Gen Z Is Having Less Sex. Why?
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This message comes from Capella University. At Capella, you can earn your degree with support from people who care about your success. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu. This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley. And before we get started, I want to give a heads up that today's show includes frank discussion about sex and sexuality.

A few years ago, I chaperoned my daughter's seventh-grade dance. The gym lights were dim, the pop songs were on rotation, with adults like me lurking on the sidelines. Thinking back to that time period, what struck me wasn't what happened, but what didn't. There was no dancing, no flirting, boys were on one side of the gym, girls on the other, and some were even hunched over their phones, more interested in what was online than each other.

At the time, I chalked it up to middle school awkwardness. But now, more than a decade later, those same kids are young adults, part of Gen Z. And what I witnessed that night might have been more than just adolescent nerves. As my guest today, journalist and author Carter Sherman writes, it was possibly a preview of something much bigger.

In her new book, The Second Coming, Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, Sherman explores why Gen Z, that's people ages 13 to 28, are having less sex than previous generations. And the sex they are having? It's often fraught with confusion, a fixation on performance from exposure to porn, shame and disconnection.

Sherman conducted more than 100 interviews with teenagers, young adults, and experts for the book and makes the argument that the decline of interest in sex and romance is a fallout from miseducation, digital overexposure, and the politicized landscape where even desire is up for debate.

Carter Sherman is a reproductive health and justice reporter at The Guardian, where she's covered the real-world results of abortion bans, access to health care for trans people, and how technology is reshaping our view of our bodies and our choices. Carter Sherman, welcome back to Fresh Air. Thank you for having me.

What was the moment, because you write quite often about sex and sexuality as it relates to reproductive health, what was this moment that made you think, I actually need to write something from my generation's point of view? I think that that realization came together over quite some time. I've been reporting on gender and sexuality now for decades.

eight to nine years. And over the course of that reporting, I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands, of young people about their sex lives and about the ways that, in particular, news and current events intersect with their sex lives and reshape their sex lives.

One of the things that I really wanted to do with this book was to trace the sexual history of Americans and to really place Gen Z and millennials within the context of that sexual history. Because I think a lot of people don't necessarily understand just how much has changed, particularly over the last 50 years. You know, we have seen the invention and dissemination of sex.

We've seen the expansion of abortion rights and the contraction of abortion rights. We've seen the rights of women grow immensely. And the reason I think it's important to understand this history is because I do think that there is very much a movement that's alive in this country that is working to try to turn back the clock.

and working to try to recreate actually the 1950s, which was a decade when the age of marriage dropped to record lows, when more people, particularly white people, were much more likely to be living in a structure where one man was providing while a woman stayed home and raised 2.5 kids.

And the thing is that, number one, I don't think you can really roll back the clock at all, given the technological inventions that we've seen since the 1950s, birth control, the internet, women's rights in many ways. But also, you know, the 1950s was an aberrant decade. It was possible only because of immense government subsidies, such as the GI Bill, and changes in housing that made it more possible for white people to flee to the suburbs and get heavily subsidized mortgages.

And so there's this interest in an imagined past. And instead, I really hope that people can look ahead towards the future and see what it is that we're living in now as opposed to trying to do what I call sexual conservatism. You make this striking point about sexual conservatism, that if we want to understand the future of young people's sexual and reproductive health in our country, we should be looking at Texas. Why Texas?

Well, the reason for Texas is somewhat personal. I actually got my start as a reporter working in Texas. I worked at an alt weekly called the Houston Press right after I graduated from college. And during that time, I really came to see Texas as a leader in sexual conservatism, which is a movement I define as the push to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is not straight, that is not married, and that is not potentially procreative.

in that it would be practiced with limited access to abortion and to hormonal birth control.

So what I saw in Texas when I lived there and what we've seen ever since is the functioning of Texas as a kind of laboratory for sexually conservative policies. Texas was the first state to basically crack Roe in half by passing a six-week abortion ban that flew in its face but was able to survive because it had a unique legal mechanism whereby people were enforcing the law on their own. They were suing one another rather than relying on the government to enforce it.

