, instead.  Page's column is, in large part, advice to the Democratic Party as it tries to figure out why and how it should be "Speaking to American Men" if it is to have any hope of reversing this trend.

Writing from the perspective of one of these alienated young, White male voters - "someone the Democratic Party once won and lost" - Page identifies several causes, including "the Democratic Party's demonization of white men," its "embrace of an extreme version of identity politics," its "inability to name an enemy, apart from Trump and the Republicans, or articulate a vision for the future," and, equating the Democratic Party with the Harris campaign of 2024 (which is not an unreasonable thing to do), that it "ran on nothing at all."  

One of the most frustrating and annoying aspects of the 2024 presidential campaign was having to listen to the constant repetition of the claim that the Democrats didn't offer a coherent agenda for the next four years.  Now, six months into the Trump regime, here is Page lecturing the Democratic party for losing White men like him by failing to articulate a vision for the future and criticizing the Harris campaign for having run "on nothing at all."  Evidently, Page never bothered to read the official 2024 Democratic Party Platform, which is close to 100 pages of concrete policy statements and legislative goals, many of which are in line with the very "economic populism" Page claims to support.  Leaving aside the fact that the only thing that mattered in 2024 was defeating Trump, is this willful ignorance?  Or is Page gaslighting us?  And are White men really being demonized?  Or is it, rather, that Page is blinded by - and blind to - his own privilege?  

I should mention that, being White, male and cis myself, I know something about privilege.  And in these three particulars I share what surely are Page's most important attributes.  Also, like him, I was an enthusiastic supporter of Bernie Sanders - in 2016, before he dropped out and endorsed Clinton, and again in 2020, before he dropped out and endorsed Joe Biden.  Unlike Page, however, I am not young and in that respect I consider Page more privileged than I am (not just in a social sense but in an existential one, too).  Also unlike Page, I am not gay.  On the other hand, I am Jewish which, it turns out, is now probably much more of a liability than being gay is.  There were a reported 2,402 anti-gay hate-crimes in 2023 but four times as many antisemitic hate-crimes that same year.  On balance, this makes Page even more privileged than I am.

Why does this matter?  Because when White men complain about being demonized, it's hard even for another White man like me to take them seriously.  And if that's my reaction, one can only imagine how galling it must be to others with far less structural advantages in our society to hear us White guys complaining about how downtrodden we are.  (The entirely understandable if morally inconsistent intolerance for men's claims of unfair treatment in the exceptional cases when those claims actually are valid is one of the chief causes, I believe, of the failure of the movement to ban male genital mutilation - to cite the most conspicuous example - to gain traction with feminists and progressives more broadly.  But it's worth pausing to remember, here, that patriarchy harms boys and men, too.)

Two of the basic questions raised by Page's column are whether White men are really being "demonized" and whether the Democratic Party, in particular, is guilty, as Page claims, of demonizing them.  The reason the Democrats have been losing the support of young White men like him, he argues (and to quote him a little more fully),

. . . is the Democratic Party's demonization of white men, ostensibly in the service of "social justice."  As Rod Dreher put it in The Free Press . . . "Think what it must be like to be a white boy growing up in a culture that tells you that you are what's wrong with the world.  You are not only demonized by cultural elites and institutions - not because of anything you believe or have done - but because of who you are."

Dreher expands on this in an essay he wrote subsequent to the publication of his Free Press piece:

[I]t's not hard to see why certain young white men are drawn into radical-right politics.  They have grown up in a culture dominated by wokeness, which tells them that everything wrong with the world is their fault. . . .

I've tried but I cannot find any evidence supporting Dreher's claim that our culture is telling young White men that "everything wrong with the world is their fault."  I also haven't been able to find a single instance of the "demonization of white men" by the Democratic Party, which is what Page explicitly accuses the Democratic Party of doing.  I'm not saying that misandry doesn't exist.  Anyone who follows social media is bound to come across memes now and then that vilify men.  But these anti-male messages obviously represent a minority viewpoint, especially on social media.  Anti-White bias and misandry are not being inculcated in children in America's schools, they are not dominant ideas in our culture, and they certainly are not espoused by the Democratic Party (the majority of the Democratic caucus of the current congress is White and male).  I realize that absence of proof isn't proof of absence, and maybe I just haven't been looking hard enough.  But, still, "he who asserts must prove."  If Page is going to level a charge like this against the Democratic Party, the burden of backing it up with at least a couple examples rests with him more than it does with me. 

