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Black masculinity revisited: The enduring legacy of Chadwick Boseman

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Black masculinity revisited: The enduring legacy of Chadwick Boseman

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I grew up in Gary, Indiana.

Back in the 1970s, it was a bustling city and the foundation of Black middle class life in northwest Indiana. When I think about Gary at that time, I think about the smells - the city was filled with a wide range of pungent, burning, chemical-like odors which blanketed my everyday existence.

We lived on 7th and Vermont streets then, which were closer to the US Steel plant. I could walk out from the front of our house and look north a few blocks to see the smoke spewing from the towers. Often the sky was hazy and gray. My mother used to tell me when she hung the freshly washed clothes on the clothesline to dry, she would have to hurry to bring the clothes in before too long or else our laundry would have silver specks embedded in them.

Gary - this hazy, smelly, industrial city of my youth in the 1970s - was a city inhabited by men who relocated there to carve out their share of the American Dream, to claim their stake of middle class life. So much of the dynamic between fathers and sons is about monument building, especially at that time in Gary. My father was laid off in 1979. By 1981, many fathers had lost their jobs in the steel mills and other factories throughout northwest Indiana. Men who otherwise were able to take care of their homes and their families were now under employed, if employed at all. In order to survive the economic calamity overtaking, these men were working at McDonald's and taking on paper routes, the jobs we kids traditionally filled.

No longer foremen or machinists, steelworkers or other tradesmen, football and basketball were spaces for them to exercise their power, prowess, and bravado; playing contact sports gave them bragging rights at church on Sunday. Sons were the monuments for their fathers' lives. In this old framework, so many men have lived an enduring conflict in trying to define themselves within the narrow lanes afford us by socio-normative structures.

I sucked at sports, not for lack of trying and not for lack of passion. Athletics just weren't my best suit. My space was less celebrated - at least, in the eyes of my father and many of my contemporaries growing up. I was then, and I remain, an empathetic intellectual who delves into my own humanity to connect with others.

Humanity is what is key particularly in a society which fetishizes Black male bodies - in fact, all Black bodies. But in the space of Black masculinity, 21st century America viscerally responds to the image and existence of Black males. This year both Kobe Bryant and, now, Chadwick Boseman have joined our ancestors after living courageously for an all too abrupt period of time.

By all accounts, Chadwick lived fully, leaving behind a legacy of quiet courage in the face of a cancer diagnosis while steadfastly dedicated to portraying iconic roles as Jackie Robinson, James Brown, Thurgood Marshall and "Stormin" Norman Earl Holloway in Spike Lee's "Da Five Bloods."

While most people, rightfully, celebrate him as T'Challa in Black Panther, it was in "Da Five Bloods" that Chadwick's unique blend of leadership, wisdom, strength, and courage that resonated with me. Stormin Norman didn't hold a machine gun and kill an impossible amount of the enemy. He didn't run the fastest or the longest. He didn't get all the pretty girls. He lived the war experience through the lens of a Black serviceman fighting asymmetrically to maintain his humanity in the chaos of war and a racialized existence within the US military.
Read the rest of this commentary on the Black & Magazine website

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Black masculinity revisited: The enduring legacy of Chadwick Boseman

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I grew up in Gary, Indiana. Back in the 1970s, it was a bustling city and the foundation of Black middle class life in northwest Indiana. When I think about Gary at that time, I think about the smells - the city was filled with a wide range of pungent, burning, chemical-like odors which blanketed my everyday existence.

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Trump, Biden, and the war over American masculinity

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Trump, Biden, and the war over American masculinity

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When voters decide between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden this November, they'll be choosing between two parties, two histories, and two very different visions of America.

They'll also be deciding between two versions of masculinity.

Trump has made a certain kind of stereotypical manliness core to his campaign ever since 2016. He bragged about his penis size during one debate, physically invaded Hillary Clinton's space during another, and repeatedly insulted his opponents' "toughness," "energy," and "stamina."

Such behavior continued through his presidency and has defined his response to the Covid-19 pandemic, during which he has claimed the virus will go away on its own, called on Americans to be "warriors" by reopening the economy, and routinely refused to wear a mask. In his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention on Thursday night - delivered before a largely mask-free crowd - he again used the language of war, boasting that "we will crush the virus" and claiming that his opponent's plan on the crisis "is not a solution to the virus, but rather a surrender." He also, yet again, demanded that states open their economies despite hundreds of daily deaths, saying, "they have to be open, they have to get back to work."

Trump has also long used the public health crisis as an opportunity to ramp up his xenophobic rhetoric, by using a racist name for the virus - something he did again in his convention speech. These bigoted and aggressive comments are part of his larger performance of masculinity, some say. "He has conflated his being a man with being a racist," William Ming Liu, a professor of counseling, higher education, and special education at the University of Maryland, College Park, who studies masculinity, told Vox in an email.

Biden, at least during his 2020 campaign, has set out to show voters a different kind of masculinity - and to subtly attack Trump's. In campaign appearances and at last week's Democratic National Convention, he's cast himself as "a dependable serious protector" and is "contrasting that to Trump's brute-force, reckless approach," Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a history professor at Calvin University who has studied white evangelicals' views of masculinity, told Vox.

In his speech at the convention, for example, Biden called Trump "a president who takes no responsibility, refuses to lead, blames others, cozies up to dictators, and fans the flames of hate and division." And he offered voters, instead, his vision of America: "one that is generous and strong, selfless, and humble."

"It's an America we can rebuild together," he promised.

As the campaign continues, and the two candidates debate each other, the conflict between their two brands of masculinity will surely be thrown into even higher relief. And Americans - who don't have the option of a female candidate this time around - will have to decide what kind of man they want in the White House in 2021.

Trump embodies a particular form of militant masculinity

For Trump, masculinity has always been about aggression: insulting other people, threatening other countries, and even attempting to display toughness in the face of a viral threat that can't actually be vanquished by physical force.

It's a kind of macho posturing that taps into trends in the American electorate that existed even before 2016, according to Du Mez. Starting in the early 2000s, a "militant, testosterone-driven vision of Christian manhood" began to take hold in evangelical circles, she said - one that "condoned violence in the pursuit of righteousness" as well as vulgar language and sexism. "It was a real kind of backlash against feminism, against the emasculation of American men," Du Mez said.

Trump's 2016 campaign played right into these ideas. Evangelical voters "talk about him as their ultimate fighting champion, as their strongman," Du Mez said. Even comments like those caught on the Access Hollywood tape, in which Trump bragged about his ability to grab women "by the pussy," weren't necessarily an issue for a voting bloc usually concerned with family values. After all, "a militant patriarchy is a part of family values politics," Du Mez said, with voters seeing Trump's comments as just another example of his rugged, testosterone-fueled manliness. Indeed, Trump won an overwhelming 77 percent of white evangelical votes in 2016, with just 16 percent going to Clinton.

And it's not just evangelicals. Over time, the embrace of militant masculinity has "created bonds across religious differences" between Christian and secular conservatives, Du Mez said. "They're similarly looking to a kind of pre-feminist or feminist-backlash retrograde masculinity as the antidote to all that ails the country today."

Trump's approach may also appeal to a wide swath of white Americans who perceive masculinity - specifically white masculinity - to be under attack. "As communities of color demonstrate, and as communities of color become more visible and prominent, white communities regard this visibility as a threat to the traditional and expected ways of being," Liu said. "And being a white man is embedded within this traditional way of being."

The president's responses to uprisings around the country in the wake of the police shootings of George Floyd, Jacob Blake, and others this year have spoken directly to those who see whiteness, and specifically white masculinity, being threatened. In May, for example, he called protesters in Minneapolis "thugs" and warned, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts" (his tweet was marked by Twitter as "glorifying violence"). His "demonstrations of authoritarianism are in a way, a wish fulfillment, of how white people want to treat race and racism," Liu said - by forcing other groups into submission.

This worldview was on display Thursday night, as Trump painted a dark picture of "anarchists, agitators, rioters, looters, and flag-burners" terrorizing American cities. "No one will be safe in Biden's America," he proclaimed, before demanding that "we have to give law enforcement, our police, back their power."

"What we can never have in America - and must never allow - is mob rule," the president continued.

Trump's rhetoric and behavior around Covid-19 have also played into ideals of militant, tough-guy masculinity. In particular, his refusal to wear a mask became part of a larger message that ignoring the risks of the coronavirus was the tough or strong thing to do. And despite warnings from public health experts about the dangers of reopening the country too early, he said during a public appearance in May that "the people of our country should think of themselves as warriors" because "our country has to open." He made that statement at a mask factory in Arizona - where he appeared without a mask.

Trump has since said Americans should wear masks, admitting that "they have an impact." But he has continued to appear in public without a mask, including at first lady Melania Trump's speech in the White House Rose Garden on Tuesday night, also attended by about 70 mostly maskless audience members, and at Vice President Mike Pence's speech on Wednesday, after which he reportedly greeted maskless attendees.

In his speech Thursday, Trump repeatedly described Covid-19 as an adversary his administration was bravely vanquishing.

"In recent months, our nation, and the entire planet, has been struck by a new and powerful invisible enemy," Trump told his audience. "Like those brave Americans before us, we are meeting this challenge," he assured them. "We will defeat the virus, end the pandemic, and emerge stronger than ever before."

For Trump, Covid-19 is a war, and one he's already won, or is just about to win - even though more than 180,000 people have died.

In his 2020 campaign, Biden is trying to show another path

Biden has occasionally sought to present the kind of aggressive masculinity Trump favors. In a 2018 speech referencing Trump's comments on the Access Hollywood tape, for example, he said that if the two were high school classmates, "I'd take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him."

And while Biden has never been known for public vulgarity or insults the way Trump is, he has been accused of disrespectful and boundary-crossing behavior with women - and by one woman, of sexual assault. Biden has denied the assault allegation and, in response to others, pledged to change his behavior in response to changing "social norms." But in the past, at least according to some, he hasn't always been a model of healthy masculinity.

More recently, however, as he seeks to present himself as an alternative to Trump in every way, he's also offered a different archetype of manliness. For example, he's "embracing that men can have emotions," Du Mez said. "His campaign is really foregrounding his own loss" - the deaths of his first wife and infant daughter, and later of his son Beau - "and then suggesting that he is better equipped to be president, perhaps especially in this moment, because he has endured such loss."

In her speech at the Democratic National Convention, for instance, Jill Biden framed her husband's perseverance in the face of personal tragedy as evidence of his strength - and preparation for carrying the nation through the tragedy of Covid-19.

"The burdens we carry are heavy, and we need someone with strong shoulders," she said. "I know that if we entrust this nation to Joe, he will do for your family what he did for ours: Bring us together and make us whole, carry us forward in our time of need, keep the promise of America for all of us."

In her words, Biden became, not the militant, aggressive macho-man exemplified by Trump, but the powerful yet benevolent father figure America needs right now.

Biden has painted a similar picture of himself in recent months. In his speech at the Democratic convention, he delivered a message of empathy to those who have lost loved ones in the pandemic. "I know how it feels to lose someone you love," he said. "I know that deep black hole that opens up in your chest. That you feel your whole being is sucked into it. I know how mean and cruel and unfair life can be sometimes."

Trump, too, mentioned those who have lost their lives to Covid-19, noting "many Americans have sadly lost friends and cherished loved ones to this horrible disease." But moments later, he was referring to the virus in racist terms while bragging about his successful war against it.

And Biden didn't just empathize - he also pledged to shield Americans from future threats, saying, "I will protect America. I will defend us from every attack. Seen, and unseen. Always. Without exception. Every time."

And he accused Trump of failing to do the same. "The president keeps telling us the virus is going to disappear," Biden said. "He keeps waiting for a miracle. Well, I have news for him, no miracle is coming."

And, he argued, "Our current president has failed in his most basic duty to this nation. He failed to protect us. He failed to protect America."

In essence, Biden didn't just offer a different, more benevolent form of masculinity from Trump. He also essentially accused Trump of failing at masculinity - of being a bad protector, an irresponsible steward of the country, and a shirker who keeps waiting for a miracle rather than doing the hard work of keeping people safe.

"There are many different ways that masculinity is imagined," Du Mez says. There's Trump's macho, reckless version, and then there are "models of masculinity that prioritize self-restraint, stoicism, and not whining about things." In his speech, Biden essentially called out Trump for failing to live up to some of those other models - for shifting blame, failing to take responsibility, and ultimately, for being weak in the face of a challenge that demands emotional as well as physical strength.

Calling Trump weak in this subtler way may be a smarter move, politically, than talking about beating him up. The Republican primary in 2016 was a reminder that when other candidates try to match Trump with tough talk, "Trump ends up winning on that particular turf, because he has no restraint," Du Mez said.

And if he sticks to presenting himself as a benevolent, empathetic protector figure, Biden will certainly offer voters a clear alternative to Trump's chest-beating - as well as a different model for young people of how a powerful man can behave. "He expresses genuine joy and laughter when he is with other people, he has a sense of humor about himself, he expresses warmth with his wife, he shows caring for his children, and he has empathy for others' joy, happiness, and pain," Liu said. "His openness to his emotions as well as his emotional connection to others informs his intellect and his decisions."

Of course, it's also telling that the 2020 election is still a contest between masculinities, with two older white men duking out over who would be a better patriarch for the country. In a way, the real broadening of America's ideas of masculinity may have to come later, when (and if) whoever is president next chooses to share power with others and, ultimately, passes the torch to them.

Biden has gestured toward this moment when he speaks of other leaders in America and in his campaign - most notably Sen. Kamala Harris, his running mate who once strongly challenged him on issues of systemic racism. Harris "is a powerful voice for this nation," Biden said in his speech last week. "Her story is the American story."