Texas also brings in hundreds of millions of dollars in federally funded absence-only education. It leads the nation in repeat teen births, which is to say teenagers who are giving birth more than once.

And it is also the home of quite a bit of sexually progressive activism. I talked to many young people who were fighting for their rights in Texas in the face of all of the sexual conservatism. And I felt that that, too, was very important to highlight, to understand that as much as we might think about young people being anxious, not having sex, focusing too much on their phones, and it is true that they're probably doing all of those things, right?

These are young people who are also profoundly interested and understand that their sex lives have political import and that their sex lives are being shaped by politicians in their lives who they may not agree with. There was this flashpoint moment that actually happened in 2021. You talked to this high schooler named Paxton Smith, who's from the Dallas area, and he

She was valedictorian for her high school, and she gave this graduation speech. I want to actually play some of it. This is the point where she goes off script. Let's listen.

I have dreams and hopes and ambitions. Every girl graduating today does. And we have spent our entire lives working towards our future. And without our input and without our consent, our control over that future has been stripped away from us. I am terrified that if my contraceptives fail, I am terrified that if I am raped,

then my hopes and aspirations and dreams and efforts for my future will no longer matter. I hope that you can feel how gut-wrenching that is. I hope you can feel how dehumanizing it is to have the autonomy over your own body taken away from you.

And I'm talking about this today, on a day as important as this. On a day honoring 12 years of hard academic work. On a day where we are all gathered together. On a day where you are most inclined to listen to a voice like mine, a woman's voice, to tell you that this is a problem and it's a problem that cannot wait.

And I cannot give up this platform to promote complacency and peace when there is a war on my body and a war on my rights. War on the rights of your mothers. A war on the rights of your sisters. A war on the rights of your daughters. We cannot stay silent. Thank you.

That was Dallas area high schooler Paxton Smith in 2021 giving a graduation speech that went viral. Carter, that speech, as you write in the book, was the beginning of this transformation for Paxton because she had kind of become like a folk hero for saying aloud what many students felt.

And I want to delve into why we're seeing such high rates of multiple teen pregnancies and lots of the other findings in Texas. What did she tell you about the sex education she received growing up in Texas?

Basically, she told me that her sex ed was wildly inept. The sex ed that she got talked about sex as if it was a kind of psychological STI, that if you had sex with one person who had sex with another person who had sex with another person, you were going to be caught up in this web of effectively degradation where people would have less value for even daring to have sex with one another. And she learned this in the classroom? She did learn this in the classroom.

She ended up signing a virginity pledge in middle school. Virginity pledges are a tactic that became popular in the 1990s due to a wave of Christian advocacy around sex ed. And then she received no sex ed in high school, is what she told me. And the thing is that that didn't stop her from wanting to have sex. She emphasized to me how much she wanted to have sex.

And she felt like oftentimes she was at war with herself between what she had been told in the classroom and what she felt within her body, which is that she didn't actually necessarily feel that it was all that bad for her to want to have sex, want to connect with other people that way. The other thing that she brought up, and I think that really contributed to the dissonance that she felt, is that she felt like she got what she called, quote unquote, a gender education education.

And oftentimes when we talk about gender education or use a phrase like that in discourse these days, it's to have an argument about LGBTQ plus rights and don't say gay laws and trans rights.

But what she meant by that phrase was that she felt like she got an education in women are this and boys are that. And specifically, she was made to feel like girls and women are less than and that she should not even like girls and women, by which she would end up not liking herself.

And that was something she ended up rejecting, as I think you can really hear in that speech, that she was really seizing her power as a woman and saying, actually, my voice matters in this debate because I have this personal connection, because this is my gender. I think one of the arguments that you also talk about in the book, but more generally, is that perhaps these discussions should be happening at home. And one of the things you write about is what happened during the pandemic? Maybe.

Many parents for the first time started to hear what their kids were learning in sex ed because they were sitting right next to them on these Zoom classroom calls. And what did you find about how that in many ways ignited some of these local fights around teaching sex ed in schools?

Well, I think actually what's sort of important to note is that in many instances because of the pandemic, young people didn't get sex ed at all. I talked to plenty of people who didn't end up getting any kind of education about sex because the pandemic happened to dovetail with exactly the time when their teachers would have been teaching them.

