Gender Is Complicated for All of Us. Let's Talk About It.
About this episode
Klein interviews gender theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton about why gender is complicated for everyone. They discuss her concept of the 'queer child' — the idea that children are inherently strange and non-normative — and 'sideways growth' as an alternative to linear models of development. The conversation covers her memoir about growing up Mormon and queer, how religion and family shape gendered expectations, the cultural fixation on childhood innocence, and what trans experience reveals about gender's fluidity. Stockton argues gender is not a simple binary to be solved but a fundamental strangeness everyone navigates, and that admitting this could make the politics of gender less punitive and more humane.