I do know that it's a favorite rhetorical tactic of the right wing (a convenient catchall that, for my purposes here, includes but is not necessarily limited to the MAGA movement, White nationalists and Christian Nationalists) to claim that White people and Christians, and now men, are persecuted, but this is a patently absurd claim in a predominantly White and Christian nation that has never had a non-Christian or Christian-adjacent president (Trump, himself, of course, represents the antithesis of actual Christianity, but that's another matter), has never had a woman president and has had only one non-White president in its entire history.  I also know that young White men like Page hate the word "privilege" and don't want to hear it but the fact is that White men are privileged and have been throughout most of our nation's (and our civilization's) history.  

Rather than that White men are being "demonized," what I think is going on in our society is that White men are finally losing some of our privilege.  And if someone is accustomed to a certain amount of privilege, it seems plausible that having it taken away can make him feel as though he is being deprived of something to which he is entitled.  But that sense of being discriminated against or oppressed, in this context, is less evidence of being treated unfairly now than it is simply of having been accustomed to receiving unfair benefits previously.  One of the privileges of privilege is not having to recognize one's own privilege.  This is what I meant when I suggested that Page is both blind to and blinded by his own privilege.

But privilege is precisely what is wrong with Page's worldview.  A good example is the emotional reaction he attributes to "most men," among which I have to assume he includes himself, when listening to a land acknowledgement - a reaction that he describes without a whiff of compunction as "secondhand embarrassment."  I don't want to come off here as holier-than-thou but, honestly, to me that seems remarkably indifferent to the suffering and misfortunes of others.  "Embarrassed" by a land acknowledgement?  The America we know today was made possible, at least in part, by acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing.  Is it really asking so much to acknowledge this?  If Page is more outraged by the fact that young White men like him might be made uncomfortable or experience "embarrassment" when listening to a land acknowledgement than he is by the misery, displacement, and death of the people whose former land is being acknowledged, then Page definitely needs to do some honest and serious soul searching.

Similarly, Page excoriates "identity politics": "General respect for minorities is one thing; deification is quite another."  (Several paragraphs below this comment, incidentally, and without a trace of irony, Page approvingly mentions Charlamagne tha God, a popular DJ and podcaster who literally refers to himself as a god.  Don't get me wrong: Lenard McKelvey can call himself whatever he wants.  But if he can call himself a god, why can't a transwoman call herself a woman, or a non-binary person use "they/them" pronouns and ask others to respect that?)  Page counters that

What young men want is someone who's willing to let them fight for themselves - together.  Economic populism allows for that without turning into a sinister form of identity politics.

Page's entire piece is written, of course, from the perspective of young White men and amounts to a plea on their behalf.  That's not identity politics?  "Sanders could give me - and lots of men like me [my emphasis] - a better life," Page declares.  (Agreed, but Sanders wasn't running only to improve the lives of young White men.)  If it counts as identity politics (and "sinister" identity politics, at that) when minorities, women, gay (and, yes, I know that Page is gay, but that just means that he should know better) or trans people invoke their identities as being central to their lived experience but doesn't count as identity politics when young White men do exactly the same thing, it is because White men still enjoy the privilege of being regarded as the standard, default, neutral person in contrast to which everyone else is an "other."  That, too, is White male privilege.  Surely the unconscious bias - by which I mean sexism - to which this can lead is also behind Page's contrasting characterizations of Sanders's and Clinton's quests for the White House.  Page represents Sanders's campaign as an act of pure selflessness and virtue.  Clinton's, on the other hand, Page denigrates as mere "political ambition." Apparently, running for president is noble when a man does it but self-serving when a woman does it.

Another example Page offers of the Democratic Party's "embrace of an extreme version of identity politics" is a "fat activist screaming about privilege."  Okay, I get it - do fat people really need their own liberation movement?  And, while we're at it, what about those self-righteous disabled people?  What makes them so special?  They even have their own law granting them special rights!  The point is, though, unless you've experienced fat-shaming or have been on the receiving end of weight-bias in the medical profession, or have been discriminated against on the basis of any number of other characteristics that you yourself may not have, you simply don't know what it's like.  But being ignorant about other people's adversity, too, is a form of privilege.  Instead of snickering at fat activists, god forbid we should put ourselves in their shoes and try to understand what they have to deal with, day in and day out.  I would say that it particularly behooves Page, as a gay man (just as it does me, as a Jewish man), to try to muster a little bit of empathy and understanding for other minorities, however they define themselves.  Gay men, too, were once the objects of scorn, ridicule, and oppression, their very gayness pathologized by the medical profession.  Gay rights, too, were once attacked as being "special rights."

Where Page perhaps (and I use that qualifier advisedly) comes closer to a least having his finger on the pulse of mainstream opinion is in his criticism of the Democratic Party's 

embrace of the most extreme goals of the trans movement, such as allowing children to transition or for transwomen to participate in women's sports. . . .