But the story of America has largely been written by men like Biden. And his biggest opportunity to model new kinds of masculinity for the future may come in the ways he chooses to let others take the lead.
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Trump, Biden, and the war over American masculinity

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When voters decide between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden this November, they'll be choosing between two parties, two histories, and two very different visions of America. They'll also be deciding between two versions of masculinity. Trump has made a certain kind of stereotypical manliness core to his campaign ever since 2016.

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What Stereotypes About Viking Masculinity Get Wrong

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What Stereotypes About Viking Masculinity Get Wrong

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Part of the Viking image today is a caricature of masculinity-the long-haired warrior still incorporated into the logos or advertising for products appealing to a supposed ideal of manly behavior. But Viking-age Scandinavian reality embraced so much more, including a true fluidity of gender. Patriarchy was a norm of Viking society, but one that was subverted at every turn, often in ways that-fascinatingly-were built into its structures.

The Vikings were certainly familiar with what would today be called queer identities. Gender boundaries were rigidly policed, at times with moral overtones, and the social pressures laid upon men and women were very real. At the same time, however, these borders were permeable with a degree of social sanction. There is a clear tension here, a contradiction that can be productive for anyone trying to understand the Viking mind.

These themes and connections can be pursued in the study of graves. Archaeologists determine the sex of the buried dead through analysis of their bones (which is reliable, though not certain) or DNA (which uses a chromosomal definition that is generally uncontroversial). However, in many cases the deceased were cremated, or preservation conditions in the soil are unfavorable to the survival of bone in any state. In these cases, for centuries, archaeologists have resorted to determining the sex of the dead through association with supposedly gendered objects-weapons in a grave are held to suggest a man, jewellery sets denote a woman, and so on.

Beyond the obvious problems of conflating sex and gender, and also effectively sexing metal, these readings risk simply piling one set of assumptions on another in what forensic decision-makers call a "bias snowball" of cumulatively questionable interpretations.
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So, while the majority of these sex/gender/artifact correlations probably do reflect Viking-age reality, not all burials conform to such patterns, and an openness to the exceptions-which we know were there-is vital. Without this, one can never hope to do archaeological justice to the gender spectrum discernible in the medieval texts or compare this with Viking-age empirical reality. More excitingly, the archaeology can turn up evidence for identities and genders that did not make it to the written sources.

The starting point comes in graves with viable bone survival. In such cases, archaeologists occasionally find people buried with objects and clothing that would usually be associated with the opposite sex. These include male skeletons wearing what appear to be dresses of the kind more conventionally buried with women, or with the oval brooches that hold the apron together at the breast, and similar combinations. For burials with female bodies, an equivalent is the presence of weapons in numbers sufficient to plausibly suggest a warrior identity for the dead. At Vivallen in Swedish Härjedalen, there was even a male-bodied person buried according to Sámi rituals, in a Sámi settlement, but wearing conventional Sámi man's equipment over a Nordic woman's linen dress, complete with jewellery to match-a crossing of both gender and cultural norms.

The most prominent example to date combines almost all of Viking gender in a single burial, raising more questions than it answers. In a 10th-century chamber grave designated Bj.581 from an urban cemetery at Birka in Sweden, an expensively dressed corpse was buried seated and surrounded by a full weapon set (which is rare), with two riding horses. This truly spectacular burial was excavated in 1878 and has been held up ever since as a type example of a high-status warrior from the mid-900s, a kind of "ultimate Viking" of the time. Bj.581 was published as such in generations of standard works. As part of this interpretative package, the deceased was always assumed to have been a man, because warriors were "obviously" male (conflating sex and gender in the familiar way). In 2011, however, an osteological study suggested the buried person was actually female, and this was confirmed by genomic analysis in 2017-the deceased carried XX chromosomes. The ensuing debate on the apparent "female warrior" of Birka went viral and now convulses Viking studies, in an at-times vituperative discussion that has little to do with women and war but more concerns underlying fault lines of gendered assumption in the discipline and beyond.

In a sense it does not really matter whether the person in the Birka grave was a female-bodied warrior woman or not (though as one of the lead authors in the research team, I firmly believe she was all those things). This person may equally have been transgender, in our terms, or non-binary, or gender fluid. There are other possibilities, too, but the point is that they must all be recognized as possible Viking-Age identities while-crucially-not assuming this must be the case. Not least, in the interpretation of Bj.581, scholars should be careful not to deny the basic agency of women, and their potential to choose one way of life over others; this person does not have to be necessarily different. Furthermore, all these intersections of activity and identity were in themselves deeply gendered-from "warriorhood" to everything else.

Importantly, none of this needed to be fixed and permanent. In the later prose texts, difficult sources though they are, one encounters individuals who change names when they embark upon a new path in life-when certain women become warriors, for example. But only sometimes-there are no universals here, and as ever the medieval sources are problematic, late, ambiguous and uncertain.

While some of their norms can appear rigid, the Scandinavians somehow applied them in ways that also allowed them to be questioned, undermined and contradicted. In many ways and for many years, Viking scholars have been naive and simplistic about their acknowledgement and recognition of gender variation in the later Iron Age. Perhaps Viking-Age people chose and renegotiated their identities every day, much as many of us do. Their ideas about gender went far beyond the binaries of biological sex, as scholars are now beginning to understand. Sadly, we are also only now becoming aware of the privilege that allowed us to overlook this for so long.

Adapted from Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings by Neil Price. Copyright © 2020 by Neil Price. Available from Basic Books.

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What Stereotypes About Viking Masculinity Get Wrong

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Part of the Viking image today is a caricature of masculinity, but Viking-age reality embraced so much more-including fluidity of gender.

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‘WAP’ Is Good, Raunchy Fun. On TikTok, It’s at Home.

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‘WAP’ Is Good, Raunchy Fun. On TikTok, It’s at Home.

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Biden Wants Black Voter Turnout Similar to Obama’s. He’ll Need Black Men.

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Biden Wants Black Voter Turnout Similar to Obama’s. He’ll Need Black Men.

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For Democrats, who rely on Black voters to power their electoral advantages in America's urban centers, the difference between good and great Black voter turnout is often a question of Black men.

Gaulien Smith, who owns a barbershop in Milwaukee, said he thought sexism had played a role in some Black male apathy for Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee. Credit... Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

MILWAUKEE - Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the economic downturn and the recent protests over racial inequality, the Black men of Milwaukee's North Side had experience with crises converging all at once.

In one ZIP code of mostly Black residents - 53206 - more than half of the children live in poverty. The neighborhood records terrible health outcomes, according to experts. And among Black men, one study estimated that from 2000 to 2017, about 42 percent of those ages 25 to 34 were incarcerated or on probation.

The men in the area who are eligible to vote can expect long lines and strict voter identification laws at the ballot box. Still, many vote consistently, calling it an electoral act of defiance in an imperfect democracy.

"I've voted in every election," said Charles Huley, 75, a church elder who lives on the North Side. "What changes is who I can convince to come with me."

For Democrats, who rely on Black voters to power their electoral advantages in America's urban centers, the difference between good and great Black voter turnout is often dependent on how many Black men go to the polls.

Black women are the party's most loyal demographic base - often referred to as its backbone - but motivated Black male voters were a crucial distinction between former President Barack Obama's record-setting Black turnout in 2008 and 2012 and the diminished performance of Hillary Clinton in 2016.

In states like Wisconsin, which was decided in 2016 by less than 23,000 votes, that dip was one of the causes of a Democratic night to forget, proof that the nominee had problems motivating the base, not just among swing voters.

In deep-blue Milwaukee County, where statewide Democrats run up the score to offset more conservative rural areas, Mrs. Clinton had one of the largest drop-offs in raw votes of any county in the country, earning more than 40,000 fewer votes than Mr. Obama did four years earlier. Pew Research estimated that in 2016, 64 percent of eligible Black women said they had voted compared with 54 percent of eligible Black men, a much larger gender gap than for white or Hispanic voters.

Four years later, as Joseph R. Biden Jr. seeks to build the coalition Mrs. Clinton could not, he operates with several personal and structural advantages.

In interviews with a dozen Black men in Milwaukee during the recent Democratic National Convention, and with several of the state's most visible Black male elected officials, they predicted that Black turnout in November would look more like it did for Mr. Obama's victories than for Mrs. Clinton's loss, fueled by a leap in enthusiasm from Black men.

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Charles Huley, 75, said he had voted in every election. Credit... Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

Little of this is because of Mr. Biden's personal appeal, they said, though he benefits from his close relationship with Mr. Obama and an absence of the sexism that many women running for office face.

The interviewees isolated other, more important factors: the constant chaos of President Trump's administration, a backlash to the president's demonization of minorities to win over white suburbanites and even Mr. Biden's selection of Senator Kamala Harris of California as his running mate.

"Four years ago, I don't think a lot of Black men felt directly connected to that campaign," said Mandela Barnes, who became Wisconsin's first Black lieutenant governor in 2019. But in 2020, he said, "people are more desperate - people need solutions and need answers."

Cavalier Johnson, the president of Milwaukee's Common Council, the city's version of a City Council, said another advantage for Mr. Biden was that his campaign - and voters - were less likely to take victory for granted.

"There was this strong assumption based on the past presidential elections about this blue wall that was impenetrable," said Mr. Johnson, who is known as Chevy, referring to the commonly repeated fact that Mrs. Clinton did not hold an in-person event in Wisconsin during the run-up to the general election.

He said that courting turnout from Black men was the same as for any other group: "You have to come out and you have to ask. And then you have to address the issues that are of concern to them."

The die is not cast, however, and Mrs. Clinton's fate still holds warning signs for Mr. Biden and his campaign. They are both Washington insiders who struggled with younger Black voters in the primary - a key demographic in Mr. Obama's general-election coalition - but won older Black voters handily en route to the nomination.

Throughout her race, Mrs. Clinton faced skepticism for her association with the 1990s expansion of the federal prison system, an overhaul that Mr. Biden helped craft. He has recently embraced the language of acknowledging systemic racism, and released a sweeping policy meant to close the racial wealth gap and improve education in Black communities. Still, as with Mrs. Clinton, the matter of trust remains.

In November, it could be Mr. Biden's improvements with white voters throughout the state - not his prowess with motivating infrequent Black voters - that powers his electoral success.

"These people locked up a lot of my brothers, you know," Adi Armour, 49, said, adding that he did not vote for Mrs. Clinton in 2016 but planned to vote for Mr. Biden in 2020. He called the decision "a tough one."

"It'll be more of a vote to get Trump out of there than a vote for Biden to get in," he explained.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have zeroed in on the importance of Black male voters in swing states like Wisconsin, and have made some concerted efforts to pry them away from Democrats.

Their efforts are twofold: to argue that Black voters' loyalty to Democrats has not been rewarded - effectively asking them, in Mr. Trump's famous words last election cycle, "What do you have to lose?" And to focus less on persuading Black men to vote for Republicans and more on creating an environment for low turnout over all.

In a leaked audio recording recently published by Politico, Mr. Trump said days before his inauguration: "Many Blacks didn't go out to vote for Hillary 'cause they liked me. That was almost as good as getting the vote, you know, and it was great."

He has said similar things publicly, and allies have argued that the administration's restrictive immigration policies could appeal to some Black voters who share a nativist instinct that outsiders are to blame for their community's woes.

State Representative David Bowen, a Democrat from Milwaukee, said he was confident that Mr. Trump's campaign efforts would not take root, considering how much the president had done to inflame racial tension. Mr. Bowen said he worried more about the pandemic's effects on reaching infrequent Black voters, as normal canvassing tools like door knocking and registration drives become more difficult.

State Representative David Bowen of Milwaukee said that although Joseph R. Biden Jr. could win without robust young voter turnout, the Democratic Party would need to be responsive to the current flood of activism. Credit... Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

"The in-person organizing that would be there, and that the Black community is used to, isn't at the same level," Mr. Bowen said. "Being on the safe side is important. But how do we balance that with the need of meeting people where they are? Because that's important, too."

Mr. Bowen is part of a cohort of Black leaders and activists who have protested racial inequality for more than 85 days straight, an effort that began after George Floyd was killed by the Minneapolis police in late May. Mr. Bowen said the group had shown no signs of slowing, and wanted to sustain its momentum and force Democrats including Mr. Biden to be more responsive to its concerns.

He said that although Mr. Biden could win without robust young voter turnout, a Democratic Party that was not responsive to the current flood of activism risked creating a disaffected generation for years to come - one that includes Black men.

"Younger voters supported that Bernie Sanders agenda because they wanted big change," Mr. Bowen said. "Older Democrats are more moderate, and some of them feel like incremental change is enough right now. But the people who are closest to the pain are the younger ones, and they're calling for substantial change in agenda. They have real demands."

According to the Pew data from 2016, Black men vote at comparable rates to other minority groups. Even for Mrs. Clinton in 2016, Black turnout returned to its levels during the pre-Obama Democratic Party, not a drop-off that was historically unprecedented.

In recent weeks, several political organizations have announced initiatives targeted at improving the political process in Black communities, and at motivating less frequent Black voters to come to the polls. More Than a Vote, a collective of athletes headlined by the basketball star LeBron James, said it would invest millions to try to recruit poll workers in Black communities. The N.A.A.C.P. announced a campaign called "Black Voices Change Lives," which will seek to expand peer-to-peer organizing in Black communities. Its stated target is a 5 percent increase in Black voter turnout in the general election from 2016.

