On the Road with Billboard Chris, Part IV: Brown University

Wherein Chris makes headway and finds some points of agreement with a self-described gender dysphoric historian of gender before being disrupted by lawnmowers and women seeking to shut him down

We visited Brown University a day after the Boston Children’s Hospital protest. A woman walking past Chris cursed at him and refused his entreaty to talk. A minute later, a young black man approached Chris to ask if he was a member of a campus organization that he could join. Chris explained that he was an off-campus interloper but that the young man should seek out the university’s free speech club. The club had expressed some interest in hosting a debate with Chris that evening, but the plans had come to naught.

We then encountered a young man eager to parley with Chris, a self-described sufferer of dysphoria who insisted he understood what it was like to have a vagina. Chris was able to make some headway with the man and got him to concede that there were certain troubling aspects of encouraging young kids to interpret gender nonconformity as trans identity and to seek medicalization, though the man declared that he would have been happy to take puberty blockers if they were available during his own youth.

Our exchange was cut short by a combination of lawnmowers and two women — one a natal female who is dating a non-binary person, the other either a trans-identified female on testosterone, or a trans-identified male on estrogen — who disrupted our conversation and tried to shut it down, the later by interfering physically with the recording.

Exchanges of this sort comprise Chris’ ordinary day to day life on the street, but are quite strange and illuminating glimpses into how the ongoing gender revolution looks and feels for those in its midst for those of us outside of the age bracket that is playing host to it. Chris told me early on in this trip that even the men who disagree with the declarations worn on his sandwich board tend to be willing to talk, while the young women most deeply invested in the trans ideology seek to shut him down. This exchange was consistent with those generalizations, though of course his long debate at the Lincoln Memorial was an exception.