When Mae Sallean was a teenager, her body and mind began to slip away from each other. Her body and face began to sprout thick hair, her voice dropped, and she felt dissociated from her physical form. Something had gone wrong, and she could not reconcile the person she was with the person the world perceived her as. The disconnect left her profoundly depressed and deeply lonely.

Mae knew, somewhere deep down, that she needed to be a girl. She lacked the language for it. In Mae’s heavily religious Texas community, the existence of queer people was barely acknowledged, and trans people, she says, were only seen “in pornography and on Maury.” But she knew, all the same.

When Mae was 15, her mother discovered a secret box full of women’s clothing that Mae wore when no one else was at home. Though very Christian, Mae’s mother didn’t freak out. She wanted to help. So she found a Christian counselor for Mae. The counselor, who had no formal training, tried to convince Mae that being trans was one of the worst things she could be and that if she didn’t change her ways, she would go to hell.

“He framed it on the same level as pedophilia,” Mae says. “That was the number one thing that stuck from those meetings until I started transitioning: I am on the same level as a pedophile.”

The conversation about trans kids right now is fundamentally broken. Because it is led, by and large, by cis people, it focuses on the potential regret children and adolescents might have after transitioning, and ignores the social, physical, emotional, and psychological costs of not transitioning. It ignores the reams of studies that underline the need to support trans kids. It ignores the lived experiences of many trans people, who despair that they were kept from transitioning as youths.

Until this year, this conversation about trans kids had mostly been carried out in the media, with publications from the New York Times to the Atlantic to the Los Angeles Times publishing stories that suggested medical practitioners aren’t doing enough to vet potential transitioners under the age of 18.  

Lawmakers were listening, and the 2022 legislative session introduced a new spate of bills aimed at stopping children from accessing trans-affirming health care, among plenty of other anti-trans legislation, especially against an incredibly small number of trans kids playing sports in school. In all, 34 states have considered anti-trans legislation in some form.

Steps taken by the state of Texas to prosecute providing health care to trans kids as child abuse mark the most extreme end of this push. Entered as supporting evidence for Texas’s measure? A recent piece on trans kids from the New York Times.

But those stories weren’t about passing legislation, at least on their face; they were typically aimed at a presumed audience of parents. The Atlantic emblazoned on a 2018 cover the words: “Your child says [he’s] trans. [He] wants hormones and surgery. [He’s] 13.” Only it didn’t use the right pronouns to refer to the real trans boy who served as its model.

Parents have been receiving an onslaught of messages about what could go wrong if their child was to transition; they’ve rarely been asked to consider what could go wrong if they weren’t able to. We are running, in real time, an experiment on what happens when you don’t accept trans kids. 

For Mae’s part, she struggled gamely through her teen years and early 20s, trying as hard as she could not to be trans. But her relationship with her mother, the only other person in Mae’s circle of family and friends who knew Mae’s “secret,” deteriorated. Mae remembers occasionally wishing her mother would die, as she was the only other person who knew of Mae’s trans identity. Today, they have a relationship, but they can’t get back what they lost.

While it is easy to view the conversation about trans youth on a statewide or even national scale, it’s important not to forget that it is also a very intimate conversation, one had in individual houses across the country. For trans children, the stakes of those conversations — whether held in statehouses or in living rooms — are literally life and death.

“Life in a transphobic society is hard for trans people; therefore, I hope my loved one is not trans” might be a train of thought that makes perfect sense to parents like Mae’s mother. It also treats transness as something fungible, akin to an aesthetic preference or a changing fashion.

The risks inherent in treating a child’s trans identity as a temporary fancy can be considerable. Most obviously, keeping a teenager from transitioning before puberty can make a teen’s mind and body seem as though they are traveling away from each other at light speed.

“I felt alienated from everyone around me, and I was constantly terrified of people finding out that I wasn’t who they thought I was,” says Nat Hunter, who first came out as a teen in 2013, then was prevented from transitioning by their parents.

Lily Osler (who is, disclosure, a friend) perfectly captures the terror of puberty for trans kids in a Waco Tribune-Herald piece exploring Texas’s ongoing crackdown on trans youth:

Puberty blockers are reversible, but the puberty that transgender kids would go through without them isn’t. Puberty writes itself into your bones. Without blockers and, at an appropriate age, hormones, it forces transgender girls, who are girls like any other, to grow facial hair and broad, angular features, and forces transgender boys to grow breasts and wide hips. Its effects can only be reversed by very expensive and difficult-to-access surgeries in adulthood, and even then only partially.

“This is not experimental care. This is care that’s been around, in a very formal fashion, for over 50 years,” says Michelle Forcier, a professor at Brown University’s medical school and co-editor of Pediatric Gender Identity. “We know that there are studies that demonstrate efficacy and safety.”

The recent hyperfocus on trans youth is largely a media invention, says Jules Gill-Peterson, a history professor at Johns Hopkins University. “Trans people and trans youth were never really objects of the media [until recently]. I really don’t think most people ever encountered the idea that they shared the world with trans youth until the last 10 years.”

The recency of that hypervisibility powers the notion that trans health care is somehow still experimental, abstracting something that is fraught with life-and-death stakes. For a trans person, the changes dictated by the body they were born into might prove incredibly painful, destabilizing, or even life-threatening.

“The risks of withholding gender-affirming care vary from patient to patient but often involve things like worsening anxiety, depression, and suicidality,” says Jack Turban, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco. “Recent legislation to take gender-affirming medical care as an option away across the board is extremely dangerous and will lead to bad outcomes.” A 2022 study published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that trans teens were 7.6 times more likely to attempt suicide than their cis peers.

The risk of not allowing trans kids to begin living as themselves compounds the longer they are alive. In 2001, Anne Vitale, a California psychotherapist who has specialized in gender-nonconforming patients since 1984, published a groundbreaking paper in the journal Gender and Psychoanalysis surveying trans women at all stages of life who did not transition as young people. The picture she painted of these women in middle and old age is deeply sad. “This anxiety, if left untreated, is manifested in … confusion and rebellion in childhood, false hopes and disappointment in adolescence, hesitant compliance in early adulthood, feelings of self-induced entrapment in middle age, and if still untreated, depression and resignation in old age,” she writes.

There’s an existential component to going through unwanted puberty, too, because with every day that passes, it becomes harder to get the world to treat you as who you are instead of what it perceives. If you are a cis person, imagine for a moment that, all evidence to the contrary, everyone in the world becomes convinced your gender is not what it is. If you are a man, everyone starts using she/her pronouns for you and calling you by a woman’s name. One day, you start insisting to the world you are who you are, and the world insists otherwise, because it cannot conceive of a self that doesn’t begin from the body. 

Are there people who later regret transition? Yes, but the data shows that the vast majority of people who pursue transition do not regret it. In the handful of studies conducted around this question, an average of about 2 percent of respondents express regret. A separate survey questioning why people detransition found the most common reason was social pressure, often from a parent. Many of those detransitioners retransitioned later, when it felt safe to do so. (See more on all of this data here.)

Not every trans person knows they are trans when they are young, and not every trans person decides to undergo medical transition. Decisions around how and when to come out as trans are private and can be made at any age. Ultimately, all medical decisions made should be between a patient and a doctor. However, for the trans people who know their gender identity from a young age and want to medically transition, every year spent not doing so often becomes all the more punishing.