And studies show, the emerging studies that we have on this topic show, that teachers became very nervous that parents would hear what was going on and that they would object to it even if it was totally normal information about sex and bodies and reproduction. And indeed,

It is true that parents got incredibly incensed over sex ed over the course of the pandemic. And we really see that take shape after the pandemic. Of course, there's a lot of kind of maddening conspiracy theories that emerged during the pandemic, things like QAnon or vaccine denial. Those surged, but so did this animosity towards comprehensive sex ed.

And comprehensive sex ed is basically sex ed that looks at the vast array of ways that people can approach sex ed and says, OK, let's teach about them. And it's actually very popular. Plenty of people, if they are told about what comprehensive sex ed is, feel really good about it. Or they at least feel good about what's called abstinence plus sex ed, which upholds abstinence as the best kind of approach to sex because abstinence does protect against STIs and pregnancy and all of that. But

but still also teaches young people about things like condoms. But after the pandemic, there was an explosion in arguments at school boards and a real demonization over comprehensive sex ed, which was compared to basically leading teachers to groom students. It was compared to teachers teaching about LGBTQ plus rights, which parents had a real issue with.

It was compared to teachers turning kids trans, which is simply not a thing. And

This was really something that emerged particularly in Texas. In 2020, the state board of education had the opportunity to rewrite the state standards around sex ed for the first time in decades. And I watched the debates that were going on in the school board around this issue. And people were just talking about things that had, frankly, no connection to reality.

I'm wondering, were those uprisings of parents happening organically or were there political forces behind them?

I think a little column A, a little column B. I think that over time, there has been growing power behind the sexual conservatism movement. And the sexual conservatism movement is striking from all kinds of directions, particularly it is striking at comprehensive sex education and striking at absence plus sex ed. It is trying to push for absence only sex ed. And I think

over the course of the pandemic when people were spending so much time online, spending so much time in online circles, and spending all of this time really just sort of marinating in conspiracy theories, that ongoing push against absence-only sex ed compounded with the kind of hateful rhetoric that people were consuming online and created basically a perfect storm of animosity towards comprehensive sex ed.

Getting back to sex ed as it relates to this phenomenon of sexual recession among Gen Zers, there is this stat that you give that

between 2010 and 2015 that half a million teenagers participated in sex ed funded by this program from the Obama administration. It was called the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program. And the goal of that program was to boost evidence-based sex ed programs, which it did. And it offered like a comprehensive program

sex education. How did that differ from abstinence ed that had been taught previously before that time period? Well, abstinence-only sex ed basically says don't have sex. And what I found really interesting in the course of reporting this book is I did not know that at the time I was entering K-12 school, so in 2000 is when I started kindergarten, I was actually at the

massive federal experiment to just throw money at abstinence-only sex education. By the end of the Bush administration, the federal government had spent more than a billion dollars on abstinence-only sex education. And the thing about that is what that really means is that the government is running a virginity campaign. If the government is telling you don't ever start having sex, they're telling you to remain a virgin.

So Obama came in and he started out the Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program, which advocated for evidence-based sex ed. And the thing about absence-only sex education is that it oftentimes doesn't meet that standard of evidence that's necessary to actually show change, show results effectively.

Instead, what we found from absence-only sex ed is that oftentimes the people who receive it start having sex at the same time as people who don't receive absence-only sex ed, that they are even likely to have the same number of partners and that they can be made to feel worse about themselves when they have sex. They're less likely to necessarily use condoms and condoms.

for people of color, they can be made to feel like they're not being included whatsoever. There was one study I looked at where a Black student brought up the fact that they were being taught as if they were expected to be sexualized, which really harkens back to racist stereotypes about Black people's sexuality. So the idea of having evidence-based sex ed was to say, okay, if we're going to be funding all of this sex ed, can we be putting it towards sex ed that we know actually works?

Now, what happened when the Trump administration came in is he yanked a bunch of that money and it was wildly destabilizing to the program. And I should note that Obama also continued to fund abstinence-only sex education just through other pathways than had previously been used.