Gaulien Smith, who owns Gee's Clippers, a barbershop in Milwaukee, said he thought sexism had played a role in some Black male apathy for Mrs. Clinton. He posited that there had been a different reaction to Ms. Harris on the ticket, because she is seen more as someone who understands the Black experience and can be a champion for Black men.

"In her, we see history," Mr. Smith said.

Kenny Paskel, 24, cannot vote because of a felony conviction. Credit... Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

At Gee's Clippers, on the city's Near North Side, the health crisis might have changed the social nature of the barbershop, but it could not destroy it. With people wearing masks and chairs spaced apart, a gaggle of Black men watched an afternoon game of the N.B.A. playoffs, hours before Mr. Biden was to accept the Democratic nomination.

The flow of customers and barbers stretched the gamut of the city's Black male electorate: businessmen, church elders, teenagers and activists. And while there was universal distaste of Mr. Trump, even from some who said they had expressed interest in his candidacy four years ago, there was a sense that 2020 was not 2016 - a mantra that has been reflected in polling, fund-raising and other measures of a country's political health.

"Even if Kamala wasn't the vice-presidential candidate, I still feel that we will come out in droves because of what we've experienced these last four years," Mr. Smith said.

Kenny Paskel, 24, sat silent in a corner. When prompted, he said that Mr. Biden would probably be his choice, but that a felony conviction on his record since the age of 17 prevented him from voting. He cannot vote in this election.

"I guess I don't know what I'm missing," he said.

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Biden Wants Black Voter Turnout Similar to Obama's. He'll Need Black Men.

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For Democrats, who rely on Black voters to power their electoral advantages in America's urban centers, the difference between good and great Black voter turnout is often a question of Black men. MILWAUKEE - Long before the coronavirus pandemic, the economic downturn and the recent protests over racial inequality, the Black men of Milwaukee's North Side had experience with crises converging all at once.

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Lady Red Couture, ‘Mother Hen’ of a Drag Scene, Dies at 43

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Lady Red Couture, ‘Mother Hen’ of a Drag Scene, Dies at 43

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A fixture in Los Angeles clubs who stood 7-foot-2 in heels, she also co-hosted the L.G.B.T.Q. talk show "Hey Qween!"

"I live, I breathe, I do everything in drag," Lady Red Couture said in her audition tape for "RuPaul's Drag Race." She didn't make the show, but she still loomed large on the Los Angeles drag circuit. Credit... Harry James Hanson

Lady Red Couture, a comedian, singer and talk-show host who called herself "the largest live-singing drag queen in captivity," and who became a mentor to younger drag performers, died on July 25 in Los Angeles. She was 43.

The cause was complications of cyclic vomiting syndrome, a condition thought to be related to migraines, said Jonny McGovern, her co-host on " Hey Qween!," a popular L.G.B.T.Q. talk show that began on YouTube and is now also available on Amazon Prime.

In her audition reel for Season 6 of " RuPaul's Drag Race," Lady Red offered a proud mantra of herself. "I live, I breathe, I do everything in drag - this is me 24/7," she said. "I am nothing to play with. Especially with my mouth."

Like some of the influential early drag queens, she also identified as a transgender woman. In an Instagram video posted in June in response to the Black Lives Matter protests, she described herself as "a Black American trans woman who is making a difference in this world."

"At a time when the word authentic is overused, honey, she was unique," said Lady Bunny, the New York City drag queen impresaria, who toured with Lady Red. "She was 6-foot-7, wore Size 16 Converse sneakers with an evening gown" - she also stood 7-foot-2 in heels - "and wore the showbiz eyelashes during the day."

"And," Lady Bunny added, "she would drop her voice real low to freak you out."

Though she was never chosen for "RuPaul's Drag Race," Lady Red cut a radiant figure within the Los Angeles drag scene, performing in clubs like Hamburger Mary's and the District and on "Hey Qween!," where she served as a vivacious Ed McMahon to Mr. McGovern's bearded Johnny Carson.

"To meet her was to fall in love with her," Frank DeCaro, the author of "Drag: Combing Through the Big Wigs of Show Business" (2019), said in an email. "She was one of the few people about whom I never heard anyone say anything shady. "

Younger drag performers were drawn to her. Ginger Minj, who competed on "RuPaul's Drag Race," described Lady Red as "the mother hen" of the circuit, adding: "Everybody knew her and looked up to her. You could always go to her with your problems."

Lady Red at a Los Angeles Film Festival party in 2011. "Everybody knew her and looked up to her," a fellow drag performer said. Credit... Craig Barritt/WireImage

Lady Red Couture was born in Los Angeles on May 30, 1977. Her mother, Kathleen Barnes, was a nondenominational Christian minister, and the two did not see eye to eye.

"She's a wonderful person - to other people," Lady Red said on her "Drag Race" audition reel in 2017.

Her father left the family when she was young and was not a part of her life, said Krystle Butler, Lady Red's younger sister. Her sister and her mother survive her.

At George Washington Preparatory High School in Los Angeles, Lady Red acted in plays and played trombone and tuba in the marching band, performing in the Tournament of Roses Parade. But she was also picked on by her peers and fought with her mother.

The arguments escalated until, Lady Red said, her mother told her, "If you want to be a girl, go be a girl," and threw her out of the house. "It hurt me a lot," she added.

It was a difficult relationship, Ms. Butler said, but it was based in love. "My mother is very religious, so at first she had to digest the whole concept. But over time she adjusted, because God loves everyone."

"She said, 'Whatever you decide to be, be the best at it,'" Ms. Butler added. "'If you're going to be a queen, be the best queen.'"

Lady Red received an associate degree from the Salt Lake Community College Culinary Institute in Utah and worked briefly as a chef with Amtrak. After returning to Los Angeles, she held a variety of jobs, including "security diva" at Gym Sportsbar and "budtender" at a MedMen cannabis dispensary, both in West Hollywood.

She started performing in drag in 1995, according to her Internet Movie Database profile. Mr. McGovern, a comedian and actor, saw her in clubs and tapped her to be his co-host on "Hey Qween!" The show, which began in 2014, rose in parallel with "RuPaul's Drag Race," becoming a go-to spot for cast members to "spill some tea," or tell some truth.

During the first season, Mr. McGovern learned that Lady Red was living in a transient hotel and invited her to move in with him. He was among the few who ever saw her without full makeup, he said.

"Lady Red's look was 1,000 percent all the time," Mr. McGovern said. "She was calling herself a full-time drag queen before accepting that she was a woman, not just a drag queen. She lived a life with glamour, but as a Black trans woman, there was a lot of hardship as well."

She never brought her hardships to the stage. The drag queen Jackie Beat recalled one tour when she and Sherry Vine, another drag queen, were in a bad mood before a show. "That's a bad place to be when it's time to sit down and paint your face and then entertain a theater filled with people who, frankly, don't care what you're going through," she said by email.

But Lady Red was not having it. Whenever she was not feeling it, she told them, she would look in the mirror and tell herself, "Get in the mood, bitch!"

"We roared with laughter and our mood instantly improved," Jackie Beat said. "We say that all the time now."

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Lady Red Couture, 'Mother Hen' of a Drag Scene, Dies at 43

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A fixture in Los Angeles clubs who stood 7-foot-2 in heels, she also co-hosted the L.G.B.T.Q. talk show "Hey Qween!" Lady Red Couture, a comedian, singer and talk-show host who called herself "the largest live-singing drag queen in captivity," and who became a mentor to younger drag performers, died on July 25 in Los Angeles.

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After Three Years of Attacking L.G.B.T.Q. Rights, Trump Suddenly Tries Outreach

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After Three Years of Attacking L.G.B.T.Q. Rights, Trump Suddenly Tries Outreach

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L.G.B.T.Q. advocates say the president has tried to divide their coalition by targeting transgender people in policy rollbacks.

President Trump in Bedminster, N.J., in August. Mr. Trump's advisers are suddenly talking about L.G.B.T.Q. people as they scramble to find new voter support. Credit... Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The month of June was filled with big moments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people.

In that monthlong stretch, the Supreme Court rendered a sweeping decision providing workplace protections for gay and transgender people. It came shortly before the fifth anniversary of the high court's landmark ruling on marriage equality. L.G.B.T.Q. people and others commemorated the murder of 49 people at the Pulse nightclub in Florida in June 2016. Thousands marched in Brooklyn, N.Y., in support of Black transgender lives.

President Trump was almost entirely silent through it all.

There was no tweet in honor of Pride Month, despite suggestions from several aides to Mr. Trump that he write one. No rollout of a coalition aimed at L.G.B.T.Q. voters by his campaign, despite preparations that had been made for one. Embassies overseas were told they couldn't fly the Pride flag.

There was, however, a rollback by the Trump administration of a regulation put in place by the Obama administration in 2016 to mandate health care as a civil right for transgender patients under the Affordable Care Act.

It is what many in the L.G.B.T.Q. coalition have come to expect from Mr. Trump, who during his 2016 presidential campaign used gay people as a wedge against Muslims, whom he painted broadly as extremists, following the shootings at Orlando's Pulse nightclub by a Muslim man. While Mr. Trump has signaled a willingness to publicly align himself with some gay men and women, he selected a deeply conservative running mate in Vice President Mike Pence, and, as president, has systematically dismantled protections implemented by President Barack Obama, especially for transgender people.

Just over two months before Election Day, Mr. Trump is trailing in almost every poll to Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee, whom activists credit with pushing Mr. Obama to support gay marriage. And Mr. Trump's advisers are suddenly talking about L.G.B.T.Q. people as they scramble to find new voter support.

Last weekend, the campaign announced the L.G.B.T.Q. coalition that had been expected in June, blaming the delay on the coronavirus.

And now Trump officials are turning to Richard Grenell, the openly gay former U.S. ambassador to Germany who served for three months as the acting director of national intelligence, to sell the president, and to attack Mr. Biden.

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Richard Grenell, center, in 2019. Mr. Grenell claimed that Mr. Trump is the "most pro-gay president in American history," in a video by the Log Cabin Republicans. Credit... Odd Anderson/Agence France-Presse - Getty Images

Alphonso David, the president of the Human Rights Campaign, the largest L.G.B.T.Q. civil rights group, responded, "We're not taking the bait."

For years, now, Mr. David said, the president has tried to divide the coalition by targeting transgender people in particular, with actions that affect the entire coalition.

"The Trump administration is looking to drive a wedge within the L.G.B.T.Q. community between L.G.B. and T.," Mr. David said.

Tori Cooper, the group's director of community engagement for the transgender justice initiative, said that the administration in is especially focused on people who have the least protection in society, transgender people of color.

"It shows the cowardice - that's the word I like to use of the current president," Ms. Cooper said.

The targeting of transgender people has extended across the federal government: a ban on transgender service in the military, an effort at the Education Department to block transgender students from choosing which bathroom to use, the rollback of health care protections by the Department of Health and Human Services, the Justice Department's move to end protections for transgender people in federal prisons.

Last month, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed allowing homeless shelters to deny transgender people access to single-sex shelters, and this month, the Education Department's office of civil rights publicly moved to block transgender girls from joining female track teams in Connecticut high schools.

Mr. Grenell, in the video, cited almost no specific domestic policy accomplishment that Mr. Trump achieved on L.G.B.T.Q. rights, as he made the pitch that Mr. Trump is the "most pro-gay president in American history." Instead, Mr. Grenell referred to his own appointment, as well as to the president's acceptance of the Supreme Court's ruling of gay marriage as constitutional and his efforts to push countries that criminalize being gay to end those practices. In the video, Mr. Grenell specifically mentioned gays and lesbians, but not transgender people.

And the night before Mr. Grenell's scheduled speech, a convention speaker praised Mr. Trump for his administration's revocation of some protections for transgender students.

To describe Mr. Trump as supportive of gay people because he appointed Mr. Grenell is the essence of "tokenism," Mr. David said.

"It's actually offensive," he said, "because you are appointing someone but removing all the rights associated with that identity."

Some administration officials have acknowledged that they see targeting transgender rights as different from gay rights.

A vigil following the Pulse nightclub shootings. During his 2016 presidential campaign, Mr. Trump used gay people as a wedge against Muslims, whom he painted broadly as extremists, following the shootings at Orlando's Pulse nightclub by a Muslim man. Credit... Ángel Franco/The New York Times

In a statement, Judd Deere, a White House spokesman, said, "While the radical left has pushed false and disgusting accusations that L.G.B.T. Americans, which includes me, are threatened under this administration, that could not be further from the truth."

Mr. Judd said that Mr. Trump has hired L.G.B.T.Q. people across the government, mentioning Mr. Grenell again, cited the president's commitment at last year's State of the Union address to ending H.I.V. transmissions in the country by 2030, and saying the president "launched a global campaign to decriminalize homosexuality, standing in solidarity with all L.G.B.T. people who live in dozens of counties around the globe that punish, imprison and even execute individuals based on their sexual orientation."

There's no evidence that Mr. Trump's campaign to decriminalize homosexuality has had any impact, or that it's been substantially different than what Mr. Obama had attempted. For instance, White House officials declined to say whether Mr. Trump had raised the brutal anti-gay purges by the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, with whom he's spoken several times in recent months. His H.I.V. pledge was similarly met with skepticism.

Mr. Trump is famously transactional, and the support he has given L.G.B.T.Q. people has usually been in connection with celebrity or support they have given him.

Mr. Trump allowed gay members into his Florida club Mar-a-Lago as long as they could pay the exorbitant membership fee; he broadcast donations to groups like the Gay Men's Health Crisis when the AIDS epidemic became a celebrity cause; and he publicly embraced the civil union between the singer Elton John, someone whose music and fame Mr. Trump admires, and Mr. John's longtime partner, David Furnish.