“It’s hard to do this as an adult. I’ve had patients that have had 60 years of gender hormones affecting their body. They have that internal trauma of living in this physical entity that doesn’t necessarily reflect who they know themselves to be,” Forcier says. “If you look at the data of gender-diverse kids who grow up with parents who provide them the support and resources they need, their depression rates are equal to peers and siblings, and their anxiety rates are so much lower than what we’ve found for other gender-diverse persons [who aren’t supported]. It’s shocking.”

What drives so many parents to insist their child simply cannot be trans? Turban theorizes that it stems from an overly rigid fear of gender nonconformity, one that arose from the gender exploration all children naturally indulge in being met with mockery or punishment.

“Those early experiences can stick with people and lead them to want to repress any nuance around gender, for fear that it may bring up difficult reflections about themselves,” Turban says. “Often, parents are afraid that their own children will be treated poorly by others due to their gender diversity, and so they may try to force their children to be gender-conforming, thinking they are protecting them.”

That insistence is also fueled by the idea that trans kids are a new phenomenon that has popped up extremely recently, thanks to the increasingly flexible ideas about gender that have become popular online in the 21st century. Yet that notion, too, is inaccurate. 

“When we make the assumption that trans kids just showed up in 2015, the least generous version of that is that there were no trans children, period, before that. That’s empirically untrue and easily [disprovable],” says Gill-Peterson. “The more sophisticated version of that assumption is, ‘Of course, there were trans kids, but they didn’t medically transition. That didn’t start until really recently.’ That’s also flat-out untrue. Trans youth have been transitioning as long as there has been medical transition.”

Gill-Peterson wrote the 2018 book Histories of the Transgender Child, which traces the last 100 years of trans childhood and the hidden history of American trans children who transitioned either socially or medically from the 1920s onward. The medicine we use to treat trans children today — often dubbed “experimental” — has, in actuality, been used to help trans youths transition with the support of parents and doctors since the mid-20th century.

The processes for treating trans children vary from clinic to clinic or even patient to patient. At present, most clinics draw from the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s seventh edition of its standards of care. The organization published its eighth edition standards in early September, though they have yet to be widely adopted. 

For much of childhood, no medical interventions are pursued. Trans children first begin what’s called a “social transition,” meaning that they may dress differently, wear their hair differently, or use a different name and pronouns. No changes with any permanence happen at this point. 

Around the age of 10, if these kids’ gender identities remain consistent, they are often placed on puberty blockers, which delay the arrival of puberty. (Puberty blockers were first developed for cis children, and they have been used for early-onset or what is called “precocious puberty” since the 1980s, gaining approval from the Food and Drug Administration in 1993.)

It’s only after all of this that hormones that will trigger the changes the body goes through in puberty even begin to be considered. These hormones are not prescribed until well into adolescence, usually around the age of 16, long after most of the trans kid’s cis peers began puberty, though WPATH’s more recent guidelines suggest beginning hormonal transition earlier may be beneficial for some teens. Surgical interventions rarely happen before the age of 18, and the most common surgical procedure teens might undergo is “top surgery,” in which a transmasculine person undergoes a mastectomy. 

Still, whether a trans person is able to access any of this care is dependent on a variety of factors, mostly stemming from parental approval and doctors trained in providing trans health care. The care is extremely similar to the care that already existed in the 20th century. Kids are just more likely to be aware of it now.

Children who transitioned in the 20th century often had to independently discover the terminology that helped them explain who they were to skeptical families and the medical establishment. Gill-Peterson says that what unites those kids with today’s trans youth is a relentless self-advocacy.

“Stuff that we think is a 21st-century mindset, there are trans kids in the 1960s espousing these things in handwritten letters to doctors,” Gill-Peterson says. “It shows how dogged and determined these kids were. They taught themselves the medical literature. They learned how to speak the lingo that adults needed to hear.”

Gill-Peterson points to a trans girl she dubbed Vicky for her book. Vicky lived in rural Ohio in the 1960s, and she learned of the pioneering New York endocrinologist Harry Benjamin, whose 1966 book The Transsexual Phenomenon made him someone Vicky hoped could help her. She wasn’t yet old enough to legally decide to begin transition without her parents’ consent, Benjamin informed her. When she asked, her father completely rebuffed her. She ran away to Columbus, where she roomed with another young trans girl. She was committed to a psychiatric ward, a fate that befell many trans people in the 20th century, before her father finally relented and allowed her to receive hormone treatment.

Gill-Peterson’s book is littered with stories like Vicky’s, those of trans people who found ways of being themselves, despite the system being stacked against them. She says Vicky’s story could easily take place in 2022. She just might find out about trans people from the internet rather than a newspaper story about a doctor in New York, and the forces keeping her from transition would most likely be her parents, but might also be the state she happened to live in.

Too often, parents make the assumption that, well, sure, maybe trans people exist, but it’s good to take a wait-and-see approach with kids, because that’s safer than those kids undergoing hormone therapy or more invasive procedures they might later regret. It seems to make intuitive sense in a society that privileges the cis experience, and it is natural for parents to want to protect their children at all costs.

Yet that protection can turn harmful if it removes the child’s agency. Leave aside, for a second, that the process for treating trans children does require extensive mental health screening to ensure the safety and certainty of the trans child. 

“Number one, why would you ever toss aside your kid like that?” Forcier says. “Number two, not allowing your kid to transition or saying, ‘I’m not going to make a decision about this,’ that’s not a neutral decision. That’s a choice that has significant consequences.”

For all the justified concern around the tenor of the media conversation and especially around anti-trans laws, the single biggest gatekeeper holding trans kids back from transitioning is their parents. In every story about a trans child trying to come out, there is a moment when they tell a parent. In most of the stories I have heard, that moment goes poorly, and that parent reacts badly. Given some of the dark statistics surrounding trans identities, a bad reaction by a parent might be understandable. Yet by far, the quality that most unites trans youth who are not at risk of suicide is parental support.

Alex Taylor, for instance, grew up surrounded by queer people, thanks to parents with a wide, diverse friend circle. But when they tried to come out to their parents at 13, they were rebuffed and sent to summer camps that, they say, toed the line of conversion therapy. Now, they no longer speak with their parents. Throughout their adolescence, Alex says, their parents kept asking them to be patient. Alex says that’s an undue expectation to place on any child.

“They’re my parents. I’m not supposed to need to have patience for them. And if I am going to have patience for them, that’s a gift, and they don’t get to expect that from me,” Alex says. “They were never going to be okay with me being my own person. And they forced me through a puberty that I didn’t consent to.”

Mae, the trans woman from Texas who tried to come out as a teen, can appreciate that everyone, from her mother to her Christian counselor, thought they were doing what was best for her. She also isn’t sure why they projected what they thought was best for her onto her without really talking to her about it first.

“Everybody wants what’s best for their kid. Even the most malicious reactions, I believe that, ultimately in their brains, somehow they’re rationalizing it as doing the right thing,” Mae says. “There’s a strong desire for a lot of people to mold their kids into being good people, but they’re not working with unformed clay.”