I think we all kind of understand how different administrations make their mark by implementing their own policies. What's interesting is that during that time period, you write that teen birth rates took a steep plunge when there was evidence-based sex ed programs, and then Donald Trump was elected. But you kind of make this argument that they've all worked in concert with each other. I think that's kind of what you're saying, that the Obama administration also implemented abstinence-only programs.

But I'm wondering, like in tracking the first and second Obama administration, Trump, then Biden, and now back to Trump, is there a common thread that you've seen throughout all of them as it relates to messaging to young people about sex? I think that the administrations are yoked together by this determination to have young people not have sex.

I think in general they would prefer that young people are not sexually active and they don't ever want to have messaging that indicates the opposite. I think they understand that people kind of see young people's sex lives as icky and they don't really want to get involved with that because what is the political benefit of doing that? What is the political benefit? But what you write here is about the social outcomes of this. And I want to get into if they're not learning about sex,

comprehensive sex education in schools, where are they learning it from? And one of the areas, one of the places is through porn. You write that porn is the most obvious form of internet sex ed and the greatest divide growing up as a late millennial and Gen Zer versus growing up as a member of an older generation.

And I feel like this is something to sit with because what you're saying is that we can't overstate the holds that porn has on the consciousness of young people and their ideas about sex. They're learning about sex from porn. Absolutely.

Something I really wanted to do in the book is to understand what the Internet is teaching young people about sex. And in previous generations, you know, you might be limited to seeing sex glimpsed through your father's playboy that he left behind. But today you can turn on your computer or look at your phone and Google for any kind of sex you want and probably a few that you don't.

What I found really interesting in talking to young people about porn is that I had sort of expected a range of perspectives on it. I had thought that some people, particularly people who are on the left, would have more of a warm view of it. People on the right would be more anti-porn. But instead what I found is that young people felt really bad about their relationship with porn. And they felt that porn had warped them sexually and made them nervous

normalized particularly, quote unquote, rough sex in such a way that they felt like their sex lives had been transformed forever by it. Our guest today is Carter Sherman, a journalist who covers reproductive health and justice. Her new book is The Second Coming, Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. We'll be right back. I'm Tanya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. I'm Tanya Mosley, and today we are talking with journalist Carter Sherman. She's a reporter at The Guardian where she covers reproductive rights, gender, and health care. Her new book, The Second Coming, explores how Gen Z is redefining sex, intimacy, and power in the aftermath of abstinence-only education, rising conservatism, and a hyper-connected digital world.

And just a note, our conversation includes frank discussions about sex and sexuality. You know, one of the things you wrote about that I'm really interested in is this term that came from actually two scholars, sexual citizenship, to describe basically this idea that everyone has the right to make informed decisions about their own bodies and sexual preferences. I was thinking about it psychologically, how it might be an important component of having a healthy relationship overall with sex.

What did your reporting reveal about how porn and the lack of sex education in the U.S. either supports or undermines this concept, this need for a human being to be a sexual citizen and have that ownership? So sexual citizenship is this concept that scholars Jennifer Hirsch and Seamus Kant have come up with.

And they define it as, quote, a socially produced sense of enfranchisement and right to sexual agency. And theoretically, we should all have that, right? We should all feel like we deserve to make choices about our own sex lives and also that we should respect other people's sexual citizenship. Right.

But it is actually very difficult to create a sense of sexual citizenship if it is not fostered by the institutions around you. That socially produced element is so critical because it means that the people in your life, the institutions in your life have to affirm it within you for you to even begin to develop it and reflect it out at other people.

And that's something I really wanted to emphasize within this book because I think that oftentimes we think about sex as a thing that happens between two or more people in a bedroom. But in reality, the terms of our sex lives are often set for us in schools, in school boards, in courtrooms, in legislatures, in Congress and in the White House.

And we approach sex differently based on the power structures around us and the way that we've been told to treat sex our entire lives. So I really wanted people to understand that it takes a lot of work to re-evaluate your approach to sex, but it can be so fulfilling to the people who are able to do that. And moreover, when people respect one another's sexual citizenship, it takes away from the possibility of things like sexual assault and sexual harassment. And don't we want society to be safer for everybody? Yeah.