But nowhere in its Master Platform of 2024 does the Democratic Party explicitly call for either of these things.  The short, extended quote that follows is by no means everything the document has to say on trans rights but this is the closest that it comes to addressing the questions of children's transitioning and transwomen participating in women's sports:

Democrats will vigorously oppose bans on gender-affirming health care and respect the role of parents, families and doctors - not politicians - in making health care decisions.

Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by . . . guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school. . . . 

(A much more thoughtful and thorough analysis of this hugely controversial topic, by the way, written by Andrew Sullivan, appeared just the other day in the Times.  In his op-ed, Sullivan, a prominent, White, gay, cis male who identifies as a conservative critiques "gender identity" specifically from the perspective of a longtime champion of gay rights.)

It's not necessary to take on the fundamental questions raised by the phenomenon of gender dysphoria, by gender identity and by gender-critical feminism, here.  (Full disclosure: I tend to fall into that last camp.)  It's enough to point out that what the Democratic Party advocates in its 2024 Platform is not "the most extreme goals of the trans movement," as Page characterizes it, and certainly is not "allowing children to transition."  It merely opposes the criminalization of gender-affirming care - that is, it opposes legislation that would deny access to gender-affirming care to children and adolescents for whom, with the guidance and support of their parents and physicians, such care has been deemed medically necessary.  That hardly seems "extreme" to me.  What's more, the Democratic Party's support for gender-affirming care and trans rights must be viewed in the context of - and as a response to - a concerted effort to politicize the issue by the right wing.  It also should be borne in mind that "gender-affirming care" in children in almost all cases entails the provision of puberty blockers which, according to the current medical consensus, do not change a person's sex or secondary sex characteristics but simply delay the onset of puberty, hence, delay the development of secondary sex characteristics, buying the child time so that, once s/he matures, and if s/he still wishes to transition to the opposite sex, that child will not have undergone physiological changes that are much harder to reverse.  Additionally, once puberty blockers are stopped, puberty will proceed normally, albeit delayed.  And surgery involving a child's genitals or to other parts of the body is, in fact, extremely rare.  This is in contrast to the gender-affirming genital surgeries that are routinely (more than one million times per year) imposed on children and infant boys without their consent in the United States with no objections whatsoever from the anti-trans chorus, including Trump - or from River Page, himself, for that matter.  But nowhere does the Democratic Party Platform call for "allowing children to transition."

As for allowing "transwomen to compete in women's sports," the only text I was able to find in the 2024 Democratic Platform that seems to have any bearing on this (and even this, it seems to me, is open to interpretation) is what I quoted above, namely, "Democrats will continue to fight for LGBTQI+ youth by . . . guaranteeing that transgender students are treated fairly and with respect at school. . . . "  Fairness, by definition, means balancing the sometimes irreconcilable interests of two parties.  I'm perfectly willing to concede that if a transwoman student athlete had already developed secondary sex characteristics before transitioning that would give her a meaningful and unfair advantage over natal women athletes, it's not necessarily unfair or intrinsically transphobic or anti-trans to take that into consideration.  But neither does it strike me as "insane," as it does Page, to treat transgender students "fairly and with respect," even if in some cases this results in allowing a transwoman to participate in women's sports. 

One of the things that is especially irksome about Page's blame-shifting onto the Democrats for supposedly embracing policies that alienate young White men and failing to articulate an agenda that would appeal to them is that he is writing at a time and in a political context in which the Democrats represent the only viable political alternative to Trumpism.  (It's not for nothing that Sanders ran as a Democrat in the Democratic primaries.)  A significant portion of Page's column is, in fact, dedicated to drawing a contrast between the corporatist tendencies of the Democratic Party and the economic populism - or democratic socialism, to be more precise - of Bernie Sanders.  Page pays lip service to criticizing the Republicans but, by focusing on the Democrats, he basically lets the Republicans off the hook:

I was drawn to Sanders in 2016 because of his message, which was that Americans had been screwed - not just by Republicans, but by the Democrats as well - the party that refused to punish the executives who nearly brought down the financial system in 2008, and who preferred to dine with the country's oligarchs instead of attacking them.  Democratic administrations were just like the Republican ones:  Heads didn't roll.  The rich got richer.  The poor were forgotten.  And nothing fundamentally changed.

