I am not going to tell you which side I'm on. Not because I don't have one — almost everyone does now, and that is part of what I want to write about — but because the demand to declare it before I've said anything is, I've come to think, the disease and not the cure.
This is an essay about the loudest fault line of the moment, the one that runs mostly online and mostly between two groups who have learned to see each other as the problem: a queer community more visible than it has ever been, and a generation of young men who feel they have been left behind. I am close enough to one of these worlds to feel its fears as something other than abstract, and far enough outside it that I would never claim to speak for it. That doubled position — inside and outside at once — is the only honest place I have to write from, and it is what makes me unwilling to do the thing the moment keeps demanding, which is to pick one of these groups and turn the other into a villain. What I want to do instead is hold both in view at the same time, along with the contradictions that come with them: more visibility and more suffering at once, more tools to connect than any generation has had and more loneliness, more ways to be seen and less safety in being seen. I don't have it solved. But I've come to believe the two camps share more than either would like to admit — and that the distance between them is not an accident.
A community more visible than ever — and still unsafe
Start with the group I know best. The queer community in America is as visible and as alive as it has been in my lifetime. More people identify as LGBTQ+ than at any point we have records for: Gallup's share of U.S. adults has more than doubled in just over a decade, and among Gen Z it approaches one in four. An estimated 2.8 million people aged thirteen and older now identify as transgender. By the numbers, this looks like a clean story of progress.
It isn't, quite. Visibility has turned out to be double-edged. To be seen is also to be available to be consumed, and a culture tends to consume difference well before it learns to protect it. More Americans than ever say they accept trans women as women and trans men as men, and that genuinely matters — but acceptance on a survey and safety in a parking lot are not the same thing. In Pew's 2025 survey, only about one in ten Americans said there is a great deal or a fair amount of social acceptance for transgender and nonbinary people, and roughly half said there is little or none — a far bleaker picture than the same respondents painted for gay and lesbian people. Recognition arrived. Safety has lagged behind it.
A generation of young men who feel left behind
Now the group I am supposed to regard as the threat. Over the same years that queer visibility rose, the political distance between young men and young women widened into one of the sharpest splits in American life, a rift that now reaches past politics and into how a whole generation thinks about marriage, work, and what a good life looks like. Young men in particular have drifted right.
It is easy, from the other side of that gap, to read the drift as plain bigotry. I think that reading is both wrong and lazy. The young men I'm describing are, by a great deal of evidence, struggling. Equimundo's 2025 survey of American men found that the defining pressure on them is economic — the old expectation to be a provider colliding with stagnant wages and vanishing job security — and that this anxiety, not some free-floating hatred, is what its authors now call the real masculinity crisis. They are lonelier than young men were a generation ago, and they feel, rightly or wrongly, that the culture has cast them as the problem. When PBS NewsHour asked why so many of them turn to the influencers of the so-called manosphere, the answer was not mainly ideology; it was that those spaces offer what a lot of these young men aren't getting anywhere else — attention, a story that explains why life feels hard, and the sense that someone is on their side.
None of that makes the manosphere harmless. At its worst it takes real pain and sells back misogyny and conspiracy: Equimundo found that men who endorse "Red Pill" beliefs are more than twice as likely to place their trust in authoritarian figures. But notice the order of events. The loneliness and the economic fear come first; the ideology arrives afterward, to explain them. Researchers who study online radicalization increasingly find the same pattern — that many young men show up to these communities already angry and already sad, and that whether the algorithm leads them there or merely follows where they were already going is genuinely contested. The grievance is upstream of the politics. If we forget that, we will keep fighting the symptom and missing the wound.
And here the essay has to turn its honesty on my own side, too. Those of us on the left have a habit of flattening that entire world into a single villain — of saying "Jordan Peterson" and "extremist" in one breath, as if the distance between a self-help lecture about making your bed and an actual ideology of hate were nothing at all. That flattening is itself a move in the culture war, and not a harmless one. It tells a lonely nineteen-year-old that the only people willing to take his unhappiness seriously are monsters, and it tells him so in the same voice that has already implied he is one. It would be hard to design a more efficient way to lose him.
The same wound, and who profits from it
Set the two stories side by side and the symmetry is hard to miss. A trans teenager and a directionless young man would each tell you, in their own vocabulary, that they feel unsafe, unseen, and talked about rather than talked to. Each is told, constantly, that the other is the reason. And both are watching the ground shift under them at the same time — the same wage stagnation, the same impossible rent, the same sense that the future got more expensive while the paycheck stood still.