I talked to a half-dozen trans people prevented from transitioning as youths for this article, and in those conversations, I asked them to think about how the supersize anti-trans conversation being driven by lawmakers made them think back on their own teenage experiences. Yes, they said, the focus on anti-trans laws is important. Just as important, however, is recognizing that one of the implicit targets of those laws and of the trans skepticism in the media is parents who might otherwise be supportive. 

Raise enough doubt about the effectiveness of trans health care for youth, and you can convince plenty of parents who might even live in otherwise progressive havens, says Nat Hunter. They tried to come out at 14 but were pushed back into the closet at every step by their purportedly progressive parents. Now they have a relationship with their parents, who finally accepted them after years of transition, but the damage was done in the moment they failed to accept their child.

“People create the scenario that they fear through their own actions. They don’t want to say, ‘I hate my child. I don’t accept them.’ They want to say, ‘I don’t want my child’s life to be worse, and I’m scared of them being trans,” Nat says. “But acting that way is what makes kids feel unloved, and that is what causes them to be hurt. People need to understand that once you open that door, that’s it for the rest of your kid’s life. They know that you won’t love them no matter what.”

The conversation around trans kids has now stepped fully outside of the home. Anti-trans laws use the power of the state to strip both children’s and parents’ agency completely, and the media’s discussion of trans kids and trans people in general too often focuses on the wrong questions.

“The center-left media and the right-wing media are having the exact same conversation about trans people [right now], which is: Are there too many? What number of trans people is the right number? That’s a really strange question to be focused on,” says Ari Drennen, the LGBTQ program director for Media Matters for America.

What might happen if, in this conversation, we centered the voices of those whom it’s actually about? As a society, we struggle to listen to children when they tell us what they need. This problem extends beyond trans kids to queer kids of all stripes, to children who tell us about abuse in their homes, to even the archetypal son who wants to play music when his dad wants him to play football. We claim to prioritize children, but we actually prioritize the idea of them, an imagined ideal that allows them as little autonomy as possible.

“We don’t listen to children. We treat children as manifestly inferior to adults. We give them less rights,” says Gill-Peterson. “We make them economically and politically dependent on adults. We put them in dangerous and vulnerable situations all the time. They have no control or participation in authoring the world they live in, the schools they go to, the doctor’s offices they visit, the adults they’re left alone with. And then we say they’re incapable of knowing anything. Therefore, they have no ability to hold adults to account. That’s a very disturbing way to treat a group of people.”

Say you are an extremely famous and/or wealthy person, and you decide you would like to have an Oscar. You could have just bought the Oscar that cinematographer Clyde De Vinna won at the second ceremony ever when it was auctioned earlier this year, but maybe you were busy that month. Or maybe what you want, more than anything, is to win a competitive Oscar, despite not being primarily known to this point for your film career.

Now imagine that you are a specific extremely famous and/or wealthy person. Imagine you are Taylor Swift, acclaimed pop star, celebrated songwriter, and director of All Too Well: The Short Film. And if you want to win an Oscar, those two words “short film” are your ticket to the stars. Increasingly, the live-action and animated short film categories are ways for famous people to win Oscars in far less competitive categories.

The Oscars are famously one of the more difficult competitive awards to win, but there are categories that are … less contested, let’s say, and categories where the rules to qualify are less stringent than in others. If you have access to the resources required to first get a film to qualify and then to mount a campaign for it to be nominated and eventually win — well, you’ll have a real leg up over the other nominees in a historically under-the-radar category.

As such, it makes sense for you, Taylor Swift, to mount an Oscar run in the live-action short category for your 15-minute, music-video-adjacent expansion of your 10-minute song expansion of your already pretty perfect five-and-a-half minute song “All Too Well.” (More on the relationships between all of that here.)

You aren’t breaking new ground here. You are following in a tradition several decades old, one that has benefited everyone from Kobe Bryant to Christine Lahti. You’re just arguably the most famous person to ever tread this path, and as such, you’re probably going to draw a lot more attention to this occasionally traveled Academy Awards byway.

How to win an Academy Award for your short film

The Academy Awards for animated and live-action short film have long been afterthoughts in the endless Oscar ceremony. Short films used to be shown before the main feature, back in the days when you would go to a movie theater for an evening’s entertainment that would often feature, among other things, a cartoon, a newsreel, a short, and at least one feature film. Now they exist primarily as a way for interesting young writers and directors to create calling cards that will get them noticed in the industry.

Sometimes, those promising young writers and directors create something that garners so much notice it launches their career and wins them a major prize. Directors like Taylor Hackford (Ray), Andrea Arnold (American Honey), and Martin McDonagh (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) won Oscars for live-action short film — Oscars that helped launch their feature-film directing careers.

The short film categories are unusually susceptible to interlopers, however, because they play by their own set of rules. Most categories at the Oscars require a movie to screen for a week in theaters in LA, New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, Atlanta, or Miami to be eligible. But the short film categories offer three different paths to Oscar glory, since so few short films are screened in American theaters anymore. Those three paths are:

• Screen your short film in a theater in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, the Bay Area, Miami, or Atlanta for at least one showing per day for one week. The public has to be able to buy tickets to those screenings, and at least one of those screenings has to precede the release of your short film in a medium other than a movie theater, such as television or streaming. This path is similar to most other Oscar categories’.
• Win an award for your short film at a film festival the Academy has deemed worthy of qualifying you for a run at an Oscar. The list of eligible film festivals is 14 pages long and includes everything from winning the Palme d’Or for short film at the Cannes Film Festival, the most prestigious in the world, to winning the “Golden Starfish Award for Best Short Film” at the Hamptons International Film Festival. You have options!
• If you’re a film student, you can qualify by having your film win a Gold, Silver, or Bronze prize in the Academy’s Student Academy Awards.

For her part, Taylor Swift (sorry, you’re not her anymore, unless you literally are, in which case, hi) screened All Too Well: The Short Film for one week at the AMC Lincoln Square in New York last November. While that timing would qualify her for the 2021 Oscars in most other categories, which run on a January 1 to December 31 qualifying calendar, the short film categories follow the festival calendar more closely and run on an October 1 to September 30 calendar. Therefore, a short film from November 2021 is eligible for the 2022 Oscars.

Swift took the short to the Tribeca Festival in June, and she will also screen it at the Toronto International Film Festival, complete with a Friday, September 9, conversation with the festival’s CEO, Cameron Bailey.

The Tribeca and TIFF appearances aren’t really for Oscar-qualifying purposes as much as they’re designed to keep the film in the public eye (since TIFF is one of the major Oscar precursor festivals) and to establish Swift’s bona fides as a director. A Tribeca conversation with filmmaker Mike Mills dug into Swift’s filmmaking influences, her potential desire to direct a feature someday, and her increasing ability to step outside of her songwriting comfort zone.

It is worth noting here that Taylor Swift is extremely rich and famous. She can afford to not only make a short film, but also book a movie theater to screen it at a time when most theaters aren’t making a habit of showing short films. That’s a path not every filmmaker can take, and it gives her an advantage in a category that historically favors up-and-coming directors. That said, Swift is technically an up-and-coming director, one whose short film bears a sophisticated visual eye while also falling prey to the common young director pitfall of moving the camera way, way too much.