In 2015, when Mr. Trump was just a few months into the Republican primary contest, some of his advisers discussed a plan for exiting the campaign if his poll numbers dropped. The plan, according to one person with direct knowledge of the discussions, was for Mr. Trump to say that the party did not agree with him on a number of issues, including gay marriage, even though he'd never publicly supported it.

But after Mr. Trump won the New Hampshire primary, his advisers knew he needed the support of evangelical voters. So in an interview with the former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly in 2016, Mr. Trump said, "I take a lot of heat because I come from New York. You know, from New York, it's like, how you can be against gay marriage? But I'm opposed to gay marriage."

Christine Quinn, the first openly gay speaker of the New York City Council, said Mr. Trump's New York business background makes his actions as president "worse - because he knows better."

As president, Mr. Trump has not demagogued L.G.B.T.Q. issues the way he has with immigrants, Muslims and Black people protesting systemic police brutality.

But Mr. Trump's embrace of initiatives promoting religious freedom has been used by people inside and outside his government to justify discrimination against gay and transgender people.

Christine Quinn during a gathering of the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Manhattan in 2017 protesting Mr. Trump's agenda. Credit... Andrew Kelly/Reuters

Over many years, Mr. Trump has been skeptical about whether he gets any political benefit from the L.G.B.T.Q. community, turning frequently to Mr. Pence, who was Mr. Trump's bridge to evangelical voters in 2016, for advice, according to administration officials. Those are the voters Mr. Trump is most anxious about losing.

Charles Moran, a spokesman for the Log Cabin Republicans, conceded that he would have preferred that Mr. Trump acknowledge Pride Month in June. But he maintained that the president is being treated unfairly and said that Mr. Obama's pro-L.G.B.T.Q. regulations were legal overreach.

"The L.G.B.T. left and what I call 'Gay Inc.' has hijacked the narrative," Mr. Moran said, adding that he himself had to get educated quickly on transgender-related issues. He accused groups like the Human Rights Campaign of being unwilling to engage with the White House.

"My phone calls get returned" by the White House, he said. "There is a genuine willingness to work with us in our community."

The Log Cabin Republicans did not endorse Mr. Trump in 2016, and the group's current support has caused a rift within its ranks. Jerri Ann Henry, the group's first woman executive director, resigned in August 2019 over the pending endorsement.

"Ultimately what should be promised is not devotion to a specific class or group of people but dedication to the set of principles," she said, "and Trump has not shown his devotion to that set of principles."

Last month, Mr. Trump was questioned about whether he would consider rescinding his ban on transgender people entering the military by a reporter for The Washington Blade, a gay newspaper.

Mr. Trump gestured to his chin, appearing to signal the reporter's mask was muffling him.

"I can't hear you," Mr. Trump said. "I can't hear a word you're saying." He never answered the question.

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After Three Years of Attacking L.G.B.T.Q. Rights, Trump Suddenly Tries Outreach

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L.G.B.T.Q. advocates say the president has tried to divide their coalition by targeting transgender people in policy rollbacks. The month of June was filled with big moments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. In that monthlong stretch, the Supreme Court rendered a sweeping decision providing workplace protections for gay and transgender people.

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Bullseye: Female Darts Player Breaks Gender Barrier

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Bullseye: Female Darts Player Breaks Gender Barrier

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The widely held image of professional darts on television screens as a beer-fuelled pub game typically played by out-of-shape men has been shattered by the barrier-breaking exploits of a young Englishwoman.

Amid raucous scenes at London's atmospheric Alexandra Palace, Fallon Sherrock became an unlikely overnight celebrity in Britain when she landed a double 18 to clinch victory over a male opponent at the sport's flagship event, the PDC World Championship, on Tuesday.

It was a first win by a woman on darts' highest stage, one that trended on Twitter and has catapulted the 25-year-old Sherrock into a life she could never have imagined.

Wednesday morning saw her appear on some of the biggest TV and radio shows in Britain. Much to her delight and surprise, she now has a blue tick next to her name on her Twitter account. The biggest payday of her career - by a long way - awaits her at the weekend.

Bigger than all that, she is now a trailblazer in the game.

"It definitely sends out a good statement," Sherrock said. "We can beat the men."

And how her win was celebrated. After hitting the winning double to claim a 3-2 victory over Ted Evetts, she skipped to the board to collect her darts and turned around to see a room of mostly inebriated men bouncing up and down and singing in celebration.

"We love you Fallon, we do," they chanted, over and over again.

She shook hands with Evetts, who then applauded Sherrock and extended his right arm out as if to urge spectators to acclaim Sherrock, a one-time professional hairdresser who first picked up a dart when she was aged 17.

"I've always had the game," she said Wednesday, "but us women have never had the opportunity to prove it."

Until last year, that is. That was when the man that runs top-level darts, promoter Barry Hearn, allocated two of the 96 places in the world championship field to women. Previously, women could attempt to qualify for the event but now spots were guaranteed.

On Monday, Mikuru Suzuki - the women's world champion - took James Richardson to a sudden-death leg in the fifth set before losing.

Before that, Gayl King of Canada (2000), Anastasia Dobromyslova of Russia (2009, 2018) and Lisa Ashton of England (2018) had played in the main draw, all losing in the first round.

Sherrock went one better, setting up a second-round match against Mensur Suljovic, the 11th seed from Austria, where she is guaranteed to win at least 15,000 pounds (nearly $20,000) even if she loses.

It is a triumph of persistence for Sherrock, who developed a serious kidney condition after giving birth to her son, Rory, five years ago. She had to take medication and one of the side-effects was the swelling of her face, which led to her receiving abuse online for her appearance.

That, plus what she described as "constant sexist comments" about trying to make her way as a darts player, "inspired me to get better and prove everyone wrong," Sherrock told the BBC.

"Well, I have just proved them wrong," she said.

It should deliver a huge fillip to the women's game. The male-dominated sport is slowly starting to embrace females, with Daniela Bata-Bogdanov of Hungary becoming the first ever female scoring official at this event. She was scoring the Sherrock-Evetts match on Tuesday.

Leading women's darts player Laura Turner is one of the commentators at the world championship.

And last year, officials took the decision to stop having walk-on girls lead players to the oche before matches at darts events "following feedback from host broadcasters." The Formula One racing series has dispensed with the long-standing tradition of having women on the grid - known as ''Grid Girls'' - before races, considering it inappropriate and outdated.

Unlike other sports where physicality is crucial, darts is about hand-eye co-ordination. So it might just be the cultural and social environment that has prevented women from making names for themselves in a game that has a cult following in Britain, and is also popular in the Netherlands and Germany among other countries as Hearn sends darts to new markets.

The opportunity is there for women to make a name for themselves in a game that not so long ago appeared blocked off for them. Sherrock's success can only help in that regard.

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Bullseye: Female darts player breaks down gender barrier

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Amid raucous scenes at London's atmospheric Alexandra Palace, Fallon Sherrock became an unlikely overnight celebrity in Britain when she landed a double 18 to clinch victory over a male opponent at the sport's flagship event, the PDC World Championship, on Tuesday.

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A Poignant Portrait of a Childhood FriendA work by Tyler Mitchell speaks to the artist’s desire to expand ideas about Black masculinity.

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A Poignant Portrait of a Childhood FriendA work by Tyler Mitchell speaks to the artist’s desire to expand ideas about Black masculinity.

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In each installment of The Artists, T highlights a recent or little-shown work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist putting the work into context. This week, we're looking at a piece by Tyler Mitchell, a photographer and filmmaker who focuses on Black subjects and is invested in creating a more equitable aesthetic culture.
Age: 25

Based in: Brooklyn

Originally from: Atlanta

When and where did you make this work? I made this work on the roof of my first real apartment, on Avenue B in New York. I had a small two-bedroom, which I shared with my friend and (often) cinematographer on film projects, Owen Smith-Clark. This image is of my best friend, Santangelo Williams. Aside from being a complete creative genius, San is one of the first friends who came out to me growing up together in Georgia. For that and many other reasons, he's always been an emblem of theever-expanding notions of Black masculinity that I touch on in my work.

Can you describe what's going on in it? San is standing beautifully and stoically in front of my lens in a knit tank top with a tear running down his face. The tear actually came from a crazy gust of wind, which just goes to show how happy accidents create poignant moments.

What inspired you to make this work? This took place in 2016, when I was in a moment of pure experimentation with fashion and portraiture of friends. I was dressing friends using what I had in my closet. I would take intimate portraits of them in my home or in areas of New York. I would often create little sets. This was born out of that early series of experiments in honest portraiture of friends.

What's the work of art in any medium that changed your life? Earlie Hudnall Jr.'s " Cooling Down, 3rd Ward, Houston, Texas " (1997). Just the ease, but also the sensuousness that exists in that picture was a revelation for me and influenced a lot of my work.

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A Poignant Portrait of a Childhood Friend

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In each installment of The Artists, T highlights a recent or little-shown work by a Black artist, along with a few words from that artist putting the work into context. This week, we're looking at a piece by Tyler Mitchell, a photographer and filmmaker who focuses on Black subjects and is invested in creating a more equitable aesthetic culture.

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How siblings' gender can affect a child's development

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How siblings' gender can affect a child's development

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How siblings’ gender can affect a child’s development

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When you talk about sibling issues, everyone takes it personally. Whether it’s birth order and the supposed advantages of being the oldest (or youngest, or middle), or the question of having …

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How Black women cleared a path for Harris to be the VP pick

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How Black women cleared a path for Harris to be the VP pick

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DETROIT (AP) - When Hazel Dukes stepped onto the Democratic National Convention stage in 1972 to second Shirley Chisholm's presidential nomination, it amounted to more than history.

The legacy of Chisholm, who famously said she was "unbossed and unbothered," was cemented that day as the first Black woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination. Dukes said Chisholm and others hoped her historic run would lay the foundation for future generations of Black women to ascend into powerful political roles to usher in systemic change within their communities.

And 48 years later, that hope is being realized as California Sen. Kamala Harris prepares to accept the Democratic Party's vice presidential nomination on Wednesday. She will be the first Black woman and first Asian American woman named to a major party presidential ticket.

"Shirley exhibited the strength of Ida B. Wells, Mary McLeod Bethune and Fannie Lou Hamer and she was a powerhouse," said Dukes, 88, a lifelong activist and current president of the NAACP New York State Conference. "African American women, we've been in this struggle. And now we are showing our power and our strength. We are saying this is our moment and our space, and we are claiming it."

That energy could decide whether Harris and Joe Biden win in November. Black voters, especially women, are a critical part of the Democratic coalition and could sway the results in critical states such as Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, North Carolina and Florida.

But historically, Black women have fought the racism and sexism that prevented them from having prominent roles within the movements for women's suffrage and civil rights. While their organizing and political contributions had measurable impact, experts say, they were largely relegated to the sidelines, or in some cases, seemingly wiped from the historical record.

That reminder is especially clear as America marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote - a right that most Black women weren't afforded until much later.

"This is certainly a watershed moment for them, but I do think it's important to emphasize that descriptive representation, as powerful as this is for women, is only that much more sweeter when it results in substantive representation," said Ravi Perry, Howard University's political science chair. "That upper glass ceiling is still there, and we are still one of the last developed nations to see a woman head of state."

So, while Harris is set to address the nation for what some hope will be a rousing speech at a time of immense economic uncertainty and racial reckoning, others hope her remarks will be set against the legacy of the many Black women on whose shoulders they believe she stands.

Her speech follows former first lady Michelle Obama, whose powerful remarks Monday kicked off the convention and outlined the dire stakes for the election ahead. She declared that President Donald Trump was "in over his head" and the "wrong president for our country."

Mrs. Obama hinted at the legacy of Black women in politics and how, even in 2020, a Black woman speaking with conviction at the convention might not be met with open arms by some, a stark reminder that the road to prominence within politics and the Democratic Party has not been easy for women of color, especially Black women.

"Now, I understand that my message won't be heard by some people," Mrs. Obama said. "We live in a nation that is deeply divided, and I am a Black woman speaking at the Democratic convention."

The first Black woman to run technically for vice president was Charlotta Bass in 1952. Bass, who was a newspaper publisher, ran through the Progressive Party, according to author and Johns Hopkins University history professor Martha Jones.

Bass receives little attention, Jones said, because her radical ideas at the time were met with great resistance.

"I think there's a temptation to kind of sanitize Black women's political history, and I think part of the reason we don't remember Bass is because she doesn't fit a shiny, polished mold of respectable Black women," said Jones, whose forthcoming book is "Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All."

"Black women have always been ambitious and nimble and willing to engage in a broad range of political views in order to figure out the problem of an American democracy that for so long disappoints Black Americans," she said.

But the legacy of Black women extends beyond politics, according to Johnnetta Cole, who became the first African American female president of historically Black Spelman College and national chair of the National Council of Negro Women.

"I have had this extraordinary honor of seeing strong Black women leaders, and there's an expression of, 'If you see one, you can be one,'" said Cole, who was mentored by civil rights legends Mary McLeod Bethune and Dorothy Height. "We are shaped and we are propelled by others. There's no question that our foremothers paved the way. But while we can talk in a moment about the extraordinary, exquisite selection of Sen. Kamala Harris, let's not declare that it's all victory."

Much work remains. America has yet to have its first Black female governor. And while inroads have been made, Black women remain significantly underrepresented in politics.

And younger grassroots organizers are balancing the historic nature of Harris' selection with her record as California attorney general and district attorney in San Francisco, which some believe could make it difficult for her and Biden to galvanize support among younger Black and Latino voters.