The post-financial-crash period of 2008 on, of course, was when Obama was president.  And, while it's true that no corporate CEOs went to prison, it's also true that the Justice Department under the Obama administration managed to secure over 125 billion dollars in fines (or "settlements") for faulty mortgages.  A democratic socialist administration, to be sure, would have done better and, one hopes, would not have allowed the greed, corruption, and mismanagement that led to the Great Recession (which, it should be remembered, began under a Republican administration in 2007) to have festered in the first place.  But a Republican administration?   For years, the Republicans have been attempting to repeal the most critical piece of legislation that was enacted to protect consumers, investors, and the American financial system in the wake of the 2008 market crash, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.  The Republicans have also been doing everything they can to kill one of this legislation's most important provisions, the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB).  And, now, while Page is busy complaining about the Democrats and the Harris campaign of 2024, Trump has effectively killed the CFPB, ordering it to cease operations and closing its building.  In contrast, Kamala Harris consistently supported the CPFB and said so time and again during the 2024 campaign.  I wouldn't call that "unprincipled" or "believ[ing] in nothing at all."

Yet not only does Page fail to credit the Democrats (and Harris in particular) with their adoption of a populist, pro-family agenda in 2024 but, midway through his piece, he pivots from contrasting the Democrats unfavorably with Sanders to contrasting them unfavorably with Trump by portraying Trump, of all people, as some sort of an economic populist.  "If Democrats want to win back young men," Page writes,

they cannot promise reform.  They have to admit what Americans already feel is true: that there is something that's going very wrong with the country - and it's time to radically change it.

Trump knows this.  He leaves you in no doubt as to who his enemies are, and they happen to be some of the most unpopular people in the country: a governing elite in both parties who have gotten all the big calls wrong.

Really?  The governing elite are Trump's "enemies"?  Trump is the governing elite.  Trump is the very embodiment of an oligarch.  What's more, he's an oligarch who has spent years maneuvering himself into a position from which he could hijack the levers of power for the personal enrichment of himself, his billionaire family and his billionaire friends.  In the first three months alone of the Trump administration, Trump's family has become three billion dollars richer.  Trump has "assembled the wealthiest presidential administration in modern history, with at least 13 billionaires set to take on government posts."   Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill" will effect the largest upward transfer of wealth in our nation's history.  It gives most of the tax cuts to the wealthiest Americans and to corporations while depriving millions of lower-income Americans of health insurance and threatening access to and raising the cost of healthcare for everyone else.  It is the clearest evidence yet that Trump is waging class warfare on poor and working-class Americans, including young White men.  Completely ignoring this, Page creates a false equivalence between the Republicans and the Democrats while lamenting that, after 2008, "[t]he rich got richer."  Well, thanks to the Republicans and to every young White man who didn't vote Democratic in 2024, the rich are now going to get even richer.

In the real world, the Democrats and the Republicans do not represent a distinction without a difference.  The reconciliation bill just passed by congress is not the creation of the Democrats.  Not one Democrat in the House of Representatives or in the senate voted for it.  It is a Republican bill through and through.  More than that, it is Trump's bill, his signature legislative accomplishment.  Yet to hear Page describe Trump (and if the description weren't so obviously false), one could easily get the impression that Trump is the champion of the little guy - a populist who's only concern is to give hard-working (or undeservedly unemployed) Americans (the "real" Americans, that is, and we know who they are) their due.  But what has Trump actually done for working Americans?  His biggest achievements (if you could call them that) so far have been to increase the cost of goods by imposing tariffs (which is basically a tax increase for the American consumer), to make it harder for Americans to access their social security benefits, and to throw close to 60,000  federal workers out of work.  These civil servants, incidentally, are hardworking, good people with mortgages, student loans and families to support - our fellow Americans - people who didn't deserve to be treated this way.  Some of them are young, White men, too.  Not only did Trump take away their jobs but he enlisted the world's richest man (an immigrant, by the way) to do it.

In Page's version of reality, that all this has come to pass is somehow the Democrats' fault for insufficiently ministering to the special needs of young White men.

Page is right about one thing.  Trump leaves you "in no doubt as to who his enemies are."  But they are not the "governing elite," as Page claims.  Rather, Trump's enemies-list includes the press ("They are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE"; "scum"), Mark Milley (a four-star general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff whose actions Trump characterized as being "so egregious that, in times gone by, the punishment would have been DEATH"), Jack Smith ("deranged," "evil and sinister"), women, assorted ("Horseface," "Lowlife," "Fat," "Ugly," "dog"), Democrats ("totalitarian," "willing to do illegal acts"), public servants ("crooked," "dishonest"), immigrants (they are "poisoning the blood of our country"), the Biden administration ("scum that spent the last four years trying to destroy our country through warped radical left minds"), Mexicans ("drug dealers," "criminals," "rapists"), Blacks ("low IQ"), Judge Juan Merchan ("psychotic," "corrupt," "incompetent"), intellectuals ("Marxist Maniacs and lunatics"),  science and scientists, universities, and probably others.  But Trump's fellow oligarchs?  Not so much.  (It's true that Trump has recently attacked Elon Musk, however, it wasn't for being part of the "governing elite" but simply because of Musk's opposition to Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill.")