Finally, Swift is Oscar-eligible in a different category this year, one where you’d more likely predict her to be nominated: Best Original Song. “Carolina,” a song she wrote for the film Where the Crawdads Sing, will be eligible for that category. Whether “Carolina” will be nominated or suffer the same fate as her non-nominated song from Cats remains to be seen. She’s also in the movie Amsterdam, from Oscar-favorite director David O. Russell, but that’s a small supporting part and unlikely to garner awards attention.

Taylor Swift might be the most notable famous person to use the different rules of the short-film category as a sneak attack on the Oscars, but she’s far from the only one. She’s not even the only famous person to attempt an Oscar run like this in this year.

Why did Kobe Bryant win an Oscar? He made a short film.

In 2018, basketball legend Kobe Bryant won an Oscar for animated short film for the film Dear Basketball. Bryant was not an animator, and he did not direct the film. (Legendary animator Glen Keane handled that job, thus winning his own first Oscar.) Because the film was based on his script, however, Bryant shared in the prize. It was the first time many Oscar watchers became aware that, hey, a short-film Oscar seems to be much easier to win than an Oscar in a more competitive category.

The very next year, actress Jaime Ray Newman, best known for her work on TV, shared the live-action short film prize with director Guy Nattiv for the film Skin. Earlier this year, actor Riz Ahmed (previously an Oscar nominee for Best Actor for The Sound of Metal) won his own Oscar in the live-action short film category for The Long Goodbye, directed by co-winner Aneil Karia and based on Ahmed’s album.

Dig around in Oscar history and you’ll find all sorts of examples of the short-film categories’ relatively looser restrictions allowing interesting things to happen. Character actors like Christine Lahti and Ray McKinnon have won Oscars for shorts they directed and starred in, and the categories have also seen failed TV pilots and animated TV specials triumph. (The Academy quickly closed up the loopholes that allowed those wins to happen.)

This year, the recent prominence of Bryant and Ahmed’s wins has raised the profile of this path to Oscar glory, and other famous people are availing themselves of it. The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg says that musician Kendrick Lamar’s short film We Cry Together screened for a week in Los Angeles in June and thus will be Oscar-eligible this year.

I want to be careful not to be too cynical here. All of the short films listed here stemmed from places more pure than simply longing to win an Oscar. Swift’s reclamation and reinvention of one of her most famous songs, Ahmed’s exploration of his fears around racism in Britain, Bryant’s ode to a sport he loved — they’re all best understood as artistic expressions first and awards plays second. Yet they are all awards plays, too. Why would any of these people go to the trouble of booking a theatrical run if not to qualify for an Oscar?

Which brings me to my final question: Do you think Taylor Swift cares if she EGOTs?

Do our celebrities feel the looming specter of the EGOT, or do they not care?

The EGOT — winning a competitive Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony — is one of those weird little bits of celebrity trivia that has slipped into the public consciousness. Though the term was invented by Miami Vice star Philip Michael Thomas, who stated it was his career ambition (he’s won none of the awards), it has taken off in the public consciousness. That’s thanks to some combination of 30 Rock, the way the internet makes it much easier to collect this sort of trivia, and how fun EGOT is to say. 

Just 17 people have won an EGOT, with Jennifer Hudson joining the list in June, making her the most recent addition. Lots and lots of people have won two or three of the prizes; few have won all four. Even illustrious names like Stephen Sondheim and John Williams have only won three out of four. (Barack Obama, the only president to win more than one of these awards, has two out of four, thanks to a long-ago Grammy win and an Emmy win earlier this month. We can only hope he’s mounting a Tony-eligible revival of Urinetown even as we speak.)

Swift has an Emmy and a Grammy, but the Oscar and Tony are historically the trickiest of the four awards to win. What’s more, her rough contemporary Adele just added an Emmy to her Grammy and Oscar last Saturday, when her special Adele One Night Only picked up a prize for the best prerecorded special. When it comes to other woman pop stars of the moment, Billie Eilish has several Grammys and an Oscar, and one can only assume an Emmy will follow whenever she decides she wants to write a song for Euphoria or something. If we expand to include men making music at the moment, John Legend already has his EGOT. Swift is falling behind!

(A musician who doesn’t yet have the awards recognition you’d expect is Beyoncé, who has won several Grammys but lost her first Oscar nomination to Eilish earlier this year. She received two Emmy nominations for her stunning 2016 video album Lemonade, but she lost a directing bid to Grease Live! and the variety special prize to a Carpool Karaoke special. Icons are often not recognized by awards bodies until later on, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say Lemonade probably should have won an Emmy over fucking Carpool Karaoke.)

I’m just not sure how much these celebrities actually think about EGOTing. If a legend like Stephen Sondheim gave a shit about whether he won an Emmy Award, allowing him to EGOT before he died, he surely would have cranked out a theme song for some forgettable sitcom or something. Lots of famous people probably enjoy winning awards but don’t think as hard about whether they will EGOT as those of us who follow “the industry” might.

So does Swift spend all her time strategizing how to win an EGOT? God, I hope not. If I were Taylor Swift, I would think about lots of other things before I thought about getting added to the Wikipedia page “List of EGOT Winners.” I must admit, however, that if I had an Emmy and a Grammy, I would definitely think all the time about how to get the Oscar and Tony, so maybe I’m wrong.

Regardless of motives, regardless of intent, winning an Oscar would be a feather in anyone’s cap. If Taylor Swift is able to win the Oscar for live-action short film, it wouldn’t be the category you’d most expect her to win in, but it would be an Oscar. For the rest of us, Swift winning a short-film Oscar would make for a fun trivia question years down the line. So see? We all win!

Country music carries within it a promise of a kind of idyllic traditionalism, even in its most progressive forms. The genre implicitly promises that there is a place where you will find the one person who completes you and build a quiet life out in the middle of nowhere together. Yet in reality, life keeps getting in the way. The best country lives in the tension between those ideas, between the life you’re supposed to want and the world that gives you so many other options, then yanks some cruelly away.

And sometimes, you just need to scream and cry and pound your fists and maybe fire a shotgun into the air. Enter the “Hey, fuck you, buddy!!” song.

Typically (though not exclusively) recorded by women, the “Hey, fuck you, buddy!!” song involves what happens when some jerk breaks your heart, then runs off to be with someone else. As you watch their truck recede into the distance, you scream, “Hey, fuck you, buddy!!” But that’s about all you can do.

Naturally, many of these songs center on divorce. From sad and lonesome classics like Tammy Wynette’s “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and Dolly Parton’s “Starting Over Again” to more fiery tracks like Loretta Lynn’s “Rated X” and Kacey Musgraves’s “Breadwinner,” a woman’s definition of herself after she ceases to be a wife is an evergreen theme in country (and popular art in general).

And now you can (and should!) add Carly Pearce’s 2021 album 29: Written in Stone to the list. It’s a whole album of kiss-off anthems, inspired by a marriage that lasted less than a year, and it marks a huge leap forward for one of country music’s most exciting young stars. Hopefully, it will help her cross over to audiences who don’t normally listen to country. Those audiences might well love Pearce’s dry, acerbic take on complete and utter heartbreak. 