Some of Harris' critics say she focused on issues that punished poor and minority families. Among them, she took on truancy and supported a statewide law modeled on her city initiative that threatened parents with jail time, fines and lost public benefits if they failed to send their children to school. But in recent years, Harris has supported more progressive criminal justice reform measures.

Karissa Lewis, the Movement for Black Lives' national field director, said she knows many activists who are inspired by Harris and others who have been "deeply and negatively impacted by some of the historical legacy of Harris."

But Lewis said it's too soon to know whether Harris will truly follow in the steps of women who came before her like Fannie Lou Hamer, a beloved civil rights activist.

"It is clear to us at M4BL that no matter who occupies the White House in January, it will require sustained struggle in building our political power to be able to shape a true Black national agenda," Lewis said.

"Fannie Lou Hamer is the model and someone that a lot of folks in modern-day movements look to," she said. "So thinking back to some of Fannie's powerful speeches, it was clear that she was speaking for the people and felt accountable to the people. I think time will tell if Harris sees herself aligned with movement and brings movement along with her."

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How Black women cleared a path for Harris to be the VP pick

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DETROIT (AP) - When Hazel Dukes stepped onto the Democratic National Convention stage in 1972 to second Shirley Chisholm's presidential nomination, it amounted to more than history. The legacy of Chisholm, who famously said she was "unbossed and unbothered," was cemented that day as the first Black woman to run for the Democratic Party's presidential nomination.

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Berlin Film Festival to adopt gender-neutral performance awards

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Berlin Film Festival to adopt gender-neutral performance awards

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The Berlin Intl. Film Festival has decided that its performance awards will be gender-neutral for next year's edition. The event's management also announced that its 71st edition, running Feb. 11-21, will be a physical event, although a hybrid model is planned for the European Film Market, which runs Feb. 11-18 in Berlin.

Instead of awards for the best actor and actress, Silver Bears will be awarded for best leading performance and best supporting performance, the festival said Monday.

"We believe that not separating the awards in the acting field according to gender comprises a signal for a more gender-sensitive awareness in the film industry," festival directors Mariette Rissenbeek and Carlo Chatrian said in a joint statement.

At this year's festival, Paula Beer won best actress for "Undine," and best actor went to Elio Germano for "Hidden Away."

The fest chiefs also revealed that the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize, which was suspended due to revelations about the part played by the first Berlinale director, Alfred Bauer, during the Nazi era, will no longer be awarded. A new award, the Silver Bear Jury Prize, will be introduced.

The international jury will award eight prizes for films in the main competition section: Golden Bear for best film (awarded to the film's producers), Silver Bear Grand Jury Prize, Silver Bear for director, Silver Bear Jury Prize, Silver Bear for leading performance, Silver Bear for supporting performance, Silver Bear for screenplay, and Silver Bear for outstanding artistic contribution.

Commenting on the decision to stage a physical event, the festival bosses said: "Festivals and markets are places of encounter and communication. This applies to the public as well as to the industry. We see an important and unique feature of festivals in their lively relationship with the audience. In times of the corona pandemic, it has become even clearer that we still require analogue experience spaces in the cultural realm."

The festival also announced Monday that the Generation section will only show feature-length films with a running time of at least 60 minutes - and no short films - in its Generation Kplus and Generation 14plus competition programs.

Full details on the changes to the festival's structure and programming, including the number of invited films, will be decided "by the festival management within the coming weeks," the festival said. Registration for films starts on Sept. 1, when the regulations will be posted on the festival website.

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Berlin Film Festival to adopt gender-neutral performance awards

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The Berlin Intl. Film Festival has decided that its performance awards will be gender-neutral for next year's edition. The event's management also announced that its 71st edition, running Feb. 11-21, will be a physical event, although a hybrid model is planned for the European Film Market, which runs Feb.

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Thumbs down! Male film critics still far outnumber female – and too few are people of color

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Thumbs down! Male film critics still far outnumber female – and too few are people of color

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Men still overwhelmingly outnumber women among the shrinking ranks of the nation's film critics - and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down movie theaters (and furloughed journalists) throughout the land, according to a new edition of a recurring study.

Male film reviewers outnumbered their female counterparts by nearly 2 to 1, according to "Thumbs Down 2020: Film Critics and Gender, and Why It Matters," touted as the most comprehensive and longest-running study of women's representation and impact as film reviewers.

If the gender statistics weren't bad enough, the race and ethnicity numbers are worse: The study found that female and male reviewers of color remain dramatically underrepresented.

Some 70% of female reviewers are white, 23% are women of color, and 7% have an unknown racial/ethnic identity, while 73% of male reviewers are white, 18% are men of color and 9% have an unknown racial/ethnic identity.

The study found only a slight increase in the number of film reviews written by women, compared with 2019. The report suggests the continuing imbalance is related to the lack of visibility for films with female protagonists and/or directed by women.

"The over-representation of men as film reviewers, coupled with the fact that a higher proportion of their reviews focus on male-driven stories and films directed by men, advantage those films by giving them greater visibility in the critical marketplace," says study author Martha Lauzen, founder and director of the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University.

But Lauzen says the numbers on reviewers of color are moving in the right direction. For example, in 2019, women of color made up 17% of top critics on Rotten Tomatoes, the website that aggregates film reviews. In 2020, that percentage increased to 33%.

"For men of color, the gains are much smaller," she said. "In 2019, men of color accounted for just 7% of top critics. In 2020, only 10% of top critics are men of color. This is a rare example of the gains for women outpacing those for men."

Lauzen predicts that as the film industry "reanimates" in coming weeks, "structural inequity will help to ensure that pre-pandemic inequities will remain in place in the pandemic and post-pandemic environments."

In other words, it's not likely to get dramatically better for female critics in the near future.
Mandatory masks and empty seats: Here's what to expect when movie theaters reopen
Lauzen has been studying gender and diversity in the film industry since 2007; her latest report was released Wednesday and provides the most current data available on film reviewers in the U.S.

The findings include:

► In early 2020, men made up 65% and women 35% of print, broadcast, and online film reviewers, the study says. Men wrote 66% and women 34% of reviews, an increase of women by just 2 percentage points, from 32% in 2019. The 2018 study also found that women made up just 32% of reviewers.

► Male reviewers outnumber female reviewers in every job title category. Men made up 83% and women 17% of "film critics." Men account for 70% and women 30% of "staff writers."

► Female-driven films and films directed by women make up a smaller proportion of men's reviews than women's reviews: 54% of the reviews written by women and 45% of those written by men are about films featuring at least one female protagonist.

► More than twice as many of the films reviewed by female critics as male critics are directed by women: 33% of films reviewed by women vs. 14% of those reviewed by men. "While it is not clear whether these differences are due to reviewer preferences or to editorial assignments, they influence the amount of attention films featuring female protagonists and films with women directors receive," the study found.

► Men continue to dominate as reviewers across every film genre and in nearly every type of media outlet. Men write 69% of reviews about action features, 68% about animated features, 68% about comedies, 66% about science-fiction features, 65% about documentaries, 63% about dramas, and 61% about horror features.

► The percentage of women exceeds that of men only at radio and television outlets (women 58% vs. men 42%), the report found.
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Since her first report in 2007, Lauzen and her team considered more than 25,000 reviews written by more than 1,600 reviewers. This year's edition examined more than 4,000 reviews written by more than 380 reviewers working for print, broadcast and online outlets in January, February and March of this year.

One positive number: Female reviewers are gaining some ground on Rotten Tomatoes, the study found. In 2020, women made up 40% and men 60% of top critics.

"For women, this represents an increase of 12 percentage points from 28% in 2019,

and 6 percentage points from 34% in 2018," the report found.

Do these findings matter to Hollywood? Maybe not as much now, in the middle of a pandemic and with tens of thousands of jobs lost and studios shuttered.
Never been to a film festival before? Thanks to COVID, they're more accessible than ever
But in 2018, Oscar winner Brie Larson used her Women in Film award acceptance speech to decry the lack of diversity among film critics, eliciting applause when she said she didn't need "a white dude to tell me what didn't work for him about '(A) Wrinkle in Time.' It wasn't made for him! I want to know what it meant to women of color, biracial women, to teen women of color."

Larson clarified: "Am I saying I hate white dudes? No, I am not. What I am saying is, if you make a movie that is a love letter to women of color, there is an insanely low chance a woman of color will have a chance to see your movie, and review your movie."

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Thumbs down! Male film critics still far outnumber female - and too few are people of color

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Men still overwhelmingly outnumber women among the shrinking ranks of the nation's film critics - and that was before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down movie theaters (and furloughed journalists) throughout the land, according to a new edition of a recurring study.

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DNC lineup of politically powerful women underscores gender gap between Democrats and Republicans

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DNC lineup of politically powerful women underscores gender gap between Democrats and Republicans

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MILWAUKEE - Former first lady Michelle Obama was the headline attraction Monday night at a Democratic National Convention that will showcase a long list of women with marquee roles in politics, from Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi to Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Those names underscore the far greater prominence of women in the Democratic Party compared with the GOP, a gender gap that also extends to the voting behavior of Americans and to public opinion about President Donald Trump.

The partisan gender gap is especially wide in Wisconsin, some pollsters say, where the DNC was originally scheduled to happen. And it has widened in Wisconsin to the point where women now account for two out of every three Democratic voters in the state, according to polling this year by the Marquette Law School.

While Trump has been winning men in Wisconsin by an average of nearly 10 points in polling this summer, he has been losing women by nearly 20.
More: Michelle Obama says Trump is the 'wrong president for our country'
"The gender gap this time could be enormous," said political scientist Kathleen Dolan of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, who studies gender and politics.

"It could be bigger this time than it was last time, which might help get people over the idea that the gender gap last time was because Hillary Clinton was a woman. It was because women are more likely to be Democrats in this country," Dolan said.

Biden will carry the female vote, but by how much?

There is no doubt that Joe Biden will carry female voters in Wisconsin and nationally this fall. The only question is by how much, and whether his edge among women will be offset by Trump's edge among men.
More:'Enough is enough': Grieving daughter blasts Trump's coronavirus response in DNC speech
Democrats hoping to expand their edge with female voters added three Republican women (and moderates) to their roster of convention speakers Monday night: former New Jersey Gov. Christine Whitman, former GOP congresswoman Susan Molinari (who was the keynote speaker at the 1996 Republican National Convention), and business executive and former California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, who backed GOP presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012 but switched to supporting Democrat Clinton in 2016 after Trump won his party's nomination.

Molinari praised Biden's record on issues important to women, and called Trump "so disappointing and lately so disturbing."

Christine Whitman called Biden a person "decent enough, stable enough and strong enough to get our economy back on track," saying "Donald Trump is not that person." Meg Whitman said, "Donald Trump has no clue how to run a business let alone an economy."

"I think COVID has emphasized particularly for women voters how high the stakes are - women especially, because we are oftentimes the primary caregiver and scheduler and now virtual educator, and many (are) also working," said Democratic consultant Tanya Bjork of Wisconsin, echoing a major theme of the convention, including Monday night's program - Trump's handling of the pandemic. "I think the lack of response to COVID is really going to hurt Trump with women."

Gender gap pronounced in the suburbs

Suburban voters are one key target.

The gender gap in the Trump-Biden race is bigger among suburban voters in Wisconsin than it is among urban or rural voters, partly because the suburbs are a more competitive partisan battleground.
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In one urban-suburban-rural breakdown used by the Marquette poll, Trump leads Biden this year by 21 points among suburban men but trails Biden by 19 points among suburban women - a staggering disparity.

The Trump campaign organized a three-day "Women for Trump" bus tour in Wisconsin last week, touting the president's record on jobs and tax cuts and "keeping families safe."

But Trump has been dogged by low ratings among female voters throughout his presidency, fueled by the pre-existing gender gap as well as his rhetoric and personal history and leadership style.
More: Prominent Latinos criticize Democrats for lack of representation at DNC
Those ratings have varied a great deal among different categories of female voters, reflecting other dividing lines in American politics.

For example, during the combined years of his presidency, Trump's job rating among blue-collar white women (those without college degrees) in Wisconsin has been 44% approval and 51% disapproval, based on polling by the Marquette Law School. This is a huge slice of the Wisconsin electorate (almost 30% of all registered voters) that is fiercely contested by both parties.

But his rating is much lower among white women with college degrees (a more Democratic group): 32% approval and 65% disapproval.

It is lower still among Hispanic women: 23% approval and 71% disapproval.

And it is rock-bottom among African-American women: 8% approval and 87% disapproval.

"Black women are the most loyal members of Democratic Party, so (Biden's) choice of a Black woman just makes sense from that perspective," said Milwaukee congresswoman Gwen Moore, referring to the selection of California Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate over a long list of other female politicians that included U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin.

Harris will speak Wednesday night.

Baldwin is scheduled to speak Thursday night.

Moore delivered welcoming remarks Monday night.

A key Dem target: white married women

Moore said that if her party can make serious inroads among white married women this year (a GOP-leaning voting group), it will be "the last gasps of breath" for Trump's re-election bid.

Dolan, the political scientist, said she expected Democrats to make two kinds of appeals to women at this week's convention - one based on health care and child care and pocketbook issues and everyday economic hardships facing women and families, and one based on fairness and equity and Trump's tone and rhetoric about women.

In her remarks Monday night, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer introduced herself as the person Pres. Trump calls "that woman from Michigan," before decrying his handling of the pandemic.
More: Read Michelle Obama's full keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention
Michelle Obama's impassioned appeal

But it was former first lady Michelle Obama who occupied center stage Monday night, delivering an impassioned appeal to Americans to participate in this election, a personal testimonial to Biden, and a blunt indictment of Trump.