My kids are Gen Z, and I talk quite a bit with my peers about how my own concept of sex and sexuality was shaped growing up during those years of HIV and AIDS when it was at its pinnacle. And the sex education I got in the 90s was very much fear-based. It was like you will either die or get pregnant. Right.

I just wanted to know, based on your research, based on folks that you talk to, like, is there a through line to that and what we're seeing in this moment up against the fact that our children have more information now than ever? So it's up against the information age where they have access to more information than we ever could back then. But we're not necessarily living in that reality with the abstinence-only sex ed push. Mm-hmm.

It's really interesting that you bring up HIV-AIDS because Gen Z is really the first generation in decades, I think, to be able to grow up without the specter of HIV-AIDS hanging over them. When I graduated high school, coincided with the development of pre-exposure prophylaxis, which helps prevent HIV-AIDS. And in fact, some of the studies I was looking at was talking about young men born in the 90s and later as being the first post-AIDS generation.

But I still think that fear that you're talking about really pervades sex ed. I spoke to one young man named Cameron in Florida, and he told me that he had an uncle who had died of HIV AIDS, and it made him very afraid of the fact that he himself was gay. And he was really concerned that something terrible could happen to him because of his sexuality. There are also some defining moments that you write about in the book, like

that really has shaped the view of sex for young people. When you asked them to name a political or cultural event that shaped their approach to sex, many of them cited the Me Too movement as a defining moment. What did some of them say to you about it?

I think what, for a lot of young women, what the Me Too movement did was help them understand that it was unfair that they were haunted by their early sexual experiences. They understood, I think, far earlier than certainly I did and far earlier than a lot of older generations, that if something had happened to them that they felt might be sort of off, that in fact it could have been sexual assault or sexual harassment and that it was wrong, that they deserved better resources.

At the same time, though, what Me Too did not do was really lead to mass institutional change. The biggest lasting reforms that came out of the Me Too movement were things that had to do with workplaces, with having better HR trainings, with reforming NDAs. And so for many of the young women in particular who I spoke with, they were left with this understanding that, OK, sexual harassment and assault is everywhere and it's wrong, but

But I don't actually have ways to fix that situation if something bad happens to me. And that ultimately creates anxiety, right? If you're walking around feeling like the world is very dangerous, that's not good for the way that you try to live your life. You talk quite a bit in the book about how men are impacted and where they sit in all of this. So Gen Z men in particular, you write, have never been

Sure of their place in the Me Too movement and any of these movements and maybe even resentful of them. And I think these are things that we can see. But I'd like for you to break this down a bit. What are some of the political scientists saying about how Gen Z men are navigating these moments and how it's really impacting their relationships to sex and intimacy?

There was one young man who I really appreciated how straightforward he was about this, where he is a reproductive justice advocate. He's a Democrat. He very much believes in the Me Too movement's mission. But he did tell me that he felt that it could be very anti-cis male.

And I think that this is a feeling that a lot of young men felt where they were made to feel like they were the bad guys, that they had done something wrong, even if they felt like they never had or that they were going to be the bad guys just by virtue of being men. And what has stunned political scientists in the years since the Me Too movement is that young men are moving to the right direction.

at rapid speeds. In 2023, 60% of Gen Z men said that they believed the United States was, quote unquote, too soft and feminine. Saying that and agreeing with that statement is highly indicative that somebody is going to end up voting for Donald Trump. And indeed, that is what we ended up seeing in the 2024 elections, as we saw a shocking number of men turn out for Trump. And

I wanted to just emphasize, though, that there is this resentfulness that's happening among young men, and then there is this fear that's still happening among young women. And so I think for me in reporting this book, the things I was trying to hold in my mind is understanding like, okay, young men might have felt like they were demonized, and maybe they really were demonized by this movement. But on the other hand, the dangers that are facing young women are so real. And in fact, the

the dangers that are facing young men are still more real. And I think in this sort of rightward push by men, that truth can get obscured. The fact that men, too, can be victims and that they, too, deserve resources if something goes wrong, that is being pushed aside. There's also this phrase that you use. Is it hegemonic masculinity? Yes, hegemonic masculinity. I mean, we can trace that along political lines, but I'm also just thinking about when you're talking about the harm and the isolation that men feel in