Pearce married fellow country singer Michael Ray in October 2019, but their marriage was over less than a year later, with Pearce officially filing for divorce in June 2020. The title of 29: Written in Stone, then, refers to the age Pearce was when her marriage both began and dissolved. But it also speaks to her anxiety around her impending 30s and her attempts to find a way forward in music after the death of her longtime producer Busbee in 2019, just weeks before her wedding.

It’s an album that looks backward — to Pearce’s parents’ marriage and to her country music foremothers like Loretta Lynn — and forward, to what Pearce might have learned from her divorce that she will bring to future relationships. It’s appropriately angry in places, appropriately grief-stricken in others, and appropriately relieved in still others. It’s an album written by someone who didn’t expect her relationship to end so quickly, but who’s also willing to admit it’s probably good it ended before she and her ex could have their lives further enmeshed.

The opening track, “Diamondback,” nicely sets up what listeners can expect from the album. Its title evokes the deadly rattlesnake, but the song splits that word into two, as Pearce assures her ex that he can have whatever he wants, but he’s “never gonna get that diamond back.” That song and others on the album have superb “getting drunk at a dive bar with your friends after a bad breakup” energy.

Pearce balances them with plaintive ballads, like the album’s second track, “What He Didn’t Do.” In that song, she seemingly explains to the imagined friends assembled at the dive bar why her marriage ended, not by talking about what her ex did to break her heart but all of the little things he didn’t do that left her feeling let down. And yet even as she demurs when asked to give all the gory details, she assures us, “we both know I could run him out of this town. That’s just dirty laundry; I don’t need to wear the truth.”

It’s easy to draw comparisons between Pearce and Musgraves. Both regularly toss off lyrics filled with evocative imagery, emotional complexity, and winking wordplay. Pearce, for instance, uses the title of her hit “Next Girl” to mean both her ex’s next fling and to warn that new fling, “I know what happens next, girl.”

29: Written in Stone has made the comparisons even more pointed, as Musgraves also released an album about her divorce last year, just one week before Pearce’s album dropped. Musgraves’s star-crossed arrived with a fleet of expectations it couldn’t hope to live up to, and its hard turn away from a pure country song disgruntled many in Musgraves’s fanbase. (I liked the album a lot, actually.)

In short, this album knows that any relationship that ends deserves at least a couple “Hey, fuck you, buddy!!” songs. 29: Written in Stone has more than its fair share for all your friends to scream along to at the bar, but it’s also got a hefty helping of heartbroken wisdom for when last call has arrived and you realize your lover’s not coming back.

29: Written in Stone might speak to those who want a more purely country take on what it means to have the thing you thought would last your whole life disintegrate. Like Musgraves, Pearce is willing to take blame for the ways she let her marriage down, but where Musgraves could overindulge in those ideas, seeming like she had slipped into self-loathing, Pearce is only too happy to throw dirt on the grave her ex dug himself.

29: Written in Stone is available on all major music streaming platforms. Physical editions are also available on CD and vinyl.

In the immediate wake of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade, social media filled with images and memes playing off a viral tweet: A clean-cut couple beams at the camera while standing outside the Supreme Court building and holding a sign reading “We will adopt your baby.” (Slate has the full story on the couple featured in that photo.)

In a post-Roe world, there is already a renewed focus on adoption as a supposed solution for unwanted pregnancies. Indeed, in the arguments before the Supreme Court last year, Justice Amy Coney Barrett suggested that adoption is a foolproof substitution for abortion. Yet the rhetoric around adoption too rarely takes into consideration the person having the baby who will be adopted.

Kathryn Joyce, an investigative reporter at Salon, has been covering adoption in America for over a decade. Her book The Child Catchers is one of the best ever written about the messy intersections of capitalism, Christianity, and adoption, digging deep into the ways the adoption industry wrings every dollar it can out of an incredibly fragile period in the lives of everyone it touches. (Disclosure: I am adopted.)

Joyce and I talked recently about adoption rhetoric at a time when American reproductive rights have been gutted. That rhetoric touches on so many other aspects of American life, most notably race and class.

“For decades now, there’s been a pro-choice rejoinder to anti-abortion activists: What are you going to do with all these extra kids you want to see born? Are you prepared to adopt all these kids?” Joyce said. “And the answer is: kind of? A lot of people will say, ‘That’s exactly what we want.’”

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. 

Photos of couples holding signs saying “We will adopt your baby” have been propagating on Twitter in the past few weeks. As somebody who’s covered this world extensively, how do images like that intersect with your work?

It feels like conversations about adoption that for a very long time were happening in the margins of discussion about reproductive rights are very much more a mainstream discussion. What’s interesting is there have been a few other moments where there has been a similar, if time-bound, recognition of this issue.

In my book, I wrote about what happened in Haiti after the devastating earthquake in 2010. There was this immense rush to not just expedite adoptions that were in process but to open up expedited adoption procedures to any child who was in institutional care in the country, even though welfare experts and even some of the more responsible adoption agencies were saying, “When the country is in complete disarray is not the time to start rushing things.” As part of that, Laura Silsby, a Baptist missionary from Idaho, wrote this extremely blunt and kind of ghoulish plan that she was going to gather [Haitian] children off the street. Ultimately, they were going to be offered for international adoption. The boldness and bleakness of that grabbed people’s attention.

Also, in 2018, when the family separation crisis at the border began to get a lot of notice, there were people who suddenly paid a lot of attention to the fact that one of the largest adoption agencies in the country, Bethany Christian Services, had been contracted by the government to offer a form of foster care for these children. People started asking: What are they going to do with these children that they’re taking away from their parents? Are they going to be offering these children for adoption?

In the aftermath of the Supreme Court overturning Roe, there’s this similarly blunt thing that happened. Two Supreme Court justices — Samuel Alito in his opinion and Amy Coney Barrett in her arguments last winter — made the argument that abortion is not needed because we’ve got adoption. Right-wing politicians have said that adoption is the answer to unplanned pregnancies. And then you have people showing up with celebratory signs and big smiles that say “We will adopt your baby.” That makes it too hard to ignore for a lot of people who weren’t really well-versed in those dynamics.

Your book primarily (but not exclusively) deals with international adoption, especially evangelical Christian families adopting children, sometimes lots of them, from overseas. How does domestic adoption fit into that picture?

The movement’s rhetoric as a whole is this idea that by adopting, you’re doing something more than just building a family. You are also solving the problem of abortion, because in their mind, you are providing the answer to unplanned pregnancy. Adoption is seen as a seamless solution.

Poverty is the common denominator here. One family is being broken apart for reasons that ultimately boil down to poverty in various complicated ways. Usually, much wealthier families are being created out of a piece of that first family.

When I was doing my reporting for the book, I spoke to the director of an adoption agency in the Pacific Northwest that prided itself on being very open and trying to avoid a lot of the ethical problems that have plagued other adoption agencies. She told me that if you look at all different forms of adoption, the one thing they have in common is the birth mother is invisible. You’re erasing not just the birth mother but the entire family of origin. They’re sometimes seen as the source of a product, as crass as that sounds. It’s how a lot of adoptees have ended up feeling — like a product or a supply.