"More than 150,00 people have died and our economy is in shambles because of a virus this president downplayed for too long," she said.

"Whenever we look to this White House for some leadership or consolation or any semblance of steadiness, what we get instead is chaos and division or a total and utter lack of empathy," she said.
More: Trump embraces CNN poll showing him closing in on Biden, but recent surveys show ex-VP ahead
"So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can," she said at another.

"Donald Trump is the wrong president for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head. He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is," she said, invoking Trump's own recent words about the casualties of the pandemic.

Said Obama:

"If you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can; and they will if we don't make a change in this election."
Craig Gilbert has covered every presidential campaign since 1988 and chronicled Wisconsin's role as a swing state at the center of the nation's political divide. He has written widely about polarization and voting trends and won distinction for his data-driven analysis. Gilbert has served as a writer-in-residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Lubar Fellow at Marquette Law School and a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, where he studied public opinion, survey research, voting behavior and statistics. Email him at craig.gilbert@jrn.com and follow him on Twitter: @WisVoter.
Dolan said one political challenge facing Democrats this fall is mobilizing low-propensity female voters (such as younger women) who don't always participate in elections. The former first lady Monday night blamed Trump's victory in part on voters who stayed home in 2016, saying, "four years ago, too many people chose to believe that their votes didn't matter."

As for Republicans, Dolan said, the gender gap poses a particular challenge: because women outnumber men in the electorate, Republicans need to carry male voters by a higher margin than Democrats carry female voters.

That is not what's happening in the polls in Wisconsin and nationally right now.

In fact, while Democrats point to the pandemic as hurting Trump among women, the polling suggests it has actually hurt Trump more among men.

The growth of Biden's lead in Wisconsin this summer since the coronavirus hit has come not because Biden's big lead among women has gotten bigger (it has held pretty steady), but because Trump's lead among men has gotten smaller - from about 18 points earlier this year to about 5 points in July and August, the Marquette polling shows.

The bottom line is that the Trump-Biden race in Wisconsin and elsewhere will not be decided by the size of the gender gap. Trump's defeat of Clinton in 2016 featured a very large gender gap. It will be decided by whether Trump's strength with men outweighs Biden's strength with women.

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DNC lineup of politically powerful women underscores gender gap between Democrats and Republicans

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MILWAUKEE - Former first lady Michelle Obama was the headline attraction Monday night at a Democratic National Convention that will showcase a long list of women with marquee roles in politics, from Kamala Harris to Nancy Pelosi to Elizabeth Warren to Hillary Clinton to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

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Who Should Compete in Women’s Sports? There Are ‘Two Almost Irreconcilable Positions’

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Who Should Compete in Women’s Sports? There Are ‘Two Almost Irreconcilable Positions’

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Some experts say inclusion and competitive fairness conflict as leaders consider how to regulate the athletic participation of transgender women.

Lindsay Hecox challenged an Idaho law barring transgender athletes from joining women's teams. She wanted to join the women's cross-country team at Boise State University. "I'm a girl and the right team for me is the girl's team," Hecox said. Credit... Kohjiro Kinno/Sports Illustrated, via Getty Images

A restrictive Idaho law - temporarily blocked by a federal judge Monday night - has amplified a charged debate about who should be allowed to compete in women's sports, as transgender athletes have become increasingly accepted on the playing field while still facing strong resistance from some competitors and lawmakers.

While scientific and societal views of sex and gender identity have changed significantly in recent decades, a vexing question persists regarding athletes who transition from male to female: how to balance inclusivity, competitive fairness and safety.

There are no uniform guidelines - in fact the existing rules that govern sports often conflict - to determine the eligibility of transgender women and girls (policy battles have so far primarily centered on regulating women's sports). And there is scant research on elite transgender athletes to guide sports officials as they attempt to provide equitable access to sports while reconciling any residual physiological advantages that may carry on from puberty.

Dr. Eric Vilain, a geneticist specializing in sexual development who has advised the N.C.A.A. and the International Olympic Committee on policies for transgender athletes, said that sports leaders were confronted with "two almost irreconcilable positions" in setting eligibility standards - one relying on an athlete's declared gender and the other on biological litmus tests.

Politics, too, have entered the debate in a divided United States. While transgender people have broadly been more accepted across the country, the Trump administration and some states have sought to roll back protections for transgender people in health care, the military and other areas of civil rights, fueling a rise in hate crimes, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

In March, Idaho became the first state to bar transgender girls and women from participating in women's sports.

The law, enacted in July by a Republican-controlled legislature with no Democratic support, required athletes to participate in sports based on their sex assigned at birth. The law mandated that all participants, including transgender athletes, answer a form about their sex, surgical procedures, medications and even whether they have had organs, like testes, removed. Any dispute in an athlete's eligibility required a physical, genetic or hormonal exam conducted by a physician.

The ban was challenged by a transgender athlete in federal court in Idaho, claiming it violated equal protection guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Chief U.S. District Judge David C. Nye temporarily halted the law on Monday, writing in an 87-page injunction that a "categorical bar to girls and women who are transgender stands in stark contrast to the policies of elite athletic bodies that regulate sports both nationally and globally," which permit transgender women to participate in women's sports in college and the Olympics under certain conditions.

While the ruling was not final, it was a victory for Lindsay Hecox, who is transgender and challenged the law in April, seeking to become eligible for the women's cross-country team at Boise State University. "I'm a girl and the right team for me is the girl's team," Hecox said Monday in a statement. "It's time courts recognize that and I am so glad that the court's ruling does."

The injunction was a setback for the Trump administration and for Barbara Ehardt, the Republican Idaho state representative who sponsored the bill. On Monday, Ehardt said she would still "stand strongly" behind her position.

In a recent interview, Ehardt, who played basketball in college and formerly coached a N.C.A.A. Division I women's team, expressed concern that residual physical advantages that transgender athletes might possess could reduce the participation of cisgender women in sports. (Cisgender means their gender identity matches their assigned sex at birth.)

Ehardt said: "The progress that we, as women, have made over the last 50 years will be for naught and we will be forced to be spectators in our own sports."

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Hecox testified against the Idaho law before it passed, then challenged it in court. Credit... Sami Edge/Idaho Education News

The Idaho case and a lawsuit in Connecticut that challenges the eligibility of transgender high school athletes have raised complicated questions about equitable access to sports, human rights and athletic advantages. Scientists have long said there is no single biological factor that determines sex, and the sex assigned at birth is not considered the sole determinant of gender.

There is little or no scientific research regarding the performance of elite transgender athletes, experts say. But some evidence suggests that residual strength and muscle mass advantages largely remain when people assigned as males at birth undergo testosterone suppression for a year.

Complicating matters further, medical and ethical questions have arisen about whether any women should be required to lower testosterone levels just to play sports. The United Nations has called required hormone suppression "unnecessary, humiliating and harmful." And there continues to be vigorous debate about the extent to which testosterone provides a decisive advantage in athletic performance.

Guidelines regarding transgender athletes represent "sport's unsolvable problem," said Ross Tucker, a South African exercise physiologist who is helping World Rugby develop its eligibility rules.

He said it seemed impossible to balance the values of competitive fairness, inclusion and safety because they conflict. "Therefore, you have to prioritize them," Tucker said. "That's the problem. One group prioritizes inclusion. Another group says we want fairness and safety" on the playing field.

At puberty, male athletes generally gain physiological advantages for many sports, like a larger skeletal structure, greater muscle mass and strength, less body fat, greater bone density, larger hearts and greater oxygen-carrying capacity. As a result, men and women mostly compete in separate divisions. At issue for scientists and sports officials is how much testosterone-suppression regimens reduce those advantages.

Even if transgender athletes retain some competitive advantages, it does not necessarily mean that the advantages are unfair, because all top athletes possess some edge over their peers, said Vilain, the director of the Center for Genetic Medicine Research at Children's National Hospital in Washington.

"It's like saying Usain Bolt's abilities are unfair because he wins by so much each time," Vilain said.

Contrary to fears expressed by some, there has been no large-scale dominance of transgender athletes in women's sports.

One former athlete who expressed such fears, the tennis great Martina Navratilova, was widely criticized and walked back her comments after writing last year in The Times of London that it was "insane" and "cheating" to allow transgender women to participate in women's sports. She wrote without evidence that any man could "decide to be female," take hormones and become victorious and then reverse course "and go back to making babies."

Veronica Ivy, who was known as Rachel McKinnon when she became the first transgender woman to win a world masters track cycling title, accused Navratilova of being transphobic and having " an irrational fear of something that doesn't happen."

Olympic historians say that no athletes at the Winter or Summer Games identified themselves publicly as transgender when they competed. At least two announced that they were transgender sometime after competing, including Caitlyn Jenner.

In recent years, transgender athletes have become more widely embraced and successful in sports from high school and college track to international weight lifting. The Tokyo Olympics, postponed to 2021 because of the coronavirus pandemic, could feature transgender women such as the BMX freestyle rider Chelsea Wolfe of the United States, the volleyball player Tifanny Abreu of Brazil and the weight lifter Laurel Hubbard of New Zealand.

"The more we are told that we don't belong and should be ashamed of who we are, the fewer opportunities we have to participate in sports," said Terry Miller, a star transgender sprinter from Connecticut. Credit... Jessica Hill for The New York Times

Governing bodies have varied in their approaches toward transgender athletes. Connecticut, for example, permits athletes to compete according to their gender identity, without restriction.

Last February, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference policy was challenged by three cisgender female athletes, Selina Soule, Chelsea Mitchell and Alanna Smith. The lawsuit, still being adjudicated, referred to two transgender sprinters, Terry Miller and Andraya Yearwood, who have won 15 state titles between them. Their dominance in winning races deprived cisgender athletes of athletic opportunities and potential college scholarships, the suit argued.

In May, the civil rights division of the United States Department of Education ruled that Connecticut's high school policy violated Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex.

"All the biological females know who is going to win before we even start, and it's sad to see that all our training just goes to waste," Smith, one of the three plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said in an interview.

The Connecticut high school association's position is that multiple federal courts and government agencies have acknowledged in reference to Title IX that the term "sex" is "ambiguous" and historical usage of the word "has not kept pace with contemporary science, advances in medical knowledge and societal norms."

Miller, the star transgender sprinter, said in a statement in February, "The more we are told that we don't belong and should be ashamed of who we are, the fewer opportunities we have to participate in sports."

Today, about 200,000 athletes compete in women's college sports. Joanna Harper, a researcher and medical physicist, estimated that about 50 are transgender.

Harper, who is transgender, said that different levels and types of sports should tailor policies to their unique circumstances, including testosterone-suppression requirements for top transgender athletes beginning in high school, but with an eye toward inclusivity.

"Where there's no professional contracts, no money, no Olympic glory, we should be very inclusive about that," Harper said.

The N.C.A.A. policy says that issues of basic fairness and equity "demand the expansion of our thinking about equal opportunity in sports." The organization requires that transgender women undergo testosterone suppression treatment for a year before becoming eligible for women's events. But the N.C.A.A. says it does not set permissible limits of testosterone for transgender athletes.

In August 2019, June Eastwood of the University of Montana became the first known transgender woman to compete in an N.C.A.A. Division I women's cross-country race. Before transitioning, Eastwood had been a top runner for Montana's men's cross-country and track teams. But in women's cross-country, she finished 60th at a regional meet and did not qualify for the national championships.

June Eastwood, center, was the first known transgender woman to compete in an N.C.A.A. Division I women's cross-country race. Credit... Rachel Leathe/Bozeman Daily Chronicle, via Associated Press

Four years earlier, Harper had published the first study on the effect of hormone therapy - testosterone suppression and estrogen - on the performance of transgender athletes.

Her research found that a nonelite group of eight transgender distance runners was no more competitive as women than as men. Her findings suggested that a performance advantage was not always maintained over cisgender women as transgender women faced a reduction in speed, strength, endurance and oxygen-carrying capacity.

Harper noted, though, that her research applied only to distance runners and that transgender sprinters may retain an advantage over cisgender sprinters because they tend to carry more muscle mass to propel themselves over shorter distances.

In May 2019, the first known transgender athlete won an N.C.A.A. track championship, when CeCe Telfer of Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire took first place in the Division II women's 400-meter hurdle race. Telfer's transition seemed to follow, at least partially, Harper's theory about sprinters.

In two seasons for the Franklin Pierce men's team, Telfer did not qualify for the national collegiate championships, ranking no better than 200th in the hurdles event. On the women's team, she ran slightly slower in winning the 400-meter hurdles (57.53 seconds) than she had before transitioning (57.34). But Telfer was faster after transitioning in the 60-meter sprint (7.63 seconds compared to 7.67) and the 400-meter sprint (54.41 seconds compared to 55.57).

Telfer attributed her success, in part, to a newfound motivation to compete, telling Outsports.com that she felt a release from gender dysphoria, which left her "uncomfortable in my skin."

But Gregory A. Brown, a professor of exercise science at the University of Nebraska-Kearney, wrote in an expert declaration for the state of Idaho in its case that Telfer's performance "provides some evidence that male-to-female transgender treatment does not negate the inherent athletic performance advantages" of a person who experienced puberty as a male.

A 2019 Swedish study of 11 transgender women found that, after a year of undergoing testosterone suppression, they experienced only a negligible decrease in strength in their thigh muscles and only a 5 percent loss of muscle mass.

One of the researchers, Tommy Lundberg of the Karolinska Institute outside Stockholm, said in an interview that the participants were untrained and that it was difficult to speculate about physical changes to elite athletes because "there are no longitudinal studies." He added, "I'm not sure there will be any reliable data at any point."

