 The prompt for my conversation, or for this conversation, has to do with a recent poll that was taken that Liz Nolan Brown, who we'll be talking to in a second, wrote up for reason this was done by Newsweek. But the finding was kind of stunning. Got a lot of play. 44% of millennials want to make misgendering a crime. Let's talk about this poll, Liz, that you wrote up, I think last week for reason. 44% of millennials want to make misgendering a crime. And let me just read a bit. You write, younger millennials were most likely to support criminal penalties for misgendering with 44% of 24 to 30, 25 to 34 year old respondents in favor and just 31% saying misgendering should not be a crime. And then you look a little bit older and the 25 to 34 year olds, that includes some Gen Z. So it's millennial in Gen Z. But then some 38% of 35 to 44 year old respondents said it should be a crime, while 35% disagreed. Some 33% of 18 to 24 year old respondents, which would be Gen Z, said it should be a crime, while 48% disagreed. So you have, Liz, to the best of your hypothesizing, what is going on that 44% of 25 to 34 year old respondents think that misgendering somebody should be a crime? Yeah, I mean, they're not thinking about it. They're not thinking it through. That's my most, I guess, hopeful interpretation, is people are very concerned with trans rights these days. They're very, a lot of people are very rightfully think that you should respect people's pronouns, respect people's gender that they consider themselves. And they want to signal that. So when you're asked in a survey, should it be a crime? Sure, why not? My hopeful, I think that's nuts. I may be a prison abolitionist, but I think this should be a crime. Yeah. So my hopeful interpretation is that people answer survey questions a lot of times based on a sort of desirability bias of trying to say what they think is right. And this is a way to signal that you think it is wrong to misgender people. But there's no actual proposal attached to this, right? There's no like, here's what the criminal penalties would be. Here's how much time people would spend in prison or what they'd have to pay. Here's how it would be enforced. There's no discussion about all the unintended consequences and things like that. So I hope that if this was an actual proposal, people were actually discussing it, the support would be a lot lower than in a poll where it's just like, hey, is this where it's more answered almost as if like, hey, is this bad? And people say, yeah. Because unfortunately we are in an era where people think that anything bad should be a crime, sort of, at least before they think it through. What about, Jim, what do you think? Is there, and this poll was done by Newsweek. The data is not available online. I looked around for it. We don't even know the exact questioning, the wording of the question. So all of that, those are serious caveats, but it seems to comport with a general attitude among a large chunk of younger people, say people under 30 or under 35, towards not putting up with speech they find ugly or uncomfortable. What's your read of something like this? What really jumped out at me is that the purely Gen Z, the 18 to 24 year olds were actually less likely to say that they thought it should be a crime. So yeah, I would love to see that data because that's an interesting result. It might suggest that maybe a corner has been turned and Gen Z is like, yeah, of course, I don't want to misgender people, but no, it should be a crime. Maybe they have witnessed enough cancel culture that they're over it. But, you know, because a few years ago, the data we have, we have suggest, you know, it's much more linear that the younger you get, the more likely people would say, no, we need to restrict speech. The other big political thing that informed, I think, or at least, you know, the millennial politics, like aside from the whole war on terrorist stuff, was like the gay marriage battles. Cause that was, you know, just when we were in high school and college and you know, in our early twenties, that was sort of dominating politics, all the different fights in the state and all of that and really driving a lot of the political tribalism. So I think, yeah, that was very formative too. One thing that's, you know, amazing and Gene's book goes into this quite a bit, that, you know, the younger you are, the more likely you are to be completely comfortable with all kinds of sexual orientation, you know, particularly something like gay marriage. Liz, what was it that, you know, kind of sensitized you or your cohort to that as an important thing? And I guess a leading question here, how much of it was it was something that you and your friends took for granted that your parents were kind of like Heming and Hong about that it was a way of separating you from your parents or one's parents? I don't know. I think a lot of our parents were a little bit opposed but came around about the issue during that time. Like, I know that my parents sort of were like, kind of a knee jerk, like, well, no, they shouldn't. And then like when they thought about it for three seconds, they were like, actually, I don't know why I'm opposed. And they changed their mind over the course of, you know, a very short time as the issue was in the spotlight. And so I think that actually that was, you know, it wasn't, I don't think a generational issue per se. I think it did, you know, it did matter a lot that a lot of us had just come up with knowing gay people in a way that were out in a way that like other generations didn't. So it just seemed like, of course, you know, this is a thing that should be allowed. But, you know, on the other hand, it was also sort of just foisted upon us because, you know, Republicans were really using that. Well, both parties were really using that as a wedge issue and a get-out-the-vote issue. I mean, and it's worth cutting out. You couldn't ignore it. Yeah, that people like Bill Clinton, certainly, but Hillary Clinton, even Barack Obama when he was elected president was openly against gay marriage, against marriage equality. So the speed with which these old, you know, kind of certainties die is, you know, it's amazing. And there's definitely, you know, you can see a lot of that sort of anger at the system alive and well amongst millennials and Gen Z, depending on, you know, where you are and what the protest is about. Like, I mean, we saw a ton of that during a lot of the, you know, racial justice protests in 2020 and again, before that, back in, you know, 2014, 2015. So I think that sort of anger at the system is still very much alive and well today. One of the things I find fascinating is that in the 60s, and I have spent much of my professional career trying to be the quizzling of the baby boom generation. Like I want to collaborate with Gen X and with Bellettios and Gen Z to sink the boomers, to get rid of them. I think, you know, the boomers tend to be full of themselves or we are full of ourselves and all of that kind of stuff. But it's interesting to me that in the 60s generation and what came after, there was a move to build alternative systems and alternative communities or to challenge the system very forthrightly. So, you know, people move to communes, people created alternative corporations, alternative schools. The Black Panthers are one example of this in the civil rights movement. And also the LGBT, you know, the gay and lesbian movement, gay liberation movement, women's lib was like, fuck you, we are going to do our own thing and we're gonna exit. And that's how we reform things. And what strikes me as a meaningful change now is that many of the people on campuses and millennials, they are actually petitioning the system rather than leaving it or even altering it. And it's almost as if they believe on some deep seated level that the system is there and it is responsive to them. And it has been because when we look at the system if the system is America, it is much better in terms of race, in terms of class, in terms of gender and sexual orientation. And I wonder if we've kind of reached the limit maybe of where, you know, the grievances that are being put in front of the system now, the system can't really do much about them. That was an excerpt from my interview with Liz Nolan Brown of Reason and Jean Twenge author most recently of Generations. If you wanna see another excerpt, go here. And if you wanna see the full conversation, go here. And make sure to come back every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time when Reason is talking to people with something very interesting to say that you definitely wanna hear.