Hegemonic masculinity, as you describe, is like this most accepted and powerful form of what being a man is. It goes back to some of what is taught in those early sex ed classes that you talk about in Texas that are really gendered. But I'm wondering how that type of masculinity, that narrow sense of what a man is, what did you find in the way it

shapes men's thoughts about their own sexual desire, their own sense of self in the sexual situation, how they have to perform and what being a man is. Hedremonic masculinity, as soon as I uncovered this concept, it felt sort of like Keystone to the rest of the book.

Basically, it's this idea that has been put forth by political scientists and sociologists about the dominant myths or narratives or stereotypes around how men are supposed to act. And in hegemonic masculinity, men are supposed to be big, strong men.

emotionless, caveman-like. And they're also supposed to be nothing like women. So this idea reinforces the gender binary. They're supposed to be straight, which is a part of being nothing like women because they're not attracted to men. And they are supposed to be good at obtaining sex. And good at obtaining sex means that they're supposed to be having a lot of sex. Their sex that they're probably having is supposed to be rougher than

And it boxes men into this idea not only about how they should be, but about how they should be in their intimate relationships.

And what I found from young men is that they're not like that. Nobody fits into the ideals of hegemonic masculinity because it's an incredibly narrow stereotype. I think we've done a really good job over the last 50 years of expanding the ways that we expect women to be and allowing for women to be more like men, to be more tomboys, to be career women, what have you. But we have kept this narrow box of hegemonic masculinity intact.

So when men feel like their masculinity is threatened, when it feels like their ability to obtain sex is threatened, they lash out. You see this predominantly, I think, or most acutely, in the phenomenon of incels. And incels believe that they are entitled to have sex with women and that when they are being denied sex by women, they become, quote-unquote, involuntarily celibate.

And it leads them to hate not only themselves, but very much hate women. And, you know, I, as I've said, have reported on gender and sexuality for many years. I've spent a lot of time trudging through some pretty gross places on the Internet to understand the ways that people think about gender and sex. And I can tell you that incel forums are some of the most

disgusting and hateful places I've ever seen on the internet. The ways that they talk about women, the ways that they talk about non-white people are profoundly upsetting. Let's take a short break. If you're just joining us, my guest is journalist Carter Sherman. Her new book is The Second Coming, Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. We'll be right back after a short break. This is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. Today we are talking to Carter Sherman. She's a journalist covering reproductive rights and gender for The Guardian. Her new book, The Second Coming, is based on over 100 interviews with young people and experts, and it offers a revealing look at how a generation is rethinking intimacy, consent, and power in today's world.

Carter, out of the people that you interviewed for this book, you come back to this woman whose story kind of sticks with you the most. You mentioned that she's a 19-year-old from Florida. You met her in an abortion clinic. What did she tell you about her experience that really sticks with you?

I met this woman when I was in the midst of reporting this book. I actually had gotten sent to Florida for my day job at The Guardian. And it was in the last few days before Florida enacted a six-week abortion ban. I was meeting some of the patients who were able to get basically the last few abortions after six weeks in the state of Florida. And I walked into this room.

room in the back of the clinic. I watched this young woman take a pill to start her abortion. And I initially thought that she was maybe in her mid-20s or something like that.

And we were talking about why she had come to the clinic that day. She had two children already, one of whom she had given birth to while she was still a minor. She was married and she and her husband were very much struggling financially. And she just thought having a third child at this time is just not feasible. It would totally wreck her plans specifically to try and have a career. She wanted to be a tattoo artist.

And I think it was as we were talking and as she was sort of talking about all of her plans for the future that I realized I had so misjudged her age. And I asked her, how old are you? And she said 19. And I was so struck by that because I...

Yeah.

And I thought about that woman a lot as I sort of wrapped up reporting for this book because I thought about the ways that she is actually doing the things that sexual conservatives want her to do. She's married. She has kids. And yet it seemed like the doors were still closing around her. And I couldn't shake her out of my head because I thought that, like, these are the people who I'm talking about when I write about this book. Like, these are the people whose futures are at stake.