And these ideas make those families of origin invisible by making them part of a broad caricature. If it’s domestic adoption, it’s got to be some messed-up family or substance-addicted family or abusive family. Or careless, feckless young parents who weren’t responsible. On the flipside, they’re made into these angels who have given the ultimate sacrifice. But they’re never looked at as individual people who, with different resources and support, might have made a different choice.

Internationally, you see a similar thing. The families of origin had been treated for a long time as a terrible situation from which children were rescued, or they were written about in some kind of third-world tragedy terms.

How do you think this intersects with race?

Sometimes in the rhetoric around international adoptions, there’s what a lot of people would characterize as “white saviorism”: These children were thrown away, and the adoptive parents or the church has come along to redeem them. A lot of times, those ideas will involve some fairly severe denigration of the country, the culture, or the family that the children came from.

If you look at the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, there was an extreme version of that rhetoric, with people talking about Haiti as this doomed or even satanic country. There was a sense of saving these children from growing up in that country. And the leaders of Haiti pointed out at the time, “What are you saying about our country if you say the only chance our children have is to be taken out of it?”

In the last 20 years, transracial adoptees in particular have talked about their experiences with this. Generational waves of adoptees of a certain age come from a particular country because that country was a hot spot adoption center at the time. So there is this older wave of Korean American adoptees [from the 1980s] who were pioneers in a lot of this research and advocacy. They talk about having many times grown up in an area where they were the only person of color. And Black or Latinx adoptees, whether they were adopted domestically or internationally, say similar things.

Even adoptees who had really happy situations and were close with their adoptive family will say that something that was missing was the understanding of what it would be like to grow up a person of color in a largely white community.

The natural question is: Why aren’t the folks who were holding those signs not just adopting kids in foster care? Obviously, it’s not that simple, but I’m still asking myself that question.

There are different dynamics at play. A lot of times people who want to adopt do want to adopt infants or young children. There is a perception that children who have been in the foster care system are damaged in some way. Sometimes, there are weird racial dynamics. There have been adoptive parents who have distinguished, racially, between Black kids in the foster care system in the US and Black kids who were available for adoption from countries in Africa. They would say, “My kid’s not Black. They’re Ethiopian.”

But the foster care system also has a ton of problems. The majority of kids who end up in the child welfare system in most places in this country are overwhelmingly there not because of child abuse but because of things that fall under the category of neglect. To people who haven’t paid that much attention to it, it’s easy to conclude that kids who are neglected aren’t being fed and aren’t safe and need to be taken away. But that’s often not what neglect ends up meaning.

Most of the time, it boils down to things that, again, are about poverty. There are huge racial disparities there, but also really significant classist elements. Poor white families also often end up on the wrong side of that scrutiny. The neglect that ends up separating so many kids from their families in poorer communities in this country is so subjective.

Kids end up in this system because they wore dirty clothes to school, or because a school nurse found lice, or because their parents were trying to get substance-abuse treatment. Most of these things just boil down, ultimately, to them being poor. If we were a country that provided better resources to deal with these things, it wouldn’t result in a system that starts its own catastrophic chain of events, both for families but also for the system as a whole when it starts taking in way more children than it can responsibly care for.

Obviously, lots of people are adopting because they can’t have children for whatever reason. But what do you see as overriding motivations about adoption within these religious communities, even in families that are only adopting two or three kids?

Everybody’s in an individual situation, and most people, the primary motivation is to either build or expand their family. That remains true.

When I was writing about the Christian adoption movement 10 years ago, there was this concerted effort to cast adoption not just as something individuals did for all the reasons that people do things, but to cast it into a religious mission, where they would be doing a number of things simultaneously. They would be solving the “orphan crisis,” which was this argument that there are hundreds of millions of children who are orphaned and in need of adoptive homes around the world. And the other argument was they could solve the abortion question. They could provide the homes that pro-choice advocates were constantly challenging and asking for when they would say things like, “Are you prepared to adopt all these extra kids?”

As the movement really got into full swing in the late 2000s and early 2010s, a lot of religious leaders started writing books making a theological case for adoption as well. A lot of those books would point out what they saw as a parallel between the adoption of children into a family and the way Christians were adopted into God’s family when they accepted Christ. So they would say, if you adopt, you are capturing this divine pattern in your family. Some of the books made an argument that the ultimate purpose of adoption is fulfilling the Great Commission mandate that you are going and converting the nations of the world, that you are evangelizing through adoption.

The physical toll a pregnancy takes on someone’s body is substantial, but as we talk about birth families, I want to think about the mental and psychological effects of going through a pregnancy and giving the child away, even if you are doing so willingly. What do those look like?

The reason I ended up writing about adoption in the first place is I was speaking to a lot of the women who had relinquished their children during the baby scoop era, before [1973’s] Roe v. Wade. Unwed parenthood was so shameful that a lot of white women got sent away to these maternity homes, so they could go through pregnancy and deliver, then pretend nothing happened.

I was speaking to these women decades later, and they were still so raw from that loss. It had come to define their life. Everyone I spoke to felt at least coerced, like they were not given a real chance to make a decision to parent. They said all kinds of things, like they would have PTSD reactions if they heard children crying, or that some of them never stopped thinking about where their child was and if they were okay.

Some of the mothers I spoke to who had this experience talked about this as a form of ambiguous loss. That’s a term they often use for families of someone who has gone missing. In some ways, that can be harder to deal with than if somebody has died because you are living constantly in this state of uncertainty.

Adoption is always going to exist. It’s always going to be part of how humanity handles children who need homes. But we’re also entering an era when there might be a lot more of it. What are some things we could do as a society to make adoption less traumatic for everybody involved?

It needs to be a truly informed choice, which is something we haven’t seen, outside of certain circumstances. But it’s never been the main experience of people relinquishing children for adoption.

So many people have talked about forms of pressure they encountered. They might have to fill out these questionnaires that make them feel like there’s no way they are prepared or wealthy enough to raise a child, which is a pretty subtle form of coercion. But there’s more overt ways, like outright telling people there’s no way they could be a good parent and if they keep their child, they’re being selfish.

We would need to start asking: Has this person or their family been offered the material resources that they are most likely lacking to be able to keep their family intact? There’s a lot of talk, even among adoption advocates, that adoption should be the last resort after trying to reunite a family, or trying to keep a child within an extended family or within their community — or at least within their country, if it’s international.

In practice, it’s never worked out that way because those options cost the state money. If you’re really going to support families, in the way that a handful of Republican politicians say they are willing to consider doing now that they have outlawed abortion in many states, that is going to cost a huge amount of money. The adoption industry is a private, market-based solution to that problem that generates money for Western businesses and all of the middlemen that get involved.

We haven’t ever really tried a system that’s non-coercive. But I also think you can’t talk about that prospect without the bedrock choice that people need to have: to decide whether to go through with a pregnancy. Most people involved in adoptions, most people who have relinquished custody, will tell you that whether or not to continue a pregnancy is a very different decision than whether to parent that child.

A new report summarizing an independent investigation into the history of sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) details decades of gaslighting and cover-ups.