The International Olympic Committee allows transgender female athletes to compete in the Games if they reduce their serum testosterone levels below 10 nanomoles per liter for a year and maintain the lower levels during their careers. Transgender men can compete without restriction.

According to World Athletics, track and field's governing body, the general testosterone range for cisgender women is .12 to 1.79 nanomoles per liter, compared with 7.7 to 29.4 nanomoles per liter for men after puberty. In other words, World Athletics says, the lowest level in the men's range is four times greater than the highest level in the women's range.

Separately, track and field has guidelines specifically for intersex athletes, competitors born with biological factors that don't fit typical descriptions for males or females. Those who possess a rare chromosomal condition are required to reduce their testosterone levels even lower, to five nanomoles per liter, in races from the quarter mile to the mile.

One of the athletes affected is Caster Semenya of South Africa, the two-time Olympic champion at 800 meters, who was classified as female at birth, identifies as a woman and is challenging the track and field policy in an ongoing case.

The I.O.C. has been widely expected to require transgender Olympic athletes to adhere to the five nanomole limit after the Tokyo Games.

According to new research, which examines available studies of testosterone suppression, evidence shows that even a reduction to one nanomole per liter - squarely within the average female range - only minimally reduces the advantages of muscle mass and strength retained as men transition to women.

That undermines the attempt of sports organizations to set universal guidelines, said Lundberg, a co-author of the study, which is undergoing peer review. He recommends that individual sports set their own policies.

"It is easy to sympathize with arguments made on both sides," Lundberg said of gender identity versus biology. But, he added, "It is going to be impossible to make everyone happy."

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Who Should Compete in Women's Sports? There Are 'Two Almost Irreconcilable Positions'

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Some experts say inclusion and competitive fairness conflict as leaders consider how to regulate the athletic participation of transgender women. A restrictive Idaho law - temporarily blocked by a federal judge Monday night - has amplified a charged debate about who should be allowed to compete in women's sports, as transgender athletes have become increasingly accepted on the playing field while still facing strong resistance from some competitors and lawmakers.

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Will They See Me as a Son, a Daughter or a Stranger?

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Will They See Me as a Son, a Daughter or a Stranger?

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Thirteen years ago, my parents tried to wish away my gender transition. Now, Alzheimer's threatens to erase their memory of me altogether.

Credit... Brian Rea

Unlike my mother's usual emails (with the entire message crammed into the subject line), this one had no text, only an attached photo. I clicked on the file and reeled at the picture of her, emaciated, with a deep gash above her bruised eye.

I called immediately. "Mom, what happened?"

"I fell. At the flat place by the puzzles." Then she said, "I'm going," and hung up.

Between our terse conversations and images like this, I hardly recognize the once talkative woman who tended to my needs and listened to my desires as a child.

In all fairness, as her transgender son, I realize there have been times when she has found me unrecognizable, too.

Thirteen years ago, when I was 34, I injected myself with testosterone for the first time and began a physical transition from female to male. Very quickly, my voice lowered, muscles grew and hair appeared all over my body, except, unfortunately, where my hairline started to recede.

For the first time, I felt right, whole. The image that greeted me in the mirror reflected what I had been feeling inside. What didn't transition so smoothly was my relationship with my parents.

Early on, they wrote me a letter encouraging me to reconsider my decision to become a man. The message, while cruel, was likely founded in misinformation, fear and concern for me, but that was no comfort in the midst of a life-changing journey, which now would not include their support. Over time, our relationship healed - somewhat. Mostly, we just didn't speak about it.

Then, in 2015, my father emailed me, acknowledging his difficulty recalling words and confirming that a recent MRI indicated early signs of Alzheimer's. Three years later, my mother learned that she had it, too.

A visit with them at their house last summer confirmed they were both entrenched in a mire of dementia from which they will never escape. My father and I sat in armchairs while my mother looked out the living room window and said, "I need to call the tree guy about those white rectangles," wondering aloud why the wind hadn't knocked them from the branches.

I followed her gaze but couldn't see the rectangles.

"Stand here," she said. "Look."

It took me a minute to see what she saw: light from the skylights above us bouncing off the window glass and forming rectangular reflections, which appeared to her to be outside.

Difficulties with spatial relationships and depth perception are common among people with Alzheimer's. My parents have the other typical symptoms also: memory loss, confusion about where they are or what time it is, inability to hold a conversation, moodiness, paranoia. And, in my father's case, increasing difficulty with walking and eating.
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These changes are upsetting to us in different ways. My parents were trained as journalists and worked as writers. Now they are frustrated by their inability to use language in ways that used to feel so natural. My father rarely speaks, and my mother can only form sentences on good days. Even then, she calls keys "stuff that goes with my car."

This, and the slow erosion of their independence, starting with the cancellation of their drivers' licenses and the opening of their home to round-the-clock care, has them feeling defeated. As a child of parents with a terminal illness, I am obviously upset, too. Unexpected, however, is the sense that my identities as a man, husband and father - all predicated on my gender transition - seem to be falling away, too, as their dementia progresses and they forget who I am.

My gender shift was just the start of many changes: a year after I began my transition, a mutual friend introduced me, via email, to a bold woman with a big personality and irreverent sense of humor. We didn't meet in person until two months later when I picked her up at the airport on a Friday night. We got married that Sunday.

In the years since, we adopted two boys from foster care when each was 9: our first in 2012 and his younger brother three years later. Then, in a manner of months after the November 2016 presidential election, the four of us left our home, jobs and friends in the United States and emigrated to Canada.

People are often curious about the speed with which these life changes occurred. Wasn't it risky to marry someone after knowing them for only a few days? Didn't you miss too much of your children's lives, adopting them when they were older? Weren't you stressed deciding in March to move to a new country in May?

I usually respond that these changes, although major, pale in comparison to changing one's gender. Once you've done that, nothing else seems as risky, fast or profound.

Yet, the pace of these changes is matched only by the speed of my parents' decline.

The nature of Alzheimer's is that affected individuals often can recall memories from their distant past more easily than recent events. On good days, my mother can describe how in the late 1960s she "found" my father while working as a reporter at a small newspaper in Kansas, where, on one of the top floors, there was a "single desk and one chair to share." When my father was brought in as a guest reporter on loan from The Kansas City Star, that week's top story was: "Love Connection in the Newsroom."

They both remember the birth of their first child too: a daughter. They named me Lesley, after the nurse whose sense of urgency saved my life. The story my mother still likes to tell is that the umbilical cord was wrapped around my neck four times. As she says, "Lesley, the nurse, told the doctor, 'Get off the golf course and deliver this baby!'"

Their memories of my new life in Canada, however - along with the adoption of grandchildren they adore, my marriage and, most of all, my gender transition - are receding, if not already gone.

"Honey, what is the name of that man? Do you remember?" My mother pointed at the massive, plaster head atop a wooden platform in their living room. This sculpture of their friend Ernest was one of my father's more successful forays into three-dimensional art. It used to occupy a prominent space in the hallway as one of the first things people saw when they entered my childhood home.

Hearing a familiar voice, my father turned to look in her direction.

"Never mind," my mother said, moving toward the shelf. "I bet I kept a photograph of him. That's something I would do."

She grabbed the head, tipped it to its side, reached up into the neck and pulled out a photograph. It was a photo of the sculpture itself, not of Ernest.

She looked at the sculpture and compared it to the picture. "Wow, you have such amazing talent," she said to my father. "Your sculpture looks just like the man in the photo!"

If my parents are unable to recognize the difference between a photograph of a white plaster sculpture and one of an actual person, how much longer will they be able to recognize me as their child, much less their son?

Last summer, while I was sitting with my parents at their kitchen table, my mother finished her lunch, stood up and announced, "I'm going outside to pull some weeds."

I waited indoors with my father as he finished his meal, until tears began flowing down his face.

"Dad, what's wrong?" I said.

"I, I just have to ... get used ... she's gone forever."

He apparently believed that because she had left his sight, she was dead.

I used to ask myself: "Will I lose my new identities once I can't be identified?" But after witnessing my father sobbing at the table, I have learned the answer. My mother just left the room. The fact that he didn't remember didn't mean she no longer existed.

Likewise, the fact that my parents will lose their memory of my transition won't mean I will cease to be a man, a devoted husband, a loving dad and my parents' son.

My parents were instrumental in creating the framework that supports who I have become. Then, over the last 40 years, they witnessed me assuming the responsibility of building upon that foundation. Although they haven't always agreed with my choices, they came to accept me for who I am.

As Alzheimer's eats away at their sense of who I was and who I have become, I hope it will be my essence that they retain. That's what matters most, for any of us.

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Will They See Me as a Son, a Daughter or a Stranger?

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Thirteen years ago, my parents tried to wish away my gender transition. Now, Alzheimer's threatens to erase their memory of me altogether. Unlike my mother's usual emails (with the entire message crammed into the subject line), this one had no text, only an attached photo.

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Five Nonbinary Comics on This Moment: ‘I’m Not Some New Buzzword’

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Five Nonbinary Comics on This Moment: ‘I’m Not Some New Buzzword’

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These comedians talk about their experiences in the industry, and wanting audiences to look beyond their gender identity.

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The comedians Jes Tom, Lorelei Ramirez, Peter Smith, James Tison and Spike Einbinder on the joys and frustrations of explaining their gender onstage. Credit Credit... Photographs by Michael George

The stand-up comedian Jes Tom has a go-to pronoun joke: "I like when people call me 'they.' It makes me feel less lonely."

Tom is part of a small but growing group of comedians that doesn't exclusively identify with the gender labels of "male" and "female," and before the pandemic were regularly performing stand-up sets around New York City.

Over several months, we spoke with five of these comedians about the joys and frustrations of explaining their gender onstage and the entertainment industry's newfound interest in nonbinary performers. They also talked about the challenges of working in a field embroiled in a continuing discussion about what is and isn't off limits in comedy.

All this coincides with a greater awareness of gender diversity in the culture at large. In 2019, Merriam-Webster's word of the year was the singular pronoun "they," and both the singer Sam Smith and Jonathan Van Ness of "Queer Eye" came out as nonbinary. The Supreme Court recently ruled that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 protects gay and transgender workers from workplace discrimination. And on the state and federal level there are proposals that would allow a third gender option on passports and drivers' licenses.

Comedy clubs remain closed, but these comedians were largely in good spirits when we reconnected with them recently to find out how they were managing as the city slowly emerges from its shutdown.

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Jes Tom, 29, has a swagger that is at once preening, arch, acidic and world-weary. When I said I found them surprisingly menacing onstage, they clapped in delight and responded, "That is the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."

An Asian-American comedian who also hosts a weekly cooking show on Instagram Live called " Iron Jes," Tom is aware of Hollywood's growing appetite for people who look like them. "For better or worse, I think that the embodiment of nonbinary that I am is really hot in the mainstream world right now. By which I mean specifically a thin, of-color but still a relatively light-skinned person, East Asian but still perfect English-speaking, assigned female at birth but still kind of masculine leaning." Indeed, Tom fits this prototype perfectly.

Tom acknowledged that their identity has helped land jobs, including commercial work that has helped sustain them during the pandemic. "As a nonbinary trans queer Asian-American stand-up comedian, I probably get a lot more paying gigs than white straight [male] comedians do," they said. "Which is not to say I have it any easier systemically.

"This is like the marginalized artist double-edged sword, right?" Tom added. "On the one hand, I look forward to the day when my whole career is not about this identity part of myself. On the other hand, I feel very grateful that this marginalized identity part of myself gets me working, gets me attention."

Being able to work in such a niche is a far cry from when they started doing comedy in 2013. Back then they were usually the only gender nonconforming person in the room. "There was, as far as I know, no queer comedy open mic," Tom recalled. "By which I mean I Googled it and nothing came up."

"If you don't know, the open mic scene in New York can be shockingly transphobic, misogynistic, racist," James Tison chirped from the stage at Club Cumming last fall.

It was the third installment of the monthly showcase "The Snowflake Mic," and Tison was explaining the ethos of the open mic night.

"You're welcome to say whatever you want. But free speech is fortunately a two-way street," Tison cautioned the participating comics. "So if you come onto this stage and you rattle off some hack premise about how trans women aren't women or if you think you found some clever new way to say the 'N-word' into a microphone and you're a white person, this audience is allowed to boo you, they're allowed to come up to you after and say 'Hey, I didn't like that,' and you have to take it."

Credit... Michael George for The New York Times

As a stand-up, Tison, 33, has performed at open mics in New York City for years and regularly encountered heckling and harassment both onstage and off. In response, they curated a list of " nontoxic open mics " on their website and created "The Snowflake Mic," reclaiming the word that is used to describe an overly sensitive person.

Not everyone appreciated the joke. A few comedians took to Twitter extolling the virtue of tough rooms and hostile crowds as important preparation for a nasty and difficult industry.

But Tison bristled at the idea that a comedy night by and for L.G.B.T.Q. comedians represents a radical departure from comedy at large or a softening of jokes. "I don't think anybody has neutral material," they said. "It's a made-up concept. There's just a lot of straight men in the business and we call that neutral."

"The Snowflake Mic" has been on hold since March, but Tison plans to restart it as soon as possible. For Tison, hosting the mic is about labor as much as it is about comedy.

Credit... Michael George for The New York Times

"Open mics are the entry point for the entire field," Tison wrote in an email. "They're the only way to actually get better at stand-up, but they're also where you build professional relationships with like-minded folks that lead to future gigs. We're talking about job opportunities in a job market."