You talked to her about her day-to-day experiences as a mother, her choice to have an abortion. Did you guys get at all into those larger issues and concerns? Is she even thinking in that way as she thinks about herself and this future ahead of her? Yes and no. I think she, I know she had a very strong belief that she deserved to have an abortion. She was supportive of abortion rights.

At the time, Florida was leading up to a vote on abortion rights, and she had never heard of it. So I think for her, the thing is that, you know, she was busy. She was a mom of two. It becomes harder for people to participate in or be aware of politics when they have all of these obligations. And I think she would have felt moved to participate in the vote or moved to advocate for the vote if she had the time to do so, but she just didn't.

What have been some of the real-world ramifications from some of the legislative actions against gender-affirming care and transgender rights within schools? I know the latest was a Supreme Court upholding of the Tennessee ban on youth gender-affirming care. What's the latest on that case?

Well, what the Supreme Court upholding the Tennessee ban means is that at least in Tennessee, that ban is going to stand. And in the 26 other states that have some kind of ban or policy that restricts access to gender affirming care, this decision might pave the way for those bans or policies to remain in place for the foreseeable future. The thing that really struck me about the United States v. Scrimeti decision is that

It came out of a relatively short campaign by sexual conservatives to make gender-affirming care a top issue in the United States. Prior to 2021, we didn't have any states that banned gender-affirming care for minors. Now we have dozens of states that do so, and we have a Supreme Court decision on the topic.

As someone who's covered abortion rights for a long time, you know, it took half a century for sexual conservatives to get Roe overturned. So to see that change,

concise of a timeline, I think speaks to the power that sexual conservatism has in society at this time and really goes to show just how much things are speeding up and just how much things might change very soon. You know, sexual conservatives are also advocating for things like don't say gay laws, which limit discussion of LGBTQ plus rights in schools. And the reason that they give for those

is to say we as parents have the right to dictate what our children learn, specifically around topics of sex and gender. What bans on gender-affirming care do, though, is they restrict parents' ability to make decisions about their children's medical care. And so for me, these two things seem like they're fundamentally in conflict. How can you have parental rights restricted

be the most important thing when it comes to don't-say-gay laws, but then have parental rights be not as important when it comes to bans on gender-affirming care? And the answer, it seems, is that these laws are not necessarily animated by parental rights, but animated by a vision of the American family where people are supposed to be cisgender and straight and married and having babies.

And the difference between today versus times of the past is that Gen Zers by and large are able to articulate their identities, including their gender identity and sexual preferences, with striking clarity. And they have access to information outside of these contexts, outside of schools, to be able to articulate those things.

Yeah. Within 24 hours of this decision, young people were speaking out about it and taking to the Internet to share how this decision made them feel. I think the Internet has really led people to understand that, you know, gay people exist.

trans and non-binary people exist. You can find acceptance and affirmation within those communities, and it is okay to embrace a kind of fluidity and ambiguity within your identity or sexual orientation.

It's not that the Internet is turning young people gay. It's that young people are coming into themselves more so. And so to see this kind of attack on them at this time when they're profoundly vulnerable, at this time when young queer and trans people are facing enormously high rates of bullying and suicide attacks.

I think it is really concerning for the future for anybody who worries about these young people's ability to flourish. Carter Sherman, thank you so much for this book and for this conversation. Thank you for having me. Carter Sherman is a reproductive health and justice reporter for The Guardian. Her new book is The Second Coming. After a short break, Critic-at-Large John Powers reviews the novel In Ling by Maria Reva. This is Fresh Air.

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This is Fresh Air. Inling is the first novel by Maria Reva, a prize-winning Canadian writer born in Ukraine. Set against the backdrop of the Russian invasion, this genre-bending dark comedy tells the story of a renegade ecologist and two women caught in the romance industry who pull off a crazy crime. Our critic-at-large John Powers loved the book, saying it explores the heaviest themes with the lightest of touches.