The SBC is a collection of loosely affiliated member churches, boasting just under 15 million members. It has no firm, established hierarchy; it doesn’t even have a central headquarters. In theory, individual churches can preach or believe whatever they want, but the larger “convention” can remove member churches that don’t toe certain lines. Representatives of these churches meet each year at an annual event — also called a convention. At the 2021 convention, member churches voted to conduct an internal investigation of sexual abuse within the church.

Complaints about sexual abuse and sexual assault on the part of pastors were sent to higher-ups who then kept those accusations quiet. Though the report, by Guidepost Solutions, was only commissioned to study the cover-up from the years 2000 on, it found incidents of sexual abuse and warnings of the same going back to the 1960s. In all, Guidepost found accusations leveled against people at all levels: church volunteers, staff, and leadership, including those at the top of the church’s ladder. Those accusations were made by people of different ages and genders, and they include allegations of child sexual abuse, the grooming of adolescents, and the sexual assault of adults.

These findings were not unprecedented. A major investigation by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express-News, published in 2019, first brought many of the accusations against church leadership to light. The publication of that report galvanized a grassroots drive by individual Southern Baptist churches to hire a firm to conduct an investigation.

What the Guidepost report has shown is the sheer enormity of the problem, beyond the already staggering scope the Houston and San Antonio newspapers had revealed. Russell D. Moore, formerly the head of the SBC’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission until he resigned both from that post and the SBC entirely in 2021, called the report the “Southern Baptist apocalypse” in a column for Christianity Today.

“It is horrifying. I expected to be the last person surprised by anything,” Moore said of the report, “and there were sections that were stunning even to me. It’s a horror, a sense of grief. It makes me contemplate the fact that I don’t even know a thimbleful of what must be being experienced by people who have survived these horrific acts of abuse in church settings. That weighs heavily.”

“Whatever vindication there is here for us, it very much goes hand in hand with grief,” said Christa Brown, the author of This Little Light: Beyond a Baptist Preacher Predator and his Gang. “I know the stories that are behind the names of these pastors [named in the report]. I know the people. I know the decimation in their lives. I know the human cost of what it has taken to get this truth out into the open.”

There’s a natural comparison point for these incidents: the scandal that ensued when the Catholic Church’s cover-up of its knowledge of priests who were child sexual abusers came to light, most prominently in a 2002 report by the Spotlight team at the Boston Globe. In this situation, too, the work of dogged newspaper journalists uncovered a scandal that the SBC was finally forced to step up and acknowledge.

The path forward to actually effecting change within the SBC is fraught with its own difficulties, however. Chief among them is the SBC’s structure — or lack thereof. Where the Catholic Church boasted a rigid hierarchy for parishioners and journalists to inveigh against in the name of justice, the SBC is loose and almost structureless. That will make reforming it very difficult indeed.

What’s more, the SBC’s theological underpinnings will make elevating the voices of those accusing pastors of abuse difficult because it privileges the voices of those pastors over those of their parishioners, especially women parishioners. In short, once a charismatic man becomes the leader of an SBC church, it can be very hard to punish him in a meaningful way.

Yet the SBC isn’t the only institution with a charismatic man problem. Those institutions litter the entirety of American evangelicalism and America itself. 

Why the structure of the SBC poses unique challenges to reforming it

Let’s start with one thing that may not be immediately obvious: The SBC publicly releasing both the Guidepost report and a list of accused abusers that it kept secret for years is an unprecedented move for the denomination. Moore sees some hope in the fact that the report exists at all.

“Before the [Texas newspapers’] report, I would have to spend a lot of time convincing congregations that this was a problem that could happen to them,” he said. “There was often this sense of screening out predators by vibe. People would often think, ‘Well, we know people [in our congregation], so we know we don’t have any problems like that.’ I noticed a big shift in that after the Houston Chronicle report. This investigation happened because grassroots Southern Baptists came to the convention last year and demanded that it happen over and against much of their leadership.”

The most obvious parallel to this scandal is the Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal. However, where these two scandals differ lies in how differently the Catholic Church and the SBC are structured.

The effectiveness of the Catholic Church’s response to its scandal is highly debatable, but the church’s hierarchical structure (priests report to bishops report to cardinals report to the pope) meant that parishioners and the media had several pressure points they could push against in the process of trying to understand what had happened. Abuse survivors could also sue individual dioceses to receive financial restitution.

The SBC lacks a similar hierarchy. It doesn’t see itself as a formal denomination but, rather, a loose association of churches that believe similarly. This structure gives individual churches under its banner lots of leeway to handle matters on their own. If your church’s pastor is misbehaving, it’s not always clear whom to report him to, especially if you don’t believe anyone in the church’s membership will do anything. But it’s not as though the SBC was unaware of the abuse problems within its ranks, despite its lack of traditional hierarchy.

“When it comes to addressing sexual abuse, up until now, they have claimed that because of their church policy, they don’t have the authority to track abusers and hold local churches accountable,” said Kristin Kobes Du Mez, a professor of history at Calvin University and the author of Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation. “But in the report we found that they had, in fact, been tracking abusers in their churches and had been maintaining a private database for their own protection. They had not in any way reached out and tried to prosecute those abusers to keep people safe.”

In addition, while lawsuits can be brought against individual churches or clergy members, the lack of anything like a diocese within the SBC means that any lawsuits will necessarily target either the smallest units of the organization or the organization as a whole. There isn’t really a good middle ground. The convention does have an executive committee, which possesses a fair amount of power to set the stage for what is considered acceptable within the SBC, but very little fills the gap between that executive committee and individual churches. 

The difficulty of seeking legal restitution and the lack of a strong hierarchy combine to explain why finding justice for survivors of sexual abuse in many Protestant denominations could prove very tricky.

“It’s not just an SBC thing,” Joshua Pease, a pastor who has also worked as a journalist covering sexual abuse in the evangelical church, said. “There are multiple different denominations that have very loose affiliations or very loose organizational structures. And then there are nondenominational churches that genuinely have zero denominational structure to them, where it literally is just one church, all on its own.”

The SBC report is a decided anomaly, simply because the SBC does have a hierarchical structure, no matter how loose or decentralized. If the pastor of a nondenominational church is sexually abusing congregants, the only authority a victim might be able to turn to is law enforcement.

SBC’s history highlights a schism that may have led to this moment

A term that comes up a lot in writing and discussions about problems with sexual abuse within the SBC or the evangelical church more broadly is “complementarianism.” In brief, complementarianism is a kind of theology that holds that men and women are created by God with inherent strengths and weaknesses, and that those differences should be not only embraced but baked into society. It’s at the root of many of the evangelical church’s struggles to recognize women in positions of authority, for obvious reasons, but it’s also at the root of many of the church’s problems with queer people. 

Complementarianism holds that “there is a hierarchical order. Man is the head of the woman, and so women should not aspire to do what men are able to do. Women should be primarily focused on home and children,” said Molly T. Marshall, president of United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. “The complementarian notion is separate roles. I would say it’s not equal roles.”

As a theology, it does not explicitly say, “Don’t believe women and children who accuse men of terrible things,” but it creates a power structure where a man who is accused of terrible things by those this theology views as beneath him is given often endless benefit of the doubt. 

The SBC does possess some institutional weight that it can use to punish offending churches. The few times it has, however, it has used that weight to prop up complementarianism, rather than punish churches harboring abusers.