Of course, that job market and the open mics that feed it are largely gone right now. Over the past few months, Tison has spent the time they would normally have spent onstage working on a podcast for the abortion rights group NARAL, writing a pilot, and uploading videos to TikTok, which they describe as "methadone" to the heroin of live comedy performance.

They've also turned their attention and anxieties to their own home. "I built a desk," Tison told me. "I repainted my bathroom twice."

For anyone concerned that nonbinary comedians represent politically correct or sanitized comedy, Lorelei Ramirez, 30, might ease their worries. At their MoMA PS1 show last fall, Ramirez told a joke about getting caught masturbating in a public library and mused about how a choir of pedophiles might sound.

Ramirez's PS1 show also included a musical performance using their voice and a looping pedal, a live projection of a digital drawing, and a circus-themed art installation, complete with a stilt walker, popcorn, and framed portraits of clowns painted by Ramirez. "Nonbinary" applies not only to Ramirez's gender, but to their entire approach to performance and art.

While they do tell jokes about their gender identity ("I'm nonbinary, so I'm not like other girls. Because I'm a person."), Ramirez often veers into absurdist body horror monologues delivered in voices that can test the line betweencutesy and creepy.

"I like to jokingly rip apart the reality that we're in," Ramirez explained over Zoom. "I just like to have people imagine the craziest thing that they can." Which, in the case of Lorelei's comedy can include a long non sequitur about being followed home and killed by a one-foot-tall imp with a giant head.

Ramirez's performances during the lockdown have mostly been limited to a weekly live drawing show called " Art Is Easy," on Twitch. They've also been working with friends to provide food and wellness services to community organizers and activists.

Though not performing regularly, Ramirez said they're still using their "comedy brain and production brain" amid the current political climate. "We created an alternative scene in an industry that didn't have space for us," Ramirez said. "So now we're doing that but in actual life, not just this small scene. And it still applies."

In an elegiac solo performance at Ars Nova, Peter Smith, 29, portrayed Princess Diana in a work that featured original songs and monologues scattered among a virtuosic lip sync of Diana's 1995 BBC interview with the journalist Martin Bashir. It was tragic and disorienting, and occasionally hilarious.

Smith's performance in "Diana" had more in common with esoteric theatrical performers like Dickie Beau or Lypsinka than your average stand-up comedian, but Smith still sees value in being an openly trans comedian playing for mainstream comedy audiences.

"If you are free from something, it's your duty to free other people," Smith told me. "Just seeing someone exist and have fun is liberating."

Smith is philosophical about the concept of nonbinary gender identity. "All language is wrong," Smith said. "To pick an identity still has a binary nature to it because there's still a decision that needs to be made."

Smith has frequently performed at comedy venues like Caroline's on Broadway, but their career has been nothing if not eclectic. They've played the titular role in a production of Leonard Bernstein's "Peter Pan," worked as a wardrobe production assistant for independent films, and assisted the painter George Condo.

They also hosted two variety shows in New York City with their frequent collaborator, Sandy Honig: the flashy high-gloss burlesque show "The Bongo Hour" and the self-consciously casual weekly comedy show "Pig," which ended its run in 2019.

Credit... Michael George for The New York Times

In 2020, Smith starred in the new musical "XY" at the Village Theater in Seattle, appeared alongside Honig in Adult Swim's "Three Busy Debras," and delivered a powerhouse rendition of the Beach Boys' "God Only Knows" in an episode of Hulu's "Shrill."

Since March, Smith has eschewed traditional comedy in favor of songwriting and community organizing, sometimes collaborating with Lorelei Ramirez. Does Smith miss live performance? Of course.

"But my desire to get back on the stage does not come close to my desire for getting people together and activating them," they said. "Everything that's happening now is very live."

A summer camp talent show was Spike Einbinder's first brush with performing comedy. They pantomimed picking tomatoes off a hamburger while Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart" played on a tape recorder. "I was never like, 'I'm doing just one thing,'" Einbinder said. "I always wanted to do it all."

Einbinder, who insisted in our conversations that their age was 5,412, fuses elements of theater, drag and performance art in their comedy sets. They have appeared onstage as demons, golems, or in the case of their alter-ego, Candy Dish, a green-skinned swamp creature who cut her teeth as a comedian working "the Bog Belt."

During their more traditional stand-up sets, Einbinder sometimes uses their trans identity to toy with their audience. "I'll say 'Who here thinks I'm a girl?'" Einbinder said. "And usually people are too afraid to answer that."

"I feel like the body that I've been given is like a weapon," Einbinder told me on the phone. "It's something that I use as a tool because I don't want it to be used against me."

Einbinder's eclectic performances made them a favorite at alternative and queer comedy nights, and they've also appeared on HBO's " High Maintenance" and " Los Espookys," which was written by their best friend, Julio Torres.

"I would like to think that the reason that I get roles and the reason that I get booked is because I'm a singular, unique person who is funny and not because I'm some new buzzword," they said. "I've always been this way."

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Five Nonbinary Comics on This Moment: 'I'm Not Some New Buzzword'

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These comedians talk about their experiences in the industry, and wanting audiences to look beyond their gender identity. The stand-up comedian Jes Tom has a go-to pronoun joke: "I like when people call me 'they.' It makes me feel less lonely."

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Death of an Indigenous essential worker sparks debate over gender identity

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Death of an Indigenous essential worker sparks debate over gender identity

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Angela Martinez died young, her death a tragedy to the many who knew and loved her. Her death became a rallying cry. A controversy. And, ultimately, a tale about identity and being oneself.

Her story begins in San Bartolomé Quialana, a smallZapotec town in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. She came into this world two months prematurely, a tiny newborn who wouldn't cry or open her eyes. Her parents, who had already lost five young children - some from measles, another from a lump in his throat - feared they would lose her too.

"They prayed to Dios Sol [sun god] to give them a child," said her brother, Plutarco Martinez.

Her story ends in Los Angeles, where she died last month at age 41. She had worked at a Burger King in Santa Monica, where she was known for her joy and generosity.

"She would always show up with a smile on her face," said Yolanda Garcia, a co-worker from Tlacolula, Oaxaca. "She was strong and would always offer to help me when I carried the heavy potato boxes."

But over the last year, Martinez's health had begun slipping. She had kidney problems and trouble breathing, said Julio Hernandez, her roommate of 23 years. In early July, as the novel coronavirus ravaged Los Angeles, Martinez's symptoms worsened.

She continued to work, but Garcia and other co-workers began to worry that Martinez had the virus.

One night, Martinez started feeling pain all over her body. Her head throbbed. Hernandez offered to call an ambulance. Martinez refused. She feared catching COVID-19 in the hospital.

" Estás pendejo. ¿Quieres que me maten ahí? " Martinez told Hernandez. "You're dumb. Do you want them to kill me there?"

Martinez died at home on July 6 in Hernandez's arms.

Hernandez suspected she died of a heart attack. Her co-workers thought it was COVID-19, a fact eventually confirmed by the coroner in August. But initially her manager at Burger King blamed it on a "hormone overdose."

The Burger King manager's assertion, set against the backdrop of a pandemic disproportionately infecting and killing Latino workers in essential jobs, set off a furor, with activists calling it transphobic and bigoted. Martinez's co-workers prepared to go on strike and called on Burger King to better protect its workers. A social media blitz was unleashed.

Burger King said the restaurant was investigating the manager's "transphobic" comments, calling them "inaccurate and unacceptable."

On the Friday afternoon of the strike, protesters in cars and co-workers on foot jammed the drive-through of the Burger King, holding up white roses in her honor and clamoring for people to "say her name." Dozens of media outlets - Telemundo, Insider, the Sun and ABC News - descended upon the eatery.

A video of the protest - showing demonstrators with posters of Martinez's face against the transgender pride flag - was posted on Twitter with the hashtag #TransLivesMatter. It quickly went viral.

And that's when a second controversy unexpectedly began.

Her loved ones accused activists behind Fight for $15, an advocacy group for fast-food workers, of misgendering Martinez on social media and making her the face of a movement of which she never asked to be a part.

Martinez's friends said she had been meticulous about not referring to herself as transgender. Though Martinez went by "she," she was neither man, nor woman. She was "muxe."

::

Column One

The muxe identity, which Martinez held dear, has existed as a respected third gender in Zapotec cultures in Oaxaca for centuries, especially in the southeastern area of Istmo de Tehuantepéc. Muxes, pronounced moo-shehs, have coexisted and even become leaders in their communities, said Felina Santiago, a 52-year-old muxe from Juchitán, Oaxaca.

"There's men, there's women and there's muxes," Santiago said. "I'm in the middle of the two. I'm only muxe."

The notion of a third gender has existed for centuries in different cultures worldwide. In some Native American cultures, the term "two-spirit" is an umbrella term describing those who fulfill a third gender. In South Asia, there are more than half a million officially recognized hijras. In Thailand, there are the kathoeys. In Ethiopia, the ashtime. And in Polynesia, the fa'afafine.

Gender identity can be a complex and highly sensitive issue - and never more so than after those who don't conform to the gender binary die, said Drían Juarez, vice president of programming at TransCanWork Inc. And if someone has died, they cannot tell the tale of who they were, or choose the words used to describe them.

"It's about honoring somebody's spirit, rather than labeling," Juarez said. Referring to the discussion following Martinez's death, "I think it highlights just how multifaceted and complex identity really is."

Juarez said she believes that Martinez's co-workers and Fight for $15 likely had the "best of intentions" when initially protesting and using her name.

"Many of Angela's co-workers understood her to be a trans woman, but we now know that she may have identified otherwise in other circles," Fight for $15 said in a statement.

The muxe identity, which Martinez held dear, has existed as a respected third gender in the Zapotec culture in Oaxaca for centuries, especially in the southeastern area of Istmo de Tehuantepéc.

In life, Martinez was supportive of her transgender friends, like Pink Moon Midnight Blue, who said Martinez "adored me in my transness." But that's not how Martinez saw herself.

"She always found it problematic that her own identity wasn't addressed correctly in trans spaces," Midnight Blue said.

Little wonder, then, that friends complained that trans activists were, as Midnight Blue wrote on Facebook, "exploiting her image without permission. She was not trans, my sister was muxe and indigenous people are tired of the erasure of our identities."

(Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times)

Midnight Blue recalled that when she and Martinez worked at a trans woman-owned El Pollo Loco, where a third of the employees were transgender, National Geographic, - and other media outlets, including the L.A. Times - invited workers to be interviewed for features on the inclusive restaurant.

Martinez declined to participate with a simple phrase, "Aquí, la trans eres tú," she told Midnight Blue. "Here, the trans woman is you."

In Martinez's hometown of San Bartolomé Quialana, there were only a few muxes, and it took some time for Martinez's family to fully embrace who Martinez was, her brother said. She started her transition after she got to L.A. and it wasn't until 2008 when the two visited their pueblo that Martinez's parents saw her express her muxe identity for the first time.

"They received her as their child," Plutarco Martinez said. "They realized that we're all human beings and we can't judge people who were born with that gift. There's no reason to."

In Los Angeles, Angela Martinez had embraced her identity with such joy that she was considering running for muxe queen - a title presented at the Vela Muxe, an annual celebration of the Oaxacan culture and identity at Casa Vertigo in downtown Los Angeles, said Janel Castañeda, a close friend of six years.

The L.A. celebration mirrors the colorful and food-filled festival in Juchitán, where it originated. There, thousands of tourists celebrate the Indigenous traditions of the community and locals crown a muxe as queen.

"She wanted to be queen," Castañeda said. "In my eyes, she already was one."

::

On a typical day before work, Martinez would fix herself un cafecito using the Oaxacan coffee beans that made her reminisce about her hometown.

As she sipped her coffee, she fed and watered her "children": some stray cats, her rescued Chihuahua named Daisy (after TV host Daisy Fuentes), and her houseplants. She was especially fond of orchids - beautiful and delicate but notoriously finicky - and had a knack for reviving them when they were close to death.

Each day, she caught the bus, finishing her makeup and listening to Alejandra Guzman and Los Héroes del Silencio on her way to work at Burger King.

The group that fully embraced Martinez in her muxe identity was her beloved pandilla. Her gang. Her friends, who included Midnight Blue and Castañeda, loved her as "heart and glue" of the group.

La pandilla got together every Thursday to bowl at Shatto 39 Lanes in Rampart Village or to sing karaoke at Martinez's house. Martinez's witty humor kept the group laughing. She could take just about any random word and make a joke of it.

" ¿Por qué somos de lo peor? " she would ask, jokingly. "Why are we the worst?"

A few years ago, Midnight Blue was staying in a shelter after leaving a toxic partner. Martinez immediately asked her to come live with her, even if space was tight. Midnight Blue was one of the nearly half a dozen people to whom Martinez gave a place to sleep.

"I immediately found a sister," Midnight Blue said. "I realized then that her kindness was not of any other person that I knew."

Midnight Blue said they would talk for hours into the night, watching the stars in the sky. No one knew exactly why she chose the name Angela, but her house was filled with trinkets, sculptures, paintings and antiques depicting angels. She even had angel wings tattooed on her back.

"One time she asked me, 'Do you think angels exist?'" Midnight Blue said. "Her greatest wish was to see an angel. I think she forgot that she was one of them."

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Death of an Indigenous essential worker sparks debate over gender identity

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On a typical day, Angela Martinez would fix herself un cafecito using the beans that made her reminisce about her hometown in Oaxaca. To Martinez, she was neither man, nor woman, nor transgender. She was muxe, a third gender recognized in the Zapotec culture in Mexico.

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UN chief: Virus reversed fragile progress on gender equality

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UN chief: Virus reversed fragile progress on gender equality