George Bernard Shaw once said that the privilege of joking in public should only be granted to people who know thoroughly what they're joking about. I thought of his words as I devoured Endling, the virtuosic debut novel by Maria Reva, a Canadian writer who was born in Ukraine and still has family there. Starting out as a straightforward story about a Ukrainian biologist, this witty, shapeshifting book turns into something trickier and more interesting.

Like so many works from or about the former Soviet bloc, Endling takes on bleak subjects—environmental ruin, the business in Brides, the war in Ukraine—and dresses them up in playful irony. Its heroine, Yeva, is a rogue ecologist who lives in a mobile lab and spends her time collecting and housing snails facing extinction.

Her favorite is Lefty, a tree snail who's an endling, the term for the last surviving member of a species. Yeva funds her mission by working for Romeo Meets Yulia, a Canadian company that deals in romance tours to Ukraine, a euphemism for the mail-order bride business. She's in it for the paycheck, not for a husband, let alone for sexual encounters.

Just as she's despairing over her failure to save the snails, Yeva meets two other romance tour workers, gorgeous Nastia and her brainy sister Sol, the daughters of a famous pussy-riot-style feminist who's gone missing. Nastia cooks up a plot to kidnap a dozen foreign bachelors who've come to Kiev looking for wives. It's a PR stunt to draw attention to the demeaning traffic in Ukrainian brides.

Frazzled and pliant, Yeva lets them use her lab to transport their hostages, even taking the wheel. As they drive through the countryside, Nastya's scheme is going just as planned. Until the bombs start falling, Vladimir Putin has begun his invasion. At precisely this point, Endling pivots. And like Percival Everett's erasure or Susan Choi's trust exercise, the frame shifts to make us question what we've been reading.

In part two, we begin following the author's fictional avatar, named Maria Reva, who lives in her parents' attic in Vancouver and is having an artistic crisis. Not only does she owe her publisher a book, but the one she's working on, the one we've just been reading, fills her with shame. It deals in clichés about Ukraine, especially the bride business, clichés that pander to Western readers. And the war makes things even worse.

How dare Maria write from the safety of Canada about the home country that's currently fighting for its life? After a bevy of metafictional hijinks, Reva eventually takes us back to war-torn Ukraine, where Yeva, Nastia, and Saul must figure out what to do with their bachelors.

I won't say what happens, but I do want to assure you that all of Riva's many strands—the war, the snails, the bride business, the kidnapping, Maria's writerly anxiety, and family ties—dovetail brilliantly. Along the way, characters get gunned down, schlemiels become heroic, and we wonder whether Ukraine, like Lefty the Snail, might be an endling. One can't juggle all these balls without being a nifty writer, and Riva is that—

I wish I could read you the delightful page-long passage in which Yeva explains why snails are marvelous. But it's too long. So instead, here is Yeva thinking bitterly about why they're not popular. Snails weren't pandas, those oversized bumbling toddlers that sucked up national conservation budgets, or any of the other charismatic megafauna, like orcas or gorillas. Snails weren't huggy koala bears, which in reality were vicious and riddled with chlamydia.

nor were snails otters, which looked like plush toys made for mascots by aquariums, despite the fact that they lured dogs from beaches to drown and rape them. A crunch under the boot, a speck to flick off a lettuce leaf. Snails were just that, snails. Of course, Yeva and Reva believe that snails, like Ukraine itself, may not be adored by the world at large, but deserve to survive and even thrive in a world that threatens them with extinction.

Indeed, for all her humor and brio, she's never ever preachy. Raven knows what she's joking about. Suffused with yearning for what's being lost, Endling leaves you asking one painful question. When creatures or nations are fighting for their very existence, shouldn't we try to help them? John Powers Reviewed Endling by Maria Reva

On the next Fresh Air, we'll discuss the regime of Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the history of Iran's nuclear weapons program, and the possible outcomes in the region following the U.S.'s bombing of Iran's facilities. Our guest will be Kareem Sajidpour, a policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. I hope you can join us. ♪

Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Brigger. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Anne-Marie Boldenado, Lauren Krenzel, Monique Nazareth, Thea Chaloner, Susan Ngakundi, and Anna Bauman.

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