Via a process called “defellowship,” the SBC member churches can remove other churches from the convention entirely. That allows the SBC to maintain some degree of theological consistency across a vast, mostly decentralized organization, which in some cases is important to the church’s mission, according to Moore. As he explains, an SBC church that suddenly started preaching polytheism would no longer be practicing Christianity as any denomination understands it. But defellowship is also used to legislate issues of who gets power and recognition within the church, and who does not.

“If you tried to ordain a woman or someone who’s gay, your church would be kicked out of the convention instantly,” said Pease. Yet this process was not used to remove churches where pastors were accused of abuse.

Complementarianism was also at the core of one of the most significant events in SBC history: the Kansas City convention of 1984. At that convention, a religious conservative drift within the SBC was solidified as the closest thing the SBC has to a doctrine, and that meant no women pastors. More progressive Southern Baptist churches either changed their views to more closely conform to that doctrine or more often left the SBC entirely, starting new fellowships of Baptist churches. 

“I wouldn’t say that the Southern Baptist Convention was affirming of women in ministry so much [before 1984] as there were people and pockets within the Southern Baptist Convention that allowed more freedom for congregations to make those choices,” said Meredith Stone, the executive director of Baptist Women in Ministry. Stone’s organization was formed in 1983, and she has long wondered if its very existence played some role in the Kansas City convention of 1984. 

Marshall also found herself at the center of those events. She was the first woman to attend the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and she was working there at the time of the resurgent conservative movement within the SBC. She was later pushed out of her job as a professor at Southern, despite tenure, because her views were no longer in line with those of the SBC.

“In my time as a professor at Southern Seminary, there were horrible pressures to fit into this complementarian modality, which always subjugates women. I would not put up with that, which is why I was run out of town,” Marshall said. “I was undaunted in my claim that women had equal authority in the church and were called to pastoral work, as would be any man that felt that calling.”

The events of 1984 are central to the modern SBC’s understanding of itself, but as Moore points out in his Christianity Today column, the two architects of that moment have been exposed as hypocrites by the revelations about sexual abuse problems within the church. Moore writes:

Those two mythical leaders are now disgraced. [Paige Patterson] was fired after alleged [sic] mishandling a rape victim’s report in an institution he led after he was documented making public comments about the physical appearance of teenage girls and his counsel to women physically abused by their husbands. [Paul Pressler] is now in civil proceedings about allegations of the rape of young men.

Complementarianism’s centrality within the SBC led to a heavily patriarchal institution, which Stone said created an environment in which sexual abuse could happen and be covered up as extensively as the Guidepost report said it was. And as such, she said, simple systemic fixes ultimately won’t be enough to reform the SBC. Instead, theological changes will have to be made, and they will be ones the SBC won’t want to make.

“The underlying systemic issues within the Southern Baptist Convention have to do with a theology that said some people are favored by God, some people have more power, and God supports them having that power and exerting it over others,” Stone said. “That in no way diminishes the culpability of individuals and the decisions that they make to act in an abusive way against another person. But I think when they are in an environment that says God supports power over saying God is about love and inclusion, it makes those actions more palatable.”

Yet the problems within the SBC aren’t just the problems of the SBC. They’re problems within evangelical churches more broadly — and within America.

The evangelical church is obsessed with charismatic guys who are leaders. But that’s not just true of the evangelical church.

Culturally, the structure of most evangelical churches makes it very hard to imagine reprisal for a powerful, popular leader. Complementarianism doesn’t just place men at the center of the church but also of the family unit; it also defines “man” in a very specific way.

Andrew Whitehead, an associate professor of sociology at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis and co-author of the book Taking America Back for God: Christian Nationalism in the United States, has found in his research that the evangelical conception of God is aggressively gendered. Yes, evangelicals are more likely than any other religious group to say that God is definitely a man, but they’ve also turned him into an incredibly masculine man, one who fulfills traditional gender roles, which are then meant to be reflected in the church.

“When you have men at the top with very little accountability and essentially blinders on, they can’t see all the different aspects of a situation,” Whitehead said. “So when things like this pop up, [evangelical men] tend to be absolutely ignorant of it or tend to protect their own, and not listen to those voices that might threaten what they see as their God-given right to be in control.”

Du Mez said this contributes to a culture that can, readily and easily, excuse sexual abuse. In her research, she has found that evangelical churches very often suggest a kind of gender essentialism in how men and women approach sex, with men seen as naturally lustful and testosterone-driven and women seen as naturally pure and non-lustful. The woman’s job is to protect purity; the man is often not at fault for giving in to his urges. Couple that outlook with a culture that generally practices deference to leaders, and you have an environment rife with the opportunity for abuse.

“When a case of sexual misconduct surfaces, it is more common than not that women are going to be blamed. ‘What did you do to seduce him?’” Du Mez said. This belief system suggests, she said, that “men just have such a hard time controlling these needs that if they aren’t being met, they’re going to find an outlet. So it’s the woman’s fault, or it’s his wife’s fault, because clearly, if he was looking outside of his marriage relationship to fulfill his sexual needs, she was not meeting them.”

Changing that culture will be difficult for many reasons. Moore suggests that the most lasting changes may have to be grassroots ones. He points to a shift within individual churches in the last few decades that has now spread across almost the entirety of the SBC. In the past, there was little oversight of the process by which parents left their children at church nurseries during services. Over time, individual churches put in place safeguards that led to making sure children were never left alone with a single nursery worker and the introduction of a system in which only people who are authorized can see the child or leave the nursery with them. That reform was introduced at a handful of churches; that it has now spread so widely through the SBC suggests one possible way for micro changes to become macro ones.

What’s more, the church can certainly make broader, more systemic changes and could adopt the recommendations within the Guidepost report. Those would all be major, concrete steps taken to reform the SBC and its culture, and they would lead to an environment where abuse would be less likely. 

Brown, the author of This Little Light, remains skeptical. Yes, the SBC could set up bodies to which those being abused could appeal, it could provide protection for other whistleblowers in the organization, and it could set up a restitution fund. Those steps, however, would have to be through groups that were independent from SBC leadership and had authority that existed outside the organization, steps she said the SBC would be unlikely to take. Instead, she fears these problems will be handled within their local churches, the very place many of these survivors suffered abuse.

“They must get past this notion of telling survivors to go to the local church,” Brown said. “All that does is send bloody sheep back to the den of the wolves who savaged them, and people are horribly wounded in that process.”

While it’s tempting to look at the problems facing the SBC as directly tied to complementarianism, requiring an overhaul to a more progressive form of theology, Pease is careful to remind me that churches are uniquely susceptible to the problem of being led by a charismatic man who is allowed to get away with things because he’s seen as guiding the church successfully. That problem applies equally to all denominations, regardless of their larger politics. 

But that’s not exclusively a problem of religious organizations, either. It’s a problem with every aspect of American life — from the tech industry to academia to Hollywood to your local church.

“Any institution is going to become a little bit insular, and probably the strongest leader is going to rise to the surface. There’s always going to be a tendency then for abuse,” Pease said. “How do we intentionally build cultures that counteract that? That’s something as a society we’re still figuring out, because we bought into the myth of the charismatic leader so deeply, and we’re paying such a heavy price.”