Page's column, as I have already mentioned, was written in response to news about a research project being undertaken by the Democratic Party in order to "reverse the erosion of Democratic support of young men, especially online."   Page refers to the $20 million earmarked for the project as "money well wasted."  The problem, in his view, is obvious: it's not the young White men like him who have been turned off by the Democratic Party but the Democrats themselves.  It doesn't seem to occur to Page that it could be the other way around.  It is this blind spot that makes me wonder whether Page's own White privilege obscures for him a darker truth about White flight from the Democratic Party - and toward the Republican Party, about which Page has little or nothing to say.  Steve Phillips, writing in The Nation a year ago, also looked into this question.  But, rather than blaming the Democrats, as Page does, Phillips provides what I think is a more realistic and, sadly, a more likely explanation.

In a country that is growing increasingly racially diverse, the Republican Party remains disproportionately white (83% of GOP voters, according to Pew Research analysis of exit polls).  White rage has always been the rocket fuel powering Trump's ascendance and continued political relevance.  Most have forgotten that when he entered the 2016 presidential contest in the spring of 2015, he languished in the polls with the support of just 5 percent of Republican voters.  Then, in his presidential announcement in June of 2015, he demonized Mexicans as rapists and murderers and clearly sent a signal that he would be the defender of white people and the culture he claimed immigrants of color threatened to destroy.

The political fruits of the speech were instantaneous.  Trump rocketed to the top of the pack in a matter of weeks and has never looked back.

That might be a slight oversimplification - I'm sure that not all Trump supporters are racists.  And it's also true that, in the last election, Trump gained support even among Black and Latino men.  This could be due to legitimate concerns (among young White men, too) about the economy but it could also be explained by what some researchers have referred to as "precarious manhood theory" and the degree to which it, in turn, explains the role of "masculine anxieties" in support for Trump.  Clearly, the "Democrats have a masculinity problem."   As Politico Magazine points out,

Republicans seem all too happy to capitalize on the gun-toting, fist-pumping tropes of stereotypical manhood.  GOP presidential candidates are bragging about their athletic prowess.  Missouri Senator Josh Hawley's recent book, Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs, joins a body of let-men-be-real-men work that includes the preachings of Jordan Peterson, the postings of Andrew Tate and the writings of a popular online guru who goes by "Bronze Age Pervert" - all of whom cast liberals and progressives as the enemies of masculinity.

But this, too, is identity politics - and in a much more sinister form, I would argue, than any DEI program is. 

Page concludes by counseling the Democrats that if they "want to win back people like me, they have to go to war with the rich."  Yet it's hard to see how going to war with the rich would appeal to the young White male constituency that Page represents given that, in 2024, those from this demographic group who didn't vote Democratic either enabled the oligarchy by not voting at all or actively supported it by voting for Trump.  Even if, in voting for Trump - with his tax-cuts that preferentially benefit billionaires and millionaires, with his cuts to Medicaid that millions of working Americans depended on, and with his tariffs, the financial burden of which is going to be borne by average American consumers - these voters ended up supporting the oligarchy unwittingly, whose fault is that?  Certainly not the democrats.

Phillips takes the exact opposite approach and advises the Democrats, rather than trying "to woo white voters," to focus on targeting "the right white people [my emphasis]."  "Democrats," he points out, "need to realize that if Donald Trump's felony conviction won't weaken his support among most white voters, then nothing will."

On balance, maybe the fact that the Democratic Party has lost men like Page has less to do with the reasons that Page cites and more to do with the fact that Trump is just so adept at appealing to the identity politics of young White men.  It would be great if this cohort could see themselves as part of a broader, racially- and gender-diverse coalition that opposes Trump's authoritarianism, his contempt for the rule of law and his class warfare against average American people but there is probably always going to be a segment of young White men for whom the allure of fascism and the seductive appeal of persecution-envy are just too great.  At least for these young White men, maybe the fault, dear River, is not in the Democratic Party but in themselves. 

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About me:  I'm originally from New York City and now live near the Finger Lakes region of New York. I'm a licensed physical therapist and I write about bodily autonomy and human rights, gender, culture, and politics. I currently serve on the board of directors for the Genital Autonomy Legal Defense & Education Fund, (GALDEF), the board of directors and advisors for Doctors Opposing Circumcision and the leadership team for Bruchim.