Here is the part I keep returning to. The platforms where this divide plays out do not make money when we understand each other. They make money when we don't — when we stay, and scroll, and feel something hot. Outrage is simply better engagement than empathy, and a feed tuned for engagement will reliably hand each side the most infuriating possible version of the other. The queer person sees only the men who want them gone; the young man sees only the people who call him a bigot for existing. Neither is seeing the median member of the other group. They are seeing the recommendation, and the recommendation is sorted for heat. The divide is real — but its sharpest edges are manufactured, and they are manufactured because the manufacture pays.
We are less divided than the feed says
It helps me to remember that the feed is not the country. The United States is full of subcultures the timeline never surfaces — local scenes, faith communities, hobbies, friendships that cheerfully ignore the lines we're told can't be crossed. It is far easier to look back on a decade as though it were a single mood than to admit it was always a thousand of them at once. Most people are not at the barricades. Most people are tired, and busy, and noticeably kinder in person than they are at a distance. That is not a reason for complacency, but it is a reason for hope, and I don't think it's a naive one.
What I find myself wanting
So what would actually help? Here I can only tell you what I've come to want, and I'll mark it plainly as mine rather than dress it up as the obvious conclusion. I find myself wanting the things that would lower the temperature for both of these groups at once, because I've come to believe their fears grow from the same root. Wages that keep pace with the work. Housing a young person can picture affording. Care — physical, mental, the kind of slack in a life that lets people be generous instead of frightened. And technology built around our actual needs rather than our attention: fewer machines designed to keep us scrolling and enraged, more that leave us alone when we've had enough. I won't pretend these are small asks, or that I've worked out the policy detail, or that I've done my own share of the work. I haven't. But I notice that nearly everything I want for the queer kid, I also want for the lonely young man. That feels like the most important thing I have to say.
The side I'll pick
I opened by refusing to tell you which side I'm on, and I'll close by half-breaking that promise. The side I'm on is the one that declines to believe the lonely and the frightened are each other's enemies. I think most people, at both ends of this divide, mostly want the same unremarkable things: to be safe, to be respected, to matter to someone, to have a future they can picture. I don't think the young man drifting right and the queer kid he's been taught to fear are opposites. I think they are two people handed the same wound and pointed at each other.
I can't fix that from a blog post. But I can refuse the premise out loud, and I can try to extend to the person I'm told to fear the same patience I'd want extended to me. That is a smaller hope than the one I started with years ago. It is also, I've come to think, a truer one — and the only kind that has ever actually closed the distance between two people.
Notes
- "LGBTQ+ Identification in U.S. Rises to 9.3%," Gallup, accessed June 4, 2026, https://news.gallup.com/poll/656708/lgbtq-identification-rises.aspx .
- "New Estimate: 2.8 Million People Aged 13 and Older Identify as Transgender in the US," Williams Institute, UCLA School of Law, accessed June 4, 2026, https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/press/trans-pop-estimates-press-release/ .
- "The Experiences of LGBTQ Americans Today," Pew Research Center, May 29, 2025, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2025/05/29/the-experiences-of-lgbtq-americans-today/ .
- "The Growing Gender Gap Among Young People," Brookings Institution, accessed June 4, 2026, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-growing-gender-gap-among-young-people/ .
- "Poll: Gen Z's Gender Divide Reaches Beyond Politics and into Its Views on Marriage, Children and Success," NBC News, 2025, https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/poll-gen-zs-gender-divide-reaches-politics-views-marriage-children-suc-rcna229255 .
- "The State of American Men 2025: Economic Anxiety Is the New Masculinity Crisis," Equimundo, 2025, https://www.equimundo.org/resources/state-of-american-men-2025/ .
- "Why 'Manosphere' Content Is Appealing to Some Young Men," PBS NewsHour, accessed June 4, 2026, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-manosphere-content-is-appealing-to-some-young-men .
- "The State of American Men 2025," Equimundo, 2025 (on "Red Pill" beliefs and trust in authoritarian figures), https://www.equimundo.org/resources/state-of-american-men-2025/ .
- Manoel Horta Ribeiro et al., "Auditing Radicalization Pathways on YouTube," arXiv, 2020, https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.08313 . Subsequent studies dispute how much the recommendation algorithm itself drives this, finding that off-platform demand often comes first.
- "Wage Stagnation in Nine Charts," Economic Policy Institute, accessed June 4, 2026, https://www.epi.org/publication/charting-wage-stagnation/ .
Bibliography
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